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39 In the mid-1920s, the American psychiatrist Karl Menninger published a review of a book entitled The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics. The book dealt with heredity, and Menninger, who explored humanity’s destructive tendencies, acknowledged that he had insufficient expertise to assess the book’s scientific merit. His assessment was based not on the science but on his psychiatric analysis of its author, Paul Kammerer. Menninger framed the review as a dialog between the missing patient (Kammerer), whose “symptoms” were reflected in the pages of the book, and his unsought-after therapist (Menninger). The patient, the psychiatrist concluded, was clinically paranoid. Through his writing , Menninger saw Kammerer’s “exaggerated defense against projected hostility ” and his “commensurate exaggeration of the ego.” Menninger said, “there is a semblance of presenting the opposite side of the question but it is not well done, for this the paranoid individual cannot well do.” On these grounds the author’s science could not be trusted. His mind was too unstable. Of the ideas, Menninger said: “It is impossible to discount sufficiently the prevailing paranoid , and hence unscientific tone of the thing.”1 This was the same Kammerer who, in that same year, was judged a pleasant dinner companion by H. S. Jennings. Jennings had taken a less personal look at the science. He liked what he saw, and he suspected that Kammerer’s rivals were unjustly judging him. The two assessments of one man’s scientific work could not have been more different. They reveal the wide range of reactions that Kammerer’s contemporaries brought to his work and his personality . Menninger’s hasty judgment and psychiatric hubris, based on no direct knowledge of his “patient,” reveals how far some would go to discredit Kammerer ’s science. Menninger was not an exception; others echoed his views, especially in Germany and America. American zoologist Howard Parshley, for 3 Paul Kammerer and Flexible Heredity 40 PART I CONSTRUCTING HEREDITY example, called Kammerer’s work pseudoscience and referred to him as a “neo-Lamarckian heretic.”2 Kammerer, no doubt, had peculiarities. His personality was a maddening combination of vanity and impulsiveness, “bombastishness,” a deep insecurity, and an at times extreme emotionality. He was concerned with dress to the point of being a dandy; he was given to dramatic overstatement; and he was sometimes quite depressed. His professional life was replete with near misses and plagued with difficulties. His application for the Habilitation (a formal professional certification to teach in German-speaking universities) had been difficult (it was granted in 1910), though in 1909, Kammerer’s experimental work on which it was based was awarded an important scientific prize for “pathbreaking physiological discoveries.”3 Yet one of Kammerer’s own colleagues had attacked his work; and in the late teens two major German geneticists, Erwin Baur and Max Hartmann, challenged it. Partly on these grounds, in 1919, a proposal to confer on Kammerer the prestigious title of associate professor at the University of Vienna was denied.4 Throughout his adult life, Kammerer had polarized his scientific associates, colleagues, and acquaintances. Pioneering British geneticist William Bateson disliked him at first sight and for over a decade challenged his work. After first meeting him in Vienna in1910, Bateson wrote his wife describing his reaction to the man and his work on the inheritance of acquired characteristics: “there was just the faintest tinge of something like suspicion of humbug in my mind . . . , but taking the whole series of experiments together I cannot really entertain the idea of fraud.”5 He dismissed his doubts as probably due to Kammerer’s likeness to Bateson’s British competitor, Karl Pearson. But Bateson’s assessment became more and more critical, and it was shared by many of his colleagues. In the early 1920s, the premier American geneticist T. H. Morgan refused to be on the scientific committee that welcomed Kammerer on his American lecture tour. In1923, just before that tour, American biometrician Raymond Pearl told neurologist Henry Donaldson that Kammerer was a fraud. Pearl had been keeping a file on Kammerer since the teens, presumably documenting the grounds for his view. Unfortunately for Pearl, the file was lost in a1919 fire in his laboratory.6 Jennings was Pearl’s colleague at Johns Hopkins. In his 1924 letter to Harrison endorsing Kammerer, described in Chapter 1, Jennings explained that Kammerer’s critics were being unfair, and he implied that Pearl’s reaction was especially extreme. He believed that the debate about Kammerer’s integrity could be traced...

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