Listen: How Long Island became the ‘eugenics capital of the world’

The study of eugenics wasn’t born on Long Island — it’s closer to say it went through puberty there. The idea of eugenics — a pseudoscience that promoted the idea that certain people or groups should be removed from the human gene pool — originated in England with Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton took the emerging ideas of evolution and genetics and attempted to apply them to human society. He believed that heredity was the primary driver of complex traits, like intelligence.

Early geneticists were convinced they could use genetics to reshape society to their ideals and believed that the human race could be improved through selective breeding. An early seat for eugenics in the U.S. was Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. As the lab’s influence began to extend to the halls of Congress, the Supreme Court, and internationally, Cold Spring Harbor became known as the eugenics capital of the world.

In this episode of “Color Code,” we explore the history of this dangerous pseudoscience. While Cold Spring Harbor’s Eugenics Record Office is now just a collection of filing cabinets and cards, its legacy is built into the fabric of the suburbs surrounding it here on Long Island. Shadows of the eugenics movement continue to influence rhetoric surrounding immigration and have contributed to racial health inequities.

“Eugenics was really the effort to try to create better human beings in sort of a scientific manner,” said David Micklos, the executive director for the DNA learning center at Cold Spring Harbor, who started the push to digitize the lab’s records on the Eugenics Records Office. He said there ended up being two forms of eugenics — called “positive” and “negative.”

Positive eugenics focused on improving one’s own heredity mostly through marriage, while negative eugenics was a set of social policies aimed at preventing those who were deemed “inferior” from reproducing.

The idea of positive eugenics was brought to the U.S. by a preeminent geneticist at the time — Charles Davenport. He was one of the first geneticists in the U.S., and discovered the genetic underpinnings of neurofibromatosis and albinism.

Davenport eventually turned his attention to founding the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1910. His research, which started as experiments in rats and hamsters, turned into collecting data on humans.

The eugenics capital of the world

The scientists at the ERO had none of our modern technology to study actual DNA. Rather, these researchers relied on collecting “pedigrees” from the people by conducting surveys on everything from physical characteristics to family relationships.

The ERO amassed hundreds of thousands of file cards with data — initially detailing physical traits like hair and eye color but eventually included medical conditions like epilepsy and mental illness.

In trying to identify the genetics behind traits they saw as bad for society, the researchers began to embrace the idea known as negative eugenics — systemically limiting who could reproduce and have children.

Micklos said that the three main goals of eugenicists at the time were banning interracial marriage, advancing anti-immigration policies, and sterilizing women with mental illnesses.

By 1910, 28 states had already banned interracial marriage — so the lab made less of an impact there. But the pedigrees they were compiling were used to advocate for the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely limited the number of immigrants allowed into the U.S. from anywhere other than western Europe.

Another target for the ERO was so-called feeble-mindedness, a catch-all term for mental illnesses and what they considered low intelligence. It was a diagnosis commonly assigned to young women and most often weaponized against low-income women that had children before being married. Eugenicists thought that the genes behind “feeble mindedness” were recessive — meaning both parents had to have the genes for it to pass on to their children.

The end of the ERO

The prominence of eugenics as a scientific field of study diminished in the years after World War II. Mainstream science concluded that the theory was too simplistic, while at the same time, the atrocities of eugenics-influenced Nazi Germany turned the general public away from these beliefs.

But, eugenics solidified some ideas about race as a factor in science and medicine — which have had lasting effects on health inequities today.

“We often imagine race, science, and eugenics as something that belongs to the past, that this was a pseudoscientific way of thinking about human difference that was prevalent in the 19th century,” said science journalist Angela Saini. “Even among those people that you would expect to be very wise and smart in the way that they think about race, they still fall into these same tracks. … High-level researchers and are still stuck in these myths that were first constructed maybe 200, 300 years ago.”

Back at Cold Spring Harbor, Jan Witkowski, a career geneticist who is a special adviser to the lab, reflected on the dark history of his organization. “I think in some way we can’t comprehend the social ways that they were thinking,” he said, surrounded by memorabilia of double helixes, comics of Charles Darwin, and photos of scientific conferences. “It would be better for everybody if it had not happened. But it is part of history, which we just deal with as part of our history. But let’s not be afraid of the talk.”

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You can download a transcript of this episode here.

To read more on some of the topics discussed in the episode:

• To take a look at some of the records Micklos and Witkowski have digitized, you can take a look here and here.
• Witkowski has also written a book about the history of Cold Spring Harbor Lab, which we read while reporting this episode. 
• Saini’s book “Superior: The Return of Race Science”.
• Jack Tchen’s installation recreating the Eugenics Record Office is closed, but you can read about it and see photos of it here.
• Read more about why some of famous geneticist Jim Watson’s colleagues think his racist views surfaced later in his career.
• Read about the anti-eugenics project that Tchen helped found.
• Read about efforts to reckon with the history of eugenics at Yale University.

This podcast was made possible with support from the Commonwealth Fund.