Altruistic World Online Library

Charles Goethe
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 3/30/20



Charles Matthias Goethe (March 28, 1875 – July 10, 1966)[1] was an American eugenicist, entrepreneur, land developer, philanthropist, conservationist, founder of the Eugenics Society of Northern California, and a native and lifelong resident of Sacramento, California.

Early life

Charles M. Goethe was born on March 28, 1875 in Sacramento California.[2] He pronounced his last name as GAY-tee.[3] Goethe's grandparents had immigrated to California from Germany in the 1870s.[2] Charles’ father was interested in agriculture and wild life. Both men also pursued careers in real estate as Charles made most of his money as a real estate broker.[2] Charles had passed the bar exam but did not pursue a career in law.[4]

As a child, Charles was interested in agriculture, biology, and the human body. In his diary, he kept a record of his diet and exercise, specifically noting days in which his regimen was not sufficient.[2] Goethe's additional childhood interest in various plants and animals evolved as he pressed and catalogued his findings.[2] His ideas concerning nature tied into his later views on eugenics, as he connected the evolution of nature to heredity.[2] Goethe explained in his memoir Seeking to Serve that his original interest in eugenics began as a child.[2]

Nature guide movement

Goethe (German pronunciation: [ˈɡøːtə] and occasionally incorrectly as "Gaytee") wrote admiringly of California’s Forty-Niners, the State’s giant redwood trees, and loved the outdoors. Goethe worked with organizations including the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society.[2] He and his wife have been called "The father and mother of the Nature Guide Movement,' initiating interpretive programs with the U.S. National Park Service.[5] The National Park Service made Goethe the “Honorary Chief Naturalist” for his work in this field.[2] This was motivated by their experience with nature programs in Europe and desire to educate visitors in the U.S. National Parks.[6] His motto was "Learn to Read the Trail-side as a Book." Goethe encouraged the general public to educate themselves about the evolution of nature as well, personally spending time dedicated to learning about different plants and animals.[2] He later introduced the Boy Scouts to Sacramento, due to his interest in furthering biological education for children.[2] As an adult, Goethe was a conservationist who worked to implement park rangers into national parks.[2]

Founder of Sacramento State College

Goethe founded California State University, Sacramento (Sacramento State College at the time), which in turn treated Goethe with the reverence of a founding father, appointed him chairman of the University's advisory board, dedicated the Goethe Arboretum to him in 1961, and organized an elaborate gala and 'national recognition day' to mark his 90th birthday in 1965, when he received letters of appreciation - solicited by his friends at CSUS - from the president of the Nature Conservancy, then-Governor Edmund G. Brown, and then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. As a result, in 1963, Goethe changed his will to make CSUS his primary beneficiary, bequeathing his residence, eugenics library, papers, and $640,000 to the University.[7]

When Goethe died, CSUS received the largest share of his $24 million estate.

Eugenics controversy

Charles Goethe worked near Arizona, focusing on health conditions in the 1920s.[2] Following his work in Arizona, Goethe desired to understand “the extent of the mestizo peril to the American ‘seed stock.'"[2] Essentially, Goethe was determined to discover the threat of Mexicans to the American population, in a eugenic sense. As a result, Goethe created the Immigration Study Commission.[2][4] With the help of his organization, Goethe hoped to ban Mexican entry into the United States of America. In addition, Goethe portrayed Mexicans as carriers of different diseases and germs. While he believed that certain Mexicans could appear as free of disease, they could in fact be silent carriers due to their health practices.[2] His ideas contributed to 1920s perceptions that the American melting pot had begun to integrate germs from certain races, specifically the Mexican race.[2]

Goethe was a strong proponent of positive eugenics.[4] His mentor was eugenicist Madison Grant, with whom he shared strong anti-immigrant beliefs. Like Grant, Goethe promoted his anti-immigrant and racist ideas through pamphlets and other tracts, and he lobbied with politicians and other bureaucrats.[8] Goethe created tiny pamphlets that he distributed to explain his beliefs concerning specific ethnic groups.[2] In these booklets, he explained the importance of family planning and eugenic practices to ensure the superiority of certain races. He invested nearly 1 million dollars to produce and distribute these pamphlets to increase biological literacy.[2] In addition to investing in these booklets, Goethe also invested in research for plant and biological genetics.[2]

Goethe also recommended compulsory sterilization of the 'socially unfit', opposed immigration, and praised German scientists who used a comprehensive sterilization program to 'purify' the Aryan race before the outbreak of World War II. Goethe also funded anti-Asian campaigns, praised the Nazis before and after World War II, and practiced discrimination in his business dealings, refusing to sell real estate to Mexicans and Asians.

Goethe believed a variety of social successes (wealth, leadership, intellectual discoveries) and social problems (poverty, illegitimacy, crime and mental illness) could be traced to inherited biological attributes associated with 'racial temperament'.

Working with the Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena, California, Goethe lobbied the State to restrict immigration from Mexico and carry out involuntary sterilizations of mostly poor women, defined as 'feeble-minded' or 'socially inadequate' by medical authorities between 1909 and the 1960s.[7][9]

Goethe was also involved in the publication of multiple journals in which he expressed his views on eugenics. Goethe was involved with the journal Survey Graphic, serving as a member of the council. The journal had published information about typhus quarantines in Mexico in both 1916 and 1917.[2] In addition to Survey Graphic, Goethe was also featured in the journal Eugenics and explained his beliefs that Mexicans were the dirt of society.[2] In the journal from the American Eugenics Society, he explained that Mexicans were as low as Negros, and did not understand basic health rules, but also resisted healthy practices.[2] In his articles, Goethe also explained that Mexicans and South Europeans were responsible for stealing jobs from Americans and introducing germs to the people.[2]

Upon return from a trip to Germany 1934, which at the time was sterilizing over 5,000 citizens per month, Goethe reportedly told a fellow eugenicist, "You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought...I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."[9] The Nazi eugenics movement eventually escalated to become The Holocaust, which claimed the lives of well over 10 million 'undesirables', including 6 million Jews.

In Sacramento, during Goethe's life, the advocacy of eugenics -the social philosophy of attempting to 'improve' the human population by artificial selection - was considered a progressive issue. Though it was opposed by many scientists who thought the understanding of human heredity was too shallow to create solid policy, and by religious leaders who opposed birth control of any form, in the years after the Holocaust it was not considered to be as radical as it is today.[9] Around 20,000 patients in California State psychiatric hospital were sterilized with minimal or non-existent consent given between 1909 and 1950, when the law went into general disuse before its repeal in the 1960s. A favorable report by Human Betterment Foundation workers E.S. Gosney and Paul B. Popenoe, touting the results of the sterilizations in California, was published in the late 1920s, which in turn was often cited by the Nazi government as evidence wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane.[10] When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II, they justified their mass-sterilizations by pointing at the United States as their inspiration.

CSUS attempted to name a new science building after him in 1965, but that effort was rebuffed by students and teachers.[7] In 2005, the university changed the name of its arboretum and botanic garden from the Charles M. Goethe Arboretum to the University Arboretum without fanfare because of renewed attention to Goethe's virulently racist views, praise of Nazi Germany, and advocacy for eugenics.

On June 21, 2007, the school board of the Sacramento City Unified School District voted to rename the "Charles M. Goethe Middle School" to the "Rosa Parks Middle School".[11]

On January 29, 2008, the Sacramento Board of Supervisors stripped his name from one of Sacramento County's busiest parks.[12] On April 25, 2008, the Sacramento Bee reported that, with a nod from Internet voters and the county parks commission, the park will be renamed River Bend Park.[13]

Personal life

Charles Goethe married Mary Glide in 1903.[2] Glide came from a wealthy family and Goethe attempted to court Mary nine times before she accepted his offer.[2] According to Goethe, his wife Mary had refused his proposals since she feared that he was solely interested in her wealth. In addition, she rejected his attempts due to the fact that she was struggling with infertility.[2] The Goethes owned multiple ranches and invested money in the stock market, becoming a wealthy and lucrative family.[2] At the time of her death in 1946, Mary's estate was worth 1.5 million.[2] Her husband, Charles Goethe, had an estate worth 24 million when he died on July 10, 1966.[2] Charles Goethe did not have any children, presumably due to Mary's infertility.[citation needed]

Books

• Manuelito of the Red Zerape by C. M. Goethe

See also

• Eugenics in the United States

References

1. Burke, Chloe. "Eugenics in California: Charles Matthias Goethe". Center for Science, History, Policy and Ethics, California State University, Sacramento. Archived from the original on 2015-12-17. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
2. Minna, Alexandra (2016). Eugenic Nation. University of California Press. pp. 69–165.
3. Burke, Chloe S.; Castaneda, Christopher J. (2007). "The Public and Private History of Eugenics: An Introduction". The Public Historian. 29 (3): 5–17. doi:10.1525/tph.2007.29.3.5.
4. Platt, Tony (2005). "Engaging the Past: Charles M. Goethe, American Eugenics, and Sacramento State University". Social Justice. 32: 17–33. JSTOR 29768305.
5. "The World's Largest Summer Camp," Yosemite Nature Notes 37(7):89-94 (July 1958) by Charles M. Goethe. Traces the origin of nature guiding in National Parks; reprinted from Nature Magazine
6. "Nature Study in National Parks Interpretive Movement," Yosemite Nature Notes 39(7):156-158 (July 1960) by Charles M. Goethe
7. Platt, Tony (February 29, 2004). "Curious historical bedfellows: Sac State and its racist benefactor: After receiving honors aplenty from university, C. M. Goethe left most of his big estate to it". The Sacramento Bee. Archived from the original on 1 July 2004. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
8. Allen, Garland E. (2013). "'Culling the Herd': Eugenics and the Conservation Movement in the United States, 1900-1940". Journal of the History of Biology. 46: 31–72.
9. Beckner, Chrisanne (February 19, 2004). "Darkness on the edge of campus". Sacramento News and Review.
10. SFGate.com - 'Eugenics and the Nazis -- the California connection', Edwin Black, San Francisco Chronicle (November 9, 2003)
11. News10.net - Search Results[permanent dead link]
12. News - Goethe name is gone from park - sacbee.com[permanent dead link]
13. - River Bend favored as new name for Goethe Park - sacbee.com[permanent dead link]

External links

• StateHornet.com[permanent dead link] - 'Online petition seeks to change name of arboretum', David Martin Olson, State Hornet (February 4, 2005)
• TimesOnline.co.uk - 'Liberal California confronts years of forced sterilisation', Chris Ayres, Sunday Times (July 11, 2003)
• 'School to erase Goethe name? Staffers say honoring man with racist views insults the students.', Dorothy Korber, "The Sacramento Bee" (February 15, 2007)
• 'Ugly side of philanthropist divides (California State University, Sacramento)', Eric Stern, Bee Staff Writer, "The Sacramento Bee" (March 1, 2007)
• 'Goethe recalled fondly by some', Eric Stern, Bee Staff Writer, "The Sacramento Bee" (March 2, 2007)

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California’s ‘number one citizen’ was a white supremacist, and he founded a state university: Charles M. Goethe, a wealthy eugenicist, was praised by the governor
by Stephanie Buck
Timeline
Sep 17, 2017


Like his counterparts in Nazi Germany, Charles Goethe espoused eugenic methods of birth control as a means to preserve the aryan race. (Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images)

Charles M. Goethe invested a lot of money and philanthropy into Northern California. His environmental work earned him a prestigious park in his name, not to mention a school and some shiny plaques. He did good. He also believed white people were the superior race and needed to biologically quarantine themselves from diseased, delinquent Mexicans. If he could prevent brown people from procreating all together, even better.

At the time, this version of white supremacy didn’t stop politicians, educators, and community leaders from singing his praises. In fact, by mid century, Goethe’s name (pronounced “gay-tee”) was everywhere, enshrined in public parks and schools around the state capital. But after his death, and after decades of sanitizing the past, Goethe’s troubling legacy tumbled out.

American eugenics simmered in the early 20th century, then boiled into the 1920s and 1930s. Goethe was a strong force in advancing the conversation. He feared that Nordic people’s historical “contributions to all mankind” were under threat by “the coming of heterogeneity.” Under a guise of protecting this group, who, in California he interpreted as the state’s earliest pioneers, he founded the Immigration Study Commission in the early 1920s. Its target was “low powers,” otherwise known as Mestizos and Mexicans, that were infecting the nation’s “germ plasm,” according to Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2015).

In 1927, he wrote to the Santa Cruz Sentinel, “The Anglo-Saxon birthrate is low. Peons multiply like rabbits….If race remains absolutely pure, and if an old American-Nordic family averages three children while an incoming Mexican peon family averages seven, by the fifth generation, the proportion of white Nordics to Mexican peons descended from these two families would be as 243 to 16,807.”

Goethe lobbied to close the border and instructed his real-estate brokers not to sell to Mexican people, who he viewed as sub-intelligent criminals.

Eugenics gave “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable,” according to one of its founders, Francis Galton. Eugenicists inferred that heredity proved humans were inherently unequal, and race was the primary marker of not only inferior and superior genes but also of social supremacy. Leaders in the movement claimed brown and black populations suffered from inferior health due primarily to intrinsically flawed biology. But the wealth and social influence enjoyed by Anglo-Saxon populations was proof of a vast intellectual edge, too. To protect whites from “contamination” was considered, by eugenicists, a noble cause in the purification of the human race.


Charles M. Goethe (1875–1966) lived as a respected member of California society. In recent years his bigotry has become a public embarrassment. (CSU Sacramento)

Already a member of several influential eugenics organizations, in 1933 Goethe organized and funded the Eugenics Society of Northern California. Over two decades, he lectured and lobbied with the goal of “reducing biological illiteracy.” During this time, he invested an estimated $1 million to publish pamphlets on racial superiority, family planning, tantrums against racial diversity, and other topics he considered related. In a 1936 presidential address to the national Eugenics Research Association, Goethe publicly defended Nazi Germany’s “honest yearnings for a better population” and proclaimed the country’s sterilization strategy as “administered wisely, and without racial cruelty.” (Two years earlier, Germany had sterilized roughly 5,000 people per month. Hitler praised America’s forced sterilization campaigns, such as Goethe’s, for the idea.) In his speech, Goethe emphasized the duty of Nordic nations to sterilize the “markedly social inadequate, such as those insane, blind, criminal by inheritance.” Between 1907 and 1940, tens of thousands of mostly poor women were involuntarily sterilized in the U.S. At least 20,000 Californians residing in state prisons and hospitals were sterilized before 1964, with laws supported by Goethe.

What made Goethe unique at the time wasn’t necessarily his white supremacist beliefs; it was the fact that he interwove racial pseudoscience with progressive tentpole issues, such as conservation and public education. Throughout his lifetime, he designated several redwood preserves, built playgrounds, financed an orphanage, established ranger programs, contributed to San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences planetarium, and, with his wife Mimi, was considered the founder of the interpretive parks movement. Each of these he considered a step toward the purification of a safer, cleaner, more wholesome, and white America.

His ideologies would conflict modern thinkers for decades, especially after Goethe’s name became the backbone of some of Northern California’s crowning establishments. Students at the California State University, Sacramento, with its commitment to diversity, stroll a campus that may not have existed without a white supremacist benefactor. The school’s arboretum, nestled behind a thicket of trees adjacent to the campus entrance, was named the “C.M. Goethe Arboretum.” The elder benefactor presented personal gifts to faculty members, sometimes via grants but also in the form of travel and “other matters.” In the mid-1960s, Sacramento Mayor James B. McKinney proclaimed March 28 “Dr. Charles M. Goethe Day” in honor of one of the city’s “most outstanding citizens.” The county board of supervisors named Goethe “Sacramento’s most illustrious citizen” and designated a portion of the American River Parkway in his honor; Goethe Park boasted 444 acres of oak trees and wild turkeys. And then there was Charles M. Goethe Middle School.

Praise poured in from media and politicians. In February of 1965, in Goethe’s 90th year, the California State Assembly honored the eugenicist with a resolution. The Sacramento Bee called him a “devoted Sacramentan who has brought national recognition to his city through a lifetime of unlimited contribution.” A telegram from President Lyndon Johnson praised “an American whose life has been so richly dedicated to the service of humanity.” Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren remembered Goethe’s “remarkable career of public service.” Governor Edmund Brown called him “our number one citizen.”


Poster for a 1977 rally against forced sterilization in California. (Rachael Romero/SF Poster Brigade via Library of Congress)

After his death in 1966, CSU Sacramento received a sizable portion of Goethe’s $24 million estate. Yet, in a 2004 paper for the university’s Division of Social Work, Professor Tony Platt reported that the university knew about Goethe’s views on race from the start. “Once his bigotry became a public embarrassment, especially in the context of the anti-racism movements of the mid-1960s and 1970s, the administration tried to surgically separate Goethe-the-conservationist from Goethe-the-eugenicist.” For several decades, the matter of benefitting from and decorating a white supremacist went mostly unaddressed.

Then Platt published some of Goethe’s long-buried tracts, which he discovered during his research at CSUS. The issue erupted. Sacramento activists fought to tear down Goethe’s name from the park and the middle school. Opponents claimed that removal was akin to historical erasure and would set a slippery precedent in political correctness. Nevertheless, Goethe Park is now River Bend, and Charles M. Goethe Middle School became Rosa Parks.

Today, another Sacramento elementary school still gets its mail delivered to Goethe Road. Some people would just as soon forget, as if it were that simple.

This article is part of our White Terror U.S.A. collection, covering the shameful history of white supremacy in America.

Eugenics & Me: How a Hitler fan paid my mother's college tuition and sent me down a rabbit hole [Charles Goethe]
by Ben Westhoff
CityPages
Wednesday, May 10, 2017


Getty images

Shortly after the birth of my mother in Minneapolis in 1948, a man from Sacramento named Charles M. Goethe began sending my grandfather checks to put toward her college education. They were for small amounts — $36 here, $5 there — but they added up.

