Laurence Snyder

Parents

1950s Nine of the association’s early leaders served in high offices with the American Eugenics Society, three of them during their tenures as ASHG president, the report said. Five presidents who served during the 1950s — Lee Dice, Curt Stern, Franz Kallmann, Madge Macklin and Laurence Snyder — supported forced sterilization of people deemed genetically unfit, including those with physical and intellectual disabilities, heritable diseases and mental illness. Another ASHG president, Claude Nash Herndon, was a key participant in North Carolina’s eugenics sterilization program, which primarily targeted Black women. He advocated to name the group’s most prestigious award after his mentor, William Allan, in 1961, the report said.