July 2007 Trivia Answer

Question:

Which prominent U.S. laboratory was significantly impacted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on May 2, 1927 in the case of Buck v. Bell? 

 

Answer:
The answer is Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL).  In its darker past (right before WWII), CSHL scientists were known for their acceptance of eugenics theories and the beliefs associated with inherited intelligence--you can look up more recent manifestations of this in the1990s Bell Curve (Murray and Hernstein) book and subsequent national discussions.  CSHL has since debunked these theories as spurious mythologies, but they persist, unfortunately, in some quarters as pseudo-science…

And the winner is...

Adrienne Stephenson,
Graduate Student,
Pharmacology
Florida A&M University

The prize:


Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present
By Harriet A. Washington. Doubleday. $27.95

Compelling, if at times gruesome, Medical Apartheid connects past medical experiments and the woeful current state of health care for blacks. In this provocatively titled book, Harriet Washington argues that the infamous “Tuskegee Experiment”—the 40-year study in which black men with syphilis were allowed to die untreated so that their cadavers could be used for research—was not an isolated incident, but rather one example of the medical establishment’s long history of mistreating African Americans. Compelling, if at times gruesome, Medical Apartheid draws a connection between past medical experiments and the woeful current state of health care for blacks.