The current Yale Alumni Magazine includes a portrait of Irving Fisher, an economics professor in the 1920s and '30s and a giant of his field.

The author, Richard Conniff, takes note of Fisher's prodigious accomplishments and his private decency in order to foreground the real subject of his article: the economist's role as one of his era's highest-wattage proponents of eugenics.

The American elite's pre-World War II commitment to breeding out the "unfit" - defined as racial minorities, low-IQ whites, the mentally and physically handicapped, and the criminally inclined - is a story that defies easy stereotypes about progress and enlightenment.

On the one hand, these U.S. eugenicists tended to be WASP grandees like Fisher - ivory-tower dwellers and privileged have-mores with an obvious incentive to invent spurious theories to justify their own position.

But these same eugenicists were often political and social liberals - advocates of social reform, partisans of science. "They weren't sinister characters out of some darkly lighted noir film about Nazi sympathizers," Conniff writes, "but environmentalists, peace activists, fitness buffs, healthy-living enthusiasts, inventors and family men."

From Teddy Roosevelt to the Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, fears about "race suicide" and "human weeds" were common among progressives, who saw the quest for a better gene pool as of a piece with their dream of human advancement.

This fascination with eugenics largely ended with the horrors wrought by National Socialism.

But the practice urged by Fisher and others - the elimination or pre-emption, through reproductive planning, of the weaker members of the human species - has become a more realistic possibility than it ever was in the 1920s and '30s.

The eugenicists had general ideas about genetics and heredity, crude ideas about intelligence, and poisonous ideas about racial hierarchies. They did not have, as we do, access to the genetic blueprints of individuals - including, most important, human beings still developing in utero, whose development can be legally interrupted by the intervention of an abortionist.

That access, until recently, has required invasive procedures like amniocentesis. But last week brought a remarkable breakthrough: A team of scientists mapped nearly an entire fetal genome using blood from the mother and saliva from the father.

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Eugenics meets technology