My mom, Catherine Reed, never met Goethe, and my grandparents didn’t know him in those days either. He was a rich, mysterious stranger who’d suddenly come into their lives.

A banker and real estate developer who promoted environmental causes, Goethe had a junior high school, a park, and an arboretum at Sacramento State named for him. The school’s president proclaimed him “Sacramento’s most remarkable citizen.”

For my grandparents — who were young scientists struggling to make ends meet — Goethe’s largesse was a gift from the gods.

He floated into their orbit after my grandfather became a professor at the University of Minnesota’s genetics institute. Goethe was passionate about the eugenics movement, a then-popular effort to improve America by regulating who could and couldn’t have babies. Ultimately, more than 60,000 American women and men with “undesirable” genes would be sterilized without their consent.

Eugenicists believed traits like criminality and “feeblemindedness” were genetic and could be eliminated from the population by sterilizing those who exhibited them. Thirty-three states permitted eugenic sterilization of those believed to be mentally unfit, promiscuous, criminal, epileptic, or in possession of other objectionable qualities.


Charles M. Goethe was a Hitler apologist who paid for my mom’s college.courtesy of Catherine Reed

Eugenicists also encouraged those of “sound genetic stock” to have more kids. That’s why Goethe was interested in my grandparents, who were both of Northern European ancestry and possessed Ph.Ds. He wanted them to have plenty of successful offspring. My mom graduated from Cornell University in 1969, debt free.

Back then eugenics was not yet a dirty word. For much of the 20th century it was considered a progressive cause with a devoted intellectual following — including doctors, lawyers, and, particularly, academics.

But Goethe took it further than most. He fought immigration, believed in white superiority, and defended Hitler in 1936. Among the Nazis’ many atrocities was the forced sterilization of hundreds of thousands of people under a plan that borrowed heavily from the American blueprint.

Upon Goethe’s 90th birthday in 1965, liberal titans including Lyndon Johnson and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren paid tribute. He would die a year later. In the decades to follow, public opinion turned sharply.

His name became tainted, unceremoniously stripped from the Sacramento facilities that bore it.

Back in the Twin Cities, my grandfather faced a reckoning. He’d arrived from Harvard to lead the Dight Institute, a new genetics program at the University of Minnesota. In the ’50s and ’60s, he fostered an important new scientific discipline called genetic counseling — advising parents on the likelihood their kids would have hereditary diseases — and was featured in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, traveling the world and receiving praise from admirers that included the Pope.

But the source of his University of Minnesota funding, as well as his children’s college, would become increasingly problematic.

The story begins with the man for whom the institute was named, Charles Dight.

Dight was eccentric, to say the least. He resided in a treehouse. Seriously. It was next to Minnehaha Creek and built on stilts.

He wanted a good view of the creek, he explained, and was worried that if his home sat on the ground, leaves would bunch up against it and create a fire hazard.

It was cozy but not cramped, featuring multiple floors accessed by a spiral iron staircase, a small kitchenette in the cupola, a coal stove, and a pair of porches. Above the front door it read, “Truth Shall Triumph, Justice Shall be Law,” a quote from an anti-slavery sermon. Impressively, he designed the treehouse himself, although it had no sewage connection — which apparently caused someone to report him to the city health department.

He could also be annoying. Dight advocated for countless causes, from pasteurized milk to public hygiene, and always had a leaflet tucked in his pants, ready to talk your ear off. People were known to leave the room when they heard him coming.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1856, Dight trained as a doctor and settled in Minnesota around the turn of the century, a member of Hamline University’s medical college before it was absorbed into the U. The pay was bad, and he supplemented it by working for an insurance company.

In 1914 he was elected to the Minneapolis City Council as a socialist, and led the push for milk pasteurization laws. For his troubles he had a street named after him — Dight Avenue, which runs parallel to Hiawatha Avenue in Longfellow, next to a bunch of grain silos.

The reforms he favored weren’t always what we think of as left-wing causes today. Sure, he was against war, and believed in the “back to the land” movement. But he also crusaded for temperance and strongly believed pigs should be fed the city’s garbage. (The logic? That pigs would get rid of the waste for free and the city could subsequently make money selling the swine.)


Charles Dight, a socialist city councilman who lived in a treehouse, lobbied to sterilize away genetic defects. Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Archives.

Divorced with no kids, he built a huge nest egg by scrimping, saving, and, well, living in a treehouse. Toward the end of his life he finally decided how he’d like to spend his money: on the eugenics movement.

Eugenics initially piggybacked on the findings of Austro-Hungarian scientist (and monk) Gregor Mendel, who, through experiments breeding pea plants, discovered many important laws of heredity.

The eugenicists applied his principles to humans, speculating (without scientific basis) that negative human traits could be stamped from the species through sterilization. Eugenics soon took hold in academia and even received glowing endorsements in mainstream magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Cosmopolitan.

Intelligence tests became widely administered (with often-flawed or racist methodologies), resulting in scientific classifications like “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron,” helping to determine who was eligible for sterilization.

In Minnesota more than 2,300 people were sterilized, mostly between 1928 and 1960. Many were institutionalized at Faribault’s School for the Feebleminded, which housed generations of the “mentally deficient,” “mentally ill,” epileptics, and others beginning in the late 19th century until finally closing in 1998.

Though Dight was a newcomer to the cause, he embraced it full bore. He started the Minnesota Eugenics Society, unsuccessfully lobbied for a eugenics tournament called the “Fitter Family Competition” at the Minnesota State Fair (these contests, popular around the country, awarded medallions to families who scored high on IQ tests and urine and blood samples), and authored a pamphlet called “Human Thoroughbreds, Why Not?”

Breeding quality people should be as much of a priority as breeding horses, he wrote, defining a thoroughbred as a person free of “inheritable defects.”


Sheldon Reed at the 1965 World Health Organization conference in Geneva. Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Archives.

The perfect human, in the eyes of most eugenicists, tended to be a white Northern European. Madison Grant’s influential 1916 tome The Passing of the Great Race classified “Nordic” Europeans as the superior race, and helped lay a foundation for Nazism in the process.

Dight took heart when Minnesota passed a sterilization law in 1925, which allowed the “feeble-minded and insane” to be “tubectomized or vasectomized” by order of doctors or psychologists. Dight didn’t feel the law went far enough, however, since it only applied to the institutionalized.

He preferred a law closer to that of Chancellor Adolf Hitler’s Germany, which in 1933 enacted the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, permitting the sterilization of anyone possessing a supposed genetic problem ranging from unintelligence to alcoholism to blindness. On August 1 of that year, Dight sent Hitler a note wishing him well on his “plan to stamp out mental inferiority among the German people.”

“I trust you will accept my sincere wish that your effort along that line will be a great success,” he concluded. He received a thank you card with Hitler’s signature.

Dight never learned the full details of the Nazis’ great “success.” He died in 1938 from heart disease. In his will, he left around $100,000 to the University of Minnesota “to promote biological race betterment, better human brain structure and mental endowment by spreading abroad the knowledge of the laws of heredity and the principles of eugenics.”

The U was thrilled, and the Dight Institute was founded in 1941. Six years later they hired my grandfather, Sheldon Reed, to lead it.

There was only one problem. My grandfather wasn’t a eugenicist. He was a human geneticist, focused on how and why maladies were passed from one generation to the next. But human genetics was a nascent field. The eugenicists held many of the purse strings.


Elizabeth Reed, a Ph.D., saw her own career derailed due to the sexist practices of the time. Courtesy of Catherine Reed.

My name is Benjamin Reed Westhoff. I attended elementary school in Mankato, and our family moved to St. Paul before I started seventh grade. We lived a few blocks away from my grandparents’ house in Falcon Heights, where we visited regularly and ate my grandmother’s meatloaf. They spoiled my brother, sister, and me, overpaying for menial chores and offering sugary cereals like Cocoa Pebbles and Lucky Charms for breakfast. At home, all we got was Cheerios.

Grandpa Shelly, as we called him, was bald and short. He wasn’t a big conversationalist, but had a diverse range of interests, from ballroom dancing to nurturing African violets to learning Hmong. One of the few white people who could write the language, he taught illiterate immigrants how to read and write it, and he and my grandmother hosted newly arrived Hmong families at their house until they could get on their feet.

Back in 1947, he was new to Minnesota and barely getting by on a modest academic salary. He had just married my grandmother, Elizabeth Reed, a scientific powerhouse herself who was raised poor on an Ohio farm, washed laboratory glassware to pay her way through Ohio State, and earned a Ph.D. in biology when it was uncommon for women.

Elizabeth’s first husband was killed in World War II, and she had a young son, whom Shelly helped raise.

As was customary at colleges at the time, nepotism rules precluded the spouses of U professors from becoming professors themselves, a practice that continued until about 1970. Though she taught biology and genetics at the U’s College of Continuing Education and at Macalester and Hamline, and co-authored important studies on psychoses and mental disabilities with my grandfather, her career was largely derailed owing to the sexist norms of the time.

The Dight Institute, housed in the zoology building, had a skeleton staff at first. Part of Shelly’s job was raising money. As anyone who’s ever fundraised can tell you, this is often a huge pain. But shortly after starting he began a promising correspondence with the wealthy Charles Goethe.

“I am intensely interested in your appointment to be Director of the Dight Institute,” Goethe wrote in 1947. “We were in touch with Dr. Dight over a long period of years.”


Ben Westhoff: His mom had no idea her benefactor defended Hitler. Photo by Jay Senter.

It was a short letter and bore the Eugenics Society of Northern California’s logo. In February, 1948 Goethe asked if Shelly would be interested in “occasional small checks” for his department “toward getting you really at work on some Eugenics research.”

Shelly gladly accepted the checks, but from the start it was pretty clear he wasn’t doing eugenics. His big thing was genetic counseling, a term he coined. It examined a subject’s hereditary history to determine the odds that his or her offspring would have health problems.

This much was appealing to the eugenicists. But whereas they might have used the information to sterilize those with “defective” genes, Shelly instead helped people understand their situations so they could decide whether or not to have kids.

Dight staffers counseled thousands of people. DNA testing hadn’t yet been invented — it wasn’t even discovered until 1953 — and many nervous parents were grateful for his services.

Human genetics was becoming mainstream, and Shelly was regularly featured in newspapers. He was asked to weigh in on the controversial paternity case levied by actress Joan Barry against Charlie Chaplin. (Chaplin couldn’t have been the father, my grandfather insisted, after comparing the results of the parties’ blood tests — which the court, who ruled Chaplin the father, for some reason ignored.)

“Got Genes? Then You Must Read This Book,” read a Minneapolis Sunday Tribune headline in 1955, giving serious column inches to Shelly’s first book, Counseling in Medical Genetics. The tome was a hit, selling briskly around the world. It was translated into Italian by the Vatican Press, and Pope Pius XII himself praised it at a 1958 conference on blood transfusion in Rome.

“The effect of genetic consultation,” he said, “is to encourage parents to have more children than they would have had without it because the possibilities of having an unhappy case are less than they think.”

Though Shelly and Elizabeth lived modestly, his work was often glamorous. He hobnobbed and raised money alongside wealthy Minneapolis elites like the Cowles family, who owned the Minneapolis Star and the Tribune. Shelly sailed on luxury liners to conferences and visited genetics institutes in New Delhi, Tokyo, and Stockholm. The World Health Organization made him an adviser, and he spoke in Geneva.

There appears to have been occasional tension with Goethe. After all, Shelly spent his time on genetic counseling, not eugenics. In one letter Goethe emphasized that his money should be used for EUGENICS, in all caps. But for the most part he liked Shelly’s work, and their relationship grew personal in 1948.

“Last but not least in my personal opinion,” Shelly ended his March 9 correspondence that year, “is the fact that my wife and I became the parents of a daughter this last week end.”

“I am thrilled to hear of the arrival of the young lady,” Goethe wrote back immediately. “Will you permit me to send you the enclosed modest check to start the bank account for her college education?”

The amount is unknown, but this was the first of many he sent on her behalf, and for my uncle, born three years later. Though Goethe and my mother never met, he became increasingly enamored of her. “I often look at her sweet smile from the picture I have at my desk at the ranch’s office,” he wrote in 1953 as she turned five. “She is all you say.”

Was Goethe a bad dude? In some ways, yes. Definitely yes. He supported Hitler’s early eugenics efforts, and in 1936 even defended the “honest yearnings for a better population” at a time when Hitler’s persecution of Jews was well known.

He argued for limiting immigration, as did many eugenicists, whose lobbying efforts helped convince Congress to pass the Emergency Immigration Restriction Act of 1921, which dramatically curtailed the number of new arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe.

This meant hundreds of thousands of Jews were denied entry to the U.S. in the run-up to World War II. My dad’s mother’s family, Orthodox Jews from Romania, made it in just under the wire. In 1941, Anne Frank’s father petitioned a U.S. official, in vain, to allow his family in.

On the other hand, Goethe’s efforts inarguably made life better for many in Sacramento and beyond. As a teen he began working for his father, a banker, and they developed much of the residential property in East Sacramento.

When he was a young man and his future wife denied his initial marriage proposal — “I don’t propose to marry a money-making machine” — he vowed to invest the bulk of their money in “human betterment.” Before long he quit the bank and they established Sacramento’s first playground and founded an orphanage.

He fought to save redwoods, contributed huge sums to Sacramento State, and helped launch the “interpretive parks” movement, which brought educational programs to the national park system.

As for my grandfather, I’m not the best person to conduct a moral evaluation. I will admit that it looks bad how willing he was to work with the eugenicists and accept their money, though he later said he didn’t know Dight supported Hitler.

Also interesting was his 1983 interview with City Pages, after his retirement, for a piece exposing the Dight Institute’s eugenics ties. He told writer Patricia Ohmans that he, like other geneticists, didn’t have a problem with the basic goal of improving society through better breeding, “but we still don’t know how to eliminate genes in any sensible fashion.”

Was Shelly a eugenicist in a geneticist’s lab coat? It doesn’t appear so. After spending days digging through the Dight Institute archives at the University of Minnesota, I’ve found no evidence he ever supported forced sterilizations or espoused racist, anti-immigrant viewpoints. He never argued for genetic superiority. And he and the Dight Institute ultimately failed to spread the principles of eugenics, as Dight had stipulated in his will.

In fact, it’s fair to say Shelly’s views on race were ahead of their time. In the archives was a draft of an address he delivered in 1951 at St. Mark’s Cathedral entitled “All Men Are Brothers Under the Skin.”

Families that couldn’t have kids would ask what type of babies they should adopt. In his book Counseling in Medical Genetics, published in 1955, he suggested that children of “mixed race ancestry” would make an excellent choice. At a time when interracial marriages were illegal in many states, these children were only “illegitimate because of social prejudice and pressure against a marriage that would have provided legitimacy.”

In one undated paper called Color of the U.S.A. — 3000 A.D., he addressed a question that white civil rights advocates sometimes heard: “Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?”

“My answer is that is I want my daughter to marry whom she chooses,” he answered. “If her choice be a Negro, he has my approval in advance, as I trust her judgment completely.”

Growing up, I was proud of my family’s liberalism. My mother and grandmother were crusading feminists and abortion rights activists. Shelly was on Minnesota Planned Parenthood’s board of directors for many years. I volunteered for Sandy Pappas’ losing St. Paul mayoral campaign against Norm Coleman in 1997. Though I no longer live here, I still cheerlead for Minnesota’s enlightened Scandinavian liberalism, and am proud the state gave its electoral votes to Hillary Clinton.

But let’s be honest: Minnesota has a messed-up racial history.

It’s overwhelmingly white — 85 percent at the last census — and dominated by Northern European ancestry. These demographics are at least partly owing to the racist immigration laws enacted 100 years ago.

In recent decades the Twin Cities has welcomed large populations of Hmong and Somali immigrants, but racial earning disparities here are some of the worst in the nation. (To be fair, these populations haven’t had many generations to assimilate.)

That doesn’t mean things were handed to my grandparents on a platter. It’s true that Goethe saw my grandmother as sound genetic stock. Her family was Scotch-Irish and German, and she was intelligent.

But while he and other eugenicists believed that one’s genes largely determined one’s fate — that nature was far more important than nurture — this was not the case with Elizabeth, who died in 1996. Held back by gender discrimination, her environment affected her career more than her DNA.

“Elizabeth was pretty angry and bitter about this most of her life, because she was smarter and more hard-working than most men who got positions above her,” my mother told me.

My mom faced discriminatory advising herself at Cornell in the late ’60s, when she was exploring post-college options. “One of my advisers said women should not go to graduate school,” she says.

Eventually, she received a Doctor of Arts degree from the University of Northern Colorado and became an entomologist researcher for the U in the late ’80s. Like her mother, she never landed a tenure-track position, and in 2004 became an artist.

She doesn’t regret taking Goethe’s money. “It started when I was a baby, and I don’t think it’s anything I should be ashamed of,” she says. She had no idea he’d defended Hitler. Even so, that knowledge wouldn’t have changed her actions. “I would be totally opposed to his values, but I believe in the idea that you can take the devil’s money and do God’s work with it.”

Considering he died while she was in college, and she went into a different field, it wasn’t hard for her to avoid being tainted by Goethe’s money. It would have been much more difficult for my grandfather, but he seems to have avoided the trap too.

In fact, as I began to dig deeper into his academic archive, something particularly interesting emerged: It turns out that a study he published with my grandmother truly frustrated the eugenicists’ scientific case.

Back in the 1920s, many worried that dumb, loose women were running around having sex and birthing hordes of mentally deficient babies. No joke.

Eugenicists believed in a theory called “differential fecundity,” which held that low-intelligence women had stronger sex drives, and thus birthed more children. Since the smart women were only reproducing in modest numbers, society was therefore slowly dumbing itself into oblivion. (You may recall this as the plot of Idiocracy.) Thus the urgent necessity to sterilize these horny, rampaging women.

The only problem is the theory was baloney. My grandparents dispelled it in their 1965 book Mental Retardation: A Family Study. (You’ll have to excuse the title. “Mental retardation” was considered an acceptable scientific term at the time, applied to anyone with an IQ under 70.)

