Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

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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
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

Postby admin » Wed Apr 01, 2020 10:16 am

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


Image
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.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

Postby admin » Wed Apr 01, 2020 10:35 am

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

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

Image
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
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

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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.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

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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
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Galton Institute [Eugenics Education Society] [The Eugenics Society] [The British Eugenics Society]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/1/20

The Galton Institute is a nonprofit learned society based in the United Kingdom. Its aims are "to promote the public understanding of human heredity and to facilitate informed debate about the ethical issues raised by advances in reproductive technology."[1]

It was founded by Sybil Gotto in 1907 as the Eugenics Education Society, with the aim of promoting the research and understanding of eugenics.[2] Members came predominately from the professional class[3] and included eminent scientists such as Francis Galton.[2]:145 The Society engaged in advocacy and research to further their eugenic goals, and members participated in activities such as lobbying Parliament, organizing lectures, and producing propaganda.[2] It became the Eugenics Society in 1924[2]:144 (often referred to as the British Eugenics Society to distinguish it from others). From 1909 to 1968 it published The Eugenics Review, a scientific journal dedicated to eugenics.[2]:225 Membership reached its peak during the 1930s.[4]

The Institute is currently based in Wandsworth, London. The Society was renamed the Galton Institute in 1989.[5]

History

Creation of the Eugenics Education Society


Image
Sybil Gotto, founder of the Eugenics Education Society (20th century). Image from the Wellcome Library.

Image
Sir Francis Galton, circa 1890s. Honorary President of the Eugenics Education Society (1907–1911). Image from the Wellcome Library.

The Eugenics Education Society (EES) was founded in 1907 at the impetus of 21-year-old Sybil Gotto, a widowed social reformer.[2]:7 Inspired by Francis Galton's work on eugenics, Gotto began looking for supporters to start an organization aimed at educating the public about the benefits of eugenics.[2]:7 She was introduced to the lawyer Montague Crackanthorpe, who would become the second president of the EES[6], by James Slaughter, the Secretary of the Sociological Society.[2]:7 Crackanthorpe introduced Gotto to Galton, the statistician who coined the term "eugenics."[7] Galton would go on to be Honorary President of the Society[2]:43 from 1907 to 1911.[8] Gotto and Crackanthorpe presented their vision before a committee of the Moral Education League, requesting that the League change its name to the Eugenic and Moral Education League, but the committee decided that a new organization should be formed exclusively devoted to eugenics.[2]:29 The EES was located in Eccleston Square, London.[9]
The goals of Eugenics Education Society, as stated in first issue of the Eugenics Review were:

1. “Persistently to set forth the National Importance of Eugenics in order to modify public opinion, and create a sense of responsibility in the respect of bringing all matters pertaining to human parenthood under the domination of Eugenic ideals.

2. To spread a knowledge of the Laws of heredity so far as they are surely known, and so far as that knowledge might affect the improvement of the race.

3. To further Eugenic Teaching at home, in the schools, and elsewhere."[10]

Membership

The EES did not exist in isolation, but was rather a part of a large network of Victorian reform groups that existed in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century.[2]:9 Members of the Society were also involved in the National Association for the Care and Protection of the Feeble-minded, the Society for Inebrity, the Charity Organisation Society, and the Moral Education League.[2]:9 The British eugenics movement was a predominantly middle class[2]:26 and professional class phenomenon.[3] Most members of the EES were educated and prominent in their fields – at one point all members were listed in professional directories.[3] Two-thirds of the members were scientists,[2]:8 and the 1914 Council of the EES was dominated by professors and physicians.[3] Women constituted a significant portion of the Society’s members, exceeding 50% in 1913[3] and 40% in 1937.[11]:56 While the majority of members came from the professional class, there were also a few members from the clergy and aristocracy, such as Reverend William Inge, the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral,[2]:47 and the Earl and Countess of Limerick.[11]:44 The Society underwent considerable growth in its early years. By 1911, the London headquarters was supplemented by branches in Cambridge, "Oxford, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Southampton, Glasgow, and Belfast," as well as abroad in "Australia and New Zealand".[2]:97 The Society found support in leading academic institutions. Statistician R. A. Fisher was a founding member of the Cambridge University Branch[2]:97, where Leonard Darwin, Reginald Punnett, and Reverend Inge lectured about the eugenic dangers a fertile working class posed to the educated middle class.[2]:101

