Hormones, Heredity, and Race

Cheryl A. Logan

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813566481
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Early in the twentieth century, arguments about “nature” and “nurture” pitted a rigid genetic determinism against the idea that genes were flexible and open to environmental change. This book tells the story of three Viennese biologists—Paul Kammerer, Julius Tandler, and Eugen Steinach—who sought to show how the environment could shape heredity through the impact of hormones. It also explores the dynamic of failure through both scientific and social lenses. During World War I, the three men were well respected scientists; by 1934, one was dead by his own hand, another was in exile, and the third was subject to ridicule.Paul Kammerer had spent years gathering  zoological evidence on whether environmental change could alter heredity, using his research as the scientific foundation for a new kind of eugenics—one that challenged the racism growing in mainstream eugenics. By 1918, he drew on the pioneering research of two colleagues who studied how secretions shaped sexual attributes to argue that hormones could alter genes. After 1920, Julius Tandler employed a similar concept to restore the health and well-being of Vienna's war-weary citizens. Both men rejected the rigidly acting genes of the new genetics and instead crafted a biology of flexible heredity to justify eugenic reforms that respected human rights. But the interplay of science and personality with the social and political rise of fascism and with antisemitism undermined their ideas, leading to their spectacular failure.

1

Three Failed Scientists

Nature and nurture were pitted against one another for most of the twentieth century. In the minds of many, they still are. Is an attribute learned or instinctive? Or is it a mix, more learned or far more hereditary? This kind of separated partitioning was, however, not prominent at the beginning of the century. At that time, many important thinkers still accepted the long-held idea that persistent changes in the environment could alter the nature of heredity, so that an individual developed under the influence of heredity that was molded by his or her environment. There could even be several kinds of heredity, some of which were especially amenable to environmental change. These thinkers fused heredity and the environment in a way that made the question of which contributed more to a trait either irrelevant or meaningless.

Scientific debates on the issue began in earnest in the 1880s with the ideas of the German zoologist August Weismann and the rise of the new genetics. These debates turned on one of the most contentious concepts in the study of heredity in the early twentieth century: the issue of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Can offspring inherit as hereditary attributes that their parents have acquired? Weismann denied it. This book tells the story of three Austrian scientists who challenged Weismann and, in the years around World War I, proposed a modern explanation of how the inheritance of acquired characteristics might occur. They believed that hormones were the key. Through hormones, individual adaptations—acquired adjustments that improved life in one generation—could, once entrenched via exercise or practice, become hereditary in subsequent generations. The sex hormones, the three men argued, were especially likely to mediate these environmental changes in heredity.

Weismann had proposed that the hereditary material (then called the “germ-plasm”) was isolated and sequestered. It lay hidden deep within “germ” cells, and it was transmitted continuously from parent to offspring in ways that made it immune from environmental influences within the body. The implications of his proposal extended beyond the science of heredity to touch on social debates about the nature of organic progress. Was nature random, or did it contain some principle that ensured forward-moving progressive change in life? Weismann and the British philosopher Herbert Spencer debated the issue in the 1890s, and blind versus progressive views of organic change informed their different views of heredity. Spencer defended the inheritance of acquired characteristics as a force shaping human purpose. Weismann sought accounts of change that relied only on chance and natural selection, Charles Darwin’s new account of evolution. Both men drew on evidence to explain odd biological phenomena that, on the surface, seemed to have little to do with purpose or progress—such things as cave dwelling animals, whose eyes degenerated when they lived in totally dark environments. Weismann insisted that natural selection alone could explain them; Spencer argued that they stemmed from the disuse brought by the dark cave environments, disuse that eventually made them hereditary.

Weismann did experiments removing rats’ tails to demonstrate that environmental change was ineffective. But he was on weak ground, arguing a point based on something that didn’t happen. As he acknowledged, his conclusions were drawn more from first principles than from evidence. In 1893, he wrote: “we know indeed, nothing at all but the chief foundation of the process; and therefore anyone who does not comprehend the logical necessity of the theory, or will not recognize it, can easily set aside the individual instances as untenable.”1 Even by 1920, evidence had not decided the issue. And by then, the stakes were especially high. Many believed that humanity itself was deteriorating; if there were no purpose in biology, what ensured nature’s progress? If nature contained principles of inherent purpose, humanity would resolve its problems naturally; nature would take care of itself and of human beings. If it did not, humans would have to step in to intervene to direct their own futures. But who would decide what that direction would be? And what form would the intervention take?

