Human Betterment Foundation
The Human Betterment Foundation was an American eugenics organization established in Pasadena, California in 1928 by E.S. Gosney with the aim "to foster and aid constructive and educational forces for the protection and betterment of the human family in body, mind, character, and citizenship". It primarily served to compile and distribute information about compulsory sterilization legislation in the United States, for the purposes of eugenics.
The initial board of trustees were Gosney, Henry M. Robinson, George Dock, David Starr Jordan, Charles Goethe, Justin Miller, Otis Castle, Joe G. Crick, and biologist/eugenicist Paul Popenoe. Later members included Lewis Terman, Robert Millikan, William B. Munro, and University of California, Berkeley professors Herbert M. Evans and Samuel J. Holmes.
After Gosney's death in 1942, Gosney's daughter Lois Castle and the HBF's board liquidated HBF with its funds going to form the Gosney research fund at the California Institute of Technology in 1943. The archives of the Human Betterment Foundation are in Special Collections at Caltech in Pasadena.
