The joke is on Shatner, or rather on an old tweet from the actor, who is best known for playing Captain James Tiberius Kirk in the original series. Considering that Star Trek has never not been political, responses to the meme have predictably flooded social media. (The best being “1966”—the year Star Trek debuted.)

Today, there is more Star Trek on air than ever before, courtesy of streaming service Paramount+. Amid this renaissance, the franchise, at its best, continues to serve as an arena for political thought, mining the events of the past and present to imagine what the future could look like. I’ve been especially interested to watch how several plotlines have lately been converging around eugenics, suggesting how heavily the subject will weigh over the future of modern Trek.

The debunked theory of eugenics gained widespread attention and influence in the first half of the 20th century until Nazi Germany’s passion for it made it politically nonviable. Nevertheless, today it still influences policy and thought around the world—including here in the U.S., where the dangerous legacy of the American eugenics movement remains embedded in the national discourse. But eugenic themes were long pushed off the screen and out of the public eye following a silent-era film debacle.

Back in the early 1900s, the eugenics movement was ubiquitous in American popular culture. State fairs hosted “better baby contests” that rewarded the healthiest and strongest (white) offspring. Op-eds pushed for doctor-approved marriage licenses in the name of “public health.” And traveling lecture tours warned of the dangers of children inheriting the supposed “weaknesses” of their parents, under the rationale that “inferior types” were a biological threat to the future.

All of this was reflected in movie plotlines of the day. But while dramas like Heredity (1912) and The Inherited Sin (1915) promoted eugenics ideals, progressive comedies like Wood B. Wedd and the Microbes (1914) and The Eugenic Boy (1914) pushed back, critiquing and debunking the movement. “Eugenics was an intrinsic part of early movie culture,” literary scholar Karen A. Keely argues in “Scientific Selection on the Silver Screen,” noting that film studios and directors in the silent era often “used their medium to argue the merits and deficits of eugenic theories and policies.”

Then came the 1916 silent film The Black Stork.

It was a plot ripped, literally, from the headlines, starring Chicago surgeon Harry J. Haiselden as himself. Historian Martin Pernick’s excellent 1996 book The Black Stork, which resurfaced the eponymous film and Haiselden from obscurity, recounts the story. In 1915, Pernick writes, Haiselden advised the mother of a baby born with deformities to forego necessary surgery and let the newborn die, lest it grow up with lifelong health conditions. After the so-called Bollinger Baby’s death, Haiselden called a press conference to announce what he had done—and would do again—for the genetic “well-being” of the nation. To Haiselden, the choice not to operate on the baby was part of the “Greater Surgery”—“the surgery that cuts away the vileness and decay and leaves only the sweet and clean and wholesome in this life of ours.”

National media covered Haiselden like a celebrity: “SURGEON LETS BABY, BORN TO IDIOCY, DIE” read a New York Times headline after Haiselden refused to perform another live-saving operation on a different newborn, with a subtitle noting the decision came “FROM ALTRUISTIC MOTIVE.”

Haiselden was a sensation, but after he appeared in The Black Stork, a fictional film version of the Bollinger case, he lost control of his message. Promotional material for the film billed it as a “eugenic love story” and “eugenic photoplay,” intended to elicit good feeling for the mother’s choice not to save her child after seeing the future he would grow up to have. But audience members empathized with the baby. Unlike the pro-eugenics op-eds or lecture tours that spoon-fed policy messages to audiences, movies and fiction gave the public more freedom of interpretation. And seeing the dead boy’s alternative life in The Black Stork unsettled them.

Those who did sympathize with the eugenics movement, meanwhile, also objected to The Black Stork: They did not want to see graphic depictions of physical deformities on the screen. All of this, Pernick argues, led to a backlash that ultimately led regional and national censorship bodies to ban or regulate eugenic themes, whether the subject was shown in a positive or negative light.

