South Bend News-Times, Volume 39, Number 10, South Bend, St. Joseph County, 10 January 1922 — Page 7

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Dr. Helen King, After Years of Scientific Researchand Laboratory Experiment

with Animals, Declares She Has Proved That

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Dr. Helen Dean Kin:,

University Faculty

Member, Advocates the Intermarriage of Close Kin.

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F lints Is UI N Cr t I I i 1 ÜLÜLiiU.V. ta IA

?!t!'; theory of ewjenica which, Dr. Helen

Dean Kinrj of Philadelphia has o&ered to a

somewhat startled vorld. "If you xconid produce a vigorous rare," she say m eßtet, "marry )0UT tistcr, your brother or your cousin. ly doing thii you con:i lidate arid perpetuate the virtues of your live. He eure, however, that you prevent defective- from marrying at all." Dr. King aupports her argument with scientific analogy. For years she has conducted experiments u ith rat. Sh.e has carried the process of cl'-sr inbreeding dov-n tl rough immmerabhj successive prvrratinvs. After reaching a point analogous to J J 00 years of human life, she has produced a rat much bigger and ynuch sounder than anu e,f forehear?. This rat, she sais. is the recult of a sucrmivn inbreeding of brother and sis f er.

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Produce a Superior Race, and Tells

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By Robert B. Vale DR. HELEN DEAN KING, who has startled other scientists with her quiet assurance in declaring that consanguineous marriages are eupenically sound, is a very human youn?: woman who likes baseball and dime novels and who doesn't care a rap what prudish folk nay fay about her or her theories. She has spent more than eicht years investigating the subject of inbreeding; studying cause and eifect through scores of generations of animals. When she arrived at the conclusion that intermarriage between members of the same family can produce a better race of humans, it was r.ot a hasty, half-baked decision. She is regarded at the University of Pennsylvania as a woman of unusual ability and she already has an international standing. The world has believed since Biblical day that it is wrong for brother and sister, cousin and cousin, uncle and niece to marry. In many lands laws ha been passed to prevent such union. And r.mv mme Miss Helen King to say

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The Rats in the Upper Picture Are Progeny of Inbreeding Carried Through Rodent Generations Equivalent to Twelve Centuries of Human Life. The Rodents Below Were Not Inbred. Note How Inferior They Are to Those Where the Life Stream Was Not Mixed.

that by interbreeding small animals she has view of the populace. Most of her tests have been produced a better type. It is very upsettish, to made with rats, and conservative persons refuse Fay the least; quite improper, according to the to place the human race on a par with rodents.

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llenrod action of Hans Makarts "Cleopatra." She Was the Lat Ptolemy, a Line Which Pr-

Dr. King is not arbitrary. She hqs, as is the way with true scientists, placed the results of her experiments before the thinking world and she is quite ready to accepr, the deductions of those who can prove that ftp is mistaken. For the present she stands on , this declaration: "When the time comes that marriage is based 1 not only on the physical fitness of the individual! but also on their recorded pedigree for generations, and is absolutely forbidden to the unfit, the surest means of improving the race will be through consanguineous marriages in families in which the members show exceptional mental and physical endowment in ways that are of value to themselves and to the community at large." It was this bold summary that created the sensation among the theologians, the doctors and the law-givers, not to speak of the common variety of man and woman who viewed inbreeding a3 something fearful and awful. Biologists were intensely interested. From all parts of the world came requests for her views and a record of her experiments. Skeptical and prejudiced persons cried "bosh," not knowing that Miss King had, by her great ability, unusual fund of knowledge End keen analytical mind, made a pla:e for herelf. She is a graduate of Vassar. For a few years she had charge of the research work at Bryn Mawr. It was there that rhe attracted the attention of the authorities of the University of Pennsylvania and was induced to join the faculty. Thirty Generations of Rats She began her experiments with four rats. Today she has a colony numbered by the tens of thousands. Each generation is pedigreed. There U a record of the physical development and, in id far as is possible, a record of the brain quality. There is one colony of more than one hundred rats, each one stowir.g a defective eye. Some have small eye, some have one larsre and or.e "small eye. In this one regard they are all defective. The reason is that they have been bred from mother:- with defective eyes. There are rats in the King laboratory with verified pedigrees goinj back to the thirtieth generation. All cf the traits of the families have been followed and charted. It has been a for.i tradition among breeders of ar.ma!s that interbreeding will produce runts. This is r.ot tru. Dr. King has developed through interbre-- i:r.g the largest rat known. It, was given the ran.? "Goliath" and was the product of the seventh' breeding of brother ar.d siste-r. Ik- was nearly twice the size of th? average white rat. Of course, it is true if rur.'s - -" ' -,v;-'-.

if the physically perfect and the mentally sound are bred, a higher type will result, according to this noted woman scientist. And do not lose sight of the fact that Dr. King is one of the few women in the world to hold a full professorship in research work. Nor does Dr. King take herself too seriously. She has plenty of time for social life and for sports. She delights in parties, knows how to tell a good story, reads tre latest novels, finds joy in detective tales, attends the movies, knows more about baseball than most men, and sometimes goes fishing. She knows more about rats than most biologists because she takes a real interest in them. Some of them she calls by name. She knows all about their great-great-great-grandfathers. And, after all, then isn't much difference between a race of rats and us. Dr. King has discovered that we are wrong in saying there are more females than males produced. It is just the revert, and this is trus with rats; 107

males to 100 female?. Also, the female has greater power of resistance with humans as with rats; more males die soon after birth than females. The rat shows a proportionate decline with humans. Rats are on the other side of the hill at an age that corresponds with forty years in the human kind. How Inbreeding Works Out Dr. King has bred rats down through generations that might correspond with 12C0 years for the human race, and she has found that inbreeding did not show any injurious results. Here are her views on the subject: "Inbreeding invariably brings to light the latent characters that were hidden by outbreeding; it cannot from its very nature introduce any new characters into the stock. Random matings in an inbred stock will not suppress the undesirable traits, but if only the puperior individuals are permitted to breed, the unwanted traits in the stock gradually can be eliminated, if linkage does not exist, and they will not reappear unless through mutation, because the germplasm of th stock no longer will contain the genetic factors un wnich those traits depend. "Inbreeding with felection thus becomes a powerful agent to purify stock, to bring about a concentration of desirable traits and to eliminate serious defects. It is through inbreeding combined with skilful selection that the mcst celebrated breeds of animals have been evolved. "Man is Subject to the same laws of heredity as the rest of the organic world. Net only feeblemindedness, epilepsy and insanity, but also general mental erficiency and marked ability in music, in art and in literature undoubtedly are transmitted from generation to generation, according to the same Mendelian laws that govern the inh"rita;.ce of the color of hair and eyes. "History shows us that the prejudice against consanguineous marriages, which has persisted" from the beginning of the Christian era, did not exist among the early nations and that such marriages were common for centuries among the Greeks, Phoenicians. Jews, Peruvians and Egyptians. One of the longest of known human pedigrees is that of the royal Ptolemies of Egypt, r.otcl for its cio?e inbreeding; brother and sister marriages being very frequent. There is no evidence that consanguineous marriages were injurious to any of those nations. The decline of the Greeks and Egyptians came when they ceased t r ? an exclusive people and the vigor of the rr. -vi- . ! ' ' vie- .?nd luxuries introduced

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