I needed your message yesterday. Even the fat red robin who hopped beside me as I walked to my daughter's house didn't lift my spirits (and he was an entertainer). I came home, found your message, perked up and went back to the keyboard. I’m working on my next article in this eugenics series and struggling hard for the segue. I’m a technical writer, public speaker, and storyteller too, but creative writing is not my forte.

I needed to verify a quote and something unexpected popped up. It was one of those am I dreaming moments that always makes me think, okay, everything really is connected. Over the last two years that I’ve been researching the eugenics movement, I’ve filled 54 pages with resources. But this, this news was completely unexpected.

In 1863, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine was chartered as an independent advisor to the nation.

In 1867 Francis Galton established the foundation of eugenics theory, when he published a two-part article, entitled "Hereditary Character and Talent," and the heritability of genius (by white people). This racist theory grew into a movement that would infect the white world.

160 years later – on March 14, 2023, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine confronted the deep history of racism in Western science and released guidelines recommending that scientists not use race as a category in genetic studies.

“Joseph Graves, an evolutionary geneticist at North Carolina A&T University who was not involved in writing the report, said “The strengths are really to help researchers disentangle the social definitions from the biological definitions.” But he warned that simply putting out a report would not be enough. “We need to get out there and be talking to our colleagues,” he said. “The report can work, but it requires people to get behind it.”