H. Laughlin's letter to C. Holmgren recommending C. Davenport for Nobel Prize (1)

1040. Professor Holmgren -2 December 23, 1936 In 1910 Doctor Davenport planned, organized and became the first director of the Eugenics Record Office, which in 1918 became a department of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In the work of this office, which developed into a new kind of research institution, Doctor Davenport laid the foundation for applying to human heredity and to human population-analysis and control those essential factors in organic evolution which he earlier had demonstrated in his discoveries on the evolution of plants and the lower animals in the Station for Experimental Evolution. He discovered how to analyze human pedigrees in such a manner as to state quantitatively the rules by which Nature governs the transmission of many human qualities - physical, mental and temperamental - from one generation to the next. He demonstrated that, while the method of application to man is of course different, still the essential biological factors in experimentally controlled evolution in the lower forms of life and in human evolution and population control are identical. These discoveries caused modern eugenics in its development to follow sound biological lines. They made possible the more certain self-direction of human evolution. For this service the main credit must be given to Doctor Davenport. Sir Francis Galton and Doctor Davenport are co-founders of eugenics as a biological and a medical science. Doctor Davenport has already received many of the highest honors for basic discoveries in biology. The one remaining honor to which he is undoubtedly entitled for his discoveries, particularly in the application of the rules of organic evolution to human kind, is the Nobel Prize in Medicine. I should be very glad to be called upon to supply additional