[ Music ] 
>> Francis Galton
was connected
to University College London
because he left his collection
here, he left his archive
of letters, of everything
you could think of to do
with Francis Galton
to this college.
This is partly because towards
the end of his life he established
from something known
as an anthropometric lab,
which is essentially a
lab for measuring people
and detailing people's
heredity and it's this legacy
that we're investigating in
two exhibitions at the library
and in the Petrie
Museum and a public programme
which I've been working on.
And Francis Galton
is probably one
of these massive polymath
Victorian scientists
but today he's probably best
known for his work on the area
of eugenics, a word and term
which he in fact coined
from two Greek words
one for well, 'eu' and one
for blood or stock, 'genes', where we 
get our word genetics from or gene.
He put these two words
together to describe a movement
that would encourage there to be
better human stock, as he saw it,
by the breeding of
eugenically better
or perfect people together
and therefore you
would eradicate things
like even alcoholism, TB,
you would establish a kind
of better health
of certain people, you would
establish a better intellectual
level, those kinds of ideas.
By the end of his life,
by 1911, there's a sort of build
up in the 1900s of interest and
acceptance of eugenic ideas,
there's a Eugenics Education
Society established, which are kind
of a lobbying group, and most
people of upper-middle class,
upper class background would accept
to some extent sort
of social and culture eugenics,
more positive eugenics which
is encouraging the breeding
of eugenically perfect
people rather than negative
which is kind of discouraging
or even stopping, enforcing,  
people who were not deemed
to be fit to have children.
And in Britain it's very
much a sort of social
and political movement
rather than an area
that actually made laws and
stops people doing things
or encourages people
to do things.
But of course eugenics
had international
impact in Canada, America,
South Africa, across the empire
as it was in the British
Empire then, but also in Europe,
in Scandinavian
countries, in mainland Europe,
in Germany for example.
And it's this international
legacy
that obviously has come
back to haunt eugenics,
really since the Second
World War because of Nazism
and because of the
horrendous atrocities practiced
by the Nazis through their
eugenic programme against people
with disabilities, against
Jews, against people
who were just considered
feeble minded or unfit to breed
for whatever reason
they determined.
And also then of course massive
sterilisation programmes
in some areas of the
United States and elsewhere.
And it's this kind
of negative eugenics
that has really haunted eugenics
and I think that's
been a real problem,
which is an understatement,
but it's been a real problem
in terms of analysing the
impact of eugenics in Britain
and the legacy of it
today because we tend
to establish ourselves as the
good guys against the bad Nazi guys
or against the bad racists in
America who sterilised lots
of black men and that, you know,
in Britain we didn't
really do very much
around eugenics, we just kind
of a had a social movement
but it wasn't that wide ranging.
And in some ways that's kind of
true but in other ways its meant
that we've not really interrogated
some of our social assumptions
about some of the areas the
Eugenics Society campaigned on,
and just to pick out a
few examples areas such as
who should have children,
about how we screen people
for having children, our
assumptions about parenting
for example; or, watching the
royal wedding and the marriage
of Kate Middleton, a so
called commoner, to a member
of the royal family
and next king,
the next in line, if you like.
And it was interesting
hearing the commentary
when she's marrying William
about how she was
bringing different stock
and how her breeding was
different to William's
and these were the kind of
words that commentators were using.
And in the newspapers there
was Kate's family tree
and an investigation
into her heredity
in a way that's actually far
more about class than anything
to do with birth and far
more about eugenic ideas
about what constitutes
breeding and I was quite shocked
by the use of some of these
words like stock and breeding
to sort of bring new blood
into the royal family.
And I think that shows
that these ideas,
these assumptions,
haven't gone away
and really what we
should be doing,
I think, in this
centenary year of Francis
Galton is
on the one hand celebrating
all his great work,
on the other hand commemorating
the legacy for the people
that his work also affected but
also interrogating ourselves
and our history and also
our own assumptions as academics
and what that presents
to non-academics
and wider society
about whether those,
how many of those assumptions
are still with us today
and how much we should
be thinking
about things differently
around medicine
around representation
and around class.
