Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Genetic research at the Institute of Experimental Biology had begun with Serebrovsky’s studies of poultry. Nonetheless, there was no doubt that the most useful subject for genetic study was the fruit fly: an animal so unprepossessing and apparently useless that it was attacked, rebuked, mocked and held up as an example of science removed from reality well into the 1950s. Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky once delivered a passionate speech in praise of the three-millimetre-long fly. His student Nikolai Luchnik remembered the gist:

  Irreplaceable subject! Reproduces quickly. Has many offspring. Clear hereditary signs. Can’t confuse a mutation with a normal individual. Red eyes, white eyes. All serious laboratories around the world work with the Drosophila. Ignoramuses like to talk about the fact that Drosophila has no economic significance. But no one is trying to develop a strain of dairy and meat fruit flies. Drosophila is needed to study the laws of heredity. The laws are the same for elephants and fruit flies. You’ll get the same results with elephants. But a generation of fruit flies grows in two weeks.30

  Drosophila were ideal laboratory animals, but they weren’t much to look at. Hearing that their institute was to receive an official visit from health commissar Nikolai Semashko, Timofeev-Ressovsky and his colleagues were concerned. Their senior colleague Serebrovsky was studying chickens at Anikovo Genetic Station. At least chickens looked useful. Why should Semashko take the time and trouble to visit a research station in Zvenigorod, fifty kilometres out of the city, just to peer at a bunch of petri dishes?

  Timofeev-Ressovsky decided to kidnap him. The stunt – a bunch of emaciated geneticists surrounding the staff car of a bemused commissar with makeshift clubs – paid off. Semashko, who must have had a sense of humour, saw to it after his inspection that the Institute of Experimental Biology was given an even grander home: a three-storeyed mansion at Vorontsovo Pole (now Obukha Street) with a garden and a yard where field experiments could be performed. Of course it is also possible that when Vogt offered to take Timofeev-Ressovsky out of the country, Semashko breathed a sigh of relief.

  In any event, an interview was arranged. Vogt and Timofeev-Ressovsky hit it off almost instantly. Their similarly colourful family backgrounds may have helped. Vogt, half-Dane, half-German, came from a line that included liberal Lutheran ministers, sea captains and at least one pirate. The Timofeev-Ressovskys’ trip to Berlin was registered in March 1925. It faced predictable bureaucratic hurdles. In Moscow the authorities thought the trip signalled the defection of a politically unreliable scientist. In Berlin the authorities suspected the Timofeev-Ressovskys of being spies or communist propagandists. Thanks to intense lobbying by Koltsov and Vogt, however, at the end of June the Timofeev-Ressovskys and their two-year-old son Dmitry were on a train to Berlin.

  Nikolai was just twenty-five years old, Elena twenty-seven. ‘When I went for work to Germany I was proud of it,’ Timofeev-Ressovsky told his biographer, the novelist Danyl Granin, many years later, ‘proud that this time the Germans came to us, instead of us to them.’

  Notes

  1. In Conway Zirkle (ed.), Death of a Science in Russia: The Fate of Genetics as Described in Pravda and Elsewhere, p. 51

  2. This objection to natural selection – that useful novelties would vanish like a drop in the ocean long before natural selection had a chance to make them spread – was first voiced in a review of The Origin of Species by Fleeming Jenkin, a professor of engineering at Edinburgh University, whose remarks so spooked Darwin that he inserted a new chapter into the sixth edition of The Origin, resuscitating Lamarck’s ideas about the inheritance of acquired characteristics. See Arthur Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad, p. 43.

  3. The effort was maintained throughout the Soviet era. In 1947 a visiting academic, Eric Ashby, reckoned that ‘not even in America, is there such a widespread interest in science among the common people as there is in Russia. Science is kept before the people through newspapers, books, lectures, films, exhibitions in parks and museums, and through frequent public festivals in honour of scientists and their discoveries. There is even an annual ‘olympiad’ of physics for Moscow schoolchildren in which they solve problems in a competition of the lines of a “knock-out” tennis tournament …’ (Eric Ashby, Scientist in Russia, p. 186).

  4. Édouard Herriot, Eastward from Paris, cited in Ashby, Scientist in Russia, p. 186.

