Paul Lombardo hadn't planned on a three-decade detour when he stopped at a greasy-spoon restaurant for breakfast in February 1980. Lombardo, then a graduate student at the University of Virginia, picked up a newspaper to read as he ate his bacon and eggs.

And the rest is history, literally and figuratively. For almost 30 years, Lombardo has tried to uncover the full story of the wrongs he read about that day.

The article he had stumbled across was about two sisters sterilized in the 1920s by the state of Virginia for being "feeble-minded." The younger sister hadn't even known she'd had a tubal ligation. She didn't learn until she was in her late 60s that the surgery hadn't been for appendicitis. The older, more famous sister — Carrie Buck — was the subject of the now infamous lawsuit over the legality of the operation, Buck v. Bell, that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

He read that although Carrie Buck was the first victim of a 1924 sterilization law, 8,300 Virginians had involuntary sterilization until the practice was stopped in the 1970s. The law itself was repealed in 1974. "It was startling," says Lombardo, 59, now a legal historian at Georgia State University in Atlanta.

He had not known of eugenics — the "science" of human improvement through controlled breeding — as more than a vague concept. Learning that there had been many eugenics programs in the United States in the 20th century and that the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in favor of Buck's sterilization amazed him.

"Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in the 1927 ruling. Lombardo says: "This woman got railroaded. And one of the giants of the Supreme Court was driving the train."

In the years that followed, Lombardo's Ph.D. dissertation focused on the attorney who fought to have Buck sterilized. In 1985, he published more research in the New York University Law Review, saying that key "facts" of the Buck case were simply not true and that Buck never received any real legal representation.

He has written journal articles and made many speeches on the subject, finding himself returning to the details of the story again and again. The case was "part of my intellectual life for so long that in some senses it was my … 'hobby' is not the right word," Lombardo says. " 'Obsession' would probably be closer."

Last fall, his book Three Generations, No Imbeciles was published. In February, he traveled to Rome to speak on the dangers of eugenics at a Vatican conference. He is working on a book titled 100 Years of Eugenics: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Project

Lombardo has no plans to abandon his fight to publicize the terrible history of eugenics. With genetics playing an increasingly important role in science, Lombardo and other bioethicists fear the lessons of the eugenics debacle matter more than ever.

University of Maryland historian Steven Selden worries about how we will handle the ethical questions of possible genetic "improvements" to humanity. "We're going to revisit all the ethical conundrums that were inherent in the eugenics movement as we move forward."

The story of Carrie Buck

Buck was born and raised in Charlottesville, then became pregnant near her 17th birthday. Her foster parents had her institutionalized as a "feeble-minded moral delinquent," despite her claims that she had been assaulted by their nephew. When she gave birth, her child was given to her foster parents, who adopted her, and Buck was sent to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-minded in Lynchburg. Buck's mother had already been committed to the colony.

With three generations available for examination, colony superintendent Albert Priddy felt confident that he could prove the Buck women were defective. He sought to have Carrie Buck sterilized under Virginia's new law authorizing surgery on epileptics, the feeble-minded, imbeciles and the socially inadequate.

The case went to court, and as it worked its way through the legal system, Priddy died and John Bell took his place at the colony. By virtue of his new position, Bell became the official defendant in the case, known thereafter as Buck v. Bell.

Aubrey Strode, the legislator who had written the Virginia law, became the lawyer representing the colony in the fight to sterilize Buck. Strode and Buck's appointed attorney, Irving Whitehead, were childhood friends. Whitehead, a longtime supporter of sterilization, had been a founding director of the Virginia Colony.

Even for a small town half a century ago, the connections felt suspect to Lombardo. The whole process, from Buck's institutionalization to the Supreme Court decision that the state could legally sterilize her, seemed cruel and arbitrary to him. Buck was indeed sterilized after the high court's ruling and was later paroled from the colony.

In his research, Lombardo found report cards for Carrie and her daughter Vivian. Buck had been passed on each year with "very good" marks in deportment and lessons. Vivian had made the honor roll. There was nothing to suggest any mental deficiency in either of them.

The child died at age 8 from measles and an intestinal infection.

Buck. v. Bell has never been overturned.

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