.... In its heyday, the office was the premier scientific enterprise at Cold Spring Harbor. There, bigoted scientists applied rudimentary genetics to singling out supposedly superior races and degrading minorities. By the mid-1920s, the office had become the center of the eugenics movement in America. Today, all that remains of it are files and photographs — reams of discredited research that once shaped anti-immigration laws, spurred forced-sterilization campaigns and barred refugees from entering Ellis Island. Now, historians and artists at New York University are bringing the eugenics office back into the public eye. By the 1920s, the office had begun to influence the United States government. Laughlin testified before Congress, advocating forced sterilization and anti-immigration laws. Congress complied. The Immigration Act of 1924 effectively barred Eastern Europeans, Jews, Arabs and East Asians from entering the country. And, at the state level, thousands of people who were deemed unfit were sterilized. The University of Heidelberg in Nazi Germany later awarded Laughlin an honorary degree for his work in the “science of racial cleansing.” He accepted the award, and his research on Long Island continued to influence Nazi ideology throughout World War II and the Holocaust. When war broke out in Europe, widespread discomfort with eugenics and Nazism turned public sentiment against the office. In the late 1930s, an independent review by the Carnegie Institution found the office unfit to conduct human scientific research, citing biases and heavy reliance on anecdotal evidence, and it was closed in 1939. nytimes/2014/10/14/science/haunted-files-the-eugenics-record-office-recreates-a-dark-time-in-a-laboratorys-past.html?ref=science&_r=0
Posted on: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 06:09:05 +0000
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