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39 American biologists arrived quite late to the discussions about coercively sterilizing those citizens who were presumed to carry hereditary defects, and, it turns out, they were among the last to leave. Nonetheless, their influence on the movement was significant because they provided scientific authenticity to the claims made by sterilization proponents, and they established that at least some human traits, including certain clearly undesirable ailments, were heritable. For biologists , participation in the discussion about compulsory sterilization was part of their interest in the broader American eugenics movement, and they were vital to the advancement of the eugenics movement in the United States. As influential as the biologists might have been when they entered the public discussion about compulsory sterilization, they gained much more from participating in the movement than the movement gained from them. Ultimately, their participation earned them significant social authority as well as funds to pursue basic scientific research on heredity and evolution. Biologists provided the compulsory sterilization movement with formal justifications for the commonly made claim that some socially or medically undesirable traits were inherited. In turn, American biologists received tremendous financial support, respect from social and political authorities, and ultimately recognition as valuable social authorities. This brought them increased status and, more important for the development of the profession of biology in the United States, it helped secure substantial funding for their research. Biologists achieved this in the context of three organizations devoted to biological research: the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor (SEE), the American Breeders Association (ABA), and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). All three owed their creation, administration, and ultimately much of their success to Charles Benedict Davenport, a biologist and perhaps the most influential man in twentieth-century American biology. From the turn of the century until his death near the end of World War II, Davenport profoundly influenced the development of the profession Eugenics and the Professionalization of American Biology  c h a p t e r 2 Chap-02.qxd 6/20/07 10:00 AM Page 39 of American biology by demonstrating toAmerican policy makers and to patrons of science the ways in which basic scientific research on evolution and heredity could ultimately improve the nation. Charles Davenport and American Biology Late-twentieth-century histories nearly universally award the title of founder of the American eugenics movement to Charles Davenport. Born in 1866 in Stamford , Connecticut, and raised in a family of New England educators and businessmen , Davenport earned a B.A. in civil engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. After briefly working for the railroad survey, he began graduate work in zoology at Harvard, earning an A.B. and then, in 1892, a Ph.D. under E. L. Mark.1 Davenport met his wife, Gertrude Crotty Davenport, while he was a graduate student. Like Davenport, she was a biologist, and she had a B.S. and M.A. in biology. He entered the job market at a time when economic conditions evaporated the few opportunities that existed for academic scientists in the United States. For most of the 1890s, Davenport scraped together a living while his wife scanned the obituaries in Science and wrote letters to dead professors’ universities soliciting jobs for her husband.2 Davenport made good on his wife’s investment. By the turn of the century, the thirty-five-year-old biologist was the director of the summer school of the Biological Laboratory of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences at Cold Spring Harbor, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, and the author of thirty papers and five books on evolution , variation, development, and morphology. His entrepreneurial spirit, which had carried him and his family through the lean 1890s, was evident in his work at the University of Chicago. At the 1901 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Davenport offered his colleagues a prediction for zoology over the next hundred years, titled“Zoology of the Twentieth Century.”He began by arguing that history could be employed to formulate predictions of the future and explained that scientific development always began with description and progressed to comparative activities. He described the nineteenth century as “the morphological century,” as systematic zoology demanded careful anatomical studies that eventually gave way to comparative anatomy, and comparison became “a fundamental zoological method.”Embryology, he argued, was likewise born a descriptive science that eventually gave birth to comparative...

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