The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,57

program. In a rambling treatise entitled The Racial Biology of Jews, Otmar von Verschuer, a professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, argued, for instance, that neurosis and hysteria were intrinsic genetic features of Jews. Noting that the suicide rate among Jews had increased by sevenfold between 1849 and 1907, Verschuer concluded, astonishingly, that the underlying cause was not the systematic persecution of Jews in Europe but their neurotic overreaction to it: “only persons with psychopathic and neurotic tendencies will react in such a manner to such a change in their external condition.” In 1936, the University of Munich, an institution richly endowed by Hitler, awarded a PhD to a young medical researcher for his thesis concerning the “racial morphology” of the human jaw—an attempt to prove that the anatomy of the jaw was racially determined and genetically inherited. The newly minted “human geneticist,” Josef Mengele, would soon rise to become the most epically perverse of Nazi researchers, whose experiments on prisoners would earn him the title Angel of Death.

In the end, the Nazi program to cleanse the “genetically sick” was just a prelude to a much larger devastation to come. Horrific as it was, the extermination of the deaf, blind, mute, lame, disabled, and feebleminded would be numerically eclipsed by the epic horrors ahead—the extermination of 6 million Jews in camps and gas chambers during the Holocaust; of two hundred thousand Gypsies; of several million Soviet and Polish citizens; and unknown numbers of homosexuals, intellectuals, writers, artists, and political dissidents. But it is impossible to separate this apprenticeship in savagery from its fully mature incarnation; it was in this kindergarten of eugenic barbarism that the Nazis learned the alphabets of their trade. The word genocide shares its root with gene—and for good reason: the Nazis used the vocabulary of genes and genetics to launch, justify, and sustain their agenda. The language of genetic discrimination was easily parlayed into the language of racial extermination. The dehumanization of the mentally ill and physically disabled (“they cannot think or act like us”) was a warm-up act to the dehumanization of Jews (“they do not think or act like us”). Never before in history, and never with such insidiousness, had genes been so effortlessly conflated with identity, identity with defectiveness, and defectiveness with extermination. Martin Neimöller, the German theologian, summarized the slippery march of evil in his often-quoted statement:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

As the Nazis were learning to twist the language of heredity to prop up a state-sponsored program of sterilization and extermination in the 1930s, another powerful European state was also contorting the logic of heredity and genes to justify its political agenda—although in precisely the opposite manner. The Nazis had embraced genetics as a tool for racial cleansing. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, left-wing scientists and intellectuals proposed that nothing about heredity was inherent at all. In nature, everything—everyone—was changeable. Genes were a mirage invented by the bourgeoisie to emphasize the fixity of individual differences, whereas, in fact, nothing about features, identities, choices, or destinies was indelible. If the state needed cleansing, it would not be achieved through genetic selection, but through the reeducation of all individuals and the erasure of former selves. Brains—not genes—had to be washed clean.

As with the Nazis, the Soviet doctrine was also bolstered and reinforced by ersatz science. In 1928, an austere, stone-faced agricultural researcher named Trofim Lysenko—he “gives one the feeling of a toothache,” one journalist wrote—claimed that he had found a way to “shatter” and reorient hereditary influences in animals and plants. In experiments performed on remote Siberian farms, Lysenko had supposedly exposed wheat strains to severe bouts of cold and drought and thereby caused the strains to acquire a hereditary resistance to adversity (Lysenko’s claims would later be found to be either frankly fraudulent or based on experiments of the poorest scientific quality). By treating wheat strains with such “shock therapy,” Lysenko argued that he could make the plants flower more vigorously in the spring and yield higher bounties of grain through the summer.

“Shock therapy” was obviously at odds with genetics. The exposure of wheat to cold or drought could