“We have been arrested, investigated by sheriffs, and repeatedly stood up by the police” Kinsey wrote in a letter to Gregg. ![]() But there were far graver risks, given the work’s taboo topic. Alan Gregg, 1943īy 1944, however, Kinsey was encountering logistical problems due to wartime rationing and the difficulty of obtaining draft deferments for graduate researchers. Kinsey attractive in manner and impressive in his account of his work. Kinsey, “ National Research Council – Sex Research – Kinsey,” September 8, 1944, Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center.Īlfred C. ![]() The following year, when Kinsey worried that the RF might be trying to distance itself publicly from sex research, Gregg assured him that “neither I personally nor this Division of the Foundation nor the Foundation as a whole wishes to have or has thought of any repudiation of your work.” Letter from Alan Gregg to Alfred C. Medical Sciences Director Alan Gregg met with Kinsey in 1943, and described the zoologist as “attractive in manner and impressive in his account of his work.” Gregg viewed Kinsey’s research program as “quite extraordinary.” Excerpt from Officer’s Diary, “ Alan Gregg,” September 3, 1943, Rockefeller Foundation records, RG 12, F-L Rockefeller Archive Center. The Foundation funds made it to Kinsey through the intermediary of NRC expertise and testimony, but very soon, RF staff members themselves began to pay attention. Foundation Staff Take Notice of KinseyĪlan Gregg, Director of the Medical Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation Rockefeller Foundation records, Photographs, Rockefeller Archive Center. “ Excerpt from letter of chairman to director of Division of Medical Sciences, Rockefeller Foundation, through Division of Medical Sciences, National Research Council,” Rockefeller Foundation records, Projects, RG 1.1, Series 200, Rockefeller Archive Center. The funding history is summarized in a Januletter. A testament to the priority placed on Kinsey’s work, fully half of all annual RF contributions to the NRC Committee went to his sex research. By 1947, Kinsey’s project was allotted $40,000 annually in NRC funding, which in turn came entirely from the Rockefeller Foundation. Kinsey’s first NRC grant in 1941 amounted to $1,600. Their decision to support Kinsey was a radical shift, which RF staff and leaders ultimately stood behind for years. Prior to their support of Kinsey, NRC Committee members had typically been conservative in their funding decisions, opting to support studies of animal rather than human sexuality. In 1941, the NRC Committee took notice of Kinsey’s research. But when the Bureau ceased operations in 1933, the NRC Committee continued to fund projects with direct support from the RF. Established in 1922, the NRC Committee originally operated with funding from another Rockefeller-created agency, the Bureau of Social Hygiene. ![]() Meanwhile, the Rockefeller Foundation was supporting the National Research Council’s (NRC) Committee for Research in the Problems of Sex. 2003 June 93(6): 896-897.The course piqued his interest and marked a pivotal moment in his career, as he quickly shifted focus from insects to humans. Kinsey: A Pioneer of Sex Research.” American Journal of Public Health. (Photo by Arthur Siegel/The LIFE Images Collection via Getty Images/Getty Images) Funding Research on the “Problems of Sex”Īlfred Kinsey was a Harvard-trained entomologist studying wasp genetics at Indiana University when, in the late 1930s, he agreed to teach a course on marriage and reproduction. Why and how did a large foundation get involved in human sexuality research - and what was this funding relationship like, especially as the controversy heated up?Īlfred Kinsey. (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1948).īut there is a much less well-known story about Kinsey and his research enterprise: that the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) funded much of his work. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. This assertion transformed American society by challenging American attitudes toward sexual normalcy. The rest of the population is spread across a “continuum” at points somewhere in between. The most well-known of the study’s conclusions asserts that only ten percent of the human population is fully heterosexual, and likewise only ten percent is exclusively homosexual. Moreover, it has been a source of heated controversy ever since. What exists today as the well-known Kinsey scale was at mid-century a revolution in scientific understanding of human sexuality. It has been over seventy years since Alfred Kinsey published research findings asserting that people do not fit exclusively into binary sexual categories.
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