Reciprocity (internationally and locally)
The GCRB offers credentialing for internationally trained genetic counselors. [ 95 ]


Genetic counselling in Australasia has developed similarly to the US. [ 96 ]  As of early 2022, there were almost 400 active genetic counsellors in Australia and New Zealand, according to the database maintained by the Australasian Society of Genetic Counsellors. [ 97 ]  This represents 346  FTE  genetic counsellors working in clinical practice, an increase of more than 50% since 2017. [ 98 ]  However, in 2023 it was estimated that there was demand enough for 418 FTE GCs in  Australasia . Workforce demand planning is complicated by the fact that one third of individuals with a GC degree in Australia are not in clinical practice, and there is a shortage of GC roles in the public system due to a lack of funding. [ 98 ]  In order to practice as a GC, individuals must first attain a  Master's degree  in genetic counselling, after which time they can practice as an associate genetic counsellor. Then, following at least two years of supervised practice and successful passing of assessment as set by the Australasian Society of Genetic Counsellors' Board of Censors, an individual can then be accredited by the  Human Genetics Society of Australasia  and registered through the National Alliance of Self Regulating Health Professions as an independent GC. [ 99 ] [ 100 ]  Most GCs practice in public or private hospital settings, but roles in private  ambulatory care , genomic diagnostic laboratories, industry, and in  academia  (teaching and research) are becoming increasingly common. Both public and private healthcare services are available in Australia and New Zealand. Genetic services are offered through the public health system in all states and territories. In the public system, genetic testing is paid for by the state governments when the test is deemed clinically appropriate by the GC and  clinical geneticist . GCs in private practice may also offer 'self-funded' genetic testing, which is paid for out-of-pocket by the client/patient. [ 92 ]


A one-year graduate diploma program was established in 1995, and a two-year Master's level training program was established in 2008. [ 92 ]  As of 2024, two Master's training programs in Australia accredited by the  Human Genetics Society of Australasia  (HGSA), [ 82 ]  one at the  University of Melbourne [ 101 ]  and one at the  University of Technology Sydney . [ 102 ]  Genetic counselling education in Australia is clinically focussed. [ 96 ]  Together, these two universities produce more than 30 graduates each year. [ 98 ]


New graduates practice as an Associate Genetic Counselor under the supervision of a certified genetic counselor and a  clinical geneticist . They can submit to the HGSA certification process via a portfolio application after one year of practice. Recertification is currently voluntary and available by completing continuing education units (CEUs). [ 82 ] [ 92 ]


Genetic counselors with training from the UK, Europe and Australia are eligible for registration and GCs qualified in other countries are considered on a case-by-case basis. [ 82 ]  Information is available through the Australasian Society of Genetic Counsellors, a special interest group of the  Human Genetics Society of Australasia . [ 103 ]


A 2023 survey of GCs in Australia & NZ provided insight into the self-reported demographics of practicing GCs with a view to understanding the diversity, inclusion, and capacities of the GC workforce. The survey found 92% of Australasian GCs are female, 93% live in major cities, two identified as  Māori , one identified as an  Aboriginal Australian , and none identified as a  Torres Strait Islander . 81% were proficient in English only and 64% did not report any religious affiliation. These and many other demographic factors were found to be  significantly different  to the populations of Australia & New Zealand. Many GCs also reported their teams were not diverse in these and other areas, but that initiatives to make diversity visible were widely used. [ 98 ]


A genetic counselor is an expert with a  Master of Science  degree in genetic counseling. Programs in North America are accredited by the Accreditation Council for Genetic Counseling (ACGC). There are currently 52 accredited programs in the United States, four accredited programs in Canada, and four programs with the intent to become accredited. [ 104 ]   Students enter the field from a variety of disciplines, including  biology /biological sciences and social sciences such as  psychology . [ 105 ]  Graduate school coursework includes topics such as human genetics, embryology, ethics, research, and counseling theory and techniques. Clinical training including supervised rotations in prenatal, pediatric, adult, cancer, and other subspecialty clinics, as well as non-patient facing rotations in laboratories. Research training typically culminates in a  capstone  or thesis project.


As of May 2019, 29 states have passed genetic counselor licensure bills that require genetic counselors to meet a certain set of standards to practice. These states are Alabama, Arkansas, California, Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Washington. Almost every other state in the United States is in the process of obtaining genetic counseling licensure. [ 106 ]


Although genetic counseling has been established over four decades, the first licenses for genetic counselors were not issued until 2002. Utah was the first state to do so. The  American Society of Human Genetics  (ASHG) has since encouraged more states to license genetic counselors before they are allowed to practice. ASHG argues that requiring practitioners to go through the necessary training and testing to obtain a license will ensure quality genetic services as well as allow for reimbursement for counselors' services. Laws requiring licensure ensure that "professionals who call themselves genetic counselors are able to properly explain complicated test results that could confuse patients and families making important health decisions". [ 1 ]


Insurance companies usually do not reimburse for unlicensed genetic counselors' services. Patients who may benefit from genetic counseling may not be able to afford the service due to the expensive out-of-pocket cost. In addition, licensure allows genetic counselors to be searchable in most insurance companies' databases which gives genetic counselors increased opportunities for earning revenue and clients the opportunity to see "the level of coverage insurers provide for their services". [ 1 ]


The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) does not currently recognize genetic counselors as healthcare providers and therefore does not reimburse for genetic counseling services unless they are provided by a physician or nurse practitioner. On June 12, 2019, H.R. 3235 "Access to Genetic Counselor Services Act of 2019," was introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives by U.S. Rep. Dave Loebsack (D-Iowa) and U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pennsylvania). H.R. 3235 would authorize CMS to recognize certified genetic counselors as healthcare providers and to cover services furnished by genetic counselors under part B of the Medicare program. Genetic counselors are those licensed by states as such, or, for those in states without licensure, the Secretary of Health and Human Services will set criteria through regulation (likely ABGC certification). Genetic counselors would be paid at 85% of the physician fee schedule. Other providers currently providing genetic counseling services will not be affected by the bill. [ 107 ] [ 108 ]


As genetic counseling continues to grow as a branch in the medical field, employment rates of genetic counselors are expected to grow by 21% over the next decade; this statistic suggests that approximately 600 new jobs will become available in the US over this time period. [ 109 ]   Graduating from an accredited program with a passing score on the board certification exam increases the job prospect. As of May 2019 the median annual wage for genetic counselors was $81,880; the lowest 10% earning less than $61,310 and the highest 10% earning more than $114,750. This includes the varying industries in this field, such as medial and diagnostic laboratories, offices of physicians, hospitals, and colleges/universities. [ citation needed ]


Cuba is the only country in Central and South America with a significant number of GCs, all of whom work for the Ministry of Health's National Center for Medical Genetics. In 2017 it was estimated there were 900 masters-qualified GCs in the country, while a 2023 update revised this number down to 474. This decrease is attributed to emigration, retirement, and deaths due to COVID-19. In all other Latin American countries, GCs are either rare or non-existent. Training programs exist in Brazil (master's) and Chile (postgraduate diploma) and it is known that GCs are working in Chile, Guatemala and Mexico. [ 81 ]


The number of genetic counsellors in this region increased from 100 in 2018 to 220 in 2023. [ 81 ]  In Israel, there are 150 licensed genetic counselors as of 2023, who must work under the supervision of a medical geneticist. Most practice in genetics departments in hospital settings, with a few working in industry or research. [ citation needed ]


The first training program in Israel started in 1997. There are currently three programs that offer a master's degree in genetic counseling, training 20 students per year. The first training program in Saudi Arabia was a graduate diploma in 2005 with a master's degree being available as of 2015. There are two training programs available in Saudi Arabia with approximately 10 trained genetic counselors graduating per year. [ 92 ] [ 93 ]


Master's level training programs were instituted in Qatar in 2018, Turkiye in 2020, the UAE in 2024, and one is planned to begin in Oman in 2025. [ 81 ]


The Israeli Ministry of Health offers licensure to genetic counselors in Israel following an exam written one year after their post-graduate work and 85-case logbook. Recertification is not required as licensure is permanent after the exam. Licensure is also offered through the Saudi Commission for Health Specialties (SCFHS) following a panel interview, testing, or oral exam by a medical board; recertification in this country is under review at this time, but all counselors practicing in Saudi Arabia are expected to obtain a license from the SCHS. [ 110 ]


The  National Society of Genetic Counselors  (NSGC) blog provides information about current topics in genetic testing and genetic counseling. [ 111 ]


Many studies have examined the attitudes of the lay public toward genetic counseling and genetic testing. Barriers to obtaining genetic counseling include lack of understanding of genetics by both patients and healthcare providers, concerns about cost and insurance, and fears of stigma or discrimination. [ 112 ] [ 113 ] [ 114 ]


The reach of genetic testing and health equity is expanding due to telephone counseling.  Telephone delivery has proven "less expensive, yielded non-inferior cognitive, minimized psychological distress, facilitated informed decision making, and achieved positive counselor-patient interactions."  As a result, telephone-based genetic counseling and testing are now commonly offered and reimbursed by many insurance companies. [ 115 ]


No simple correlation has been found between the change in technology to the changes in values and beliefs towards genetic testing. [ 116 ]


An increase in genetic counseling outreach efforts are needed to intentionally extend opportunities to populations that have been historically underrepresented in the profession to create a more diverse and inclusive workforce and access to services. [ 117 ] [ 118 ]  Given the history of low engagement of under-represented minority populations in both clinical genetic services and genetic research, both of these aspects will be challenged and must be addressed before the benefits of precision medicine will be fully realized. [ 119 ]


In Europe and Australia, the current model of care in genetic counselling involves clients being referred by a general practitioner or other medical professional to a publicly funded hospital-based genetics service. Due to the rapid increase in demand for genetic counselling services, new ways to integrate genetic counselling into the healthcare system are being actively investigated. Future potential models of care currently being trialled include the genetic counsellor-embedded model, where genetic counsellors are integrated into hospital departments from which patients are referred, such as cancer and immunology. [ 120 ]  Another model of care that has been investigated is the provision of specially-trained nurses or other non-genetics healthcare personnel to identify persons eligible for genetic testing, and to provide pre-test counselling. [ 121 ]  Taken together, these alternative models of care are called genetic counselling mainstreaming. [ 120 ]  Mainstreaming has also been proposed to alleviate the administrative and clinical workload of GCs, as other healthcare providers would take on aspects of genetic counselling. [ 98 ]


Genetic purging  is the increased pressure of natural selection against deleterious  alleles   prompted by  inbreeding . [ 1 ]


Purging occurs because deleterious alleles tend to be recessive, which means that they only express all their harmful effects when they are present in the two copies of the individual (i.e., in homozygosis). During inbreeding, as related individuals mate, they produce offspring that are more likely to be homozygous so that deleterious alleles express all their harmful effects more  often, making individuals less fit. Those less fit individuals pass fewer copies of their genes to future generations. In other terms,  natural selection  purges recessive deleterious alleles in  inbred  individuals.


