Lady Professor

by Switzer, Robert L. ;

  Word spread quickly that the lady biology professor was informally teaching about pregnancy and childbirth, and her office was soon crowded with coeds, many of whom were not biology students. Very cautiously at first, they asked about what it felt like to be pregnant and what they somewhat fearfully expected during delivery. The girls also found that Emma answered questions about sexual intercourse and contraception frankly and in detail. She was astonished at how little most of them knew about these topics and how grateful they were for her candid and unembarrassed explanations. There was a need, Emma saw, for an organized course on human sexuality, marriage, and pregnancy, and she would likely be the only person on campus who would have the credentials—and courage—to teach it.

  As the time of her delivery drew nearer, Emma began to think seriously about how she was going to get this big thing out of her. She knew that her body was adapted to childbirth, but the details were obscure. Her mother had told her next to nothing.

  She had witnessed the birth of kittens and piglets on the farm; those slippery little creatures appeared to slide out of their mothers in a single pulse, but the birth of a calf took longer and more exertion. Her father and brothers had ordered her out of the barn once when they had to assist a cow with a difficult calving, but she had hidden behind a stall and watched while the calf was extracted from the bawling cow with an arrangement of ropes and pulleys. It was a disturbing memory. She had vague and frightening recollections of her mother’s breach delivery of her baby brother Aaron twenty-three years ago and recalled that her mother had breast-fed the baby, but she needed to know much more than that.

  She turned to textbooks in the library, and at her insistence, her doctor reluctantly loaned her a medical school textbook of obstetrics. Because the book devoted so much attention to the problems that can occur during pregnancy and delivery, it made for troublesome reading, as Emma’s doctor had warned her. She was able to extract detailed information on the normal course of labor and delivery, and she decided to prepare detailed notes and anatomical sketches. Someday, she was determined, this should be taught in a Harrington College course.

  EMMA GAVE BIRTH to a baby boy on November 2, 1935 whom she and Joe named Enrico Hansen Bellafiori. The name was chosen in memory of Emma’s beloved lost brother Henrik and to honor his father’s Italian heritage. Although the baby presented in the ideal left anterior occipital position, it was a long and painful birth.

  Emma decided to refuse anesthesia with ether, because she had learned that it often required delivery of the baby with forceps and the newborn sometimes had difficulty starting breathing. At the doctor’s insistence because Emma was a first-time mother at age thirty-five, she entered the Harrington County hospital as soon as she and Joe were certain that labor was under way.

  Joe stayed with Emma through the long hours before she moved to the delivery room. He struggled to maintain calm as labor intensified and Emma rode out increasingly frequent mountainous waves of exertion and pain.

  “I see now why they call it labor,” he would say for years afterward.

  He was excluded from the delivery room and paced frantically until a nurse came to tell him that he was the father of a little boy. From her experience of the birth of calves on the farm, Emma knew to expect dramatic groans, blood and a slimy, vein-rich purplish placenta, and she was just as glad that her excitable, city-bred husband was not present to witness the gory expulsion of his son.

  During her pregnancy, Emma had privately worried that she lacked motherly feelings toward her unborn child. Her plans had been disrupted by this stranger who had invaded her body. Will I come to love this child? she wondered unhappily. Her fears dissolved after Enrico was born. Emma was flushed with tender love toward the little warm, pink fellow as he suckled gently at her swollen breasts with soft sighs and grunts, his tiny hands curled into fists. The unique, indescribable smell of his skin and breath was sufficient to provoke tears and the involuntary leaking of breast milk. He was so sweet, so helpless, so peaceful when sleeping. Emma fell quickly and deeply in love with her baby. I needn’t have worried, she reflected. The mothering instinct is built-in, a necessary part of mammalian biology.

  After Thanksgiving, Emma did not return to her office, but asked Joe to post a notice that she would be glad to see students in their home. Occasionally a coed or a pair of them visited Emma while she was nursing the baby, which she quickly learned to do discreetly while she answered the student’s questions. Dean Woodrow sent her a letter complaining about the practice, which she ignored.

  “What I do in my own home,” she told Joe, “is none of the Dean’s business.”

  Emma made a note to include lactation and breastfeeding of infants to the course on human reproductive biology that she intended to initiate.

  Emma and Joe would later remember the first year of Enrico’s life as a mixture: the exhausted blur of night feedings, walking a restless, colicky baby, changing diapers and endless laundry—a haze that alternated with delight in Enrico’s first smiles and giggles, his learning to crawl and toddle, his babbling and obvious curiosity about the world. Unlike most husbands, Joe shared in the tasks and did most of the cooking, and he took delight in his infant son.

  Even after Enrico was weaned at the end of the summer of 1936, Emma and Joe were too occupied with their teaching responsibilities and childcare to work on their research projects. Emma returned to her normal teaching duties in the fall of 1936. She installed a crib in her office and hired Mrs. Schroeder, an older widow, to come with Emma to the campus to care for Enrico while Emma taught her classes. Coeds, even some male students, came with growing frequency to Emma’s office to see her child. Again, Dean Woodrow sent a letter complaining about activities that he characterized as unseemly, undignified, and disruptive, and again Emma ignored him.

