Mendel's Dwarf (39 page)

“Only?”

“Only more so. Your voice-over explaining how you cope, what drives you, what you believe or don’t believe, you know the kind of thing? I want it to be your story, from your viewpoint. Literally, as well.” He crouched down, just to make it clear. “Lots of low camera angles. The world according to Ben.” He cut at the air with the blade of his hand.

“What’s that guy doing?” Eric called from the bar. “Giving you grief, is he?”

“He’s from television.”

Eric nodded as though that explained all. “How’s Jean, by the way? Haven’t seen her for ages.”

At Eric’s words, Toogood’s eyebrows rose. He tensed visibly, like a pointer sensing game. “Who’s Jean?”

“A friend.”

The fact of a friend, a female friend, lay there between us. Toogood swallowed, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, and leaned toward me. Behind him the pinball machine uttered a shriek of joy and rang up thousands and thousands of points. “Not a girlfriend, is she?” he asked in a whisper. “These days we can handle almost anything we like on TV. What I mean is, do
you have a girl, Ben?” He smiled a gap-toothed smile that had excited Olga when we’d looked around the laboratories. “Or a boy, for Christ’s sake, if that’s what suits you. It doesn’t matter one way or the other. But what does a guy like you do for sex?”

“A Scientist of Our Time” went on the air a few months later. You will have seen the thoughtful documentary. You will have watched the world according to Ben, a world of low camera angles, of upward slants, of obstacles provided by the things of everyday life—chairs, laboratory benches, public lavatories, buses, and, of course, people. Perhaps you asked yourself why. Why did Benedict Lambert ever walk the streets of London against the background of his own caustic commentary on the passing tide of humanity, their genetic quirks, their mutations, and their variations? What was his motive?

“… all these people on the King’s Road, staring at me in horror and pity, are no less victims of their genes than I. It is just that my condition is more apparent and is considered a defect …” pause for a woman with a dachshund to pass by “… except in the case of this breed of dog …”

Whyever did he discuss matters of race and gender, of beauty and ugliness, of behavior and comportment?

“… instances of clearly inherited behavior are few. There is monoamine oxidase A deficiency, which leads to aggression and violence; there may be a form of male homosexuality, with its gene located on the long arm of the X chromosome; there are few others yet. But I’m afraid they will come …”

Whyever did he bare his barrel chest to the world?

“… you learn to live with the physical problems. It is the emotional wounds that never heal …”

Why did he waddle, like a circus act, across the television screens of the nation? Why did he climb, like a clumsy chimp, up
the rungs of a great helical DNA ladder constructed in the television laboratories out of plastic and metal, to perch on the key to his lifelong search, an adenine: thymine base pair? Why did he squat there like the great god Bes on his throne and observe the camera, the audience, the whole bloody world through a three-dimensional puzzle of plastic atoms to ask
why?
—why should a man be at the mercy of a molecular maze such as this? “A reasonable estimate is that on average every one of us carries about four harmful recessive mutations. Sometimes, if you are unlucky like me, you carry a dominant one …”

Why?

Of course the question is false. Scientifically, I mean. Philosophically as well, in all probability. We are what we are; there isn’t anything else. But still you find yourself asking, don’t you?

W
HY?

O
n New Year’s Eve, 1866, Mendel sat down and wrote to Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli, enclosing a copy of the paper. Nägeli was Professor of Botany at the University of Munich. An appropriate man to turn to, you might think. In his own work Nägeli had mapped the cellular nature of plants and identified the zones of cell division in shoots and roots. In his writings he had already touched on the question of inheritance. He had been one of the first to make a distinction between inherited and acquired characteristics—between nature and nurture—and in the manner of scientists throughout the ages had attempted to clarify the vagueness of his ideas by coining terms.

