A question of blood, race, and politics.

This article explores the political and intellectual context of a controversy arising from a proposal made at the 1959 meetings of the American Society of Blood Banks to divide the blood supply by race. The authors, a group of blood-bankers and surgeons in New York, outlined difficulties in finding compatible blood for transfusion during open-heart surgery, which they attributed to prior sensitization of their patient, a Caucasian, by a previous transfusion from an African American donor. Examining the statistical distribution of blood-group antigens among the various races, they concluded that risk of adverse hemolytic reactions and the cost of testing could be reduced by establishing separate donor pools. The media reported the suggestion, which, given the political climate of the day, rapidly became a public issue involving geneticists, blood-bankers, physical anthropologists, and the African American medical community. Liberals condemned it, whereas eugenically inclined segregationists used the finding to support their views concerning evolutionary distance between the races and the dangers of miscegenation. Here we examine the contribution of comparative racial serology to this affair, the arguments and background of the main players, and the relevance of the debate to discussions about the role of "race" in post-genomic medicine.

Racial science in social context: John R. Baker on eugenics, race, and the public role of the scientist.

In 1974 a British biologist, John Randal Baker (1900-1984), published a large and controversial book simply entitled Race that reiterated persistent eugenicist themes concerning the relation between race, intelligence, and progress. The history of Baker's book is a case study in the politics of scientific publishing, and his ideas influenced scholars associated with later works such as The Bell Curve. Baker, a student of Julian Huxley, was a longtime participant in the British eugenics movement and opponent of what he took to be a facile belief in human equality. In 1942, together with Michael Polanyi, he founded the Society for Freedom in Science to oppose those who advocated the central planning of scientific research. Baker's eugenics, political activities, and views on race express an elitist individualism, associated with the conservative wing of the eugenics movement, that this paper explores in the context of his career as a whole.

Toward a racial abyss: eugenics, Wickliffe Draper, and the origins of The Pioneer Fund.

The Pioneer Fund was created in 1937 "to conduct or aid in conducting study and research into problems of heredity and eugenics . . . and problems of race betterment with special reference to the people of the United States." The Fund was endowed by Colonel Wickliffe Preston Draper, a New England textile heir, and perpetuates his legacy through an active program of grants, some of the more controversial in aid of research on racial group differences. Those presently associated with the Fund maintain that it has made a substantial contribution to the behavioral and social sciences, but insider accounts of Pioneer's history oversimplify its past and smooth over its more tendentious elements. This article examines the social context and intellectual background to Pioneer's origins, with a focus on Col. Draper himself, his concerns about racial degeneration, and his relation to the eugenics movement. In conclusion, it evaluates the official history of the fund.

A darker shade of green: medical botany, homeopathy, and cultural politics in interwar Germany.

In 1941 a proposal was made to Nazi SS Reichsführer, Heinrich Himmler, that extracts of a South American plant, Dieffenbachia seguine, might be used for the mass sterilization of racially undesirable war prisoners. The proposal was based on published animal fertility research conducted by Dr Gerhard Madaus, co-founder of a firm that produced and marketed natural medicinals. His fertility experiments were part of a broader series aimed at evaluating the scientific validity of ethnobotanical folk-knowledge. This article traces the historical background to the Madaus research: first, the role of homeopathy in the introduction of Dieffenbachias to western medicine; secondly, the social context of German 'alternative' medicine in the interwar period; and finally, the role of Madaus himself, whose homeopathically-oriented research on botanical medicinals inadvertently initiated the chain of events described here.