The Imperial Institute in 1893
Housed Great Hall of University of London
Demolished in 1969
Imperial College London was founded in 1907
Wednesday, 3 May 2023
H.G. Wells, The Chronic Argonauts, and Imperial College London
This blog post is based on extracts from Imperial College Archives
The existence of The Chronic Argonauts in the present day remains an intriguing story of the lengths an author will go to destroy his work, and the role of an archive in preserving the past. This dichotomy is revealed in S. J. Marshall’s prologue to the reprinting of The Chronic Argonauts in The Phoenix in 1980 [the Science Schools Journal was renamed The Phoenix in 1904].
The rediscovery of The Chronic Argonauts in 1980 was thus made possible by the actions of the Imperial College Archives in retaining copies as a record of College endeavours, despite the best efforts of its author to consign the story to history.
A scan of The Chronic Argonauts by H. G. Wells in The Phoenix, 1980 (PDF) with illustrations by Paul Williams is available here.
The Chronic Argonauts (Summary in Wiki)
"You think that sounds mad," he said, "to travel through time?"
H. G. Wells, The Chronic Argonauts, Science Schools Journal No 13, 1888, p367.
May 2020 marks the 125th anniversary of the publication of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, a work of science fiction. Proving a very popular concept, The Time Machine has since been adapted for radio, film and comics.
Wells first introduced the idea of time travel in his story The Chronic Argonauts, published in 1888 in the student journal he helped to create, the Science Schools Journal. This occurred seven years prior to the publication of The Time Machine.
H. G. Wells – The Student
Herbert George Wells studied Biology at the Royal College of Science (RCS) from 1884 to 1887. Although he failed his final
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exams, he was later made an Honorary Fellow of Imperial College.
His entry in the Register of the Royal College of Science details his academic career
Sunday, 30 April 2023
ON THE FOUR DESPICABLE INTELLIGENCE AND EUGENICS CONFERENCES AT UCL
Extract from my draft book: Lavender Rising: An Intersectional History of the Queer Struggle
7. Eugenics: The Scourge of Humankind
Luck, chance, and fate bemuse philosophers to this day;
Maybe everything’s predestined, but have it your way.
Our fortune is their misfortune,
As Isis rolls the die,
And secretive eugenics takes them like a fly,
Maybe we’re all controlled
By strange powers rippling from above;
Maybe the ruthless Gatekeepers are void of human love.
7.1 RETURN TO UCL
In January 2018, the Guardian reported that a senior academic (James Thompson) at UCL had hosted a pseudo-scientific conference on eugenics and intelligence, attended by arch-Tory Toby Young, with speakers who included white supremacists and advocates of paedophilia.(Rawlinson and Adams, 2018).
While UCL Provost Michael Arthur claimed that he wouldn’t tolerate anything on campus that incited racial hatred or violence, it was stated that the conferences had been held four times since 2014 and included associations with the U.S. Pioneer Fund, originally co-founded by the American, pro-sterilization, pro-Nazi eugenicist Harry Laughlin (Van Der Merwe , 2018)
In reaction to these unauthorised conferences, a medical student called Ayo Olatunji co-organised the ‘decolonise UCL campaign’ (Cheesegrater, 2018). Leonard (2019) we quote Olatungi as saying:
“When we look at the legacy of eugenics there is heavy focus on race, class and disability, but the legacy also notably houses the ideals that led to the fatal persecution of LGBT people globally, through the instillation of imperialist colonial laws. We must acknowledge eugenics was and is intersectional no matter how perverse the ideas it generated.”
In July 2019, I (Tom) visited UCL, my postgraduate alma mater, for the first time since 1976, accompanied by my friend Scott Forster, a Scottish poet who I’d met at a meeting of the Edinburgh Creative Writers Group, and who’d helped me during 2013 to put together my history of Bayesian Statistics.
At UCL, we gave invited expert witness testimony to the 14 member Commission of Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL which had been created in reaction to student protests concerning the four secret conferences on Eugenics on the UCL campus. We came under the scrutiny of the élite Commission in an office attached to the magnificent UCL library under the dome that overlooks the celebrated UCL quadrangle.
