"Second Only to Control of Atomic Weapons ... "

Rockefeller family could control the process directly without government meddling.5

"Second Only to Control of Atomic Weapons ... " John D. Ill's forced sterilization program was no radical departure for the family. The Rockefellers had long regarded Puerto Rico as a convenient human laboratory. In 1931, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, later renamed the Rockefeller University, financed the cancer experiments of Dr. Cornelius Rhoads in Puerto Rico.

Rhoads was no ordinary scientist. It later came out that Rhoads had deliberately infected his subjects with cancer cells to see what would happen. Eight of his subjects died. According to pathologist Cornelius Rhoads, "Porto Ricans are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of nien ever inhabiting this sphere. What the island needs is not public health work but a tidal wave. Or something to totally exterminate the population. I . have dont:; my best to further the process of extermination by killing off 8 ... "6 Initially written in a confidential letter to a fellow researcher, Rhoads's boast of killing Puerto Ricans appeared in Time magazine in February 1932 after Pedro Albizu Campos, leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, gained possession of the letter and publicized its contents'?

Rather than being tried for murder, the Rockefeller Institute scientist was asked to establish the US Army Biological Warfare facilities in Maryland, Utah and also Panama, and was later named to the US Atomic Energy Commission, where radiation experiments were secretly conducted on prisoners, hospital patients and US soldiers.8

In 1961, more than a decade before his policies were to become enshrined in NSSM 200, JDR III gave the Second McDougall Lecture to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Rockefeller told the listeners, "To my mind, population growth is second only to control of atomic weapons as the paramount problem of the day:' He spoke of a "cold inevitability, a certainty that is mathematical, that. gives the problems posed by too-rapid population growth a somber and chilling caste indeed." The "grim fact"