Pushing eugenics practices off the popular screen wasn’t exactly a win for the anti-eugenics camp. In the years following The Black Stork, eugenic films could still be screened for health professionals—and these works, hidden from public view, continued influencing policy that would become responsible for some of the most vile compulsory and coercive sterilization laws in the U.S. targeting Indigenous, Black, brown, poor, disabled, unmarried, mentally ill, and incarcerated people, among others. This “firmer distinction between education, medical, and social films and entertainment films” that obscured eugenic sterilization campaigns from the public came just as the “professional powers to intervene in the bodies and lives of the ‘unfit’ continued to expand,” as scholar Angela M. Smith pinpoints in Hideous Progeny: Disability, Eugenics, and Classic Horror Cinema.

In 1927—the same year censors approved a heavily-edited version of The Black Stork for rerelease under the title Are You Fit to Marry?—the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s state-enforced sterilization law, ruling 8-1 in Buck v. Bell that 18-year-old Carrie Buck could be legally sterilized for being “feeble minded,” a decision that influenced Adolf Hitler when he designed the eugenics system for Nazi Germany. (“There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the American Union,” he wrote in Mein Kampf.)

After World War II, when the full extent of the horrors of Hitler’s Third Reich were revealed to the world, the eugenics movement lost momentum. But its influence continued on—the U.S. sanctioned mass institutionalization and forced sterilization policies into the 1970s. (Oregon’s last state-sanctioned forced sterilization occurred in 1981.) Today, the advancement of the “great replacement” theory—the racist ideology that there’s a conspiracy to “replace” white Americans—is yet another callback to a eugenics-based belief set, and is reflected in everything from the fight over abortion rights to the Buffalo mass shooting in May.

That’s why it’s important that shows like Star Trek—which has touched on the dangers of eugenics since the introduction of its greatest antagonist, the genetically engineered Übermensch Khan Noonien Singh, back in 1967—continue to put a spotlight on the subject.

As researchers who studied genetic engineering in film and television from 1912 through 2020 recently concluded in the Journal of Literature and Science, the visibility of this theme in film and television matters “not because it determines the attitudes of the public” but because it “furnishes the public debate.”

Too often, the science—or in this case, racist, classist, ableist, long-debunked pseudoscience—that shapes policy has been argued behind closed doors. Looking back on The Black Stork and its impact, is a reminder of why it matters that we don’t shy away from confronting it on screen.

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My doubts, as it happened, had some validity. The name Central Metric Office proved to be a red herring, since the office’s purposes were narrow. Scotland Yard had something very specific in mind: a system of criminal identification, imported from France, relying on card files of prisoners that were sorted according to an array of bodily measurements. The office in question, though, offered evidence that police devotion to data was quite real, and the office was linked to an impressive network of measurement activities. Probing the episode of the Central Metric Office opened up a new perspective on the history of genetic knowledge, and even on its human meaning.

Most textbook accounts have genetics emerging quite suddenly in 1900. Historians have long treated this moment as pivotal. The year 1900 is when Gregor Mendel’s decades-old hybridization experiments on peas suddenly became famous. Almost immediately, his work was celebrated as the foundation for a science of biological inheritance.

At almost the same time, in 1899, measurements such as those collected by the Central Metric Office drew the attention of anthropologists. A year later they appeared in the first issue of a pioneering statistical journal, Biometrika, with a triumvirate of editors that included eugenic pioneers Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. Their movement to investigate how heredity shaped abilities and “defects” was just then getting off the ground, and they worked to support it with vast repositories of data from schools, universities, prisons, hospitals, and insane asylums. The Mendelian and biometric strains of eugenics thus began to flourish almost simultaneously. However, modern scholarship, taking a more cultural approach, is uncovering a much richer and longer history for the investigation of human heredity.

In fact, as further probing revealed, the biological inheritance of criminality had been widely suspected, often simply assumed, for decades before the London police first spoke of a Central Metric Office. But prison officials had very little access to family data. It was only around 1900 that hereditary information on criminals began to appear in connection with a crisis, as it seemed, of “feeblemindedness.”

What brought about this supposed crisis, paradoxically, was the expansion of schooling. Beginning about 1870, as governments made elementary education universal and even mandatory in much of Europe and North America, they created a category of child known as “feebleminded.” Those who fell behind in school were given this label. They were sometimes sent to special schools, where they were subject to medical and psychological examination. Followers of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso claimed that such children were biologically and morally backward: in short, born criminals. Others denied this, arguing that the defective children were not specifically criminal, but simple and gullible, hence vulnerable to bad influences.