By that point eugenics fervor had slowed and the second wave of feminism was taking hold, but the basic principle of differential fecundity was still believed by many. Elizabeth was the lead author of the study, which surveyed over 80,000 people. It was the largest ever of its kind, an attempt to understand how mental deficiency was passed from generation to generation, and how society was impacted.

Turns out we weren’t turning into a nation of idiots. “Our work shows that the intelligence of the population is not dropping rapidly and that it might be increasing slowly,” it concludes, noting that “while a few of the retarded produce exuberantly large families of children with low average intelligence, most of the retarded produce only one child or no children at all.”

The book tackled difficult questions, like what to do about would-be parents who didn’t have the mental capacity to care for offspring. My grandparents recommended voluntary sterilization, so long as the subjects’ own parents or guardians gave consent. (The sterilization of the “intellectually disabled,” as it’s now known, remains a controversial issue to this day.)

Mental Retardation: A Family Study was reviewed as “monumental” and a “landmark.” At the time of its release, the eugenics movement was on its way out, and my grandparents’ findings only accelerated its demise.

The Dight Institute wasn’t long for this world either. Shelly retired in 1978, and without a strong successor, chaos ensued. In the coming decade it was renamed the Institute of Human Genetics and folded into the medical school. This was done not so much because of controversy over Dight or eugenics itself, but because the institute’s methods were growing obsolete. Human genetics had become medicalized, and genes were increasingly being studied at the molecular level, rather than through surveys and probability charts.

“At the Dight Institute, they were old-fashioned geneticists,” notes Neal Ross Holtan, medical director of St. Paul-Ramsey County Public Health, who authored his Ph.D. dissertation on Shelly, the Dight Institute, and eugenics.

Genetic counseling, however, is still practiced to this day.

Sane people now agree that attempting to improve society by stripping away individuals’ reproductive sovereignty is a bad idea. But it’s trickier to pass judgment on people from another time. Was Dight an inspired activist or an overzealous, naive kook? Was Goethe a humanitarian or a monster? What about my grandfather?

Ultimately, these questions are probably moot. Dight’s name is gone from the genetics institute, Goethe’s name has been removed from Sacramento institutions he helped foster, and my grandfather, who passed in 2003, doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. They’re now officially obscure. Time will only make them more so.

Except, of course, to people like me. The people who knew and loved them.

To me, Shelly will always be the guy who let me dig my grubby little paws into a full box of Froot Loops to retrieve a plastic toy. He’ll always be the guy who gave me a special little present on each of my siblings’ birthdays, so I wouldn’t feel too left out. He’ll always be my grandpa. And that means more to me than any paper he wrote.

Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/1/20

On January 17, 1945, as the Russian army approached Auschwitz, Mengele went from office to office methodically gathering his research materials. "He came into my office without a word," recounted pathologist Martina Puzyna. "He took all my papers, put them into two boxes, and had them taken outside to a waiting car." Mengele and the documents fled first to Gross-Rosen concentration camp, and then into Czechoslovakia. There he joined up with Hans Kahler, a close friend, coauthor and one of Verschuer's twins researchers. The Russians liberated Auschwitz on January 27, at about 3 P.M., and Mengele's horrors were quickly discovered. International commissions listed him as a war criminal. But Mengele slipped through the Allied manhunt and eventually escaped to South America. [1]

Even as the Allies closed in, Verschuer still hoped he and Hitler's Reich would prevail in its war against the Jews. Just months before Mengele abandoned Auschwitz, Verschuer published part of a lecture proclaiming, "The present war is also called a war of races when one considers the fight with World Jewry .... The political demand of our time is the new total solution [Gesamtlosung] of the Jewish problem." By the beginning of 1945, the Reich was collapsing. On February 15,1945, amid the chaos of Berlin's last stand, Verschuer found two trucks with which to ship his lab equipment, library, and several boxes of records to his family home in Solz. [2]

Nazi eugenicists continued their cover-up, in progress since the Normandy invasion. On March 12, 1945, Hans Nachtsheim, assistant director at the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, wrote Verschuer in Solz. "A mass of documents have been left here which should be or have to be destroyed should the enemy ever come close to here .... We should not choose a moment ... too late to destroy them." [3] In the first days of May, the Reich was reduced to rubble and der Fuhrer had killed himself. [4] Nazism and its eugenics were defeated. But now its architects and adherents would reinvent its past.

In April of 1946, the military occupation newspaper in Berlin, Die Neue Zeitung, published an article on various doctors who had fled Germany, and followed it up on May 3 with specific accusations against Verschuer. In the article, Robert Havemann, a communist and chemist who had resisted the Nazis, expressed out loud what many knew. He openly accused Verschuer of using Mengele in Auschwitz to obtain blood samples and eyeballs from whole murdered families. [5]

A nervous Verschuer reacted at once. He sent a sworn statement to Otto Hahn, the occupation-appointed administrator of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, insisting that he had always opposed racial concepts. "Even before 1933," averred Verschuer, "but also after, I took personal risks and attacked, as a scientist, in speeches and in writing, the race concept of the Nazis .... I argued against attributing values to races, I warned against the high estimation of the Nordic race, and I condemned the misuse of the results of anthropology and genetics to support a materialistic and racial point of view of life and history." [6]

He went on to concede his relationship with Mengele, referring to him only as "Dr. M.," and insisting it was totally innocent. Verschuer stated, "A post-doc of my former Frankfurt Institute, Dr. M., was sent against his will to the hospital of the concentration camp in Auschwitz. All who knew him learned from him how unhappy he was about this, and how he tried over and over again to be sent to the front, unfortunately without success. Of his work we learned that he tried to be a physician and help the sick.... [7]

"After I went to Berlin [from Frankfurt]," Verschuer continued, "I began research on the individual specificity of the serum proteins and the question of their heredity .... For these experiments I needed blood samples of people of different geographic background .... At that time my former post-doc Dr. M. visited me and offered to obtain such blood samples for me within the context of his medical activity in the camp Auschwitz. In this manner I received -- during this time, certainly not regularly -- a few parcels of 20-30 blood samples of 5-10 mls." [8]

Verschuer then asked Hahn to give him a character reference, and even drafted a statement for Hahn to sign: "Professor von Verschuer is an internationally known scientist who has kept away from all political activity .... Professor von Verschuer had nothing to do with the errors and misuses of the Nazis, by which his scientific field was particularly hit. He kept his distance from them and, whenever he was confronted by them, he criticized them courageously." Hahn would not sign such a document. [9]

So Verschuer sought support from his allies in American eugenics. Shortly after Havemann's expose, Verschuer wrote to Paul Popenoe in Los Angeles, hoping to reestablish cooperative ties. On July 25, Popenoe wrote back, "It was indeed a pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my colleagues in Germany .... I suppose sterilization has been discontinued in Germany?" Popenoe offered tidbits about various American eugenic luminaries and then sent various eugenic publications. In a separate package, Popenoe sent some cocoa, coffee and other goodies. [10]

Verschuer wrote back, "Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a great deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The letter builds another bridge between your and my scientific work; I hope that this bridge will never again collapse but rather make possible valuable mutual enrichment and stimulation." Seeking American bona fides, Verschuer tried to make sure his membership in the American Eugenics Society was still active. "In 1940, I was invited to become a member of the American Eugenics Society," Verschuer wrote. "Now that this calamitous war has ended, I hope that this membership can be continued. I would be grateful if you might make a gesture in this matter. In this context, I would like to mention that in recent months a former employee, a person devoid of character, has made extremely defamatory statements about me, which have also found their way into the American press. Therefore, it is possible that persons who do not know me better might have formed a wrong opinion of me. You will surely understand that it is important to me that any damage to my reputation be repaired and I would be very grateful for your kind help in doing so." [11]

Verschuer wrote again at the end of September 1946, requesting Popenoe's help. Because Verschuer was considered part of the Nazi medical murder apparatus, the Americans had halted his further work. "Since I wrote you," said Verschuer, "I have learned that the American military government does not intend to permit the continuation of my scientific work. This attitude can only be due to the spread of false information about me and my work. I have regularly sent you all of my scientific publications and you have known me for many years through correspondence. Therefore, may I ask for two things? 1. For a letter of recommendation from yourself and other American scientists who know me, stating that you know me as a serious scientific researcher and that you value my continued scientific work; 2. I ask you and other American geneticists and eugenicists who know me to undertake steps with the American military government in Germany to bring about the granting of permission for me to continue my life's work as a scientific researcher. It is my urgent wish that I be able to rebuild genetic and eugenic science from the ruins we stand upon in every area in Germany, a science that -- free of the misuse of past years -- may again attain international renown." [12]

Popenoe, who had also been corresponding with Lenz, was eager to be helpful, but uncomfortable standing up for an accused Nazi doctor. "I am distressed to hear that you may not be allowed to go ahead with your scientific work," Popenoe replied to Verschuer on November 7, 1946, "but it is hard for me to see how any of us over here could give any evidence that would be of value to you, even if we knew where to send it. Of course we could all testify that your scientific work before the war was objective and maintained very high standards. But if you have been 'denazified,' as I take to be the case from what you say, it was certainly not for that work, which is the only work I know about. None of us over here knows anything about what was going on in Germany from about 1939 onwards, but I suppose the action taken against you is due to your prominence in public life, as the successor of Eugen Fischer (who has been attacked bitterly in this country), etc. I could say nothing that would be pertinent, because I don't know anything about it. I am being perfectly frank with you, as you see .... But as it stands now, all I could say is: 'All his work that I saw before the war was of high quality,' and the authorities would presumably reply, 'That has nothing to do with it.''' [13]

Correspondence bounced back and forth between the two until Popenoe finally sent a brief letter of endorsement, limited to the prewar years. Verschuer then asked if he could be invited to join the faculty of an American university. "I have inquired from some leaders in American genetics," Popenoe replied, "and they all feel that it will be a long time before any university here is ready to offer a position to any German scientist who occupied an important position in Germany during the war years. As you perhaps know, our army brought over a number of physicists and other specialists, and their presence in this country has led to many protests and recriminations. I think it is out of the question, therefore, for you to look forward to any scientific activity here in the next few years -- much as I myself should like to have a visit from you." [14]

Throughout late 1947 and 1948, Verschuer continued corresponding with leading eugenicists and geneticists at American institutions, seeking to reestablish academic exchanges and professional standing. He submitted one of his older books for a new review by the American Eugenics Society. Popenoe promptly assured he would review it in a new eugenic publication called Family Life, and then bemoaned the loss of German eugenic publications. "It is sad to think," Popenoe wrote, "that the scientific journals, and even the publishing houses that produced them no longer exist!" Verschuer also began exchanges with scientists at the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota. These were received with goodwill and even enthusiasm. When Nazi agitator C. M. [Charles Matthias] Goethe of California received Verschuer's letter, he replied that he was "thrilled." [15]

While Verschuer was busy reestablishing his support in America, he was rehabilitating himself in occupied Germany as well. After making his accusations public, Havemann organized a committee of Kaiser Wilhelm Institute scientists to examine the evidence against Verschuer. They ruled that Verschuer indeed had engaged in despicable acts in concert with Mengele at Auschwitz, but their report was kept secret for fifteen years. In 1949, while the first report remained under lock and key, a second board of inquiry was urged to reexamine the issue. This second board unanimously ruled that he had committed no transgressions involving Auschwitz, and indeed that "Verschuer has all the qualities which qualify him to be a researcher and teacher of academic youth." Virtually comparing Verschuer to Christ being crucified, the esteemed panel of German scientists declared they could not sit in judgment of him as "Pharisees" (Pharisaerhaft). [16]

Soon, Verschuer once again became a respected scientist in Germany and around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American eugenicists and geneticists. Hermann Joseph Muller of Texas, a Rockefeller fellow who had worked at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research during 1932, served as the first president of the American Society of Human Genetics. [17]

In the fall of 1950, the University of Munster offered Verschuer a position at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. At about that time he helped found the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature, which later published his books, including one on cancer. In the early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human Genetics. [18]

A later president of the American Society of Human Genetics, Kurt Hirschhorn, remembered his own encounter with Verschuer in about 1958. An Austrian Jew, Hirschhorn had come to the United States as a refugee during the Hitler era. Hirschhorn became a genetic researcher and, while on a fellowship to Europe, he had visited Verschuer at the University of Munster. "Verschuer was partly responsible for the whole extermination," Hirschhorn related emphatically during a February 2003 interview. "He was the one that gave the Nazis the pseudo-genetic rationale to destroy the Jews and Gypsies. He was part of the organization [American Society of Human Genetics] in 1949 because in those days ... it was all covered up. No one really knew. But I'll never forget. I was sitting in his university office in Munster as a young man, and he asked a lot of personal questions about my background, and so forth, until he found out I was Jewish. I knew who he was by that time. I took a great deal of pleasure in telling him that I came to the United States from Austria, and when I turned eighteen, I enlisted in the army and went over there and fought the Nazis -- and went right through Munster. He was taken aback." [19]

In the 1960s, Frankfurt prosecutors were obliged by international pressure to continue their hunt for Nazis. The same prosecutors who investigated Mengele examined his relationship to Verschuer but concluded there was no connection between the two. Benno Muller-Hill, a German geneticist, later investigated Verschuer's activities. Muller-Hill reviewed Verschuer's many written defenses, including the one in which Verschuer claimed that while in Auschwitz, Mengele "tried to be a physician and help the sick." Writing in the journal History and Philosophy of Science, Muller-Hill described Verschuer's account as "Lies, lies, lies." [20]

Verschuer was never prosecuted. In 1969, he was killed in an automobile accident. But the legacy of his torturous medicine, twisted eugenics and conscious war crimes lives on.

***

As the ashes of Jews and Gypsies wafted into the air of Europe and were dumped into the Vistula River coursing through the heart of Europe, so their victimization flowed into the mainstream of modern medical literature. Medical literature evolves from decade to decade. As American eugenic pseudoscience thoroughly infused the scientific journals of the first three decades of the twentieth century, Nazi-era eugenics placed its unmistakable stamp on the medical literature of the twenties, thirties and forties.

The writings of Nazi doctors not only permeated the spectrum of German medical journals, they also appeared prominently in American medical literature. These writings included the results of war crime experimentation at concentration camps. Verschuer's own bibliographies, circa 1939, enumerated a long list of Nazi scientific discoveries, authored by him, his colleagues and assistants, including Mengele. Such scientific publication continued right through the last days of the Third Reich. The topics included everything from rheumatism, heart disease, eye pathology, blood studies, brain function, tuberculosis, and the gastric system to endless permutations of hereditary pathology. [21] Much of it was sham science. Some of it was astute. Both types found their way into the medical literature of the fifties and sixties. Hence, Nazi victimization contributed significantly to many of the modern medical advances of the postwar period.

For example, the Nazis at Dachau, using ice water tests, were the first to experimentally lower human body temperature to 79.7 degrees Fahrenheit -- this to discover the best means of reviving Luftwaffe pilots downed over the North Sea. Nazi scientists learned that the most effective method was rapid rewarming in hot water. Nuremberg testimony revealed that Dr. Sigmund Rascher, who oversaw these heinous hypothermia tests, prominently reported his breakthroughs at a 1942 medical symposium with a paper entitled "Medical Problems Arising from Sea and Winter." [22]

After the war, Rascher's conclusions were gleaned from Nazi reports and reluctantly adopted by British and American air-sea rescue services. A Nuremberg war crimes report on Nazi medicine summed up the extreme discomfort of Allied military doctors: "Dr. Rascher, although he wallowed in blood ... and in obscenity ... nevertheless appears to have settled the question of what to do for people in shock from exposure to cold .... The method of rapid and intensive rewarming in hot water ... should be immediately adopted as the treatment of choice by the Air-Sea Rescue Services of the United States Armed Forces." [23]

Rascher reported to Hubertus Strughold, director of the Luftwaffe Institute for Aviation Medicine. Strughold attended the Berlin medical conference that reviewed Rascher's revelations. A Nazi scientist wrote at the time that there were no "objections whatsoever to the experiments requested by the Chief of the Medical Service of the Luftwaffe to be conducted at the Rascher experimental station in the Dachau concentration camp. If possible, Jews or prisoners held in quarantine are to be used." [24]

After the war, Strughold was smuggled into the United States under the infamous Operation Paperclip project, which offered Nazi scientists refuge and immunity in exchange for their scientific expertise. Once in the U.S., Strughold became the leader in American aviation medicine. His work was directly and indirectly responsible for numerous aeromedical advances, including the ability to walk effortlessly in a pressurized air cabin -- now taken for granted -- but which was also developed as a result of Dachau experiments. He was called "the father of U.S. Space Medicine," and Brooks Air Force Base in Texas named its Aeromedical Library in his honor. A celebratory mural picturing Strughold was commissioned by Ohio State University. When Jewish and Holocaust-survivor groups, led by the Anti-Defamation League, discovered the honors extended to Strughold, they objected. Ohio State University removed its mural in 1993. The U.S. Air Force changed its library's name in 1995. [25]

In 2003, the state of New Mexico still listed Strughold as a member of its International Space Hall of Fame. But on February 13, 2003, when this reporter asked about their honoree's Nazi connection, a startled museum official declared, "If he was doing experiments at Dachau, it would give one pause why anyone would ever nominate him in the first place." Museum officials added they would immediately look into removing his name. [26]

Another case involved Nazi doctors Hallervorden and Spatz. In 1922, the two had successfully identified a rare and devastating brain disease caused by a genetic mutation. The disease came to be known as Hallervorden-Spatz Syndrome in their honor. During the Hitler era, while working at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research, Hallervorden and Spatz furthered their research by utilizing hundreds of brains harvested from T-4 victims. Right through the 1960s, Hallervorden authored numerous influential scientific papers on the subject. For decades, the name Hallervorden-Spatz has been used by the leading medical institutions in the world, honoring the two Nazis who discovered the disorder. Thousands of articles and presentations have been made on the topic, using the name Hallervorden-Spatz. Medical investigators created an "International Registry of Patients with Hallervorden-Spatz Syndrome and Related Disorders." [27]

