Hopeful Monsters

by Nicholas Mosley

  Quite often I went through to talk to Mrs Elgin and Watson in the kitchen. In their separate world they would be banging pots and pans about and getting on with polishing the silver.

  I would say 'Who do you like best, my father's or my mother's friends?'

  Mrs Elgin would say 'I've got something better to do all day than think about things like that!'

  I once said 'I think that man with the beard is going to ask the man in white flannels to marry him.'

  Watson said 'One day the wind will change and you won't be able to get rid of those ideas!'

  I would think - Oh one day will I find someone with whom talk is not a testing or a battle?

  Then sometime in 1923 (this was the summer of my eleventh birthday) there appeared on the Cambridge scene - I mean by 'Cambridge scene' not only the academics in their lecture-rooms and laboratories but also, on this occasion at least, the concourse on my father's lawn - a biologist from Vienna called Kammerer. The story of Kammerer is quite well known; but I have this particular memory of him among the men in white flannels and knickerbockers and the croquet hoops on our lawn. Kammerer was a thin, youngish middle-aged man with a high forehead and brushed-back hair; he wore a dark suit of a strangely hairy material. His eyes were alert and watchful; he seemed puzzled, yet not put out by the things going on around him. When my father introduced him to my mother, he kissed her hand. Then he held on to her hand for a moment, as if his attention had been caught by something just behind her eyes. My mother put one foot behind the other and rubbed her ankle with it; it was almost as if she were doing a curtsey.

  I thought - But he is like someone come down from a strange planet: a mutation?

  My father stood hitting a tennis racket against his leg.

  Now what I had heard of this Dr Kammerer was that my father looked on him as a great enemy: they had been having some dispute about the nature of genetic inheritance. Dr Kammerer (so I had understood from my father) was a heretic - something called a 'Lamarckian'. What he was supposed to believe in (it is impossible in such areas, as you say, to avoid the jargon) was the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

  What Darwinists such as my father believed in (arguments about dogma go round and round; it is impossible also not to repeat oneself) was that parents can transmit through heredity only what they have inherited themselves - they cannot pass on the skills or faults or features that they have acquired during their lifetimes; though they can, of course, pass on something of these by teaching. Evolutionary jumps take place when mutations in genetic material occur by chance; 'chance' means here just what cannot be explained scientifically in terms of what is predictable. There was even a theory that genetic mutations might be caused by cosmic radiation, but this conjecture could not be tested.

  Lamarckians (taking their name from a French biologist who lived in the early nineteenth century) claimed that it is impossible to explain evolution by chance occurrences: for such huge steps to have occurred as, for instance, the emergence of the human eye, there would have to have been such myriad interlocking coincidences as to be inconceivable: what possible evolutionary advantage could there have been in the emergence on their own of one or two still useless facets of the complex totality of the human eye which only functions when it is complete? For explanations to make sense there had to be taken into account the likelihood of some directing or at least coordinating force among the plethora of required mutations: and it did seem, yes, that this might be provided by the possibility of what had been of advantage to parents being in some way genetically passed on. This would not mean, for instance, that a parent who had lost a limb would pass on to an offspring this lack of a limb: Lamarckians suggested that only such characterises might be passed on as would be of advantage in coming to terms with the environment.

  But this sort of talk was anathema to Darwinists, ostensibly because there was no means of explaining scientifically how this learning on the part of parents could be transmitted to the genetic material, the cells of which could be shown (or so it was believed)

  to be quite separate from the cells of the other parts of the body. But it seems to me now (of course, no scientist talked like this at the time) that there was some rage or even terror amongst biologists at the suggestion that what a person had acquired (or not acquired!) during a lifetime might be passed on to offspring: what a burden of responsibility this would place upon a parent! Every failure would be perpetuated; every fault would make a person accountable for ever.

  During the early years of the twentieth century the situation remained confused: neither Darwinists nor Lamarckians seemed able to answer the objections that each put up against the other. Then there was the rediscovery by people like my father of Mendelian genetics - theories about inheritance suggested by Mendel fifty years earlier but not at the time taken up. These described how innumerable small differences occurring naturally in genetic material could be seen, by an understanding and application of mathematics, to account for the larger changes in living forms seeming to occur just when a change in the environment, as it were, provoked or required them: it was as if (my mother had used an image that was coming into vogue at the time) there were indeed all sorts of latent mutations hanging about waiting to be encouraged to emerge from what might be called a 'gene pool'. This image, it was true, did not seem very explicit about what it actually referred to; but then experts such as my father could retreat behind their jargon - or behind their claim that such a matter could properly only be understood by mathematicians.

  But then, just when geneticists like my father seemed to be getting the business sorted out, or at least protected, there turned up on the scene this Viennese biologist called Kammerer who appeared to claim once more that Lamarck was probably right - in certain circumstances parents could, yes, be shown to transmit by heredity to their offspring characterics which they had acquired during their lifetimes.

  Kammerer was this thin man with a high forehead and brushed-back hair; he had come on to our lawn and had kissed my mother's hand: my father was banging his tennis racket against his leg.

