Remembering Nikola Tesla, Eugenicist

Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk celebrated Nikola Tesla’s birthday this week with a US$1 million donation to set up a Tesla museum in Long Island. The Serbian-American inventor, who died in 1943, was a prodigious inventor and is regarded by some of his admirers as the greatest geek who ever lived. With time, he has become a cult figure, which explains his appearance in the Oscar-nominated film The Prestige.

Apart from inventing alternating electric current, Tesla was a futurist. In 1935 he gave an interview to the American magazine Liberty (now defunct) in which he peered 100 years into the future. Of interest to readers of BioEdge is his enthusiastic endorsement of eugenics, a common feeling before World War

“The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature.

“As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions...