Edward Murray East (October 4, 1879 – November 9, 1938) was an American plant geneticist, botanist, agronomist and eugenicist.

He worked at the Bussey Institute of Harvard University where he performed a key experiment showing the outcome of crosses between lines that differ in a quantitative trait.

[3] East was a prominent figure in early American genetics and a strong supporter of the eugenics movement in the United States.

[7] East wrote two major works on eugenics, Mankind at the Crossroads (1923) and Heredity and Human Affairs (1927), in which he compared groups of people based upon the racial categorizations of the time.

In his book Heredity and Human Affairs (1927), he made quite a few pointed comments against interbreeding and miscegenation in the human species, stating that "the negro race as a whole is possessed of undesirable transmissible qualities both physical and mental, which seem to justify not only a line but a wide gulf to be fixed permanently between it and the white race".

[5][7] Another principal concern of East's was the existing social policy, and his perception that it favored the "imbecile" over the "genius", and that the continued use of public funds to this end would have negligible value, if not directly causing harm.

[10] In 1919, Edward M. East and Donald F. Jones worked together on monographs on experimental biology, including a book on inbreeding and outbreeding and their genetic and sociological significance.

East and Jones explicitly considered inbreeding and outbreeding in man, their effect on the individual, and the intermingling of races and review the national stamina literature.

Believing with the Drosophila workers that most mutations were recessive and deleterious, East concluded that the increased homozygosity caused by inbreeding should generally be accompanied by detrimental effects.

He diligently studied his collection of birds' eggs, which he purchased with money he earned working at the local grocery store.

East was recommended to undertake the new work of improving the chemical compositions in corn, and accepted the appointment in Newhaven in 1905.