The Seeds of Life

by Edward Dolnick

  “civil war between cells.”: Wagner, “Virchow,” 918.

  He chose sausages: Schultz, “Rudolf Virchow.” But though the story is a favorite of medical historians, it may well be apocryphal. It may have arisen from a true event, in 1865, when Virchow delivered a speech in Berlin calling for the inspection of pork as a public health precaution. Virchow held up a smoked sausage for the crowd to see and explained that this delectable treat was in fact infected. A veterinarian in the audience stood up and declared that trichinae, the organisms that cause trichinosis, were “the most harmless animals in the world. It is only doctors without practice who make a noise about them, in order to create some occupation for themselves.” One of Virchow’s colleagues challenged the man to eat the infected sausage. The crowd began chanting, “Eat! Eat!” The veterinarian gave in, took a bite, and stormed out of the hall. Five days later, according to newspaper reports, he lay helpless in bed, unable to move arms or legs. (This account is from Dr. Thudichum, “The Trichina Disease,” Edinburgh Medical Journal 11, part 2 [1866]: 771–772. Online at http://tinyurl.com/glya6ps.)

  Living organisms followed “blind laws: Hunter, Vital Forces, 63.

  Hertwig was frosty and forbidding: Goldschmidt, Portraits, 76–80.

  “arises to completion like a sun: Weindling, Darwinism, 70.

  Driesch was snobbish: Goldschmidt, Portraits, 69.

  Life, he declared, contained mysteries: Ibid.

  The resolution of the mystery: Fisher, Weighing the Soul, 138–140.

  the writer John Stewart Collis: Collis, The Worm Forgives the Plough, 43.

  * Perhaps it is not surprising that God as the mathematicians pictured him bore a striking resemblance to the mathematicians themselves. “If triangles had a god,” Montesquieu would write a few decades later, “he would have three sides.”

  * But not altogether impossible. In 1640 William Harvey met a young man who had fallen from a horse onto a sharp rock; he had been left with a hole in his chest, which he covered with a metal plate. He had fully recovered, and his injury made him a celebrity. (Once, in Rome, a crowd eager for a peek inside a living body had filled an opera house to see him.) Both Harvey and then King Charles I eagerly reached inside the man’s chest and placed their fingers on a beating human heart.

  * Scientists today still marvel (or cringe) when they consider how lightly men get off in the actual labor of baby making. The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers contrasts “a sperm cell weighing one-trillionth of a gram” with “a nine-month pregnancy producing a seven-and-a-half-pound baby.”

  * Scholars debated why God had defaced the round Earth with mountains, like warts on a perfect face. Until the mid-1600s, mountains, even the Alps, were denounced as “deformities,” “boils,” and “monstrous” growths. The consensus was that God had made the Earth a perfect, utterly smooth sphere. Mountains rose up later, when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden. Not only was humankind punished for disobeying God, but so was the Earth itself.

  * In the ancient world, contraception was nearly always regarded as solely the woman’s responsibility. To prevent pregnancy, women gulped down potions made from elaborate recipes or inserted pastes and salves in their vaginas. Men had it easier. Surprisingly, condoms did not come into use in ancient times. The definitive history of contraception states flatly that “there is little if any evidence for usage of a condom or sheath during antiquity to prevent conception.” By the 1700s, men did sometimes wear condoms (in his memoirs, Casanova refers to a condom as an “English riding coat”). But condoms remained rare until scientists learned to vulcanize rubber, in 1844.

  * We met Pliny before, warning that menstrual blood had the power to turn wine sour and drive bees from their hives.

  * The Trobrianders did not practice birth control, of course, and anthropologists have not resolved the mystery of why pregnancies were not more common. Perhaps it is worth noting that wild yams, which were a staple of the Trobriand diet, contain a hormone that served as the basis for the first birth control pill. (But no modern studies have demonstrated that yams have any contraceptive effects.)

  * This view was a long time dying. In 1656, in Boston, a ship’s captain named Thomas Kemble returned from a three-year sea voyage and kissed his wife at the doorstep of their home. Kemble was charged with “lewd and unseemly behavior” (made all the worse because the kiss took place on a Sunday) and sentenced to two hours in the pillory.

