Between 1909 and the early 1950s, the state of California sterilized over twenty thousand patients in government institutions for the mentally ill and mentally deficient. Of the many states that had compulsory steriliza tion programs, California's was by far the largest in terms of patients sterilized, affecting nearly as many people as the sum of the totals from the next four top-sterilizing states combined (figure 2.1)~1 The motivation for these sterilizations has traditionally been associated with the concept of eugenics: the desire to improve the human gene pooi by discouraging the reproduction of the "unfit." These mass sterilizations have generally been taken as the most tangible and permanent of all of the American forays into eugenics, and its closest link to the genocidal policies practiced by National Socialist Germany. The history of eugenics is generally told explicitly as "a history of a bad idea" (e.g., Carlson 2001). It is an intellectual history, an account of the dangerous power of ideology-infected science. This framework, which dominated historical accounts of eugenics since they first started being written in the 1 960s, tended to focus on the genesis and transformation of eugenic thought as reflected in the writings of eugenic propagandists and occasionally state legislation.2 Aside from legislation for immigration restriction, eugenics had very little federal recognition in the United States, and was prosecuted mainly on a state-by-state basis. In the American case, the intellectual history approach has been used extensively to trace strong connections between the American embrace of eugenics and the case of the Nazis (Black 2003). Such comparisons pack considerable rhetorical impact in a culture that has long prided itself on its crusading role in the Second World War, and the history of eugenics and possible eugenic futures have become the standard case study of the intersection between biology and society.

Denouncing state-controlled research, U.S. investigators advanced the American agenda during the Cold War

During the course of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government secretly attempted to acquire a monopoly on the patent rights for inventions used in the production of nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. The use of patents as a system of control, while common for more mundane technologies, would seem at first glance to conflict with the regimes of secrecy that have traditionally been associated with nuclear weapons. In explaining the origins and operations of the Manhattan Project patent system, though, this essay argues that the utilization of patents was an ad hoc attempt at legal control of the atomic bomb by Manhattan Project administrators, focused on the monopolistic aspects of the patent system and preexisting patent secrecy legislation. From the present perspective, using patents as a method of control for such weapons seems inadequate, if not unnecessary; but at the time, when the bomb was a new and essentially unregulated technology, patents played an important role in the thinking of project administrators concerned with meaningful postwar control of the bomb.

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