Purging reduces both the overall number of recessive deleterious alleles and the decline of mean fitness caused by inbreeding (the  inbreeding depression  for fitness).


The term "purge" is sometimes used for selection against deleterious alleles in a general way. It would avoid ambiguity to use " purifying selection " in that general context, and to reserve "purging" to its more strict meaning defined above.


Deleterious alleles segregating in populations of  diploid  organisms have a remarkable trend to be, at least, partially recessive. This means that, when they occur in homozygosis (double copies), they reduce  fitness  by more than twice than when they occur in heterozygosis (single copy). In other words, part of their potential deleterious effect is hidden in heterozygosis but expressed in homozygosis, so that selection is more efficient against them when they occur in homozygosis. Since inbreeding increases the probability of being homozygous, it increases the fraction of the potential deleterious effect that is expressed and, therefore, exposed to selection. This causes some increase in the selective pressure against (partially) recessive deleterious alleles, which is known as purging. Of course, it also causes some reduction in fitness, which is known as  inbreeding depression .


Purging can reduce the average frequency of deleterious alleles across the genome below the value expected in a non-inbred population during long periods. [ 2 ]  which reduces the negative impact of inbreeding on fitness. If inbreeding is due just to random mating in a finite population, due to purging the fitness mean fitness declines less than would be expected just from inbreeding and, after some initial decline, it can even rebound up to almost its value before inbreeding. Another consequence is the reduction of the so-called inbreeding load. This means that, after purging, further inbreeding is expected to be less harmful. The efficiency of purging is reduced by genetic drift and, therefore, in the long term, purging is less efficient in smaller populations. [ 1 ]  Purging can be increased if individuals mate with relatives more often than expected by random mating.


Accounting for purging when predicting inbreeding depression is important in evolutionary genetics, because the fitness decline caused by inbreeding can be determinant in the evolution of  diploidy , sexual reproduction and other main biological features. It is also important in animal breeding and, of course, in  conservation genetics , because inbreeding depression may be a relevant factor determining the extinction risk of endangered populations, and because conservation programs can allow some breeding handling in order to control inbreeding. [ 3 ]


In brief: due to purging, inbreeding depression does not depend on the standard measure of inbreeding (Wright's inbreeding coefficient  F ), since this measure only applies to  neutral  alleles. Instead, fitness decline it depends on the "purged inbreeding coefficient"  g , which takes into account how deleterious alleles are being purged.


Purging reduces inbreeding depression in two ways: first, it slows its progress; second, it reduces the overall inbreeding depression expected in the long term. The slower the progress of inbreeding, the more efficient is purging.


In the absence of natural selection, mean fitness would be expected to decline exponentially as inbreeding increases, where inbreeding is measured using Wright's inbreeding coefficient  F [ 4 ]  (the reason why decline is exponential on  F  instead of linear is just that fitness is usually considered a multiplicative trait). The rate at which fitness declines as  F  increases (the inbreeding depression rate  δ ) depends on the frequencies and deleterious effects of the alleles present in the population before inbreeding.


The above coefficient  F  is the standard measure of inbreeding, and gives the probability that, at any given neutral locus, an individual has inherited two copies of a same gene of a common ancestor (i.e. the probability of being homozygous "by descent"). In simple conditions,  F  can be easily computed in terms of population size or of genealogical information.  F  is often denoted using lowercase ( f ), but should not be confused with the coancestry coefficient.


However, the above prediction for the fitness decline rarely applies, since it was derived assuming no selection, and fitness is precisely the target trait of  natural selection . Thus, Wright's inbreeding coefficient  F  for neutral loci does not apply to deleterious alleles, unless inbreeding increases so fast that the change in gene frequency is governed just by random sampling (i.e., by  genetic drift ).


Therefore, according to the  model , the decline of fitness can be predicted using, instead of the standard inbreeding coefficient  F , a "purged inbreeding coefficient" ( g ) that gives the probability of being homozygous by descent for (partially) recessive deleterious alleles, taking into account how their frequency is reduced by purging. [ 1 ]  Due to purging, fitness declines at the same rate  δ  than in the absence of selection, but as a function of  g  instead of  F .


This purged inbreeding coefficient  g  can also be computed, to a good approximation, using simple expressions in terms of the population size or of the genealogy of individuals (see BOX 1). However this requires some information on the magnitude of the deleterious effects that are hidden in the heterozygous condition but become expressed in homozygosis. The larger this magnitude, denoted purging coefficient  d , the more efficient is purging.


An interesting property of purging is that, during inbreeding, while  F  increases approaching a final value  F  = 1 ,  g  can approach a much smaller final value. Hence, it is not just that purging slows the fitness decline, but also that it reduces the overall fitness loss produced by inbreeding in the long term. This is illustrated  below  for the extreme case of inbreeding depression caused by recessive lethals, which are alleles that cause death before reproduction but only when they occur in homozygosis. Purging is less effective against mildly deleterious alleles than against lethal ones but, in general, the slower is the increase of inbreeding  F , the smaller becomes the final value of the purged inbreeding coefficient  g  and, therefore, the final reduction in fitness. This implies that, if inbreeding progresses slowly enough, no relevant inbreeding depression is expected in the long term. implies, for example, that the average fitness of a population that has been moderately small for a long time, can be very similar to that of a large population with more genetic diversity. In conservation genetics, it would be very useful to ascertain the maximum rate of increase of inbreeding that allows for such efficient purging.


Consider a large non-inbred population with mean fitness  W . Then, the size of the population reduces to a new smaller value  N  (in fact, the  effective population size  should be used here), leading to a progressive increase of inbreeding.


Then inbreeding depression occurs at a rate  δ , due to (partially) recessive deleterious alleles that were present at low frequencies at different loci. This means that, in the absence of selection, the expected value for mean fitness after  t  generations of inbreeding, would be:


where

 F

 t

 {\displaystyle F_{t}}

  is the population mean for Wright's inbreeding coefficient after  t  generations of inbreeding. [ 4 ]


However, since selection operates upon fitness, mean fitness should be predicted taking into account both inbreeding and purging, as


In the above equation,

 g

 t

 {\displaystyle g_{t}}

  is the average "purged inbreeding coefficient" after  t  generations of inbreeding. [ 1 ]  It depends upon the "purging coefficient"  d , which represents the deleterious effects that are hidden in heterozygosis but exposed in homozygosis.


The average "purged inbreeding coefficient" can be approximated using the recurrent expression


There are also predictive equations to be used with genealogical information.


As an example of genetic purging, consider a large population where there are recessive lethal alleles segregating at very low frequency in many loci, so that each gamete carries on the average one of these alleles. Although about 63% of the gametes carry at least one of these lethal alleles, almost no individual carry two copies of the same lethal. Therefore, since lethals are considered completely recessive (i.e., they are harmless in heterozygosis), they cause almost no deaths. Now assume that population size reduces to a small value (say  N =10), and remains that small for many generations. As inbreeding increases, the probability of being homozygous for one (or more) of these lethal alleles also increases, causing fitness to decline. However, as those lethals begin to occur in homozygosis, natural selection begins purging them. The figure to the right gives the expected decline of fitness against the number of generations, taking into account just the increase in inbreeding  F  (red line), or both inbreeding and purging (blue line, computed using the purged inbreeding coefficient  g ). This example shows that purging can be very efficient in preventing inbreeding depression. However, for non-lethal deleterious alleles, the efficiency of purging would be smaller, and it can require larger populations to overcome genetic drift.


Inbreeding depression and purging play a major role in the evolution of reproductive systems. As an example, they determine when selfing becomes at an advantage compared to outcrossing. [ 5 ] [ 6 ]  Another example is the genomic renewal in yeasts.   Saccharomyces cerevisiae  and  Saccharomyces paradoxus  have a life cycle that alternates between long periods of  asexual reproduction  as a diploid, ending in  meiosis  that is usually immediately followed  selfing , with only rare  outcrossing . [ 7 ]  Recessive deleterious mutations accumulate during the diploid expansion phase, and are purged during selfing: this purging has been termed "genome renewal". [ 8 ] [ 9 ]


When a previously stable population undergoes inbreeding, if nothing else changes, natural selection should consist mainly of purging. The joint consequences of inbreeding and purging on fitness vary depending on many factors: the previous history of the population, the rate of increase of inbreeding, the harshness of the environment or of the competitive conditions, etc. The effects of purging were first noted by Darwin [ 10 ]  in plants, and have been detected in laboratory experiments and in vertebrate populations undergoing inbreeding in zoos or in the wild, as well as in humans. [ 11 ]  The detection of purging is often obscured by many factors, but there is consistent evidence that, in agreement with the predictions explained above, slow inbreeding results in more efficient purging, so that a given inbreeding F leads to less threat to population viability if it has been produced more slowly. [ 12 ] [ 13 ]


Nevertheless, in practical situations, the genetic change in fitness also depends on many other factors, besides inbreeding and purging. For example, adaptation to changing environmental conditions often causes relevant genetic changes during inbreeding. Furthermore, if inbreeding is due to a reduction in population size, selection against new deleterious  mutations  can become less efficient, and this can induce additional fitness decline in the medium-long term.


