RARE \"Eugenics\" Lionel Penrose Hand Signed 3X5 Card For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "Eugenics" Lionel Penrose Hand Signed 3X5 Card. 

June 1898 – 12 May 1972) was an English psychiatrist, medical geneticist, paediatrician, mathematician and chess theorist, who carried out pioneering work on the genetics of intellectual disability. Penrose

was the Galton professor of eugenics (1945–1965), then professor of human genetics

(1963–1965) at University College London,

and later emeritus professor. Penrose was educated at the Downs School, Colwall and the Quaker Leighton Park School, Reading, and later St John's College,

Cambridge On leaving school in 1916, he served, as

a conscientious objector,

with the Friends' Ambulance Unit/British Red Cross in France until the end of the First World War. He went on to study at St. John's College,

Cambridge; he was a Cambridge Apostle. At Cambridge, he gained a first class degree

in moral sciences before leaving for Vienna for a year, to study at the

psychological department at the University of Vienna. In

1928, he qualified with the conjoint in 1928 at St Thomas' Hospital before

qualifying for a Doctor of Medicine in

1930. Penrose undertook research into schizophrenia, designing tests of intelligence that were

non-verbal in nature that are still in use. He was one of the earliest

investigators of phenylketonuria in

the 1930s. Penrose's

"Colchester Survey", produced as the report in 1938, in collaboration

with the MRC called

the MRC special report: No.229, Clinical and genetic study of 1,280

cases of mental defect, was the earliest serious attempt to study the

genetics of mental retardation. He found that the relatives of patients with

severe mental retardation were usually unaffected but some of them were

affected with similar severity to the original patient, whereas the relatives

of patients with mild mental retardation tended mostly to have mild or

borderline disability. Penrose went on to identify and study many of the

genetic and chromosomal causes of mental

retardation (then called mental deficiency). This body of work culminated in

the book, The Biology of Mental Defect (Sidgwick and Jackson,

Ltd., London, UK, 1949). Penrose was a central figure in British medical

genetics following World War II. From 1945 to

1965, he worked as Galton Professor at the Galton Laboratory at University College London.

The first title of his chair was "Professor of Eugenics" (1945–1963),

then he had it changed to "Professor of Human Heredity" (1963–1965).

According to his successor, Professor Harry Harris, Penrose “never liked the

name 'eugenics’, because it seemed to him to be too much associated

with uninformed and dangerous policies of racial purification." Harris

also reported the "long delay" in changing this name was due to

"legal problems" associated with the original donation from Francis Galton and described how Penrose simply ignored

the "eugenics" element of his job title.

Penrose's Law states that the population size of prisons

and psychiatric hospitals are

inversely related, although this is generally viewed as something of an

oversimplification.  Penrose, a member of

the Society of Friends (Quakers),

was a lead figure in the Medical Association for the Prevention of War in the

1950s. Penrose developed the Penrose method, a method for apportioning seats in a global

assembly based on the square root of each

nation's population. Such a voting system is based on the voting power of any

voter (measured by the Penrose–Banzhaf index)

decreasing with the size of the voting body as one over its square root. See

also Penrose square root law. Penrose

was particularly interested in different facets of biology, for example fingerprint, demography, and cytogenetics, which were a result of his research into the

problems of mental defect, especially Down syndrome. He did intensive research on the latter,

communicating the results of his investigations in 1963 and winning the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr.

Foundation Award for his contributions to the understanding of

the causes of mental retardation.