Leading family support groups involved with the disorder have also taken their organizational names from the two Nazi doctors. But the news about Hallervorden and Spatz's Nazi past recently became known to many in the field. In 1993, two doctors expressed the view of many in a letter to the editor of the journal Neurology. "It is also time to stop using the term, 'Hallervorden-Spatz disease' whose only purpose is to honor Hallervorden by using his name." Another journal, Lancet, expressed a similar view in 1996, describing the continued honorary use of the name "Hallervorden-Spatz" as "indefensible" because "both Hallervorden and Spatz were closely associated with the Nazi extermination policies." [28]

In January of 2003, the Hallervorden-Spatz Syndrome Association renamed itself the NBIA Disorders Association; the acronym was derived from "neurodegeneration with brain iron accumulation." Just after the announcement, the newly-renamed association's president, Patricia Wood, told this reporter that the name change was certainly due to the legacy of Nazi experiments attached to Hallervorden and Spatz. The association's website confirmed that the name change was driven by "concerns about the unethical activities of Dr. Hallervorden (and perhaps also Dr. Spatz) involving euthanasia of mentally ill patients during World War II." [29]

The National Institutes of Health also adopted the Hallervorden-Spatz appellation for its research into the disease. NIH convened a two-day workshop on the disorder in May of 2000. As of March 2003, the National Institutes of Health continues to maintain a Hallervorden-Spatz Disease Information web page. On February 13, 2003, an NIH spokesman said that the institute was becoming aware of the Hallervorden-Spatz Nazi legacy and monitoring name changes in the field. "It is unfortunate that the two people who have discovered and researched this disease have undergone political scrutiny," the spokesman said, "but I don't see any name change at this time." The spokesman stressed that the problem was mere "political scrutiny." The spokesman did confirm that the institute would adjust its website's search engine to permit the term "NBIA" to reach its Hallervorden-Spatz information sites. [30]

Nazi medical victims suffered torture to substantially advance Reich scientific knowledge and modern medicine. Then the murdered specimens were delivered to the likes of Verschuer and Hallervorden and their eugenic institutions. But then what? After the war, victims' remains were transferred to or maintained by some of Germany's leading medical research facilities. Hence the exterminated continued to provide organic service to German medicine. In 1989, the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, the successor to Hallervorden's center, admitted that it still possessed thirty tissue samples in its files. That same year, tissue samples and skeletons were also found in universities in Tubingen and Heidelberg. In 1997, investigators confirmed that the University of Vienna's Institute of Neurobiology still housed four hundred Holocaust victims' brains. The University of Vienna had functioned as part of the Reich after Austria's union with Germany in 1938. Similar discoveries have been made elsewhere in former Nazi-occupied Europe. [31]

-- War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black

Professor Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer
Otmar von Verschuer (rear) supervises the measurement of two men's head circumference as part of an anthropometric study of heredity.
Born: 16 July 1896, Wildeck, German Empire
Died: 8 August 1969 (aged 73), Münster, West Germany
Citizenship: German
Scientific career
Fields: Human biology, human genetics
Institutions: Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, University of Münster

Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer (16 July 1896 – 8 August 1969) was a German human biologist and geneticist, who was the Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Münster until he retired in 1965. A member of the Dutch noble Verschuer family, his title Freiherr is often translated as baron.

He was regarded as a pioneer in the twin methodology of genetics research and in the study of the inheritance of diseases and anomalies.[1] A eugenicist with an interest in racial hygiene, he was an advocate of compulsory sterilization programs in the first half of the 20th century.[2][3] Among his many students was Josef Mengele.

He successfully redefined himself as a geneticist in the postwar era. During the 1950s and 1960s, he was known for research on the effects of nuclear radiation on humans and for his warnings against the possibility of creating "scientifically improved" human beings offered by genetic science.

Verschuer was the director of the Institute for Genetic Biology and Racial Hygiene from 1935 to 1942 and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics from 1942 to 1948. From 1951 to 1965, he was Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Münster, where he also served as Dean of the Faculty of Medicine. At Münster, he established one of the largest centers of genetics research in West Germany, and remained one of the world's most prominent genetics researchers until his death. He became Professor Emeritus in 1965; he received numerous memberships in learned societies. In 1952 he was elected President of the German Anthropological Association. His son Helmut von Verschuer was a high-ranking official of the European Commission.

Family

Otmar von Verschuer was born into a noble family originally from Gelderland, Netherlands; the Verschuer family remains prominent in the Netherlands, where it is known as van Verschuer. From birth he held the title of Freiherr (baron), a title that had been granted to several family branches by the Holy Roman Emperor, the Dutch king, and the elector of Hesse. He was mainly of Dutch, German, Estonian/Baltic German, and Swedish descent, and had distant Scottish ancestry. His father Hans von Verschuer was a businessman who owned a mining company, while his mother Charlotte née von Arnold was originally from Estonia; her family was ennobled in Russia in the mid-19th century and was partially resident in Sweden. He was a descendant of the House of Stuart through his 6th great grandmother Brita Stuart, a Swedish noblewoman of Scottish royal descent.[4]

Otmar von Verschuer was the father of Helmut Freiherr von Verschuer (also known as Helmut van Verschuer), a high-ranking official of the European Commission, and the grandfather of the Belgian-German actor, Leopold Freiherr von Verschuer (born 1961 in Brussels).[5]

Early career

Verschuer served in the First World War and had been promoted to first lieutenant by 1918. From 1919, he studied medicine at the University of Marburg. He earned a doctorate in medicine at LMU in 1923 and a habilitation at the University of Tübingen in 1927. In 1927, he became head of department for human genetics at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics.

Nazi era

In 1935, Verschuer became a member of the congregation of the anti-Nazi pastor Otto Fricke, a leading member of the Confessing Church. He also maintained a close friendship with his relative, Adam von Trott zu Solz, a leading resistance figure. Despite his proximity to the Confessing Church, he joined the Nazi Party in 1940, although he wasn't actively involved with politics.

In the late stages of the Second World War, Verschuer directly or indirectly started to use research material obtained in the Auschwitz concentration camp, mainly through his former student Josef Mengele, who served there as a camp physician.[6]

Verschuer was never tried for war crimes despite many indications that he not only was fully cognisant of Mengele's work at Auschwitz, but even encouraged and collaborated with Mengele. In a report to the German Research Council (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; DFG) from 1944, Verschuer talked about Mengele's assistance in supplying the KWIfA with some "scientific materials" from Auschwitz:

My assistant, Dr. Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) has joined me in this branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer and camp physician in the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Anthropological investigations on the most diverse racial groups of this concentration camp are being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer [Himmler]; the blood samples are being sent to my laboratory for analysis.

Verschuer wrote in the report that the war conditions had made it difficult for the KWIfA to procure "twin materials" for study, and that Mengele's unique position at Auschwitz offered a special opportunity in this respect. In the summer of 1944, Mengele and his Jewish slave assistant Dr. Miklós Nyiszli sent other "scientific materials" to the KWIfA, including the bodies of murdered Gypsies, internal organs of dead children, skeletons of two murdered Jews, and blood samples of twins infected by Mengele with typhus.

He was accepted during the war as a member of the American Eugenics Society, a position he kept until his death.

Post-war career

As the war was drawing to a close in 1945, Verschuer moved the files of the KWIfA into the Western part of Germany, hoping for a more favorable response from the advancing Allied armies than from the advancing Soviet Army. In late 1945 or early 1946, he petitioned the mayor of Frankfurt to allow him to reestablish the KWIfA. However, the commission in charge of rebuilding the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft decreed that "Verschuer should be considered not as a collaborator, but one of the most dangerous Nazi activists of the Third Reich." The KWIfA was not reestablished.

In 1951, Verschuer was awarded the prestigious professorship of human genetics at the University of Münster, where he established one of the largest centers of genetics research in West Germany. Like many "racial hygienists" of the Nazi period, and many American eugenicists, Verschuer was successful in redefining himself as a genetics researcher after the war, and avoided the taint of his work with Nazi eugenics. Many of his wartime students were similarly appointed to top positions in universities of Erlangen, Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, and Münster.

In his denazification hearing, Verschuer was deemed to be a Nazi fellow traveler (Mitläufer, a relatively mild categorization meaning someone who was neither a supporter or member of the regime nor an active opponent), and fined 600 Reichsmark. He was never prosecuted for his research activities during the war. Leo Alexander who investigated the case concluded that no solid evidence could be found, and considered it likely that Verschuer had destroyed any possibly incriminating material.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Verschuer led major research projects on the effects of nuclear radiation on humans. Deeply religious, he also concerned himself with questions of Christian ethics, and argued that eugenics must be based on human dignity and love for mankind; according to historian Sheila F. Weiss he "turned his back on" Nazi beliefs. In the 1960s he warned against human geneticists trying to create "scientifically improved" human beings.[7]

Verschuer died in 1969 in an automobile accident.

Honours

• 1934: Fellow of the Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
• 1943: Fellow of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
• 1949: Fellow of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur
• 1949: Corresponding member of the American Society of Human Genetics
• 1953: Honorary member of the Italian Society of Medical Genetics
• 1955: Honorary member of the Anthropological Society of Vienna
• 1956: Honorary member of the Japanese Society of Human Genetics
• 1959: Corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
• 1961: Among the founders of The Mankind Quarterly

Bibliography

• Erbpathologie (Hereditary pathology, 1934).[8]
• Erbbiologie als Unterlage der Bevölkerungspolitik (Hereditary biology as a basis for the population policy). First published in 1933, re-published and modified in 1936.[8]
• Rassenhygiene als Wissenschaft und Staatsaufgabe (Racial hygiene as Science and State function, 1936).[8]
• Leitfaden der Rassenhygiene (Textbook of Racial hygiene, 1944).[8]
• Eugenik. Kommende Generationen in der Sicht der Genetik (Eugenics: Coming Generations in the view of Genetics, 1966).[8]

Notes

Regarding personal names: Freiherr is a former title (translated as Baron). In Germany since 1919, it forms part of family names. The feminine forms are Freifrau and Freiin.
1. Björn M. Felder, Paul J. Weindling, Baltic Eugenics: Bio-Politics, Race and Nation in Interwar Estonia, p. 310
2. Nicholas Wade, "IQ and Heredity: Suspicion of Fraud Beclouds Classic Experiment", Science 26 November 1976: 916–919.
3. D. D. Dorfman, "The Cyril Burt Question: New Findings", Science 29 September 1978: Vol. 201 no. 4362 pp. 1177–1186
4. Niclas von Rothstein (2014), "von Arnold." Ointroducerad adel 2015 : kalender över Ointroducerad adels förening, ISBN 9789163766510
5. Hans W. Geissendörfer, Ediths Tagebuch: Erinnerungen, Essays, Personen-Beschreibungen, p. 115, 1983
6. A display of von Verschauer in relation to Mengele appeared during 2011 in the exhibit "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race" in the Museum of Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas.Kerns, William (21 February 2011). "Deadly medicine [photo of von Verschuer appears in the print edition only]". Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. pp. B1, B4. Retrieved 25 February 2011.
7. Über einen faustischen Pakt
8. Westermann, Kühl, Gross (2009), p. 78

Sources

• Westermann, Stefanie; Kühl, Richard; Gross, Dominik, eds. (2009), Medizin und Nationalsozialismus vol. 1: Medizin im Dienst der "Erbgesundheit": Beiträge zur Geschichte der Eugenik und "Rassenhygiene" (English: Medicine and National Socialism, Vol. 1: Medicine at work, the "hereditary health": Contribution to history of Eugenics and "race hygiene"), LIT Verlag Münster, ISBN 978-3643104786

See also

• Nazi eugenics
• Dr Heinrich Gross

References

• Sheila Faith Weiss: After the Fall. Political Whitewashing, Professional Posturing, and personal Refashioning in the Postwar Career of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. Isis, Vol. 101 (2010), 722–758.
• Peter Degen, "Racial Hygienist Otmar von Verschuer, the Confessing Church, and comparative reflections on postwar rehabilitation," pp. 155–65 in Jing Bao Nie, Japan´s Medical Wartime Atrocities (London: Routledge&Kegan, 2010)
• Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
• Paul Weindling, "'Tales from Nuremberg': The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology and Allied medical war crimes policy," in Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus: Bestandaufnahme und Perspektiven der Forschung, ed. Doris Kaufmann, v.2 (Goettingen: Wallstein, 2000), 635–652.
• Katrin Weigmann: "In the name of science. The role of biologists in Nazi atrocities: lessons for today's scientists" in EMBO Reports v.2 #10 (2001), 871–875.
• Eric Ehrenreich, "Otmar von Verschuer and the 'Scientific' Legitimization of Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2007 21(1):55–72

External links

• Works by or about Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer at Internet Archive
• "In the name of science" EMBO Reports article about KWI scientists' wartime atrocities, with images of Verschuer
• "Skeletons in the Closet of German Science" Deutsche Welle article on Verschuer's research connection to Mengele

Society for Biodemography and Social Biology [American Eugenics Society [The Society for the Study of Social Biology]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/1/20

The Society for Biodemography and Social Biology
Formation 1922
Location: United States
President: Hans-Peter Kohler
Formerly called: The Society for the Study of Social Biology;[1] The American Eugenics Society[2]

The Society for Biodemography and Social Biology, formerly known as the Society for the Study of Social Biology and before then as the American Eugenics Society,[1] is dedicated to "furthering the discussion, advancement, and dissemination of knowledge about biological and sociocultural forces which affect the structure and composition of human populations."[3]

History

The Society formed after the success of the Second International Congress on Eugenics (New York, 1921). The founders included Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin, Irving Fisher, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Henry Crampton. The organization started by promoting racial betterment, eugenic health, and genetic education through public lectures, exhibits at county fairs, etc.

Under the direction of Frederick Osborn the society started to place greater focus on issues of population control, genetics, and, later, medical genetics. In 1930, the Society included mostly prominent and wealthy individuals, and membership included many non-scientists. The demographics of the Society gradually changed, and by 1960, members of the Society were almost exclusively scientist and medical professionals. Consequentially, the society focused more on genetics and less on class-based eugenics.[2]

After the Roe v. Wade decision was released in 1973, the Society was reorganized and renamed The Society for the Study of Social Biology.[2] Osborn said, "The name was changed because it became evident that changes of a eugenic nature would be made for reasons other than eugenics, and that tying a eugenic label on them would more often hinder than help their adoption. Birth control and abortion are turning out to be great eugenic advances of our time."[4][5]

The name was most recently changed to Society for Biodemography and Social Biology.[1]

Journal

The Society's official journal is Biodemography and Social Biology, which was originally established in 1954 as Eugenics Quarterly. It was renamed to Social Biology in 1969 and to its current title in 2008.[6]

List of presidents

• Irving Fisher 1922–26 (Political Economy, Yale University)
• Roswell H. Johnson 1926–27 (Cold Spring Harbor, Univ. of Pittsburgh)
• Harry H. Laughlin 1927–29 (Eugenics Record Office)
• C. C. Little 1929 (Pres., University of Michigan)
• Henry Pratt Fairchild 1929–31 (Sociology, New York University)
• Henry Farnham Perkins 1931–34 (Zoology, University of Vermont)
• Ellsworth Huntington 1934–38 (Geography, Yale University)
• Samuel Jackson Holmes 1938–40 (Zoology, University of California)
• Maurice Bigelow 1940–45 (Columbia University)
• Frederick Osborn 1946–52 (Osborn-Dodge-Harriman RR connection)
• Harry L. Shapiro 1956–63 (American Museum of Natural History)
• Clyde V. Kiser 1964–68 (differential fertility, Milbank Memorial Fund)
• Dudley Kirk 1969–72 (Demographer, Stanford University)
• Bruce K. Eckland 1972–75 (Sociology, University of North Carolina)
• L. Erlenmeyer-Kimling 1976–78 (Genetic Psychiatry)
• Gardner Lindzey 1979–81 (Center for Advanced Study, Behavioral Sciences)
• John L. Fuller 1982–83 (Behavioral genetics)
• Michael Teitelbaum 1985–1990 (US Congress staff; US population policy)
• Robert Retherford 1991–1994 (East-West Institute, Hawaii; funded by AID)
• Joseph Lee Rodgers 1994, 1995 (family influences)
• Current: Hans-Peter Kohler

See also

• United States portal
• American Society of Human Genetics
• British Eugenics Society
• Eugenics in the United States
• Human Betterment Foundation

References

1. Eugenics, Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology, (2014, pp 619-626) ISBN 978-1-4614-5583-7
2. American Eugenics Society, Controlling Heredity.
3. The Society for Biodemography and Social Biology, Homepage (Last retrieved Nov 26, 2014)http://www.biodemog.org Archived 2013-04-14 at Archive.today
4. Messall, Rebecca (Fall 2004). "The Long Road of Eugenics: From Rockefeller to Roe v. Wade". The Human Life Review. 30 (4): 33–74, 67. PMID 15856597.
5. American Eugenics Society, Inc. (1931). Organized eugenics: January 1931. pp. 3, 65.
6. "Biodemography and Social Biology Publication History".

External links

• The Society for Biodemography and Social Biology
• Biodemography and Social Biology The academic journal.

************************************

American Eugenics Society (1926-1972)
by Rachel Gur-Arie
Arizona State University. School of Life Sciences. Center for Biology and Society. Embryo Project Encyclopedia.
Published: 2014-11-22

The American Eugenics Society (AES) was established in the US by Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin, Henry Crampton, Irving Fisher, and Henry F. Osborn in 1926 to promote eugenics education programs for the US public. The AES described eugenics as the study of improving the genetic composition of humans through controlled reproduction of different races and classes of people. The AES aided smaller eugenic efforts such as the Galton Society in New York, New York, and the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan, and it influenced eugenic policy set by the US Supreme Court in cases including Buck v. Bell (1927) and Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942). The AES was renamed the Society for the Study of Social Biology in 1972.