The scientists on whom I focus believed that they had a novel solution. They agreed, as most did, that the environment could be destructive. But without accepting notions of inherent purpose, they also argued for the constructive power of the environment as the key to the problems of heredity and progress. The environment could, after all, shape adaptive change in heredity through the intermediary action of the body’s hormones, chemicals produced by glands that secreted their products directly into the bloodstream. It was a novel hypothesis, and it raised intriguing possibilities. But they failed, and they failed spectacularly.

Modern science can be and has been of huge benefit to humanity. The histories of medicine, the cell theory, and the germ theory of disease, for example, reveal many important successes. But scientists have also pursued flawed ideas. Some of these are immoral; some are unsupported by evidence; some are just discarded. And some seem wrong, but can return, usually in very different dress, to be reconsidered at a later date. Historical accounts of failed science are not stories of the linear accumulation of flawed knowledge, which at some point reaches a logical criterion established for failure. The information is not usually discovered to be wrong because evidence tells us that it is. That happens; but perhaps just as common are episodes in which ideas are discarded because they are premature or inconsistent with a social or political context whose solution for a time drives scientific priorities. Scientists and the problems they face cannot be separated from their social contexts. Personal, political, and social influences shape scientific communities and the motivations and beliefs that guide scientists’ work. They help shape the “configuration of ideas” that makes science a useful and socially meaningful enterprise, and, at some points in history, they influence how the rules of science work.2

Perhaps no problem illustrates this more clearly than the early twentieth-century debates about nature and nurture that informed the rise of eugenics. Enlightenment ideals of human improvement, Darwinism, the rediscovery of Mendel’s laws of heredity, and the growth of modern genetics all supported the new field of eugenics, a branch of applied biology that sought to intervene and modify heredity to improve humanity. Many eugenicists rationalized numerous ethical abuses in the name of science and progress. These including forced sterilization, euthanasia, and even the murder of people deemed “unfit.” Those advocating and implementing eugenics were not, however, primarily fanatical politicians or pseudoscientists lacking a solid grounding in science (though there were some of these). Instead, many were well versed in the expert scientific knowledge of the time and deeply involved in scientific debates that were decided—as many are—with incomplete evidence. But there were also challengers. In the 1920s, several dissenters challenged the ascent of mainstream eugenics, which I call selectionist eugenics. Some dissenters resisted eugenics altogether, basing their rejection on moral, not scientific, grounds. Others resisted the science underlying eugenics. Some did both.

Dissenting Scientists

The three scientists that I present were among the dissenters. In the interwar period they promoted an alternative application of biology to society based in their hormonal interpretation of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Genetics and endocrinology were both new sciences, and these men were at the center of an attempt to integrate the two fields to redefine how humanity might ensure its future. They lived in Vienna, and they knew each other distantly. Two were coworkers. One was an acknowledged pioneer in his field, a second was a prominent scientist-politician, internationally known for modern health reforms. For a time the international scientific establishment paid close attention to their ideas; and for a time their approach succeeded. But when it failed, it failed amid racist ridicule, political exile, fraud, and even suicide. Theirs is the story of how controversial but good science, science judged plausible by the standards of the time, can fail partly under the weight of political and social influence, personality, and prejudice. It is the story of how scientific failure can be abetted by the historical contexts in which scientists live and work. I tell their story through their personal passions and the overlapping concepts that united their effort. They had different goals, and each brought distinct expertise to the task; but they shared a deep regard for developmental flexibility understood as a foundational dimension of biology. And they were committed to building biological principles that resisted the prevailing social hierarchies of race, class, and gender at just the time when these hierarchies had begun to dominate mainstream eugenics. Through their history we can understand how dissenting voices in science—in this case Jewish dissenting voices raised in a time of virulent antisemitism—fail as much for political as for scientific reasons, and with spectacular personal and social consequences.

