Dna: The Secret of Life

by Watson, James

  Much more astutely reasoned was Lysenko's careful manipulation of the media. His original brush with fame in Pravda had taught him that the state-controlled press was a better venue for scientific self-promotion than the dusty pages of academic or trade journals. In 1929 Pravda twice featured the barefoot professor's success with vernalization, each time reporting in loving detail the down-home contribution of Lysenko Senior.

  At that point the Soviet Union needed a Lysenko. The "agricultural reorganization," as Stalin preferred to call the collectivization of farms, was proving a catastrophe. Even the official estimates, notorious for their rosy overstatements, painted a grim picture of rural productivity during this period. Lysenko's intuitive quick fixes made him the man of the hour, even if they wound up doing more harm than good the morning after. He embodied an important Bolshevist ideal, deistvennost – "action quality." No messing around with grand theories or arcane academic concerns, Lysenko, the can-do barefoot professor, was all about action and solving practical problems.

  Lysenko learned quickly how to play the Soviet system. His lectures made no pretense to being scientific in any sense that we would recognize: they consisted instead of ideological rants peppered with all the Marxist-Leninist jargon du jour. Small wonder Stalin was a fan, leading the standing ovation (at a Congress of Collective Farm Shock – Brigade Workers) with cries of "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko!" In return, Lysenko astutely named his latest big idea, a variety of branched wheat, for Stalin. Happily accepting the honor, the generalissimo fortunately never found out that the branched wheat was another bust: though inherently higher in yield, it requires such low-density planting as to more than offset the advantage of its multiple seed heads.

  Sucking all of Soviet agriculture into a vast experiment each time he introduced another hopelessly impractical new scheme, Lysenko was ultimately responsible for the starvation of millions. But since Soviet records of the era – especially those kept by Lysenko himself – are woefully self-serving, we will probably never know the actual number of lives sacrificed on the altar of Lysenko's career. Suffice it to say that at the time of Stalin's death in 1953, the availability of meat and vegetables has been estimated by more objective analysts to have been no greater than in the darkest feudal days of Tsar Nicholas II. Lysenko's pernicious influence, however, was not limited to agriculture.

  If Soviet farming had its homegrown principles, Soviet science too needed a scientific credo of its own; it pained Lysenko and his followers to imagine the new Soviet man following so meekly in the footsteps of "bourgeois" Western scientists. And Lysenko's wild theories of agricultural development had boiled down to the idea that you could transform any crop so long as you subjected it to the right environment: winter wheat could become spring wheat through a simple environmental manipulation. And it was no one-season fix, for, according to Lysenko, such changes would then breed true – acquired traits would be passed on to the next generation. Eventually Lysenko became a full-fledged Lamarckist.* In an unusual fit of experimental enthusiasm, he even commissioned experiments to "disprove" Mendelism – the basis of genetics in the decadent Western tradition. In his mathematical incompetence, Lysenko actually became convinced that the results refuted Mendel's ratios, even when a reanalysis of the data by a distinguished Soviet mathematician showed that in fact the ratios fitted Mendel's predictions exactly. Lysenko, then, was not above doing an occasional experiment, but was never one to countenance a result contradicting even the most outlandish hypothesis.

  * In 1801 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck first published his theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, erroneously suggesting that traits acquired during an individual's life could be passed on to its offspring. Flawed though his idea was, Lamarck, unlike Lysenko, was at least trying to base his inferences on observation.

  The late 1930s saw a series of debates between Lysenko, backed by what have been described as his "hard core of militant ignoramuses," and the Soviet genetics community – a distinguished group by the standards of the international science of the day. H. J. Muller, one of T. H. Morgan's students (and my professor in graduate school at Indiana University), went to Russia to participate in the great social experiment of Communism and found himself instead embroiled in bizarre, largely stage-managed public discussions about Larmarckian inheritance. In this era of Stalin's purges, political truths carried much more weight than mere scientific ones. To what extent Lysenko directly contributed to the "repression" – to use the preferred Soviet euphemism for Stalin's purges – of the geneticists who spoke against him will probably never be known but, no matter who gave the orders, the fact remains that much of the opposition to Lysenko's Lamarckian ideas simply disappeared as the 1930s drew to a close. Some geneticists heroically stood their ground as outspoken critics. Muller was forced to flee for his life. The doyen of Soviet genetics (and an ardent Soviet patriot), Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940. He died in prison of malnutrition.

  In 1948, it was officially decreed that the debate was over: Mendelism was out, Lysenkoism was in – an absurd and tragic outcome particularly when one considers that it came four years after Avery's landmark experiment showing DNA to be the transforming (Mendelian) factor. The Lysenkoite response to the discovery of the double helix, incidentally, was characteristically obscurantist: "It deals with the doubling, but not the division of a single thing into opposites, that is, with repetition, with increase, but not with development." I've no idea what this means, but it seems to be consistent (in its meaninglessness) with Lysenko's other writings on heredity:

  In our conception, the entire organism consists only of the ordinary body that everyone knows. There is in an organism no special substance apart from the ordinary body. But any little particle, figuratively speaking, any granule, any droplet of a living body, once it is alive, necessarily possesses the property of heredity, that is, the requirement of appropriate conditions for its life, growth and development.

