by Laura Furman
He’d written to Muller a few times during graduate school, sending results that confirmed or extended Muller’s own and asking about his latest work. At a conference, Muller had tracked Sam down and inspected his most recent data closely; after that, they’d continued to correspond about interesting questions. If a quantum of light could, as Niels Bohr suggested, trigger photosynthesis, was it also the case that an individual ionization caused a mutation? Did chromosome breaks result from radiation’s direct or indirect effects? After Muller left Austin in the wake of a scandal involving his support of a Communist-leaning student newspaper, he went to Berlin, where, he wrote to Sam, he was collaborating with a brilliant Russian scientist who shared his interest in using the tools of physics to explore the nature of the gene. The work was intriguing, the company stimulating, but just as he was settling in, Hitler was appointed chancellor and soon his colleagues began to lose their jobs. Muller then accepted his Russian friend’s invitation to come help set up a research program and most recently had written to Sam from the Institute of Genetics in Leningrad.
Was it possible, Sam wrote him, that given his background and their shared interests, he could be of some use at the institute? Secretly, he thought they also shared a disgust with what was going on in their country, the mad inequities that seemed to be destroying every good thing. In Russia, Sam thought, science might assume its rightful role, and scientists, instead of being separated into little fiefdoms ruled by petty kings, would work under the shelter of the state, free to follow their best ideas. He was thrilled when Muller, so enthusiastic himself about the Soviet experiment, found money for a position in which Sam was, if not quite an independent investigator, more than a student.
Soon Sam was living in Leningrad, investigating chromosomal rearrangements and learning that many of the apparent point mutations caused by X-ray treatment were actually recombinations of broken fragments. Segments were lost, segments were duplicated; he began to get a sense of what size a gene might be, and how it might function when moved to a new position. What if natural mutations were actually rearrangements of the particles in the chromosomes, rather than changes to the particles themselves? Muller proved to be an excellent guide. Not a teacher, as Axel had been; not really a friend; he was clearly Sam’s boss, but he was accessible and kind, and Sam was thrilled to be working with someone he’d admired for so long.
It hardly mattered that, with housing short everywhere, Sam had to sleep in the corners of other scientists’ rooms, for a while in a bed behind a curtain in the laboratory, later in a basement hall. Everything was crowded, everyone was improvising; he was glad to be part of the common flow, and even the struggle to find supplies was worth it—such excitement! Such work, for such a purpose. Surrounded by Russians day and night, he learned the language quickly. And when the institute was moved to Moscow, Sam went too, leaving behind several friends and a woman with whom he’d had a brief affair.
Writing to his mother—he tried to write home twice a month—he described the farmers and engineers he met, the German Jews who’d sought refuge in the Soviet Union as the Nazis rose to power, the ardently socialist Englishmen and discontented Americans. He met men who’d soldiered in several wars, including one who’d fought Germans at the beginning of the Great War and then Americans, later, in Archangel, with the Reds. He showed me the white cotton overcoat he’d worn, Sam wrote, which had made him invisible in the snow. He claimed that once, as he’d been scrounging for food in the streets, he’d seen an American soldier leap from the top of a gigantic wooden toboggan run and onto the ice below. Really, I am living in the most remarkable place.
That winter, as the snow fell and fell—he was never warm, no one had enough fuel—Sam thought often of that soldier suspended in the air. Leaping from or leaping toward? For all the hardships of daily life here, he still felt freer than he had since his time in Axel’s lab, and he moved through Moscow with a sense he hadn’t had in years of everything being interesting. At the Medico-Genetics Institute he saw hundreds of pairs of identical twins—how eerie this was, each face doubled!—being studied like laboratory mice. He visited collective farms, and he met a geneticist named Elizaveta who’d discovered a remarkable mutant fly a few years before Sam arrived. Walking toward her bench was like walking into Axel’s lab for the first time, the air dense with the smells of ether and bananas and flies fried on lightbulbs, the atmosphere of delight. Elizaveta, who had long, narrow, blue-green eyes below the palest brows, said she knew that genes controlled development: but were they active all the time, or did each act only at a particular period of development, and lie dormant otherwise?
At meetings—so many meetings!—he listened to talks about the practical applications of genetics to agriculture and the Marxist implications of the theory of the gene. Once, in a dark room after a day of lectures, he watched a film called Salamandra, about an idealistic scientist who’d demonstrated Lamarckian inheritance in salamanders but then was betrayed by a sinister German who tampered with his specimens to make it look as though his results had been faked. Denounced, deprived of his job, he lived in exile until rescued by a farsighted Soviet commissar who proved his work had been right all along. Partway through, Sam grasped that this was a transposition of the life and fate of Kammerer, who’d killed himself after a researcher proved that some of his results had been faked. By then, his own big mistake seemed very far away.
