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There was a time when people in America were sterilized, sometimes unwittingly, by activists aiming to create a healthier, “better” population. As the progress of genomics accelerates, we need to remember the lessons of the past.

It is something of an open secret in the United States that during much of the 20th century, the government conducted a massive eugenics campaign designed to eliminate unwanted traits from society. It is less well known just how sweeping that campaign was: more than 60,000 people were sterilized—most against their will, many without any knowledge of what was being done to them—to prevent these supposedly undesirable traits from being passed on. Many eugenics leaders in business and government used the opportunity as a thinly veiled way to target people based on race, disability, even on grounds of morality. (How’s that for irony?)

Immigrants, African-Americans, and the mentally ill bore the brunt of it; women were more often victims because people assumed they were to blame for the birth of so-called inferior children. Sterilizations took place all over the country, frequently in prisons and psychiatric...