Activities (1907–1939)

The main activities the Eugenics Education Society engaged in were research, propaganda, and legislative lobbying. Many campaigns were joint efforts with other social reform groups. The EES met with 59 other organizations between 1907 and 1935.[10]

Shortly after the Society was founded, members protested the closing of London institutions housing alcoholic women.[2]:31 A resolution was drafted proposing that alcoholics be segregated to prevent their reproduction, as the EES held the eugenic belief that alcoholism was heritable.[2]:32 This resolution proved unsuccessful in Parliament in 1913.[2]:32

In 1910, the Society's Committee on Poor Law Reform refuted both the Majority and Minority Reports of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, declaring their belief that poverty was rooted in the genetic deficiencies of the working class. This view was published in a special Poor Law issue of the Eugenics Review.[2]:72 The Committee suggested that paupers be detained in workhouses, under the authority of the Poor Law Guardians, to prevent their breeding.[2]:73 The same year, E. J. Lidbetter, EES member and former employee of the Poor Law Authority in London, attempted to prove the hereditary nature of poverty by compiling and studying the pedigrees of impoverished families.[2]

Image
A Eugenics Society poster (1930s). Image from the Wellcome Library.

In 1912, President Leonard Darwin assembled a Research Committee to standardize the format and symbols used in pedigree studies. The members of the Committee were Edgar Schuster, Alexander M. Carr-Saunders, E. J. Lidbetter, Major Greenwood, Sybil Gotto, and A. F. Tredgold. The standardized pedigree they produced was published in the Eugenics Review and later adopted by Charles Davenport's Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor in the United States.[2]:77

In 1912, a group of physicians from the EES met unsuccessfully with the President of the Local Government Board to advocate for the institutionalization of those infected with venereal disease.[2]:32 The Society’s interest in venereal disease continued during WWI, when the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases was formed with the inclusion of members of the EES.[2]:33

In 1916, EES President Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, published a pamphlet entitled “Quality not Quantity,” encouraging members of the professional class to have more children.[2]:49 Darwin proposed a tax rebate for middle-class families in 1917, but the resolution was unsuccessful in Parliament.[2]:49 In 1919, Darwin stated his belief that fertility was inversely proportional to economic class before the Royal Commission on Income Tax.[2]:49 He feared the falling birth rate of the middle-class would result in a “national danger.”[2]:49

Image
A Eugenics Society exhibit (1930s). Image from the Wellcome Library.

The Eugenics Education Society was renamed the Eugenics Society in 1924 to emphasize its commitment to scientific research extending beyond the role of public education.[2]:144

In the 1920s and 1930s, members of the Eugenics Society advocated for graded Family Allowances in which wealthier families would be given more funds for having more children, thus incentivizing fertility in the middle and upper classes.[2]:49[11] Statistician and EES member R. A. Fisher argued in 1932 that existing Family Allowances that only funded the poor were dysgenic, as they did not reward the breeding of individuals the EES viewed as eugenically desirable.[2]:49

In 1930, the Eugenics Society formed a Committee for Legalising Sterilisation, producing propaganda pamphlets touting sterilisation as there solution for eliminating heritable feeblemindedness.[2]:204

During this time period members of the Society such as Julian Huxley expressed support for eutelegenesis, a eugenic proposal to artificially inseminate women with the sperm of men deemed mentally and physically superior in an effort to better the race.[12]:77

Activities (1942–1989)

The Eugenics Society underwent a hiatus during the Second World War and did not reconvene until 1942, under the leadership of General Secretary Carlos Blacker.[11]In the postwar period, the Society shifted its focus from class differences to marriage, fertility, and the changing racial makeup of the UK.[12]

