History of Eugenics Inside UCL

“All hell broke loose” in January 2018 when The London Student and Private Eye reported on a secret, invitation-only meeting on eugenics and intelligence hosted at UCL. The “London Conference on Intelligence” seemed to be a mask for racist science, white supremacy, and “unapologetic” eugenics.

UCL executives were furious, declaring they knew nothing about it. Students and staff were furious too. How could such an event take place at UCL? It seemed against every value the institution professed.

Caption: UCL students protesting presence of “London Conference on Intelligence” on UCL property following news reports in January 2018. Credit: anonymous photographer with images circulating on social media. (Information invited as to source.)

Protesters argued this event was not a one-off. Instead, it seemed a symptom of permanent infection. They considered this “conference” just another step in a long historical arc of UCL actively supporting eugenics, racist science, colonisation, and white supremacy. This was legacy hiding in plain sight.

Inside UCL’s History of Eugenics

The history of UCL’s involvement with eugenics is not widely known among staff and students. Considerable historical research is available for some parts of this story while others are more obscure.

The university’s formal support for eugenics had three phases: enthusiasm (1907-1914), passive support (1915-1943), and rejection leading to closure (1943-1963). UCL was quick to add eugenics to its portfolio when it seemed an innovative area of research and policy development. The university was slow to interrogate the impacts of these programmes or to recognise the biases introduced by research leaders. The university also failed to confront the restrictions it put on itself when accepting money for research and when opportunities came for change. At times, "keeping funds" took precedence over "keeping principles".

What counts as UCL?

UCL evolved in name and organisation during the twentieth century. For example, during 1907-1976, the university was “University College, University of London”, and it operated as a unit within the federation of “University of London”. Keeping track of the formalities can be confusing. The key point here is that the university had changing layers of governance and executive authority but it still had executives making decisions. For simplicity, we use “UCL” to cover all the units that eventually became part of today's UCL, and we overlook the finer points of mergers, divisions, and re-organisations. Our term “executive” includes all those contributing to approvals and oversight, including at times the University Senate, the Academic Principal, the Academic Council, and later, the Provost. The history of eugenics inside UCL had many people were involved in decision-making and approvals. Whether they chose close scrutiny or proforma approval was their own decision.

Caption: “Eugenics Tree” image created for Second International Congress of Eugenics in New York City, 1921. Credit: Laughlin (1923).

Enthusiasm (1904-1914)

UCL executives were enthusiastic about eugenics at the start, repeatedly making positive decisions to invest in it across several programmes. They also actively invested in subjects linked to eugenics. Their enthusiasm came from thinking only universities had the range of experts needed to tackle big, interdisciplinary subjects. Supporters of these investments wanted universities to discipline eugenics into a science, replacing myth and prejudice with what they perceived as analysis and objectivity. They were keen to stamp their mark on areas like public health, medicine, and education. Promoting eugenics as a university science was one way to achieve this end.

Caption: Professor Karl Pearson in his office. Date unknown, but likely 1911. In that year, Pearson was appointed “Francis Galton Professor of Eugenics”. Credit: UCL Special Collections.

Professor Karl Pearson (1857-1936) was the most influential eugenicist in UCL’s history. He was an expert in applied mathematics, and he developed fundamental tools in statistics. Pearson designed and directed the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, which was launched in 1907. He ran this unit until he retired in 1933.

Pearson’s ability to dedicate so much effort to eugenics was made possible by Francis Galton (1822-1911). Galton was an elder statesman in London’s community of “gentleman scientists”. He promoted statistical thinking about nearly everything, and this is why he and Pearson created their alliance. Throughout his life, Galton had terrible anxiety over what he perceived as British national decline. As remedies, he proposed many schemes based on monitoring people’s physical health and (what he called) natural ability. Galton’s anxieties escalated after British military losses in the Second Boer War and a government inquiry into the “physical deterioration” of the British population. He approached UCL, offering to kickstart research into reversing national decline. Eugenics was part of his agenda.

From 1904 Galton tried to run a small research group on his own, giving it the antiquated title, “Eugenics Record Office”. This failed. In 1906, he begged Pearson to take over. Galton saw in Pearson someone with the skills to develop quantitative research on the subject plus the skills to build a lasting research centre. He gave seed money to Pearson, and he dangled the offer of much more money if the centre was a success. Pearson seized the opportunity, transformed Galton's proposal into something he wanted for himself, and took the proposal to university executives. They approved the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics in January 1907.