  Emma and Joe were troubled by their lack of progress on their joint research. There was simply no time for it, and they had no funds for the work in any case.

  “We can’t just let it die,” Emma said.

  “I know, I know. If I could just work out the structures of the other three pigments . . .” he replied.

  They agreed to submit a proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation for a thousand dollars to support their research.

  “Joe, they’ll never give us that much money,” Emma exclaimed.

  “Well, let’s ask for everything we need anyway. If they give us less, we’ll make do with less.”

  CHAPTER 17

  1938

  THE INSIGHT INTO the deeper consequences of their research did not come to Emma and Joe in an instant, a dazzling moment of clarity, of understanding replacing bafflement, as was the common layman’s notion of scientific discovery. Rather, it developed slowly, first as a hypothesis that Emma developed to make sense of her collection of mutants that were unable to form the normal orange-red pigment of the sporulating fungus, the pigment that they named Pigment A. Later, when Joe solved the chemical structures of Pigments B, C, and D, which were accumulated by various mutant strains, the pieces fit together to form a coherent whole—a whole of far-reaching implications.

  Emma classified her mutant strains into two groups: albino mutants, which were white; and pig (for pigment) mutants that produced colored pigments, but not the red-orange Pigment A of the parent fungus. The majority of the mutant strains were albinos. By mapping and genetic crosses, Emma determined that there were at least six separate albino genes, but she had no idea how each gene differed from the others.

  The pig mutants were more interesting, however. Emma had isolated twenty-three of them and established that they mapped to four separate genetic locations, which correlated with which of the three colored pigments they accumulated.

  When she and Joe carefully analyzed the pigments using his new method of separation on glass tubes filled with powdered cellulose, they found that one set of mutants excreted only Pigment D; Emma named these pigD. Another set, dubbed pigB, produced mostly Pigment B, but also small amounts of Pig
ment D. The final group of mutants formed predominately Pigment C and small quantities of both Pigment D and B; these were named pigC mutants. The pigC mutants mapped to two distinct locations, so Emma classified them as pigC1 and pigC2.

  “I think we are looking at genes involved in different steps of a linear pathway for making Pigment A,” Emma told Joe as they studied her data. “It’s like one of Henry Ford’s assembly lines. The car chassis comes down the line and there’s one worker to put on each wheel. If the first worker is injured and can’t work—that’s basically what happens to my mutants—the workers upstream don’t realize it, and cars with no wheels pile up. If the first worker is OK, but the second one is unable to work, both cars with no wheels and cars with one wheel accumulate, mostly the latter. If the third worker is knocked out, you get cars with two wheels and some with one wheel and some with no wheels. And so on.”

  She drew a scheme on the blackboard, talking excitedly as she wrote.

  “It works this way: the albino genes are needed to make Pigment D. If any one of them is defective, as in my mutant strains, they can’t make Pigment D or any other colored pigments. There must be several steps because I have found six genes, but whatever they make, it’s not colored. The pig genes are needed for the last three steps. Pigment D comes first, then Pigment B, then Pigment C and finally Pigment A.”

  “Why is Pigment D first?”

  “Because it’s the only pigment that accumulates when pigD is defective. The others accumulate more than one pigment.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense. Like the assembly line with the first worker knocked out. The albino genes make the car chassis,” Joe exclaimed. “And pigB has to come after pigD because it accumulates both B and D. D must be converted into B somehow by the pigD gene.”

  “Exactly,” Emma replied. “And by the same logic pigC comes after pigD and pigB, because it accumulates all three intermediate pigments, but no Pigment A. And Pigment B is converted to Pigment C by the pigB genes because you don’t get any of it in the pigB mutants.”

  “Yes, yes, and pigC converts C into A. But how come there are two kinds of pigC mutants?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe there’s a step we haven’t discovered. Or maybe two genes have to work together.”

  “Emma, this is a beautiful hypothesis. Now I have got to determine the exact structures of the rest of the pigments, because it ought to make chemical sense. If one pigment is converted into another, they should be pretty similar in chemical structure, shouldn’t they? Like the cars that are the same except for the number of wheels.”

  “Yes, exactly. And the idea is that each gene is like an assembly line worker: it carries out one step in the assembly of the final pigment. The thing we haven’t figured out yet is how. How do genes work?”

  “That would be really exciting if we could understand that, wouldn’t it?” Joe exclaimed.

  He grasped Emma by the hands and danced her around the floor in a burst of boyish enthusiasm that was familiar from the early days of their collaboration, but she had not seen in a long time. Their research had been overshadowed for the past three years by the demands of raising a young child, their relentless teaching duties, and an acute lack of funds for research materials. Finally, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for five hundred dollars had allowed work to begin again. Most of the funds were being used by Joe for his attempts to determine the chemical structures of Pigments B, C, and D

  His parents’ commotion brought little Enrico running on his short legs into the room. “Mommy, Daddy dancing,” he piped, reaching up with his arms. “’Rico dance too.”

  “Enrico, il mio bambino!” Joe cried as he swept the child up, swung him around and handed him to Emma. “Did you know that your mother is the smartest woman in the world?”