In addition, part of the inbreeding depression could be not due to deleterious alleles, but to an intrinsic advantage of being heterozygous compared to being homozygous for any available allele, which is known as overdominance. Inbreeding depression caused by overdominance cannot be purged, but seems to be a minor cause of overall inbreeding depression, although its actual importance is still a matter of debate. [ 14 ]


Therefore, predicting the actual evolution of fitness during inbreeding is highly elusive. However, the component of fitness decline expected from inbreeding and purging on deleterious alleles could be predicted using  g .


Understanding genetic purging and predicting its consequences is of great importance in evolutionary and conservation genetics. Endangered populations use to undergo inbreeding due to their reduced numbers, and purging can play a relevant role in determining their extinction risk and the success of conservation strategies.  [ 15 ]


GeneTree  was a family history website focused on using DNA testing to trace ancestry. [ 1 ]  A website account was free, and within their account users could order DNA tests, enter results from other testing companies, search the DNA database, create an online family tree, and correspond with family members – including sharing pictures. [ 2 ]


Genetree.com was closed on January 1, 2013 and its assets were transferred to  Ancestry.com . [ 3 ]


GeneTree was founded in 1997 by a graduate of  Wayne State University ’s Center for Molecular Medicine and Genetics, Terrence Carmichael, who earned a master’s degree in molecular biology and genetics in 1995.  Genetree did not offer multi-generational genealogy tests initially.  Carmichael declared, “Over 95 percent of our first-year business was in paternity testing.”  In fall 2001, GeneTree sold its assets to Salt Lake City-based  Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation  ("SMGF") which originated in 1999. [ 4 ]


The GeneTree website brought together elements of several existing Sorenson Companies: DNA testing by Sorenson Genomics, the DNA-genealogy database established by the SMGF research project, and the media sharing abilities of Sorenson Media. [ 5 ] [ 6 ]


In 2012, Ancestry.com announced to its customers, "In March, Ancestry.com DNA, LLC acquired access to an extensive collection of DNA assets from SMGF." [ 7 ]   Genetree.com was discontinued on January 1, 2013 and access to family trees was no longer made available through the GeneTree site. [ 3 ]   Prior to that date, Ancestry.com offered their subscribers who were former GeneTree customers an opportunity to download their DNA test results and manually enter them at Ancestry.com.  Beginning January 1, 2013, those who don't have a current subscription to Ancestry.com no longer had access to their GeneTree DNA results. [ 8 ]


GeneTree offered  Y chromosome  DNA testing (males only) that gives information about paternal ancestry, including 33-marker and a 46-marker test. [ 9 ]  YDNA is passed from father to son, so males with the same YDNA often have the same surname in addition to sharing a male ancestor. [ 10 ]


GeneTree offered  mitochondrial DNA  testing (males and females) that gives information about maternal ancestry. [ 11 ]  GeneTree's tests look at HVR1, HVR2, and HVR3 of the mtDNA. mtDNA is passed from mother to children, so people with the same mtDNA share a female ancestor. [ 12 ]


In addition to DNA testing services, GeneTree sold consultation services to help customers further understand their test results. [ 13 ]


The  genomic epidemiological database for global identification of microorganisms  or  global microbial identifier [ 1 ]  is a platform for storing  whole genome sequencing  data of  microorganisms , for the identification of relevant  genes  and for the comparison of  genomes  to detect and track-and-trace  infectious disease  outbreaks and emerging  pathogens . [ 2 ]  The database holds two types of information: 1) genomic information of  microorganisms , linked to, 2)  metadata  of those microorganism such as  epidemiological  details. The database includes all genera of microorganisms:  bacteria ,  viruses ,  parasites  and  fungi . [ citation needed ]


For  genotyping  of microorganisms for  medical diagnosis , or other purposes, scientists may use a wide variety of  DNA profiling  techniques, such as  polymerase chain reaction ,  pulsed-field gel electrophoresis  or  multilocus sequence typing . A complication of this broad variety of techniques is the difficulty to standardize between techniques, laboratories and microorganisms, which may be overcome using the complete  DNA  code of the genome generated by whole genome sequencing. [ 3 ]  For straightforward diagnostic identification, the whole genome sequencing information of a microbiological sample is fed into a global genomic database and compared using  BLAST  procedures to the genomes already present in the database. [ 4 ]  In addition, whole genome sequencing data may be used to back calculate to the different pre-whole genome sequencing genotyping methods, so previous collected valuable information is not lost. [ 5 ] [ 6 ]  For the global microbial identifier the genomic information is coupled to a wide spectrum of metadata about the specific microbial clone and includes important clinical and  epidemiological  information such as the global finding places, treatment options and  antimicrobial resistance , making it a general microbiological identification tool. This makes  personalized treatment  of microbial disease possible as well as real-time tracing systems for global surveillance of  infectious diseases  for  food safety  and serving  human health . [ citation needed ]


The initiative for building the database arose in 2011 and when several preconditions were met: 1) whole genome sequencing has become mature and serious alternative for other genotyping techniques, [ 7 ] [ 8 ]  2) the price of whole genome sequencing has started falling dramatically and in some cases below the price of traditional identifications, 3) vast amounts of  IT  resources and a fast  Internet  have become available, and 4) there is the idea that via a cross sectoral and  One Health  approach infectious diseases may be better controlled. [ 9 ] [ 10 ]


Starting the second millennium, many microbiological laboratories, as well as national health institutes, started genome sequencing projects for sequencing the infectious agents collections they had in their  biobanks . [ 11 ] [ 12 ]  Thereby generating private databases and sending model genomes to global nucleotide databases such as  GenBank  of the  National Center for Biotechnology Information [ 13 ]  or the nucleotide database of the  EMBL . [ 14 ]  This created a wealth of genomic information and independent databases for  eukaryotic  as well as  prokaryotic  genomes. [ 15 ] [ 16 ] [ 17 ]  The need to further integrate these databases and to harmonize data collection, and to link the genomic data to metadata for optimal prevention of infectious diseases, was generally recognized by the scientific community. [ 18 ]  In 2011, several infectious disease control centers and other organizations took the initiative of a series of international scientific- and policy-meetings, to develop a common platform and to better understand the potentials of an interactive microbiological genomic database. The first meeting was in Brussels, September 2011, [ 19 ] [ 20 ]  followed by meetings in Washington (March 2012) and Copenhagen [ 21 ]  (February 2013). In addition to experts from around the globe, Intergovernmental Organizations have been included in the action, notably the  World Health Organization  and the  World Organization for Animal Health . [ citation needed ]


A detailed roadmap [ 22 ]  for the development of the database was set up with the following general timeline:


Current members:


Former members:


The  history of eugenics  is the study of development and advocacy of ideas related to  eugenics  around the world. Early eugenic ideas were discussed in  Ancient Greece  and  Rome . The height of the modern eugenics movement came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.


According to  Plutarch , in  Sparta  every proper citizen's child was inspected by the council of elders, the  Gerousia , which determined whether or not the child was fit to live. [ 1 ]  If the child was deemed incapable of living a Spartan life, the child was usually killed in a chasm near the  Taygetus  mountain known as the  Apothetae . [ 2 ] [ 3 ]  Further trials intended to discern a child's fitness included bathing them in  wine  and exposing them to the elements to fend for themselves, with the intention of ensuring that only those considered strongest survived and procreated. [ 4 ]


The lack of sources by contemporary Greeks mentioning Spartan eugenics and the lack of archeological evidence has brought ideas about Spartan eugenics into question. While  infanticide  was practiced by Greeks, no contemporary sources support Plutarch's claims of mass infanticide motivated by eugenics. [ 5 ]  In 2007 the suggestion that infants were dumped near Mount Taygete was called into question due to a lack of physical evidence. Anthropologist Theodoros Pitsios' research found only bodies from adolescence up to the age of approximately 35. [ 6 ] [ 7 ]


This purported practice has been described as an archetypal form of utopian eugenics that is closely associated with Sparta. [ 8 ] [ 9 ]


Plato's political philosophy  included the belief that human reproduction should be cautiously monitored and controlled by the state. [ 10 ]  He advocated that  selective breeding  should be applied to both humans and animals. Plato recognized that this form of government control would not be readily accepted, and proposed the truth be concealed from the public via a fixed lottery. Mates, in Plato's  Republic , would be chosen by a "marriage number" in which the quality of the individual would be quantitatively analyzed, and persons of high numbers would be allowed to procreate with other persons of high numbers. This would then lead to predictable results and the improvement of the human race. Plato acknowledged the failure of the "marriage number" since "gold soul" persons could still produce "bronze soul" children. [ 11 ]  Plato's ideas may have been one of the earliest attempts to mathematically analyze  genetic inheritance , prefiguring some of what would much later become known as  Mendelian genetics . [ 12 ]


The geographer  Strabo  ( c.  64 BCE –  c.  24 CE) stated that the  Samnites  would take ten  virgin  women and ten young men who were considered to be the best representation of their  sex  and  mate  them. Any selected male committing a dishonorable act would be separated from his partner. [ 13 ]


In  Ancient Rome ,  Seneca the Younger  discussed selective infanticide, saying "We put down mad dogs; we kill the wild, untamed ox; we use the knife on sick sheep to stop their infecting the flock; we destroy abnormal offspring at birth; children, too, if they are born weak or deformed, we drown. Yet this is not the work of anger, but of reason – to separate the sound from the worthless." [ 14 ]  According to  Tacitus  ( c.  56  –  c.  120 ), a Roman of the  Imperial Period , the  Germanic  tribes of his day killed any member of their community they deemed cowardly, unwarlike or "stained with abominable vices", usually by drowning them in swamps. [ 15 ] [ 16 ]  Modern historians see Tacitus' ethnographic writing as unreliable in such details. [ 17 ] [ 18 ]


Another question entirely is why eugenics rose, and did so in ways whose complexity still grounds a highly active field of study in  intellectual history  today.