In 1944, R. C. Wofinden published an article in the Eugenics Review describing the features of "mentally deficient" working-class families and questioning whether mental deficiency led to poverty or vice versa.[12]:46 Blacker argued that poor heredity was the cause of poverty, but other members of the Society, such as Hilda Lewis, disagreed with this view.[12]:47

Following WWII, British eugenicists concerned by rising divorce rates and falling birth rates attempted to promote marriages between "desirable" individuals while preventing marriages between those deemed eugenically unfit.[12]:44 The British Social Hygiene Council, a group with ties to the Eugenics Society, formed the Marriage Guidance Council, an organization that offered pre-marital counseling to young couples.[12]:45In 1954, the Eugenics Society was referred to by the North Kensington Marriage Welfare Centre's pamphlet "Eugenic Guidance," as a source for consultation for couples worried about passing on their "weaknesses."[12]:45

As a result of the British Nationality Act of 1948, which enabled Commonwealth citizens to immigrate to the UK, postwar Britain saw an influx of non-white populations.[12]:98 The Eugenics Society became concerned with changes to the racial makeup of the country, exemplified by its publication of G. C. L. Bertram's 1958 broadsheet on immigration from the West Indies.[12]:98 Bertram claimed that races were biologically distinct due to their evolved adaptations to different environments, and that miscegenation should only be permitted between similar races.[12]:99

In 1952, Blacker stepped down as Secretary of the Eugenics Society to become the administrative chairman of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, or IPPF.[12]:122 The IPPF was sponsored in part by the Eugenics Society and headquartered within the Society's offices in London.[12]:123 Blacker's influence continued in 1962, when he published an article in the Eugenics Review defending voluntary sterilization as humanitarian effort beneficial to mothers and their existing children.[12]:124

The last volume of the Eugenics Review was published in 1968. It was succeeded by the Journal of Biosocial Science.[2]:255 Following the 1960s, the Eugenics Society experienced a loss of support and prestige and eventually shifted its focus from eugenics in Britain to biosocial issues such as fertility and population control in Third World countries.[8] The Eugenics Society changed its name to the Galton Institute in 1989, a reflection of the negative public sentiment towards eugenics following WWII.[8]

Acknowledgement of Eugenic Past

The Galton Institute's website currently states that "the Galton Institute rejects outright the theoretical basis and practice of coercive eugenics, which it regards as having no place in modern life."[13]Furthermore, "the current Galton Institute has disassociated itself completely from any interest in the theory and practice of eugenics, but recognises the importance of the acknowledgement and preservation of its historical records in the interest of improving awareness of the 20th century eugenics movements in the social and political context of the times."[14] Current President Veronica van Heyningen has acknowledged that "Galton was a terrible racist," but she believes it is "reasonable to honour him by giving his name to institutions" due to his significant contribution to the field of genetics.[15]

Prominent Members

• Leonard Arthur, tried for murder in 1981 but acquitted
Arthur Balfour
• Florence Barrett
• William Beveridge
• Paul Blanshard
• Walter Bodmer
• Russell Brain, 1st Baron Brain
• Chris Brand
• Cyril Burt
• Neville Chamberlain, British Prime Minister (1937–1940)
• Winston Churchill, Honorary Vice President
• John Cockburn
• David Coleman
• James Herbert Curle
• Charles D'Arcy
Charles Davenport, Vice President (1931)
• Mary Dendy
• Robert Geoffrey Edwards
Havelock Ellis
• Hans Eysenck
• Ronald Fisher
Francis Galton, after whom the institute was eventually renamed
Charles Goethe
Ezra Gosney
• Madison Grant
• David Starr Jordan, Vice President (1916, 1931)
Franz Josef Kallmann
• John Harvey Kellogg
John Maynard Keynes, Director (1937–1944), Vice President (1937)
• Richard Lynn
• James Meade
• Peter Medawar
• Naomi Mitchison
• Sybil Neville-Rolfe, née Gotto, founder
• Henry Fairfield Osborn
• Frederick Osborn
• Roger Pearson
Alfred Ploetz, Vice President (1916)
• Margaret Pyke
• Margaret Sanger
• Eliot Slater
• Marie Stopes
• James Mourilyan Tanner
• Richard Titmuss
• Alice Vickery
• Frank Yates

