Many people don't know about the eugenics movement of the 20th century. Adolf Hitler wanted to create a master race by killing all those he thought inferior - Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and retarded children
Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, said, "eugenic sterilization is an urgent need ...we must prevent multiplication of this bad stock."
Many states allowed forced sterilization of those with "insanity, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy." In 2003, the Governor of South Carolina apologized for decades of forced sterilizations.
The San Francisco Chronicle examines the history of eugenics in California, a key backer of whom was Charles Goethe, a wealthy conservationist and benefactor of what would become California State University's Sacramento campus in Echoes of Eugenics Movement in Stem Cell Debate.
Goethe, who backed preserving redwood stands as a way to enhance California's natural environment, also wanted to apply animal breeding concepts to the betterment of humanity -- apparently to exclude most everyone who wasn't white and European.
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Chloe Burke, a Cal State Sacramento historian and organizer of a daylong conference held Friday and billed as the first of its kind, called "From Eugenics to Designer Babies: Engineering the California Dream." says, "Both are linked to a conviction that tampering with heredity or our genetic makeup can lead to solutions for a broad number of problems, both individual and social," she said.
Behind the advocacy of stem cells, she said, "is this dream of living in a disease-free future," one of the early threads that made up Goethe's own worldview.