The Rhine Parapsychology Laboratory

The botanist J. B. Rhine and his wife Louisa followed the psychologist William McDougall to Duke in 1927 and 1928, and by 1930 Rhine had begun a program of card-guessing and dice experiments intended to test extrasensory perception and psychokinesis under controlled, statistically analyzed conditions, a deliberate break from the seance-room methods of earlier psychical research. His 1934 book Extra-Sensory Perception popularized the term and made Duke, for several decades, the recognized center of experimental parapsychology in the United States, formalized as the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory in 1935 and given a peer-reviewed outlet in the Journal of Parapsychology from 1937.

Rhine reached Duke's mandatory retirement age in 1965 and, rather than let the program close with him, founded an independent nonprofit, the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man, which took the laboratory's records and continued its work outside the university; it was renamed the Rhine Research Center in 1995, the centenary of Rhine's birth, and still operates in Durham today as a body legally and financially separate from Duke, though closely identified with it in the public memory of the field. Duke's own psychology department no longer runs an active parapsychology program, and the university's relationship to the subject today is historical, the place where a controversial research tradition first tried to make itself into an experimental science.