Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Serebrovsky’s relationship with Koltsov cooled in the years following the Tactical Affair, though this made little professional difference. Serebrovsky had already relocated to the institute’s field station in Anikovo, on the banks of the Moscow River, to the west of the city. Here he spent his time breeding chickens.

  Serebrovsky was Koltsov’s expert in genetics. This was a field Koltsov was keen for his institute to occupy, since studying the genetics of agriculturally important subjects – wheat, poultry and cattle – attracted government funding. Genetics had another advantage, in that it was largely a paper science, requiring little in the way of imported laboratory equipment. Serebrovsky’s work on the genetics of poultry proved so important – a foundation of so much future genetics – that it was translated and reprinted all over the world well into the 1970s. More immediately, during the Civil War, Serebrovsky’s experimental subjects could be converted into welcome dinners for the institute’s staff. (This was no joke: Koltsov saved several associates from starvation by transferring them to his experimental stations outside Moscow.)

  Meanwhile Koltsov was bringing on another talent. Sergei Sergeevich Chetverikov was rather less interested in politics, and rather more of Koltsov’s own social stripe (indeed, the two men were distantly related). His parents were both from wealthy textile families, It was 1895, and Sergei was around fifteen years old when he began to collect butterflies. His father, quietly appalled by his son’s ambition to be a zoologist, bundled him off to Dresden to study engineering, but it was hopeless; within a year he relented and Sergei joined the department of comparative anatomy of Moscow University.

  Chetverikov would prove to possess extraordinary theoretical talent, but it wasn’t this, or even his distant blood relation to his boss, that first landed him a place in Koltsov’s institute; it was his ability to look after insects without killing them.

  The same year he had launched Serebrovsky’s poultry-breeding career, Koltsov had received a copy of Thomas Hunt Morgan’s book The Physical Basis of Heredity from friends in Germany. This was the undisputed bible of the new field of genetics, detailing the pioneering experimental work of Morgan and his team at Columbia University in the United States. For a while, Koltsov’s copy of Morgan’s book was the only one in Russia. It travelled between Moscow and St Petersburg, and was then taken out of its binding so that Koltsov’s students could translate individual chapters.

  In their tiny cupboard of a room at Columbia, Morgan, Alfred Sturtevant, Calvin Bridges and Hermann Muller had begun trying to unpick the genome of a living creature, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.18 To help them, they had looked for ways to induce unmistakable, visible mutations in their stock of fruit flies – mutations they could follow from generation to generation. One promising avenue seemed to be to expose the flies to X-rays. Koltsov duly set a researcher, Dmitry Romashov, the task of repeating this work. Alas, Romashov had no more experience of insects than anyone else at the institute, and the experiments were a flop. Chetverikov, who had worked with Koltsov already on the Beztuzhev courses, and organised an insect room there, was invited to join the institute in 1921 to stem the slaughter of the fruit flies.

  Chetverikov was a meticulous collector and a talented zoologist, whose interests extended far beyond the practical work of the institute. Through his mathematician brother Nikolai he had become interested in biometrics, applying statistics and careful measurements to the study of whole populations. His first notable piece of writing, Volny Zhizni (Waves of Life, 1905), is an account of the fluctuating population size of various butterflies and moths observed near his family’s dacha:

  It can be said without any exaggeration that the fauna is not permanent for a minute … Hence anyone who has more or less carefully studied some fauna of a single location knows that no two years are the same: that which last year was rare or even absent is met this year in abundance, and conversely that which last year struck the eye with each step now demands careful search.19

  Waves of Life teased out how changes in the size of a population affected the amount of variation it displayed. This was a first step towards reconciling genetics and evolution, and according to Chetverikov the paper ‘produced a sensation in Russian readership circles’.

  Once at the Institute of Experimental Biology, Chetverikov revived this project, gathering together several of Koltsov’s best students, including his wife, Anna Ivanovna, Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky (the man who had used a Red Cross uniform to blag scientific equipment for his teaching establishment), and Elena Alexandrovna Fiedler, a former assistant of Vladimir Vernadsky.

