In 1921, a eugenic society was set up in Britain to create a race of well-formed, well-endowed, beautiful men and women. It aimed to increase the offspring of the wise, healthy and well-to-do while reducing the progeny of the poor, weak and unemployed. It lobbied Parliament to create laws to compulsorily sterilise ?undesirables? and set up a clinic to achieve the ?reduction of the birth rate at the wrong part and increase of the birth rate at the right end of the social scale.?The founder, Dr Marie Stopes, was supported by some of most eminent persons of her time: Julian Huxley, John Maynard Keynes, Lady Constance Lytton, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and senior members of the medical and political establishments. Sir James Barr, ex-president of the British Medical Association, congratulated her for inaugurating: ?? a great movement which I hope will eventually get rid of our C3 population and exterminate poverty. The only way to raise an A1 population is to breed them.?Dr Halliday Sutherland spoke out against eugenics and, when he accused Stopes of ?exposing the poor to experiment,? she sued him for libel. Their intense legal battle lasted for over two years and went all the way to the House of Lords.Developments in gene technology give today?s eugenicists access to tools that their predecessors could only dream about. "Exterminating Poverty" ? the true story of the fight against eugenics one-hundred years ago ? will inform and inspire those who take up the fight today.