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How the Web was almost won
Just how close did we come to a Net ruled by Microsoft? The "server wars" show a grim counterpart to the browser wars.
By Tim O'Reilly
[11/16/99]

Technology: View from the top
The accidental entertainer
Rob Burgess wasn't chasing cartoons -- but with Macromedia's Flash and Shockwave enabling a faux broadband experience, he's suddenly tight with Stan Lee.
By John Geirland
[11/15/99]

Direct mail double cross?
A fight over opt-in marketing has anti-spam activists crying foul.
By Deborah Scoblionkov
[11/12/99]

You're_a_Loser.com
Behind (and beneath) every Internet gazillionaire is an army of downtrodden "NetSlaves."
By Janelle Brown
[11/11/99]

The consumer's always wrong
Why else would visitors to consumer rating sites like Deja.com rank Rolling Rock the second-best beer and Alan Keyes the top presidential candidate?
By Mark Gimein
[11/10/99]

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Already the laboratory had IQ test scores for Vivian's mother Carrie and her grandmother Emma which found the women to be "morons." Adding the "data" about Vivian's looks to the mix was enough to establish that three generations of the Buck family were of low intellect. These facts became the basis of a landmark 1927 Supreme Court decision that allowed states to forcibly sterilize people who carried "hereditary defects." Carrie Buck was forcibly sterilized, and by the mid-1930s, about 20,000 people in the United States met the same fate under similar laws.

Vivian Buck's story, along with various state sterilization laws, are among the artifacts that will soon be on the Web as part of a digital image archive chronicling a dark chapter in U.S. history -- the American Eugenics Movement. The movement, which began in 1904, was a government-sponsored social engineering project which sought to improve the human species by encouraging "fit" people to marry and procreate while sterilizing and prohibiting unions between the "unfit."

The Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement is expected to go online in January 2000. Judging from a preview, it's a pretty powerful site, featuring a collection of troubling documents and pictures. There are photos of men arranged as if in a police line-up, which purport to show correlations between the size and shape of one's head and one's intelligence; there is a photo of a young boy just out of diapers who was identified as a likely potential criminal -- a determination based on the shape of his face. There are family trees which track alcoholism and idiocy across the generations; and there are photos of the "fittest families" -- who apparently evidenced no undesirable traits.

Up to now, the materials of the eugenics archive, which had been dispersed among several institutions including the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, have remained an obscure body of research, accessible only to scholars. By granting broad access to the archive over the Internet, David Micklos, director of Cold Spring Harbor's DNA Learning Center and chief architect of the eugenics archive, hopes to encourage students and the general public to make a connection between what happened in the early 1900s and events in genetic research that are grabbing headlines today -- a connection that could provide an ethical context for some agonizing decisions we face in our personal lives and in society. Clicking through some of the shocking images and articles of the exhibit, I was struck by a disquieting common ground shared by eugenics and today's prenatal genetic testing: a belief that biology is destiny and that science alone can help us overcome it.

Next page | What price a "perfect" baby?