  This was on a Sunday afternoon; there were the men in blazers and white flannels on the lawn. They were playing croquet; at any moment they might be playing leap-frog. Dr Kammerer was looking round the garden as if he were sizing up possible escape routes; or perhaps manoeuvres for survival on this strange planet.

  My father said 'Do you play tennis?'

  Dr Kammerer said 'I sometimes play.'

  My father said 'I can lend you a pair of shoes.'

  Now I knew about my father's ways of playing tennis: he used a tennis court as some sort of battle-ground on which to engage with the people (and these seemed to be most people) against whom he felt aggression. He was, I suppose, quite a good player for his age; he put great energy into his game; he would serve and rush to the net; he would leap to and fro volleying; he would prance backwards towards the baseline slashing at high balls as if they were seagulls or vultures attacking him. Sometimes I would be his partner in a foursome and it seemed to be his aim, at the net, never to let a ball reach me. Once there was a very high lob and my father came staggering back; it was obviously my ball; I tried to get to it; my father and I collided and he fell on top of me. I remember the bright amused look in his eye as people ran up to us as if he might have done me some injury.

  Now Dr Kammerer was saying 'Oh I don't need any shoes!'

  My father said 'You can't play in those.'

  Dr Kammerer said 'I will play in bare feet.'

  He sat on the grass and took off his shoes. My mother watched him. When he looked up he seemed to wink at my mother.

  Then he took off his jacket and jumped up and down on his toes. He had trousers that were much narrower than the trousers of my father's friends. He looked elegant. Trousers at that time were apt to be like the screens behind which one undressed in a doctor's consulting-room.

  My father said 'Well I suppose you'll need a racket!'

  Dr Kamme
rer said 'Or shall I use my bare hands!' He smiled, not quite catching my mother's eye.

  She said 'You don't have to play, you know!'

  He said 'Oh I think I do!'

  In fact Kammerer played tennis well. But he seemed to treat it not so much as a game - an activity in which someone had to win and someone to lose - as an exercise in practising some quite solitary proficiency. He stood halfway up the court near the service line and played most of his shots from there; he did not rush to the net nor come prancing back; he stayed roughly where he was and when balls came near him he volleyed or half-volleyed them for the most part expertly, and when balls did not come near him he turned and watched his partner solicitously. When it came to his turn to serve

  he seemed reluctant and even slightly bewildered about this; but then he pulled off some quick cutting serves that went into the corners of his opponents' court and were quite often aces. He appeared to be somewhat apologetic about these: but not too much, as if he were anxious lest this might seem condescending.

  My father on the other side of the net heaved and leaped and dashed about like a seal: I thought - Kammerer is a keeper at a zoo and he is throwing my father fish. When the score had reached something like six all my father said 'You've played quite a bit!'

  Dr Kammerer said 'In my time.'

  My father said 'Shall we play sudden death?'

  Dr Kammerer looked to where my mother and I were sitting, and where Watson was coming out with tea-things on to the lawn. He put his hand on his heart. He said 'As a matter of fact, I think what I would love is some tea!'

  My father said 'Ah, it's a business keeping fit!'

  We sat on deckchairs on the lawn. Dr Kammerer sat next to my mother. He glanced at her sideways quickly from time to time; my mother seemed to know that he was doing this but to be pretending not to know; but in such a way that Dr Kammerer would know that she knew. I was thinking - If Dr Kammerer is some mutation, is it that he knows, without talking, what people are up to?

  Sometime in the course of tea Dr Kammerer turned to me and said 'You do not like tennis?'

  I said 'Not really.'

  He said 'Why not?'

  I said 'I don't think I like winning.'

  He seemed to think about this. Then he said 'You are very lucky.'

  My father, who had overheard this conversation, said 'Not winning would seem to be an accomplishment extraordinarily easy to achieve.'

  Dr Kammerer said 'Oh no, it is very difficult! Very paradoxical!'

  I was pleased about this. I thought - Dr Kammerer, my mother and I, we are each a mutation that knows what the others are up to?

  After tea my father took Dr Kammerer off to his study. Before he went Dr Kammerer said to my mother 'I will see you before I go?'

  She said'Yes.'

  I thought - But will he be able to survive, in this environment!

  While he was gone I talked with my mother about what she knew about Dr Kammerer. He came from a prosperous Viennese family;

  he had originally trained to be a musician but had turned to biology because of a passionate love for animals. He was often able to keep delicate animals alive for his experiments in circumstances in which others could not.

