Frederick Osborn went so far as to predict that as science grew better able to identify the carriers of recessive defects, restrictions on their marriages might well become an accepted public-health measure.⁴
4. Lionel Penrose, "Discussion of 'Clinical and Genetic Study of 1280 Cases of Mental Defect'", Conference of Medical Officers, July 22, 1938, Lionel Penrose Papers, University College London, file 65/1; Lancelot Hogben, Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science (Williams and Norgate, 1931), pp. 201-2; Haldane, Heredity and Politics, pp. 89-91; Frederick Osborn, Preface to Eugenics (Harper & Bros., 1940), p. 34. As for diseases that might respond to postnatal therapy, Herbert Spencer Jennings had no doubts: "far better is the condition of the race in which . . . defective genes have been cancelled as they arise." Herbert Spencer Jennings, The Biological Basis of Human Nature (W. W. Norton, 1930), p. 354.
"In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity" - Daniel J. Kevles