The Gene

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

  “I saw enough of savage races”: Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (Duisburg: Haniel-Stiftung, 2012), 176.

  “initiated into an entirely new province of knowledge”: Francis Galton to C. R. Darwin, December 9, 1859, https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/DCP-LETT-2573.xml.

  Galton tried transfusing rabbits: Daniel J. Fairbanks, Relics of Eden: The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), 219.

  “Man is born, grows up and dies”: Adolphe Quetelet, A Treatise on Man and the Development of His Faculties: Now First Translated into English, trans. T. Smibert (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5.

  He tabulated the chest breadth and height: Jerald Wallulis, The New Insecurity: The End of the Standard Job and Family (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 41.

  “Whenever you can”: Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 340.

  “Keenness of Sight and Hearing”: Sam Goldstein, Jack A. Naglieri, and Dana Princiotta, Handbook of Intelligence: Evolutionary Theory, Historical Perspective, and Current Concepts (New York: Springer, 2015), 100.

  To marshal further evidence, Galton began: Gillham, Life of Sir Francis Galton, 156.

  Galton published much of this data: Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (London: Macmillan, 1892).

  “You have made a convert”: Charles Darwin, More Letters of Charles Darwin: A Record of His Work in a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Letters, vol. 2 (New York: D. Appleton, 1903), 41.

  Galton called this the Ancestral Law of Heredity: John Simmons, The Scientific 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Scientists, Past and Present (Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996), “Francis Dalton,” 441.

  Basset Hound Club Rules, a compendium: Schwartz, In Pursuit of the Gene, 61.

  Two prominent biologists: Ibid., 131.

  But as Darbishire analyzed his own first-generation: Gillham, Life of Sir Francis Galton, “The Mendelians Trump the Biometricians,” 303–23.

  In the spring of 1905: Karl Pearson, Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, 1860–1906 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906), 48–49.

  trying . . . to rework the data to fit Galtonian theory: Ibid., 49.

  “To Weldon I owe the chief awakening of my life”: Schwartz, In Pursuit of the Gene, 143.

  “Each of us who now looks at his own patch”: William Bateson, Mendel’s Principles of Heredity: A Defence, ed. Gregor Mendel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1902), v.

  “We have only touched the edge”: Ibid., 208.

  “is second to no branch of science”: Ibid., ix.

  Johannsen shortened the word to gene: Johan Henrik Wanscher, “The history of Wilhelm Johannsen’s genetical terms and concepts from the period 1903 to 1926,” Centaurus 19, no. 2 (1975): 125–47.

  “Language is not only our servant”: Wilhelm Johannsen, “The genotype conception of heredity,” International Journal of Epidemiology 43, no. 4 (2014): 989–1000.

  “The science of genetics is so new”: Arthur W. Gilbert, “The science of genetics,” Journal of Heredity 5, no. 6 (1914): 235–44, http://archive.org/stream/journalofheredit05amer/journalofheredit05amer_djvu.txt.

  “the technology of the industrial revolution confirmed”: Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 3.

  “forces which bring greatness to the social group”: Problems in Eugenics: First International Eugenics Congress, 1912 (New York: Garland, 1984), 483.

  In the spring of 1904, Galton presented his argument: Paul B. Rich, Race and Empire in British Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 234.

  “introduced into national consciousness, like a new religion”: Papers and Proceedings—First Annual Meeting—American Sociological Society, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1906), 128.

  “All creatures would agree that it was better”: Francis Galton, “Eugenics: Its definition, scope, and aims,” American Journal of Sociology 10, no. 1 (1904): 1–25.

  “if unsuitable marriages from the eugenic point of view”: Andrew Norman, Charles Darwin: Destroyer of Myths (Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword, 2013), 242.

  Henry Maudsley, the psychiatrist: Galton, “Eugenics,” comments by Maudsley, doi:10.1017/s0364009400001161.

  “He had five brothers,” Maudsley noted: Ibid., 7.

  “It is in the sterilization of failure”: Ibid., comments by H. G. Wells; and H. G. Wells and Patrick Parrinder, The War of the Worlds (London: Penguin Books, 2005).

