J. B. Rhine

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Joseph Banks Rhine (29 September 1895 – 20 February 1980), usually known as J. B. Rhine, was an American botanist and parapsychologist, widely regarded as the founder of laboratory-based parapsychology as a scientific discipline. He founded the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke University, the Journal of Parapsychology, the Parapsychological Association, and the organisation now known as the Rhine Research Center.

Early life and education

Rhine was born in Waterloo, Juniata County, Pennsylvania, the second of five children of Samuel Ellis Rhine and Elizabeth Ellen Vaughan Rhine. He served in the United States Marine Corps during the First World War before entering the University of Chicago in 1919, where he earned a B.S. in botany in 1922, an M.S. in 1923, and a Ph.D. in 1925. In 1920 he married fellow student Louisa Ella Weckesser, who as Louisa E. Rhine went on to become a noted parapsychologist in her own right, focusing on the collection of spontaneous, real-world psychic case reports rather than laboratory testing.

Path into psychical research

After graduating, Rhine briefly taught plant physiology at West Virginia University, where his interest in the paranormal first developed. In 1926, he studied mediumship cases at Harvard University alongside Walter Franklin Prince, including exposing fraud in the "Margery" (Mina Crandon) case. Drawn by the work of psychologist William McDougall, Rhine followed him first to Harvard and then, in 1927, to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he would remain for the rest of his career.

The Duke Parapsychology Laboratory

Rhine and McDougall established the Parapsychology Laboratory at Duke around 1930, conducting experiments into telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. Rhine's early card-guessing tests, using the Zener cards developed with colleague Karl Zener, became the laboratory's signature methodology, and his first standout subject, Duke student Adam Linzmayer, scored perfectly across a series of short trials in 1931.

In 1934, Rhine published Extra-Sensory Perception through the Boston Society for Psychic Research, summarising the lab's early findings and, per most accounts, coining the term "extra-sensory perception" itself. The book drew international attention to Rhine's work, and he became director of the Parapsychology Laboratory in 1940.

Institution-building

Beyond his own research, Rhine is credited with building much of the institutional foundation of modern parapsychology in the United States. He launched the Journal of Parapsychology in 1937, adopted the term "parapsychology" (translating a German term originally coined by Max Dessoir) in preference to the older "psychical research," and led the founding of the Parapsychological Association in 1957. Anticipating declining institutional support at Duke, he established the independent Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man in the early 1960s, which continues today as the Rhine Research Center. He retired from Duke in 1965.

Later life and death

Rhine continued directing the Institute for Parapsychology, the Foundation's research arm, from 1964 to 1968, and remained active in the field for the rest of his life. He died on 20 February 1980 in Hillsborough, North Carolina, shortly after being elected president of the Society for Psychical Research — a recognition of his standing in the field, arriving at the very end of his life.

Legacy and criticism

Rhine's results were never successfully replicated to the satisfaction of the wider scientific community, and his methodology drew sustained criticism throughout his career and afterward. Nonetheless, the institutions and experimental traditions he founded — from Zener card testing to the later ganzfeld work carried out at research centres including the University of Edinburgh — shaped the entire subsequent field of parapsychology, and "ESP" remains, by a wide margin, the most widely recognised term for claimed extrasensory ability in general public use.

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