Like Galton, Pearson was motivated by fears of decline, especially the supposed decay of British “racial stock”, which he understood to be solely white Anglo-Saxon. Pearson’s eugenics was motivated by racism targeting eastern European migrant Jewish communities living in London’s East End. He also was motivated by ableism, focused on people with significant mental and physical health issues.

Surprisingly for a open racist and ableist, Pearson also worried about biases introduced during research into these subjects. He thought most eugenicists were sloppy in their methods and amateurish in their ideas. He wanted his contribution - meaning UCL’s contribution - to be the imposition of scientific rigour, thoroughness, and precision. Pearson promised to do this using de-biasing tools he was developing with his team of “biometricians”. However, Pearson hated criticism, and he had an extremely fragile personality. He deliberately insulated his work from external scrutiny.

Caption: Pearson’s handwritten announcement for Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, December 1906. Credit: UCL Special Collections, Galton Papers 3-3-16-9.

Pearson and the “Eugenics Laboratory” staff worked within a network of eugenics-related projects across UCL. This included collaborations in archaeology, public health and medicine, education, and elsewhere. The Galton Laboratory published many research monographs and pamphlets. It hosted visiting researchers. It organised training sessions and public lectures. During the Laboratory’s first decade, Pearson was praised repeatedly by university executives. After Galton died in 1911 and UCL received his donations to endow an academic post, Pearson’s job title was converted to “Francis Galton Professor of Eugenics”. This conversion released him from other teaching duties and gave him nearly-complete independence to develop programmes as he wanted.

Caption: David Heron’s 1910 monograph, “The Influence of Defective Physique and Unfavourable Home Environment on the Intelligence of School Children,” published by the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics. Credit: Legacies of Eugenics Digital Library.

Pearson rarely stood as a public face for eugenics. He avoided conferences, such as major international congresses, professional societies, and public-membership groups. He rarely engaged with the press and pressured his staff against the same. Instead, he preferred settings where he was in full control and his authority as a university professor put him at an advantage, such as when giving public lectures on campus or continuing professional development workshops, also on campus.

Caption: Advertisement for course of ten popular lectures on “The Present State of Our Knowledge of the Science of National Eugenics” at UCL, delivered by Professor Karl Pearson and members of the Eugenics Laboratory, dated 1921. Credit: UCL Special Collections, Pearson Papers 4/19.

Passive Support (1915-1943)

The Great War changed many things at UCL. Eugenics lost its place as a university-celebrated subject. The sense of crisis motivating British eugenicists a decade before had evaporated. Pearson lost momentum during the war years, too, and never regained it. The research agenda for the Eugenics Laboratory shrank. The work was increasingly descriptive. Major projects became bogged down in complexities of data collection, standardisation and computation. Money became a problem owing to post-war inflation. Pearson’s theories of inheritance were rejected by most biologists. He no longer seemed to have much new to offer, and he became obsessed with nostalgia. The centre of British eugenics moved from university settings to community-based organisations (e.g., Eugenics Society), think tanks (e.g., Political and Economic Planning, or PEP), and commercial authors (e.g., Leonard Darwin and Julian Huxley).

Caption: Cover for Leonard Darwin’s 1928 book, What is eugenics?. Darwin was Chairman of the Eugenics Society (1911-1928). Darwin was not associated with UCL. Commercial writers, such as Darwin, were more effective and more aggressive promoting eugenics policies than university programme directors, such as Pearson. Ronald Fisher was a close friend of Leonard Darwin, and he transferred to the Eugenics Society key responsibilities he had as Director of the Eugenics Laboratory. Credit: author’s private collection.

Eugenics research did not disappear from UCL after the war. Instead, it became something predominantly researched by individuals rather than centrally-sponsored units. The executive vision of universities shaping eugenics as a new field or discipline was abandoned. UCL could have closed the Eugenics Laboratory as these interests changed, but this was never considered. Pearson was a good administrator, his other projects were doing well, and from the outside the Eugenics Laboratory seemed to be productive. Galton’s 1911 donation paid for most of the eugenics work. Closure would bring no financial gain because that money was restricted to one purpose. Despite failing with special fundraising for new facilities, Pearson convinced UCL to move his research groups to a new location on campus (what now is the North-West Wing in UCL’s central quad). Construction began in 1913, but during The Great War, the building was handed over to University College Hopsital. Pearson's groups moved into their new facilities in 1920.

