Aggregated News

Eugenics tree diagram

Image from Wikicommons

In late 2019, with the 100th birthday of Science News a few years off, our team considered how we might celebrate. We realized that inviting the world to explore the more than 80,000 original reports of advances in science, medicine and technology in our archive was an obvious choice.

Newspaper magnate Edward W. Scripps and zoologist William E. Ritter founded Science Service, the original name of the news organization, to provide accurate, engaging news of science to the public. “The success of democratic government as well as the prosperity of the individual may be said to depend upon the ability of the people to distinguish between real science and fake,” wrote our founding editor Edwin Slosson in 1921.

But Science Service didn’t always live up to those ideals. As we planned for our centennial, we knew that alongside stories chronicling great feats of science there would be articles that we now find horrifying. Through much of its early history, this organization widely shared, and in some cases endorsed, ideas that were racist, sexist, xenophobic and otherwise prejudiced...