Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Kammerer, who was something of a showman, drew big conclusions from his work. In 1924 he wrote a visionary book, The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics, about how his theories could be harnessed to the betterment of human society. Improve the material conditions of life, and people would give birth to a generation of children superior in every way to their parents! Lamarckism made us ‘captains of the future’. Mendelian genetics offered only a shuffling of existing characteristics: it made us ‘slaves of the past’.

  Paul Kammerer’s work took him all over the world, and he received an enthusiastic reception from the New York Times when he toured the United States in 1923. In Russia, Kammerer’s claims were met with even greater keenness and interest. His huge treatise on general biology appeared in translation in 1925. Two years later Efim Smirnov discussed Pavlov’s and Kammerer’s experiments at length in a major survey of ‘the problem of the inheritance of acquired characteristics’, and two different publishers released Kammerer’s book The Enigma of Heredity in translation. And Russia’s enthusiasm for Kammerer extended beyond the page: in 1926 the Communist Academy invited Kammerer to head a special laboratory, affiliated to Pavlov’s institute, to look into the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Kammerer accepted the offer. He had already met young Moscow enthusiasts of his work, and discussed the possibilities for research in the Soviet Union with Anatoly Lunacharsky, the education commissar.

  (Later, discussing the controversy between genetics and Lamarckism, Lunacharsky confessed: ‘I am not sufficiently qualified in biology to be able to say right now and for sure whether one side or the other in this dispute is absolutely right. But it is hard to discount worldwide sympathy for advocates of the idea that the living organism depends directly on the environment for its hereditary characteristics.’9)

  Kammerer’s equipment had already been shipped to Moscow, and he was literally just a couple of days from boarding a train there himself when controversy and disaster overwhelmed him, in the guise of a paper in Nature by the American Gladwyn K. Noble – a paper that presented incontrovertible evidence that his most celebrated experiment was a fraud.

  The experimental animals at the heart of this controversy were toads. Kammerer’s latest experiments took advantage of a peculiarity of the species Alytes obstetricus, which, unlike other toad species, mates on dry land.

  Toads that mate in water have slippery skins and, prior to the mating season, the male toad grows small spines along the edges of his palms and fingers of his hands to give him some extra grip. They are quite distinctive because, being heavily pigmented with melanin, they are darker than the surrounding tissue. Kammerer had run a breeding programme, forcing several generations of Alytes obstetricus to breed in water, and he reckoned he had produced a generation of toads whose males sported pigmented spines along their hands.

  The problem was in demonstrating his achievement. All he could do was preserve his animals and cart them around Europe, as carefully as he could, from laboratory to laboratory – and this is what he did. In Cambridge and in London he delivered enthusiastic, competent lectures about his research, while the scientific community, led by the British geneticist William Bateson, conducted a sceptical study of his jarred specimens. No one doubted Kammerer’s technical skill or his integrity. Breeding amphibians in captivity was not for the faint-hearted (Bateson, who spent fourteen years battling Kammerer’s claims, marvelled that he had managed to breed Alytes at all). Neither Bateson nor anyone else doubted Kammerer’s dedication to his work.10

  The longer Kammerer travelled, the faster his specimens began to deteriorate. Phenomena that were subtle in the first place now became virtually impossible to study. It was clear that the toads would only withstand one more inspection – so it had better be a good one.

  In 1926 Gladwyn Noble, from the American Museum of Natural History, went to Vienna. With Kammerer’s head of department, Hans Prizbram, he made a detailed examination of Kammerer’s celebrated toad – and discovered that the black pigmentation in its ‘nuptial pads’ was not melanin, or anything like it. It was Indian ink.

  The fraud was so crude, several conspiracy theories have been thrown up to explain it. Was a rival out to discredit Paul Kammerer? Had Kammerer’s imminent departure for the Soviet Union triggered a reactionary smear campaign? Or had an enthusiastic but hapless junior ‘touched up’ his boss’s ever-more-putrid specimen?