  The little boy squealed with laughter. He was, like his father, very expressive, quick to laugh, quick to cry. Though he slept in a crib in his own room, he had learned to climb out and often joined his parents in their bed when he woke in the morning or if disturbed by dreams at night.

  Joe’s love for him was exuberant, Emma’s quieter, steadier—and, as the willfulness of a two-year-old emerged, firmer. He had his father’s dark curly hair, brown eyes, and sun-tanned complexion, so Emma sometimes called him Little Joe.

  Mrs. Schroeder still spent many hours during the weekdays with him. Emma had given up feeling guilty about this; her child’s happiness and loving security was sufficient evidence for her to be content. She and Joe occasionally remarked that they could no longer remember what life had been like before Enrico. There was no love, they had discovered, more unconditional than parental love for a child.

  IN THE SPRING of 1938 Emma was selected as the faculty member to give the annual Harrington College Lecture. The lecturer was chosen by popular vote of the students. Emma did not know this, but she had been elected College Lecturer twice before, but Dean Woodrow had suppressed the vote and named the runner-up, in both instances a male member of the humanities faculty. However, Dean Woodrow reached mandatory retirement age in 1937, and his successor, Dean Nibblock, honored the students’ selection without question.

  As Emma considered the topic for her lecture, she decided not to lecture on the exciting ideas that she and Joe were developing. The work was incomplete; vital evidence had yet to be obtained. Furthermore, the genetics and chemistry would be difficult to present clearly to a large general audience of students and faculty, most of whom had little or no knowledge of science. So, she chose a topic that had arisen from time to time and that, as recent events were showing, deserved attention. She titled her lecture “Why I Do Not Teach Eugenics.”

  Emma’s title provoked some puzzlement, but her lecture was well attended by students because she had a reputation as a lively and stimulating teacher, and the faculty always attended the annual College Lecture. She began by describing briefly the central idea of the eugenics movement: the use of genetic selection for the improvement of the human race.

  “I am a biologist with a strong interest in genetics,” she said. “I am persuaded of the power of genetics to predict and understand the inheritance of many traits in all species. There can be no doubt that the principles of genetics apply to humans, as well as to other animals and plants. Everyday experience shows us that. We observe how children resemble their parents.”

  She presented evidence that some human diseases are inherited, using the example of hemophilia. Then she described some of the ideas developed by Charles Davenport and his followers, but she avoided the long, censorious description of the Jukes family that Professor Gillespie had read with such relish to her genetics class at Hancock College back in 1922.

  “From these descriptions of families with long histories of socially undesirable behavior, the eugenicists have jumped to the conclusions that such behavior is inherited, and that such individuals should be prevented from reproducing, even by such drastic means as forced sterilization. But they have failed to demonstrate the genetic basis for such behavior. They neglect the effect of environment. What would happen, for example, if a child born to a family of paupers, alcoholics, or other social deviants were to be transferred to the care of a normal family and given loving care, good nutrition, and a sound education? The so-called heritable social deviance of the child might never be expressed at all. Furthermore, we know that the expression of genes is conditional. Consider the simple case of the arctic hare. Many genetic experiments have proven that hair color in rabbits and hares is inherited. Yet the arctic hare has brown color in the summer and white in the winter.

  “I reject eugenics, not because it is science whose conclusions I dislike—although I do—but because it is faulty science whose conclusions are not logically supported and are being woefully misapplied. The most appalling illustration of this is now being seen in Germany under National Socialist rule. Citing the careless and sweeping generalizations of so-called Rassenkunde or racial science, the Nazis are removing a broad swath of undesireables from so
ciety into confinement and conducting forced sterilizations, without a shred of evidence for the genetic transmission of the various illnesses and disabilities in question. Even more extreme is their designation of entire racial groups, particularly Jews and gypsies, for exclusion from the self-identified Herrenvolk or master race. These people are being deprived of their fundamental rights of citizenship; their property is being expropriated; they are being denied their means of livelihood and being forced into exile.”

  Emma realized as she prepared these lines how much her affection for Rosa Levin and Herschel Greenspan had opened her eyes to these atrocities, which received remarkably little attention in the US. It was easy to be indifferent to cruelty suffered by those whom we did not know.

  “This is an appalling misuse of science—no, not science, faulty science—for political ends. We may in coming years gain a deep and valuable understanding of how human behavior is governed by inherited characteristics, but we cannot do experiments with human beings. Humans are not to be bred like cattle or dogs, even if we understood the genetics adequately to do so—and we most assuredly do not.”

  Emma’s lecture was greeted with tepid applause. The audience had expected something more cheerful, more like her enthusiastic lectures in general biology classes. Certainly, nothing political was wanted. Secure behind her oceans, still struggling to recover from the Great Depression, America wanted to ignore the ugliness of Hitler’s Germany and its growing aggressiveness toward its neighbors. And many were not particularly sympathetic toward Jews, at home or abroad.

  Even Joe’s reaction was muted. He admired Emma’s spunk and forcefulness and agreed with her conclusions, but they had rarely discussed the evolving situation in Europe. Many of Joe’s Italian relatives admired Mussolini, although Joe thought he was a strutting clown.