In 1798,  Thomas Malthus  proposed his hypothesis in  An Essay on the Principle of Population .


He argued that although human populations tend to increase, the happiness of a nation requires a like increase in food production. "The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon its poverty, or its riches, upon its youth, or its age, upon its being thinly, or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which it is increasing, upon the degree in which the yearly increase of food approaches to the yearly increase of an unrestricted population." [ 19 ]


However, the propensity for population increase also leads to a natural cycle of abundance and shortages:


We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards population...increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are increased. The food therefore which before supported seven millions, must now be divided among seven millions and a half or eight millions. The poor consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe distress. The number of labourers also being above the proportion of the work in the market, the price of labour must tend toward a decrease; while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise. The labourer therefore must work harder to earn the same as he did before. During this season of distress, the discouragements to marriage, and the difficulty of rearing a family are so great, that population is at a stand. In the mean time the cheapness of labour, the plenty of labourers, and the necessity of an increased industry amongst them, encourage cultivators to employ more labour upon their land; to turn up fresh soil, and to manure and improve more completely what is already in tillage; till ultimately the means of subsistence become in the same proportion to the population as at the period from which we set out. The situation of the labourer being then again tolerably comfortable, the restraints to population are in some degree loosened; and the same retrograde and progressive movements with respect to happiness are repeated.


Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.


The idea of progress was at once a social, political and scientific theory. The theory of evolution, as described in Darwin's  The Origin of Species , provided for many social theorists the necessary scientific foundation for the idea of social and political progress. The terms  evolution  and  progress  were often used interchangeably in the 19th century. [ 24 ]


Dysgenics   refers to any decrease in the prevalence of traits deemed to be either socially desirable or generally adaptive to their environment due to  selective pressure  disfavouring their reproduction. [ 25 ]


In 1915 the term was used by  David Starr Jordan  to describe the supposed deleterious effects of modern warfare on group-level genetic fitness because of its tendency to kill physically healthy men while preserving the disabled at home. [ 26 ] [ 27 ]  Similar concerns had been raised by early eugenicists and  social Darwinists  during the 19th century, and continued to play a role in scientific and public policy debates throughout the 20th century. [ 28 ]


More recent concerns about supposed dysgenic effects in human populations were advanced by the controversial psychologist and self-described " scientific racist " [ 29 ]   Richard Lynn , notably in his 1996 book  Dysgenics: Genetic Deterioration in Modern Populations , which argued that changes in  selection pressures  and decreased  infant mortality  since the  Industrial Revolution  have resulted in an increased propagation of deleterious traits and  genetic disorders . [ 30 ] [ 31 ]


Sir  Francis Galton  (1822–1911) systematized these ideas and practices according to new knowledge about the evolution of man and animals provided by the theory of his half-cousin  Charles Darwin  during the 1860s and 1870s. After reading Darwin's  Origin of Species , Galton built upon Darwin's ideas whereby the mechanisms of  natural selection  were potentially thwarted by human  civilization . He reasoned that, since many human societies sought to protect the underprivileged and weak, those societies were at odds with the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest, and only by changing these social policies could society be saved from a "reversion towards mediocrity", a phrase he first coined in statistics and which later changed to the now-common " regression towards the mean ". [ 36 ]  (Incidentally, Galton also coined the phrase " nature versus nurture ".)


Galton first sketched out his theory in the 1865 article "Hereditary Talent and Character", then elaborated further in his 1869 book  Hereditary Genius . [ 37 ]  He began by studying the way in which human intellectual, moral, and personality traits tended to run in families. Galton's basic argument was that  "genius" and "talent" were hereditary traits  in humans, although neither he nor Darwin yet had a working model of this type of heredity. He concluded that, since one could use  artificial selection  to exaggerate traits in other animals, one could expect similar results when applying such models to humans. As he wrote in the introduction to  Hereditary Genius :


I propose to show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations. [ 38 ]


Galton claimed that the less intelligent were more fertile than the more intelligent of his time. Galton did not propose any selection methods; rather, he hoped a solution would be found if social  mores  changed in a way that encouraged people to see the importance of breeding. He first used the word  eugenic  in his 1883  Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development , [ 39 ]  a book in which he meant "to touch on various topics more or less connected with that of the cultivation of race, or, as we might call it, with 'eugenic' questions". He included a footnote to the word "eugenic" which read:


That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek,  eugenes  namely, good in stock, hereditary endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words,  eugeneia , etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word  eugenics  would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than  viriculture  which I once ventured to use. [ 40 ]


In 1908, in  Memories of my Life , Galton defined eugenics as "the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally", [ 41 ]  a definition agreed in consultation with a committee that included the  biometrician   Karl Pearson . It was slightly at odds with Galton's preferred definition, given in a lecture to the newly formed Sociological Society at the  London School of Economics  in 1904: "the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage". [ 42 ]  The latter definition, which encompassed nurture and environment as well as heredity, was favoured by broadly left-wing, liberal elements of the ensuing ideological divide. [ 43 ]


Galton's formulation of eugenics was based on a strong  statistical  approach, influenced heavily by  Adolphe Quetelet 's "social physics". Unlike Quetelet,  Galton did not exalt the "average man" but decried him as mediocre. Galton and his statistical heir  Karl Pearson  developed what was called the  biometrical  approach to eugenics, which developed new and complex statistical models (later exported to wholly different fields) to describe the heredity of traits. However, with the rediscovery of  Gregor Mendel 's laws of heredity, two separate camps of eugenics advocates emerged, one of statisticians, the other of biologists. Statisticians thought the biologists had exceptionally crude mathematical models, while biologists thought the statisticians knew little about biology. [ 44 ]


Eugenics eventually referred to human selective reproduction with an intent to create children with desirable traits, generally through the approach of influencing  differential birth rates . These policies were mostly divided into two categories:  positive eugenics , the increased reproduction of those seen to have advantageous hereditary traits; and  negative eugenics , the discouragement of reproduction by those with hereditary traits perceived as poor. Negative eugenic policies in the past have ranged from paying those deemed to have bad genes to voluntarily undergo sterilization, attempts at  segregation ,  compulsory sterilization , and even  genocide . Positive eugenic policies have typically taken the form of awards or bonuses for "fit" parents who have another child. Relatively innocuous practices such as  marriage counseling  had early links with eugenic ideology. Eugenics is superficially related to what later became known as  Social Darwinism . While both claimed intelligence was hereditary, eugenics asserted new policies were needed to actively change the status quo towards a more "eugenic" state, while the Social Darwinists argued that society itself would naturally "check" the problem of " dysgenics " if no welfare policies were in place—for example, the poor might reproduce more but would have higher mortality rates. [ 45 ]


Charles Davenport  (1866-1944), a scientist from the United States, stands out as one of history's leading eugenicists. He took eugenics from a scientific idea to a worldwide movement implemented in many countries. [ 46 ]  Davenport obtained funding from the Carnegie Institution, to establish the  Station for Experimental Evolution  at  Cold Spring Harbor  in 1904 [ 47 ]  and the Eugenics Records Office in 1910, which provided the scientific basis for later Eugenic policies such as  enforced sterilization . [ 48 ]  He was instrumental in building  the  International Federation of Eugenics Organizations  (IFEO) in 1925, and became its first president. [ 49 ]  While Davenport was located at Cold Spring Harbor and received money from the  Carnegie Institute of Washington , the organization known as the  Eugenics Record Office  (ERO) started to become an embarrassment after the well-known debates between Davenport and  Franz Boas . Davenport continued to occupy the same office and the same address at Cold Spring Harbor, but his organization now became known as the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, which currently retains the archives of the Eugenics Record Office. [ 50 ]  However, Davenport's racist [ clarification needed ]  views were not supported by all geneticists at Cold Spring Harbor, including  H. J. Muller ,  Bentley Glass , and  Esther Lederberg . [ 51 ]


In 1932, Davenport welcomed  Ernst Rüdin , a prominent Swiss eugenicist and race scientist, as his successor in the position of President of the IFEO. [ 52 ]   Rüdin, director of the  Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft  (German Research Institute for Psychiatry), a  Kaiser Wilhelm Institute  located in Munich, [ 53 ]  was a co-founder (with his brother-in-law  Alfred Ploetz ) of the  German Society for Racial Hygiene . [ 54 ]  Ploetz recommended a " racial hygiene " system in which panels of physicians decided whether to grant individuals  citizenship  or  euthanasia . [ 55 ]  Other prominent figures in eugenics who were associated with Davenport included  Harry Laughlin  (United States),  Havelock Ellis  (United Kingdom),  Irving Fischer  (United States),  Eugen Fischer  (Germany),  Madison Grant  (United States),  Lucien Howe  (United States), and  Margaret Sanger  (United States, founder of a  New York  health clinic that later became  Planned Parenthood ).  Later Sanger commissioned the first  birth control pill . [ 56 ]


In September 1903, an "Inter-departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration" chaired by  Almeric W. FitzRoy  was appointed by the government "to make a preliminary enquiry into the allegations concerning the deterioration of certain classes of the population as shown by the large percentage of rejections for physical causes of recruits for the  Army ", and gave its Report to both houses of parliament in the following year. [ 57 ]  Among its recommendations, originating from professor  Daniel John Cunningham , were an anthropometric survey of the British population. The  Catholic church  was opposed to eugenics, as illustrated in the writings of Father  Thomas John Gerrard . [ 58 ]


