BAR HARBOR, Maine (AP) — A Maine science laboratory has announced plans to remove the names of its founder from its conference center because of the founder’s support of eugenics.
Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor said C.C. Little’s role in the eugenics movement “cast a long shadow on his achievements,” the Portland Press Herald reported. Little founded the laboratory in 1929.
Jackson Laboratory president Edison Liu said in a letter to lab staff last week that the Little Conference Center must be renamed. He wrote that the lab repudiates “the social and political construct of eugenics, an idea and movement now thoroughly discredited on both scientific and moral grounds.”
Eugenics, the practice of selective breeding to attempt to improve genetic characteristics, has been championed by racist groups over the years.
Little died in 1971. He was also a supporter of restricting immigration and ethnic quotas, Liu said.
Jackson Laboratory is an influential, independent institution that links genetics with biomedical research.
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