  “A pleasant sort o’ soft woman”: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1960), 12.

  In 1911, Havelock Ellis, Galton’s colleague: Lucy Bland and Laura L. Doan, Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), “The Problem of Race-Regeneration: Havelock Ellis (1911).”

  On July 24, 1912: R. Pearl, “The First International Eugenics Congress,” Science 36, no. 926 (1912): 395–96, doi:10.1126/science.36.926.395.

  Davenport’s 1911 book: Charles Benedict Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: Holt, 1911).

  Van Wagenen suggested, and “they are totally”: First International Eugenics Congress, Problems in Eugenics (1912; repr., London: Forgotten Books, 2013), 464–65.

  “We endeavor to keep track”: Ibid., 469.

  “Three Generations of Imbeciles Is Enough”

  If we enable the weak and the deformed: Theodosius G. Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man (New York: New American Library, 1966), 158.

  And from deformed [parents] deformed [offspring]: Aristotle, History of Animals, Book VII, 6, 585b28–586a4.

  In the spring of 1920, Emmett Adaline Buck: Many of the details of the Buck family story are from J. David Smith, The Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Liberty Corner, NJ: New Horizon Press, 1989).

  Her husband, Frank Buck: Much of the information in this chapter is from Paul Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

  A cursory mental examination: “Buck v. Bell,” Law Library, American Law and Legal Information, http://law.jrank.org/pages/2888/Buck-v-Bell-1927.html.

  Of these, an idiot was the easiest to classify: Mental Defectives and Epileptics in State Institutions: Admissions, Discharges, and Patient Population for State Institutions for Mental Defectives and Epileptics, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1937).

  On January 23, 1924: “Carrie Buck Committed (January 23, 1924),” Encyclopedia Virginia, http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Carrie_Buck_Committed_January_23_1924.

  On March 28, 1924: Ibid.

  “Moron, Middle Grade”: Stephen Murdoch, IQ: A Smart History of a Failed Idea (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007), 107.

  Carrie Buck was asked to appear: Ibid., “Chapter 8: From Segregation to Sterilization.”

  On March 29, 1924, with Priddy’s help: “Period during which sterilization occurred,” Virginia Eugenics, doi:www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/VA/VA.html.

  “Do you care to say anything”: Lombardo, Three Generations, 107.

  “A cross between”: Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Scribner’s, 1916).

  “the menace of race deterioration”: Carl Campbell Brigham and Robert M. Yerkes, A Study of American Intelligence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1923), “Foreword.”

  “The Eugenic ravens are croaking”: A. G. Cock and D. R. Forsdyke, Treasure Your Exceptions: The Science and Life of William Bateson (New York: Springer, 2008), 437–38n3.

  “It is better for all the world”: Jerry Menikoff, Law and Bioethics: An Introduction (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2001), 41.

  “Three generations of imbeciles is enough: Ibid.

  In 1927, the state of Indiana passed: Public Welfare in Indiana 68–75 (1907)
: 50. In 1907, a new law passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor of Indiana provided for the involuntary sterilization of “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” Although it was eventually found to be unconstitutional, this law is widely regarded as the first eugenics sterilization legislation passed in the world. In 1927, a revised law was implemented and before it was repealed in 1974, over 2,300 of the state’s most vulnerable citizens were involuntarily sterilized. In addition, Indiana established a state-funded Committee on Mental Defectives that carried out eugenic family studies in over twenty counties and was home to an active “better babies” movement that encouraged scientific motherhood and infant hygiene as routes to human improvement. http://www.iupui.edu/~eugenics/.

  Better Babies Contests: Laura L. Lovett, “Fitter Families for Future Firesides: Florence Sherbon and Popular Eugenics,” Public Historian 29, no. 3 (2007): 68–85.

  “You should score 50% for heredity”: Charles Davenport to Mary T. Watts, June 17, 1922, Charles Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society Archives, Philadelphia, PA. Also see Mary Watts, “Fitter Families for Future Firesides,” Billboard 35, no. 50 (December 15, 1923): 230–31.

