Charles Benedict Davenport

Charles Benedict Davenport (1866–1944) was an American biologist and the leading organizer of the eugenics movement in the United States. Trained at Harvard, he became director of the Carnegie Institution's Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor in 1904 and founded the Eugenics Record Office there in 1910. His Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911) and studies such as Body-Build and Its Inheritance (1923) applied Mendelian genetics to human traits on the basis of family pedigrees, and he campaigned for immigration restriction and sterilization laws. His scientific reputation collapsed with the movement he led, but his early work on biometrics and animal genetics remains part of the record.