Working all the time, excited by the new experiments in the lab, he ignored what was happening out on the streets until, after a while, even he couldn’t avoid knowing about the party members being persecuted and executed, those who disagreed with Stalin disappearing. Intellectuals and scientists from different fields began to disappear as well, including geneticists, some of them Sam’s own colleagues. The director of the twins study vanished and his institute was dissolved. Elizaveta, more cautious than some, gave her flies to Sam and then slipped away to her grandmother’s village. Geneticists had failed, Sam read, to serve the state by providing the collectives with new crops and livestock that could thrive in difficult climates and relieve the food shortages. They were stuck in bourgeois ways of thought. If a society could be transformed in a single generation, if the economy could be completely remade, why couldn’t the genetic heritage of crops or, for that matter, of man, be transformed as well?
In this context, Lamarck was a hero; and also Kammerer (Sam could see, now, why he’d been shown that film); and also the horticulturist Ivan Michurin, who’d claimed that through some kind of shock treatment he could transform the heredity of fruit trees, allowing growth farther north. Trofim Lysenko, pushy and uneducated, rose up from nowhere to extend Michurinism beyond what anyone else could have imagined. Lysenko hated fruit flies, he knew no mathematics, he found Mendelian genetics tedious, even his grasp of plant physiology was feeble. How could Sam take him seriously? Lysenko claimed that heredity was nothing so boringly fixed as the Mendelians said, but could be trained by the environment, endlessly improved. At a big meeting Sam attended at the end of 1936, Muller tried to rebuff Lysenko by clearly restating Mendelian genetics and outlining the institute’s research programs. Larmarckian inheritance, Muller explained, could not be reconciled with any of the evidence they’d found.
Sam was amazed when some in the audience actually hissed, and more so when, after Lysenko responded by dismissing all of formal genetics, those same people stood and cheered. Genetics was a harmful science, Lysenko said, not a science at all but a bourgeois distortion, a science of saboteurs. Muller and his like were wrecking socialism, preventing all progress, whereas he would now completely refashion heredity! His Russian was failing him, Sam kept thinking; Lysenko couldn’t be saying that what should be so, must be so. Yet his friends heard the same thing. Those who doubted him, Lysenko said, were criminal. A theory of heredity, to be correct, must promise not just the power to understand nature but the power to change it.
Muller, after making careful arrangements to protect his colleagues, left
the country early in 1937, and Sam followed a few weeks later, first destroying the papers and letters he’d received from his Russian friends. Of course I understand why you need me to return to the United States, he carefully wrote to his mother, who’d requested no such thing but could be counted on to understand that his letters were likely being read.
Back in Philadelphia, writing up his last results from the Moscow lab in the small bedroom where he’d slept as a child, the familiar sound of his mother working in the living room complicated by the movements of the two teachers with whom she now shared the house, Sam began another search for work. This time he had better luck, finding a position at a small college near the western edge of Illinois. For a while, as he was trying to set up yet another lab—how many times could a person order glassware, brushes, ether, drying racks, all the bits and pieces needed to do the smallest experiment?—he thought about changing fields entirely. If science in the United States was controlled by a few powerful people, and science in the Soviet Union was nothing but a branch of politics—then what was the point of doing anything? Perhaps he’d do better at farming, or statistics, or auto mechanics.
Soon enough, though, he got caught up in the life of a place that at first had felt to him like nowhere. His better students were curious and eager to learn, and he found—as perhaps Axel had found earlier; Sam longed to talk with him about this but couldn’t afford a trip east—that he had to hurl himself at a problem again, simply to give the students something to do. He started a genetics course in addition to his sections of general biology; he bought a little house with two large trees; he met a woman he liked, who planted vegetables in his backyard and taught him how to cook chard. The college gave him an excellent incubator, as well as some other crucial equipment. Through the fly-exchange network he was able to get some useful stock, which in turn put him in touch with many of the researchers trained in Morgan’s lab: not only Axel but also Harold and George (that was how he first met them) and, inevitably, Duncan, who immediately mailed to Sam’s new address all the papers he’d published while Sam was abroad. Once Sam solved some difficulties with mites and temperature fluctuations, he was back in business and, after hiring a couple of student helpers, began a new set of experiments. For one particular project, he used Elizaveta’s flies.
He’d smuggled breeding stock into the country, and when the cultures were established, he turned, with a sense of recovering his younger self, to investigating them. Like some of the curiosities naturalists had noticed and collected for years—crustaceans with legs where jaws or swimmerets should be, plants with petals transformed into stamens—Elizaveta’s flies shared the property that one organ in a segmental series had been transformed into another. How were those homeotic mutants produced? And were those variations heritable or caused by damage to the developing embryo? An acquaintance of Axel’s had discovered a true-breeding homeotic mutant he called bithorax, in which the little stabilizing structures normally found behind the fore-wings had been transformed into a second set of wings; Elizaveta had worked with that four-winged mutant, and also with an even odder one called aristapedia, which had legs growing where the antennae should be. Endlessly fascinating, Sam thought, and he began to investigate how a mutation to a single gene could cause such massive effects.
