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191 In his retrospective summary of the fifty-year history of the science of genetics written in 1950, Richard Goldschmidt celebrated the triumph of Mendelism. In the process. he used two phrases to dismiss the likes of Paul Kammerer, Julius Tandler, and others, who—heretically by1950—had seriously explored the inheritance of acquired characteristics, attempting to reconcile it with chromosomal cell division and Mendel’s laws. Lamarckism, Goldschmidt said, reflected an “historical oddity” of the young science; it was one of “the childhood diseases of genetics” in its youth.1 By contrast, he compared the impact of “mature” genetics to that of Galileo; he praised not just neo-Darwinism, but “hyper-Darwinism”; and he could see progress in it—even in 1950—as the foundation of selectionist eugenics. Those years of debate in the teens and twenties seemed misspent in 1950, as Mendelian ratios and population genetics fused with cellular genetics and neo-Darwinism to unify biological science in what is often called “the Modern Synthesis.”2 It would only get better in1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick presented the double helix as a model of the chemical structure of genes. It would be hard to overstate how many outstanding advances in genetics and evolutionary theory after 1930 warranted Goldschmidt’s pride. It was a triumph, and Kammerer’s, Tandler’s, and Steinach’s attempts were overcome in part by the success of that triumph. In his groundbreaking study of alternatives to Darwinism at the turn of the century, Peter Bowler writes, “In the end, the [Lamarckian] theory was abandoned not because it lacked proof, but because Mendelian genetics proved so much easier to elaborate into the conceptual foundation for the study of heredity.”3 But the triumph of genetics was not solely a scientific one—success was based in more than concepts, data, and disproof. And the scientific advances made were not without cost; its deserved 9 Asymmetry, Failure, and Flexible Heredity 192 PART II REFORM EUGENICS success should not blind us to the ways in which genetics directly and indirectly contributed to the abuses of eugenics. The rejection of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was an important aspect of how genetics fed selectionist eugenics. In Central Europe, the scientific advances that helped spawn its success were intertwined in complex matrices of new scientific discovery and pressing social questions, which, in that historical moment, seemed to threaten humanity to its core. In the episode I have presented, scientific debates took place in an historical context that altered the outcome, as the mix of science, society, and prejudice with debates about progress, degeneration, and the problem of teleology fueled a momentum of success that overwhelmed the endocrine-based hypothesis of somatic induction. Historical accounts of the transition must include assessments of the social forces that helped sustain one view over another and the ways in which those forces were challenged or facilitated by societal values and reactions . The failures of Kammerer, Steinach, and Tandler were partly personal. Kammerer’s suicide, Tandler’s flight amid revolution and the rise of fascism, and Steinach’s exile, isolation, and near ridicule helped bury their respective scientific advances. Yet personal failure need not lead to scientific failure; more was involved as their science, too, failed. The Asymmetry of Success and Failure It is a commonplace that history is written by the winners. Because the fruits of science are so obvious to us, this privileging of the present may be even more tempting in the history of science. Recent advances in our understanding of the relationship between, science, scientists, and society have produced important counterweights to the temptations of success.4 Historians of science now avoid assuming that the scientific concepts dominant in their own time would, but for a weak or incomplete scientific base, eventually emerge from the past. It is trivial to say that we know today that Steinach was right about the interstitial cells; by the standards of today’s science, they are the major source of the mammalian sexual secretions, testosterone and estradiol. And the possibility that hormones might (somehow) alter genes is a good idea by today’s standards. Hormones like estradiol activate receptors, which act as “transcription factors” that control gene action. But Kammerer, Tandler, and Steinach did not and could not have known these things; and they in no way anticipated them. In their time, there were no hormone receptors, there were no transcription factors, there was not really DNA, at least not as a recognizable concept...

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