Credit: close-up of School of Architecture and Department of Applied Statistics and Eugenics (here “Eugenics”) in “University College, University of London: New School of Architecture and Front Buildings in Gower Street, W.C. | Professor F.M. Simpson, FRIBA, Architect.” The Building News and Engineering Journal, volume 105, issue number 3074 (05 December 1913), pages 796-797. Floorplan of School of Architecture on page 800. The Eugenics wing is not examined. This architectural drawing is on pp. 806-07. Thanks to Ananda Rutherford for directing me to this image.

When executives reviewed Pearson’s programmes each year, they seemed only interested in the finances; they never challenged him on the research agenda. In contrast, most UCL researchers interested in eugenics worked in specialist subjects such as public health, population studies, planning, international development, and especially education. At the same time, there was increased opposition at UCL to eugenic ideologies. Not only were eugenic proposals picked apart on many scientific grounds, but those proposals also lost preferment as a course of action compared with alternatives, such as improved education, exercise, better nutrition, and improved living conditions. In addition, extremism in Europe and the United States in the 1930s was driving many British academics to reject eugenic ideologies that a generation before might have seemed desirable to them. UCL was finding ways to hire refugee researchers from Europe, not to discriminate against them.

When Pearson retired in 1933, UCL chose to keep the Eugenics Laboratory. Ronald A. Fisher (1890-1962) was appointed the second Francis Galton Professor of Eugenics and both Fisher and the Laboratory were placed in a newly created “Department of Eugenics”. Fisher was a brilliant statistician and a campaigning eugenicist, but he was not a leader. He did little with the Galton-funded resources at his disposal. In eugenics, he mostly repeated long-standing self-serving arguments in favour of extra privileges for academics. Instead, he concentrated on other research such as mathematical population genetics and the analysis of human blood chemistry, where he made important contributions. UCL executives were not especially interested in his work. They often ruled against him when forced to settle arguments over issues such as who taught statistics and genetics, or how much space he could use on campus.

Fisher resigned his professorship in 1943 and UCL did not feel any sense of urgency to find a successor. Their appetite for Pearson-style eugenics had disappeared. At the same time, the university had to decide what to do with the Laboratory’s facilities, staff, and what remained from the money gifted by Francis Galton in 1911. Rather than quitting the eugenics project, they instead chose to bend the terms of their original agreement and use the money for a related purpose.

Caption: “Pattern of causes of mental deficiency in patients of all ages,” lecture notes by Lionel Penrose. Credit: UCL Special Collections, Penrose Papers 2/45/6, page 5.

Rejection Leading to Closure (1945-1965)

In 1945, biologists at UCL wanted to hire a specialist in human genetics. To fund it at a time when money was extremely limited, they reached into the fund started from Galton’s donation. Executives supposed “eugenics” had evolved since 1907. The political, racist and destructive eugenics programmes were discredited, they convinced themselves, but an underlying interest remained in human genetics as an apolitical study of inheritance and traits. Clinical themes and scientific medicine became their new interpretation for Galton’s original intent.

Using the Galton bequest still required using the job title agreed with him decades ago. The irony was not lost on the person UCL hired as its third Galton Professor of Eugenics, Lionel Penrose (1898-1972). Penrose was an authority on the inheritance of mental illnesses, such as Down’s anomalies. He referred to these as “mental defects”. While he respected Galton for his emphasis on statistical methods and analytical thinking, Penrose completely rejected eugenics. In a 1949 lecture to the Eugenics Society, he was scathing. He left no doubt he would be leading the unit at UCL away from their original goals and towards a programme of care, compassion, and inclusion. He did the same when teaching about eugenics in the university.

Penrose’s core argument about eugenics was that it was polluted with discrimination and bias. He also argued eugenicists vastly overstated the role of heredity in shaping complex characters. Often, Penrose said, environment played a stronger role in determining how a person developed biological and mental characteristics. There was still far too much unknown about the sciences of human genetics and development to support the claims made by eugenicists. He called out their ableism as a profound mistake.