Presidents[6][16]

• James Crichton-Browne, President (1908–1909)
• Montague Crackanthorpe, President (1909–1911)
Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, President (1911–1929)
• Bernard Mallet, President (1929–1933)
• Humphrey Rolleston, President (1933–1935)
• Thomas Horder, President (1935–1949)
Alexander Carr-Saunders, President (1949–1953)
• Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin, President (1953–1959)
Julian Huxley, Vice-president (1937–1944), President (1959–1962)
• James Gray, President (1962–1965)
• Robert Platt, President (1965–1968)
• Alan Parkes, President (1968–1970)
• P. R. Cox, President (1970–1972)
• C. O. Carter, President (1972–1976)
• Harry Armytage, President (1976–1982)
• Bernard Benjamin, President (1982–1987)
• Margaret Sutherland, President (1987–1993)
• G. Ainsworth Harrison, President (1993–1994)
• Peter Diggory, President (1994–1996)
• Robert Peel, President (1996–1999)
• John Timson, President (1999–2002)
• Steve Jones, President (2002–2008)
• Walter Bodmer, President (2008–2014)
• Veronica van Heyningen, President (2014–present)

See also

• American Eugenics Society
• Amy Barrington
• Eugenics
• Human Betterment Foundation
• Arthur Jensen
• Walter Kistler
• Glayde Whitney
• Social hygiene movement

References

1. "Galton Institute Home Page". Galton Institute. Accessed 14 December 2010.
2. Mazumdar, Pauline M. H. (1992). Eugenics, human genetics, and human failings : the Eugenics Society, its sources and its critics in Britain. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0415044243.
3. MacKenzie, Donald (1976). "Eugenics in Britain". Social Studies of Science. 6 (3/4): 499–532. doi:10.1177/030631277600600310. ISSN 0306-3127. JSTOR 284693. PMID 11610196.
4. Brignell, Victoria (9 December 2010). "The eugenics movement Britain wants to forget". newstatesman.com. New Statesman. Retrieved 10 June 2018. Membership of the British Eugenics Society reached its peak during the 1930s.
5. "British Eugenics Society". The Eugenics Archives. Retrieved 2019-09-27.
6. "Past Presidents – The Galton Institute". Retrieved 2019-10-15.
7. "The Eugenics Society archive". wellcomelibrary.org. Retrieved 2019-10-04.
8. Mazumdar, Pauline M. H. (2000). "Essays in the History of Eugenics (review)". Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 74 (1): 180–183. doi:10.1353/bhm.2000.0029. ISSN 1086-3176.
9. "Papers of the Eugenics Society to be Digitised". Wellcome Library. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
10. Baker, Graham J. (2014-05-01). "Christianity and Eugenics: The Place of Religion in the British Eugenics Education Society and the American Eugenics Society, c.1907–1940". Social History of Medicine. 27 (2): 281–302. doi:10.1093/shm/hku008. ISSN 0951-631X. PMC 4001825. PMID 24778464.
11. Jones, Greta (1996). Social Hygiene in Twentieth Century Britain. Kent, United Kingdom: Croom Helm Ltd. ISBN 0-7099-1481-4.
12. Hanson, Clare (2013). Eugenics, Literature and Culture in Post-War Britain. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-80698-5.
13. "Eugenic past – The Galton Institute". Retrieved 2019-10-15.
14. "About – The Galton Institute". Retrieved 2019-10-17.
15. McKie, Robin (2019-07-13). "Top university split in row over erasing 'racist' science pioneers from the campus". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712. Retrieved 2019-11-16.
16. "Governance – The Galton Institute". Retrieved 2019-11-16.

External links

• Galton Institute
• Charity Commission. The Galton Institute, registered charity no. 209258.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

Postby admin » Wed Apr 01, 2020 11:31 am

Torsten Sjögren
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.

