Resources: Database: Eugenics Archives

Resources: Database Eugenics

Michael J. Sandel, “The Case Against Perfection: What’s Wrong with Designer Children, Bionic Athletes, and Genetic Engineering,” The Atlantic (April 2004)

Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we may soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may also enable us to manipulate our own nature — to enhance our muscles, memories, and moods; to choose the sex, height, and other genetic traits of our children; to make ourselves "better than well." When science moves faster than moral understanding, as it does today, men and women struggle to articulate their unease. In liberal societies they reach first for the language »

Malcolm Gladwell, "None of the Above: What IQ doesn't tell you about race," New Yorker, December 17, 2007

If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn effect-the steady rise in scores across generations? One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a social scientist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, received a large package in the mail. It was from a colleague in Utrecht, and it contained the results of I.Q. tests given to two generations of Dutch eighteen-year-olds. When Flynn looked through the data, he found something puzzling. The Dutch eighteen-year-olds from the nineteen-eighties scored better than those who took the same tests in the nineteen-fifties—and not just slightly better, »

Patricia Nelson Limerick, "'Why Am I an Experiment?' One Eskimo's Unhappy Encounter with Western Civilization," NY Times (June 25, 2000)

Review of GIVE ME MY FATHER'S BODY: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo. by Kenn Harper. Foreword by Kevin Spacey. Illustrated. 277 pp. South Royalton, Vt.: Steerforth Press. $24. Given the arrangements of power on the planet in the last few centuries, white men have had lots of chances to override the rights of other people with indifference. This does not mean that white men have a particular talent for oppression, but it does mean that they have had peculiar historical opportunities to develop, exercise and refine that talent. Writing about this state of affairs can be risky. »

Malcolm Gladwell, "None of the Above: What IQ Doesn't Tell You about Race," New Yorker (December 17, 2007)

None of the Above What I.Q. doesn’t tell you about race. by Malcolm Gladwell December 17, 2007 Text Size: Small Text Medium Text Large Text Print E-Mail Feeds If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn effect—the steady rise in scores across generations? If what I.Q. tests measure is immutable and innate, what explains the Flynn effect—the steady rise in scores across generations? Related Links Audio: Malcolm Gladwell on race and I.Q. Keywords I.Q.s; Race; Flynn, James; “What Is Intelligence?” (Cambridge; $22); Flynn effect; Intelligence; Racism One Saturday in November of 1984, James Flynn, a »

Tamar Lewin, "Corporate Culture and Big Pay Come to Nonprofit Testing Service," New York Times (November 23, 2002)

Buoyed by growing revenue, the Educational Testing Service, the not-for-profit group that produces the SAT, the Advanced Placement exams and the Graduate Record Exams, last year gave one-time bonuses of as much as $366,000 to 15 of its officers. E.T.S., the world's largest testing organization, has traditionally paid salaries comparable to those at colleges, universities, and groups like the College Board, which administers the tests that the service devises for it. But under the leadership of Kurt Landgraf, a former chief operating officer of the DuPont Company who became president of E.T.S. two years ago, compensation has soared. Mr. Landgraf »

Scott Christianson, "Bad Seed or Bad Science? The Story of the Notorious Jukes Family," New York Times (February 8, 2003)

On Reflection, a Family Long Seen as Congenital Misfits Were Victims of Skewed Data ________________ By SCOTT CHRISTIANSON BINNEWATER, N.Y. — For more than a century, the Jukes clan has been presented as America's most despised family. Social science researchers long believed they were a case study of dysfunction, a bunch of genetically linked paupers, criminals, harlots, epileptics and mental defectives, whose care had placed a huge financial burden on taxpayers. The family's pedigree was used for decades as a textbook example of how heredity shaped human behavior and helped lead to calls for compulsory sterilization, segregation, lobotomies and »

Vermont's Sterilization Law (1931)

It is hereby enacted by the General Assembly of the State of Vermont: Section 1. Construction. Henceforth it shall be the policy of the state to prevent procreation of idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded or insane persons, when the public welfare, and the welfare of idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded or insane persons likely to procreate, can be improved by voluntary sterilization as herein provided. Section 2. Examination and certificate; operation, report. When two physicians and surgeons legally qualified to practice in the state, examine a person resident of the state, and decide: (1) that such person is an idiot, imbecile, feeble-minded or »

Ron Rosenbaum, ""The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Photo Scandal." The New York Times Sunday Magazine (January 15, 1995)