  In August 1922, the Institute of Experimental Biology received a windfall: Hermann Muller, co-author of The Physical Basis of Heredity, visited Moscow. A radical socialist and a committed materialist who had fallen out with Thomas Hunt Morgan over whether a gene was an actual thing,20 Muller was every inch a scientist in the Soviet mould. And he brought gifts: more than a hundred strains of Drosophila melanogaster, full of the genetic markers the Morgan lab had used to demonstrate the chromosomal theory of inheritance.

  The visit was not without precedent. From its inception, genetics was an international discipline, dependent upon distributing to other researchers material developed in one’s own laboratory. Whether it was the fruit fly, the evening primrose, maize, mice or wheat, the exchange of new mutants, varieties and stocks was an essential part of doing genetics. For Russian researchers, receiving such a significant collection from an overseas ally was an unprecedented coup. The collection went first to Moscow’s premier geneticist, Alexander Serebrovsky at the Anikovo station. But Koltsov had no trouble persuading him that Chetverikov was better placed to look after the collection, and arrangements were made so that everyone in the institute would get the chance to work on Drosophila in addition to their own work.

  From 1922 to 1924, most of the genetics work at Koltsov’s institute was directed at mastering the theory of genetics as it had emerged from Morgan’s ‘Fly Room’. Chetverikov and his students studied the hard way. He scoured Western scientific journals for articles on genetics and handed them out to his seminar members to translate as best they could – word by word from the dictionary, if they had to.

  As a consequence, Chetverikov’s group got the gist of problems, but found it hard to penetrate the mathematical detail. Ignorance served them well, because buried in that detail were a whole host of assumptions about the nature of genetics, some of which turned out to be false. Chetverikov and his colleagues worked away at fusing genetics, evolutionary theory and biometric studies of the sort that informed Waves of Life. They did not know that this was supposed to be impossible. They did not know that naturalists and experimental geneticists were supposed to be at loggerheads. They did not know that evolution and genetics were incompatible. They blithely assumed that what they learned in the laboratory would in some way link up with what they observed in nature. And it did.

  Around 1925 Chetverikov organised his seminar rather more formally, though the name the group chose for themselves, the Screeching Society, says something about their sense of humour.21 The seminar was deliberately kept small, and prospective members could be admitted only by unanimous vote.

  The seminar group set out to answer one of the great imponderable questions of genetics: how do species remain so distinct from each other, while at the same time evolving and dividing into new forms? To this end, it conducted the first study of a wild population of Drosophila, and laid the groundwork for the development of population genetics. In the autumn of 1925, Chetverikov completed a paper describing their achievement, and what it meant for biology.

  Many genetic variations appear in the laboratory setting. The veins of a Drosophila’s wings, for instance, occasionally turn out deformed, and these deformations are then passed down through generations of flies. It doesn’t do them any good. Indeed, mutations observed in the laboratory are almost always harmful. Natural populations, on the other hand, appear remarkably uniform. Thei
r wings are not deformed. Their eyes are not too close together, and their ears do not stick out. They look so alike, they might have sprung from the same egg.

  In the wild, harmful mutations show up very rarely, since ‘in the severe struggle for survival, which reigns in nature, the majority of these less viable mutations, originating among normal individuals, must perish very quickly, usually not leaving any descendants’.22

  In nature, then, among individuals old enough to breed, there is an incredibly small gap between the fittest and the least fit. Indeed, this gap is so small, it is hard to see how natural selection ever gets a look-in. The fittest individuals don’t survive longer or reproduce any more often than the less fit. A large population of very alike individuals is incredibly stable: it will keep churning out versions of itself till the last trump. So what makes a species change?

  Mutations (which are usually harmful) are always recessive. For this reason, the pioneering British biologist William Bateson believed all that recessives are accidents – mere genetic waste. Chetverikov looked at recessive mutations differently; for him, they were a mechanism for storing wild and unusual genetic ideas.