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]

-- International Federation of Eugenics Organizations [The Permanent International Eugenics Committee], by Wikipedia


Karl Gustaf Torsten Sjögren (/ˈʃoʊɡrən/ SHOH-grən, Swedish: [ˈɧø̂ːɡreːn];[1] 30 January 1896 – 27 July 1974) was a Swedish psychiatrist and geneticist. He was born in Södertälje and died in Gothenburg.[2] Torsten Sjögren was professor of psychiatry at Karolinska Institutet from 1945 to 1961. He was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1951.

Sjögren–Larsson syndrome is named after him (along with Tage Larsson) as well as Marinesco–Sjögren syndrome. [3][4]

He was also involved in the characterization of juvenile neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis.

He should not be confused with Henrik Sjögren, after whom Sjögren's syndrome is named.

References

1. "Sjögren pronunciation". Forvo.
2. doctor/1609 at Who Named It?
3. synd/1678 at Who Named It?
4. SJOGREN T, LARSSON T (1957). "Oligophrenia in combination with congenital ichthyosis and spastic disorders; a clinical and genetic study". Acta Psychiatr Neurol Scand Suppl. 113: 1–112. PMID 13457946.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

Postby admin » Wed Apr 01, 2020 11:45 am

German Society for Racial Hygiene
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/1/20

The German Society for Racial Hygiene (German: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene) was a German eugenic organization founded on 22 June 1905 by the physician Alfred Ploetz in Berlin. Its goal was "for society to return to a healthy and blooming, strong and beautiful life" as Ploetz put it. The Nordic race was supposed to regain its "purity" through selective reproduction and sterilization.[1] The society became defunct after World War II.

Image
Hartheim Euthanasia Centre in 2005

History

Soon after the society was founded, it received generous support by the German imperial government and it was not the only organization of its kind in the world. Many organizations existed post WW2 with similar goals. Notable members comprised Ploetz' brother-in-law Ernst Rüdin and his childhood friend Gerhart Hauptmann, Wilhelm Bölsche, Max von Gruber, Agnes Bluhm, Wilhelm Filchner, Anastasius Nordenholz, and Ludwig Hermann Plate. The biologists Ernst Haeckel and August Weismann, as well as the gynecologist Ernst Ludwig Alfred Hegar became honorary members.

Since Ploetz wanted to establish an international movement, the society was soon renamed International Society for Racial Hygiene with branches in Berlin including Erwin Baur, in Munich, in Freiburg with the well-known human geneticists Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer and from 1910 in Stuttgart, which included the geneticist Wilhelm Weinberg.[2] The organization was affiliated with the British Eugenics Education Society under Francis Galton; branches in Sweden, the United States, and the Netherlands were also established in the early 20th century.[3] In 1924, the organization was named back to German Society for Racial Hygiene.[4]

The ideas represented by the society became increasingly popular after the International Hygiene Exhibition of 1911. The organization wanted to establish "racial hygiene" as a scientific subject and contributed substantially to their implementation in Germany. With both adoption of the ideas of Nazi eugenics and with concrete consultations on political racial measures, the society took direct influence on statutes like the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring", which were an integral part of the Action T4 "euthanasia" programme of the Nazi regime led by Adolf Hitler. By 1933, the Society for Racial Hygiene had 1,300 members, many of them academics, as well as high functionaries in the Nazi Party.[5]

References

1. Schafft, Gretchen Engle: "From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich". University of Illinois Press. 2004. Pg. 42.
2. Carlson, Elof Axel: "The Unfit: a history of a bad idea". CSHL Press. 2001. Pg. 321.
3. Schafft 2002, pg. 42
4. Hubbard, Ruth: "Abortion and Disability: Who Should and Should not Inhabit the World" in Davis, Lennard J. (ed.): "The Disabilities Studies Reader". Routledge. 1997. Pg. 191.
5. Burleigh, Michael; Wippermann, Wolfgang: "The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945". Cambridge University Press. 1991. Pg. 52.
• (in German) Wolf, Caroline Wissenschaftler wider besseres Wissen in amatom Nr. 18.
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Re: Freda Bedi Cont'd (#2)