It was, however, the supposed link of criminality to feeblemindedness that sparked systematic data collection on criminal heredity. Felons, arriving in jails or prisons as adults and attended by police officers with no medical training, were unlikely to provide information on the mental health of their families. The opposite was true for schoolchildren under the watch of teachers, doctors, and school officials. The role of heredity in feeblemindedness became a hot topic in the late 19th century, and schools for such children turned into sites for hereditary investigation. It was a huge stimulus to the nascent eugenics movement, which in many respects took off long before 1900, though it was not known as such.

Breeding results on peas and poultry provided a basis for genetic explanations, but did not create these hereditary concerns. Rather, medical-social anxieties contributed to the excitement about breeding and heredity that made biometric as well as Mendelian methods seem thrilling and even fateful. From about 1880, special schools were the most important sources of data on human heredity and of proto-eugenic anxieties.

To get the full picture, however, we need to look even further back to earlier sources for hereditary and eugenic study. Record keeping on inheritance of feeblemindedness was shaped by an enterprise whose first beginnings can be traced back at least to 1789. In January of that year, King George III’s symptoms of madness became alarming enough to precipitate a constitutional crisis in England. Was the king likely to recover, or would it be necessary to appoint his son as regent?

Dr. William Black, a veteran of studies of smallpox inoculation, knew how to proceed with such questions. He found his way to private records on the insane (there were no good public ones) from the royal asylum of Bethlem. Within months, Black published tables of cure rates in relation to several variables, including one on causes of insanity. “Family and hereditary” appeared here as perhaps the most important cause of all.

Black’s statistics were exceptional, but a vast expansion of insane asylums in the early 19th century stimulated new routines of recordkeeping. Causes of insanity were of particular interest. Lay as well as medical witnesses endorsed the key role of hereditary causation right from the start. Although the new public asylums at first reported abundant cures, patient numbers increased with hyper-Malthusian fury. Disappointed by their failure or inability to cure their patients, the doctors (known as “alienists”) focused more and more on the presumed causal role of heredity. If this alarming epidemic could not be checked by medicine, the key might be to persuade young men and women tainted by bad heredity to refrain from marriage.

When King George III’s madness became clear, Dr. William Black searched the records of the royal asylum, Bethlem Hospital, to understand which patients had recovered. Courtesy of the Wellcome Trust/Wikimedia Commons.

This project, eugenic in all but name, was anchored in data collection on patients and their families. A Norwegian alienist, for example, compiled the first family pedigrees of insanity in 1859, and then labored to track the migration of these hereditary factors from generation to generation. Two German doctors compiled data to calculate the increased probability of madness when one or both parents had been diagnosed insane.

When statisticians and geneticists turned their attention to questions of human heredity around 1900, they learned immediately that psychiatrists and school psychologists already possessed not just unmatchable data on the transmission of mental illness and mental weakness, but sophisticated tools to compile and analyze the numbers. All this data work led to modest scientific successes punctuated by embarrassments, as claims for the discovery of a single hereditary factor for mental illness soon appeared scandalous. Data files also facilitated the injustice, as it is now recognized, of forced sterilization—which was legal for a time in much of the United States and abroad—as well as mass killings of asylum patients in Nazi Germany.

Partly in reaction to these horrors, postwar human and medical geneticists tried to model their science on fruit fly genetics. But doctors, psychologists, and geneticists could not put aside this old faith in genetic causes of schizophrenia, mental disability, even criminality. Geneticists in the 1970s gathered data from prisons in the expectation that much violent crime might be explained by the presence of an extra Y chromosome, and the campaign or the Human Genome Project was included promises to identify the genes for schizophrenia.

The science of human genetics has deep roots in eugenic doctrines and projects that go back more than two centuries. The use of numbers to support ideas arising from fear or bigotry is not limited to benighted days gone by.