  5. S. P. Fyodorov, ‘Surgery at the Crossroads’, Journal of Surgery, ed. I. I. Grekov [in Russian] (1996), vol. 155, no. 6, p. 114.

  6. Billed as the ‘trial of the century,’ the trial of John Thomas Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, received international coverage. Scopes was convicted of teaching evolution in a state-funded school, in contravention of Tennessee’s Butler Act of 1925, and fined $100. The verdict was overturned on appeal, and is remembered as a victory for proponents of evolution. In practical terms, it was anything but: the Butler statute was upheld as constitutional, and several other states followed suit and banned the teaching of evolution in the years that followed.

  7. This nice turn of phrase is not mine. It belongs to a soldier in the First World War, responding to one of William Bateson’s lectures to the troops on Darwinism. Bateson, a pioneering geneticist, dubbed it ‘a flash of illiterate inspiration’. See Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad, p. 20.

  8. Quotation adapted from A. E. Gaissinovitch, ‘The Origins of Soviet Genetics and the Struggle with Lamarckism, 1922–1929’, trans. Mark B. Adams, Journal of the History of Biology 13, no. 1 (1980), p. 17.

  9. Ibid. p. 48.

  10. Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad, p. 12.

  11. Ibid.

  12. Ibid., p. 1.

  13. Quoted in David Joravsky, ‘Soviet Marxism and Biology before Lysenko’, Journal of the History of Ideas 20, no. 1 (1959), p. 93.

  14. Serebrovsky was born into the family of a leftist architect acquainted with Alexander Bogdanov and the future commissar of education Anatoly Lunacharsky.

  15. I. P. Pavlov, ‘New Research on Conditioned Reflexes,’ Science, 58, no. 1506 (1923), pp. 359–361. Cited in N. F. Suvorov and V. N. Andreeva, ‘Problems of the Inheritance of Conditioned Reflexes in Pavlov’s School’, Neuroscience and Behavioral Physiology 21, no. 1 (1 January 1991), p. 9.

  16. V. V. Babkov, ‘The Theoretical–Biological Concept of Nikolai K. Kol’tsov’, Russian Journal of Developmental Biology, 33 (2002), pp. 255–62. See also Sergei Fokin, ‘Russian Zoologists in Naples’, Science in Russia (2010), pp. 71–8.

  17. D. A. Granin, The Bison: A Novel About the Scientist Who Defied Stalin, pp. 45–6.

  18. Robert E. Kohler captures both the modest resources and global importance of that room in Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life.

  19. S. S. Chetverikov, ‘Volny Zhizni’ [‘Waves of Life’], Dnevnik zootdeleniia, vol. 3, no. 6 (1905). Quoted in Mark B. Adams, ‘Towards a Synthesis: Population Concepts in Russian Evolutionary Thought, 1925–1935’, Journal of the History of Biology, 3, no. 1 (1970), pp. 107–29. For more on Chetverikov’s work, see Adams’s paper ‘The Founding of Population Genetics: Contributions of the Chetverikov School 1924–1934’, Journal of the History of Biology 1, no. 1 (1968), pp. 23–39.

  20. For Muller, genes were the be-all and end-all of all life processes; he conjectured that they ‘arose coincidentally with growth and “life” itself’. Thomas Hunt Morgan, on the contrary, absolutely refused to speculate about the nature of the gene. In his Nobel Prize lecture, delivered in 1931, he said: ‘At the level at which the genetic experiments lie, it does not make the slightest difference whether the gene is a hypothetical unit, or whether the gene is a material particle.’ This constant evasion drove his student Muller to distraction. See ‘Thomas H. Morgan – Nobel Lecture: The Relation of Genetics to Physiology and Medicine’, Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014; available from Nobelprize.org at http://bit.ly/1SlUfs1.

  21. The ‘Sovmestnoe Oranie’ shortened itself to the acronym ‘So-or’, added ‘Droz’ (for ‘drosophilists’
) as a prefix, and is often referred to as the ‘drozsoor’.

  22. S. S. Chetverikov, ‘On Certain Aspects of the Evolutionary Process from the Standpoint of Modern Genetics,’ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105, no. 2 (21 April 1961), p. 171.