  We will never be sure. As soon as Noble’s paper was published, on 7 August, Kammerer shut up shop. He wrote to the Soviet authorities and withdrew from his Moscow postings. The deception was not his, he wrote, but his position had been made untenable. On 23 September 1926, he set off along a mountain path in the Alps, found a quiet spot, drew a revolver, and shot himself in the head.11

  Kammerer’s death only heightened the scandal surrounding his name. Those who knew him were not altogether surprised at his fate. Lunacharsky put the matter delicately: ‘On the other hand, there were quiet rumours about the other, dark sides of Kammerer’s life, its social and family aspects, etc.’12

  Kammerer’s manic depression had been tripping him up for years. A string of affairs had disordered his personal life quite severely before he was ever invited to Russia. His first marriage had broken up, and his second lasted hardly any time at all. Even as Noble’s paper was going to press, Kammerer’s lover, Grete Wiesenthal, had pulled out of her promise to accompany him to Russia, and this disappointment, along with the humiliation occasioned by Noble’s paper, was probably what tipped him over the edge.

  The response of Marxist biologists and their patrons to the news was a strange mix of horrified sympathy and political haymaking. Marx had promised that science, as it developed and coalesced under socialism, would improve the human lot. Lamarckism fitted seamlessly into this ideological scheme. If Lamarck’s great champion had been exposed as a fraud, then it could not possibly be the science that was wrong!

  Izrail Agol’s sympathetic obituaries of Paul Kammerer capture this kind of shrill, defensive thinking perfectly. He was actually quite reserved about Kammerer’s scientific work. He did not believe that Kammerer had altogether vindicated Lamarck’s ideas. However, Kammerer’s ‘consistent, monistically materialist position’ had driven mysticism out of biology, and clearly this had led directly to his persecution in the West. The future of science lay in the Soviet Union: ‘Where else but in the land of the victorious proletariat could [Kammerer] find comradely sympathy and support for quiet, objective, scientific research?’13

  Agol compared the conditions of his homeland to the ones that pertained in America, where (as the Scopes trial had reminded everyone) there was a law against teaching evolution in Tennessee – a state which Agol charmingly if inaccurately called ‘one of the most enlightened areas of the United States’.

  Lunacharsky was aware of the hash Kammerer had made of his private life, but this didn’t stop him from turning Kammerer into a political martyr. You only have to look at his peculiar vanity project, the feature film Salamandra, which came out in late 1928. By then, research had moved on, and Lamarck’s ideas were being rejected by the very scientists who had supported his invitation to Moscow. But this story was too good to be derailed by a few facts.

  In the film, a biologist at a university in Central Europe (we’ll call him Kammerer for convenience) is working with salamanders. By changing their surroundings, he has changed the colour of succeeding generations. A priest, learning of this, realises that this discovery will spell an end to the power of the Church (why?) and hatches a conspiracy with a young prince whom he has had appointed as Kammerer’s assistant. Kammerer is persuaded to announce his discovery at a formal university meeting. The night before the big day, however, the priest and the prince enter Kammerer’s laboratory, open the jar in which the specimen salamander is kept, and inject it with ink. During Kammerer’s presentation, someone takes out the salamander, and dips it into a jar of water – and all the colour runs out. An immense uproar follows, and Kammerer
is kicked out of the university.

  Next we see the scholar, down and out, begging for loose change with an experimental monkey which has followed him into the streets. A former student (played by Lunacharsky’s wife) takes a train to Moscow, and obtains an interview with Lunacharsky (playing himself), who straight away sets about saving the life of this victim of bourgeois persecution. The last scene shows Kammerer and his old student riding east on a train bearing a large streamer. It reads, ‘To the land of liberty’.

  Salamandra was hugely popular. It was still in the cinemas when Arthur Koestler, Kammerer’s best-known English-language biographer, visited Moscow six years later. It was dreadful tosh, of course. Alexander Sergeevich Serebrovsky, a Marxist biologist with impeccable Party connections,14 thought the whole effort shameful: ‘Comrade Lunacharsky … arranges class elements about this problem: in support of the inheritance of acquired characters are the revolutionary intelligentsia, the People’s Commissariat of Education and others, while against it are clerics, bankers, fascists, and counterfeiters.’ This fairy tale especially irritated Serebrovsky since he had been for years the leading Marxist critic of Lamarckism in biology. Since when, he wanted to know, did being a Marxist make you a Lamarckist?