ONE AFTERNOON IN THE LATE 1970's, deep in the labyrinthine interior of a massive Gothic tower in New Haven, an unsuspecting employee of Yale University opened a long-locked room in the Payne Whitney Gymnasium and stumbled upon something shocking and disturbing. Shocking, because what he found was an enormous cache of nude photographs, thousands and thousands of photographs of young men in front, side and rear poses. Disturbing, because on closer inspection the photos looked like the record of a bizarre body-piercing ritual: sticking out from the spine of each and every body was a row of sharp metal »

"Virginia Governor Apologizes for Forced Sterilizations," UP (May 3, 2002)

Virginia Governor Apologizes for Forced Sterilizations NewsMax.com Wires Friday, May 3, 2002 RICHMOND, Va. � Gov. Mark Warner issued a formal apology Thursday for the state's decision to forcible sterilize thousands of Virginians from 1924 to 1979. His apology coincides with the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's Buck vs. Bell decision upholding Virginia's eugenics sterilization law. "Today, I offer the commonwealth's sincere apology for Virginia's participation in eugenics," the recently elected Democrat said. "As I have previously noted, the eugenics movement was a shameful effort in which state government never should have been involved," said Warner. "We must »

Scott Allen, "New Book Delves into Fernand's Cruel Past," The Boston Globe (May 1, 2004)

NEW BOOK DELVES INTO FERNALD'S CRUEL PAST By Scott Allen The Boston Globe, May 1, 2004 WALTHAM -- His foster mother died suddenly in March 1949, leaving 8-year-old Fred Boyce heartbroken and homeless. Needing a new home for him, state social workers said the shy boy should be institutionalized, based on an IQ test showing he was "feebleminded." Without a word from the child, a judge in Boston committed him to a home for people with mental retardation, dooming Boyce to a childhood of taunts, loneliness, and anger. Boyce, now 63, is one of hundreds of people of normal intelligence »

Welling Savo, "The Master Race," Boston Magazine (December 2002)

The Master Race Welling Savo Massachusetts state officials sterilized and imprisoned "inferiors" and "defectives" they thought would contaminate the gene pool � years before the Nazis ever started doing it. Now, for the first time, this once-secret story is revealed. Make a right off Route 202, about 90 miles west of Boston, and climb a steep tree-lined road to the town of Shutesbury, population: 1,800. There are a few houses along the one-mile ascent, behind patches of thinning trees and knobby dirt driveways. "ZERO TOLERANCE SPEED ZONE" reads a sign near the crest of the hill. The people who live »

Nicholas Lemann, "The Great Sorting," Atlantic Monthly (Sep 1995)

The Atlantic Monthly, Sept 1995 v276 n3 p84(13) "The great sorting." Nicholas Lemann. The first mass administrations of a scholastic-aptitude test led with surprising speed to the idea that the nation's leaders would be the people who did well on tests In the April, 1948, issue of a publication called The Scientific Monthly an article appeared under the title "The Measurement of Mental Systems (Can Intelligence Be Measured?)." The authors, W. Allison Davis and Robert J. Havighurst, were well-known liberal educators; Davis had written a book about the plight of young Negroes in the South, called Children of Bondage, and »

Nicholas Lemann, "The Structure of Success in America," Atlantic Monthly (August 1995)

The Atlantic Monthly, August 1995 v276 n2 p41ff "The structure of success in America." Nicholas Lemann. In America perhaps only race is a more sensitive subject than the way we sort ourselves out in the struggle for success. At the center of that struggle are higher education and ETS, the Educational Testing Service. Herewith an inside look at the history and workings of one of the most familiar yet least public of American institutions "Finally, I decided to take the plunge," Henry Chauncey wrote in his diary on Sunday, February 4, 1945, a few days before his fortieth birthday, and »

Brooke Donovan, "At Harvard: Campus Affairs; The Naked and the Nude" (1995)

At Harvard: Campus Affairs The Naked and the Nude It is hilarious to imagine: the young George Bush, a first-year at Yale, summoned mysteriously to a dingy, windowless room on the fourth floor of Paine-Whitney Gymnasium. After waiting in line outside, Bush enters the room, skinny and awkward; somewhat nervously, he follows orders from two middle-aged men in shirtsleeves. He undresses at their request. One of the men attaches metal spikes to his spine at regular intervals and positions him in profile to a camera on one end of the room. Three flashes later, the young Bush returns to relative »

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