Penrose worked within the university’s management to delete the word “eugenics” from his role. This was not a priority, bit it important to him. Advice to executives opposed change, citing original (legally binding) agreements with Galton. When formal efforts stalled, Penrose resisted informally, referring to himself only as “Galton Professor” (or directly criticising eugenics when his full job title came up) and referring to his research group as the “Galton Laboratory”. He regained control of Annals of Eugenics and in 1954 renamed it Annals of Human Genetics. In 1963, Penrose finally succeeded in having his title changed to “Professor of Human Genetics”.

Penrose retired in 1965. Successive Galton Professors continued with the new name. The Galton Laboratory also continued after Penrose’s retirement, and no eugenics research was undertaken in the lab thereafter. Just as most biologists were doing around the world, in the 1960s and 1970s researchers in the Galton Laboratory relegated eugenics to a period in history that ended with the Second World War. (This was a case of denial because across Britain eugenics ideologies continued to underpin discrimination and exclusion. Relegation to them simply meant excluding eugenics from their research interests.)

Caption: Birth Control Clinic in Caravan with Nurse, London. Date unknown. Marie Stopes’s promotion of birth control combined her campaigning for women’s health and eugenics family planning. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC-BY 4.0.

The History About Eugenics Inside UCL That's Harder to Summarise

UCL’s formal support for eugenics - creating jobs and programmes to develop work in the area - had important symbolic value. It contributed to an atmosphere opposed to belonging and inclusion. It created an allowance for discrimination. UCL's formal support for eugenics faded during Lionel Penrose’s tenure as Galton Professor from the mid-1940s into the 1960s. Crucially, however, UCL’s formal support is only part of the story of the university’s association with eugenics research and advocacy. Eugenics did not disappear simply because a few titles changed or because it was abandoned by most geneticists. The decentralised, loosely controlled nature of research and teaching in universities means other activities had space to exist outside institutional promotion. These other activities are more challenging to trace and harder to assemble into a complete picture.

Some UCL staff were eugenics campaigners regardless of their university post. For instance, the birth control and women’s health campaigner Marie Stopes (1880-1958) supported aggressive eugenics policies. At UCL for a small part of her career, Stopes was trained as a palaeobotanist. She left that field when she could support herself financially on her campaigning work.

JBS Haldane (1892-1964) was an influential science writer, a well-established biologist and a provocateur. His support for eugenics was complex. In the 1920s, Haldane promoted eugenics as a futuristic tool for “improving” human health and intellectual abilities. At the same time, he denounced most eugenicists for racist biases. As his politics changed, Haldane changed his mind about eugenics, coming to stress the importance of environmental paths for improvement and structural biases that advantaged some people over others. He came to champion human diversity and class struggle. Haldane came to UCL in 1933 as Professor of Genetics. In 1937, he changed job titles to become the first Weldon Professor of Biometry. After Fisher left UCL, Haldane successfully lobbied for control of the staff and budget of the Eugenics Laboratory, wanting them for other purposes. He was key to UCL’s decision to hire Penrose. By 1946, Haldane was stressing the importance of environment and opportunity over innate abilities. In 1958, he sharply critcised Pearson at a university dinner given to mark the centenary of his birth.

Also in biology, UCL Nobel Laurette Peter Medawar (1915-1987) supported active manipulation of human populations in the 1950s and 1960s. He was vague on goals and vague on which qualities should be preferred over others. He took an overtly ableist view in medicalising “defects,” proposing prenatal diagnosis and termination.

Credit: The Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test is an adaptive cognitive assessment instrument first revised in 1916 by Lewis Terman (1877-1956), a psychologist and eugenicist based at Stanford University. Terman 're-normed' the original Binet-Simon test - initially developed in France to identify children falling behind so they could get additional educational support - to assess American populations. He expanded its scope by introducing an adaptive format that effectively prioritised individuals deemed ‘genetically superior’ - a reflection of eugenic ideologies that influenced educational, immigration, and social policies in the United States. Credit: UCL IOE Library Special Collections.

Education was the largest area of influence for eugenics at UCL outside Pearson’s programme. In terms of people affected, it was far more important. The overlap between education and eugenics focuses on ideas of “natural ability” and efforts to measure natural abilities in children through testing in school. Broadly, the most significant types of test focused on intelligence, or IQ. Experimental psychologists at UCL, such as Charles Spearman (1863-1945), and staff working in what later became the Institute of Education, played important roles in developing school testing programmes and in creating policies for decision-making based on the results. Those roles developed in association with school systems and local government in London.