Eugenics was supported by many prominent figures of different political persuasions before  World War I  (and as  positive eugenics  after the War), including:  Liberal  economists  William Beveridge  and  John Maynard Keynes ;  Fabian socialists  such as the Irish author  George Bernard Shaw ,  H. G. Wells ,  Havelock Ellis ,  Beatrice Webb  and  Sidney Webb  and other literary figures such as  D. H. Lawrence ; and  Conservatives  such as the future Prime Minister  Winston Churchill  and  Arthur Balfour . [ 59 ]  The influential economist  John Maynard Keynes  was a prominent supporter of eugenics, serving as Director of the  British Eugenics Society , and  writing that eugenics is "the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists". [ 60 ]


Francis Galton  explained during a lecture in 1901 the groupings which are shown in the opening figure and indicated the proportion of society falling into each group, along with their perceived genetic worth. Galton suggested that negative eugenics (i.e. an attempt to prevent them from bearing offspring) should be applied only to those in the lowest social group (the "Undesirables"), while positive eugenics applied to the higher classes. However, he appreciated the worth of the higher working classes to society and industry. [ citation needed ]


The  1913 Mental Deficiency Act  proposed the mass segregation of the "feeble minded" from the rest of society. [ 61 ]   Sterilisation programmes  were never legalised, although some were carried out in private upon the mentally ill by clinicians who were in favour of a more widespread eugenics plan. [ 62 ]  The Act, however, enabled the formation of residential schools for the "feeble minded" by social workers such as  Mary Dendy . [ 63 ]


Those in support of eugenics shifted their lobbying of  Parliament  from enforced to  voluntary sterilization , in the hope of achieving more legal recognition. [ 62 ]  In 1931,  Labour Party   Member of Parliament   Major A. G. Church , proposed a  Private Member's Bill  to legalise the operation for voluntary sterilization. This was rejected by 167 votes to 89. [ 64 ]  In 1934, the  Brock Report  of the Departmental Committee on Sterilisation recommended sterilisation of disabled people but the Report's recommendations were not followed by changes to the law. [ 65 ]


Two universities ( University College London  and  Liverpool University ) established courses on eugenics. The  Galton Institute , affiliated to UCL, was headed by Galton's protégé,  Karl Pearson . [ 66 ]


In 2008, the  British Parliament  passed a law prohibiting couples from choosing  deaf  and disabled  embryos  for implantation. [ 67 ]


In 2012, the British Parliament passed the  Welfare Reform Act 2012 . The law created various caps on welfare payments, most prominently the  two-child benefits cap , with the government's stated aims being to push non-working parents into employment, reduce the number of children born to parents in receipt of state benefits and minimise the cost of welfare to taxpayers. The policy has been critiqued by researchers as an attempt to restrict the reproductive rights of poorer citizens, as well as being a major source of child and family poverty since 2017. [ 68 ] [ 69 ] [ 70 ]


One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenics (before it was labeled as such) was  Alexander Graham Bell . In 1881 Bell investigated the rate of  deafness on Martha's Vineyard ,  Massachusetts . From this he concluded that  deafness  was hereditary in nature and, through noting that congenitally deaf parents were more likely to produce deaf children, tentatively suggested that couples where both were deaf should not marry, in his lecture  Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race  presented to the  National Academy of Sciences  on 13 November 1883. [ 71 ] [ 72 ]  However, it was his hobby of livestock breeding which led to his appointment to biologist  David Starr Jordan 's Committee on Eugenics, under the auspices of the  American Breeders' Association  (ABA). The committee unequivocally extended the principle to humans. [ 73 ]


Another scientist considered the "father of the American eugenics movement" was  Charles Benedict Davenport . [ 74 ]   In 1904 he secured funding for the Station for Experimental Evolution, later renamed the Carnegie Department of Genetics.  It was also around that time that Davenport became actively involved with the ABA. This led to Davenport's first eugenics text, "The science of human improvement by better breeding", one of the first papers to connect agriculture and human heredity. [ 74 ]  Davenport later went on to set up a Eugenics Record Office (ERO), collecting hundreds of thousands of medical histories from Americans, which many considered to have a racist and anti-immigration agenda. [ 74 ]  Davenport and his views were supported at  Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory  as late as 1963, when his views began to be de-emphasized.


As the science continued in the 20th century, researchers interested in familial mental disorders conducted a number of studies to document the heritability of such illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Their findings were used by the eugenics movement as proof for its cause. State laws were written in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next generation. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and were not abolished until the mid-20th century.  All in all, 60,000 Americans were sterilized. [ 75 ]


Michigan  became the first state to introduce a  compulsory sterilization  bill on May 16, 1897. However, the law did not pass. The proposed law, which called for the mandatory castration of defined types of criminals and "degenerates," fails to pass in the legislature but sets a precedent for similar laws. [ 76 ]  In 1907  Indiana  became the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at  compulsory sterilization  of certain individuals. [ 77 ]  Although the law was overturned by the  Indiana Supreme Court  in 1921, [ 78 ]  the  U.S. Supreme Court  upheld the constitutionality of a  Virginia law  allowing for the  compulsory sterilization  of patients of state mental institutions in 1927. [ 79 ]


Beginning with  Connecticut  in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic,  imbecile  or  feeble-minded " from marrying. In 1898  Charles B. Davenport , a prominent American  biologist , began as director of a biological research station based in  Cold Spring Harbor  where he experimented with evolution in plants and animals. In 1904 Davenport received funds from the  Carnegie Institution  to found the Station for Experimental Evolution. The  Eugenics Record Office  (ERO) opened in 1910 while Davenport and  Harry H. Laughlin  began to promote eugenics. [ 80 ]


W. E. B. Du Bois  maintained the basic principle of eugenics: that different persons have different inborn characteristics that make them more or less suited for specific kinds of employment, and that by encouraging the most talented members of all races to procreate would better the "stocks" of humanity. [ 81 ] [ 82 ]


The  Immigration Restriction League  (founded in 1894) was the first American entity associated officially with eugenics. The League sought to bar what it considered dysgenic members of certain races from entering America and diluting what it saw as the superior American racial stock through procreation. They lobbied for a  literacy test  for  immigrants , based on the belief that literacy rates were low among "inferior races". Literacy test bills were vetoed by President  William McKinley  in 1897 and by President  Woodrow Wilson  in 1913 and 1915; eventually, President Wilson's second veto was overruled by Congress in 1917. Membership in the League included:  A. Lawrence Lowell , president of  Harvard University ,  William DeWitt Hyde , president of  Bowdoin College , James T. Young, director of  Wharton School , and  David Starr Jordan , president of  Stanford University . The League allied themselves with the American Breeder's Association to gain influence and further its goals and in 1909 established a eugenics committee chaired by David Starr Jordan with members Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell,  Vernon Kellogg ,  Luther Burbank ,  William Earnest Castle ,  Adolf Meyer , H. J. Webber and Friedrich Woods. [ 83 ]  The ABA's immigration legislation committee, formed in 1911 and headed by League's founder Prescott F. Hall, formalized the committee's already strong relationship with the Immigration Restriction League. [ 83 ]


In years to come, the ERO collected a mass of family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport, the  psychologist   Henry H. Goddard  and the conservationist  Madison Grant  (all well respected in their time) began to lobby for various solutions to the problem of the "unfit". (Davenport favored  immigration restriction  and sterilization as primary methods; Goddard favored segregation in his  The Kallikak Family ; Grant favored all of the above and more, even entertaining the idea of extermination.) [ 84 ]  Though their methodology and research methods are now understood as highly flawed, at the time this was seen as legitimate scientific research. [ 85 ]  It did, however, have scientific detractors (notably,  Thomas Hunt Morgan , one of the few Mendelians to explicitly criticize eugenics), though most of these focused more on what they considered the crude methodology of eugenicists, and the characterization of almost every human characteristic as being hereditary, rather than the idea of eugenics itself. [ 86 ]


Some states sterilized "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. The  U.S. Supreme Court  ruled in the 1927  Buck v. Bell  case that the state of  Virginia  could sterilize individuals under the  Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 . The most significant era of  eugenic sterilization  was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenics legislation in the United States. [ 87 ]  A favorable report on the results of sterilization in  California , the state with the most sterilizations by far, was published in book form by the biologist  Paul Popenoe  and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane.


Such legislation was passed in the U.S. because of widespread public acceptance of the eugenics movement, spearheaded by efforts of progressive reformers. [ 88 ]  Over 19 million people attended the  Panama-Pacific International Exposition  in  San Francisco , open for 10 months from February 20 to December 4, 1915. [ 89 ]  The PPIE was a fair devoted to extolling the virtues of a rapidly progressing nation, featuring new developments in science, agriculture, manufacturing and technology. A subject that received a large amount of time and space was that of the developments concerning health and disease, particularly the areas of  tropical medicine  and race betterment (tropical medicine being the combined study of  bacteriology ,  parasitology  and  entomology  while racial betterment being the promotion of eugenic studies). Having these areas so closely intertwined, it seemed that they were both categorized in the main theme of the fair, the advancement of civilization. Thus in the public eye, the seemingly contradictory areas of study were both represented under progressive banners of improvement and were made to seem like plausible courses of action to better American society. [ 90 ]


The state of California was at the vanguard of the American eugenics movement, performing about 20,000 sterilizations or one-third of the 60,000 nationwide from 1909 up until the 1960s. [ 89 ]  By 1910, there was a large and dynamic network of scientists, reformers and professionals engaged in national eugenics projects and actively promoting eugenic legislation. The American Breeder's Association was the first eugenic body in the U.S., established in 1906 under the direction of biologist Charles B. Davenport. The ABA was formed specifically to "investigate and report on heredity in the human race, and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood". Membership included Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford president David Starr Jordan and Luther Burbank. [ 91 ]


When Nazi administrators went on trial for  war crimes  in  Nuremberg  after  World War II , they attempted to justify the mass sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by citing the United States as their inspiration. [ 75 ]  The Nazis had claimed American eugenicists inspired and supported Hitler's racial purification laws, and failed to understand the connection between those policies and the eventual genocide of the  Holocaust . [ 92 ]


The idea of "genius" and "talent" is also considered by  William Graham Sumner , a founder of the American Sociological Society (now called the  American Sociological Association ). He maintained that if the government did not meddle with the social policy of  laissez-faire , a class of genius would rise to the top of the system of  social stratification , followed by a class of talent. Most of the rest of society would fit into the class of mediocrity. Those who were considered to be defective ( mentally delayed ,  handicapped , etc.) had a negative effect on social progress by draining off necessary resources. They should be left on their own to sink or swim. But those in the class of delinquent (criminals, deviants, etc.) should be eliminated from society ("Folkways", 1907).


