We often ask ourselves, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" There are lots of answers, none of them entirely satisfactory, of course.

But how about this question?: "Why do good people do bad things?" Perhaps because we know in our hearts that all of us are fallen, we find that easier to explain.

But what about when good people do terrible, horrific, ghastly things? That disturbing question is one of many raised by "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race," an exhibit that opened recently at  the Science Museum of Minnesota.

[Most of what follows is based on, "Eugenics: Deadly Medicine," a story written by Maura Lerner for the [Minneapolis] Star Tribune. You can read her account in its entirety at www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/15948397.html?page=1&c=y.]

I hail from Minnesota and I know a fair amount about how the eugenics craze that spawned mass sterilization spread throughout the United States in the early decades of the 20th century. What I didn't know until I read Lerner's account was that "Minnesota joined the bandwagon in 1925, with a law permitting forced sterilization of patients in mental institutions." I am an unabashed apologist for Minnesota so that knowledge that thousands were sterilized set me back on my heels.

According to Lerner, the exhibit was produced by the U.S. Holocaust Museum, which I drive by every day on my way to work in Washington, D.C. The traveling collection includes "books, artifacts, posters, historic newsreels and interviews with survivors."

The exhibit probes our darkest impulses, including "how highly educated people on both sides of the Atlantic…were swept up in the eugenics movement of the early 20th century."

Ultimately it is about the big "how" question--"'how was the Holocaust possible,'" according to Susan Bachrach, curator of the exhibition at the Holocaust Museum.

She told Lerner that "One of the answers has to do with the role of physicians and scientists." Put another way, the exhibit tries to get at "how doctors ended up committing barbaric acts in the name of science."

I won't spoil the story for you by exploring this in detail. Suffice it to say that the slippery slope was greased by the notion that there are some genetic endowments that are "good" and that science has a duty to help "improve the human race," in the words of  Stephen Feinstein, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, which is sponsoring the exhibit.

Eugenicists were convinced that the "fittest children" would be produced if the "better" sort of people matched up. Implicit in this highly dubious notion was a corollary: surely if you want the "best" people to breed, you also don't want this off set by the "less fit" having children.

To its ever-lasting shame, the United States Supreme Court adopted this philosophy which often ran in tandem with the notion that "defectives" would, if allowed to reproduce, "bankrupt the state." In the 1927 case of Buck vs. Bellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, no less, declared "three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Nazi Germany mated that hideous idea with the notion of "racial hygiene," or racial purity. With a deadly, inexorable logic, "German doctors and scientists followed a path from mass sterilization to mass murder, as the list of 'inferior people' grew to the millions: Jews, Gypsies, blacks, deformed children, the mentally retarded, the mentally ill, the deaf, the blind."

If you can, take a moment and read the article in its entirety at
www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/15948397.html?page=1&c=y.