  * To each his own. Mark Twain disagreed with Augustine: “Of all the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go any length for it—risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself. And what do you think he has done? He has left it out of his heaven!”

  * He missed another chance when the emperor Marcus Aurelius dragooned him to accompany the Roman army into battle against a host of German tribes. Galen dodged the assignment, only to learn later that the emperor had allowed his physicians to dissect one or more slain “barbarians” from the enemy’s ranks. “There can be no doubt that if he had known he would be allowed to dissect a human, he would have braved the perils and discomforts of the campaign,” observes one recent biographer.

  * The duke would later commission Leonardo’s Last Supper.

  * The comment turns up, out of the blue, on a page of spectacular drawings of the hand that show in detail how its muscles, bones, and tendons interact.

  * Prisoners awaiting death had to fend off anatomists, or their agents, who tried to cajole them into bartering their soon-to-be corpses for money. Some condemned men arranged deals. They used the money to ease their last days in prison or for new clothes to wear to the gallows.

  * Dutch archival records show that Dr. Deyman, the surgeon in Rembrandt’s painting, earned six silver spoons for his labors, the equivalent of several hundred dollars in today’s money.

  * Fear of dissection had a long history. Shakespeare died in 1616. His epitaph reads: “Good friend, for Jesus sake forebear / To dig the dust enclosed here. / Blest be ye man that spares these stones / And cursed be he that moves my bones.”

  * The poet Thomas Hood wrote a grimly comic poem in 1826 called “Mary’s Ghost,” where Mary tells her sad story to her beloved William: “I thought the last of all my cares / Would end with my last minute, / But when I went to my last home / I didn’t stay long in it. / The body-snatchers, they have come / And made a snatch at me. / It’s very hard that kind of men / Won’t let a body be.”

  † Body snatching was against the law, but the law was a muddle. Since a body was not property, it did not belong to anyone. Stealing a shroud carried higher penalties than stealing the body within it.

  * Butchers had always known that when you cut an animal’s throat, blood jets out in a rush. (Soldiers and criminals knew about gushing blood, too.) Before William Harvey, no one cited that familiar observation as proving that blood races through the body. All that it showed, anatomists believed, was what happened in one special, violent case, not in the everyday course of life.

  * It takes about twenty seconds for blood to make a complete circuit of the body.

  * Robert Boyle, one of the great figures of the scientific revolution, shared Harvey’s obsession. A profoundly religious man, Boyle looked on dissection as a way of honoring God. Rummaging inside “dead and stinking carcasses” sounded unpleasant, he conceded, but in fact few pastimes were as “delightful” as exploring “the forsaken mansions of the omniscient Architect.”

  † As well as demonstrating Harvey’s zeal, these particular dissections represented a practical, if unsentimental, response to the perennial problem of finding bodies to study.

  * Centuries later, it would turn out that this outlandish doctrine had something to it: as a new embryo develops, both male and female genitalia do arise from the same tissue.

  * By this reasoning, a man’s flat chest would presumably have rated as inferior to a woman’s protruding breasts, but that argument never made much headway. Aristotle had waved it aside
impatiently, long before Galen. The superiority of the male’s chest was self-evident, he argued, because it was firm and muscular, while the female’s breasts were soft and spongy.

  * In the Middle Ages, this belief in women’s “earthy” nature transformed into the view that women were sexually voracious. More lustful than men but less rational, women had to be held in check by men, for the sake of order and propriety.

  * Nature is endlessly innovative, and exuberantly so when it comes to sexual anatomy. The octopus has no penis at all (though it does have three hearts), for instance; snakes have two penises, which they use one at a time, alternately in successive matings; and several kinds of marine flatworms have dozens.

  * Naturalists would later learn that deer do not menstruate. Among nonhuman females, menstruation occurs almost solely in primates (and bats).