  23. A tip of the hat to Charles Darwin. There are fifteen species of finches in the Galapagos Islands. Darwin came across them in 1835 and had his servant shoot samples for HMS Beagle’s collection. Their significance for his evolutionary theory dawned only later. The most important differences between the finches on the Galapagos are in the size and shape of their beaks; each is adapted to a different food source.

  24. Marina Bentivoglio, ‘Cortical Structure and Mental Skills: Oskar Vogt and the Legacy of Lenin’s Brain’, Brain Research Bulletin 47, no. 4 (1998), pp. 291–6.

  25. History has not been particularly interested in Cécile, a pioneering investigator of Huntington’s disease; her work tends to get folded in under her husband’s name. Contemporaries were more canny: fellow neurologist Igor Klutzo remembered her as ‘extremely intelligent, probably the most intelligent person I have met in my life’. (See G. W. Kreutzberg, ‘If You Had Met Him, You Would Know’, Brain Pathology 2, no. 4 [1 October 1992], pp. 365–9.) Her husband was only too happy to concede the point: Cécile is cited as the main author on many of the couple’s joint papers.

  26. Jochen Richter, ‘Pantheon of Brains: The Moscow Brain Research Institute 1925–1936’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 16 (2007), pp. 138–49

  27. Bentivoglio, ‘Cortical Structure and Mental Skills’, p. 293.

  28. The second part of Nikolai’s name, ‘Ressovsky’, indicated the place where he was born. The elder sons of the nobility often sported such double names, though few persisted with the affectation after 1917.

  29. N. V. Timofeev-Ressovsky, Vospominaniia: Istorii, rasskazannye im samim, s pis’mami, fotografiiami i dokumentami [The Stories Told by Himself with Letters, Photos and Documents], p. 106.

  30. Granin, Bison, p. 56.

  7: Shaping humanity

  ‘The acquisition of a profound knowledge of brain anatomy and physiology is one of the most important tasks of the new century’: the Moscow Institute for Brain Research.

  Eugenics has before it a high ideal which also gives meaning to life and is worthy of sacrifices; the creation, through conscious work by many generations, of a human being of a higher type, a powerful ruler of nature and creator of life. Eugenics is the religion of the future and it awaits its prophets.1

  Nikolai Koltsov, 1922

  One of the nineteenth century’s last independent ‘gentlemen scientists’, the Englishman Francis Galton, has several claims to fame. He was Charles Darwin’s first cousin, a pioneer of statistics, and first conceived the use of fingerprints in forensics. He was the proud inventor of underwater reading glasses, an egg-timer-based speedometer for cyclists, and a self-tipping top hat.

  He was also a proponent of eugenics. A contemporary of Gregor Mendel (the two were born in the same year, 1822), Galton was firmly convinced that heredity cannot change during one’s lifetime. ‘Will our children be born with more virtuous dispositions’, he asked, ‘if we ourselves have acquired virtuous habits?’ His answer, delivered in an 1865 magazine article entitled ‘Hereditary Character and Talent’, was a resounding ‘no’.

  Galton’s first book on human heredity, Hereditary Genius (1869), was published two years after the first volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Both books are about the betterment of the human race, but their philosophies are diametrically opposed. Marx supposed the environment was everything. Galton assumed the same for heredity. We already know how to improve whole populations, he argued. We do it by manipulating bloodlines. Ask any farmer. Ask any pig breeder.

  If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilisation into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins.

  ‘This’, Galton argued, ‘is precisely the aim of Eugenics.’2

  Livestock breeders mate choice specimens to improve their stock. For the same reason, they prevent runts and weaklings from breeding, usually by slaughtering them. Human beings are animals, and are just as capable of being shaped through a planned breeding programme as wheat, or chickens or dogs. The question is, what would a human breeding programme look like? Would it be a positive programme, using health education to promote couplings that produce genetically healthy offspring? Or would it be negative, discouraging or preventing pairings that would otherwise spread disease or disfunction? Was some sort of combination of both possible? How prescriptive would it be? Would it work by persuasion, or by compulsion?

  Galton considered eugenics in a mostly positive light. Though he had some minatory things to say about the breeding habits of the feckless, he was, at heart, a sucker for genius. He focused his research on the bloodlines of remarkable families, and wondered how eugenic policies might foster future talent.

