It is the function of the National Research Council as an agency of the National Academy of Sciences to further in all feasible ways the development of science and the extension, perfecting, dissemination, and useful application of knowledge of natural phenomena. Thirty-two years ago when studies of sex were virtually taboo the Council created a special committee to initiate, organize and financially support the study of problems in sex and reproduction. During its long and active existence the Committee has sponsored and partially supported scores of investigations, including several longrange and long-continued programs of research. Among the best known of the Committee-supported projects have been studies in the field of endocrinology, where the discovery of hormones and their functions has proved of extraordinary importance. The Committee has supported studies in the sexual behavior of infra-human mammalian species, laboratory investigations of the neurologic bases of sexual behavior, some anthropological studies, and several case history studies of human sex behavior, including the Hamilton study which it sponsored in the late 1920’s, and the studies made by Terman and Miles, and by Landis and Bolles in the late 1930’s.
From the first the Committee sought an opportunity to initiate and support such human studies. But human sexual behavior is much more difficult to study objectively and scientifically than are reproductive mechanisms and processes. However skillful and wise, no investigator in this field can escape inhibiting and discouraging circumstances. The success of Dr. Kinsey and his corps of colleagues in meeting and overcoming these difficulties has therefore been notable. His project stands unique in its scope, methodological skills, degree of objectivity and history of progress and achievement.
It was in 1940, three years after he had begun his task, that Dr. Kinsey first applied to our Committee for financial aid. After preliminary inquiry, a small initial grant was made for 1941. During that year we gathered pertinent information about the institutional auspices of the project and by personal visits and interviews sought bases for an appraisal of Kinsey as a scientific investigator, his plans, his program, and his method. The inquiry was exceptionally thorough and painstaking because of the scope and the prospective demand of the undertaking for large resources of wisdom and tact, professional skill, energy, time, and funds. Assured by the outcome of the inquiry, we rapidly increased the annual allotment, and over the years the Committee aid has amounted to almost half of the total budget for the investigation.
From its inception in 1938, this project has had the staunch and generous support of the administration of Indiana University. Otherwise its rapid development, its expansion, and remarkable degree of success would have been impossible.
Now in its fifteenth year, the project has had to meet and resolve many problems of operation and some determined opposition; but in some respects it has been very fortunate. In the United States, the twentieth century has been a period of exceedingly rapid and revolutionary change in sex attitudes and practices. Whereas throughout the nineteenth century the puritanic attitude in sexual matters was dominant in the United States, since the turn of the century both mores and practices have been in flux. What fifty years ago could not have been mentioned in a social group—sexual and reproductive happenings and experiences—are now spoken of without inhibition. These changes are in part a product of (1) woman’s progressive sexual and economic emancipation; (2) the all-pervasive influence of Freud’s views and discoveries; and (3) the exposure during the World Wars of millions of American youth to cultures and peoples whose sex codes and practices differ greatly from those in which they had been reared. These changes made feasible the work of the Committee, and prepared the way for the Kinsey report. Only a few decades earlier, Henry Havelock Ellis (1859- 1939), eminent student of sex in England, suffered severe censure and legal restriction of the publication of his scholarly findings. Only a little later, Sigmund Freud’s (1856-1939) account of the role of sexuality in the etiology of the neuroses was rejected by his medical colleagues. But the Austrian psychiatrist persisted with his inquiry, and eventually proposed theories and formulated hypotheses which have fundamentally changed our conception of the role of sexuality in our mental and social lives.
Comparison of Freud and Kinsey is not implied, for the two men differed greatly in temperament, professional training and experience, and in their objectives; but what should be noted is the fact that Freud, on the basis of his clinical experience, proposed theories which laid the foundation for a task he was not fitted by nature or training to carry on. This is the great task of fact-finding through careful, patient, long-continued, objective research which Alfred Kinsey, the laboratory- and field-trained biologist, is now engaged in doing. From the Kinsey project, sufficiently extended, should come basic knowledge of sexual phenomena against which theory may be checked, modified and supplemented.
The current report makes a notable contribution of fact in replacement of ignorance and of inadequately verified surmise. We look forward to the possibility that the Institute for Sex Research may long serve to inform, enlighten and guide us in an area where knowledge and understanding may affect the very existence of the genus Homo . We, as scientists, have large faith in the values of knowledge, little faith in ignorance.
| ROBERT
M. YERKES
, Chairman Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, 1922-1947 GEORGE W. CORNER , Chairman Committee for Research in Problems of Sex, 1947-date |