New book recounts how eugenics, forced sterilization were studied in Cold Spring Harbor in the 1920s

Spring 1924 was the high water mark for the Eugenics Record Office, a Cold Spring Harbor research facility whose staff hoped to use selective breeding to engineer the human race.

The work is now understood to have been nothing more than scientific gloss for bigotry, but that March, Virginia passed a law authorizing sterilization of institutional inmates under which the state moved to sterilize a "feeble minded" young woman, Carrie Buck.

It laid the ground for a Supreme Court case in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in an opinion affirming the law’s constitutionality, observed of Buck’s family that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." The following May, the Immigration Act of 1924 was signed into law, barring citizenship for huge numbers of southern and eastern Europeans based in part on their purported undesirable racial traits, and excluding entirely immigrants from Asia.

"There were nefarious motives from the get-go," said Mark Torres, author of a new history of the ERO, "Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics," scheduled to be released Tuesday by The History Press. "It started with data collection and they built it into this huge propaganda movement" said Torres, a labor lawyer and assistant adjunct professor of economics at Hofstra University, in an interview.

As Torres writes, the ERO guided both the Supreme Court and Congress with testimony by its staffers including, notably, second-in-command Harry Laughlin. 

Laughlin, who never met Buck, submitted testimony to a Virginia court about her "mental defectiveness" and "immorality." Named an Expert Eugenics Agent by the chairman House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization with "full authority to conduct racial and immigration studies on behalf of the U.S. Congress," Laughlin collected troves of data from institutions and prisons to show that certain "racial and national types were genetically prone to crime and amoral behavior," Torres writes.

ERO research was used to pass a New York State law under which sterilizations were performed on more than 40 inmates of state institutions from 1912 through 1920, when the law was repealed. The ERO also created a model sterilization law for states that was later adapted by Nazi Germany and its leaders maintained cordial ties with their Nazi counterparts. Laughlin distributed what Torres calls a "Nazi eugenics propaganda film" and accepted an honorary degree offered by a German academic who would pioneer use of carbon monoxide to murder thousands of people the Nazis deemed mentally handicapped.

From 1910 to 1939, Laughlin and ERO founder Charles Davenport, aided by field researchers and funded by wealthy donors, compiled hundreds of thousands of records about human subjects. Eventually working under the auspices of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, they aimed to record and trace across generations characteristics like skull size, height and weight that we now understand as DNA heritable, but also those, like criminality or a love of the sea, now understood to be subjective and highly conditioned by environmental factors — not traits at all, in the sense of genetics.

Prominent among them was the condition of "feeblemindedness" or mental deficiency, which, as associated by eugenicists with low scores on IQ tests and promiscuity, was a catchall for poor women who had children outside of marriage.

Some of their research subjects were Long Islanders who may not have been in a position to freely consent, Torres writes. Newspaper coverage from the time quoted the superintendent of the giant Kings Park State Hospital, Dr. William A. Macy, saying he was in "frequent consultation" with Davenport and that his staff was "preparing useful data and information for the benefit and guidance for future generations for the successful prevention of insanity."

Two other major facilities, Central Islip State Hospital and Pilgrim State Hospital in Brentwood, also "openly facilitated" eugenics research, Torres writes. Office researchers also studied the inmates of a Yaphank almshouse and residents of the Shinnecock and Unkechaug Indian reservations. To secure the Indians’ cooperation they offered gifts and told them the purpose of the study was to determine if their bloodlines were "pure," Torres writes.

Davenport and Laughlin were civic-minded and prominent Long Islanders, championing roadwork and development around Cold Spring Harbor and fundraising for a tuberculosis hospital in Nassau County.

But by the 1930s, the ERO’s political and propagandistic work, particularly its ties to Nazi eugenics, made Carnegie Institute leaders acutely uneasy. In 1935, a year after Davenport’s retirement, a committee of Carnegie scientists visited to evaluate the ERO's research and judged it dubious. "Traits, such as ‘self-respect,’ ‘holding a grudge,’ ‘loyalty,’ and ‘sense of humor’ ... can seldom truly be known to anyone outside an individual’s close associates," a committee report noted witheringly.

"They said that virtually nothing of scientific value had been accumulated," said David Micklos, executive director of the Dolan DNA Learning Center of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the biomedical research not-for-profit that grew out of the Carnegie Institute.

ERO leaders made basic errors in their survey and statistical methods. They also ignored evidence that contravened the tenets of eugenics, Micklos said. That included work on corn done at Cold Spring Harbor demonstrating the offspring of genetically diverse parents was superior to the better of the two parents, yielding bigger, healthier plants, a phenomenon called hybrid vigor. 

There were beneficial aspects of eugenics, such as an attention to pediatric care and an epidemiological approach to observing patterns of illness, said Nancy Tomes, a Stony Brook University historian of medicine. But the movement pathologized poor and marginalized people and its capacity to harm long outlived the Nazi regime, she said.

Torres writes that sterilizations were carried out on a wide scale in Puerto Rico in the late 1940s, and for decades later in American Indian reservations and in states including North Carolina and California, sometimes forced or coerced in hospitals or prisons. By the 1970s, at least 60,000 people had been legally sterilized against their will in 30 states, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute.

The ERO and the eugenics movement of the early 20th century "capitalized on latent ideas and bigotry that are always resonant," said Micklos, who said the historical legacy of the ERO, disdained by prominent geneticists even in its heyday, was slight.

But in vitro fertilization and advances in the study of the human genome enabling genetic screening and editing have created concerns among scientists and medical ethicists that these are new, more technologically refined forms of eugenics. There are already concerns over pregnancy termination and genomic screening for conditions like Down syndrome, and the Genome Research Institute has identified ethical concerns over new techniques that can estimate risks for more genetically complex disorders.

Micklos imagines a near future in which expectant parents who refuse this kind of diagnostic forecasting, for religious or other reasons, face social or political opprobrium, or where those with the money to pay for gene tech use it to improve their odds of having smart, healthy and athletic children.

"There are 30 or 40 genes that we know contribute to intelligence, memory and learning," he said. "Theoretically, you could go through and look among 20 embryos for the best combination. It’s hard to believe that’s not going to be done."