Postby admin » Thu Apr 02, 2020 6:59 am

Birth control
by Molly Ladd-Taylor
Eugenicsarchive.ca
April 28, 1014

Birth control has had a complicated relationship to eugenics. While birth control makes it possible for a woman to decide for herself when (and if) to have children, eugenics puts society’s interest in reproduction above the individual’s desires. Yet proponents of birth control often used eugenic arguments while eugenicists distributed contraceptives in poor communities to reduce births among those they considered unfit. The tension between the right to choose birth control, a precondition for women’s freedom, and the coercive use of birth control as a means of population control, has shaped social policy and the politics of reproduction.

Birth Control and the Law: Criminalization and Legalization

Women and men in every society have sought to control their own reproduction. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, rising expectations for health, child welfare, and women’s rights, combined with elite anxieties about immigration and the declining birth rate among educated whites, brought personal decisions about reproduction and child welfare into the public eye. “Birth control” – that is, legal contraception, abortion, and contraceptive sterilization – entered the world of policy and politics.

Birth control and even abortion were largely unregulated in North America until the late nineteenth century. In 1873, the U.S. Congress enacted the Comstock Law, which defined contraceptives as obscene and made it a federal crime to send information about contraception or abortion through the mail or across state lines. In Canada, the Criminal Code of 1892 prohibited the advertisement or sale of any literature or device intended to prevent conception or cause abortion.

Laws against contraception and abortion generally remained in place until the 1960s. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the prohibition on contraceptive use among married couples in 1965 and extended the right to use contraceptives to unmarried couples in 1972. A year later in Roe v. Wade (1973), the court ruled that the constitutional right to privacy included abortion (until the fetus could live outside the womb). In Canada, contraception was decriminalized and some abortions made legal in the 1969 revisions to the Criminal Code. In 1988, the Supreme Court decision R. v. Morgentaler legalized all abortions in Canada. Even so, the right to contraception and especially abortion remains hotly debated, especially in the United States.

The Question of Contraceptive Sterilization

In law, there is a distinction between eugenic and contraceptive sterilization. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld compulsory eugenic sterilization in the notorious Buck v. Bell decision in 1927, but voluntary sterilization for contraceptive purposes (like all other forms of birth control) had an ambiguous legal status until the 1970s. Most U.S. hospitals restricted voluntary sterilization to patients who met the 120 rule (a woman’s age multiplied by the number of her children had to be at least 120); voluntary sterilizations were also restricted in Canada prior to the decriminalization of contraception in 1969. In both countries, public pressure led to the relaxation of restrictions and public funding for contraceptive surgery in the 1970s, just as eugenic sterilization laws were being repealed. Sterilization quickly became one of the most popular forms of birth control. At the same time, there was a significant increase in coerced “contraceptive” sterilizations, both in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Canada.

The legal-political status of birth control in Canada, and to a lesser extent the United States, was also shaped by the doctrine (and lobbying power) of the Catholic Church. In 1930, the papal encyclical Casti Connubii affirmed the sanctity of marriage and condemned divorce, artificial birth control, abortion, and eugenics legislation.

The Two Sides of Birth Control

Both birth control and eugenics emerged as political issues in the early twentieth century, in the context of industrialization, immigration, and the changing status of women and racialized groups. At first, conservative eugenicists opposed legal contraception because of its association with feminism. They thought that “fit” white women were already having too few children compared to the poor and uneducated and worried that expanding women’s reproductive options would lead to “race suicide.” By the 1930s, however, birth control’s association with feminism had weakened and many eugenicists saw contraception as a tool of population control.

Birth Control as Woman’s Right

In the nineteenth century, most North American women lacked the right to vote and sit on juries. Married women were economically dependent on their husbands and legally obliged to submit to their sexual needs. Elite women who objected to the idea that constant pregnancy was the married woman’s fate asserted the principle of “voluntary motherhood.” Using the language of degeneracy, they claimed that the damage caused by involuntary motherhood could be passed on to succeeding generations. Only if motherhood was truly voluntary could superior offspring be ensured.