However, methods of eugenics were applied to reformulate more restrictive definitions of white racial purity in existing state laws banning  interracial marriage : the so-called  anti-miscegenation laws . The most famous example of the influence of eugenics and its emphasis on strict racial segregation on such "anti- miscegenation " legislation was Virginia's  Racial Integrity Act of 1924 . [ citation needed ]  The  U.S. Supreme Court  overturned this law in 1967 in  Loving v. Virginia , and declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.


With the passage of the  Immigration Act of 1924 , eugenicists for the first time played an important role in the Congressional debate as expert advisers on the threat of "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe. [ 93 ]   While eugenicists did support the act, they were also backed by many labor unions. [ 94 ]  The new act, inspired by the eugenic belief in the racial superiority of "old stock" white Americans as members of the " Nordic race " (a form of  white supremacy ), strengthened the position of existing laws prohibiting race-mixing. [ 95 ]  Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption of  incest  laws in much of the U.S. and were used to justify many  anti-miscegenation laws . [ 96 ]


Stephen Jay Gould  asserted that restrictions on  immigration  passed in the United States during the 1920s (and overhauled in 1965 with the  Immigration and Nationality Act ) were motivated by the goals of eugenics. During the early 20th century, the United States and Canada began to receive far higher numbers of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. It has been argued that this stirred both Canada and the United States into passing laws creating a hierarchy of nationalities, rating them from the most desirable  Anglo-Saxon  and  Nordic  peoples to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, who were almost completely banned from entering the country. [ 97 ]  Others, however, argued that Congress gave virtually no consideration to these factors, and claim the restrictions were motivated primarily by a desire to maintain the country's cultural integrity against the heavy influx of foreigners. [ 98 ]


In the US, eugenics supporters included  Theodore Roosevelt . [ 99 ]  Research was funded by distinguished philanthropies and carried out at prestigious universities. [ 100 ]  It was taught in college and high school classrooms. [ 101 ]   In its time eugenics was touted by some as scientific and progressive; [ 88 ]  the natural application of knowledge about breeding to the arena of human life. Before the realization of  death camps  in  World War II , the idea that eugenics would lead to  genocide  was not taken seriously by the average American.


The policy of removing mixed-race  Aboriginal  children from their parents emerged from an opinion based on Eugenics theory in late 19th and early 20th century  Australia  that the 'full-blood'  tribal  Aborigine would be unable to sustain itself, and was doomed to inevitable extinction, as at the time huge numbers of aborigines were in fact dying out, from diseases caught from European settlers. [ 102 ]  An  ideology  at the time held that mankind could be divided into a civilizational hierarchy. This notion supposed that Northern  Europeans  were superior in civilization and that Aborigines were inferior. According to this view, the increasing numbers of mixed-descent children in Australia, labeled as "half-castes" (or alternatively "crossbreeds", "quadroons", and "octoroons") should develop within their respective communities, white or aboriginal, according to their dominant parentage. [ 103 ]


In the first half of the 20th century, this led to policies and legislation that resulted in the removal of children from their tribe. [ 104 ]
The stated aim was to  culturally assimilate   mixed-descent  people into contemporary Australian society. In all states and territories legislation was passed in the early years of the 20th century which gave Aboriginal protectors guardianship rights over Aborigines up to the age of sixteen or twenty-one. Policemen or other agents of the state (such as Aboriginal Protection Officers), were given the power to locate and transfer babies and children of mixed descent from their communities into institutions. In these Australian states and territories, half-caste institutions (both government or  missionary ) were established in the early decades of the 20th century for the reception of these separated children. [ 105 ] [ 106 ]  The 2002 movie  Rabbit-Proof Fence  portrays a true story about this system and the harrowing consequences of attempting to overcome it.


In 1922,  A.O. Neville  was appointed the second  Western Australia  State  Chief Protector of Aborigines . During the next quarter-century, he presided over the now notorious 'Assimilation' policy of removing mixed-race  Aboriginal  children from their parents.


Neville believed that biological absorption was the key to 'uplifting the Native race'. Speaking before the  Moseley Royal Commission , which investigated the administration of Aboriginals in 1934, he defended the policies of  forced settlement , removing children from parents, surveillance, discipline and punishment, arguing that "they have to be protected against themselves whether they like it or not. They cannot remain as they are. The sore spot requires the application of the surgeon's knife for the good of the patient, and probably against the patient's will". In his twilight years, Neville continued to actively promote his policy. Towards the end of his career, Neville published  Australia's Coloured Minority , a text outlining his plan for the biological absorption of aboriginal people into white Australia. [ 107 ] [ 108 ]


The idea of  Social Darwinism was widespread among  Brazil 's leading scientists, educators, social thinkers, as well as many elected officials, in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This led to the "Politica de Branqueamento" (Whitening Policies) set in practice in Brazil in the early part of the 20th century. This series of laws intended to enlarge the numbers of the  white race  in  Brazil  through  miscegenation  with European immigrants.


The first official organized movement of eugenics in  South America  was a Eugenics Conference in April 1917, which was followed in January 1918 by the founding of the São Paulo Society of Eugenics. This society worked with health agencies and psychiatric offices to promote their ideas. The year 1931 saw the foundation of the "Comitê Central de Eugenismo" (Central Committee on Eugenics) presided by Renato Kehl. Among its suggestions were an end to the immigration of non-whites to Brazil, and the spread of policies against miscegenation. [ 110 ]


The ideas of the Central Committee on Eugenics clashed with the Whitening Policies of the beginning of the 20th century. While the Whitening Policies advocated miscegenation in order to reduce the numbers of pure Africans in Brazil in favor of mulattos, who were expected to then produce white off-spring – a policy very similar to the "uplifting the Native race" in Australia – the Central Committee on Eugenics advocated no miscegenation at all and separation between the whites and non-whites in Brazil. When it became obvious that the future of Brazil was in  industrialization  (just as it was for other countries around the world), Brazil had to face whether they had a working force capable of being absorbed by an industrial society.  [ dubious  –  discuss ] [ citation needed ]


A new ideology was needed to counter such racialist claims. This ideology, known as  Lusotropicalism , was associated with  Gilberto Freyre , and became popular throughout the  Portuguese Empire : specifically,  Brazil  and  Angola . Lusotropicalism claimed that its large population of mixed-race people made Brazil the most capable country in tropical climates to carry out a program of industrialization. [ dubious  –  discuss ]  Its mixed-race population had the cultural and intellectual capabilities provided by the white race, [ citation needed ]  which could not work in tropical climates, combined with the physical ability to work in tropical climates, provided by the African black race. This excluded the fact that white prisoners, working under penal servitude in  Puerto Rico , seemed quite capable of working in a tropical environment.  [ citation needed ]


In the first decades of the twentieth century, the work of the  Rockefeller Foundation  was decisive for the implementation of public health initiatives in Brazil, especially in the so-called public health movement. At that time, Brazilian eugenics was the same as public health, as expressed in the maxim "to sanitize is to eugenize". [ 111 ]


In Canada, the eugenics movement gained support early in the 20th century as prominent physicians drew a direct link between heredity and public health. [ 112 ]  Eugenics was enforced by law in two Canadian provinces. In  Alberta , the  Sexual Sterilization Act  was enacted in 1928, focusing the movement on the sterilization of  mentally deficient  individuals, as determined by the  Alberta Eugenics Board . [ 113 ]  The campaign to enforce this action was backed by groups such as the United Farm Women's Group, including key member  Emily Murphy . [ 114 ]


As in many other former  British Empire  colonies, eugenic policies were linked to racist (and racialist) agendas pursued by various levels of government, such as the  forced sterilization of Canada's indigenous peoples  and specific provincial government initiatives, such as  Alberta's eugenics program . As a brief illustration, in 1928 the province of Alberta started an initiative, "…allowing any inmate of a native residential school to be sterilized upon the approval of the school Principal. At least 3,500 Indian women are sterilized under this law." [ 115 ]  As of 2011, research into extant archival records of  sterilization  and direct killing of  First Nations  youth (through intentional transmission of disease and other means) under the residential school program is ongoing. [ 116 ]


Individuals were assessed using  IQ tests  like the  Stanford-Binet . This posed a problem to new  immigrants arriving in Canada , as many had not mastered the  English language , and often their scores denoted them as having impaired intellectual functioning. As a result, many of those sterilized under the  Sexual Sterilization Act  were immigrants who were unfairly categorized. [ 117 ]  The province of  British Columbia  enacted its own  Sexual Sterilization Act  in 1933. As in Alberta, the British Columbia Eugenics Board could recommend the sterilization of those it considered to be suffering from "mental disease or mental deficiency". [ 118 ]


Although not enforced by laws as it was in  Canada's western provinces , an obscenity trial in  Depression -era  Ontario , can be seen as an example of the influence of eugenics in Ontario.  Dorothea Palmer , a nurse working for the Parents Information Bureau – a privately funded birth control organization based out of  Kitchener, Ontario  – was arrested in the predominantly Catholic community of  Eastview, Ontario  in 1936. She was accused of illegally providing birth control materials and knowledge to her clients, primarily poor women. The defense at her trial was mounted by an industrialist and influential eugenicist from Kitchener,  A.R. Kaufman . Palmer was acquitted in early 1937. The trial lasted less than a year, and later became known as  The Eastview Birth Control Trial , demonstrating the influence of the eugenics lobby in Ontario.


