The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,29

mission to ensure that Mendel, once forgotten, would never again be ignored. First, he independently confirmed Mendel’s work on plant hybrids in Cambridge. Bateson met de Vries in London and was impressed by his experimental rigor and his scientific vitality (although not by his continental habits. De Vries refused to bathe before dinner, Bateson complained: “His linen is foul. I daresay he puts on a new shirt once a week”). Doubly convinced by Mendel’s experimental data, and by his own evidence, Bateson set about proselytizing. Nicknamed “Mendel’s bulldog”—an animal that he resembled both in countenance and temperament—Bateson traveled to Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, giving talks on heredity that emphasized Mendel’s discovery. Bateson knew that he was witnessing, or, rather, midwifing, the birth of a profound revolution in biology. Deciphering the laws of heredity, he wrote, would transform “man’s outlook on the world, and his power over nature” more “than any other advance in natural knowledge that can be foreseen.”

In Cambridge, a group of young students gathered around Bateson to study the new science of heredity. Bateson knew that he needed a name for the discipline that was being born around him. Pangenetics seemed an obvious choice—extending de Vries’s use of the word pangene to denote the units of heredity. But pangenetics was overloaded with all the baggage of Darwin’s mistaken theory of hereditary instructions. “No single word in common use quite gives this meaning [yet] such a word is badly wanted,” Bateson wrote.

In 1905, still struggling for an alternative, Bateson coined a word of his own. Genetics, he called it: the study of heredity and variation—the word ultimately derived from the Greek genno, “to give birth.”

Bateson was acutely aware of the potential social and political impact of the newborn science. “What will happen when . . . enlightenment actually comes to pass and the facts of heredity are . . . commonly known?” he wrote, with striking prescience, in 1905. “One thing is certain: mankind will begin to interfere; perhaps not in England, but in some country more ready to break with the past and eager for ‘national efficiency.’ . . . Ignorance of the remoter consequences of interference has never long postponed such experiments.”

More than any scientist before him, Bateson also grasped the idea that the discontinuous nature of genetic information carried vast implications for the future of human genetics. If genes were, indeed, independent particles of information, then it should be possible to select, purify, and manipulate these particles independently from one another. Genes for “desirable” attributes might be selected or augmented, while undesirable genes might be eliminated from the gene pool. In principle, a scientist should be able to change the “composition of individuals,” and of nations, and leave a permanent mark on human identity.

“When power is discovered, man always turns to it,” Bateson wrote darkly. “The science of heredity will soon provide power on a stupendous scale; and in some country, at some time not, perhaps, far distant, that power will be applied to control the composition of a nation. Whether the institution of such control will ultimately be good or bad for that nation, or for humanity at large, is a separate question.” He had preempted the century of the gene.

* * *

I. De Vries’s “mutants” might actually have been the result of backcrosses, rather than spontaneously arising variants.

II. The story of Bateson’s “conversion” to Mendel’s theory during a train ride has been disputed by some historians. The story appears frequently in his biography, but may have been embellished by some of Bateson’s students for dramatic flair.

Eugenics

Improved environment and education may better the generation already born. Improved blood will better every generation to come.

—Herbert Walter, Genetics

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other. . . . Say to them “The . . . citizen should . . . make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generations does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females”; say this to them and they sway slightly to and fro. . . . Say to them “Murder your mother,” and they sit up quite suddenly.

—G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils

In 1883, one year after Charles Darwin’s death, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton published a provocative book—Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development—in which he laid out a strategic plan for the improvement of the human race. Galton’s idea was simple: he