Before the formation of the AES, several other eugenic organizations helped lead to the AES. The increasing international interest in eugenics from 1904 to 1926 spurred the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1904 to create the Station for Experimental Evolution at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Geneticists Albert F. Blakeslee and Charles Davenport had helped establish the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1890. Davenport, the director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, had connections to the Eugenics Records Office (ERO), and later recruited Laughlin to serve as the ERO's director.

In 1906, John H. Kellogg, a medical doctor, founded the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. The Race Betterment Foundation sponsored three conferences between 1914 and 1928, culminating in the 1928 formation of a Eugenics Registry for family biological records. The American Museum of Natural History in New York, New York, financed the Galton Society. The Galton Society took its name after its founder Francis Galton, a UK eugenicist and cousin of Charles Darwin. The Galton Society focused on racial anthropology and was involved with the Eugenics Education Society in London, England, which played a major role in the 1908 foundation of the English Eugenics Society.

In 1912, Leonard Darwin, son of naturalist Charles Darwin, held the First International Congress of Eugenics in London. More than three hundred people from England, Europe, and the US attended his conference. The growing support for eugenics in the next decade prompted the Eugenics Record Office of Cold Spring Harbor and the American Museum of Natural History to sponsor the 1921 Second International Congress of Eugenics in New York, New York. Scientist Alexander G. Bell served as honorary president. During the Second International Congress of Eugenics, Irving Fisher from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, proposed the American Eugenics Society. Fisher stressed a need for a widespread eugenics education in the US. With that proposal, Osborn, president of the International Congress, appointed an Interim Committee that worked on the AES until its formal incorporation on 30 January 1926. Fisher served as the society's first president. Davenport, director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, was the first vice president. Among the Society's presidents, Laughlin, who served as president from 1927 to 1929, promoted eugenical sterilization in the early twentieth century US.

Multiple committees formed within the AES to target different aspects of eugenic education. Examples of such committees include the Committee on Crime Prevention, whose work pushed the Chicago Municipal Court in Chicago, Illinois, to publish Laughlin's Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. The credibility of the AES increased due to the involvement of Clark Wister, curator of the anthropology section in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, New York, and Sewell Wright, a US geneticist.

From the 1920s to the 1930s, some of the AES's work was presented at state and local fairs. Contests called Fitter Family contests involved popular competitions between families and couples to determine who would produce the most viable offspring based on physical appearance, behavior, intelligence, and health. Exhibits had flashing red lights to emphasize statistics of birth rates of able-bodied people compared to what organizers called degenerates. Statisticians claimed that while every sixteen seconds a child was born in the US, they also said that not all children were of the same caliber. According to the exhibits, a capable child was born every seven and a half minutes, whereas a feebleminded child every 48 seconds, and a future criminal every 50 seconds. To display potential economic benefits of adopting eugenics, the exhibits included the statistic that every fifteen seconds, one hundred dollars of taxpayer money went towards supporting mentally ill patients.

The goals and actions of the AES changed over the years, depending on different presidencies of the organization. Henry F. Perkins, who was president from 1931 to 1933, worked with the Birth Control League, the predecessor of Planned Parenthood and a US sexual and reproductive healthcare center. Margaret Sanger, called Noal Slee at the time of membership, a member of the AES in 1956, established the American Birth Control League in 1921. The American Birth Control League became part of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942. In the 1960s, president Harry Shapiro claimed that increasing the use of birth control gave the potential to improve the quality of the US population.

During Perkins's presidency in 1932, the AES held the Third International Congress of Eugenics sponsored by the ERO and the American Museum of Natural History. Unlike the high attendance of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, seventy-three people attended the conference. After that conference, Perkins published A Decade in the Progress of Eugenics, and it partly noted that eugenics theory had no empirical support to promote discrimination based on race and social class. The document also emphasized the study of hereditary variations focusing on defects such as mental disability. Ellsworth Huntington from Yale University, who served as president of AES from 1934 to 1938, focused on hereditary defects and switched the AES's focus from positive eugenics to negative eugenics. Positive eugenics maintains that superior families should produce more children. In contrast, negative eugenics claims that degenerates should not have children. In his book Tomorrow's Children: The Goal of Eugenics, Huntington described the AES's new focus on negative eugenics.

In October of 1928, the AES launched its monthly journal Eugenics. At the time, Eugenics was the only journal in the world to promote research-based eugenics. In 1930, the Galton Publishing Company took over the journal, but when the company closed in 1931, the journal was stopped. Eight years later in 1939, the monthly publication of Eugenical News was transferred from the Eugenics Research Association to the AES. From 1916 to 1953, Eugenical News was the primary source of eugenic-related events and news in the United States. In 1954, the AES launched Eugenics Quarterly, a journal focusing on hereditary defects in scientific research.

Peak membership of the AES was in 1930 with 1,260 members. Although New York, California, and Massachusetts were the states with the highest memberships, every state in the US had at least one member. The 1930 cohort of the AES consisted predominantly of wealthy men and women, and few scientific professionals from fields relating to eugenics. However, in reaction to the eugenic atrocities of World War II, support for eugenics and AES membership began to drop. By 1960, the AES has less than 400 members, most of whom were male scientists and medical professionals. After that time, the AES's focus shifted to genetic analysis and to the investigation of the factors driving human evolution.

The five Princeton conferences of 1964 to 1969 in Princeton, New Jersey, demonstrated a shared interest in human evolution between geneticists and population specialists. From 1960 to 1970, the AES gathered together researchers from different disciplines and provided people with a place to discuss human evolution. Scientists involved with the group noted that factors in social and physical environments influence heredity and human development. Researchers increasingly studied living conditions and lifestyle habits of people. In many large medical schools, there were facilities for medical genetic research, whereas newly established heredity counseling clinics served as the basis for modern genetic counseling centers. To define a new research focus, in 1969 the official publication of the AES switched its name from Eugenics Quarterly to Social Biology. In 1972, the AES was renamed the Society for the Study of Social Biology. The society stated that the name change did not align with a change in interest or policy, but better reflected the newfound common emphasis on the study of biological, social, and medical trends that shape human evolution.

As of 2014, the Society of Social Biology is also called the Society for Biodemography and Social Biology. The Society's journal, Biodemography and Social Biology, addresses the biological, social, and cultural influences on human population makeup from interdisciplinary fields including psychology, anthropology, genetics, and criminal justice. The Society of Social Biology has distanced itself from the AES.

Sources

• Buck v. Bell. 274 U.S. 200 (1927). http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case? ... +274+U.S.+ 200+(1927).&hl=en&as_sdt=806&case=1700304772805702914&scilh=0 (Accessed January 9, 2014).
• Darwin, Leonard. What Is Eugenics? New York: Third International Congress of Eugenics, 1929. http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.16382 (Accessed November 20, 2014).
• Davenport, Charles Benedict. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. New York: Henry Holt, 1911. http://dx.doi.org/10.5962/bhl.title.94524 (Accessed November 20, 2014).
• "Eugenics in the Schools." The Atlanta Constitution, November 27, 1927.
• Fisher, Irving. The Rate of Interest: Its Nature, Determination and Relation to Economic Phenomena. Macmillan, 1907. https://archive.org/details/rateinterestits00fishgoog (Accessed August 2, 2014).
• Galton, Francis. Hereditary Genius. Macmillan and Company, 1869. https://archive.org/details/hereditarygeniu04galtgoog (Accessed November 20, 2014).
• Grant, Madison. "Racial transformation of America." The North American Review 1924. http://www.unz.org/Pub/NorthAmericanRev-1924mar-00343 (Accessed June 27, 2014).
• Huntington, Ellsworth. Tomorrow's Children: The Goal of Eugenics. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1935.
• Laughlin, Harry H. Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. Chicago: Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922. https://archive.org/details/eugenicalsterili00laug (Accessed November 20, 2014).
• Mehler, Barry. "A History of the American Eugenics Society, 1921–1940." PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988. http://www.ferris.edu/isar/dissertation.htm (Accessed June 27, 2014).
• Messall, Rebecca R. "Margaret Sanger and the Eugenics Movement." The Denver Post, June 3, 2010, Guest Commentary Section. http://www.denverpost.com/recommended/ci_15212441 (Accessed June 27, 2014).
• Osborn, Henry F. "Ontogenic and phylogenic variation." Science 4 (1896): 786–9.
• Osborn, Frederick. "History of the American Eugenics Society." Biodemography and Social Biology 21 (1974): 115–26.
• Perkins, H. F. "A Decade of Progress in Eugenics." Third International Congress in Eugenics, New York. Williams & Wilkins Company: Baltimore, Md., 1934. https://archive.org/details/decadeofprogress00inte (Accessed August 2, 2014).
• Roe v. Wade. 410 U.S. 113 (1973). http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case? ... 5835207673 (Accessed November 20, 2014).
• Sanger, Margaret. Woman and the New Race. New York: Eugenics Publishing Co., 1920. https://archive.org/details/womannewrace00sang (Accessed August 2, 2014).
• Shapiro, Harry Lionel. Man, Culture, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson. 316 U.S. 535 (1942). http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case? ... 1644873759 (Accessed November 20, 2014).
• The Society for Biodemography and Social Biology. http://www.biodemog.org/ (Accessed October 26, 2013).
• Treasures of the APS. "Promoting Eugenics in America." American Philosophical Society. http://www.amphilsoc.org/exhibits/treasures/aes.htm (Accessed October 26, 2013).

American Society of Human Genetics
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/1/20

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), founded in 1948, is the primary professional membership organization for specialists in human genetics worldwide. As of 2009, the organization had approximately 8,000 members. The Society's members include researchers, academicians, clinicians, laboratory practice professionals, genetic counselors, nurses, and others who have a special interest in the field of human genetics.[1]

ASHG's mission is to advance human genetics in science, health, and society through excellence in research, education, and advocacy. It serves research scientists, health professionals, and the general public by providing forums to:

• Share research results at the Society's Annual Meeting and in The American Journal of Human Genetics (AJHG);
• Advance genetic research by advocating for research support;
• Enhance genetics education by preparing future professionals and informing the public; and
• Promote genetic services and support responsible social and scientific policies

As the field of human genetics has expanded, ASHG has founded additional organizations within its membership body, including the following:[1]

• National Society of Genetic Counselors, founded in 1979, as an advocacy group for the nascent field of genetic counseling.
• American Board of Medical Genetics, founded in 1981, to certify practitioners in human genetics.
• American Board of Genetic Counseling, founded in 1991, to certify genetic counselors.
• American College of Medical Genetics, founded in 1991, as a specialty board for medical geneticists at the doctoral level. It achieved full membership in the Council of Medical Specialty Societies in 1993.

ASHG annual meeting

The ASHG Annual Meeting is the oldest and largest international human genetics conference worldwide. It is held each fall in a major U.S. or Canadian city and attracts about 6,000–7,000 attendees, plus exhibitors. The meeting features invited presentations from the world's leading geneticists, along with a variety of symposia, workshops, and other abstract-driven sessions focusing on the most important and recent developments in basic, translational, and clinical human genetics research and technology. It also offers exhibitors the opportunity to interact with attendees and promote their services, products, and new technology, including state-of-the-art medical and laboratory equipment, and computer software designed to enhance genetics research and data analysis.[2]

Awards

The Society's highest honor, awarded annually since 1961, is the William Allan Award, established in memory of the physician William Allan to recognize substantial and far-reaching scientific contributions to human genetics, performed over a sustained period of scientific inquiry and productivity. The Curt Stern Award, established in 2001, recognizes scientific achievements over the previous ten years.

Other ASHG annual awards include: the Arno Motulsky-Barton Childs Award for Excellence in Human Genetics Education (established in 1995), Charles Epstein Trainee Research Awards (established in 1995), Advocacy Award (established in 2015), Mentorship Award (established in 2016), and Early-Career Award (established in 2017).[3]

Education and professional development

ASHG aims to promote awareness of human genetics, encourage young people to enter genetics-related careers, foster trust and support for genetics research, and help prepare health professionals to integrate genomics into medicine. Since 2007, the Society has organized the annual DNA Day Essay Contest for high school students. It also provides career development tools and opportunities for early-career geneticists, including fellowships in Genetics & Public Policy and Genetics & Education in partnership with the National Human Genome Research Institute.

Science policy

ASHG backs policies that support scientific discovery, the translation of discoveries into health advances, the appropriate application of genetics in society, and the integration of genetics teaching into children’s education and training of health professionals. In collaboration with the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, ASHG supports increased federal funding for scientific research, particularly from the National Institutes of Health.

On January 2, 2008, the American Society of Human Genetics released a statement on direct-to-consumer sales of genetic tests, calling for improved standards and for oversight by the Federal Trade Commission to insure the accuracy and validity of genetic testing and sales claims.[4]

See also

• Franz Josef Kallmann, one of the founders

Franz Josef Kallmann, MD (July 24, 1897 – May 12, 1965), a German-born American psychiatrist, was one of the pioneers in the study of the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders. He developed the use of twin studies in the assessment of the relative roles of heredity and the environment in the pathogenesis of psychiatric disease.

Kallmann was born in Neumarkt, Silesia, the son of Marie (née Mordze / Modrey) and Bruno Kallmann, who was a surgeon and general practitioner.[1][2] He fled Germany in 1936 for the United States, because he was of Jewish heritage.[3] Paradoxically, he had been a student of Ernst Rüdin, one of the architects of racial hygiene policies in Nazi Germany.[4] In a speech delivered in 1935, while still in Germany, he advocated the examination of relatives of schizophrenia patients with the aim to find and sterilize the "nonaffected carriers" of the supposed recessive gene responsible for the condition.[5]

In 1944, he described a congenital endocrine condition (hypogonadotropic hypogonadism with anosmia) that has come to be known as Kallmann's syndrome.

In 1948, he became one of the founders of the American Society of Human Genetics.[4]

-- Franz Josef Kallmann, by Wikipedia

• List of presidents of the American Society of Human Genetics

List of presidents of the American Society of Human Genetics
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/1/20

This list of presidents of the American Society of Human Genetics includes all presidents since the Society's creation in 1948.

Presidents

Year / Name

2020 / Anthony Wynshaw-Boris
2019 / Leslie Biesecker
2018 / David L. Nelson
2017 / Nancy J. Cox
2016 / Hal Dietz
2015 / Neil Risch
2014 / Cynthia C. Morton
2013 / Jeffrey C. Murray
2012 / Mary-Claire King
2011 / Lynn Jorde
2010 / Roderick R. McInnes
2009 / Edward McCabe
2008 / Aravinda Chakravarti
2007 / Wylie Burke
2006 / Stephen T. Warren
2005 / Peter H. Byers
2004 / Robert Nussbaum
2003 / David Lee Valle
2002 / Michael Conneally
2001 / Huntington F. Willard
2000 / Ronald Worton
1999 / Uta Francke
1998 / Arthur Beaudet
1997 / Larry Shapiro
1996 / Charles Epstein
1995 / Judith Goslin Hall
1994 / Maimon M. Cohen
1993 / Janet D. Rowley
1992 / Walter E. Nance
1991 / Michael M. Kaback
1990 / C. Thomas Caskey
1989 / L. L. Cavalli-Sforza
1988 / David E. Comings
1987 / Stanley Gartler
1986 / Charles Scriver
1985 / Frank Ruddle
1984 David L. Rimoin
1983 John Walley Littlefield
1982 Margery W. Shaw
1981 Barbara H. Bowman
1980 Leon Rosenberg
1979 Eldon Sutton
1978 Alfred Knudson
1977 Arno Motulsky
1976 Barton Childs
1975 John Hamerton
1974 Victor McKusick
1973 Eloise Giblett
1972 John Borden Graham
1971 Alexander Bearn
1970 William Schull
1969 Kurt Hirschhorn
1968 Irene Uchida
1967 Bentley Glass
1966 Philip Levine
1965 Howard Newcombe
1964 Arthur Steinberg
1963 James F. Crow
1962 F. Clarke Fraser
1961 L. C. Dunn
1960 C. C. Li
1959 Madge Macklin
1958 W. D. Boyd
1957 Curt Stern
1956 S. C. Reed
1955 C. Nash Herndon
1954 James Neel
1953 Clarence Oliver
1952 F. J. Kallmann
1951 Lee R. Dice
1950 Laurence H. Snyder
1949 H. J. [Hermann Joseph] Muller

References

• "ASHG Presidents, 1949-2020". American Society of Human Genetics. Retrieved 2020-03-06.

References

1. "History, American Society of Human Genetics". Retrieved 2009-06-07.
2. "Meetings, American Society of Human Genetics". Retrieved 2017-12-07.
3. "Awards, American Society of Human Genetics". Retrieved 2017-12-07.
4. "ASHG Statement on Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing in the United States" (PDF). Retrieved 2009-06-07.

External links

• American Society of Human Genetics
• American Journal of Human Genetics
• ASHG Annual Meeting

Franz Josef Kallmann
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/1/20

Category C

The less frequent Category C type of psychiatric genetic writer sees Rudin, in the words of Lerer and Segman, as ‘‘a man who was not only a willing accomplice to the most abhorrent crimes against humanity but an enthusiastic theorist who provided the intellectual basis for many of these crimes’’ (Lerer and Segman, 1997, p. 459). These researchers concluded,

There can be only one justification for the name of Ernst Rudin appearing in a contemporary scientific journal and that is to enable a generation of researchers who may not be fully aware of his tainted legacy, to learn more about it and to appreciate how easily science can be perverted in the service of evil. (p. 460)

Other psychiatric genetic researchers have written about Rudin as an architect and accomplice of unspeakable crimes against humanity (e.g., Baron, 1998; Gejman, 1997; Gershon, 1997; Propping, 2005; Schulze et al., 2004). Authors such as Baron, Gejman, Gershon, and Lerer and Segman did not set out to write a history of their field, but were mainly reacting to what they saw as the ‘‘whitewash’’ (Gershon, 1997, p. 457) perpetrated by colleagues such as Zerbin-Rudin and Kendler (1996) and Gottesman and Bertelsen (1996). In his comment on Zerbin-Rudin and Kendler’s claim that Rudin’s work was not well known due mainly to language barriers and persistent ‘‘presentism,’’ Gershon wrote, ‘‘By putting it this way, this article ignores the disrepute into which this discipline fell all over the world for many years, in no small part because of the misuses of science by prominent scientists in the field, such as Ernst Rudin’’ (Gershon, 1997, p. 457).