The eugenics policies we condemned (see section 7.7) included, among numerous others:
Homophobic Discrimination
Transphobia
Social Control against non binary or gender fluid people
Practises of social control fuelled by gender-influenced colonial attitudes to the gender binary
Kevin Rawlinson and Richard Adams (2018) UCL to investigate eugenics conference secretly held on campus (The Guardian)
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2018/jan/10/ucl-to-investigate-secret-eugenics-conference-held-on-campus Accessed 27 April 20233e
Ben Van der Merwe (2018) Exposed: London eugenics conference and is neo-Nazi links (London Student)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Student
(Iink: ninth reference) Accessed 30 April 2023
Cheesegrater (2018) Inheriting Galton: The people working to make UCL
less racist (News and Investigations
https://cheesegratermagazine.org/2018/03/19/decolonise-ucl-institutional-racism/ Accessed 29 April 2023
UCL Minds [1] Eugenics Podcast Transcript (UCL Living with Eugenics)
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-minds/podcasts/living-eugenics/transcrip
Thomas H. Leonard (2014) A Personal History of Bayesian Statistics. WIRES Computational Statistics Vol 6, pp80-115. Wiley Hot Article of the Week, 28 April 201
Saturday, 29 April 2023
Martyrdom in Taipei
Credit: Historical Photo
Excerpt from my draft book Lavender Rising: An Intersectional History of the LGBTQI+ Struggle.
MRC: Army Math Research Centre in Madison-Wisconsin
1.12 MARTYRDOM IN TAIPEI
After a member of MRC tried to badmouth her in scurrilous terms, my CIA-bound girl-friend ‘The Mayflower Rose’ raised concerns with me during 1982 as to whether forces within and surrounding MRC had been complicit in the arrest during July 1981 of the Han Chinese martyr Chen Wen-Chen, an assistant professor of statistics at Carnegie-Mellon ( Cheng, 2021). Chen was allegedly hacked to death by the Taiwanese Secret Police, and his mutilated body discovered on the campus of the Taiwanese National University in Taipei. The Mayflower girl said that her information came from a distinguished female mathematician at Penn State
In 1993, and according to my memory, one of the Professors of Statistics at UW Madison circulated an e-mail to his departmental colleagues, which would have confirmed my suspicions. Unfortunately, the professor has since fervently denied sending any such e-mail. It therefore remains unproven in my perception as to whether there was indeed a plot within MRC. If there was a plot, then one possible motive could have been professional jealousy by a nasty MRC back-stabber.
See also Shan (2022), Carnegie-Mellon (2016), Chou (2003). Tina Chou was a celebrated Associated Press Reporter who investigated Chen Wen-Chen’s death, only to be pursued and persecuted by the Taiwanese despots herself.
In my mind, I see this all as part of a real-life Pynchonesque saga. Yes indeed, a screaming does come across the sky.
Wendy Cheng (2021) The Bold and Unruly Legacy of Wen Chen-Wen (New Bloom)
https://newbloommag.net/2021/07/02/chen-wen-chen-legacy/ Accessed 29 April 2023
Shelly Shan (2022) Archives of Chen murder ‘concealed without merit (Taiwan News) https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2022/07/04/2003781106
Accessed 6 May 2023
Carnegie-Mellon (2016) Wen-chen Chen (Statistics and Data Science)
https://www.stat.cmu.edu/fifty/wen-chen-chen Accessed 6 May 2023
Tina Chou (2003) A Political Death and a Media Casualty (CWCMF)
http://www.cwcmf.org.tw/figure/media%20casualty_English-1.pdf
Thursday, 27 April 2023
FURTHER EUGENICS REFERENCES
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/24/japan-apologises-to-people-forcibly-sterilised-under-defunct-eugenics-law, last accessed June 2019 .
xliii Liz Ford ,Peru's forcibly sterilised women find their voice(2016),The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/jan/04/peru-forced-sterilisation-quipu-project-alberto-fujimori, last accessed June 2019 .
xliv Soutik Biswas, India's dark history of sterilisation(2014),https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-30040790, last accessed June 2019.
xlv Leyland Cecco, Human rights groups call on Canada to end coerced sterilization of indigenous women(2018), The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/18/canada-indigenous-women-coerced-sterlilization-class-action-lawsuit, last accessed June 2019.
xlvi Alexandra Minna Stern, That Time The United States Sterilized 60,000 Of Its Citizens (2016), Huffington Post, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sterilization-united-states_n_568f35f2e4b0c8beacf68713, last accessed June 2019.
xlvii Corey Johnson ,California was sterilizing its female prisoners as late as 2010(2013),The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/08/california-female-prisoner-sterilization, last accessed June 2019.
xlviii Natalia Antelava ,Uzbekistan's policy of secretly sterilising women(2012), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17612550 ,last accessed June 2019.