The popularity of the eugenics movement peaked during the  Depression  when sterilization was widely seen as a way of relieving society of the financial burdens imposed by defective individuals. [ 119 ]  Although the eugenics excesses of  Nazi Germany  diminished the popularity of the eugenics movement, the  Sexual Sterilization Acts  of Alberta and British Columbia were not repealed until 1972. [ 120 ]


Nazi Germany  under  Adolf Hitler  was well known for eugenics programs which attempted to maintain a "pure"  Aryan race  through a series of programs that ran under the banner of  racial hygiene . Among other activities, the Nazis performed extensive experimentation on live human beings to test their genetic theories, ranging from simple measurement of physical characteristics to the research for  Otmar von Verschuer  carried out by  Karin Magnussen  using "human material" gathered by  Josef Mengele  on twins and others at  Auschwitz  death camp. [ 121 ]  During the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazi regime used  forced sterilization  on hundreds of thousands of people whom they viewed as mentally ill, an estimated 400,000 between 1934 and 1937. The scale of the Nazi program prompted one American eugenics advocate to seek an expansion of their program, with one complaining that "the Germans are beating us at our own game." [ 122 ]


The Nazis went further, however, murdering tens of thousands of the institutionalized disabled through compulsory " euthanasia " programs such as  Aktion T4 . They used  gas chambers  and lethal injections to murder their victims. [ 123 ]


They also implemented a number of "positive" eugenics policies, giving awards to  Aryan  women who had large numbers of children and encouraged a service in which "racially pure" single women could deliver illegitimate children. Allegations that such women were also impregnated by  SS  officers in the  Lebensborn  were not proven at the Nuremberg trials, but new evidence (and the testimony of Lebensborn children) has established more details about Lebensborn practices. [ 124 ]  Also, "racially valuable" children from occupied countries were forcibly removed from their parents and adopted by German people. Many of their concerns for eugenics and racial hygiene were also explicitly present in their systematic murder of millions of "undesirable" people, especially  Jews  who were singled out for the  Final Solution , this policy led to the horrors seen in the  Holocaust . [ 125 ]


The scope and coercion involved in the German eugenics programs along with a strong use of the rhetoric of eugenics and so-called "racial science" throughout the regime created an indelible cultural association between eugenics and the  Third Reich  in the post-war years. [ 126 ]


The ideas of eugenics and race were used, in part, as justification for German colonial expansion throughout the world. Germany, as well as Great Britain, sought to seize the colonial territories of other 'dying' empires which could no longer protect their possessions. Examples included China, the Portuguese Empire, the  Spanish Empire , the  Dutch Empire  and the  Danish Empire .


Thus the colonies Germany required for her bursting population, as markets for her overproductive industries and sources of vital raw materials, and as symbols of her world power would simply have to be taken from weaker nations, so the pan-Germans asserted publicly and the German government believed secretly. [ 127 ]


German colonies in Africa  from 1885 to 1918 included  German South-West Africa  (present-day  Namibia ),  Kamerun  (present-day  Cameroon ),  Togoland  (present-day  Togo ) and  German East Africa  (present-day  Tanzania .  Rwanda  and  Burundi ).  Genocide  was carried out there, against the  Herero  people of present-day Namibia and later a programme of research in physical anthropology was conducted using their skulls.


The rulers of German South West Africa carried out a programme of genocide against the aboriginal Herero people. One of the officials enacting this program was General  Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha .


The 1918 British "Bluebook" documented the genocide that took place at  Shark Island  and  Windhoek Concentration Camps , including photographs. [ 130 ]  The Bluebook was used as a negotiating tool by the British at the end of World War I to gain control of what had been German Southwest Africa, after Germany was defeated. [ 131 ]


Skulls of the Herero were collected from  Rehoboth, Namibia  in about 1904, for the purpose of demonstrating the supposed physical inferiority of these people. The  Kaiser Wilhelm Institute  used the Herero skulls by 1928. [ 132 ]


The physical anthropologists used measurements of skull capacity, etc., in an attempt to prove that Jews, Blacks and Italians were inherently "inferior" to Whites. Examples of such activity were found from about 1928 at the  Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics . This contrasted with a lot of 19th-century German anthropology which was generally more cosmopolitan. [ 133 ]


Eugen Fischer  of the  Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics  and his students carried out " Bastard studies " anthropological studies of  mixed race  people throughout the German colonial empire, including the colonies in Africa and the Pacific. [ 134 ]  Fischer also worked with the United States eugenicist  Charles Davenport .


Rita Hauschild, a doctoral student and then staff member of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Human Heredity, Anthropology, and Eugenics, carried out " bastard studies ", anthropometric studies of mixed-heritage populations in  Trinidad  and  Venezuela , in pursuit of the Nazi doctrine of "racial hygiene". Her research was at first confined to  Tovar ,  Venezuela , a former German colony, and was extended to  Trinidad  with support from the  UK Foreign Office . The populations studied, in 1935 to 1937, were "Chinese-Negro hybrids" in Trinidad, "Chinese-Indian" and "Chinese-Negro" "hybrids" in Venezuela. [ 135 ]  In addition, Johannes Schaeuble engaged in "bastard studies" in Chile.


In the early part of the  Shōwa era , Japanese governments executed a eugenics policy to limit the birth of children with "inferior" traits, as well as aiming to protect the life and health of mothers. [ 136 ]  The  Race Eugenic Protection Law  was submitted from 1934 to 1938 to the  Imperial Diet . After four amendments, this draft was promulgated as the  National Eugenic Law   in 1940 by the  Konoe  government. [ 137 ]  According to the  Eugenic Protection Law  (1948), sterilization could be enforced on criminals "with genetic predisposition to commit crime", patients with genetic diseases such as  total color-blindness ,  hemophilia ,  albinism  and  ichthyosis , and mental affections such as  schizophrenia , and  manic-depressiveness , and those with  epilepsy . [ 138 ]  Mental illnesses were added in 1952.


The  Leprosy Prevention laws  of 1907, 1931 and 1953, the last one only repealed in 1996, permitted the segregation of patients in sanitariums where  forced abortions  and  sterilization  were common, even if the laws did not refer to it, and authorized punishment of patients "disturbing peace", as most Japanese leprologists believed that vulnerability to the disease was inheritable. [ 139 ]  There were a few Japanese leprologists such as Noburo Ogasawara who argued against the "isolation-sterilization policy" but he was denounced as a traitor to the nation at the 15th conference of the Japanese Association of Leprology in 1941. [ 140 ]


One of the last eugenic measures of the Shōwa regime was taken by the  Higashikuni  government. On 19 August 1945, the  Home Ministry  ordered local government offices to establish a  prostitution  service for  Allied occupation soldiers  to preserve the "purity" of the "Japanese race". The official declaration stated: "Through the sacrifice of thousands of "Okichis" of the  Shōwa era , we shall construct a  dike  to hold back the mad frenzy of the occupation troops and cultivate and preserve the purity of our race long into the future..." [ 141 ]


Early in the  Japanese administration of Korea , staff at the Japanese Association of Leprology attempted to discourage marriage between Japanese women and Korean men who had been recruited from the peninsula as laborers following its annexation by Japan in 1910. In 1942, a survey report argued that "the Korean laborers brought to Japan... are of the lower classes and therefore of inferior constitution...By fathering children with Japanese women, these men could lower the caliber of the  Yamato minzoku ". [ 142 ]  However, eugenics pioneer Unno Kōtoku of  Ryukyu University  influentially argued based on  heterosis  in plants that exclusive Japanese  endogamy  might cause "degeneration" of the Japanese race. Since he regarded intermarriage with white or black people as "disastrous", he advocated intermarriage with  Koreans , whose "inferior" physical characteristics would be subsumed by the "superior" Japanese, according to his thinking. [ 143 ]  Japanese-Korean intermarriage was promoted by the government in Korea using  serological  studies that claimed to prove that Japanese and Koreans had the same pure ancestral origin. [ 144 ]


After independence in the late 1940s, both  North  and  South Korea  continued to perpetuate the idea of an ethnically homogeneous  Korean nation  based on a divine single bloodline. [ 145 ]  This "pure-blood-ism" (순혈주의) is a source of pride for many Koreans, and informs  Korean nationalism , politics, and foreign relations. [ 146 ] [ 147 ]  In South Korea, an  ethnic nationalism  tinged with pure blood ideology sustained the dictatorships of  Syngman Rhee  and  Park Chung-hee , [ 148 ]  and it still serves as a unifying ideology, as  Brian Reynolds Myers  argues, in  North Korea . [ 145 ]  Deep-seated cultural biases originating in eugenics policies  result in discrimination  against  multiracial  people in South Korea, according to the United Nations  Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination . [ 149 ] [ 150 ]


In the 20th century, the idea of eugenics was imported to South Korea from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. [ 151 ] [ 152 ]  During the 1970s and 80s, the  military dictatorships  of the  Fourth  and  Fifth  Republics of  South Korea  established various  internment  and  concentration camps , most famously the so-called  Brothers Home , which forcibly detained people from the lower classes (often falsely accused of being homeless). [ 153 ]  Additionally, from the mid 1970s to the mid 1990s, these dictatorships, as well as the currently ruling  Sixth Republic  which succeeded them, sterilized  mentally ill  and  intellectually disabled  individuals; the exact number of individuals sterilized is not known. A law imposed by  Park Chung-Hee  permitting the involuntary sterilization of mentally ill or mentally retarded South Koreans was repealed only in 1997. [ 154 ]


Eugenics was one of many ideas and programs debated in the 1920s and 1930s in  Republican China , as a means of improving society and raising China's stature in the world.  The principal Chinese proponent of eugenics was the prominent sociologist  Pan Guangdan , and a significant number of intellectuals entered into the debate, including  Gao Xisheng , biologist  Zhou Jianren , sociologist  Chen Da , and  Chen Jianshan , and many others. [ 155 ] [ 156 ]  Chen Da is notable for the link he provides to the  family planning policy  and  One Child Policy  enacted in China after the establishment of the  People's Republic of China .


