Ploetz’s contacts with international and U.S. eugenicists were long and extensive. In the 1880s, he lived in the United States, where he studied U.S. utopians and practiced medicine in Massachusetts. He also bred chickens and began getting interested in the eugenics belief in breeding humans. He served as one of the vice-presidents of the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, and the next year, he became a member of the elite Permanent International Eugenics Committee, which later evolved into the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations (IFEO).