From the 1890s to the 1910s, a small group of feminists and sex radicals, such as the American Margaret Sanger, took the radical position that women were entitled to heterosexual pleasure without fear of procreation. They claimed that “birth control,” a term coined by Sanger, was essential to women’s freedom and self-fulfillment and they openly defied the laws that made disseminating birth control information a crime. Sanger was arrested after she opened the first North American birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York, in 1916. After a lengthy legal battle, a New York court ruled in 1923 that physicians could provide contraceptive information. Birth control was a medical decision, not a woman’s right.

Birth Control as Population Control

The idea of birth control as population control took root in the 1920s. The slogan, “more children from the fit, less from the unfit,” wrongly attributed to Margaret Sanger, reflects both many birth controllers’ deep-seated eugenicist beliefs and a politically expedient strategy designed to win support from physicians and potential donors. In the infamous Negro Project of the Birth Control Federation of America (later Planned Parenthood), the racist-eugenicist goal of reducing the birth rate of southern backs undercut Sanger’s own commitment to birth control as a woman’s right.

The population control argument for birth control was also pervasive in Depression-era Canada. Rubber manufacturer A.R. Kaufman, a prominent birth controller and eugenicist from Kitchener, Ontario, founded the Parents’ Information Bureau (PIB), which hired visiting nurses to distribute contraceptive information to poor couples with large families. In 1936, when PIB worker Dorothea Palmer was arrested in a French Canadian neighbourhood in Eastview, Ontario, Kaufman’s lawyers launched a spirited legal defense. They contended that distributing contraceptives to poor Francophone Catholics was a public good and secured Palmer’s acquittal.

Population Control vs. Women’s Rights in the Postwar Era

After the Second World War, contraceptive use became an increasingly respectable form of “family planning,” and population control advocates shifted their attention to reducing fertility in the global south.

The tensions between population control and women’s rights exploded in the 1970s. Feminists demanding easier access to abortion and contraceptive sterilizations had to confront the reality that large numbers of African Americans, Indigenous women, Latinas, and women with disabilities were being coerced into sterilization. After the sterilization of two black girls at a family planning clinic in Alabama became an international scandal in 1973, a federal judge declared that “the dividing line between family planning and eugenics is murky.” He prohibited any government-funded sterilization where the patient’s capacity for non-coerced consent was in doubt, including minors and persons with intellectual disabilities (ID). Yet social workers and trial judges have continued to pressure welfare mothers and drug users to “choose” long-term contraceptives, and some parents of children with intellectual disabilities have sought sterilization for their daughters. In 1986, the Supreme Court of Canada barred court-ordered contraceptive sterilizations of persons with ID.

The Tangled Histories of Birth Control and Eugenics

Reproductive decisions must never be coerced, and the shameful association between birth control and eugenics should be exposed. In recent years, however, Margaret Sanger’s advocacy of eugenics has been used to tarnish all publicly-funded reproductive health services, especially the U.S. Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which requires most insurers to pay for contraception, including voluntary sterilization, as part of women’s health care. In fact, the history of birth control is two-sided. Birth control is not just another term for population control; the right to use – or not to use – birth control is also a cherished women’s right.

References

Chesler, E. (1992). Woman of valor: Margaret Sanger and the birth control movement in America. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Dyck, E. (2013). Facing eugenics: reproduction, sterilization, and the politics of choice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Gordon, L. (2002). The moral property of women: a history of birth control politics in America. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Kluchin, R. M. (2009). Fit to be tied: sterilization and reproductive rights in America, 1950-1980. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press.

Ladd-Taylor, M. (2001). Eugenics, sterilization and modern marriage: the strange career of Paul Popenoe. Gender & History, 13, 298-327.

Ladd-Taylor, M. (2014). Contraception or eugenics? Sterilization and 'mental retardation' in the 1970s and 1980s. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 31, 189-211.

McLaren, A. (1990). Our own master race: eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945. Toronto, Ont: McClelland & Stewart.

