An Embarassing Past

In one of the videos we watched in class about eugenics, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and its connections to eugenics was mentioned. This stood out to me because both of my parents work there, and I've started working there over the summers. The video mentioned Charles Davenport who became the director of CSHL in 1898. Davenport, along with his wife, and among other things, studied miscegenation, which is the mixed breeding of racial groups. They believed that miscegenation caused "biological and cultural degradation." Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office with funding from the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In 1939, the Institute withdrew funding to the ERO, which had to close. Even though Davenport may have been a proponent of eugenics, other genetic, medical, and molecular biological research was also being done at the lab. James D. Watson, a co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, was the president of the lab for a long time. I had a chance to meet him once and see his Nobel Prize. Watson has been a controversial figure because of his views. In 2007, he was compelled to retire as president of the labs after having been quoted as saying, "[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really."

I learned a lot about the history of CSHL and its relationship to eugenics through Charles Davenport and the ERO. However, research at the lab today focuses on cancer, neurobiology, plant genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics, not eugenics.