The Gene Read online

  Against this backdrop, the US Supreme Court took scarcely any time to reach its decision on Buck v. Bell. On May 2, 1927, a few weeks before Carrie Buck’s twenty-first birthday, the Supreme Court handed down its verdict. Writing the 8–1 majority opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. reasoned, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

  Holmes—the son of a physician, a humanist, a scholar of history, a man widely celebrated for his skepticism of social dogmas, and soon to be one of the nation’s most vocal advocates of judicial and political moderation—was evidently tired of the Bucks and their babies. “Three generations of imbeciles is enough,” he wrote.

  Carrie Buck was sterilized by tubal ligation on October 19, 1927. That morning, around nine o’clock, she was moved to the state colony’s infirmary. At ten o’clock, narcotized on morphine and atropine, she lay down on a gurney in a surgical room. A nurse administered anesthesia, and Buck drifted into sleep. Two doctors and two nurses were in attendance—an unusual turnout for such a routine procedure, but this was a special case. John Bell, the superintendent, opened her abdomen with an incision in the midline. He removed a section of both fallopian tubes, tied the ends of the tubes, and sutured them shut. The wounds were cauterized with carbolic acid and sterilized with alcohol. There were no surgical complications.

  The chain of heredity had been broken. “The first case operated on under the sterilization law” had gone just as planned, and the patient was discharged in excellent health, Bell wrote. Buck recovered in her room uneventfully.

  Six decades and two years, no more than a passing glance of time, separate Mendel’s initial experiments on peas and the court-mandated sterilization of Carrie Buck. Yet in this brief flash of six decades, the gene had transformed from an abstract concept in a botanical experiment to a powerful instrument of social control. As Buck v. Bell was being argued in the Supreme Court in 1927, the rhetoric of genetics and eugenics penetrated social, political, and personal discourses in the United States. In 1927, the state of Indiana passed a revised version of an earlier law to sterilize “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists.” Other states followed with even more draconian legal measures to sterilize and confine men and women judged to be genetically inferior.

  While state-sponsored sterilization programs expanded throughout the nation, a grassroots movement to personalize genetic selection was also gaining popularity. In the 1920s, millions of Americans thronged to agricultural fairs where, alongside tooth-brushing demonstrations, popcorn machines, and hayrides, the public encountered Better Babies Contests, in which children, often as young as one or two years old, were proudly displayed on tables and pedestals, like dogs or cattle, as physicians, psychiatrists, dentists, and nurses in white coats examined their eyes and teeth, prodded their skin, and measured heights, weights, skull sizes, and temperaments to select the healthiest and fittest variants. The “fittest” babies were then paraded through the fairs. Their pictures were featured prominently on posters, newspapers, and magazines—generating passive support for a national eugenics movement. Davenport, the Harvard-trained zoologist famous for establishing the Eugenics Record Office, created a standardized evaluation form to judge the fittest babies. Davenport instructed his judges to examine the parents before judging the children: “You should score 50% for heredity before you begin to examine a baby.” “A prize winner at two may be an epileptic at ten.” These fairs often contained “Mendel booths,” where the principles of genetics and the laws of inheritance were demonstrated using puppets.

  In 1927, a film called Are You Fit to Marry?, by Harry Haiselden, another eugenics-obsessed doctor, played to packed audiences across the United States. The revival of an earlier film titled The Black Stork, the plot involved a physician, played by Haiselden himself, who refuses to perform lifesaving operations on disabled infants in an effort to “cleanse” the nation of defective children. The film ends with a woman who has a nightmare of bearing a mentally defective child. She awakens and decides that she and her fiancé must get tested before their marriage to ensure their genetic compatibility (by the late 1920s, premarital genetic-fitness tests, with assessments of family histories of mental retardation, epilepsy, deafness, skeletal diseases, dwarfism, and blindness, were being widely advertised to the American public). Ambitiously, Haiselden meant to market his film as a “date night” movie: it had love, romance, suspense, and humor—with some retail infanticide thrown in on the side.

