State Institute for Racial Biology 1922
In 1921 Sweden's Riksdag voted unanimously to establish Statens Institut för Rasbiologi in Uppsala — the world's first state-funded racial biology institute, opening in 1922 under Herman Lundborg, a decade before the Nazi racial programme began.
On 13 May 1921 both chambers of the Swedish Riksdag voted to establish Statens institut för rasbiologi in Uppsala. The motion had been submitted in January 1920; every political party supported it. The institute formally opened in 1922 with Herman Lundborg — who had organised the 1919 Swedish Folk Types Exhibition — as its first director.
Its official mission: “to conduct scientific research in the field of racial biology with special consideration for the Swedish people.” In practice it examined 100,000 Swedes and published Svensk raskunskap as a high school textbook. Lundborg claimed Sweden was “the first cultural state in the world” to create such an institute; historian Paul Weindling disputes this, noting England had an equivalent since 1905 — Sweden was likely the first state-funded version, not the first institute overall.
Gunnar Dahlberg replaced Lundborg in 1935 and redirected the work toward medical genetics, sceptical of racial classification as science. The institute ceased independent operation on 30 June 1959 and became the Department of Medical Genetics at Uppsala University. The unanimous cross-party founding vote — a decade before the Nazi programme — removes any possibility of treating Swedish eugenics as a response to extremist pressure. It was mainstream policy, and it preceded the sterilization law that followed twelve years later.