  Darwin was next in line for the Lysenko treatment. The out-of-control peasant-made-good denied the cardinal precept of Darwinism – competition among individuals within a species for access to limited resources – and postulated, as perhaps a good Communist should, that individuals do not compete, but cooperate. He went further, combining his anti-Mendelian and anti-Darwinian views in a bizarre unified theory of the origin of species: given that organisms are molded by their environment, it should be possible, with the right environmental conditions, to transform any one species into any other. Change a warbler's diet to caterpillars, to take his favorite example, and you can produce a cuckoo. Ardent Lysenkoists from around the country were soon writing in with reports of their own transformational successes: viruses turned into bacteria, a rabbit into a chicken. Soviet biology was itself undergoing a transformation of sorts: from science to joke.

  Lysenko's rejection of Darwin eventually put him in a position so awkward as to tax even his own formidable skills of political survival. Stalin's final years witnessed the "Great Stalin Plan for the Transformation of Nature." In part, this involved planting a lot of trees to protect the steppes from the vicious east winds, thus moderating the climate in general. It was not a bad idea in principle, but as one might expect, Lysenko had his notions about the best way to grow trees: plant them in a cluster, he argued, and the individual seedlings will not compete with each other for sunlight and nutrients but will rather cooperate for the good of the community. In the late forties, armies of peasants fanned out across the steppe planting oak trees in clusters in accordance with the Lysenko method. The result? Intense competition among individual trees, which enfeebled all members of each cluster. By 1956 only 4 percent of the oaks planted were thriving; only 15 percent had even survived. The Ministry of Agriculture withdrew its endorsement of the Lysenko planting protocol, but only after a sum estimated at over 1 billion rubles had been squandered.*

  * The modern dollar equivalent is difficult to compute because the official exchange rates of that era generally reflected Communist wishfu
l thinking rather than financial reality. To put the sum in context, however, it can be noted that in 1956 one-sixth of the Soviet workforce earned an annual wage of around three thousand rubles.

  It was a stunning setback, but so entrenched was Lysenko's authority, and so crowded with his protégés were the ranks of Soviet biology, that it wasn't until 1964 that the Kremlin turned its back on him for good. The barefoot professor had managed to persuade Stalin's successor that he was still the man to create a Soviet agricultural miracle. Indeed, when Khrushchev was bundled ignominiously out of office by the Soviet Central Committee (and replaced with Brezhnev), it was rumored that one important reason for the intervention was a general frustration with Khrushchev's continued reliance on Comrade Lysenko. Lysenko himself died in 1976. His family requested that he be buried in the most prestigious Russian national cemetery at the Novo-Devichi convent. The request was denied.

  I would not for a moment wish to suggest, by telling the parable of Lysenko, that the fate of Soviet science under that fool's sway is remotely comparable to the state of contemporary Western research in even the most politically overpowering university setting. But the extreme instance should suffice to demonstrate that ideology – of any kind – and science are at best inappropriate bedfellows. Science may indeed uncover unpleasant truths, but the critical thing is that they are truths. Any effort, whether wicked or well-meaning, to conceal truth or impede its disclosure is destructive. Too often in our free society, scientists willing to take on questions with political ramifications have been made to pay an unjust price. When in 1975 E. O. Wilson of Harvard published Sociobiology, a monumental analysis of the evolutionary factors underlying the behavior of animals ranging from ants – his own particular subject of expertise – to humans, he faced a firestorm of rebuke in the professional literature as well as the popular media. An anti-Wilson book published in 1984 bore a title that said it all: Not in Our Genes. Wilson was even attacked physically, when protesters objecting to the genetic determinism they perceived in his work dumped a jug of water on him during a public meeting. Similarly, Robert Plomin, whose work on the genetics of human intelligence we shall presently address, found the American academy so hostile that he decamped from Penn State to England.

  Passions inevitably run high when science threatens to unsettle or redefine our assumptions about human society and our sense of ourselves – our identity as a species, and our identities as individuals. What could be a more radical question than this: Does the way I am owe more to a sequence of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs inherited from my parents, or to the experiences I've had ever since my father's sperm and mother's egg fused together many long years ago? It was Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, who was the first to frame the question as one of nature versus nurture. And the implications spill over into less philosophical, more practical areas. Are all math students born equal, for instance? If the answer is no, it may well be a waste of time and money trying to force differential equations down the throats of people like me who are simply not wired to take the stuff on board. In a society built on an egalitarian ideal, the notion that all men are not born equal is an anathema to many people. And not only is there a lot at stake, but the issues are very difficult to resolve. An individual is a product of both genes and environment: how can we disentangle the two factors to determine the extent of each one's contribution? If we were dealing with laboratory rats, we could conduct a set of simple experiments, involving breeding and rearing under specified uniform conditions. But, happily, humans are not rats, so illuminating data are hard to come by. This combination of the debate's importance and the near impossibility of satisfactorily resolving it makes for perennially lively argument. But a free society should not shrink from honest questions honestly asked. And what is critical is that the truths we discover are then applied only in ethical ways.