  As the front of the American eugenics movement advanced from imprisonment to sterilization to outright murder, European eugenicists watched the escalation with a mix of eagerness and envy. By 1936, less than a decade after Buck v. Bell, a vastly more virulent form of “genetic cleansing” would engulf that continent like a violent contagion, morphing the language of genes and inheritance into its most potent and macabre form.

  * * *

  I. Undoubtedly, the historical legacy of slavery was also an important factor driving American eugenics. White eugenicists in America had long convulsed with the fear that African slaves, with their inferior genes, would intermarry with whites and thereby contaminate the gene pool—but laws to prevent interracial marriages, promulgated during the 1860s, had calmed most of these fears. White immigrants, in contrast, were not so easy to identify and separate, thus amplifying the anxieties of ethnic contamination and miscegenation in the 1920s.

  PART TWO

  * * *

  “IN THE SUM OF THE PARTS, THERE ARE ONLY THE PARTS”

  Deciphering the Mechanism of Inheritance

  (1930–1970)

  It was when I said

  “Words are not forms of a single word.

  In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.

  The world must be measured by eye.”

  —Wallace Stevens, “On the Road Home”

  “Abhed”

  Genio y hechura, hasta sepultura. (Natures and features last until the grave.)

  —Spanish saying

  I am the family face:

  Flesh perishes, I live on,

  Projecting trait and trace

  Through time to times anon,

  And leaping from place to place

  Over oblivion.

  —Thomas Hardy, “Heredity”

  The day before our visit with Moni, my father and I took a walk in Calcutta. We started near Sealdah station, where my grandmother had stepped off the train from Barisal in 1946, with five boys and four steel trunks in tow. From the edge of the station, we retraced their path, walking along Prafulla Chandra Road, past the bustling wet market, with open-air stalls of fish and vegetables on the left, and the stagnating pond of water hyacinths on the right, then turned left again, heading toward the city.

  The road narrowed sharply and the crowd thickened. On both sides of the street, the larger apartments divided into tenements, as if driven by some furious biological process—one room splitting into two, two becoming four, and four, eight. The streets reticulated and the sky vanished. There was the clank of cooking, and the mineral smell of coal smoke. At a pharmacist’s shop, we turned into the inlet of Hayat Khan Lane and walked toward the house that my father and his family had occupied. The rubbish heap was still there, breeding its multigenerational population of feral dogs. The front door of the house opened into a small courtyard. A woman was in the kitchen downstairs, about to behead a coconut with a scythe.

  “Are you Bibhuti’s daughter?” my father asked in Bengali, out of the blue. Bibhuti Mukhopadhyay had owned the house and rented it to my grandmother. He was no longer alive, but my father recalled two children—a son and a daughter.

  The woman looked at my father warily. He had already stepped past the threshold and climbed onto the raised veranda, a few feet
from the kitchen. “Does Bibhuti’s family still live here?” The questions were launched without any formal introduction. I noted a deliberate change in his accent—the softened hiss of the consonants in his words, the dental chh of West Bengali softening into the sibilant ss of the East. In Calcutta, I knew, every accent is a surgical probe. Bengalis send out their vowels and consonants like survey drones—to test the identities of their listeners, to sniff out their sympathies, to confirm their allegiances.

  “No, I’m his brother’s daughter-in-law,” the woman said. “We have lived here since Bibhuti’s son died.”

  It is difficult to describe what happened next—except to say that it is a moment that occurs uniquely in the histories of refugees. A tiny bolt of understanding passed between them. The woman recognized my father—not the actual man, whom she had never met, but the form of the man: a boy returning home. In Calcutta—in Berlin, Peshawar, Delhi, Dhaka—men like this seem to turn up every day, appearing out of nowhere off the streets and walking unannounced into houses, stepping casually over thresholds into their past.

  Her manner warmed visibly. “Were you the family that lived here once? Weren’t there many brothers?” She asked all this matter-of-factly, as if this visit had been long overdue.

  Her son, about twelve years old, peeked out from the window upstairs with a textbook in his hand. I knew that window. Jagu had parked himself there for days on end, staring into the courtyard.