According to Gejman, ‘‘in all probability chronically ill patients from the families that Rudin used in his epidemiological research were murdered in the T4 euthanasia program’’ (Gejman, 1997, p. 456). The same holds true for subjects in other studies conducted by Munich school researchers such as Luxenburger and Schulz. Baron also weighed in on this point:

Given the scope of this hideous program and its focus on the genetically unfit, it is highly likely that Rudin’s own research subjects -– thousands of patients and family members were enrolled in his programs –- were among those who fell prey to the evil he helped inculcate. The information he collected could readily be put to malevolent use. … he compiled a vast data bank (on the order of tens of thousands of families) in order to calculate Mendelian ratios, based on information obtained from hospitals, asylums and other institutions. (Baron, 1998, p. 97)

Because Rudin participated in and supported the T4 ‘‘euthanasia’’ program while possessing detailed records of the families of people diagnosed with schizophrenia and other conditions, it is indeed likely that he provided this information to help identify and kill the people he and his colleagues had studied. As the German psychiatrist Uwe Peters described it, ‘‘Like a spider in the center of its net, all strings of information and power came together in [Rudin’s] hands’’ (Peters, 2001, p. 300).

But even Category C authors are not immune to revisionist accounts. In his book on the evolution of psychiatric genetic thought, Mellon wrote, ‘‘The role of the founders of modern psychiatric genetics in the sequence of events leading to mass murder is most troubling. Ernst Rudin was an early and vocal proponent of eugenic applications to mental problems. …his contribution to the series of events that helped lead to the exterminations is unmistakable’’ (Mellon, 1996, p. 112). At the same time, based on Slater’s 1971 account, Mellon mistakenly claimed that ‘‘in contrast to Rudin,’’ Luxenburger and Schulz ‘‘managed to stay out of the mainstream eugenic movement’’ (p. 113). The fact remains that Luxenburger supported and helped implement the eugenic policies of the Nazi regime (Joseph, 2004), and according to a 1934 report by the Danish eugenicist Tage Kemp, Schulz was ‘‘doing a great deal of statistical work concerning mental diseases of practical value for the sterilization law and the eugenical legislation in Germany’’ (quoted in Black, 2003, p. 419). In the late 1930s Rudin and his institute formed an alliance with Heinrich Himmler’s dreaded SS (Schutzstaffel; Weindling, 1989; Weiss, 2010), and in a memo Rudin assured a leader of the SS Ahnenerbe that although Schulz was not ‘‘a flaming National Socialist,’’ his usefulness to the SS could be assured without reservation (Weiss, 2010, p. 164).

In Baron’s (1998) otherwise important review of Rudin’s crimes, where he wrote that ‘‘Rudin played a central role in inspiring, condoning and promoting forcible sterilization and castration of schizophrenics’’ (p. 96), he implied that Rudin’s former associate Franz Kallmann discarded his hard-line eugenic beliefs after he had been forced to leave Germany in 1936 because of his partial Jewish ancestry. In 1935, while still active in Germany, Kallmann had called for the forcible sterilization of the healthy (yet presumed ‘‘schizophrenia taint carrier’’) family members of ‘‘schizophrenics’’ – a proposal rejected as too radical even by Kallmann’s racial-hygienicist colleagues who strongly supported the sterilization law (Muller-Hill, 1998). Although Baron discussed Kallmann’s 1935 support for the compulsory sterilization of family members, he wrote, ‘‘while in the USA, Kallmann recanted his early position on this matter and proceeded with perseverance and dedication to develop one of the finest academic programs in modern psychiatric genetics’’ (Baron, 1998, p. 99). However, Kallmann’s eugenic views, though adapted to a new country and post-war revelations of Nazi crimes committed in the name of eugenics and racial hygiene, remained largely unchanged until his death in 1965 (Joseph, 2004).

After being forced to leave Germany in 1936, Kallmann established the field of psychiatric genetics in the United States at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University, based largely on the racial hygienic methods and theories he had learned in Rudin’s Munich school. At the same time, Kallmann remained a strong supporter of eugenics and compulsory sterilization (Kallmann, 1938a, b). Upon his arrival in the United States, Kallmann wrote, ‘‘The recommendation of negative eugenic measures against the carriers of any mental disease is genetically justifiable’’ after meeting certain criteria. Kallmann then wrote that ‘‘the schizophrenic disease process’’ meets these criteria (Kallmann, 1938b, p. 105). Clearly, in addition to people labeled schizophrenic, the ‘‘healthy’’ biologically-related ‘‘carriers of mental disease’’ were targeted by Kallmann for the application of ‘‘negative eugenic measures’’ such as sterilization. He called for ‘‘systematic preventative measures among the tainted children and siblings of schizophrenics’’ (Kallmann, 1938b, p. 113), because ‘‘we cannot expect sufficient success from the prevention of reproduction in the symptom-carriers alone’’ (Kallmann, 1938a, p. 4). This suggests that his 1935 position in favor of eugenic interventions directed at the family members of people diagnosed with schizophrenia remained largely in place, although by now he would not support the compulsory sterilization of these relatives, despite ‘‘the menace involved in the propagation of heterozygotic taint-carriers’’ (see Kallmann, 1938a, pp. 68–69).

Moreover, Kallmann published an annual review in the American Journal of Psychiatry from 1944 until his death in 1965, entitled ‘‘Heredity and Eugenics.’’ Themes of Kallmann’s annual updates included positive references to eugenic theories and policies, the alleged benefits of the compulsory eugenic sterilization laws then existing in many U.S. states (e.g., Kallmann, 1947, p. 515; 1951, p. 505), and discussions of Nazi genetic researchers Rudin and Verschuer in a positive light (e.g., Kallmann, 1952, 1953).

-- Ernst Rudin: Hitler’s Racial Hygiene Mastermind, by Jay Joseph and Norbert A.Wetzel

Franz Josef Kallmann
Born: July 24, 1897, Neumarkt, Silesia
Died: May 12, 1965 (aged 67), New York
Nationality: German-American
Known for: Kallmann's syndrome
Scientific career
Fields: Psychiatry

Franz Josef Kallmann, MD (July 24, 1897 – May 12, 1965), a German-born American psychiatrist, was one of the pioneers in the study of the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders. He developed the use of twin studies in the assessment of the relative roles of heredity and the environment in the pathogenesis of psychiatric disease.

Kallmann was born in Neumarkt, Silesia, the son of Marie (née Mordze / Modrey) and Bruno Kallmann, who was a surgeon and general practitioner.[1][2] He fled Germany in 1936 for the United States, because he was of Jewish heritage.[3] Paradoxically, he had been a student of Ernst Rüdin, one of the architects of racial hygiene policies in Nazi Germany.[4] In a speech delivered in 1935, while still in Germany, he advocated the examination of relatives of schizophrenia patients with the aim to find and sterilize the "nonaffected carriers" of the supposed recessive gene responsible for the condition.[5]

In 1944, he described a congenital endocrine condition (hypogonadotropic hypogonadism with anosmia) that has come to be known as Kallmann's syndrome.

In 1948, he became one of the founders of the American Society of Human Genetics.[4]

He died in New York.

Partial bibliography

• The genetics of schizophrenia; a study of heredity and reproduction of the families of 1,087 schizophrenics. New York: JJ Augustin, 1938. 291 ss.
• Kallmann FJ, Reisner FJ. Twin studies on the significance of genetic factors in tuberculosis. The American Review of Tuberculosis 47, s. 549 (1943)
• The genetic aspects of primary eunocchoidism (1944)
• The genetic theory of schizophrenia. The American Journal of Psychiatry 103: 309 (1946)
• Modern concepts of genetics in relation to mental health and abnormal personality development. Psychiatric Quarterly 21, 4, 535-553 (1947) DOI:10.1007/BF01654317
• The genetics of psychoses; an analysis of 1,232 twin index families. American Journal of Human Genetics 4, ss. 385–390 (1950)
• Heredity in Health and Mental Disorder (1953)
• Zur Symptomatologie der Gehirnzystizerkose. Mschr. Psychiat. Neur. (1929)
• Marcuse H, Kallmann F. Zur Sulfosinbehandlung der Paralyse und Schizophrenie. Nervenarzt 2: 149-53 (1929)

See also

• Kallmann syndrome

Footnotes

1. "Who was who in America". Marquis-Who's Who. 17 February 1968 – via Google Books.
2. "RootsWeb.com Home Page". freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com.
3. Obituary Franz Joseph Kallman, 1897-1965, The American Journal of Psychiatry, July 1966, Issue 123 pages 105-106
4. Torrey EF, Yolken RH (September 2009). "Psychiatric Genocide: Nazi Attempts to Eradicate Schizophrenia". Schizophr Bull. 36 (1): 26–32. doi:10.1093/schbul/sbp097. PMC 2800142. PMID 19759092.
5. Muller-Hill B. Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933–1945.Woodbury, NY: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 1988: 11, 31, 42–43, 70.

Hermann Joseph Muller
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/1/20


Hermann Joseph Muller, ForMemRS
[x]
Hermann J. Muller speaking at the 1952 World Science Fiction Convention
Born: December 21, 1890, New York City, New York, U.S.
Died: April 5, 1967 (aged 76), Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.
Nationality: United States
Alma mater: Columbia University
Known for: The genetic effects of radiation
Spouse(s): Jessie Marie Jacobs (m. 1923); Dorothea Kantorowicz (m. 1939)
Children: 2
Awards: 1927: Newcomb Cleveland Prize; 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine; Linnean Society of London's Darwin–Wallace Medal (1958); Foreign Member of the Royal Society[1]; 1963 Humanist of the Year (American Humanist Association)
Scientific career
Fields: Genetics, molecular biology
Doctoral advisor: Thomas Hunt Morgan
Doctoral students: H. Bentley Glass
Influences: J. T. Patterson

Hermann Joseph Muller (December 21, 1890 – April 5, 1967) was an American geneticist, educator, and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation (mutagenesis), as well as his outspoken political beliefs.[2] Muller frequently warned of long-term dangers of radioactive fallout from nuclear war and nuclear testing, which resulted in greater public scrutiny of these practices.

Early life

Muller was born in New York City, the son of Frances (Lyons) and Hermann Joseph Muller, Sr., an artisan who worked with metals. Muller was a third-generation American whose father's ancestors were originally Catholic and came to the United States from Koblenz.[3] His mother's family was of mixed Jewish (descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews) and Anglican background, and had come from Britain.[3][4] Among his first cousins are Herbert J. Muller and Alfred Kroeber (Kroeber is Ursula Le Guin's father).[3] As an adolescent, Muller attended a Unitarian church and considered himself a pantheist; in high school, he became an atheist. He excelled in the public schools. At 16, he entered Columbia College. From his first semester, he was interested in biology; he became an early convert of the Mendelian-chromosome theory of heredity — and the concept of genetic mutations and natural selection as the basis for evolution. He formed a biology club and also became a proponent of eugenics; the connections between biology and society would be his perennial concern. Muller earned a bachelor of arts degree in 1910.[5]

Muller remained at Columbia (the pre-eminent American zoology program at the time, due to E. B. Wilson and his students) for graduate school. He became interested in the Drosophila genetics work of Thomas Hunt Morgan's fly lab after undergraduate bottle washers Alfred Sturtevant and Calvin Bridges joined his biology club. In 1911-1912, he studied metabolism at Cornell University, but remained involved with Columbia. He followed the drosophilists as the first genetic maps emerged from Morgan's experiments, and joined Morgan's group in 1912 (after two years of informal participation).[6]

In the fly group, Muller's contributions were primarily theoretical - explanations for experimental results and ideas and predictions for new experiments. In the emerging collaborative culture of the drosophilists, however, credit was assigned based on results rather than ideas; Muller felt cheated when he was left out of major publications.[7]

Career

In 1914, Julian Huxley offered Muller a position at the recently founded William Marsh Rice Institute, now Rice University; he hurried to complete his Doctor of philosophy degree and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915-1916 academic year (his degree was issued in 1916). At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work. In 1918, he proposed an explanation for the dramatic discontinuous alterations in Oenothera larmarckiana that were the basis of Hugo de Vries's theory of mutationism: "balanced lethals" allowed the accumulation of recessive mutations, and rare crossing over events resulted in the sudden expression of these hidden traits. In other words, de Vries's experiments were explainable by the Mendelian-chromosome theory. Muller's work was increasingly focused on mutation rate and lethal mutations. In 1918, Morgan, short-handed because many of his students and assistants were drafted for the U.S. entry into World War I, convinced Muller to return to Columbia to teach and to expand his experimental program.[8]

At Columbia, Muller and his collaborator and longtime friend Edgar Altenburg continued the investigation of lethal mutations. The primary method for detecting such mutations was to measure the sex ratios of the offspring of female flies. They predicted the ratio would vary from 1:1 due to recessive mutations on the X chromosome, which would be expressed only in males (which lacked the functional allele on a second X chromosome). Muller found a strong temperature dependence in mutation rate, leading him to believe that spontaneous mutation was the dominant mode (and to initially discount the role of external factors such as ionizing radiation or chemical agents). In 1920, Muller and Altenburg coauthored a seminal paper in Genetics on "modifier genes" that determine the size of mutant Drosophila wings. In 1919, Muller made the important discovery of a mutant (later found to be a chromosomal inversion) that appeared to suppress crossing over, which opened up new avenues in mutation-rate studies. However, his appointment at Columbia was not continued; he accepted an offer from the University of Texas and left Columbia after the summer of 1920.[9]

Muller taught at the University of Texas from 1920 until 1932. Soon after returning to Texas, he married mathematics professor Jessie Marie Jacobs, whom he had courted previously. In his early years at Texas, Muller's Drosophila work was slow going; the data from his mutation rate studies were difficult to interpret. In 1923, he began using radium and X-rays,[10] but the relationship between radiation and mutation was difficult to measure because such radiation also sterilized the flies. In this period, he also became involved with eugenics and human genetics. He carried out a study of twins separated at birth that seemed to indicate a strong hereditary component of I.Q. Muller was critical of the new directions of the eugenics movement (such as anti-immigration), but was hopeful about the prospects for positive eugenics.[11] In 1932, at the Third International Eugenics Congress, Muller gave a speech and stated, "eugenics might yet perfect the human race, but only in a society consciously organized for the common good.[12]

Discovery of X-ray mutagenesis

In 1926, a series of major breakthroughs began. In November, Muller carried out two experiments with varied doses of X-rays, the second of which used the crossing over suppressor stock ("ClB") he had found in 1919. A clear, quantitative connection between radiation and lethal mutations quickly emerged. Muller's discovery created a media sensation after he delivered a paper entitled "The Problem of Genetic Modification" at the Fifth International Congress of Genetics in Berlin; it would make him one of the better-known public intellectuals of the early 20th century. By 1928, others had replicated his dramatic results, expanding them to other model organisms, such as wasps and maize. In the following years, he began publicizing the likely dangers of radiation exposure in humans (such as physicians who frequently operate X-ray equipment or shoe sellers who radiated their customers' feet).[13]

His lab grew quickly, but it shrank again following the onset of the Great Depression. Especially after the stock market crash, Muller was increasingly pessimistic about the prospects of capitalism. Some of his visiting lab members were from the USSR, and he helped edit and distribute an illegal leftist student newspaper, The Spark. It was a difficult period for Muller both scientifically and personally; his marriage was falling apart, and he was increasingly dissatisfied with his life in Texas. Meanwhile, the waning of the eugenics movement, ironically hastened by his own work pointing to the previously ignored connections between environment and genetics, meant that his ideas on the future of human evolution had reduced impact in the public sphere.[14]

Work in Europe

In September 1932, Muller moved to Berlin to work with the Russian expatriate geneticist Nikolay Timofeeff-Ressovsky; a trip intended as a limited sabbatical stretched into an eight-year, five-country journey. In Berlin, he met two physicists who would later be significant to the biology community: Niels Bohr and Max Delbrück. The Nazi movement was precipitating the rapid emigration of scientific talent from Germany, and Muller was particularly opposed to the politics of National Socialism. The FBI was investigating Muller because of his involvement with The Spark, so he chose instead to go to the Soviet Union (an environment better suited to his political beliefs). In 1933, Muller and his wife reconciled, and their son David E. Muller and she moved with Hermann to Leningrad. There, at the Institute of Genetics, he imported the basic equipment for a Drosophila lab—including the flies—and set up shop. The Institute was moved to Moscow in 1934, and Muller and his wife were divorced in 1935.[15]

In the USSR, Muller supervised a large and productive lab, and organized work on medical genetics. Most of his work involved further explorations of genetics and radiation. There he completed his eugenics book, Out of the Night, the main ideas of which dated to 1910.[16] By 1936, however, Joseph Stalin's repressive policies and the rise of Lysenkoism was making the USSR an increasingly problematic place to live and work. Muller and many of the Russian genetics community did what they could to oppose Trofim Lysenko and his Larmarckian evolutionary theory, but Muller was soon forced to leave the Soviet Union after Stalin read a translation of his eugenics book and was "displeased by it, and...ordered an attack prepared against it."[17]

Muller, with about 250 strains of Drosophila, moved to Edinburgh in September 1937, after brief stays in Madrid and Paris. In 1938, with war on the horizon, he began looking for a permanent position back in the United States. He also began courting Dorothea "Thea" Kantorowicz, a German refugee; they were married in May 1939. The Seventh International Congress on Genetics was held in Edinburgh later that year; Muller wrote a "Geneticists' Manifesto"[18] in response to the question: "How could the world's population be improved most effectively genetically?" He also engaged in a debate with the perennial genetics gadfly Richard Goldschmidt over the existence of the gene, for which little direct physical evidence existed at the time.[19]