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Even science has carried this idea to extremes. Genes, for example, are said to account for the difference between people who are perpetual cheaters and those in a lifelong committed relationship. Genes are said to be the reason why some people vote conservative while others vote liberal and why some don’t vote at all. Genes supposedly determine our ability to get through those last years of college, to keep ourselves out of credit card debt, or to invest in the stock market in order to plan for our retirement. And on and on.

If you take this narrative literally, you might think that humans have little free will or sense of right and wrong, and that our environments, educations, and societies play a minor role in how we act or the choices we make. We are, in this version, fleshy computers running hardware provided by our genes.

Why are genes so popular now? Why do they seem to explain everything so perfectly? And how did we come to want to know ourselves through our DNA?

These questions first came to me as I was wrapping up a book on the Human Genome Project and ideas about race. Looking at the state of genetic science, I noticed a push toward investigating the genetics of social phenomena arising in my own field of sociology. I decided to talk to scientists, experts, and everyday people to get a sense of why so many things previously understood in terms of social relations and environmental conditions were coming to be explained in terms of our genomes.

What I discovered is that science and pop culture each spin a narrow version of what genes are and how they impact us, together professing that genes are the deepest essence of ourselves. These two strands combine and reinforce each other.

Recently, researchers, even social scientists, have been focused on finding genetic causes for things in ways that leave out the environment, culture, and social upbringing. Pop culture has seized on these scientific reports, relaying findings as the ultimate truth. And as public interest in genetics and genetic testing has grown, the organizations that fund scientific research have begun putting a premium on studies that seek answers in the genes, closing a feedback loop.

Looking at phenomena beyond disease has become the newest trend, and there is a great deal of energy being spent on opening up opportunities for it. Scientists who are willing to risk their reputations on the new arena of social behavior are being rewarded by the biggest funders and health organizations out there. The National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation, for example, are eager supporters of studies as well as efforts to build out a new field of science wholly focused on the genetics of social phenomena.

The space opened up is now being populated by social scientists who are new to genetics, but who believe that they will be able to revolutionize the hunt for genetic associations. This is most striking in the spate of new gene-focused fields, fields like “genopolitics” and “genoeconomics,” that creatively mash up natural and social science methods to apply genetics to new arenas of life, such as political participation and financial decision-making.

A prominent example of the kind of research that these fields are doing is the ongoing search for genes associated with educational attainment. A consortium of political scientists, economists, and sociologists have been mining the human genome for genetic culprits that have an impact on how far people make it through school. Another example is the hunt for rage genes. Scientists have linked the MAOA gene to violent behavior, rape, and even gang participation.

Despite arising from complex interdisciplinary approaches, these hybrid sciences all too often promote genetic determinism. Though they aim to characterize the special way that genes and environments interact to make us who we are, most often they use methods common to genetic science that analyze only the DNA portion of the gene-environment equation. It is expensive and challenging enough to tackle genes alone, and funders do not require that genetic studies pay detailed attention to the environment, so scientists leave the environment out of the picture. Instead of showing us how nature and nurture work together, they reinforce a nature versus nurture way of thinking. This isn’t the fault of individual scientists, but rather is built into the way things are done when hunting for genes. Even the most seasoned social scientists end up checking deep environmental analysis at the door.

For the general public, an even more reductive sense of how genes work and what they mean reigns supreme. TV shows like CSI convince viewers that genes are entities that trump all else. Cultural analysts who have studied the rise of genes in pop culture say that DNA has a certain mystique, seeming indivisible and irreducible, like atoms. And in a world where everyday people are increasingly being asked to manage their own health, to optimize it in any way possible, genetic susceptibilities seem to be one bit of outside reassurance for an uncertain future.

This potent combination of data and cultural resonance gives relatively flimsy scientific conclusions tremendous potency. When I spoke with experts across society—teachers, attorneys, prison wardens, and more—about genetic tests, I learned that they believed that genes had a uniquely predictive power. Many were concerned that tests could be misused by non-experts, but they nevertheless believed that knowing about someone’s DNA would help in working with them. IQ tests could be used to track kids into different types of schools. Criminality tests could determine how to handle repeat offenders. Moreover, tests could be given in infancy, or even administered prenatally.