  One of the experiments for which he had become famous just before the First World War (I learned about these in the weeks or months following the visit of Dr Kammerer) was to do with two species of salamander (small newt-like amphibians) known as Sala-mandra atra and Salamandra maculosa. The former are found in the European Alps, and the latter in the Lowlands. The two species have different breeding characteristics: the alpine female gives birth on dry land to two fully formed young salamanders; the lowland species gives birth in water to up to fifty tadpole-like larvae which only months later turn into salamanders. Kammerer's experiment had been to take alpine salamanders and to put them in lowland conditions and see whether, as a first step, they would acquire the breeding characteristics of lowland salamanders; and then, if they did, to see what would be the breeding characteristics of the offspring of these salamanders in so-called 'neutral' conditions -would they have inherited the acquired characteristics of their parents, or would they have reverted to the original breeding habits of their ancestors? Kammerer claimed that he had, first, succeeded in getting alpine salamanders to breed in lowland conditions in a lowland manner - they had produced, that is, tadpole-like larvae -and then the offspring of these salamanders in so-called 'neutral' conditions had continued to produce larvae: and so from this Kammerer suggested that they had inherited the acquired characteristics of their parents.

  It seems to me now (you think it could not have struck me like this at the time?) that there was a dubiousness about these experiments and the claims that Kammerer seemed to make from them: for instance, what could have been the 'neutral' conditions in which offspring were placed that would have been suitable for demonstrating their inheriting (or not) the acquired characteristics? Might not the conditions provided be simply those that encourage the emergence of either one set of characteristics or the other? But what was striking about the objections to Kammerer on the part of mainstream biologists (this was what much later came particularly to interest me) was that they did not point out rationally, as they might so easily have done, the flaws in his arguments and procedures; they seemed intent on impugning emotionally his honesty

  and even his sanity; they claimed that he was 'cooking' his results -even those that were so obviously tentative.

  One of the difficulties about all this in 1923 was that Kammerer's experiments with salamanders had been done before the First World War; during the war his laboratory had been dismantled and most of his specimens destroyed; in the post-war inflation in Vienna he had found it impossible to get money to set up his experiments again. And then there was the fact that when other biologists tried to repeat his experiments, they could not keep alive long enough to get any results the animals that Kammerer had managed to keep alive through several generations. It was perhaps annoyance at this that drove mainstream biologists to hint that Kammerer must be a charlatan.

  Nevertheless his reputation was still such that he was invited to Cambridge in 1923: he was only the second ex-enemy-alien to be invited to Cambridge since the war. (The first - you will be pleased at the coincidence! - had been Einstein.)

  I picked up bits and pieces about all this at the time: I learned details later. But the picture I had in my mind about Kammerer did not have to be much amended later.

  At the end of that day when he had played tennis on the lawn and after he had gone along with the rest of my father's guests - I had not properly said goodbye to him: I minded about this: I had run out on to the drive just in time to wave as he drove away; I think he waved to me; but of course it was more probable that he was waving to my mother -

  - At the end of this day, when my mother and father and I were settling down to some plates of cold meat for supper, my father said -

  'Well, what's the verdict?'

  My mother said The verdict about what?'

  'Dr Kammerer, of course.'

  'He is certainly very charming.'

  'Yes, "charming" is the word I would use myself

  'You use it with a certain distaste.'

  'It is not a word held in high regard in scientific circles.'

  'But this afternoon we were not in scientific circles.'

  'No indeed we were not.'

  And so on.

  This was the sort of conversation that had to be suspended while Watson the parlourmaid came in with dishes. Watson was a tall

  craggy woman like a member of a military band. She would bang her plates and cutlery about at the sideboard like percussion.

  The word 'charming' was one I had not heard my mother use before. I thought - Well, no, you could not call my father's friends charming: and my mother's friends, well, but their charm is like that of witches around a lukewarm cauldron. But Dr Kammerer was like a wizard with his hands round a crystal ball -

 
; My mother said 'He played tennis very well.'

  My father said 'He never moved.'

  'How lovely to find someone who hardly needs to move!'

  'Well in his line of business he certainly moves one or two pieces around on the board, when no one is looking, I can tell you!'

  When my father and my mother went on like this I usually switched my attention off: but every now and then I cared about something enough to want to try to divert them.

  I said 'But why do you think Dr Kammerer was able to keep his salamanders alive in captivity, while others could not?'

  My father said 'That is indeed a subject on which we have little information.'

  My mother said 'Perhaps he loved them.'

  My father said 'Loved them!'

  My mother said 'Haven't you heard that things are sometimes helped to stay alive if they are loved?'

  Perhaps Watson clattered in or out again at this point with some dishes. I sometimes wondered - Might one of the reasons why people employ servants be so that they can be rescued at regular intervals from their dreadful conversations?

  But now my father ploughed on. 'Yes indeed Dr Kammerer is said to have an amazing way with animals. Once, when he was out on one of his walks looking for specimens, he is said to have picked up a toad and to have kissed it.'

  My mother said 'I'm sure it turned into a princess.'

  Watson had become curiously quiet at the sideboard.

  I said 'But you haven't answered my question.'

  My father said 'What was your question?'

  'Why do you think Dr Kammerer could keep his salamanders alive while you could not.'

  I thought this quite brave. I knew that my father had tried, and failed, to reproduce some of Kammerer's experiments. To be able to ask a question like this, I was probably on the edge of tears.

  My father said 'Are you suggesting that there was some flaw in