  In 1927, a film called Are You Fit to Marry?: Martin S. Pernick and Diane B. Paul, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  PART TWO: “IN THE SUM OF THE PARTS, THERE ARE ONLY THE PARTS”

  “In the Sum of the Parts”: Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), “On the Road Home,” 203–4.

  It was when I said: Ibid.

  “Abhed”

  I am the family face: Thomas Hardy, The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (Ware, Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth Poetry Library, 2002), “Heredity,” 204–5.

  In 1907, when William Bateson visited: William Bateson, “Facts limiting the theory of heredity,” in Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Zoology, vol. 7 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Warehouse, 1912).

  “Morgan is a blockhead”: Schwartz, In Pursuit of the Gene, 174.

  “Cell biologists look; geneticists count; biochemists clean”: Arthur Kornberg, author interview, 1993.

  “We are interested in heredity not primarily”: “Review: Mendelism up to date,” Journal of Heredity 7, no 1 (1916): 17–23.

  Walter Sutton, a grasshopper-collecting farm boy: David Ellyard, Who Discovered What When (Frenchs Forest, New South Wales, Australia: New Holland, 2005), “Walter Sutton and Theodore Boveri: Where Are the Genes?”

  In 1905, using cells from the common mealworm: Stephen G. Brush, “Nettie M. Stevens and the Discovery of Sex Determination by Chromosome,” Isis 69, no. 2 (1978): 162–72.

  The students called his laboratory the Fly Room: Ronald William Clark, The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea (New York: Random House, 1984), 279.

  He had visited Hugo de Vries’s: Russ Hodge, Genetic Engineering: Manipulating the Mechanisms of Life (New York: Facts On File, 2009), 42.

  For Morgan, this genetic linkage: Thomas Hunt Morgan, The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity (New York: Holt, 1915), “Chapter 3: Linkage.”

  genes had to be physically linked to each other: Morgan was exceptionally lucky in choosing fruit flies for his experiments, since flies have an unusually low number of chromosomes—just four. If flies had multiple chromosomes, linkage might have been much harder to prove.

  It was a material thing: Thomas Hunt Morgan, “The Relation of Genetics to Physiology and Medicine,” Nobel Lecture (June 4, 1934), in Nobel Lectures, Physiology and Medicine, 1922–1941 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1965), 315.

  The czarina of Russia, Alexandra: Daniel L. Hartl and Elizabeth W. Jones, Essential Genetics: A Genomics Perspective (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 2002), 96–97.

  Grigory Rasputin: Helen Rappaport, Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2003), “Hemophilia.”

  Rasputin was poisoned: Andrew Cook, To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2005), “The End of the Road.”

  On the evening of July 17, 1918: “Alexei Romanov,” History of Russia, http://historyofrussia.org/alexei-romanov/.

  In 2007, an archaeologist: “DNA Testing Ends Mystery Surrounding Czar Nicholas II Children,” Los Angeles Times, March 11, 2009.

  Truths and Reconciliations

  All changed, changed utterly: William Butler Yeats, Easter, 1916 (London: Privately printed by Clement Shorter, 1916).

  In 1909, a young mathematician: Eric C. R. Reeve and Isobel Black, Encyclopedia of Genetics (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2001), “Darwin and Mendel United: The Contributions of Fisher, Haldane and Wright up to 1932.”

  In 1918, Fisher published: Ronald Fisher, “The Correlation between Relatives on the Supposition of Mendelian Inheritance,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 52 (1918): 399–433.

  Hugo de Vries had proposed that mutations: Hugo de Vries, The Mutation Theory; Experiments and Observations on the Origin of Species in the Vegetable Kingdom, trans. J. B. Farmer and A. D. Darbishire (Chicago: Open Court, 1909).

  In the 1930s, Theodosius Dobzhansky: Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), “From Laboratory to Field: Evolutionary Genetics.”