Months passed, a year of hard work passed; thousands of cultures and tens of thousands of flies. In the mutant, he learned, the antennal discs developed early, at the same time as the leg discs, allowing the evocator that normally instructed the leg discs to act on the antennal discs as well. Evocator: he loved that word. The chemical substance that acts as a stimulus in the developing embryo. How intriguing, how sensible, really, that the mutant gene didn’t build a leglike structure out of thin air. Instead it acted more simply and generally, altering the rate of development so that a whole pattern of growth occurred at a time and place where it ought not to be.
Others were working on this as well, but there was so much to do, along so many branching paths, that Sam had no sense of racing to solve a problem before someone else. Rather, the whole world seemed to shimmer, a delectable feeling he’d first had as a boy, working with Mr. Spacek: the act of throwing himself at one problem, this problem, lit up every other aspect of his experience in the world. Legs grew out of a fly’s head because of a small change in timing; would his life have been different if his father had died earlier, or later? If he hadn’t met Mr. Spacek when he did, or gone to college at sixteen and found Axel willing to teach him. If he hadn’t met Avery or Ellen, hadn’t met Duncan …
In this state of excitement, he’d gone to the congress, where he presented his results and then connected that work with Goldschmidt’s, with work on position effects and the possibility that the particles of heredity might move around, with the possibility that maybe all genetic changes were changes in development. Maybe genes weren’t particles after all, weren’t arranged like beads on a string, but were more like spiderwebs, susceptible to the influence of events in the cytoplasm; maybe they weren’t quite as impregnable to outside influence as previously thought? He aimed his ideas at his former Russian colleagues, who should have been there but weren’t; at Axel, who was there but had missed all the groundwork; at Muller, who’d found a temporary haven in Edinburgh and who, although distracted by the responsibilities of hosting the congress, still found time to come and listen to him. He sailed past his notes, avoiding the false paths of Kammerer and Lysenko, which, unlike most of his audience, he’d learned for himself, to speculate about the question of timing. When, in the course of development, might a tiny change cause massive later effects? Might inheritance not be far more complex than we’d guessed? When he finished speaking and looked out at the disgruntled faces in the audience—Duncan’s face was red, Axel was poking his notepad with a pencil, Muller was gazing at him quizzically—he had a separate thought, which had nothing to do with inheritance. The first big leap he’d taken, with Kammerer’s work, had turned out to be wrong. Was it possible that now no one could see the rightness of this second big leap, because of his first mistake?
Two bright white ships, crisp and military-looking with broad red stripes across their bows, came out of the distance to meet them when they were still several hundred miles from Halifax. Sailors from the coast guard cutters transferred food, which they needed badly—oranges! Sam saw, and apples and cheese, potatoes and meat, fresh bread!—along with toothbrushes and hairbrushes, soap, shampoo, donated clothing, more blankets. Two doctors, wanting to examine the wounded to see who might need the alignment of broken bones checked with their portable X-ray machine and who should be transferred to the cutters for care, also came aboard.
For the first time in more than a week, Sam brushed his hair, cleaned his teeth with something other than a finger, and along with everyone else dipped into the new supplies to spruce up for that night’s celebration. Officers from the cutters joined them, the captain extracted a case of whiskey from the hold, a few passengers did what they could to decorate the deck while others, beginning to believe now that they’d get home safely, began to relax. All around him, Sam saw groups of people, faces suddenly scrubbed shades lighter, smiling and talking with the friends they’d made on the journey. These women bound to those, these students to those sailors; the college girls—for him, still simply pleasant acquaintances—more closely attached to Duncan and Harold and George than he’d understood.
He felt, for a moment, unusually alone—more so when he saw that Axel, standing only a few feet away as the whiskey was handed around, was barricaded by Duncan and Harold and George. Fanning out from them were Laurel and Pansy and Maud, talking to a young man Sam hadn’t met; Lucinda, playing cards with the plant physiologist he’d first seen the day they were rescued; and Bessie and Aaron, sitting on one of the hatches, watching the constellations rise in the sky. Sam went over to Bessie’s side as Pansy asked the young man what he planned to do when he got home.
“I’m still in school,” he said shyly.
<
br /> Sam looked up, spotting the stars of Pegasus. He remembered sitting on his father’s shoulders, following the line of his arm as he traced out shapes overhead. Look at the horse, do you see the dolphin? There’s a whale … Or did he remember those shapes from other evenings, much later, with his mother?
“I’m an art student,” the young man continued. “I was traveling on a fellowship. But now …”
“You’ll go back when the war is over?” Maud asked.
“What’s the point?” he said. “Without my friend.”
As Sam continued to pick from the glitter overhead all the constellations he could remember, the student described how he and a dear friend from their school in Boston had split a traveling scholarship meant for one of them so that they could both see Europe. Despite their pinched budget and the signs of war cropping up everywhere, they’d visited Paris, Amsterdam, Verona, Venice, and even Berlin before returning to London, which they’d reached about the same time Sam reached Edinburgh. They too had found their ship home from Glasgow commandeered and later sailings either booked or canceled; they too had boarded the Athenia as a last resort. After the torpedo struck, he and his friend had managed to stay together in one of the last and most crowded lifeboats, which was also the most unlucky—the one that had swung too close to the Knute Nelson and been crushed by its propellers.