xlix UNCHCR,Hungary: Reports of the forced sterilization of women (2000-2011), https://www.refworld.org/docid/4f9695202.html , last accessed June 2019.
l Soutik Biswas,How Britain tried to 'erase' India's third gender, (2019), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-48442934 , last accessed June 2019.
li Vicky Allan The shaming of big, poor families smacks of eugenics(2015),https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/13416701.the-shaming-of-big-poor-families-smacks-of-eugenics/ last accessed June 2019 ; Dawn Foster,Leaked Tory plans to cap child benefit have the whiff of eugenics about them(2015), The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/30/leaked-tory-plans-cap-child-benefit-poor , last accessed June 2019.
lii Rosemary Bennett, ,University College London under fire over its conferences on ‘eugenics’ (2018) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/university-college-london-under-fire-over-its-conferences-on-eugenics-qq5z9vvgk last accessed June 2019.
liii UCL statement on the London Conference on Intelligence(2018),https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jan/ucl-statement-london-conference-intelligence-0 ,last accessed June 2019.
liv Exposed: London’s eugenics conference and its neo-Nazi links(2018) http://londonstudent.coop/exposed-london-eugenics-conferences-neo-nazi-links/, last accessed June 2019.
lvii Ayo Olatunji, Aftermath of the UCL eugenics conferences and plans for Centre of Race/Decoloniality (2018), https://medium.com/@AyoOlatunji/aftermath-of-the-ucl-eugenics-conferences-and-plans-for-centre-of-race-decoloniality-6cd58f62541e, last accessed June 2019.
lviiiWhy is my curriculum white?(2014), Youtube ,https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dscx4h2l-Pk, last accessed June .
lix See Decolonising the Curriculum By Melz Owusu , TEDxUniversityofLeeds, youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeKHOTDwZxU , last accessed June 2019.
lxNathaniel Joselson, Decolonization can be hard to see,https://njoselson.github.io/Motivation-Example/.
Monday, 24 April 2023
THE WISCONSIN IDEA: Eugenics in the State of Wisconsin
Charles Van Hise, UW President (1903-1918)
Advocated the Wisconsin 'Eugenics' Idea
Extract from my draft book: Lavender Rising: An Intersectional History of the LGBTQI+ Struggle
Eugenics
Definition Delta: ‘Eugenics’ is the immoral and scientifically flawed theory of “racial or human stock improvement” and “planned or enforced breeding,” which was thus named by Francis Galton in 1883.
Eugenics gained popularity during the early 20th century following the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and the Namibian medical experiments and genocides (1904-1908), The UK Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 led to the incarceration of tens of thousands of unfortunate people who were judged to be ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘morally defective’. See Whitaker (2019) for a concise and lucid history of eugenics and its relevance to bad psychiatry. The intersectionality of eugenics and social change is discussed by Phoenix (2021).
Following the infamous First International Eugenics Congress during July1912 in the Imperial Institute on what is now Imperial College Road in South Kensington, London , eugenicists in the U.S., Germany, and worldwide, believed that they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity, for example by sterilization, incarceration, genocide, or by economic discrimination against indigenous people, people of colour, LGBT+ people, or intelligent underclass children with low IQ scores.
Eugenics was rife in the Department of Genetics (founded in 1910), of the University of Wisconsin-Madison after the department was founded in 1910 (see Genetics [1] and Genetics [2] ) . The earliest members of the department advocated marriage restriction and forced sterilization. Almost 2,000 primarily institutionalized Wisconsinites who were sterilized on account of their ‘feeble-mindedness’ or ‘moral imbecility’.
Founding chairman Leon J. Cole did lasting harm to the people of Wisconsin by promoting toxic eugenic thought and legislation, such as the Wisconsin forced sterilization statutes. The university president (1903-1918), Charles Van Hise, should have stuck to his career as an academic geologist. He vocally advocated for eugenic laws as a part of the ‘Wisconsin Idea’ whereby university experts informed the public and legislators of relevant ‘science’, and further further promoted eugenic thought by founding the UW School of Criminology.
Many doctors treating patients on federal social welfare followed eugenic ideas about the reproduction of ‘burdensome, unfit’ people or groups, and indigenous tribes were discriminated against. The teaching and promoting of eugenics in the UW departments of sociology, criminology, genetics, and zoology began in the early 1900’s and continued until 1948. The eugenicists’ attitude towards the poor seems to have continued until more recently. In 1992, I bailed out a young gay man with mental health issues from the jail on the top floor of Dane County Courthouse who’d been left there simply because he was impoverished.
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