The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,58

no more produce permanent, heritable changes in its genes than the serial dismemberment of mice’s tails could create a tailless mouse strain, or the stretching of an antelope’s neck could produce a giraffe. To instill such a change in his plants, Lysenko would have had to mutate cold-resistance genes (à la Morgan or Muller), use natural or artificial selection to isolate mutant strains (à la Darwin), and crossbreed mutant strains with each other to fix the mutation (à la Mendel and de Vries). But Lysenko convinced himself and his Soviet bosses that he had “retrained” the crops through exposure and conditioning alone and thereby altered their inherent characteristics. He dismissed the notion of genes altogether. The gene, he argued, had been “invented by geneticists” to support a “rotting, moribund bourgeoisie” science. “The hereditary basis does not lie in some special self-reproducing substance.” It was a hoary restatement of Lamarck’s idea—of adaptation morphing directly into hereditary change—decades after geneticists had pointed out the conceptual errors of Lamarckism.

Lysenko’s theory was immediately embraced by the Soviet political apparatus. It promised a new method to vastly increase agricultural production in a land teetering on the edge of famine: by “reeducating” wheat and rice, crops could be grown under any conditions, including the severest winters and the driest summers. Perhaps just as important, Stalin and his compatriots found the prospect of “shattering” and “retraining” genes via shock therapy satisfying ideologically. While Lysenko was retraining plants to relieve them of their dependencies on soil and climate, Soviet party workers were also reeducating political dissidents to relieve them of their ingrained dependence on false consciousness and material goods. The Nazis—believing in absolute genetic immutability (“a Jew is a Jew”)—had resorted to eugenics to change the structure of their population. The Soviets—believing in absolute genetic reprogrammability (“anyone is everyone”)—could eradicate all distinctions and thus achieve a radical collective good.

In 1940, Lysenko deposed his critics, assumed the directorship of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Union, and set up his own totalitarian fiefdom over Soviet biology. Any form of scientific dissent to his theories—especially any belief in Mendelian genetics or Darwinian evolution—was outlawed in the Soviet Union. Scientists were sent to gulags to “retrain” them in Lysenko’s ideas (as with wheat, the exposure of dissident professors to “shock therapy” might convince them to change their minds). In August 1940, Nicolai Vavilov, a renowned Mendelian geneticist, was captured and sent to the notorious Saratov jail for propagating his “bourgeoisie” views on biology (Vavilov had dared to argue that genes were not so easily malleable). While Vavilov and other geneticists languished in prison, Lysenko’s supporters launched a vigorous campaign to discredit genetics as a science. In January 1943, exhausted and malnourished, Vavilov was moved to a prison hospital. “I am nothing but dung now,” he described himself to his captors, and died a few weeks later.

Nazism and Lysenkoism were based on dramatically opposed conceptions of heredity—but the parallels between the two movements are striking. Although Nazi doctrine was unsurpassed in its virulence, both Nazism and Lysenkoism shared a common thread: in both cases, a theory of heredity was used to construct a notion of human identity that, in turn, was contorted to serve a political agenda. The two theories of heredity may have been spectacularly opposite—the Nazis were as obsessed with the fixity of identity as the Soviets were with its complete pliability—but the language of genes and inheritance was central to statehood and progress: it is as difficult to imagine Nazism without a belief in the indelibility of inheritance as it is to conceive of a Soviet state without a belief in its perfect erasure. Unsurprisingly, in both cases, science was deliberately distorted to support state-sponsored mechanisms of “cleansing.” By appropriating the language of genes and inheritance, entire systems of power and statehood were justified and reinforced. By the mid-twentieth century, the gene—or the denial of its existence—had already emerged as a potent political and cultural tool. It had become one of the most dangerous ideas in history.

Junk science props up totalitarian regimes. And totalitarian regimes produce junk science. Did the Nazi geneticists make any real contributions to the science of genetics?

Amid the voluminous chaff, two contributions stand out. The first was methodological: Nazi scientists advanced the “twin study”—although, characteristically, they soon morphed it into a ghastly form. Twin studies had originated in Francis Galton’s work in the 1890s. Having coined the phrase nature versus nurture, Galton had wondered how a scientist might discern the influence of one over