Francis Crew, Animal Geneticist and Human Eugenicist

                                                                        Tom  Leonard                       

                                                               

                                                                     Francis Crew

Francis Albert Eley Crew FRS FRSE LLD (2 March 1886 – 26 May 1973) was an English animal geneticist. He was a pioneer in his field leading to the University of Edinburgh’s place as a world leader in the science of animal genetics. He was the first Director of the Institute of Animal Breeding and the first Professor of Animal Genetics. He is said to have laid the foundations of medical genetics.^[1]


1957 Eugenics Society Membership.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2973698/pdf/eugenrev00039-0001a.pdf


CREW, PROF. F. A. E., M.D., D.Sc., M.R.C.P., F.R.S., F.R.S.E., Usher Institute, Warrender Park Road,
Edinburgh, 9..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Albert_Eley_Crew

SEE           EUGENICS IN EDINBURGH

According to Cristina Moreno Lozano & Henry Dee, in their 2020 article,

Genetics, Eugenics and Colonial Science at Edinburgh University during the Interwar Period

A member of the Eugenics Society from 1919, Crew was also heavily involved in the development of eugenics in Britain. He hoped to organise both a Eugenics Society branch and a eugenics lectureship at Edinburgh.¹ As a “citizen”, “biologist” and “eugenist”, he rejected the “biological predestination” of Social Darwinism (which was increasingly seen as out-dated after WWI). Instead - quoting the father of eugenics, Francis Galton - he was

convinced that the greatest of ‘the agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally,’ is that of the social inheritance, an environmental factor consisting of all the gains of progress in the evolution of society, and acquired by the individuals of each generation through the medium of the mind during education.²

1 P.M.Z. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, its source and its critics in Britain, pp.151-152.

2 F.A.E. Crew, ‘A Biologist in a New Environment’, Eugenics Review, 11 (1919)

                                  Henry Dee's Research.
                                  Henry Dee's The Republic
                                  I am a bad native




More about Francis Crew:
VENEREAL  DISEASES AND THE REFORM ENIGMA

MUTATION TO MEDICINE

DOING MEDICINE TOGETHER

BIOGRAPHY BY LANCELOT HOGBEN