Edward Murray East

Edward Murray East (October 4, 1879 – November 9, 1938) was an American plant geneticist, botanist, agronomist and eugenicist. He is known for his experiments that led to the development of hybrid corn and his support of 'forced' elimination of the 'unfit' based on eugenic findings. He worked at the Bussey Institute of Harvard University where he performed a key experiment showing the outcome of crosses between lines that differ in a quantitative trait. He is also known as a critic of consumption and as a pioneer of thinking about environmental limits. While some scholars see his population thinking as nothing more than eugenics on a global scale, others see his population thinking as driven by environmental concerns, not eugenics.

Work in eugenics and population

East was a prominent figure in early American genetics and a strong supporter of the eugenics movement in the United States. He was strongly influenced by the work of Thomas Malthus, especially Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). This influence led East to create many of his ideas concerning birth control and immigration policy. He applied many of the ideas that he had developed in his research on the applications of genetics to agriculture to his ideas about human society.

East wrote two major works on eugenics, Mankind at the Crossroads (1923) and Heredity and Human Affairs (1927), in which he compared groups of people based upon the racial categorizations of the time.