After 10 months of study, Wake Forest University School of Medicine issued a report yesterday about its role in North Carolina's eugenic sterilization program, and repeated its apologies for its involvement.

"None of us like what happened here and doubly regret that our institution was involved," said Dr. William Applegate, the dean of the medical school.

The report was critical of a decision by medical-school officials to accept money from a controversial figure who supported eugenics and segregation. "It was bad judgment," Applegate said.

The four members of the committee studied material from the school's archives, records from the Human Betterment League - a group that pushed for the expansion of the state's eugenic sterilization program - minutes from the school's Board of Trustees, hospital records and other material to produce the seven-page report.

The committee, composed of two doctors, a lawyer, and a researcher, started looking into Wake Forest's role in response to "Against Their Will," a series of stories published in the Winston-Salem Journal in December. Applegate directed the school to examine its role as soon as he learned that it was involved.

The Eugenics Board of North Carolina ordered the sterilizations of more than 7,600 people from 1929 through 1974. Many of the operations were done against the patients' wishes, and some were performed on children as young as 10. Documents obtained by the Journal showed that North Carolina expanded its eugenic sterilization program while most of the other states with similar programs were scaling back and that the North Carolina program increasingly targeted poor, black women as it grew. Gov. Mike Easley formally apologized for the program in December and approved the recommendations of a study panel in September that called for health and educational benefits for sterilization victims.

Nationwide, about 65,000 people were sterilized as part of the eugenics movement. Supporters of eugenics wanted to eliminate such social ills as out-of-wedlock births, genetic defects and mental illness thought to be hereditary.

The series also examined Wake Forest's involvement with the state sterilization program.

Though the school was involved on a relatively small scale, the Journal investigation showed that:

• Wake Forest accepted money from Wickliffe Draper, a philanthropist with known racist views;

• participated in a eugenic sterilization program along with local elected officials that may have operated outside the purview of the state eugenics board;

• and that the expansion of the state eugenic sterilization program was supported by Dr. C. Nash Herndon, then the head of the Department of Medical Genetics at Wake, in his role as the president of the Human Betterment League.

Draper gave two $40,000 grants to the school in 1950 and 1951 after Herndon presented ideas for genetic research to him. Herndon and Dr. Coy Carpenter, then the dean of the medical school, went to Draper again in 1951, asking for more money for an institute for the study of genetics. Draper agreed to give $100,000 if the school agreed not to officially advocate interracial marriage, to consider teaching about therapeutic sterilization and not to dispute the theory of overpopulation leading to food shortages unless scientific data disproved the theory.

Carpenter agreed to the conditions and accepted the money in 1953. The money was used to pay for Herndon's position, and after his retirement the remainder went to the C. Nash Herndon Fund, which still exists and is used for general operating expenses for the medical school.

Applegate said that the school would not take money from someone like Draper today.

"If there was one thing in this that surprised me, it was the leadership level involved in soliciting funds from Wickliffe Draper," he said. "That's sort of a difficult thing for me to accept but it happened. In hindsight, none of us would solicit money from that person."

The school now rigorously screens donors and their intentions before accepting money, Applegate said.

The committee also examined the role played by two doctors at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine. Dr. William Allan and Herndon taught and promoted the ideas of eugenics for years. Allan published many papers about the subject.

During his years as the chairman of the Department of Medical Genetics, Herndon wrote annual reports from 1943 through 1948 that referred to the department's eugenic activities, the committee found.

"Both Dr. Herndon and Dr. Allan supported the concept of eugenics, including involuntary sterilization and genetic counseling, and believed, as did many others during the early part of the 20th century, that it could be used to improve the health and welfare of society. Their status as faculty members provided a platform to advocate their views on eugenics," the report said.

Applegate said that similar programs could not exist today because of different attitudes about medicine and better safeguards against experimentation.

"In this time, as the report says, the ability to extrapolate from science without the checks and balances was greater," Applegate said. "In the modern paradigm the rights of the individual come first. Medicine is not to be used as a social tool."

Doctors at Wake Forest now have to go through the Institutional Review Board, an in-house committee composed of doctors, ethical and religious people and others, if they want to conduct any clinical trials or experimental medicine with human subjects, he said.

The report also found that faculty members performed sterilizations, including involuntary sterilizations, on patients. Committee members disputed that Herndon performed surgeries, saying that he was an internist and not a surgeon.

The Journal's series had said that Herndon performed at least six sterilizations, based on a comment attributed to Herndon in the minutes of the Human Betterment League recorded in November 1949. The minutes said that Herndon "had himself performed six operations in the past week and told of the very advanced policy of Baptist Hospital."

Committee members searched through the hospital records for six weeks before the statement and found no record of Herndon performing any surgeries, said Dr. Charles McCall, the chairman of the committee.

"We were convinced we could tell who the surgeon was. Dr. Herndon was not a surgeon and his name was not part of that (those records)," McCall said.

In the series, the Journal also reported that the medical school had collaborated with Forsyth County on the "Forsyth County Eugenics Program," which sterilized dozens outside of the eugenics laws.

Committee members said that they found nothing to indicate that the school's doctors had performed sterilizations outside of the law, which required that county workers petition for sterilization and a doctor sign an affidavit saying that the procedure was necessary. "There was just no evidence to suggest that among the documents we reviewed," McCall said.

Documents obtained by the Journal from the medical-school archives showed that Herndon worked with Forsyth County on a program that did not seem to be overseen by the state.

"In September 1943, a project aimed at eugenic improvement of the population of Forsyth County was begun in co-operation with Dr. J. Roy Hege, Forsyth County Health Officer. This project consists of a gradual, but systematic effort to eliminate certain genetically unfit strains from the local population. About thirty operations for sterilization have been performed," Herndon wrote in his annual report for the Department of Medical Genetics for the 1943-44 school year.

Until 1963, all sterilization operations in North Carolina had to be approved by the state eugenics board. There are no indications that the state approved nearly that many sterilizations in Forsyth County that year, according to Journal research.

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