  “It’s all right,” she said to her son, motioning with her hands. He fled inside. She turned to my father. “Go upstairs if you’d like. Look around, but leave the shoes on the stairwell.”

  I removed my sneakers, and the ground felt instantly intimate on my soles, as if I had always lived here.

  My father walked around the house with me. It was smaller than I had expected—as places reconstructed from borrowed memories inevitably are—but also duller and dustier. Memories sharpen the past; it is reality that decays. We climbed a narrow gullet of stairs to a small pair of rooms. The four younger brothers, Rajesh, Nakul, Jagu, and my father, had shared one of the rooms. The eldest boy, Ratan—Moni’s father—and my grandmother had shared the adjacent room, but as Jagu’s mind had involuted into madness, she had moved Ratan out with his brothers and taken Jagu in. Jagu would never again leave her room.

  We climbed up to the balcony on the roof. The sky dilated at last. Dusk was falling so quickly that it seemed you could almost sense the curvature of the earth arching away from the sun. My father looked out toward the lights of the station. A train whistled in the distance like a desolate bird. He knew I was writing about heredity.

  “Genes,” he said, frowning.

  “Is there a Bengali word?” I asked.

  He searched his inner lexicon. There was no word—but perhaps he could find a substitute.

  “Abhed,” he offered. I had never heard him use the term. It means “indivisible” or “impenetrable,” but it is also used loosely to denote “identity.” I marveled at the choice; it was an echo chamber of a word. Mendel or Bateson might have relished its many resonances: indivisible; impenetrable; inseparable; identity.

  I asked my father what he thought about Moni, Rajesh, and Jagu.

  “Abheder dosh,” he said.

  A flaw in identity; a genetic illness; a blemish that cannot be separated from the self—the same phrase served all meanings. He had made peace with its indivisibility.

  For all the talk in the late 1920s about the links between genes and identity, the gene itself appeared to possess little identity of its own. If a scientist had been asked what a gene was made of, how it accomplished its function, or where it resided within the cell, there would be few satisfactory answers. Even as genetics was being used to justify sweeping changes in law and society, the gene itself had remained a doggedly abstract entity, a ghost lurking in the biological machine.

  This black box of genetics was pried open, almost accidentally, by an unlikely scientist working on an unlikely organism. In 1907, when William Bateson visited the United States to give talks on Mendel’s discovery, he stopped in New York to meet Thomas Hunt Morgan, the cell biologist. Bateson was not particularly impressed. “Morgan is a blockhead,” he wrote to his wife. “He is in a continuous whirl—very active and inclined to be noisy.”

  Noisy, active, obsessive, eccentric—with a dervishlike mind that spiraled from one scientific question to the next—Thomas Morgan was a professor of zoology at Columbia University. His main interest was embryology. At first, Morgan was not even interested in whether units of heredity existed or how or where they were stored. The principal question he cared about concerned development: How does an organism emerge from a single cell?

  Morgan had resisted Mendel’s theory of heredity at first—arguing that it was unlikely that complex embryological information could be stored in discrete units in the cell (hence Bateson’s “blockhead” comment). Eventually, however, Morgan had become convinced by Bateson’s evidence; it was hard to argue against “Mendel’s bulldog,” who came armed with charts of data. Yet, even as he had come to accept the existence of genes, Morgan had remained perplexed about their material form. “Cell biologists look; geneticists count; biochemists clean,” the scientist Arthur Kornberg once said. Indeed, armed with microscopes, cell biologists had become accustomed to a cellular world in which visible structures performed identifiable functions within cells. But thus far, the gene had been “visible” only in a statistical sense. Morgan wanted to uncover the physical basis of heredity. “We are interested in heredity not primarily as a mathematical formulation,” he wrote, “but rather as a problem concerning the cell, the egg and the sperm.”

