SCIENCE HISTORY: DOES RENAMING A BUILDING REWRITE ITS PAST?

Back in June, University College London (UCL) announced that it would be denaming the Galton Lecture Theatre as “one step in a range of actions aimed at acknowledging and addressing the university’s historical links with the eugenics movement.” Sir Francis Galton, whom the lecture theatre was named after, was a Victorian scientist who founded the British study of eugenics. But does removing Galton’s name minimise, or even hide, his role in shaping our society today? We posed this question to Subhadra Das, a science historian and curator at UCL, who has spent the last eight years looking after the items in the university’s Galton collection.

HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT THE RENAMING OF THE GALTON LECTURE THEATRE?

I’m very pleased, because it’s something that people have wanted to happen for a long time and it’s definitely the right thing to do. But I hope that my community at the university also realises that this is really just the beginning. That