Cold Spring Harbor

[Peters & Pim & Po]

Interest in eugenics grew with the rediscovery and wide
dissemination of an obscure Austrian monk's experiments  in
breeding peas. Gregor Mendel's discovery of genetically
transmitted dominant and recessive traits seemed to  many
the key that would unlock the mysteries of human heredity.
In the U.S., biologist Charles Davenport  (1866-1944)
established, with the help of a $10 million endowment from
the Carnegie Institution, a center for  research in human
evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y. A strict Mendelian,
Davenport believed so-called  single-unit genes determined
such traits as alcoholism and feeblemindedness. The way to
eradicate such failings in  the human stock, he argued, was
to prevent their carriers from reproducing. He voiced the
hope that "human  matings could be placed upon the same high
plane as that of horse breeding." He declared that
prostitution was not  caused by poverty but by an "innate
eroticism." He advocated eugenic castrations.


>From Time Magazine

CURSED BY EUGENICS

By Gray, Paul

Time; January 11, 1999

Oyster Bay Kites and Poppies 
delicate dancers
in the Winds high and low
round the fish farms
Kites and Poppies
oyster boats 
Kites blue, tarps dragging farmers on the Sound
he stops to pull a lobster up 
put a magnum of scotch down in exchange
a barterer from the great south bay side of the Island
he's no narrow back Irish now
his wings grown back with clamming
Kite, dirty money
That Monk's lab
Poppies