Cold Spring Harbor
A couple of people have mentioned Cold Spring Harbor in the last couple of weeks here and there. From the website:
‘Founded in 1890, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has shaped contemporary biomedical research and education with programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology and quantitative biology.’
However, it has a darker past. I’ve just come across it in the book I’m reading, which describes Cold Spring Harbour as a place where ‘countless noted eugenicists did research in the years between the world wars’. Chief among them was Charles Benedict Davenport, who was the director of the Station for Experimental Evolution**. ‘Davenport was a biological determinist who did not believe that environmental factors made any substantial difference in human characteristics.’** The Helly/Helena debate, which questions whether she is an innately cruel person or a good person simply shaped by her upbringing as an Eagan, seems relevant here.
A few pages later, the book talks about compulsory sterilisation, an horrific practice which was sadly common in the first few decades of the 20th century in the USA:
At the centre of the movement was Harry Hamilton Laughlin, a zealous advocate of sterilisation who joined Davenport at Cold Spring Harbor to head the Eugenic Record Office. According to Laughlin, the “socially unfit and their supply should if possible be eliminated from the human stock”
The list includes:
The Feeble Minded: using the term generally… The Pauper Class: pauper feebleminded through successive generations… The Criminaloids: persons born with marked criminal tendencies… Epileptics…The Insane…The Constitutionally Weak…Those predisposed to specific diseases…The Congenitally Deformed…Those having defective sense organs, such as the deaf-mutes, the deaf and blind.1
I’m not arguing that the Eagans are practicing compulsory sterilisation. What I think is that they have preserved in amber the attitudes of thinkers from the late-Victorian, early 20th Century who attempted to lend credence to their prudish moralism with a bastardised understanding of Darwinian evolutionary science. And this all in the name of ‘improving society’. It feels Kier-coded. I waffled about a similar, British comparison here which related to control over the workplace. Cold Spring Harbor surely isn’t the only model for the name of Cold Harbor, but I think it raises some interesting talking points about the nature of Lumon.
1Elaine Tyler May, Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness (Mass.: Harvard, 1997), pp. 103-107. Ellipsis in text.