Alfred Kinsey

Widely considered as the most important sex researcher in the history, American biologist Alfred Kinsey wrote two influential books on the nature of human sexuality: “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” and “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female”. Kinsey was also the founder of the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction (now named after him) at Indiana University.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey in June 1894, Alfred Kinsey’s father taught engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology. Kinsey graduated from Columbia High School, Hoboken, and his father insisted him to acquire a degree in engineering at Stevens. After two years, Kinsey recognized that engineering was not his passion, so he was transferred to Bowdoin College, Maine to study biology.

Contributions and Achievements:

Kinsey finally got a B.S. in biology and psychology in 1916. After that, he was listed in a doctoral program in zoology at Harvard University, where he got his Sc.D. in 1919. He took a teaching position in the department of zoology at Indiana University where he remained for the remainder of his career.

Kinsey had already become a big name in entomology by the mid-1930s. His research on gall wasps is considered as the pivotal point in the field of entomology. Meanwhile his interest in human sexuality bore fruit when, in 1938, the Indiana University publication, Daily Student, issued an editorial calling for extensive information about and testing for venereal diseases, a serious health problem that had then stormed the nation.

Kinsey requested permission to design a noncredit course on marriage with about hundred enrolled participants, in which several issues pertaining to sexuality were addressed. Soon he gave up his research on gall wasps and concentrated fully on human sexuality. His projects gained funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Research Council in 1942 so established the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana. He conducted interviews from 5,300 males and 5,940 females on which he based his groundbreaking works.

His publication about male sexuality was issued out in 1948 which sold over a half million copies. The female version, one the other hand, was printed five years later, however to a less warm reception.

Later Life and Death:

The research work of Alfred Kinsey almost ended after the release of “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female”. He had allegedly offended thousands of Americans and the U.S. congress exerted pressure on Dean Rusk, the incharge of the Rockefeller Foundation, to unilaterally terminate the financial support of the institute.

After failing to raise funding from other means, Kinsey unfortunately gave up his extraordinary efforts that revolutionized sexuality research. The institute, however, survived and is still functioning as an independent organization under Indiana University.

Alfred Kinsey died on August 25, 1956 of a heart ailment and pneumonia. He was 62 years old.

Alfred Binet

Alfred Binet was a French psychologist who invented the first practical intelligence test, the Binet-Simon scale. His principal goal was to identify students who needed special help in coping with the school curriculum

Alfred Binet, one of the most influential French psychologists and scientists, is known for his extensive research related to the mental capacity of humans. He literally revolutionized the fields of education and psychology, especially in regard to intelligence testing. Binet’s findings were way ahead of his time, and although he did not quite realise the true worth of his contributions, his name is cemented in the world of psychology.

Born in July 1857, in Nice, France to a physician father and artist mother, Binet’s parents got divorced when he was quite young. He was mostly raised by his mother. At 15, he received several awards for his extraordinary skills in literary composition and translation at the prestigious Louis-le-Grand school. Binet took law and medicine as his favorite subjects. He acquired a degree in law but chosen not to pursue a career in any of these subjects.

While in his mid-twenties, Binet was given permission as a reader at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. There, he studied about the developments and trends in psychology. He was inspired by the works of Theodule Ribot and John Stuart Mill, and that boosted his enthusiasm for sensory and associationistic psychology.

Contributions and Achievements:

Binet met Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière Hospital in the early 1880s. He extensively studied, researched and published his works on hypnosis and hysteria. While asserting a controversial theory, he gradually comprehended the nature of suggestibility on psychological experimentation.

In 1884 he got married to Laure Balbiani, the daughter of the famous embryologist Edouard-Gérard Balbiani. They had two daughters together, Madeleine and Alice. Binet gave up his position at the Salpêtrière in 1890. He carried out home experiments with his daughters and observed their behavior and responses in a systematic approach. Subsequently, he published his work explaining these experiments that dealt with individual differences and measuring intelligence. His daughter’s ability to differentiate the relative size of collections premised conservation studies by Jean Piaget.

Binet volunteered at the Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Sorbonne, where he was made a director in 1894. He worked with Henry Heaunis and Theodore Simon to lay down the psychology journal “L’Année psychologique”. The journal is widely considered to be one of the most important contributions in the history of psychology.

The approaches of Binet’s experimental research also addressed schoolchildren. French physical chemist Victor Henri briefly helped him with the investigations of visual memory and research regarding individual psychology. He advocated that the intelligence of a person, and the individual differences in intelligence of more than one persons, could well be measured. He became a member of the Free Society for the Psychological Study of the Child. Binet also performed his services to a Commission on the Education of Retarded Children for the French government. The landmark development of mothods related to the intelligence quotient (IQ) tests also took place during this time. In an effort to find out the inadequacies that influence mental subnormality, Binet and Simon devised an instrument.

The research emphasis of Alfred Binet on the variable intelligence of children offered a fundamental model for measuring and understanding the individual differences of both typically and atypically developing children.

Later Life and Death:

Alfred Binet also studied human sexual behavior (he coined the term “erotic fetishism”) and the palm reading abilities of the famous Paris chiromancer Valentine Dencausse. He died on October 18, 1911.