The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,63

was to digest the material with an enzyme that, of all things, degraded DNA.

DNA? Was DNA the carrier of genetic information? Could the “stupid molecule” be the carrier of the most complex information in biology? Avery, MacLeod, and McCarty unleashed a volley of experiments, testing the transforming principle using UV light, chemical analysis, electrophoresis. In every case, the answer was clear: the transforming material was indubitably DNA. “Who could have guessed it?” Avery wrote hesitantly to his brother in 1943. “If we are right—and of course that’s not yet proven—then nucleic acids are not merely structurally important but functionally active substances . . . that induce predictable and hereditary changes in cells [the underlined words are Avery’s].”

Avery wanted to be doubly sure before he published any results: “It is hazardous to go off half-cocked, and embarrassing to have to retract it later.” But he fully understood the consequences of his landmark experiment: “The problem bristles with implications. . . . This is something that has long been the dream of geneticists.” As one researcher would later describe it, Avery had discovered “the material substance of the gene”—the “cloth from which genes were cut.”

Oswald Avery’s paper on DNA was published in 1944—the very year that the Nazi exterminations ascended to their horrific crescendo in Germany. Each month, trains disgorged thousands of deported Jews into the camps. The numbers swelled: in 1944 alone, nearly 500,000 men, women, and children were transported to Auschwitz. Satellite camps were added, and new gas chambers and crematoria were constructed. Mass graves overflowed with the dead. That year, an estimated 450,000 were gassed to death. By 1945, 900,000 Jews, 74,000 Poles, 21,000 Gypsies (Roma), and 15,000 political prisoners had been killed.

In the early spring of 1945, as the soldiers of the Soviet Red Army approached Auschwitz and Birkenau through the frozen landscape, the Nazis attempted to evacuate nearly sixty thousand prisoners from the camps and their satellites. Exhausted, cold, and severely malnourished, many of these prisoners died during the evacuation. On the morning of January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered the camps and liberated the remaining seven thousand prisoners—a minuscule remnant of the number killed and buried in the camp. By then the language of eugenics and genetics had long become subsidiary to the more malevolent language of racial hatred. The pretext of genetic cleansing had largely been subsumed by its progression into ethnic cleansing. Even so, the mark of Nazi genetics remained, like an indelible scar. Among the bewildered, emaciated prisoners to walk out of the camp that morning were one family of dwarfs and several twins—the few remaining survivors of Mengele’s genetic experiments.

This, perhaps, was the final contribution of Nazism to genetics: it placed the ultimate stamp of shame on eugenics. The horrors of Nazi eugenics inspired a cautionary tale, prompting a global reexamination of the ambitions that had spurred the effort. Around the world, eugenic programs came to a shamefaced halt. The Eugenics Record Office in America had lost much of its funding in 1939 and shrank drastically after 1945. Many of its most ardent supporters, having developed a convenient collective amnesia about their roles in encouraging the German eugenicists, renounced the movement altogether.

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I. The “backbone” or spine of DNA and RNA is made of a chain of sugars and phosphates strung together. In RNA, the sugar is ribose—hence Ribo-Nucleic Acid (RNA). In DNA, the sugar is a slightly different chemical: deoxyribose—hence Deoxyribo-Nucleic Acid (DNA).

“Important Biological Objects Come in Pairs”

One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and the mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.

—James Watson

It is the molecule that has the glamour, not the scientists.

—Francis Crick

Science [would be] ruined if—like sports—it were to put competition above everything else.

—Benoit Mandelbrot

Oswald Avery’s experiment achieved another “transformation.” DNA, once the underdog of all biological molecules, was thrust into the limelight. Although some scientists initially resisted the idea that genes were made of DNA, Avery’s evidence was hard to shrug off (despite three nominations, however, Avery was still denied the Nobel Prize because Einar Hammarsten, the influential Swedish chemist, refused to believe that DNA could carry genetic information). As additional proof from other laboratories and experiments accumulated in the 1950s,I even the most hidebound skeptics had to convert into believers. The allegiances shifted: the handmaiden of chromatin was suddenly its queen.

Among the early converts to the religion of DNA was a young