The Population Council attained its 40th anniversary in 1992 and received the 1992 United Nations Population Award in recognition of its ‘‘most outstanding contribution to the awareness of population questions and to their solutions’’. The Population Council is an international non-profit organisation that applies science and technology to the understanding of population problems in developing countries, with an annual budget of more than forty million US dollars. It has a central office and biomedical laboratories in New York city, 16 regional and country offices around the world, and it maintains population programmes in some 50 developing countries. The programmes cover a range of research and its applications in social and health science in developing countries, including the themes of the factors that affect population change, family planning and fertility, reproductive health and child survival, contraceptive development and introduction, and reproductive physiology.
Past presidents include Frederick Osborn, John D Rockefeller III and Frank W Notestein, all well known to readers of this Newsletter, and most recently George Zeidenstein. Its 6th president took over on 1 January 1993. The new president is Margaret Catley-Carlson, Canadian Deputy Minister for Health and Welfare, who looks forward to bringing better family health, including fertility management, to substantially greater numbers of the world’s families. She is on record as saying ‘‘it will be the family size decisions of today’s largest ever generation of teenagers - and their children - that determine whether the world’s population doubles again as it has since 1950. This need not happen.’’
Note: The Population Council's website is at http://www.popcouncil.org/. Recent (September 2006) items include an announcement of a report on Immigration and Ethnic Change in Low-Fertility Countries: A Third Demographic Transition by Professor David Coleman, at one time Honorary Secretary of the Galton Institute.