Pioneer Fund significant person J. Philippe Rushton
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation and alleged hate group established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature. One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics.From 2002 until his death in October 2012, the Pioneer Fund was headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, who was succeeded by Richard Lynn.Two of the best known studies funded by Pioneer Fund are the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart and the Texas Adoption Project, which studied the similarities and differences of identical twins and other children adopted into non-biological families.
Research backed by the fund on race and intelligence has generated controversy and criticism, such as the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which drew heavily from Pioneer-funded research. The fund also has ties to eugenics, and has both current and former links to white supremacist publications such as American Renaissance and Mankind Quarterly.History after 1945
Corporate lawyer Harry F. Weyher Jr. was president of the Pioneer Fund from 1958 until his death in 2002.Following Jesse Helms's 1984 Senate re-election bid, The Washington Post journalists Thomas B. Edsall and David A. Vise reported that both Helms and Thomas F. Ellis were linked to the Pioneer Fund, which was described as having "financed research into 'racial betterment' by scientists seeking to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites.": A16 1 Later directors included Marion A. Parrott (1973–2000), J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn and Gerhard Meisenberg (as of 2019).Rushton, who headed Pioneer until 2012, spoke at conferences of the American Renaissance (AR) magazine, in which he has also published articles. Anti-racist Searchlight magazine described one such AR conference as a "veritable 'who's who' of American white supremacy."