  Serebrovsky considered this a rhetorical question. It turned out, however, to have a frighteningly precise answer. At what point did being a Marxist make you a Lamarckist? The fateful date is 1923.

  *

  Ivan Pavlov, too, subscribed to Lamarck’s theory that acquired characteristics were inherited. In this he was no different to many other physiologists and psychologists of his generation. Being a physiologist with an interest in psychology, however, he did something to test his allegiance, and oversaw experiments to show how acquired behaviours might be passed from generation to generation.

  Between 1921 and 1923 one of Pavlov’s co-workers, Nikolai Studentsov, trained a mouse to run to a feeding rack only after a buzzer had sounded. The mouse was an unresponsive pupil – it took 298 tries for its conditioned reflex to be established. Studentsov then trained the mouse’s offspring. They established the reflex much faster than their parents (after 114 repetitions); their children, in turn, were even faster (29 repetitions), the third generation faster still (11 repetitions), and the fourth were running to the feeding rack at the appointed moment almost immediately (6 repetitions). These astonishing results became the talk of the life-sciences community, and soon enough reached the ears of Nikolai Konstantinovich Koltsov, Russia’s leading light in the new science of genetics.

  Koltsov paid Pavlov a visit. Studentsov’s experiments, he explained, were badly flawed. Studentsov had had no previous experience in training mice, so chances were that ‘it wasn’t the mice which had learned, but the experimenter’.

  Pavlov wasn’t ready to give up on such spectacular results. That summer, as he lectured across Britain and the United States, he regaled audiences with news of Studentsov’s success. An article in the American journal Science, presenting Pavlov’s report, quoted him as saying, ‘I consider it probable that after some time a new generation of mice will run in response to the bell to the feeding place without preceding lessons.’15

  ‘Had that article not borne Pavlov’s signature, we would have simply ignored it,’ Koltsov later remarked. But Pavlov’s opinions mattered a great deal – a rash declaration from him was quite capable of derailing the young science of genetics. Koltsov orchestrated a concerted newspaper campaign against Pavlov’s assertions.

  It proved unnecessary. Pavlov had, after all, been listening. Returning to Russia, he had assigned one of his most senior researchers, Evgeny Ganike, to design a much more robust experiment – one that entirely automated the training process. When Koltsov visited Pavlov once again, in 1925, he found the old man in a penitent mood: Pavlov showed him Ganike’s automated experiment, and cheerfully admitted that it had disproved Studentsov’s findings. ‘Now I’m just working with dogs, I don’t want to work with mice any more!’

  A published opinion in Pravda in 1927 sealed the matter: the idea that conditioned reflexes could be inherited vanished from the physiology journals, and Pavlov himself organised a laboratory to study the genetics of behaviour. On his order, three sculptures were erected in front of the building: of René Descartes, Ivan Mikhailovich Sechenov – and Gregor Mendel.

  Neither Koltsov nor Pavlov had any idea just how much damage Pavlov’s mouse experiments had done to the cause of Russian genetics. Neither man had behaved badly. Indeed, Pavlov’s honest attempts to prove the inheritance of behaviours, the failure of those experiments, and the way he had handled that failure, were by any measure exemplary.

  Nonetheless, the damage was done. For four years, the Russian public lived with the notion that Ivan Pavlov, their most celebrated scientist, had proved that acquired characteristics could be inherited.

  *

  A sincere and well-connected Bolshevik, Alexander Serebrovsky led a campaign against Lamarck’s ideas from inside that bastion of Bolshevik learning and research, the Communist Academy.

