In 1904, Nature printed a speech about eugenics by the statistician Francis Galton. One of the foremost scientists of his day, Galton defined eugenics as “the science which deals with all influences that improve and develop the inborn qualities of a race”. He said that “the aim of eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens, causing them to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation”.
Galton’s scientifically inaccurate ideas about eugenics had a huge, damaging influence that the world is still grappling with. The idea that some groups — people of colour or poor people, for example — were inferior has fuelled irreparable discrimination and racism. Nature published several papers by Galton and other eugenicists, thus giving a platform to these views. At the time, eugenics “was an active area of research and considered a very legitimate one”, says Melinda Baldwin, a historian at the University of Maryland, College Park, who wrote Making Nature, a 2015 history of the journal. Nature, she says, “helped to spread eugenic doctrine by publishing those scientists”.
Galton’s papers are part of a shameful seam running through Nature’s history. Since its founding more than 150 years ago, this journal has developed a reputation for publishing some of the world’s most important scientific discoveries. But we have also published material that contributed to bias, exclusion and discrimination in research and society. Some of our articles were offensive and harmful, a legacy we are now making an overdue effort to examine and expose. They contrast starkly with the journal’s current goal of fostering equity, diversity and inclusion.
We have been examining Nature’s history in the lead up to a forthcoming special issue on racism in research, to be published next month. We promised to do this in 2020, after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, triggered a wave of protests over the harms caused by systemic racism. Four guest editors (Melissa Nobles, Chad Womack, Ambroise Wonkam and Elizabeth Wathuti) who are guiding our special issue have highlighted the importance of scientific institutions acknowledging the ways in which their histories have compounded systemic racism — and although this editorial is not a comprehensive account of the journal’s contributions to racism and other problematic legacies of science, it is a start.