  * De Graaf studied the edible dormouse, which resembles a squirrel. (It is larger than the dormouse that played a cameo role at the Mad Hatter’s tea party in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.) Its name reflects the Roman practice of roasting dormice and dipping them in honey.

  * The human penis, though of compelling interest to its owner, is of far plainer design than many others in the animal kingdom. While a barnacle stays glued to its rock, for instance, its bristle-covered, chemical-sensing penis can stretch this way and that in search of a mate in the neighborhood. The barnacle penis extends to eight or nine times the animal’s length. It is the biggest in nature, proportionally, and moved Darwin to wonder. The human penis is essentially a tube to deliver semen. (Its role in excreting urine is apparently an evolutionary afterthought, an improvised two-fer in the cobbled-together fashion that turns up so often in nature.)

  * Bias against females turned up in the least likely settings. Observers from Aristotle to Leonardo—this was a span of eighteen centuries—claimed, for instance, that they had noticed a striking pattern. Male chicks came from round eggs, which were close to the perfect shape; female chicks came from eggs that were long and pointy and, therefore, inferior.

  * A female rabbit can give birth to a litter and be pregnant again within twenty-four hours. Hence, “breeding like rabbits.”

  * The first eyeglasses were reading glasses, for close-up work. Middle-aged users snatched them up, thrilled that their involuntary retirement had suddenly ended. This invention, which may seem small to us, in fact marks a chasm between everyday life as it had always been and as it would become. Until recent times, disabilities and injuries accumulated through the years, never to be mended. Bad eyes, bad ears, throbbing teeth, ripped tendons were all but universal. There was no treatment but fortitude. Eyeglasses hinted at a better future.

  * Frustratingly little is known about Leeuwenhoek’s personal life. We know, for instance, that both Leeuwenhoek and Johannes Vermeer were born in Delft in October 1632 (their baptisms are recorded on the same page in the records of Delft’s Oude Kerk), and we know they lived only 150 yards from one another. But small as Delft was, there is no proof that the two geniuses ever met. This would have been a remarkable summit meeting: few people ever had a more passionate interest in lenses and light.When Vermeer died, Leeuwenhoek was named executor of his estate. Vermeer had made a middling success of his career but had died bankrupt. To pay off a debt to the baker, Vermeer’s widow gave him Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid and The Guitar Player. Today their values would be in the tens of millions, or higher. Vermeer owed the baker a bit under $80 in today’s money.

  * The hazards of the inanimate world, like earthquakes and volcanoes, did not pose any theological riddles. God had flooded his creation, after all, and everyone understood that at any moment he might punish sinning humankind once more.

  † When a theologian asked J. B. S. Haldane, one of the eminent figures in twentieth-century biology, what we can learn about the mind of God by studying his creation, Haldane scarcely paused to ponder. “He must have been inordinately fond of beetles.”

  * Jan Swammerdam cited yet another argument in support of the theory that all life had begun at once: it explained the essential Christian doctrine of original sin, which holds that every human being is born bad, tainted by a sin passed on from Adam.

  * The Russian doll analogy, which features in every history of biology, captures the strange notion of encasement, which is indeed the crucial feature of the preexistence theory. But the analogy is misleading in one important regard. The model of a doll inside a doll inside a doll would mean that each generation in a given family had only a single member. Instead, each parent doll should have within it one doll for each child.

  * Both Newton and Leibniz believed in preformation. Newton was an ovist, Leibniz a spermist.

  * This same ichneumon (which was really a wasp rather than a fly) horrified Darwin and further convinced him that nature had not been designed by a benevolent God. The female wasp injects a caterpillar with a poison that paralyzes it; then she lays her eggs on the caterpillar’s body. The wasp larvae devour the still-living caterpillar little by little (because a living host is more nutritious than a dead one), saving the heart for last so as to prolong the feast. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created” these wasps, Darwin wrote, and in another letter he lamented “the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low, and horribly cruel works of nature!”