Later career

When Muller returned to the United States in 1940, he took an untenured research position at Amherst College, in the department of Otto C. Glaser. After the U.S. entry into World War II, his position was extended indefinitely and expanded to include teaching. His Drosophila work in this period focused on measuring the rate of spontaneous (as opposed to radiation-induced) mutations. Muller's publication rate decreased greatly in this period, from a combination of lack of lab workers and experimentally challenging projects. However, he also worked as an adviser in the Manhattan Project (though he did not know that was what it was), as well as a study of the mutational effects of radar. Muller's appointment was ended after the 1944–1945 academic year, and despite difficulties stemming from his socialist political activities, he found a position as professor of zoology at Indiana University.[20] Here, he lived in a Dutch Colonial Revival house in Bloomington's Vinegar Hill neighborhood.[21]

In 1946, Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, "for the discovery that mutations can be induced by X-rays". Genetics, and especially the physical and physiological nature of the gene, was becoming a central topic in biology, and X-ray mutagenesis was a key to many recent advances, among them George Beadle and Edward Tatum's work on Neurospora that established in 1941 the one gene-one enzyme hypothesis.[22] In Muller's Nobel Prize lecture, he argued that no threshold dose of radiation existed that did not produce mutagenesis, which led to the adoption of the linear no-threshold model of radiation on cancer risks.[23]

The Nobel Prize, in the wake of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, focused public attention on a subject Muller had been publicizing for two decades - the dangers of radiation. In 1952, nuclear fallout became a public issue; since Operation Crossroads, more and more evidence had been leaking out about radiation sickness and death caused by nuclear testing. Muller and many other scientists pursued an array of political activities to defuse the threat of nuclear war. With the Castle Bravo fallout controversy in 1954, the issue became even more urgent.[citation needed] In 1955, Muller was one of 11 prominent intellectuals to sign the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, the upshot of which was the first 1957 Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, which addressed the control of nuclear weapons.[24][25] He was a signatory (with many other scientists) of the 1958 petition to the United Nations, calling for an end to nuclear weapons testing, which was initiated by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling.[24]

Muller's opinions on the effect of radiation on mutagenesis, however, had been criticized by some scientists; geneticist James F. Crow called Muller's view "alarmist" and wrote that it created in the public "an irrational fear of low-level radiation relative to other risks".[26][27] It has been argued that Muller's opinion was not supported by studies on the survivors of the atomic bombings, or by research on mice,[28] and that he ignored another study that contradicted the linear no-threshold model he supported, thereby affecting the formulation of policy that favored this model.[23]

Muller was awarded the Linnean Society of London's Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958 and the Kimber Genetics Award of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1955.[29] He served as president of the American Humanist Association from 1956 to 1958.[30] The American Mathematical Society selected him as its Gibbs Lecturer for 1958.[31] He retired in 1964.[32] The Drosophila basic units of inheritance, their chromosomal arms, are named "Muller elements" in Muller's honor.[33]

H. J. Muller and science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin were second cousins; his father (Hermann J. Muller Sr.) and her father's mother (Johanna Muller Kroeber) were siblings, the children of Nicholas Müller, who immigrated to the United States in 1848, and at that time dropped the umlaut from his name. Another cousin was Herbert J. Muller, whose grandfather Otto was another son of Nicholas and a sibling of Hermann Sr. and Johanna.[34]

Personal life

Muller is survived by his daughter, Helen J. Muller, now a professor emerita at the University of New Mexico, who has a daughter, Mala Htun, also a professor at the University of New Mexico. His son, David E. Muller, professor emeritus of mathematics and computer science at the University of Illinois and at New Mexico State University, died in 2008 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. David's mother was Jessie Jacobs Muller Offermann (1890-1954), Hermann's first wife. Helen's mother was Dorothea Kantorowicz Muller (1909-1986), Hermann's second wife.[3] He had a brief affair with Milly Bennett.[35]

Impact

His work on the biological effects of radiation exposure is referenced in Rachel Carson's revelatory book, Silent Spring.[36]

Former graduate students

• Seymour Abrahamson
• Raissa L. Berg
• Elof Axel Carlson
• Sara Helen Frye
• H. Bentley Glass
• C. P. Oliver
• Irwin I. Oster
• Abraham P. Schalet
• Wilson Stone
• William Edgar Trout III
• Dale Eugene Wagoner

Former postdoctoral fellows

• George D. Snell

Worked in lab as undergraduates

• Margaret Russell Edmondson
• Carl Sagan

People who worked in his lab in Indiana [1]

Bibliography

• Herman Joseph Muller, Modern Concept of Nature (SUNY Press, 1973). ISBN 0-87395-096-8.
• Herman Joseph Muller, Man's Future Birthright (SUNY Press, 1973). ISBN 0-87395-097-6.
• H. J. Muller, Out of the Night: A Biologist's View of the Future (Vanguard Press, 1935).
• H. J. Muller, Studies in Genetics: The Selected Papers of H. J. Muller (Indiana University Press, 1962).

See also

• Mutagenesis
• Bateson–Dobzhansky–Muller model
• Repository for Germinal Choice
• Muller's ratchet
• Muller's morphs
• History of biology
• History of genetics
• History of model organisms

References

1. Pontecorvo, G. (1968). "Hermann Joseph Muller. 1890-1967". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 14: 348–389. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1968.0015.
2. Carlson, Elof Axel (1981). Genes, radiation, and society: the life and work of H. J. Muller. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-1304-9.
3. Elof Axel Carlson (2009). "Hermann Joseph Muller 1890—1967" (PDF). National Academy of Sciences.
4. "Hermann J. Muller - Biographical". NobelPrice.org.
5. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 17-37
6. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 37-69
7. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 70-90; for more on the culture and norms of the fly lab, see Kohler, Robert E. (1994). Lords of the fly: Drosophila genetics and the experimental life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-45063-6..
8. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 91-108
9. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 109-119
10. Hamilton, Vivien (2016). "The Secrets of Life: Historian Luis Campos resurrects radium's role in early genetics research". Distillations. 2 (2): 44–45. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
11. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 120-140
12. "The Eugenics Crusade What's Wrong with Perfect?". PBS. October 16, 2018. Retrieved November 4, 2018. There is no scientific basis for the conclusion that the socially lower class have genetically inferior intellectual equipment. Certain slum districts of our cities are factories for criminality among those who happen to be born in them. Under these circumstances, it is society, not the individual, which is the real criminal and which stands to be judged. Eugenics might yet perfect the human race, but only in a society consciously organized for the common good.
13. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 141-164
14. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 165-183
15. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 184-203
16. H. J. Muller, Out of the Night: A Biologist's View of the Future(New York: Vangard, 1935), p. v.
17. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 204-234; quotation from p 233, correspondence from Muller to Julian Huxley, March 9, 1937
18. "The 'Geneticists Manifesto'," originally published in Journal of Heredity, 1939, 30:371-73; reprinted in H. J. Muller, Studies in Genetics: The Selected Papers of H. J. Muller (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 545-548.
19. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 235-273
20. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 274–288
21. Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory. City of Bloomington Interim Report. Bloomington: City of Bloomington, 2004-04, 90.
22. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 304–318
23. Calabrese, E. J. (30 June 2011). "Muller's Nobel lecture on dose–response for ionizing radiation:ideology or science?"(PDF). Archives of Toxicology. 85 (4): 1495–1498. doi:10.1007/s00204-011-0728-8. PMID 21717110. Retrieved 30 December 2011.
24. John Bellamy Foster (2009). The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet, Monthly Review Press, New York, pp. 71–72.
25. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 336–379.
26. James F. Crow (1987). "Muller, Dobzhansky, and Overdominance". Journal of the History of Biology. 20 (3): 351–380. doi:10.1007/bf00139460.
27. "Calabrese says mistake led to adopting the LNT model in toxicology". Phys.org. January 23, 2017.
28. Les leçons inattendues d'Hiroshima par Bertrand Jordan - SPS n° 308, avril 2014
29. "Kimber Genetics Award". National Academy of Sciences.
30. "Past AHA Presidents". American Humanist Association.
31. Muller, H. J. (1958). "Evolution by mutation". Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 64 (4): 137–160. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1958-10191-3. MR 0095766.
32. "Hermann Muller and Mutations in Drosophila". U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information. Archived from the original on 2 February 2015.
33. Schaeffer, SW (2018). "Muller "Elements" in Drosophila: How the Search for the Genetic Basis for Speciation Led to the Birth of Comparative Genomics". Genetics. 210 (1): 3–13. doi:10.1534/genetics.118.301084. PMC 6116959. PMID 30166445.
34. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 10–11
35. Kirschenbaum, Lisa A. (July 28, 2015). International Communism and the Spanish Civil War. Cambridge University Press. p. 175. ISBN 978-1-107-10627-7. Retrieved January 16,2020.
36. Carson, Rachel (Rachel Louise), 1907-1964. (1962). Silent spring. pp. 209, 211, 279. ISBN 978-0-14-118494-4. OCLC 934630161.

External links

• Nobel Biography
• Hermann Joseph Muller — Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences
• The Muller manuscripts, 1910–1967 in archives of the Indiana University
• On the origins of the linear no-threshold (LNT) dogma by means of untruths, artful dodges and blind faith, Edward J. Calabrese, Environmental Research 142 (2015) 432–442.
• Hermann J. Muller Collection Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives

Max Planck Institute for Brain Research
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/1/20


New building of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt

The Max Planck Institute for Brain Research is located in Frankfurt, Germany. It was founded as Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research in Berlin 1914, moved to Frankfurt-Niederrad in 1962 and more recently in a new building in Frankfurt-Riedberg. It is one of 83 institutes in the Max Planck Society (Max Planck Gesellschaft).

Research

Research at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research focuses on the operation of networks of neurons in the brain. The institute hosts three scientific departments (with directors Moritz Helmstaedter of the Helmstaedter Department, Gilles Laurent of the Laurent Department, and Erin Schuman of the Schuman Department), the Singer Emeritus Group, two Max Planck Research Groups, namely Johannes Letzkus' Neocortical Circuits Group and Tatjana Tchumatchenko's Theory of Neural Dynamics Group, as well as several additional research units. The common research goal of the Institute is a mechanistic understanding of neurons and synapses, of the structural and functional circuits which they form, of the computational rules which describe their operations, and ultimately, of their roles in driving perception and behavior. The experimental focus is on all scales required to achieve this understanding - from networks of molecules in dendritic compartments to networks of interacting brain areas. This includes interdisciplinary analyses at the molecular, cellular, multi-cellular, network and behavioral levels, often combined with theoretical approaches.

History

The "Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Hirnforschung" (KWI for Brain Research) was founded in Berlin in 1914, making it one of the oldest institutes of the "Kaiser Wilhelm Society for the Advancement of Science", itself founded in 1911. It was based on the Neurologische Zentralstation (Neurological Center), a private research institute established by Oskar Vogt in 1898 and run together with his wife Cécile Vogt-Mugnier, also an accomplished brain researcher.

From 1901 to 1910, Vogt's coworker at this institute was Korbinian Brodmann, who in 1909 established the cytoarchitectonic classification of cortical areas still in use today (e.g., his area 17 is the primary visual cortex). Oskar Vogt's own scientific achievements also were in the field of cortical cytoarchitectonics and myeloarchitectonics.

In the 1920s Oskar Vogt became interested in the potential morphological correlates of mental abilities, and hence in the neuroanatomical study of 'elite brains'. When Lenin died of a brain hemorrhage in 1924, his brain was preserved in formaldehyde, where it remained for two years. In 1926, Vogt was recruited by the Soviet government to help establish Lenin's genius via histological investigation of his brain. He was given some space in Moscow to carry out this work and two years later, a spacious and representative brick building that had been confiscated from an American business. In it, he helped establish and then headed the Moscow Brain Institute. Between 1926 and 1930, Vogt travelled to Moscow several times to supervise the work on Lenin's brain by the Russian collaborators who had been trained at Vogt's KWI for Brain Research in Berlin.

In 1927, Vogt gave a preliminary report on his findings in Moscow, concluding from his histological observations that Lenin must have been an athlete in associative thinking ("Assoziationsathlet") - a conclusion deemed farfetched by some of his neurologist colleagues and adversaries. Lenin's brain was, for a time, on display in the Lenin Mausoleum and now rests at Moscow's Brain Institute.

World War I delayed the plans for a new building to house the KWI for Brain Research. The KWI's first proper building in Berlin-Buch was only inaugurated in 1931 under the directorship of Oskar Vogt. It was the world's largest and most modern brain research institute of its time, including Departments of Neurophysiology (Tönnies and Kornmüller), Neurochemistry (Marthe Vogt and Veit), Genetics (Timoféeff-Ressovsky), a Research Clinic (Soeken, Zwirner), and the Neuroanatomical Departments of Oskar and his wife Cécile Vogt. Based on critical remarks Vogt had made about national socialism, a protective attitude towards Jewish coworkers at the institute, and rumors that he was a communist (spirited by his Moscow contacts), Vogt was pressed to early retirement by 1937. The Vogts moved to Neustadt in the Black Forest and established another private brain research institute, funded in part by the family of steel baron Krupp (who had already funded Vogt´s first private institute in Berlin) and by Vogt´s own funds. In 1937, Hugo Spatz, a pupil of Franz Nissl, became Vogt's successor as director of the KWI for Brain Research and head of the Neuroanatomy Department. During his tenure, the Departments of Neuropathology (Hallervorden) and of Tumor Research (Tönnis) were added. One focus of both Spatz’s and Hallervorden’s histological research were pathologies of the extrapyramidal/motor system. In a previous collaboration they had described an extrapyramidal disease that was later named Hallervorden-Spatz syndrome.

Between 1940 and 1945, Hallervorden and Spatz became involved in the atrocities of the Nazi regime by studying the brains of euthanasia victims. For many years, brain sections from these studies remained archived in the institute (which by then had become the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt am Main) together with research material from other periods. When this was recognized, all sections dating from the period 1933-1945 were given a burial at a Munich cemetery by the Max Planck Society in 1990. A memorial stone was erected in honor of the victims of these atrocities. Use of the eponym Hallervorden-Spatz syndrome is strongly discouraged due to Hallervorden and Spatz's involvement with the Nazi party and was replaced by the more descriptive terminology pantothenate kinase-associated neurodegeneration.

After 1945, the different departments of the KWI for Brain Research were relocated to Dillenburg, Giessen, Köln, Marburg and Göttingen. In 1948 the Max Planck Society was founded to succeed the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, and the institute became the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. Hallervorden retired as director in 1955, Spatz in 1959. In 1962, a new building was erected in Frankfurt-Niederrad to house the Departments of Neurobiology (Hassler, Director 1959-1982) and Neuropathology (Krücke, Director 1956-1979), as well as the Research Groups "Evolution of the Primate Brain" (Stephan) and "Neurochemistry" (Werner). Rolf Hassler, a pupil of Oskar Vogt and coworker of the famous Freiburg neurologist Richard Jung, studied subcortical brain areas, thalamo-cortical systems, basal ganglia and the limbic system. Wilhelm Krücke, a pupil of Hallervorden, was a renowned specialist on peripheral neuropathies. He was the reason for the institute's relocation to Frankfurt, as he was simultaneously head of the 'Edinger Institute', the Neuropathology Department of Frankfurt University's Medical School. In 1982, the KWI for Brain Research's Department of General Neurology, which had been relocated to Köln, became the Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research in that city, independent of the MPI for Brain Research. The other relocated departments of the KWI were closed with the retirement of their directors.

In 1981, the MPIH was restructured towards non-clinical, basic neuroscience through the establishment of the Departments of Neuroanatomy (Wässle, Director 1981-2008) and Neurophysiology (Singer, Director 1982-2011), followed by the Department of Neurochemistry (Betz, Director 1991-2009). Heinz Wässle conducted functional and structural studies of the mammalian retina, Heinrich Betz analyzed the molecular components of synapses, and Wolf Singer studied higher cognitive functions with a focus on the visual system.

In the first decade of the new millennium, the MPG defined the analysis of neural networks as a central research topic for the institute. In 2008 Erin Schuman and Gilles Laurent were appointed as directors of the departments "Synaptic Plasticity" and "Neural Systems", respectively. The new departments took up work in the summer of 2009 and were initially located in interim facilities on the Science Campus "Riedberg" of the Frankfurt University. The construction of a new building for the institute on this campus was recently finalized, next to the MPI of Biophysics. The new institute building currently houses the three departments of the institute (those of Erin Schuman, Gilles Laurent and Moritz Helmstaedter), several Research Groups at the institute (Tatjana Tchumatchenko and Johannes Letzkus recently joined as Max Planck Group Leaders in 2013), several core facilities, and the Max Planck Research Unit for Neurogenetics of Peter Mombaerts.

As of 2016, Moritz Helmstaedter is the Managing Director of the Institute.[1]

Graduate Program

The International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Neural Circuits is a graduate program offering a Ph.D. The school is run in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics and the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main as well as the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies and the Ernst Strüngmann Institute.

References

1. Marx, Vivien (May 2015). "Erin Margaret Schuman". Nature Methods (Paper). 12 (5): 375. doi:10.1038/nmeth.3374.

External links

• Homepage of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research
• Homepage of the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Neural Circuits

Population Control, Nazis, and the United Nations
by Anton Chaitkin
1996

ROCKEFELLER AND MASS MURDER

The Rockefeller Foundation is the prime sponsor of public relations for the United Nations’ drastic depopulation program, which the world is invited to accept at the UN’s scheduled September conference in Cairo, Egypt.

The adoption of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), held in Cairo, Egypt in 1994, represented a fundamental shift in population and development, moving population policies and programmes from demographic targets towards a people-centred approach, grounded in the respect for human rights and a strong emphasis on environmental sustainability. Subsequently, the Millennium Development Goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development integrated many goals and objectives of the ICPD Programme of Action.

