Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

Grant’s book ended with a plea for his kind of America: “We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals, which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian in the age of Pericles and the Viking in the days of Rollo.” Grant’s lament was in direct contradiction to the poem emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty written by Emma Lazarus, an American Jew. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. ALTHOUGH MADISON GRANT’S BOOK swept a nation, not everyone bought into his deception. 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.