Other countries that adopted some form of eugenics program at one time include  Denmark ,  Estonia ,  Finland ,  France ,  Iceland ,  Norway , and  Switzerland  with programs to sterilize people the government declared to be mentally deficient. [ 162 ]  In Denmark, the first eugenics law was passed in 1926, under the  Social Democrats , with more legislation being passed in 1932. Though the sterilization was initially voluntary (at least theoretically), the law passed in 1932 allowed for involuntary sterilization of some groups. [ 163 ]


Beginning in the late 1920s, greater appreciation of the difficulty of predicting characteristics of offspring from their heredity, and scientists' recognition of the inadequacy of simplistic theories of eugenics, undermined whatever scientific basis had been ascribed to the social movement. As the  Great Depression  took hold, criticism of economic value as a proxy for human worth became increasingly compelling. [ 164 ]  After the experience of Nazi Germany, many ideas about "racial hygiene" and "unfit" members of society were discredited. [ 165 ]  The  Nuremberg Trials  against former Nazi leaders revealed to the world many of the regime's genocidal practices and resulted in formalized policies of medical ethics and the 1950  UNESCO  statement on race. Many scientific societies released their own similar "race statements" over the years, and the  Universal Declaration of Human Rights , developed in response to abuses during the Second World War, was adopted by the  United Nations  in 1948 and affirmed, "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family." [ 166 ]  In continuation, the 1978  UNESCO  declaration on race and racial prejudice states that the fundamental equality of all human beings is the ideal toward which ethics and science should converge. [ 167 ]


In reaction to Nazi abuses, eugenics became almost universally reviled in many of the nations where it had once been popular (however, some eugenics programs, including sterilization, continued quietly for decades). Many pre-war eugenicists engaged in what they later labeled "crypto-eugenics", purposefully taking their eugenic beliefs "underground" and becoming respected anthropologists, biologists and geneticists in the postwar world (including  Robert Yerkes  in the U.S. and  Otmar von Verschuer  in Germany). [ citation needed ]  Californian eugenicist  Paul Popenoe  founded  marriage counseling  during the 1950s, a career change which grew from his eugenic interests in promoting "healthy marriages" between "fit" couples. [ 168 ] [ better source needed ]


In 1957, a special meeting of Britain's Eugenics Society discussed ways to stem losses in membership, including the suggestion "that the Society should pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics, which was apparently proving successful with the US Eugenics Society". In February 1960 the Council resolved to pursue "activities in crypto-eugenics...vigorously" and "specifically" to increase payments to the  Family Planning Association  and the  International Planned Parenthood Federation . The subsequent sale of a birth-control clinic (the bequest of Dr  Marie Stopes ) to Dr  Tim Black  and the change of Society's name to  Galton Institute  (on the grounds that it was "less evocative") align with the Society's crypto-eugenic policy. [ 169 ]


The  American Life League , an opponent of abortion, charges that eugenics was merely "re-packaged" after the war, and promoted anew in the guise of the population-control and environmentalism movements. They claim, for example, that  Planned Parenthood  was funded and cultivated by the Eugenics Society for these reasons.  Julian Huxley , the first Director-General of  UNESCO  and a founder of the  World Wildlife Fund , was also a Eugenics Society president and a strong supporter of eugenics. [ 170 ]


[E]ven though it is quite true that any radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care, and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable. --Julian Huxley [ 171 ]


High school and college textbooks from the 1920s through the 1940s often had chapters touting the scientific progress to be had from applying eugenic principles to the population. Many early scientific journals devoted to heredity in general were run by eugenicists and featured eugenics articles alongside studies of heredity in nonhuman organisms.  Even the names of some journals changed to reflect new attitudes. For example,  Eugenics Quarterly  became  Social Biology  in 1969 (the journal still exists today, though it looks little like its predecessor). Notable members of the  American Eugenics Society  (1922–94) during the second half of the 20th century included  Joseph Fletcher , originator of  Situational ethics ;  Clarence Gamble  of the  Procter & Gamble  fortune; and  Garrett Hardin , a  population control  advocate and author of the essay  The Tragedy of the Commons .


In the United States, the eugenics movement had largely lost most popular and political support by the end of the 1930s, while forced sterilizations mostly ended in the 1960s with the last performed in 1981. [ 172 ]  Many US states continued to prohibit biracial marriages with "anti-miscegenation laws" such as Virginia's  Racial Integrity Act  of 1924, until they were overruled by the Supreme Court in 1967 in  Loving v. Virginia . [ 173 ]  The  Immigration Restriction Act  of 1924, which was designed to limit the immigration of "dysgenic"  Italians , and  eastern European Jews , was repealed and replaced by the  Immigration and Nationality Act  in 1965. [ 174 ]


However, some prominent academics continued to support eugenics after the war. In 1963 the  Ciba Foundation  convened a conference in London under the title "Man and His Future", at which three distinguished biologists and Nobel laureates ( Hermann Muller ,  Joshua Lederberg , and  Francis Crick ) all spoke strongly in favor of eugenics. [ 175 ] [ better source needed ]  A few nations, notably the Canadian province of  Alberta , maintained large-scale eugenics programs, including forced sterilization of mentally handicapped individuals, as well as other practices, until the 1970s. [ 176 ]


Beginning in the 1980s, the history and concept of eugenics were widely discussed as knowledge about  genetics  advanced significantly, making practical  genetic engineering , which has been widely used to produce  genetically modified organisms , with  genetically modified foods  being most visible to the general public. Endeavors such as the  Human Genome Project  made the effective modification of the human species seem possible again (as did Darwin's initial theory of evolution in the 1860s, along with the rediscovery of  Mendel's laws  in the early 20th century).  Article 23 of the  Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities  prohibits compulsory sterilization of disabled individuals and guarantees their right to adopt children.


A few scientific researchers such as psychologist  Richard Lynn , psychologist  Raymond Cattell , and scientist  Gregory Stock  have openly called for eugenic policies using modern technology, but they represent a minority opinion in current scientific and cultural circles. [ 177 ]  One attempted implementation of a form of eugenics was a " genius sperm bank " (1980–99) created by  Robert Klark Graham , from which nearly 230 children were conceived (the best-known donors were  Nobel Prize  winners  William Shockley  and  J. D. Watson ). After Graham died in 1997 funding ran out, and within two years his sperm bank had closed. [ 178 ]


Richard J. Herrnstein  and  Charles Murray 's book  The Bell Curve  argued that immigration from countries with low  national IQ  is undesirable. According to  Raymond Cattell , "when a country is opening its doors to immigration from diverse countries, it is like a farmer who buys his seeds from different sources by the sack, with sacks of different average quality of contents". [ 179 ]


with the  People's Republic of China 's 1950 Marriage Law stating that " impotence ,  venereal disease ,  mental disorder  and  leprosy ", as well as any other diseases seen by medical science as making a person unfit to marry, were grounds for prohibition from  marriage . The 1980 law dropped all specific conditions bar leprosy, and the 2001 law now specifies no conditions, simply approval by a medical doctor. [ 180 ]


Various provinces began to pass laws barring certain classes of people, such as the mentally delayed, from reproducing in the late 1980s. [ 180 ]  The Chinese Maternal and Infant Health Care Law (1994), which has been referred to as the "Eugenic Law" in the West, required a health check prior to marriage. Carriers of certain genetic diseases were allowed to marry only if they are sterilized, or agree to use some other form of long-term contraception. [ 181 ]  Though the requirement for the health check has been dropped at the national level, it continues to be required by some provinces. Local medical doctors make the decision on who is "unfit" to marry. [ 180 ]  Much Western comment on the law has been critical, but many Chinese geneticists are supportive of the policy. [ 182 ]


In the Chinese province of  Sichuan  in 1999, a sperm bank called Notables' Sperm Bank opened, with professors as the only permitted donors. The semen bank was approved by the authority for family planning in the provincial capital  Chengdu . [ 183 ]


In  postwar Japan , the  Eugenic Protection Law  ( ja:優生保護法 ,  Yusei Hogo Hō )  was enacted in 1948 to replace the National Eugenic Law of 1940. [ 184 ]  The main provisions allowed for the surgical sterilization of women, when the woman, her spouse, or family member within the 4th degree of kinship had a serious  genetic disorder , and where pregnancy would endanger the life of the woman. The operation required consent of the woman, her spouse and the approval of the Prefectural Eugenic Protection Council. [ 185 ]


The law also allowed for  abortion for pregnancies  in the cases of  rape ,  leprosy ,  hereditary-transmitted disease , or if the physician determined that the fetus would not be viable outside of the womb. Again, the consent of the woman and her spouse were necessary.  Birth control  guidance and implementation was restricted to doctors, nurses and professional  midwives  accredited by the Prefectural government. The law was also amended in May 1949 to allow abortions for economic reasons at the sole discretion of the doctor, which in effect fully legalized abortion in Japan. [ 185 ]