  In a large population the chances of two adults mating who share the same recessive mutant gene are vanishingly small. When the going is good, then, populations absorb recessive mutations like sponges. But when the population crashes, or becomes fragmented, then individuals are much more likely to mate with someone genetically related to them. Then the chance that recessive genes will get expressed rises astronomically. Most of these recessives will prove harmful, but a few will confer an advantage.

  Take a large population of, say, finches, laying finch eggs that hatch into finches virtually identical to their parents. Once that population gets fragmented, it will speciate into many families of finch, each adapting to its own unique environment.23

  Published in the Journal of Experimental Biology under the title ‘On certain aspects of the evolutionary process from the viewpoint of modern genetics’, Chetverikov’s paper is today considered one of first and strongest bonds established between genetics and evolutionary theory.

  *

  In January 1923, pioneering German neurologists Oskar and Cécile Vogt travelled to Moscow to participate in the First All-Russian Congress for Psychoneurology.

  The couple’s lecture, distilling twenty-five years’ study of the cellular structure of the cerebral cortex, left a deep impression on specialists in Moscow. It offered them a unique view of a new and fast-developing science. Oskar explained how he and his wife would study thin slices of brain tissue through a microscope, and bit by bit, slice by slice, assemble a model of the structure of the brain, down to the level of the individual cell. This work required good vision and keen insight: ‘It is like flying over a landscape, when one sees a number of towns; only the talented investigator of architecture can rapidly spot characteristics (like peculiar buildings) to identify individual towns.’24

  Their lecture was also peculiarly, upsettingly topical: Lenin, father of the new nation, was even then dying, of repeated insults to the brain.

  Lenin suffered his first stroke on 26 May 1922, and several more followed over a two-year period, along with prolonged epileptic seizures. An international medical team headed by the Breslau neurologist Otfried Foerster was struggling to save his life. During the Vogts’ visit, the team invited Oskar to visit Lenin’s bedside. There was no advice he could give, and Lenin died on 21 January 1924, aged fifty-three. Here the story would have ended, had some bright spark in the halls of government not decided, against the family’s wishes, to preserve the leader’s brain.

  This was not, at the time, such an unusual thing to do. The practice had begun in the mid-1850s in Germany, where Rudolph Wagner studied the brain of the physicist and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (and noted its ‘remarkably convoluted’ appearance). In 1876, French scientists founded the Mutual Autopsy Society of Paris, each member offering brains and other organs up to post-mortem dissection by his fellows. Pavlov’s rival Bekhterev founded a Pantheon of Brains in 1927 – an institution maintained to this day. Bekhterev’s own brain is part of the collection.

  Foerster was asked who might best study Lenin’s brain in detail; he suggested Oskar Vogt, and on New Year’s Eve 1924, Vogt received the invitation. It was a signal honour for an entrepreneur who had never held any academic position beyond ones he had invented for himself. (On 2 February 1925 the Academy of Sciences elected him a corresponding member to bolster his CV.)

  At the end of February 1925 Oskar’s wife Cécile arrived in Moscow, bearing with her all the equipment required for their investigation of Lenin’s brain.25 The Lenin Institute accommodated the Vogts’ laboratories in Moscow’s historic Dmitrovka district, and between 1925 and 1927 sections of Lenin’s brain were stained for microscopic investigation.

  Oskar delivered his first major report on 19 November 1929. ‘In layer three of the brain cortex, in many cortical areas, especially in the deeper regions of this layer, I found pyramidal cells of a size I have never before observed and in a number that I have never before observed,’ Vogt declared. What did this signify? No one had a clue, but Vogt was generous: ‘Our brain anatomical results show Lenin to have been a mental athlete,’ he announced, delivering one of the most frequently cited bullshit statements in the history of science.