Decision-making worked in two eugenical directions. Ambitions were high for those scoring well on tests. Those scoring lowest received less investment and fewer resources. Cyril Burt (1883-1971) began his career elsewhere but came to UCL in 1931 with a focus on persistent delinquency. He lobbied for radical expansion of educational testing. He helped develop and promote the 11+ exam system, which tested students at the end of primary school and guided opportunities for secondary education. He was a strong believer in innate abilities. His system created a rationale for heavily investing in some children while practically abandoning others.

Caption: Bernard Coard’s (1971) How the West Indian Child is Made Educationally Sub-Normal in the British School System, front cover. Credit: author's private collection.

Immigration from the West Indies and South Asia in the 1950s and 1960s led to expanded school programmes in some parts of the UK. Testing was used to allocate children to different types of programmes. Low scoring students in some places were classified as “subnormal” and transferred into poorly resourced, remedial schools. Those schools received a vastly disproportionate number of children from migrant families, especially those from the West Indies. The consequences were overtly discriminatory, a pattern exposed by Bernard Coard in 1971.

Within educational professions and their supporting research communities, arguments were heated over objectivity and prejudice in testing. Those in favour of testing held onto the idea of a standardised experience for evaluation. Those opposed complained of cultural bias in tests, uneven preparation, and structural advantages for some children over others. Recent historical research has shown a complex and long-running argument in education about testing, eugenics and adjacent issues.

Caption: G.K. Chesterton (1922), Eugenics and Other Evils, excerpt from page 3. An alumnus of UCL and Slade School of Art, Chesterton was a sharp critic of eugenics, calling it a fantasy grounded in pseudo-morality “as if one had a right to dragoon and enslave one's fellow citizens as a kind of chemical experiment”. Credit: author’s private collection.

Anti-eugenics and Resistance to Eugenics

Throughout its history, eugenics inside UCL had critics as well as supporters. For instance, when the student magazine University College Gazette carried one of Pearson’s early lectures promoting eugenics in 1904, it added a satirical feature ridiculing his proposals. The journalist and influencer (and UCL alumnus) G.K. Chesterton took on the movement at its popular height with his 1922 book, Eugenics and Other Evils.

Rejecting Nazi racist anthropology in the 1930s, the statistician Geoffrey Morant’s (1939) Races of Central Europe: A Footnote to History undercut arguments for purity and homogeneity. Many UCL academics joined campaigns to resettle colleagues and other innocent people forced to flee Nazi persecution.

Egon Pearson (1895-1980) wanted nothing to do with the eugenics programmes his father created. When Karl Pearson retired in 1933, UCL reorganised his programmes into two areas, statistics and eugenics. They hired Egon Pearson to head a new Department of Statistics. Egon fiercely resisted association with eugenics and protected teaching and research in his department against encroachment tainted with eugenics. DMS Watson (1886-1973) took the same view as Professor of Zoology. The resistance of these two men created considerable frustration for Ronald Fisher, the Professor of Eugenics, and the Eugenics Laboratory.

Caption: “Portrait of a Movement,” by Rosa Branson (1933- ), British painter and fabric designer. “Portrait” was launched at London City Hall in March 2007 at a joint event with the Alliance for Inclusive Education and Parents for Inclusion. Hung November 2010 in Nunn Hall, 20 Bedford Way, UCL Faculty of Education and Society (formerly Institute of Education, or IOE). Credit: Rosa Branson for mural, author for photograph.

Critical Focus on Legacy (2015-today)

The 2010s witnessed a resurgence of interest in UCL’s associations, historical and present, with eugenics. This was part of a challenge about the legacy of that ideology’s presence in the university. Questions were asked about the purpose of commemorative acts such as naming university spaces and investing heavily in engagement with eugenics-related material within UCL’s museums. Had the institution forgotten the association of those names with those abhorrent programmes? How could the institution on one hand promote an environment of diversity, equity, and inclusion, while on the other hand commemorate individuals passionately devoted to their reversal? De-naming related to forgotten associations with eugenics was also underway internationally.

