Pioneer Fund
| Formation | March 11, 1937 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Wickliffe Preston Draper |
| Type | Nonprofit foundation |
| Focus | |
| Headquarters | New York City, U.S. |
Director | Gerhard Meisenberg |
Key people |
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation 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. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. 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. After Lynn's death in 2023, much of the activity of the Pioneer Fund shifted to the Human Diversity Foundation.
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. One prominent example is 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.