Latnok Born

In 1948, a handful of the original Project members came together to form a society to counter the effects of Project Eugene. It was to be a scientific society dedicated to the evolution of human intelligence. Their goal: to nudge human consciousness and intelligence along by unlocking the social and genetic power of diversity within the species homo sapiens. They called themselves the Latnok Society, from the Hungarian word Latnok, which means seer or prophet. They hoped, perhaps naively, that their vision of humanity might be the true destiny of human kind.

The Latnok Society traces its beginnings to the massive mobilization of science that helped the allies win World War II. In the high-desert of eastern Washington state, the US War Department assembled a group of scientists to take part in the biological equivalent of the Manhattan Project, code named: Project Eugene.

Like their counterparts on the Manhattan Project, many of the team members were refugees of Nazi Germany's advance across Europe. They knew first-hand the horrors of the Third Reich and were highly motivated, desperate even, and willing to do anything to help defeat Germany.

The scientists of Project Eugene raced to create a unified theory of human evolution. Debates raged, egos clashed and the project stalled. Until this ragtag group of refugees (Project Eugene included Poles, Jews, Germans, Italians, North Africans, Hungarians, Russians and Romanians) realized that their differences were their strengths. The collective sum of knowledge and creativity that grew from their diversity was far greater than any one of them could have achieved on their own.