  The study of degeneracy fell to a New York social reformer, Richard Louis Dugdale. Dugdale became interested in the matter when, during an 1874 inspection of conditions at a jail in New York State, he learned that six of the prisoners there were related. Using prison records, relief rolls and court documents, he traced the Jukes family tree back six generations to a Dutch colonist named Max. More than half of over 700 people related to this family by blood or marriage were criminals, prostitutes or destitute. Dugdale concluded that degeneracy, like genius, runs in families.

  His response to this finding was actually quite measured. (It helped that he was a follower of Lamarck.) ‘The licentious parent makes an example which greatly aids in fixing habits of debauchery in the child. The correction’, he wrote, ‘is change of the environment … Where the environment changes in youth, the characteristics of heredity may be measurably altered.’3

  Later writers were not so circumspect. An Indiana reformatory promptly launched a eugenic sterilisation effort. It began in 1899 as a voluntary experiment with prisoners, but rapidly expanded. In 1907, Indiana enacted the USA’s first compulsory sterilisation statute. California followed suit in 1909, and in 1917 its statute was extended to cover any patient at a state mental health institution ‘who is afflicted with mental disease that may have been inherited and is likely to be transmitted to descendants …’

  The desire to restrict population growth was quite alien to the Russian tradition. At the First International Eugenics Congress, held in 1912 in London, Prince Peter Kropotkin delivered a passionate diatribe against the idea. Who were unfit, he asked: workers, or moneyed idlers? Working-class women who suckled their own children, or society ladies who farmed the duties of a mother onto others? Those who produced degenerates in slums, or those who produced degenerates in palaces? ‘Before recommending the sterilisation of the feeble-minded, the unsuccessful, the epileptic, was it not their duty to study the social roots and causes of these diseases?’4

  Subsequent events only strengthened Russian hostility to negative eugenics. In the years between 1917 and 1920, Moscow lost half its population, Petrograd a staggering 71 per cent. Russia needed not fewer births, but many more.

  Eugenics found its first Soviet home at a State Museum of Social Hygiene created by the Commissariat of Health in January 1919. Koltsov led the museum’s consultative group on ‘the biological question’, covering ‘general biology, physiology, anthropology, and racial hygiene’. (That last term no doubt has set the reader’s alarm bells ringing, but the term was a common one: it referred to studying the relationship between disease and ethnicity. What it most certainly did not imply was any attempt to enforce apartheid between Russia’s many peoples.)

  Eugenic studies were an important part of a major health initiative orchestrated by health commissar Nikolai Semashko, which travelled under the broad label
‘social hygiene’. This was basically preventative medicine: a health system that would not just heal the sick, but which would prevent illness from happening. Under Semashko’s sponsorship, enthusiastic physicians used statistics, surveys and questionnaires to learn about health and disease in Soviet society. They also evaluated living and working conditions, arguing that social interventions would bring about revolutionary changes in the quality of health. At its height in 1927, the list of topics studied in the State Museum for Social Hygiene included nutrition, housing, demography, urbanisation, migration, occupational hygiene, alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual hygiene, prostitution, sanitary education …

  It was the job of Koltsov’s Institute of Experimental Biology to back this effort up with solid biological data and the latest genetic theory. The institute conducted eugenic studies alongside its genetic work. The distinction between the two activities was not particularly important in those early days. Besides, the government wanted to see practical work conducted for the betterment of the people, and eugenics was an obvious practical application of the new genetic science.

  Eugenics also needed a lobbying group that would explain these activities both to the public and to the authorities themselves. Koltsov created the Russian Eugenics Society for this purpose in 1922. Because there was no money for another, separate scientific association, the society doubled as a clearing house for the latest eugenic information through its mouthpiece, the Russian Eugenics Journal. Koltsov was editor-in-chief, and himself wrote genealogical studies of Darwin, Galton and Gorky – the supreme Bolshevik example of a self-made man (Gorky’s relatives were all drunks, savants, petty criminals and blaggers). In ‘Betterment of the Human Race’, presented at the inaugural meeting of the Society in 1921 and published in 1922, Koltsov exuberantly explored the implications of eugenics. In particular, he described a vivid thought experiment illustrating the power of selective breeding.