One of the three was a zoologist, one an endocrinologist, and one an anatomist. Two were internationally famous; the third was known, but less prominent. The least prominent man was the zoologist Paul Kammerer (1880–1926). For Kammerer, the failure was both scientific and deeply personal. In 1923, while on lecture tour in America, he had been over-enthusiastically hailed as “Darwin’s Successor” by the New York Times. But late in 1926, he committed suicide in the wake of intimations of scientific fraud when the journal Nature announced that some of his experimental specimens had been artificially altered. The most prominent of the three men was the pioneering reproductive endocrinologist Eugen Steinach (1861–1944). In 1926, Steinach was among the most famous endocrine physiologists of Europe. His failure was scientific and medical. By the 1940s, he was ridiculed and his scientific reputation destroyed. He was on vacation in Switzerland when the Nazis entered Vienna in 1938; he was exiled and died there, a bitter and unhappy man. The third was the anatomist and politician Julius Tandler (1869–1936). Tandler’s failure was scientific and deeply political. After the end of World War I, he became a central figure in Austrian public health. He shaped the health and child care reforms of Vienna’s governing Social Democrats, spearheading the medical and health reforms of “Red Vienna.” But after over fifteen years of civil service, in 1934 he was driven into exile under the threat of imprisonment. Two years later he died of a heart attack in Moscow.

The three were colleagues in the Viennese scientific community. Steinach and Kammerer worked in the same laboratory. Steinach and Tandler had been students in the same institute; both were experts in the science of sexuality, which greatly benefited from their pioneering work. Kammerer and Tandler were committed to the humanitarian reform of society on scientific and socialist grounds. All three worked on an application of biology to society that united endocrinology and genetics to emphasize developmental flexibility over and above rigid genetic fixity. And for a time, they explicitly argued from within biology against the eugenics that advocated the forced sterilization of mentally and physically disabled people and the elimination of supposed “degenerates.” In the development of scientific knowledge, social bias can insert itself into spaces left empty by incomplete theories and evidence. Amid the social structures that shape and apply scientific knowledge, scientific advance is often shaped by such bias. The reactions within science to these men’s views on sexual equality, to their political positions, to their ideas of racial flexibility and improvement, and to their perceived Jewishness, eventually helped engulf their science.

The least significant in his own time was Kammerer; but partly because his passion linked the other two around a novel solution to the nature-nurture problem, I begin with him.

Paul Kammerer

If Kammerer is remembered at all today, it is probably for the cloud of fraud recounted by Arthur Koestler in his 1971 book The Case of the Midwife Toad. The book describes an episode in which Kammerer was implicated in tampering with data that he had collected around 1909. The data examined the mating characteristics of land-breeding toads that had been reared in water, the so-called midwife toads. From about 1910 to the discovery of fraud in 1926, the data were important because (along with many others) they demonstrated experimentally that characteristics acquired by individuals in one generation, through positive adjustment to a changed environment, could alter the heredity of their descendents—the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The idea had been popular in the early and middle nineteenth century, but by 1920, its fortunes had begun to decline. Against the rising tide of the new science of genetics, Kammerer remained one of its most vocal defenders.3

But Kammerer was a poorly paid assistant who had labored for many years over experiments on toads and salamanders. Such a journeyman scientist has an important place in this story for two reasons. For almost two decades he had amassed a large body of zoological evidence considered by many to be the most convincing data demonstrating the inheritance of acquired characteristics. By 1920, if the idea were to stand or fall, many believed it would do so based in large part on Kammerer’s evidence. Second, beginning in about 1918, Kammerer developed a hypothesis that drew on a new theory in reproductive endocrinology to argue that hormones could mediate the persistent and flexible impact of the environment on heredity. In hormones, he sought evidence of the mechanism by which heredity might be rendered flexible. Kammerer and his senior colleague, endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, then collaborated on experiments analyzing the impact of climate on heritable differences in the sexual characteristics of mammals. The results led them to reject what were thought to be rigid sexual differences among human “races.” Kammerer’s goal was a scientifically based moral reform of what he saw as the racist base of mainstream eugenics. He advocated instead a new, more ethical eugenics, which he called “productive eugenics.”

Many scientists carefully watched Kammerer’s research. In 1924, American zoologist and geneticist Herbert Spencer Jennings wrote to his colleague, Yale embryologist Ross Harrison, endorsing Kammerer’s work. Jennings had just hosted Kammerer’s lecture at Johns Hopkins University, and after the lecture, Kammerer stayed in Jennings’s home. It is not clear why Jennings felt compelled to write to Harrison, but the communication reads like a letter of recommendation. In it, he gave Kammerer measured praise. He was, wrote Jennings, adept at raising animals and probably a “very skillful experimenter.” Jennings also commented on Kammerer’s personality: “He also seemed to me a very direct, unaffected, straightforward personality; certainly nothing about him suggests the faker”—confirming that others were already suspicious of his research. But Jennings was no sycophant; he had no reason to be. He warned that Kammerer might not be good at theory; he had a “simplicity about him…. On the other hand I should be disposed to have confidence in any particular concrete result that he presents.” At least some of Jennings’s Hopkins colleagues apparently agreed: “The other men who met him seemed to get the same impression that I did, so far as I heard, as to his personality and honesty.” Alluding to controversies that already surrounded Kammerer’s work, Jennings criticized the “bad tactics” of Kammerer’s American detractors.4

