{"id":234604,"date":"2020-11-20T07:28:41","date_gmt":"2020-11-20T13:28:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=234604"},"modified":"2021-07-14T21:40:52","modified_gmt":"2021-07-15T02:40:52","slug":"uc-berkeley-apologizes-research-fund-eugenics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/uc-berkeley-apologizes-research-fund-eugenics\/","title":{"rendered":"UC Berkeley apologizes for using money from 40-year old research fund promoting eugenics"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When UC Berkeley bioethics professor Osagie K. Obasogie received a staff email in 2018 notifying him about the availability of research funds from the “Genealogical Eugenic Institute Fund,” he was reportedly shocked. The Fund was offering the University hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for “research and support” relating to “family planning, infertility, assisted reproduction technologies, prenatal screening, abortion, gene editing and gene modification”\u00a0and came from a family trust to the University of California Board of Regents in 1975. Eventually, it was allocated to the Berkeley campus’ School of Public Health. According to Professor Obasogie, the $2.4 million fund’s\u00a0stated purpose was \u201cthe improvement of the human race through research and education in that field generally known as eugenics.\u201d<\/p>\n

As news of the eugenics fund surfaced, Berkeley Public Health Dean Michael Lu told the Berkeley News, \u201cBy accepting and using these funds over the past four decades, we must acknowledge that Berkeley Public Health has been a part of this horrific legacy of eugenics that has caused great harm in medicine and public health, from forced sterilizations to genocides.\u201d\u00a0Lu added that the University is “committed to acknowledging our complicity, apologizing for our past sins and taking action to make things right,” noting,\u00a0\u201cIt was wrong then. It is wrong now.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to the Berkeley News<\/a>, “Berkeley Public Health is now moving forward with plans to rename and repurpose the former eugenics fund, with the goal of educating the Berkeley campus community, and the broader public, about eugenics\u2019 brutal legacy. The fund will be renamed and repurposed for projects that foster conversations about eugenics and that benefit communities most harmed by this practice.”<\/p>\n

READ:\u00a0Coercive population control and eugenics are still alive and well today<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The Los Angeles Times\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0that “about $1 million has been drawn from the account” since 2000, and it was recently accessed by an unnamed faculty member who allegedly did not use the funds for “eugenics research.” The Times notes the fund was “established by a family trust called the Rogers Family Foundation, which was created in 1960 by trustees and Alta Corp.” The paper claimed, “the first documented expenditures were in 1987 to train genetic counselors \u2014 who typically help people with family planning or address inherited conditions \u2014 until the program was shut down in the 1990s.”<\/p>\n

One idea for repurposing the fund, writes the Times, is to “create a \u201c1907 Project,\u201d named for the year the world\u2019s first eugenic law was passed in Indiana, that would explore the centrality of eugenics in contemporary life sciences and public health through essays and UC-wide forums.”\u00a0California’s eugenic law was enacted in 1909, just a few years after Indiana’s, and remained on the books until 1979.<\/p>\n