Andrea Barrett - Archangel

Working all the time, excited by the new experiments in the lab, he ignored what was happening out on the streets until, after a while, even he couldn’t avoid knowing about the party members being persecuted and executed, those who disagreed with Stalin disappearing. Intellectuals and scientists from different fields began to disappear as well, including geneticists, some of them Sam’s own colleagues. The director of the twins study vanished and his institute was dissolved. Elizaveta, more cautious than some, gave her flies to Sam and slipped away to her grandmother’s village. Geneticists had failed, Sam read in the papers, to serve the state by providing the collectives with new crops and livestock that could thrive in difficult climates and relieve the food shortages. They were stuck in bourgeois ways of thought. If a society could be transformed in a single generation, if the economy could be completely remade, why couldn’t the genetic heritage of crops or, for that matter, of man, be transformed as well?

In this context, Lamarck was a hero; and also Kammerer (Sam could see, now, why he’d been shown that film); and also the horticulturist Ivan Michurin, who’d claimed that through some kind of shock treatment he could transform the heredity of fruit trees, allowing their growth farther north. Trofim Lysenko, pushy and uneducated, rose up from nowhere to extend Michurinism beyond what anyone else could have imagined. Lysenko hated fruit flies, he knew no mathematics, he found Mendelian genetics tedious. Even his grasp of plant physiology was feeble. How could Sam take him seriously? Lysenko claimed that heredity was nothing so boringly fixed as the Mendelians said, but could be trained by the environment, endlessly improved. At a big meeting Sam attended at the end of 1936, Muller tried to rebuff Lysenko by clearly restating Mendelian genetics and outlining the institute’s research programs. Lamarckian inheritance, Muller explained, could not be reconciled with any of the evidence they’d found.

Sam was amazed when some in the audience actually hissed, and more so when, after Lysenko responded by dismissing all of formal genetics, those same people stood and cheered. Genetics was a harmful science, Lysenko said, not a science at all but a bourgeois distortion, a science of saboteurs. Muller and his like were wrecking socialism, preventing all progress, whereas he would now completely refashion heredity! His Russian was failing him, Sam kept thinking; Lysenko couldn’t be saying this. What should be so, must be so? Yet his friends heard the same thing. Those who doubted him, Lysenko said, were criminal. A theory of heredity, to be correct, must promise not just the power to understand nature but the power to change it.

Muller, after making careful arrangements to protect his colleagues, left the country early in 1937, and Sam followed a few weeks later, first selecting breeding stock from the best of Elizaveta’s flies, and then destroying all the papers and letters he’d received from his Russian friends. Of course I understand why you need me to return to the United States , he carefully wrote to his mother, who’d requested no such thing but could be counted on to understand that his letters were likely being read. Back in Philadelphia, writing up his last results from the Moscow lab in the small bedroom where he’d slept as a child, the familiar sound of his mother working in the living room complicated by the movements of the two teachers with whom she now shared the house, Sam began another search for employment. This time he had better luck, finding a position at a small college near the western edge of Illinois. For a while, as he was trying to set up yet another lab — how many times could a person order glassware, brushes, ether, drying racks, all the bits and pieces needed to do the smallest experiment? — he thought about changing fields entirely. If science in the United States was controlled by a few powerful people, and science in the Soviet Union was nothing but a branch of politics — then what was the point of doing anything? Perhaps he’d do better at farming, or statistics, or auto mechanics.

Soon enough, though, he got caught up in the life of a place that at first had felt to him like nowhere. His better students were curious and eager to learn, and he found that he had to hurl himself at a problem again, simply to give them something to do. He started a genetics course in addition to his sections of general biology; he bought a little house with two large trees; he met a woman he liked, who planted vegetables in his backyard and taught him how to cook chard. The college gave him an excellent incubator, as well as some other crucial equipment. Through the fly-exchange network he was able to get some useful stock, which in turn put him in touch with many of the researchers trained in Morgan’s lab: not only Axel but also Harold and George (that was how he first met them) and, inevitably, Duncan, who immediately mailed to Sam’s new address all the papers he’d published while Sam was abroad. Once Sam solved some difficulties with mites and temperature fluctuations, he was back in business and, after hiring a couple of student helpers, began a new set of experiments. For one particular project, he used Elizaveta’s flies.

When the fly cultures he’d smuggled in were established, he turned, with a sense of recovering his younger self, to investigating them. Like some of the curiosities naturalists had noticed and collected for years — crustaceans with legs where jaws or swimmerets should be, plants with petals transformed into stamens — Elizaveta’s flies shared the property that one organ in a segmental series had been transformed into another. How were those homeotic mutants produced? And were those variations heritable or caused by damage to the developing embryo? An acquaintance of Axel’s had discovered a true-breeding homeotic mutant he called bithorax, in which the little stabilizing structures normally found behind the forewings had been transformed into a second set of wings; Elizaveta had worked with that four-winged mutant, and also with an even odder one called aristapedia, which had legs growing where the antennae should be. Endlessly fascinating, Sam thought, and he began to investigate how a mutation to a single gene could cause such massive effects.

Months passed, a year of hard work passed; thousands of cultures and tens of thousands of flies. In the mutant, he learned, the antennal discs developed early, at the same time as the leg discs, allowing the evocator that normally instructed the leg discs to act on the antennal discs as well. Evocator : he loved that word. The chemical substance that acts as a stimulus in the developing embryo. How intriguing, how sensible, really, that the mutant gene didn’t build a leg-like structure out of thin air. Instead it acted more simply and generally, altering the rate of development so that a whole pattern of growth occurred at a time and place where it ought not to be.

Others were working on this as well, but there was so much to do, along so many branching paths, that Sam had no sense of racing to solve a problem before someone else. Rather, the whole world seemed to shimmer, a delectable feeling he’d first had as a boy, working with Mr. Spacek: the act of throwing himself at one problem, this problem, lit up every other aspect of his experience in the world. Legs grew out of a fly’s head because of a small change in timing; would his life have been different if his father had died earlier, or later? If he hadn’t met Mr. Spacek when he did, or gone to college at sixteen and found Axel willing to teach him. If he hadn’t met Avery or Ellen, hadn’t met Duncan …

In this state of excitement, he’d gone to the congress in Edinburgh, where he presented his results and then connected that work with Goldschmidt’s, with work on position effects and the possibility that the particles of heredity might move around, with the possibility that maybe all genetic changes were changes in development. Maybe genes weren’t particles after all, weren’t arranged like beads on a string, but were more like spiderwebs, susceptible to the influence of events in the cytoplasm; maybe they weren’t quite as impregnable to outside influence as previously thought? He aimed his ideas at his former Russian colleagues, who should have been there but weren’t; at Axel, who was there but had missed all the groundwork; at Muller, who’d found a temporary haven in Edinburgh and who, although distracted by the responsibilities of hosting the congress, still found time to come and listen to him. He sailed past his notes, avoiding the missteps of Kammerer and Lysenko, which he knew more vividly than most. Carefully, he speculated about the question of timing. When, in the course of development, might a tiny change cause massive later effects? Might inheritance not be far more complex than we’d guessed? When he finished speaking and looked out at the disgruntled faces in the audience — Duncan’s face was red, Axel was poking his notepad with a pencil, Muller was gazing at him quizzically — he had a separate thought, which had nothing to do with inheritance. The first big leap he’d taken, with Kammerer’s work, had turned out to be wrong. Was it possible that now no one could see the rightness of this second big leap, because of his first mistake?