The belief that nature is really what’s driving us is not new. It’s an idea that can be traced to the earliest thinking about genes and evolution, back to Darwin—and also to his infamous cousin, the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton. Darwin allowed for nurture to kick in as soon as individuals were born, but Galton popularized the idea that the transfer of traits via DNA was all that mattered. In his version, nature and nurture were at odds, with nature winning every time. Francis Galton’s vision went beyond the notion that nature determined the essence of humanity; he believed that the only way to rid humanity of undesired traits was to rid it of the people with those traits.

Though most people today would not want to live in a eugenic society, where DNA decides everyone’s fate, it could be a real possibility if we don’t change the way we think about genes. Our increasing belief in genetic determinism, in an era in which tests are proliferating like mad, threatens to bring us to a world in which people will be slated for totally different experiences, relationships, and life outcomes based on their genes. This will be nothing less than a high-tech eugenic social order, even though people will feel they’ve bought into it voluntarily—through dating apps and hobby tests.

In fact, if you take our current cultural attitudes to their likely conclusion, eventually, there could be two genetic classes. The haves will be able to test their embryos and use IVF to select for things like high intelligence and bullish fiscal attitudes. The have-nots will be tested in infancy or as they enter school, where they will be tracked for certain classrooms and educational and fitness programs, or given no school at all. Educational institutions will become closed-off places where like meets like, as will the labor programs and trade schools offered to those who have “less fit” DNA. If we don’t develop a more critical approach to the information offered by DNA testing, a social order built from the most insidious inequality truly could be our future.

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At the time, however, sterilization both was countenanced by the U.S. Supreme Court (in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case) and supported by many scientists, reformers, and law-makers as one prong of a larger strategy to improve society by encouraging the reproduction of the “fit” and restricting the procreation of the “unfit.” In total, 32 U.S. states passed sterilization laws between 1907 and 1937, and surgeries reached their highest numbers in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Beginning in the 1970s, state legislatures began to repeal these laws, finding them antiquated and discriminatory, particularly towards people with disabilities.

Of the 60,000 sterilizations in the United States, California performed one-third, or 20,000, of them, making the Golden State the most aggressive sterilizer in the nation. Ten years ago, I published a book that explores the history of eugenics and sterilization in California, but I was frustrated that my research had yielded so little information about the state’s extensive sterilization program. I knew next to nothing about the thousands of Californians sterilized in institutions such as Sonoma, Mendocino, and Patton, all located in rural, remote parts of the state.

Who were these people? Why were they committed to institutions and then deprived of their reproductive autonomy? What was the demographic composition of those sterilized? Were certain groups of people disproportionately targeted? What about their families, interests, and lives, in and outside of the institution?

In 2007, I finally found crucial pieces of the historical puzzle. At the administrative offices of the state’s Department of Mental Health (now Department of State Hospitals), which had directed the state’s sterilization program decades earlier, a secretary pointed me to a standard-issue gray metal filing cabinet. Inside, I found a box with some microfilm reels. Squinting at the small dark font on the negative strips, I could make out the words “Sterilization Recommendation.”

In total, I located 19 microfilm reels containing thousands of documents dating from 1919 to 1952 (the most active years of sterilization), which had been preserved in the 1970s when the paper files were discarded. Several years ago, I was able to launch a project with a team of students and researchers at my institution, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to create a dataset that contains all these records in de-identified and coded form. Data entry has been a protracted and demanding process, taking nearly three years, but ultimately we created a dataset containing 19,995 patient records.

Our dataset reveals that those sterilized in state institutions often were young women pronounced promiscuous; the sons and daughters of Mexican, Italian, and Japanese immigrants, frequently with parents too destitute to care for them; and men and women who transgressed sexual norms. Preliminary statistical analysis demonstrates that during the peak decade of operations from 1935 to 1944 Spanish-surnamed patients were 3.5 times more likely to be sterilized than patients in the general institutional population.

Laws that govern the use of medical records require that we redact personal information to protect patient privacy. Even though we will never be able to divulge the real names or precise circumstances of the 20,000 people sterilized in California, we can still see the ugly underside of medical paternalism and how authorities treated Mexican-Americans, African-Americans, immigrant groups, and people with disabilities and mental illnesses in 20th-century America.

