Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

Thomas Hunt Morgan, a geneticist who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work on chromosomes, noted that there was no such thing as the Nordic race or the Aryan race. Biologically speaking, all humans were products of an intermixture of many genetic backgrounds. There was only one race: the human race. Emily Greene Balch, a Wellesley economist who would also later win the Nobel Prize, saw eugenics as just another sad example of the powerful exploiting the weak: “Rash is the man who passes lightly from skull measurements to vast unprovable sociological and historical generalizations. The pseudoscience [that] makes it the function of the strong man to purge the world of the weak, might, one hoped, by this time have gone out of date.” H. L. Mencken, a satirist, essayist, and editor of the American Mercury, was sickened by the hauteur and superiority of those who had been born on third base and thought they had hit a triple: “My impression, though I am blond and Nordic myself, is that the genuine member of that great race, at least in modern times, is often indistinguishable from a cockroach.”

Even in these dark times, people stood for the light.