  With a lack of reliable data, the nature/nurture debate was entirely subject to the shifting winds of social change. Early in the twentieth century, during the heyday of the eugenics movement, nature was king. But when the fallacies of eugenics became apparent, culminating in its horrific applications by the Nazis and others, nurture began to gain the upper hand. In 1924 John Watson (no relation), the American father of an influential school of psychology called "behaviorism," summarized his nurture-ist perspective as follows:

  Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-formed, and my own specified world to bring them up in and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist 1 might select: doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant-chief, and yes, even beggar-man and thief, regardless of his talents, penchants, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race of his ancestors.

  The notion of the child as tabula rasa – a blank slate upon which experience and education can write any future – dovetailed nicely with the liberal agenda that grew out of the sixties. Genes (and the determinism they stood for) were out. Discounting inheritance, psychiatrists preached that mental illness was caused by varieties of environmental stress, an assertion that inspired endless guilt and paranoia among the parents of the afflicted: where did we go wrong? they asked. The tabula rasa remains the paradigm of choice among the politically entrenched defenders of some increasingly untenable views of human development. Among some unregenerate hardliners of the women's movement, for example, the notion of biological – genetic – differences in cognitive aptitudes between the sexes is simply unspeakable: men and women are equally capable of learning any task, period. The fact that men are more common in some fields and women in others is, these theorists would have it, purely a result of divergent social pressures: the male slate is inscribed with one destiny, the female with another, and it begins with our laying that pink blanket on the baby girl and the blue one on the baby boy.

  Today we are seeing a swing away from the extreme nurture-ist position embodied by the other Watson. And it is no coincidence that this drift away from behaviorism is coinciding with our first glimpses of the genetics underpinning behavior. As we saw in chapter 11, for years the genetics of humans has lagged behind that of fruit flies and other creatures owing to a lack of genetic markers and the impossibility of doing breeding experiments on people. But since the introduction in 1980 of DNA-based genetic markers the analysis of human traits through the mapping of related genes has advanced by leaps and bounds. Most of the effort has understandably been expended on meeting the most urgent human need genetics can address: diagnosis and treatment of inherited disease. Nevertheless, some efforts have been directed toward nonmedical questions. Robert Plomin, for example, has used this approach to hunt up genes influencing IQ, taking advantage of an annual gathering in Iowa of superbright schoolchildren from across the nation. With an average IQ of 160, these slightly scary kids were an obvious place to start to look for genes that might affect IQ. Plomin compared their DNA to that of a sample of "normal" kids with average range IQs like yours and mine* – and indeed he found a weak association between a genetic marker on chromosome 6 and stratospheric IQ. Here was reason to suppose that a gene or several genes in that region might in some way contribute to IQ. Of course, any mechanism governing such a complex trait is apt to involve many genes.

  *Mine is a respectable, but definitely not stellar, 122. I discovered it by sneaking a quick look at a list on a teacher's desk when I was eleven.

  In chapter 11, we discussed the difficulty of mapping polygenic traits, like heart disease, that are produced by multiple genes, each with a small individual effect, each mediated by the environment. Behavioral traits generally fall in this category. So far as we know, having the appropriate variant on chromosome 6 would not by itself a genius make: there are doubtless necessary variants in genes as yet undiscovered. And even a solid genetic basis might not get you there unless you were also reared in an environment in which learning and thinking were honored over Nickleodeon. But the discovery, and the acknowledgment, of any molecular basis for intelligence is a breakthrough such as only the genetic revolution could fost
er.

  Before DNA markers were available, the meat and potatoes of behavioral genetics was twin studies. Twins come in two varieties: dizygotic (DZ), meaning two individuals develop from two separate eggs, each fertilized by a different sperm; and monozygotic (MZ), meaning that both come from a single fertilized egg, which in early development – usually the 8- or 16-cell stage – splits into two balls of cells. DZ twins are no more genetically similar than any two siblings, but MZ twins are genetically identical. MZ twins are therefore always the same sex, while DZ twins may or may not be. Surprisingly, it hasn't been very long since we first understood this fundamental difference between twin types. In 1876, when Francis Galton first suggested that twins might be useful in determining the relative contributions of heredity and upbringing, he was unaware of the difference (whose basis had been worked out just two years earlier), and assumed wrongly that it was possible for different-sex twins to be derived from a single fertilized egg. From his later publications, however, it's clear that the message eventually got through.