While important progress has been made, considerable gaps still exist in the implementation of different areas of the Programme of Action. In 2010, the General Assembly decided to extend the Programme of Action beyond 2014 with a view to fully meeting its goals and objectives (A/RES/65/234). In 2014, the Secretary-General reported that progress in implementing the goals and objectives of the Programme of Action had been unequal and fragmented and that new challenges, realities and opportunities had emerged since its adoption (E/CN.9/2014/4). The General Assembly held a special session in September 2014 to assess the status of implementation of the Programme of Action and to renew political support for actions required for the full achievement of its goals and objectives.

The Commission on Population and Development (CPD), at its fifty-second session in 2019, will carry out a review and appraisal of the ICPD Programme of Action and its contribution to the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda. The timing of this appraisal, 25 years after “Cairo”, is consistent with the five-year cycle of review of the status of implementation of the ICPD Programme of Action carried out by the CPD in 2004, 2009 and 2014, respectively.

In preparation for the fifty-second session of the CPD, the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs will convene an expert group meeting. The meeting will examine progress and gaps in implementing the goals and objectives set out in the ICPD Programme of Action and explore the potential implications of future demographic trends for the full implementation of the Programme, and discuss the contribution of the ICPD Programme of Action to the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda. The meeting will also examine progress in measuring sustainable development indicators related to population....

Fertility below replacement level is of concern for governments as it leads to population decline and accelerates population ageing. By far the largest decline in total population attributed to fertility, the largest negative contribution of any component in any country, is expected in China: -236 million people between 2010 and 2050 or 18 per cent of China’s population. Other countries with the fertility component accounting for a population decline of 11 million or more people are Bangladesh, Brazil, Germany, India, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Japan, the Russian Federation, Thailand, and the United States of America (figure III.6). In terms of the largest impact relative to population size, 11 countries or areas will see their populations shrink by more than 20 per cent by 2050 due to fertility below the replacement level: Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Macao SAR of China, Mauritius, Poland, the Republic of Moldova, Singapore, Taiwan Province of China, and Thailand. For another 52 countries, the contribution of the fertility component to population decline will be between 10 and 20 per cent. Altogether, between 2010 and 2050, fertility below replacement level will contribute to a decline of the
total population for 110 countries....

The analysis in this report of trends in fertility from 1950 to 2050 and beyond shows steady fertility declines in most countries in the world, as well as a slow-down of population growth at the global level. These trends are particularly marked for high and middle-income countries in Europe and Northern America, but they are also observed in much of Oceania, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as in Northern and Southern Africa. Similar trends, albeit with a time lag, are beginning to take place in low-income countries in Africa and Asia. Almost all countries that have experienced fertility declines have either already completed their fertility transitions or have reached rather advanced stages, characterized by low fertility and mortality. More and more countries are reaching below-replacement fertility levels, in some cases resulting in negative population growth rates. High fertility remains increasingly a characteristic of the least developed countries, with nearly all pretransitional and early-transition countries located in sub-Saharan Africa....

The Projections prepared by the United Nations Population Division foresee that fertility in high-fertility countries will eventually decline, and that most, but not all countries will reach below-replacement fertility by the end of this century...

The international community will need to continue to invest in the poorest countries to expand family planning and reproductive health initiatives and, at the same time, support initiatives to cope with ageing populations. With the right development policies, economic and social gains, the advancement of women and girls as well as the improvement of living conditions of older persons will contribute to the achievement of the SDGs.

-- Review and Appraisal of the Programme of Action of the International Conference on Population and Development and its contribution to the follow-up and review of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, Population Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, by United Nations Population Division

Evidence in the possession of a growing number of researchers in America, England, and Germany demonstrates that the Foundation and its corporate, medical, and political associates organized the racial mass murder program of Nazi Germany.

These globalists, who function as a conduit for British Empire geopolitics, were not stopped after World War II. The United Nations alliance of the old Nazi rightwing with the New Age leftwing poses an even graver danger to the world today than the same grouping did in 1941.

Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller created the family-run Rockefeller Foundation in 1909. By 1929 he had placed $300 million worth of the family’s controlling interest in the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (later called “Exxon”) to the account of the Foundation.

The Foundation’s money created the medical specialty known as Psychiatric Genetics. For the new experimental field, the Foundation reorganized medical teaching in Germany, creating and thenceforth continuously directing the “Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry” and the “Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity.” The Rockefellers’ chief executive of these institutions was the fascist Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, assisted by his proteges Otmar Verschuer and Franz J. Kallmann.

In 1932, the British-led “Eugenics” movement designated the Rockefellers’ Dr. Rudin as the president of the worldwide Eugenics Federation [International Federation of Eugenics Organizations]. The movement called for the killing or sterilization of people whose heredity made them a public burden.

The Racial Laws

A few months later, Hitler took over Germany and the Rockefeller-Rudin apparatus became a section of the Nazi state. The regime appointed Rudin head of the Racial Hygiene Society [German Society for Racial Hygiene]. Rudin and his staff, as part of the Task Force of Heredity Experts chaired by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, drew up the sterilization law. Described as an American Model law, it was adopted in July 1933 and proudly printed in the September 1933 Eugenical News (USA) with Hitler’s signature. The Rockefeller group drew up other race laws, also based on existing Virginia statutes. Otmar Verschuer and his assistant Josef Mengele together wrote reports for special courts which enforced Rudin’s racial purity law against cohabitation of Aryans and non-Aryans.

The “T4” unit of the Hitler Chancery, based on psychiatrists led by Rudin and his staff, cooperated in creating propaganda films to sell mercy killing (euthanasia) to German citizens. The public reacted antagonistically: Hitler had to withdraw a tear-jerker right-to-die film from the movie theaters. The proper groundwork had not yet been laid.

Under the Nazis, the German chemical company I.G. Farben and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil of New Jersey were effectively a single firm, merged in hundreds of cartel arrangements. I.G. Farben was led up until 1937 by the Warburg family, Rockefeller’s partner in banking and in the design of Nazi German eugenics.

Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Standard Oil pledged to keep the merger with I.G. Farben going even if the U.S. entered the war. This was exposed in 1942 by Sen. Harry Truman’s investigating committee, and President Roosevelt took hundreds of legal measures during the war to stop the Standard-I.G. Farben cartel from supplying the enemy war machine.

In 1940-41, I.G. Farben built a gigantic factory at Auschwitz in Poland, to utilize the Standard Oil/I.G. Farben patents with concentration camp slave labor to make gasoline from coal. The SS was assigned to guard the Jewish and other inmates and select for killing those who were unfit for I.G. Farben slave labor. Standard-Germany president Emil Helfferich testified after the war that Standard Oil funds helped pay for SS guards at Auschwitz.

In 1940, six months after the notorious Standard-I.G. meeting, European Rockefeller Foundation official Daniel O’Brian wrote to the Foundation’s chief medical officer Alan Gregg that “it would be unfortunate if it was chosen to stop research which has no relation to war issues” so the Foundation continued financing Nazi “psychiatric research” during the war.

In 1936, Rockefeller’s Dr. Franz Kallmann interrupted his study of hereditary degeneracy and emigrated to America because he was half-Jewish. Kallmann went to New York and established the Medical Genetics Department of the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The Scottish Rite of Freemasonry published Kallman’s study of over 1,000 cases of schizophrenia, which tried to prove its hereditary basis. In the book, Kallmann thanked his long-time boss and mentor Rudin.

Kallmann’s book, published in 1938 in the USA and Nazi Germany, was used by the T4 unit as a rationalization to begin in 1939 the murder of mental patients and various “defective” people, perhaps most of them children. Gas and lethal injections were used to kill 250,000 under this program, in which the staffs for a broader murder program were desensitized and trained.

Dr. Mengele…

In 1943, Otmar Verschuer’s assistant Josef Mengele was made medical commandant of Auschwitz. As wartime director of Rockefeller’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity in Berlin, Verschuer secured funds for Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz from the German Research Council. Verschuer wrote a progress report to the Council: “My co-researcher in this research is my assistant the anthropologist and physician Mengele. He is serving as Hauptstuermfuehrer and camp doctor in the concentration camp Auschwitz…. With the permission of the Reichsfuehrer SS Himmler, anthropological research is being undertaken on the various racial groups in the concentration camps and blood samples will be sent to my laboratory for investigation.”

Mengele prowled the railroad lines leading into Auschwitz, looking for twins — a favorite subject of psychiatric geneticists. On arrival at Mengele’s experimental station, twins filled out “a detailed questionnaire from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.” There were daily drawings of blood for Verschuer’s “specific protein” research. Needles were injected into eyes for work on eye color. There were experimental blood transfusions and infections. Organs and limbs were removed, sometimes without anesthetics. Sex changes were attempted. Females were sterilized, males were castrated. Thousands were murdered and their organs, eyeballs, heads, and limbs were sent to Verschuer and the Rockefeller group at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.

In 1946, Verschuer wrote to the Bureau of Human Heredity in London, asking for help in continuing his “scientific research.”

Facelift

In 1947, the Bureau of Human Heredity moved from London to Copenhagen. The new Danish building for this was built with Rockefeller money. The first International Congress in Human Genetics following World War II was held at this Danish institute in 1956. By that time, Verschuer was a member of the American Eugenics Society, then indistingishable from Rockefeller’s Population Council.

Dr. Kallmann helped save Verschuer by testifying in his denazification proceedings. Dr. Kallmann created the American Society of Human Genetics, which organized the “Human Genome Project” — a current $3 billion physical multiculturalism effort. Kallmann was a director of the American Eugenics Society in 1952 and from 1954 to 1965.

In the 1950s, the Rockefellers reorganized the U.S. eugenics movement in their own family offices, with spinoff population-control and abortion groups. The Eugenics Society changed its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology, its current name.

The Rockefeller Foundation had long financed the eugenics movement in England, apparently repaying Britain for the fact that British capital and an Englishman-partner had started old John D. Rockefeller out in his Oil Trust. In the 1960s, the Eugenics Society of England adopted what they called Crypto-eugenics, stating in their official reports that they would do eugenics through means and instruments not labeled as eugenics.

With support from the Rockefellers, the Eugenics Society (England) set up a sub-committee called the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which for 12 years had no other address than the Eugenics Society.

This, then, is the private, international apparatus which has set the world up for a global holocaust, under the UN flag.

International Federation of Eugenics Organizations [The Permanent International Eugenics Committee]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/1/20

The International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO) was an international organization of groups and individuals focused on eugenics. Founded in London in 1912, where it was originally titled the Permanent International Eugenics Committee, it was an outgrowth of the first International Eugenics Congress. In 1925, it was retitled. Factionalism within the organization led to its division in 1933, as splinter group the Latin International Federation of Eugenics Organizations was created to give a home to eugenicists who disliked the concepts of negative eugenics, in which unfit groups and individuals are discouraged or prevented from reproducing. As the views of the Nazi party in Germany caused increasing tension within the group and leadership activity declined, it dissolved in the latter half of the 1930s.

History

In 1912, Leonard Darwin presided over an International Eugenics Congress at the University of London which was sponsored by the Eugenics Education Society (now the Galton Institute) in Britain.[1] Over 800 attendees and an equal number of visitors gathered each day of the Congress to discuss the political, social and cultural context of eugenics and its practical applications. By its end, the Congress had established a Permanent International Eugenics Committee,[1] of which Darwin was named president.[2] In 1921, the Committee arranged for the second meeting of the International Eugenics Congress to take place, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.[1] Led by Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, and Clarence Little, it focused on issues including human heredity, racial differences, regulation of human reproduction, and eugenics.

In 1925, the Committee was renamed the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (IFEO).[1] American eugenicist Charles Davenport was a dominant force in the early history of the body.[2] As its president, in 1929, he wrote a letter to Benito Mussolini, then Prime Minister of Italy, warning him that "maximum speed [was] necessary" in implementing a eugenics program in Italy, because of the "enormous" danger of failing to control undesirable reproduction.[3] The IFEO held its 9th Conference in England in 1930.[4] Davenport led the IFEO meeting two years later in New York in 1932 at which Ernst Rüdin was selected as his successor to presidency.[1][2][5] In the 1930s, the organization was meeting every two years, with a simultaneous Conference.[6][7] By 1934, when the group met in Zurich,[6] the original IFEO had representative organizations and individuals from Argentina, Belgium, Cuba, the Dutch East Indies, England, Estonia, France, Italy, Germany, South Africa, Switzerland, and the United States.[8][9]

The IFEO's emphasis on negative eugenics, in which the unfit are eliminated from society through such measures as forced sterilization and laws against reproduction, led to the formation of a splinter group in 1933, when Italian sociologist Corrado Gini established the Latin International Federation of Eugenics Organizations specifically to give a place to organizations fundamentally opposed to the approach.[10][11][12] The Latin International Federation of Eugenics Organizations had its first meeting in 1935 and soon represented groups from Argentina, Brazil, Catalonia, France, Mexico, Portugal, Romania, and Switzerland (French and Italian). Focused on encouraging reproduction of the "fit", the Latin International Federation of Eugenics Organizations was disrupted by the advent of World War II, its second congress cancelled, but Gini continued to promote positive eugenics until his death in 1965.[13]

The IFEO began to struggle in the 1930s with the increasingly controversial views on Eugenics in Nazi Germany.[14] Germany had not been permitted to join the IFEO until 1927 due to World War I and subsequent resistance to their membership by the French and Belgian,[9] but the German stance dominated discussion in IFEO meetings in the 1930s.[7][15] Reporting on the 1934 meeting in Zurich for the journal Eugenics Review, IFEO secretary Mrs. C.B.S. Hodson wrote:

A number of searching questions were exchanged with the different speakers. The Dutch in particular showed hesitancy in accepting the findings of transmissibility in regard to certain diseases as an adequate criterion for sterilization, while those coming from countries such as Switzerland, where the operation is a practical possibility and increasingly practised, found less difficulty in accepting the German point of view. In fact, between those critics who alleged that Germany was going too far and those (notably the French) who suggested that the categories should include more types, the protagonists of the new eugenic era in Germany appear to hold a middle course.

Of the 1936 meeting in the Netherlands, where Hodson indicates the views of Germany was a major focus, she wrote:[7]

it emerged that castration of sex offenders is being widely demanded in Holland, while sterilization is still regarded with distaste and suspicion. Denmark, originally most cautious to avoid compulsion in sterilization, has now made this as well as other regulations for the feeble-minded, compulsory for that category. At the same time administrators in Denmark take the utmost care to use their powers with reserve until public confidence has been built up. Marriage laws are easily promulgated in Scandinavia; in Germany (supposed land of drastic legislation) advisory marriage bureaux are paving the way with careful and paternal help towards legislation, which may be withheld for some time.

The 1936 meeting, hosted in Scheveningen, was attended by 50 delegates from 20 countries.[16] At that meeting, the term of the presidency was limited to four years, whereupon Rüdin was made honorary vice president along with Alfred Ploetz, Darwin and Jon Alfred Mjøen, newly elected.[17] Torsten Sjögren was chosen as his successor after five nominees had refused the office. Under Sjögren's presidency, activity in the IFEO lapsed to the point that the British Eugenics Society, instrumental in founding the group, considered withdrawing.[1][14] According to Stefan Kühl in For the Betterment of the Race (originally Die Internationale der Rassiten 1997), Sjögren was submissive to the Nazi party with their increasingly controversial views on eugenics, which contributed to the disintegration of the organization in the latter half of the 1930s.[12]

Notes

1. (Bashford and Austin 2010, p. 156)
2. (Michalik, p. 113)
3. (Sprinkle 1994, p. 91)
4. (Nature 1932)
5. (Yeomans and Weiss-Wendt 2013, p. 39)
6. (Hodson & 1934 217)
7. (Hodson 1936, p. 217)
8. (Bashford and Austin 2010, p. 157)
9. (Yeomans and Weiss-Wendt 2013, p. 12)
10. (Bashford and Austin 2010, pp. 389–90)
11. (Cassata 2011, p. 177)
12. (Kühl 2013, p. 110)
13. (Bashford and Austin 2010, pp. 391–92)
14. (Kühl 2013, p. 109)
15. (Hodson & 1934 220)
16. (Nature 1936)
17. (Hodson 1936, p. 219)

References

• Bashford, Alison; Austin, Philippa (26 August 2010). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-970653-2.
• Cassata, Francesco (2011). Building the New Man: Eugenics, Racial Science and Genetics in Twentieth-century Italy. Central European University Press. ISBN 978-963-9776-83-8.
• Hodson, C.B.S. (October 1934). "International Federation of Eugenic Organizations: A Survey of the Zurich Conference". Eugenics Review. 26 (3): 217–220. PMC 2985370.
• Hodson, C.B.S. (October 1936). "International Federation of Eugenic Organizations: Report of the 1936 conference". Eugenics Review. 28 (3): 217–219. PMC 2985601.
• Kühl, Stefan (2013). For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-137-28612-3.
• Michalik, Piotr. "The Attempt to Introduce Eugenic Legislation in the Second Polish Republic as Viewed from the Perspective of the Solutions Adopted in the United States of America". In Wacław Uruszczak; Dorota Malec; Kazimierz Baran; Maciej Mikuła (eds.). Krakowskie Studia z Historii Państwa i Prawa, tom 4. Wydawnictwo UJ. ISBN 978-83-233-3388-3.
• "International Federation of Eugenic Organizations". Nature. 129 (3255): 431. 19 March 1932. doi:10.1038/129431a0.
• "International Federation of Eugenic Organizations". Nature. 141 (3557): 31. 1 January 1938. doi:10.1038/141031f0.
• Sprinkle, Robert H. (31 October 1994). Profession of Conscience: The Making and Meaning of Life-Sciences Liberalism. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-1-4008-2158-7.
• Yeomans, Rory; Weiss-Wendt, Anton (1 July 2013). Racial Science in Hitler's New Europe, 1938-1945. U of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-4605-8.

Categories:

• Organizations established in 1912
• Eugenics organizations