The faces, the voices, the stories. This newspaper's series about North Carolina's eugenics sterilization, whose last installment is running today, is disturbing in many ways and for many reasons, but it's the human elements it portrays that keep coming to mind.

What happened in North Carolina, and especially in Winston-Salem and Forsyth County, is a cautionary tale with lessons that ought to be heeded as we try to figure out the best ways to take advantage of today's cutting-edge science. It's a reminder of how easily good people - community leaders, journalists, doctors, politicians and ordinary citizens - can tolerate and even promote something that's terribly wrong.

The revelations of how North Carolina sterilized more than 7,600 people, often against their will and on the flimsiest of pretexts, should provoke serious soul-searching and discussion. What does this history say about our state, our community, our heritage? Could something like this happen here, today?

The eugenics movement and its failed attempt at social engineering have been discredited. But how does our society today deal with the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, the misfits, the poor, the elderly, the neglected and abused children? Do we treat those who are different from us because of race, ethnicity or sexual orientation as we should, or do we still harbor prejudices? Are we paying as much attention as we should to the decisions that are being made about such issues as cloning, genetic engineering, stem-cell research - or do we just leave all that to somebody else?

Such soul-searching and discussion are important, and the need for such activities is high on the list of reasons why it would be wrong simply to let the story of eugenics and forced sterilizations in North Carolina remain cloaked in secrecy.

But while so engaged, we should not let those faces and voices fade from our memories. Making up the big picture of what happened in North Carolina are a lot of individual people who were unfairly denied one of the most basic of human rights, the right to have children.

One way to honor the victims who are dead is to try to avoid similar mistakes. But because North Carolina continued its sterilization program well into the 1970s, even when such programs were being discredited in many other places, many of its victims are alive today. What can we do for them?

In May of this year, the governor of Virginia, which had the nation's second highest number of forced sterilizations, apologized for his state's role in the "shameful effort" and unveiled a memorial to the 18-year-old unwed mother who was the first person sterilized under Virginia's 1924 law. Earlier this month, the governor of Oregon apologized for that state's forced sterilization program and established Dec. 10 as Human Rights Day there. Here in Winston-Salem, as the story has unfolded, the Journal's publisher has apologized this week for this newspaper's role in legitimizing the eugenics sterilization program.

Some may dismiss such public apologies and memorials as shallow gestures. They are not. They serve the purpose of forcing us to confront our history, with the hope that we will learn the lessons it offers. They also tell the living victims that society does value their worth and dignity, that we acknowledge and regret the great wrong that was done to them. That would seem to be the least that the state of North Carolina could do.