Consider the following stories:

In 1943, a 15-year-old Mexican-American boy we will call Roberto was committed to the Sonoma State Home, an institution for the “feebleminded” in Northern California. Roberto’s journey to Sonoma began the previous year when he was picked up by the Santa Barbara Police for a string of infractions that included intoxication, a knife fight, and involvement with a “local gang of marauding Mexicans.” Citing his record of delinquency and “borderline” IQ score of 75, the officials at Sonoma recommended that Roberto be sterilized.

Roberto’s father adamantly, and unsuccessfully, opposed his son’s sterilization, and went so far as to secure a priest to protest the operation. Again and again, the records reveal that many Mexican-American families like Roberto’s resisted compulsory sterilization, seeking support from the Catholic Church, the Mexican Consulate, and legal aid societies. On occasion, family members were able to stop or forestall the operation; in most cases, however, medical superintendents would simply override such protestations and proceed with surgery.

Four years later, the relatives of Hortencia, a young African-American woman held in Pacific Colony in Spadra, California, contacted the NAACP to make a strong case against her sterilization. They halted the surgery with threats of high-profile legal action, even though this meant Hortencia was not permitted to leave the institution.

At the same time, we found that many parents and guardians consented to the sterilization of their loved ones. Silvia, a Mexican-American mother of a toddler, was 20 years old when she was placed in Pacific Colony in 1950. She was assessed with an “imbecile” IQ of 35 and reportedly had been raised in a violent home. Silvia’s mother ostensibly could not control her daughter and approved her sterilization.

Image used in accordance with the California Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects Protocol ID 13-08-1310 and the University of Michigan Biomedical IRB HUM00084931.

 
Fifteen years earlier, Timothy, a white 25-year old placed in Stockton because of same-sex encounters since boyhood and a psychiatric diagnosis of “dementia praecox, hebephrenic type,” consented to his own reproductive surgery, perhaps because he knew that it was a potential ticket out of the facility or because he felt it would help him control his pathologized sexual desires.

In contrast, Mark, a white clergyman committed to Patton (a hospital for the “mentally ill”) for “dementia praecox, catatonic type,” wrote to officials in Sacramento in 1947 that he was “religiously opposed” to his own vasectomy. Records indicate that by speaking up for himself Mark persuaded authorities against the recommended vasectomy.

Postcard c.1910s of Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino. Patton, Southern California’s primary mental hospital for many years, was the largest sterilizer of the mentally ill in California and second highest sterilizer overall in the state.

 
Taken together, these experiences illuminate, often in poignant detail, an era when health officials controlled with impunity the reproductive bodies of people committed to institutions. Superintendents wielded great power and proceeded with little accountability, behaving in a fashion that today would be judged as wholly unprofessional, unethical, and potentially criminal. We hope our project can restore the dignity and individuality of people such as Roberto, Hortencia, and Mark, who were subjected to this kind of dehumanization.

This history remains relevant, considering a more contemporary episode of sterilization abuse, again in California’s public institutions. Although the state’s eugenic sterilization law was repealed in 1979, existing legislation provided leeway for operations in state prisons pursuant to a strict set of criteria. Between 2006 and 2010, 146 female inmates in two of California’s women’s prisons received tubal ligations that ran afoul of these criteria; at least three dozen of these unauthorized procedures directly violated the state’s own informed consent process. The majority of these female inmates were first-time offenders, African-American or Latina. Echoing the rationale of the eugenicists who championed sterilization in the 1930s, the physician responsible for many of these operations blithely explained they would save the state a great deal of money “compared to what you save in welfare paying for these unwanted children—as they procreated more.” In 2013, an intrepid journalist at the Center for Investigative Reporting broke this story and it eventually led to the passage of a bill banning sterilization in California state prisons.

These revelations demonstrate that, even in our age of bioethics and awareness of the wrongs of medical experimentation, we are not immune from the conditions that facilitated compulsory sterilization in the mid-20th century: lack of institutional oversight, presumptions that certain members of society are not “fit” to reproduce, and overzealous and biased physicians. The documents we found certainly contain historical lessons for the present and starkly remind us that we should never forget the past.

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