Caption: Excerpt from article, “Exposed: London’s eugenics conference and its neo-Nazi links,” The London Student, 10 January 2018. UCL student, Ben Van Der Merwe, broke the story about meetings of the London Conference on Intelligence meetings. Credit: Internet Archives Way Back Machine captured on 2 August 2018.

Revelations in 2018 about meetings of the “London Conference on Intelligence” were interpreted against the backdrop of political movements and academic action towards empowerment of otherwise marginalised groups. International campaigns, such as #BlackLivesMatter, and local campaigns, such as “Why Isn’t My Professor Black?,” significantly raised the profile of those efforts. Theories of de-centring, de-colonising, embodiment, globalisation, and intersectionality energised academic involvement. Though this placed heavy emphasis on race and racialisation, other affected parts of the UCL community also mobilised to engage themes of belonging, continued marginalisation, threat, and reparative justice. For instance, the UCL Students’ Union report, “Disability Discrimination Faced by UCL Students and Recommended Measures” sharply challenged UCL not only on action but also on mindset. Likewise, deaf students and staff passionately represented themselves not as a problem to fix but as a community to engage.

Just as eugenics support is difficult to map across the whole institution, ongoing resistance to eugenics ideologies also is difficult to map in its entirety. There's a lot! Formal elements of UCL’s promotion of anti-eugenics are extensive, they range from UCL Centre for Inclusive Education to UCL Centre for Holocaust Education. As a reparative act, UCL Department of Genetics, Evolution, and Environment created a new academic post, Lecturer in Biology and Society, to foreground its anti-eugenics position. Money associated with Galton’s legacy was used deliberately to support their post. UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation provides not only a focal point for historical studies of eugenic and scientific racism but also serves as an intellectual centre for post-colonial alternatives. As another act of recovery, the Centre is located in rooms once occupied by Pearson’s Eugenics Laboratory. The EGA Institute for Women’s Health and the UCLH Fertility Counselling service research screening and patient decision making. The Migration Research Unit replaces the anti-immigrant bias so prevalent at the start of the twentieth century. And so much more. The cumulative effect of these many programmes is a profound community of resistance to eugenics discrimination.

Caption: Eugenics Inquiry chair, Professor Iyiola Solanke (Leeds) presents recommendations from the Chair's report, February 2020. Group on stage are members of the Inquiry committee. Credit: Mary Hinkley, UCL Media Services.

Inquiry is Launched; Apologies; Action

Following an investigation into events surrounding the London Conference on Intelligence, UCL executives organised an “Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL”. This was tasked with examining UCL’s historical role in eugenics, the status of teaching and study of eugenics, and the current status of any donations linked to eugenics. The Inquiry also was asked to consider the use of honorary names, for example naming buildings after individuals, around the university that might be related to eugenics. It was invited to make whatever recommendations it thought were necessary to help overcome these legacy issues.

The Inquiry worked between 2018 and 2020 and two final reports were submitted in February 2020. UCL accepted all recommendations, creating a “Response Group” to work on implementation. In June 2020, UCL removed names from three facilities linked directly to eugenicists. In January 2021, the then-Provost and President Professor Michael Arthur issued a formal apology.

““UCL acknowledges with deep regret that it played a fundamental role in the development, propagation and legitimisation of eugenics. … We apologise for being slow to interrogate properly the history and legacy of eugenics at UCL, and for failing to act with sufficient speed to remedy the ongoing effects on those in our community who are the targets of the eugenic mentality.”

At the same time, UCL announced new funding and programme enhancements which aimed to improve access and experience for disabled members of UCL’s community and for students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. It also expanded programmes related to race equality and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). The university committed to greater prominence for its history and legacies of eugenics, and it reviewed names of buildings across campus.

Caption: Worker from UCL Estates removing nameplate from Pearson Building in June 2020 as part of a formal de-naming process. During removal (left). After removal (right). The Pearson Building commemorated Professor Karl Pearson and was one of the locations of the Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics. The building name was changed to "North-West Wing". Credit: anonymous photographer with images circulating on social media. (Information invited on source.)

“Prejudice in Power” grows directly from these recommendations. It offers a showcase for some of the awareness-raising programmes called for by the Response Group.

Those interested in researching history of eugenics at UCL specifically should explore our Resources About Eugenics.

Author: Professor Joe Cain, UCL Department of Science and Technology Studies (STS)