Jennings was well informed about Kammerer’s research. In lectures presented before and after Kammerer’s visit, Jennings examined in detail Kammerer’s zoological evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The debates had intensified around the experimental evidence supporting it, and American scientists were particularly skeptical. Jennings’s lecture notes puzzled at the strong reaction against the concept in America. Any serious consideration of the idea, he wrote jokingly, quickly convinced one’s scientific colleagues that he was probably guilty of insurance fraud or of beating his wife. Jennings noted that the positive evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics would have to be overwhelming. But he considered Kammerer’s work promising—the best evidence available. After describing Kammerer’s salamander studies in detail, he wrote “remarkable if true!” Of Kammerer’s body of work, he noted: “These 14 or more years of work gave [a] very great mass of results of very highest interest—published in extensive detailed illustrated memoirs in the scientific journals on many species.”5

His lectures were a strong endorsement: “If work proves itself,—[it] will undoubtedly have to be considered one of the most important pieces of work in generations…. Important to keep eyes on Kammerer’s experiments; no one will catch up with him for a while!”6 But this was almost as far from prophetic as one could get; less than a decade later Jennings wrote: “[Kammerer’s] work made a strong impression, until it was suddenly shown that the result of one of his experiments had been falsified. Kammerer committed suicide. His entire work has been discredited.”7 After the scandal broke in the summer of 1926, Kammerer denied any role in the fraud, and many colleagues defended him. But, already a depressed man and now dejected at the damage to his honor, he shot himself in September. As Jennings shows, the suicide was widely regarded as an admission of guilt. Kammerer’s reputation was destroyed, and with it, the most convincing evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics.8

Eugen Steinach

Paul Kammerer was a master curator of animals. Breeding and rearing healthy animals were his passions, and they had enabled him to produce convincing zoological evidence. But after 1900, knowledge of cell structure grew rapidly, and the requirements of evidence changed. Zoological demonstrations of flexible heredity like Kammerer’s were less and less convincing. Instead, cellular evidence was needed to explain how flexible heredity worked. Scientists wanted to know what cellular process could convey an environmental change to deep within a cell and alter its hereditary material. In about 1917, Kammerer abandoned his salamander and toad work and turned to the research of his new colleague, Steinach, to address the problem of mechanism.

Steinach had worked for years with the renowned physiologist Ewald Hering at the German University in Prague. But in 1912, he was hired to direct the Physiology Department in Vienna’s Institute for Experimental Biology, where Kammerer had worked since 1903. Though his early work was on the nervous system, by the late 1890s, Steinach had turned to the study of what were then called inner secretions—hormones. Between 1910 and 1930, he carried out ingenious experiments showing that sexual development in mammals was not rigidly controlled either by genes or by gametes (eggs and sperm). Rather, sexual attributes unfolded flexibly under the influence of hormones. He also demonstrated that hormones were produced in a bisexual mix that could shape the development of either male or female sexual characteristics in either males or females. His work challenged the rigidity, if not the form, of the late nineteenth-century boundaries between male and female, and his scientific demonstrations were often sensational. The program established Steinach as the ranking, if controversial, pioneer in Central European reproductive endocrinology. But Steinach’s hopes were also based in endocrine procedures that he had developed to treat the infirmities of old age by surgically modifying hormone production. The method, termed rejuvenation, was a surgical forerunner of hormone replacement therapy, and it may well have been his scientific undoing. By the late 1930s, rejuvenation was ridiculed and Steinach’s pioneering early research marginalized.9

Julius Tandler

Though Kammerer’s suicide was tragic, his failure was spectacular not because it was linked to scientific fraud or because it ended in self-inflicted death. It was spectacular because in post–World War I Austria, the hope of a different kind of application of biology to society rested with the validity of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Kammerer had long advocated the concept for improving society, and he was not alone. Many Viennese scientists and social theorists based their hopes for an improved human heredity on the inheritanc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Three Failed Scientists
• Part I: Constructing Heredity
• Part II: Reform Eugenics
• Epilogue
• Notes
• About the Author