  In September 1943, Dobzhansky: Th. Dobzhansky, “Genetics of natural populations IX. Temporal changes in the composition of populations of Drosophila pseudoobscura,” Genetics 28, no. 2 (1943): 162.

  Dobzhansky could demonstrate it experimentally: Details of Dobzhansky’s experiments are sourced from Theodosius Dobzhansky, “Genetics of natural populations XIV. A response of certain gene arrangements in the third chromosome of Drosophila pseudoobscura to natural selection,” Genetics 32, no. 2 (1947): 142; and S. Wright and T. Dobzhansky, “Genetics of natural populations; experimental reproduction of some of the changes caused by natural selection in certain populations of Drosophila pseudoobscura,” Genetics 31 (March 1946): 125–56.

  Transformation

  If you prefer an “academic life”: H. J. Muller, “The call of biology,” AIBS Bulletin 3, no. 4 (1953). Copy with handwritten notes, http://libgallery.cshl.edu/archive/files/c73e9703aa1b65ca3f4881b9a2465797.jpg.

  We do deny that: Peter Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century (Simon & Schuster, 2008), 209.

  Grand Synthesis: Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, The Evolutionary Synthesis: Perspectives on the Unification of Biology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).

  Transformation was discovered: William K. Purves, Life, the Science of Biology (Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2001), 214–15.

  Griffith performed an experiment: Werner Karl Maas, Gene Action: A Historical Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 59–60.

  “this tiny man who . . . barely spoke above a whisper”: Alvin Coburn to Joshua Lederberg, November 19, 1965, Rockefeller Archives, Sleepy Hollow, NY, http://www.rockarch.org/.

  Griffith published his data: Fred Griffith, “The significance of pneumococcal types,” Journal of Hygiene 27, no. 2 (1928): 113–59.

  In 1920, Hermann Muller: “Hermann J. Muller—biographical,” http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1946/muller-bio.html.

  accumulated mutations—dozens of them: H. J. Muller, “Artificial transmutation of the gene,” Science 22 (July 1927): 84–87.

  In Darwin’s scheme: James F. Crow and Seymour Abrahamson, “Seventy years ago: Mutation becomes experimental,” Genetics 147, no. 4 (1997): 1491.

  “There is no permanent status quo in nature”: Jack B. Bresler, Genetics and Society (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1973), 15.

  struck him as frankly sinister: Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, “A New Eugenics,” 251–68.

/>   befriended the novelist and social activist Theodore Dreiser: Sam Kean, The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code (Boston: Little, Brown, 2012), 33.

  The FBI launched: William DeJong-Lambert, The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research: An Introduction to the Lysenko Affair (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 30.

  Lebensunwertes Leben (Lives Unworthy of Living)

  He wanted to be God: Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 359.

  A hereditarily ill person costs 50,000 reichsmarks: Susan Bachrach, “In the name of public health—Nazi racial hygiene,” New England Journal of Medicine 351 (2004): 417–19.

  Nazism, the biologist Fritz Lenz once said: Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, Human Heredity (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1931), 417. Also used by Hess, Hitler’s deputy, the phrase was originally coined by Fritz Lenz as part of a review of Mein Kampf.

  had coined the phrase as early as 1895: Alfred Ploetz. Grundlinien Einer RassenHygiene (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1895); and Sheila Faith Weiss, “The race hygiene movement in Germany,” Osiris 3 (1987): 193–236.

  In 1914, Ploetz’s colleague Heinrich Poll: Heinrich Poll, “Über Vererbung beim Menschen,” Die Grenzbotem 73 (1914): 308.

  Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology: Robert Wald Sussman, The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), “Funding of the Nazis by American Institutes and Businesses,” 138.

  Hitler, imprisoned for leading the Beer Hall Putsch: Harold Koenig, Dana King, and Verna B. Carson, Handbook of Religion and Health (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 294.

  Sterilization Law: US Chief Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, vol. 5 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1946), document 3067-PS, 880–83 (English translation accredited to Nuremberg staff; edited by GHI staff).

  Films such as Das Erbe: “Nazi Propaganda: Racial Science,” USHMM Collections Search, http://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/fv3857.