  But where might genes be found within cells? Intuitively, biologists had long guessed that the best place to visualize a gene was the embryo. In the 1890s, a German embryologist working with sea urchins in Naples, Theodor Boveri, had proposed that genes resided in chromosomes, threadlike filaments that stained blue with aniline, and lived, coiled like springs, in the nucleus of cells (the word chromosome was coined by Boveri’s colleague Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz).

  Boveri’s hypothesis was corroborated by work performed by two other scientists. Walter Sutton, a grasshopper-collecting farm boy from the prairies of Kansas, had grown into a grasshopper-collecting scientist in New York. In the summer of 1902, working on grasshopper sperm and egg cells—which have particularly gigantic chromosomes—Sutton also postulated that genes were physically carried on chromosomes. And Boveri’s own student, a biologist named Nettie Stevens, had become interested in the determination of sex. In 1905, using cells from the common mealworm, Stevens demonstrated that “maleness” in worms was determined by a unique factor—the Y chromosome—that was only present in male embryos, but never in female ones (under a microscope, the Y chromosome looks like any other chromosome—a squiggle of DNA that stains brightly blue—except that it is shorter and stubbier compared to the X chromosome). Having pinpointed the location of gender-carrying genes to a single chromosome, Stevens proposed that all genes might be carried on chromosomes.

  Thomas Morgan admired the work of Boveri, Sutton, and Stevens. But he still yearned for a more tangible description of the gene. Boveri had identified the chromosome as the physical residence for genes, but the deeper architecture of genes and chromosomes still remained unclear. How were genes organized on chromosomes? Were they strung along chromosomal filaments—like pearls on a string? Did every gene have a unique chromosomal “address”? Did genes overlap? Was one gene physically or chemically linked to another?

  Morgan approached these questions by studying yet another model organism—fruit flies. He began to breed flies sometime around 1905 (some of Morgan’s colleagues would later claim that his first stock came from a flock of flies above a pile of overripe fruit in a grocery store in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Others suggested that he got his first flies from a colleague in New York). A year later, he was breeding maggots by the thousands, in milk bottles filled with rottin
g fruit in a third-floor laboratory at Columbia University.I Bunches of overripe bananas hung from sticks. The smell of fermented fruit was overpowering, and a haze of escaped flies lifted off the tables like a buzzing veil every time Morgan moved. The students called his laboratory the Fly Room. It was about the same size and shape as Mendel’s garden—and in time it would become an equally iconic site in the history of genetics.

  Like Mendel, Morgan began by identifying heritable traits—visible variants that he could track over generations. He had visited Hugo de Vries’s garden in Amsterdam in the early 1900s and become particularly interested in de Vries’s plant mutants. Did fruit flies have mutations as well? By scoring thousands of flies under the microscope, he began to catalog dozens of mutant flies. A rare white-eyed fly appeared spontaneously among the typically red-eyed flies. Other mutant flies had forked bristles; sable-colored bodies; curved legs; bent, batlike wings; disjointed abdomens; deformed eyes—a Halloween’s parade of oddballs.

  A flock of students joined him in New York, each one odd in his own right: a tightly wound, precise Midwesterner named Alfred Sturtevant; Calvin Bridges, a brilliant, grandiose young man given to fantasies about free love and promiscuity; and paranoid, obsessive Hermann Muller, who jostled daily for Morgan’s attention. Morgan openly favored Bridges; it was Bridges, as an undergraduate student assigned to wash bottles, who had spotted, among hundreds of vermilion-eyed flies, the white-eyed mutant that would become the basis for many of Morgan’s crucial experiments. Morgan admired Sturtevant for his discipline and his work ethic. Muller was favored the least: Morgan found him shifty, laconic, and disengaged from the other members of the lab. Eventually, all three students would quarrel fiercely, unleashing a cycle of envy and destructiveness that would blaze through the discipline of genetics. But for now, in a fragile peace dominated by the buzz of flies, they immersed themselves in experiments on genes and chromosomes. By breeding normal flies with mutants—mating white-eyed males with red-eyed females, say—Morgan and his students could track the inheritance of traits across multiple generations. The mutants, again, would prove crucial to these experiments: only the outliers could illuminate the nature of normal heredity.