THE idea that the quality of the human race can be improved by tinkering with genes dates back to the time of Plato. In his famous work Republic, the Greek philosopher envisioned a society constantly editing its evolution towards a more polished, superior copy of itself.

About 2,500 years later, British scientist Francis Galton put Plato's ideal on a "scientific" footing. In his book, Hereditary Genius, he went to great lengths to show that talent runs in families and in 1883, he coined the word eugenics, from the Greek for "good birth".

In the years that followed, eugenics became a hot topic of research. British mathematician Karl Pearson used statistical methods to prove that environment had little to do with the development of mental and emotional qualities. He felt that the high birth rate of the poor was a threat to civilisation and that the higher races must supplant the lower. Pearson shares the blame, with many other racist eugenics researchers, for making the egregious misuse of the word "eugenics" in Hitler's propaganda.

But Hitler's infamous experiments had a precedent in a relatively unknown experiment carried out in 1886 by Elisabeth Nietschze, sister of the famous German philosopher Freidrich Nietschze. In the Latin American republic of Paraguay, there is a village with an unusual name: Nueva Germania, or New Germany. The inhabitants of this village differ from their neighbours in that they have blond hair and blue eyes. These people are the offsprings of that infamous experiment. The idea, proposed by the German composer Alfred Wagner, was to create a new race of superhumans by inbreeding a group of people from Saxony in Germany.

But the experiment was never completed. Elisabeth died in 1934 -- Hitler actually cried at her funeral -- leaving behind a legacy of poor, inbred and diseased inhabitants of Nueva Germania.

Meanwhile, American biologist Charles B Davenport "proved" that traits such as criminality and feeble-mindedness are passed on to the progeny through genes. He also asserted that genes decide whether one became a naval officer or not, the important genes being the ones that carried traits such as thalassophilia, or love of the sea, and hyperkineticism, or wanderlust.

By 1935, sterilisation laws had been enacted in Switzerland, Germany, Norway and Sweden. Most of the laws then provided for voluntary or compulsory sterilisation of people thought to be insane, idiotic, imbecilic, feeble-minded or epileptic; some applied equally to habitual criminals or "moral perverts".

By the end of World War II, however, eugenics had fallen into disrepute, thanks largely to Nazi Germany's pseudoscientific justifications for anti-semitism. The Nazis abused eugenics in the guise of "euthanasia", or "good death", to exterminate not only the mentally and physically handicapped, but Jews, Catholics and Gypsies as well.

The backlash against eugenics soon led to a mass exodus of biologists from the field of genetics and behaviour, and social scientists advocated a paradigm of human evolution as shaped almost exclusively by culture.