Remembering Nikola Tesla, Eugenicist
By Michael Cook,
BioEdge
| 07. 12. 2014
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...
Related Articles
By Pete Shanks
| 02.27.2026
Last month, we published “The Shameful Legacy of Tuskegee” which focused on a proposed experiment in Guinea-Bissau. The study’s plan echoed the notorious Tuskegee disaster, withholding safe, effective vaccines against hepatitis B from some newborns while inoculating others. It was to be financed by the U.S. but performed by a controversial Danish team. That project provoked a multi-national outcry, leading to a remarkable response from the World Health Organization:
WHO has significant concerns regarding the study’s scientific...
By Kiana Jackson and Shannon Stubblefield, New Disabled South | 02.09.2026
"MC0_8230" via Wikimedia Commons licensed under CC by 2.0
This report documents a deliberate assault on disabled people in the United States. Not an accident. Not a series of bureaucratic missteps. An assault that has been coordinated across agencies...
By Scott Solomon, The MIT Press Reader | 02.12.2026
Chris Mason is a man in a hurry.
“Sometimes walking from the subway to the lab takes too long, so I’ll start running,” he told me over breakfast at a bistro near his home in Brooklyn on a crisp...
By Jonathan D. Moreno, Hastings Center Bioethics Forum | 02.09.2026
When I began to write a book about bioethics and the rules-based international order, the idea that the world was facing the greatest geopolitical change since World War II was uncontroversial for those who were paying attention to such esoterica...