  Away from the microscope, Oskar Vogt devoted much of his time to planning a permanent institute to study the brain. The Moscow Institute for Brain Research (incorporating Bekhterev’s Pantheon of Brains) was officially founded in November 1928. Modelled on Vogt’s Berlin institute, it reflected and consolidated the two countries’ excellent post-war record of scientific cooperation.26

  Vogt’s institute was more than just a piece of intellectual empire-building. The plan was that it should research the genetic basis of all kinds of mental disorders and diseases. The Vogts were puzzled by the way certain inherited neurologic disorders varied tremendously in frequency and severity. They assumed that these variations had a genetic origin, rather like the mutations they had collected among bumble bees and beetles during their long walking holidays: ‘Just as the body hair and colour spots of these insects are subject to variation,’ Vogt argued, ‘so also is the brain of man …’27

  Vogt was friends with the health commissar Nikolai Semashko and Nikolai Gorbunov, secretary of the Council of People’s Commissars, a former chemical engineer and the Bolsheviks’ leading patron of the sciences. He also visited Koltsov’s Institute of Experimental Biology, looking for a young associate he could take back to Berlin to jump-start genetic research into the brain. It did not take long before Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky and Elena Alexanderovna came to his attention. By now a married couple, Nikolai and Elena had found a single mutation in the fruit fly species Drosophila funebris that produced all manner of deformations in a vein in the fly’s wings. That a single kind of mutation could produce many variant wing-types caught Vogt’s attention. He discussed the matter with Koltsov and Semashko: would the young couple (they were still in their mid-twenties) be interested in a long stay in Berlin?

  *

  Nikolai Vladimirovich Timofeev-Ressovsky had been born into a family of impoverished nobility, on a modest estate which bordered the Ressa River.28 His father, Vladimir Viktorovich Timofeev-Ressovsky, was a railway engineer. The family, if not especially wealthy, had an extraordinary pedigree. In their family tree there were Cossacks, including Stepan Rasin, the Russian Robin Hood; the descendants of Rurik, ninth-century ancestor of the tsars; admirals of the Russian Navy; the anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin (himself a brilliant biologist); and many military officers and intellectuals. Family legend had it that one ancestor set off to explore the North Pole, contrived to wind up in an African prison, escaped, stole a ship in Turkey and sailed it back to Sevastopol.

  Timofeev-Ressovsky was studying biology at Moscow University when the revolution erupted. He entered the war as an infantryman in a Cossack unit and ended th
e war a sergeant-major in the cavalry of the Red Army (and first bass in the Moscow military chorus). His wartime progress was anything but orthodox.

  In 1918 he was captured by a band of anarchist ‘Greens’. The Greens were a non-aligned force defending Russia against the Germans. They had no love for Red Army NCOs, but were quickly charmed by Timofeev-Ressovsky’s stories of Prince Kropotkin, who was his grandmother’s cousin. (‘He gave us raspberry jam, which, by the way, was a gift from Lenin …’)

  He fought for the Greens a while, was hit on the head with the flat of a sword, woke up abandoned and set off to rejoin the Reds. He participated in the Red Army’s attack on the White Army of General Denikin in the Russian south, before typhoid brought an end to his hectic career. In 1922 he returned to Moscow. ‘I think, nevertheless, that all in all the life was merry,’ he later recalled. ‘Very few hungry, very few frozen. Rather, people were young, healthy, and vigorous.’29

  Nikolai Koltsov accepted Timofeev-Ressovsky into his institute in spite of his lack of higher qualifications (he had only a high school gold medal), and soon enough one of his students, Elena Alexanderovna Fiedler, caught the young man’s eye.

  Elena was a long-time associate of Koltsov’s; she had been working with him since attending the Shaniavksy, where Koltsov ran a research laboratory. Once, on a field trip led by Koltsov’s student Mikhail Zavadovsky to the nature preserve in Askania-Nova, the road to Moscow was cut off by fighting (civil war was raging throughout the Ukraine) and the expedition broke up. Reaching Kiev, Elena fell under the orbit of Vladimir Vernadsky, and was one of those who had helped him map the chemical compounds of which all living things are composed. It was Elena who passed on Vernadsky’s ‘biogeochemical’ ideas to Timofeev-Ressovsky, sparking his interest in the biology of entire populations. Elena and Nikolai’s co-written papers on the subject formed the prologue to a lifelong partnership.