by Laura Furman
But he wanted to work, simply to work, and he tried to stay focused on that. The old wooden house where he bunked that summer was less than a block from the lab, surrounded by sand and scrubby pines, but during his first weeks he went there only to sleep. Every minute he could steal from his course and his jobs he spent designing an experiment that might prove or disprove what Kammerer contended. Instead of Kammerer’s slow-growing salamanders and midwife toads, Sam decided to use his swiftly reproducing flies. And he’d work with their eyes, not only because variations in eye color had been the first and best-documented of the mutations observed in fruit flies but also because eyes and their development had always been central to these discussions.
He used fly cultures he’d kept for Axel, techniques he’d learned in his lab, a procedure he’d seen Duncan do in a different context. With a needle he ground to a very sharp point and then heated, he touched—just touched—the center of the red eye of a lightly etherized female fly; then he touched the other eye and laid the fly on a dry piece of paper, which he put into a little vial. A couple of hours later, he transferred the treated flies to a food bottle. In the few that survived the procedure he watched how the Malpighian tubules, which worked rather like kidneys, turned deep red and stayed that way. So: injury to one organ, the eye, caused what appeared to be a permanent change in another organ: an acquired characteristic.
Later, he mated the treated females to normal males and proceeded as usual. Amid the next generation he found a few mutants—yellow body, narrow eyes, twisted penis—as expected. And also, unexpectedly, seventeen flies, both male and female, with red Malpighian tubules. This was peculiar, and completely interesting: what did it mean? Immediately, he started breeding these to each other. None of their offspring showed the red tubules, but that might mean nothing; the trait was likely recessive, and he had only a small sample.
Duncan and most of the other students had a sense of what he was doing; they wandered in and out of the open labs and they all talked not only while they worked but also during their outings. Still, no one knew the details until the director asked him to give a presentation at one of the season’s last Friday-night gatherings. He was nervous when he spoke—undergraduates were rarely asked to speak in front of the whole community—and he referred to earlier work that he hoped might support his own. In particular, a recent symposium that many in his audience had attended and that had examined this crucial question: could an injury to one generation cause an effect that was inherited by the next?
Swiftly, he moved through those other researchers’ results. One had demonstrated the transmission of acquired eye defects in rabbits, which seemed to have the characteristics of a Mendelian recessive. Others had shown what seemed to be inheritable effects of injury from alcohol, lead, radium, and X-rays. Perhaps, though, this was parallel induction: had a physical agent acted simultaneously on both the germ cells and the somatic cells, producing changes independently in each, or had the change induced in the body actually affected the germ cell? Which was the mechanism at work with Sam’s flies, and would either case argue for evolution directly guided by the environment? Sam saw Duncan in the audience, listening intently and taking notes, although he didn’t ask any questions afterward. Other hands did wave, though, and Sam was pleased with the way he guided the passionate, occasionally contentious, but civil discussion that followed.
In September, when he returned to college and reported all this to Axel, Axel shook his head and said he wished Sam had consulted him before throwing himself at such a controversial issue. He should never, Axel said, have presented this to so many eminent scientists before testing his hypotheses more thoroughly. Then he said that while he didn’t yet trust Sam’s results, they were intriguing and Sam should push the work forward. He’d supply the flies and the other materials; when the time came, he’d help Sam write up the results. “Although it would have been better,” he added, “if you’d done even more while you were still there.”
“I should have,” Sam admitted.
And would have, he knew, if he hadn’t gotten involved with Ellen. Four years Sam’s senior, presently working as a biology instructor at Smith, she’d spent the previous year in England, where she’d cut off her hair, befriended several brilliant women, and taken up feminism and eugenics. One opinion she held strongly was that exceptionally intelligent people—“Like you,” she said to Sam, during a collecting trip at Quisset, “and me”—should have children together, which would improve the world. Later, she and Sam decanted their specimens side by side, and a few nights after that, when a crowd of students got drunk on the beer two chemists had brewed, they ended up entwined in the dusty wooden attic over the supply room.