  * Considering how odd the sex lives of birds and bees are, by human standards, “the birds and the bees” is a surprising idiom. No one is quite sure when it came to be a euphemism for sex, but the phrase is apparently not ancient. Cole Porter may have coined it, in 1928. (The original lyrics of “Let’s Do It” skipped over birds and bees in favor of a bit of jaunty racism: “Chinks do it, Japs do it, Up in Lapland even little Laps do it.” When tastes changed, Porter rewrote the lyrics: “Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.”)

  * Nearly all Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes have been lost. One sold at auction in 2009 for $491,776.

  * Why it takes such a fantastic number of sperm cells to fertilize one egg is still a matter of scientific debate. (For generations, medical students have learned that the reason is that, “None of them will stop to ask for directions.”)

  * Three centuries later, Monty Python echoed the sentiment, this time in song: “Every sperm is sacred. / Every sperm is great. / If a sperm is wasted, / God gets quite irate.”

  * It was well-known, too, that the children born of sex between demons and humans often had uncanny powers. Merlin, the magician who served as King Arthur’s mentor, for instance, was said to have been the offspring of a nun and a demon.

  † The anonymous pamphleteer coined the word “onanism,” still occasionally used as a synonym for “masturbation.” In the Bible Onan’s father commands him to have sex with his brother’s widow. But the plan went awry, we read in Genesis, and when Onan “went in unto his brother’s wife, he spilled it on the ground.” This sounds more like coitus interruptus than masturbation, but our pamphleteer was evidently not in the mood for a debate. Neither was God. “The thing which he did displeased the Lord, whereupon he slew him.” (In more recent times, Dorothy Parker named a canary Onan, because he spilled his seed on the ground.)

  * The true cause of the lumps and deformities that afflicted Merrick has never been settled. Modern-day doctors studying his case had come up with a diagnosis of neurofibromatosis, where the body grows (usually benign) tumors, but lately that theory has come into dispute.

  * In our own day, there was a vogue for pregnant women to listen to Mozart, on the grounds that classical music in utero produced brighter children.

  * In Puritan New England a century after Paré, two men (in separate cases) were arrested when sows gave birth to piglets that looked suspiciously like the men in question. In New Haven in 1647, in the better documented case, the unfortunately named Thomas Hogg was confronted with a piglet that, in its owner’s words, “had a fair and white skin, and head as Thomas Hogg’s is.” A second piglet had “a head like a child’s
and one eye like him, the bigger on the right side, as if God would describe the party.” This was considered unimpeachable evidence, but Hogg refused to confess. By Connecticut law, that ruled out hanging. (No one had witnessed the crime.) Frustrated, the court sentenced Hogg to be “severely whipped” and thrown in jail. (In bestiality cases, both animal and human were punished; the law demanded that the animal be killed and added a perhaps unnecessary caution, “and not eaten.”)

  * Nearly three hundred years later, biologists were still wrestling with the aphid mystery. Aphids turn out to be startlingly versatile beasts, capable of reproducing both sexually and asexually. When times are good, all aphids are female, and they churn out identical copies of themselves as quickly as possible, without mating. When times are bad, the mothers give birth to both males and females. They reproduce by mating, as if figuring that sex will yield all sorts of offspring, some of whom may thrive in the unpredictable new world.

  * Even the hard-to-faze Leeuwenhoek once confessed that he should not have moved directly, one evening, from staring at dissected oysters under the microscope to devouring a plateful for his dinner. Somehow, he noted queasily, his feast left him feeling “not as much pleasure as I should have done.”

  * Mathematics (and music and chess) are famous for child prodigies. Biologists peak later. “Biology is special that way,” says the neuroscientist David Eagleman. “It takes years for people to get a feeling for the organism—for how nature actually works. Young people come in all the time knowing a lot of fancy math. They say, ‘What if it’s like this computational model, this physical problem?’ They’re terrific ideas, but they’re wrong. Nothing works the way you think it should.”

  † Newton’s contemporaries held him in awe. His masterpiece, Principia Mathematica, is still regarded as the greatest of all scientific works. In a poem that accompanied the Principia, Edmond Halley wrote, “Nearer the gods no mortal may approach.” On Newton’s death, in 1727, Alexander Pope composed his famous couplet: “Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night, / God said, ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”