  At the same time – and despite the men’s serious political differences – he was being drawn into the intellectual orbit of his old tutor Nikolai Koltsov. Koltsov was politically suspect: he came from a well-to-do family (his mother was related by blood to the theatre director Konstantin Stanislavsky) and had already been thrown in jail and threatened with state execution. Nonetheless, Serebrovsky recognised the genius of the man who had put Pavlov straight about his mice, and he worked energetically in support of Koltsov’s independent research institution, the Institute of Experimental Biology.

  Koltsov was a liberal. Like many, he had walked out of Moscow University in 1911. Within the year he had created an outstanding zoology programme and a research laboratory at the Shaniavsky. Serebrovsky and Mikhail Zavadovsky attended. (Mikhail was the older brother of Boris Zavadovsky, the Darwinian propagandist.) Koltsov’s other base was the Beztuzhev Advanced Courses for Women, better known as Moscow Women’s University; he set up a laboratory there, too.

  In Europe at the turn of the century biology was still a descriptive science. Koltsov’s first published work was on the development of the pelvis in frogs. But he reckoned purely descriptive approaches had ‘exhausted their research program and their vitality’. Study abroad and at marine biological stations at Naples, Rostov and the Russian station at Villefranche persuaded him to explore new, experimental approaches to his subject: genetics, cytology, protozoology, hydrobiology, physicochemical biology, endocrinology, experimental embryology – even animal psychology.16

  In 1913 Koltsov became co-editor of the newly launched popular science journal Priroda [Nature] and three years later, in late 1916, he managed to secure a large grant from the will of Russian railway magnate G. M. Mark to create an Institute of Experimental Biology. It was housed in Moscow’s merchant quarter – a splendid building donated by the city duma – and Koltsov filled it with his favourite co-workers from the Shaniavsky, including Serebrovsky.

  Koltsov’s experience of persuading private donors to part with their money served him well in his dealings with the Bolsheviks. Patrons were soon found within the health commissariat, the agriculture commissariat, and KEPS, the Commission for Studying the Natural Productive Forces of Russia – brainchild of Vladimir Vernadsky and his colleague Alexander Fersman.

  Even such illustrious backing could not insulate the Institute of Experimental Biology from the hardships of revolution and civil war. Koltsov kept the lab open around the clock, and students had to earn their places by lecturing, carpentry or repair work. They soldered, mended, made whatever they could, before settling to study.

  They learned to determine species, did live culturing. Everyone had his own cultured amoebas, flagellates. Every stage of division and multiplication had to be fixed, compared, drawn. Then the same with sponges. All this was done independently. They dissected all kinds of bugs and beetles, observed regenerations and transplantation in guppies and tritons. Ev
eryone had his own research, made discoveries, gasped, made mistakes, asked questions, and felt like a real researcher.17

  It was a happy and productive working environment, and the political divide between Serebrovksy’s revolutionary generation and Koltsov’s bourgeois one could safely be left at the door until 1920, when the Cheka announced they had exposed an organisation called the Tactical Centre. This clandestine organisation had been formed, they said, to create a conspiratorial alternative government for Moscow in preparation for the city’s occupation by White forces under General Denikin. What the Cheka actually uncovered has never been entirely clear. No one has yet found evidence of a structure capable of fomenting an armed uprising in Moscow. More likely, it was just a loose coalition of grumblers.

  The discovery of the ‘Tactical Centre’ conspiracy gave the Cheka carte blanche to interrogate their most highly placed opponents. Even the Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, Sergei Oldenburg, was chucked – albeit briefly – into jail. On 19 August 1920 Koltsov was arrested. Twenty-four people were executed by firing squad that day but Koltsov, having being held for thirty-eight hours without food, was eventually released. (It is likely that Maxim Gorky managed his rescue: prior to the revolution Gorky had met him several times in Italy, where they were both living.)

  Koltsov made a good show of shrugging off this terrifying experience. In the first issue of the Proceedings of the Institute of Experimental Biology he added a laconic footnote to a paper describing the effects of malnutrition. Speaking of his own case he described just how much weight he had lost in jail. The incident made him much more circumspect, however: the wit and political innuendo of his earlier writing is missing after the mid-1920s.