The next day, when Sam apologized for what had happened, Ellen calmly claimed it as her own idea and said Sam had only done what she wanted. At the beach, she wore a daring wool-jersey bathing suit that clung to her wiry shape and ended midthigh, the white trim disturbingly like underwear, and when she swam, she looked to Sam, with her close-cropped hair, like one of the elegant spiraling clam worms he collected at night. He had no idea how he felt about her; he was nineteen, and she let him make love to her. Sam couldn’t imagine why.
“Because I want to have several children, starting soon,” she told him. “And you’re such a good specimen. You’re tall”—here she tapped one of Sam’s fingers—“big-boned and bright”—tap, tap—“hardworking, sturdy, even-tempered.”
By then she was working on Sam’s second hand, having thrust the first inside her blouse. His hands on her small, pointed breasts, his mouth in the hollow of her throat, her bony feet on his back. He was completely inexperienced when they met; he was astounded. For the last two weeks of his stay at Woods Hole he was with Ellen every night. If I’m pregnant, she said the day they parted, we’ll get married. If not—
Not, as it turned out, although they met as often as they could during Sam’s last year of college, several times near Sam and twice in Massachusetts, the second time just after Duncan proved him wrong.
What kind of a person would, in utter secrecy, interrupt his own project to replicate a fellow worker’s experiments and doublecheck his results? Duncan published a paper noting that the preliminary results of a young student investigator—here he named Sam—presented orally and informally had sufficiently interested him to push those experiments further. When he did, he found that in flies whose eyes had been burned, the Malpighian tubules indeed turned red, and that a small number of the offspring of those flies also had red tubules.
But he also saw something Sam had failed to see, perhaps because he’d been so absorbed with Ellen. In his early work in Morgan’s lab, Duncan had occasionally noticed—or so he wrote; Sam wondered if it wasn’t Morgan himself who saw this—larvae feeding on the eyes of dead flies that had fallen on the food at the bottom of the culture bottle; this had colored the intestines of the larvae red. After seeing the initial data (and this did sound like him; he could test a chain of reasoning like a crow pulling at the weak spots in a carcass), Duncan had suddenly wondered if the pigment might be carried through the pupa stage, possibly appearing in the adult fly.
He crushed the eyes of some flies, mixed them with yeast and agar from a culture bottle, and added larvae; their intestines soon became filled with the red food, and a bit later the Malpighian tubules, visible through the larval walls, became deep red. The larvae pupated; adults emerged; their tubules too were red. Variations with different foods showed clearly that some component of the red pigment in the crushed eyes passed from the digestive tract of the larvae into the Malpighian tubules and remained there into the adult stage. Sam’s larvae had eaten the damaged eyes of dead flies and that—not a response to the injury itself—had colored their tubules. Sam had found not an acquired characteristic, but simply a transient response to diet. Acquired characteristics were not—could not be, Duncan said—inherited.
Sam was wrong, he’d been proven wrong, but at first that didn’t seem so serio
us—why would people hold his curiosity against him? He was young, he was enthusiastic; he’d seen a big question in Kammerer’s work and explored it open-mindedly, trying to follow the data rather than his own preconceptions; he’d shared his findings honestly. Leaving Woods Hole for his last year of college, he’d sensed that others saw him as a wonderfully promising student, welcome anywhere. Six months later, the recent work he’d done in Axel’s lab rendered pointless by Duncan’s paper, those same people seemed to regard him as a dubious young man who’d overreached himself. Even Axel, after reading the copy Duncan sent specially to him, a little handwritten note—“I’m sorry”—scrawled at the top, groaned and went for a long walk before sitting down with Sam.
“I should have seen that,” Axel said when he returned. “If you’d kept in touch with me over the summer, if we’d been talking about your experimental design … I should have seen that before Duncan did.” Sam couldn’t tell whether Axel was more angry at himself for missing it or proud of having taught Duncan so well.