McLaren, A., & McLaren, A. T. (1997). The bedroom and the state: the changing practices and politics of contraception and abortion in Canada, 1880-1997. Toronto: Oxford University Press.

Revie, L. (2006). 'More than just boots!' The eugenic and commercial concerns behind A. R. Kaufman's birth controlling activities. Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 23, 119–43.

Roberts, D.E. (1997). Killing the black body: race, reproduction, and the meaning of liberty. New York: Pantheon Books.

Schoen, J. (2005). Choice and coercion: birth control, sterilization, and abortion in public health and welfare. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Stote, K. (2012). The coercive sterilization of Aboriginal women in Canada. American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 36, 117-150.

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Eugenics and Birth Control
by PBS.org
Accessed: 4/2/20

In 1883 a British biologist named Francis Galton combined the roots of the Greek words for "good" and "origin" to create the term "eugenics" for an applied science based on genetics and breeding. The "science" of eugenics proposed that human perfection could be developed through selective breeding. In the late nineteenth century researchers developed the idea, a blend of genetic research and social theory. Eugenics soon crossed the Atlantic and by the 1920s and 1930s was adopted by mainstream scientists, doctors and the general public.

Positive and Negative Approaches

The eugenics movement had two basic strands. Advocates of "positive" eugenics believed in promoting childbearing by the "fit" classes. Those who supported "negative" eugenics stood for the discouragement and suppression of reproduction among people of "inferior stock." Within these two camps, the definitions of who would be classified as "fit" and "unfit" varied greatly.

A Vehicle for Racism and Nativism

Some eugenicists separated the "fit" and "unfit" classes along racist and nativist lines. Under this eugenics model, those considered most worthy of rearing children were couples who were middle class or upper class Nordic-Teutonic whites. Racial minorities and ethnic immigrant groups were typically classified as unfit. The poor and physically handicapped, whose problems were classified as hereditary, were also in this negative category. Eugenics supporters pushed middle and upper-class "native" whites to have large families. In some circles eugenicists went as far as declaring birth control selfish and a form of "racial suicide." The same people believed that blacks and other minorities should not reproduce. Although eugenicists did not promote contraceptive use, fearing that the "unfit" would not use the methods properly, sterilization was often promoted as the best option to limit their numbers.

Eugenics and Birth Control

Margaret Sanger's birth control movement and quest for the Pill intersected the rise of the eugenics movement in America. At a time when birth control was still not publicly accepted in American society, some eugenicists believed birth control was a useful tool for curbing procreation among the "weak." In the 1920s and 30s, Sanger calculated that the success of the eugenics idea gave her own movement legitimacy, and tried to ally her cause with the movement. Eugenics was a dominant theme at her birth control conferences, and Sanger spoke publicly of the need to put an end to breeding by the unfit. In 1920 Sanger publicly stated that "birth control is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives."

What Did Sanger Believe?


Sanger's relationship with the eugenics movement was complex -- part strategy and part ideology. Many historians now believe that Sanger opposed eugenics along racial lines. Furthermore, Sanger opposed the belief of many eugenicists that poverty was hereditary, asserting instead that poverty, criminal behavior and other social problems were due to environmental factors and were not predetermined.

Suspect Intentions

Following World War II and the Holocaust, the science of eugenics was discredited. It was soon forgotten by many. But when Margaret Sanger was being lauded for her role in the creation of the Pill in the 1960s, many in the African American community recalled her association with eugenics. Suspicious of her intentions to begin with, some were appalled by her ongoing support of the population control movement.

Legacy of Distrust

Some African Americans believed that Sanger's motive was not to aid black women but to eliminate future black generations. In promoting the development of the birth control pill in the 1950s, Sanger had heralded it as the panacea to world overpopulation, starvation and hunger. Sanger wrote: "I consider that the world, and almost our civilization for the next 25 years, is going to depend on a simple, cheap, safe, contraceptive to be used in poverty stricken slums, jungles and among the most ignorant people." Although African American women appreciated the effectiveness and reliability of oral contraceptives, and used the method in large numbers, they resented the way white-dominated organizations seemed to push the Pill in black communities.
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