In the wake of that paper, Sam knew he wouldn’t be welcome at Columbia, where everyone had assumed he’d follow Axel and Duncan to graduate school. But with Axel’s help he found a place in a small program in Wisconsin, run by a sound but middling geneticist. Not one of Morgan’s golden boys, like Bridges or Sturtevant; not even someone at the top of the second tier (which was how Axel disparagingly characterized himself), but a man who knew he was lucky to have a lab and the funding for a few graduate students.
Sam spent that last summer in Axel’s lab, maintaining the cultures and leaving everything in order for Axel’s next helper, wishing, all the time, that he could be discussing new projects with Axel. But Axel, collaborating with a friend in Texas, was seldom there, and Ellen, who might have helped him settle into his new life, instead did the reverse. If she’d gotten pregnant during his last year of college, nothing, Sam knew, could have wedged them apart—but she didn’t, and didn’t, and when summer came and she still wasn’t pregnant, they didn’t see each other for several months. In August, she backed out of her offer to drive to Wisconsin with him, and before Thanksgiving she was gone.
For a long time, Sam was able to avoid her. His luck ran out after seven years, at a big meeting in Washington where Duncan received a prestigious award. Sam was moving toward the back of the auditorium, having just heard a talk by a maize geneticist and hoping to escape before Duncan spoke. He ran into Ellen in the middle of the aisle, herding two boys and a girl, all recognizably Duncan’s, toward the special seats at the front set aside for the prizewinner’s family. She introduced the children awkwardly and asked how Sam was doing.
“Fine,” Sam said. “Just finishing my thesis.” She and Duncan had married before he’d even started that work. After which Axel, as if inspired by them, had married a mathematician he’d met in Texas, moved to a leafy street twenty minutes from the college, and promptly produced a son.
“We miss you at Woods Hole,” she said.
“Handsome boys,” he said, avoiding their eyes.
Tugging at her younger son’s collar, bending to adjust the skirt on the dark-haired little girl who’d inherited her reedy arms and legs, Ellen said that she and Duncan went back every year, always with the children, who loved it. But nothing had ever been as wonderful as her second summer there. When, Sam knew by then, she’d already left him but he didn’t know it. When she and Duncan had both returned and Sam, in the shadow of his big failure, had been unable to join them.
On the lifeboat, before the sun rose, when the night was at its coldest and the waves were tossing them about and when, having long since thrown up everything he’d eaten the previous day, Sam was retching painfully and Bessie’s hand was lightly patting the back of his neck, he had thought about his calm hand bringing the needle’s point so lightly, so deftly, to each Drosophila eye. How the flies’ wounds had sometimes stuck to the food, and to each other; how those that lived were weak for several days, some unable to eat. Here on the ship, shaken about like a fly in a test tube, he too was having trouble eating. One evening he learned that while most of the geneticists who’d been on the Athenia with him had been picked up by the British destroyers, two were apparently lost. And on the eighth day of the crossing, while he scored patterns in the oatmeal that was one of the few things left to eat, Sam learned that the little girl who’d been in a coma had finally died.
Gloom spread through the ship as each seating heard the news, and later Sam saw Bessie, near the bow, comforting her son, Aaron, who was crying. He and the girl had been friends, Sam thought, or at least known each other the way children even of different ages do when confined together. He couldn’t stop himself from walking over to Aaron and squatting down beside him. He rested his hand on Aaron’s back, his fingertips moving gently.
“Shh,” he said. “It’s all right.” Which was what he’d said in the boat, when Aaron was so cold and sick that he was crying. Also this was what Bessie had said to Sam. Now she said, “He’s taking this very hard.”
“Were they close?” Sam asked. The two geneticists who’d drowned, husband and wife, had worked at a small Minnesota college and traveled only rarely to international gatherings. Sam hadn’t met them at the congress, but he had on the ship, and he’d envied them when they came down hand in hand to what would be their last dinner. Axel had said, at that same meal, how much he’d been missing his wife and son.
“She took him for walks around the deck, when she was bored,” Bessie said, gesturing toward their own crowded railings, so packed with passengers eager for air—they were expecting rain—that strolling was out of the question. “They played make-believe. You know, the way children will: I’ll be the mommy and you be the little boy, and I’ll get you ready for school …”
“She sounds sweet,” Sam said. The figures crowding the railings separated, moved together again, bunched, and dispersed, long lines forming only to condense into shorter segments.
“Not always—once she pinched him hard enough to leave a mark.”
Aaron shrugged off Sam’s hand and pushed himself more firmly into Bessie’s legs. “Do you have children?” she asked, smoothing her son’s hair.
“I don’t,” Sam said, and if Duncan and Harold hadn’t joined them just then, he might have told Bessie how pained he’d been when he understood that he likely never would have any. Ellen, who couldn’t get pregnant with him, had gotten pregnant instantly with Duncan; no woman he’d been with since had had so much as a scare. Sometimes, when he’d had too much to drink (throughout Prohibition, he and his friends had always had access to lab ethanol), he used to joke around with a toothpick-and-gumdrop figure he called Mr. Heredity. Look at me! he’d have the figure say. Interested since childhood in how we inherit traits, but I can’t reproduce! But although he laughed as hard as anyone when Mr. Heredity drooped his gumdrop head, later, when he began to grasp the fact that no one would ever have his hair or his blocky nose, his height or his big hands, he felt quite otherwise. The day his heart stopped, the day he got hit by a bus (the day a torpedo sank the ship that was taking him home), everything that had led to his father and mother and converged in him would be extinguished.
But here were his colleagues, bearing down. He managed a smile as they greeted him and, looking at Bessie and Aaron, asked if they could do anything to help. Sam introduced them only by name, without explaining how he knew them.
“We’re fine,” Bessie said.
Impossible to focus on her and Duncan at the same time. Instead, Sam kept his eyes on the unusually turbulent sky. Great, soft, gray clouds piled one atop the other, pushing each other aside like wrestling dogs.
Bessie said, looking only at him, “Margaret’s death made Aaron miss his father more than usual. He keeps thinking something’s happened to him, that he won’t be there when we get home. Those men we saw in the water …” She picked Aaron up and left.
Duncan watched them walk away and then turned back to Sam, eyes bright with curiosity. “
You were in the same lifeboat?”
Sam nodded. He’d told Duncan nothing about the night in the boat; what Duncan knew of the torpedo, the flames, the boats in the water, he knew from other survivors, not from him.
“If you ever want to talk,” Duncan said, pushing aside his floppy hair, “I’m happy to listen.”
After Sam graduated from college, he mostly kept his work to himself. Axel, busy with his new wife and son, also had new students to train and increasingly relied on his connection to Duncan, who was doing very well as part of his advisor’s group. Duncan and his colleagues shared fly strains with Axel’s lab; Axel and his students collaborated on papers with them, which helped them all. Sam worked alone, steadily and quietly, throughout his years in graduate school, doing nothing without his advisor’s explicit approval, choosing a thesis project closer to his advisor’s heart than to his own and committing to it entirely. He kept in close touch with Avery, who’d gone to England by then, and Avery helped him modify an X-ray source so he could radiate his Drosophila and look for mutations. The experiments he completed were nowhere near as flashy as Muller’s work in this area, nor did he and his advisor gather anywhere near as much data—they were working along parallel tracks at first and then, after Muller had yet another big breakthrough, in support of what he’d already shown—but Sam knew it was solid work, a bandage for his dented reputation. By 1930, when he got his degree, he was able, despite the growing effects of the crash, to find a position in Missouri. In between teaching sections of general biology, he worked every spare minute in his own lab, grateful for what he’d been able to salvage and trying not to envy Duncan, who had followed his advisor out to California and had a much better job.
Half his salary he sent to his mother, who, in the wake of both her parents’ deaths, had taken in boarders but even so was still struggling to hang on to the Philadelphia house. When he lost his job in 1933, he knew she felt the blow too. Although he wrote to everyone he’d ever met, there were no positions to be had. Axel, who temporarily had to close his own lab, could find him nothing, and Duncan couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help, despite being the protégé of someone who’d just won a Nobel Prize. When Sam had nothing to lose and was on the verge of going back home, he appealed to the man whose paper had so inspired him during his first year of college, and in whose field he now worked.