Oh, the deception of naming, the seductiveness of language! Give an idea a name and it suddenly appears to take on a concrete existence,
beauty
becoming a yardstick against which we can measure our loathing or our admiration,
truth
becoming a testament enabling us to lie,
love
rearing its ugly snake’s head and handing you the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Oh, the reification of abstracts! Think of
Kultur
and you want to reach for your gun. Think of
Lebensraum
and
Volk
, and the storm-troopers begin to march. Think of
Rassenhygiene
and the ovens begin to smoke. Nägeli’s own particular coining was not exactly sonorous,
but still very Germanic—
idioplasm:
the material of inheritance. He saw the idioplasm as being built up out of corpuscular hereditary factors, but until this moment had nothing in the way of empirical evidence to support the idea. Now this vague and fanciful concept was about to have substance given to it.

Highly Esteemed Sir
,

The acknowledged preeminence that your noble self enjoys in the detection and classification of wild-growing plant hybrids makes it my agreeable duty to submit for your kind consideration the description of some experiments in artificial fertilization
.

I suppose it was the manner of the day, but one does wish Mendel hadn’t cringed quite so much. If I could have acted as secretary, things would have been rather more terse and to the point. Perhaps:

Dear Nägeli
,

I enclose a copy of my recent paper on hybridization in
Pisum
which I feel you ought to read. If you don’t grasp its importance, for goodness’ sake pass it on to someone who might …

But that, I’m afraid, is wishful thinking. The answer from Nägeli came two months later. It reeks of condescension:

Honored colleague
,

It seems to me that the experiments with
Pisum,
far from being finished, are only beginning …

Only beginning! Eight years, and somewhere around thirty-three thousand plants! Only beginning! I feel rage mounting like a substance in my throat. It is something that I need to hawk up and
spit out, foul and pungent, into the eye of this bearded fraud. He might have gained eternal fame by recognition of the enthusiastic, naive friar from Brünn; he might have gained applause instead of opprobrium, immortality instead of the dusty death of a minor entry in the encyclopedia. But Professor Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli cannot see beyond his own nose. We are forced to witness Mendel bowing down before this second-rater:

In the projected experiments … I shall be entering a field in which your honor possesses the most extensive knowledge, knowledge that can only be gained through many years of zealous study …

Extensive knowledge, indeed. Mendel had suggested that he might repeat the garden pea work with
Hieracium
, hawkweed. This ugly beast was Nägeli’s favorite experimental plant, but it is an absurd plant for artificial crossing. It is a member of the Compositae family, along with the daisy and the dandelion, which means that it has flowers composed of minute individual florets no more than a millimeter in diameter. Artificial pollination has to be carried out using a lens. But there is worse, far worse than this. The plain fact is that the hawkweed genus usually sets seed and produces offspring without fertilization. It is, in the florid world of botanical language,
parthenogenetic
.

I particularly like that term.
Parthenos
is, of course, a maiden or virgin. Mary the mother of Jesus was one such, and according to dogma she produced her son by the process of parthenogenesis, which means, quite simply, virgin birth. Mendel would have believed this dogma, or if he had doubts he would have suppressed them, but let that point go. The term
parthenogenetic
applies to hawkweed no less than to the Virgin Mary: hawkweed makes babies without sex. Hawkweed is quite useless for genetics.

One wants to weep. One wants to be able to call across the
gulf of one hundred and thirty years, across the Communist dictatorship and the Greater Germany of the Nazis, across the smoking ruins of two world wars; one wants to shout out a warning across the implacable barrier of time. But he is deaf to all entreaty, the stout, stubborn friar with the puzzled expression and eyesight growing ever weaker as he struggles with minute flowers with even more minute sexual parts, as he attempts the impossible, to make the damn hawkweed
breed
.

Yet there is this, toward the end of his eighth letter to Nägeli, written in July 1870:

Of the experiments of previous years, those dealing with
Matthiola annua
and
glabra [stock],
Zea
[maize],
and
Mirabilis [four-o’clock]
were concluded last year. Their hybrids behave exactly like those of
Pisum.
Darwin’s statements concerning hybrids of the genera mentioned in
The Variations of Animals and Plants under Domestication … 
need to be corrected in many respects
.

That passing mention is momentous. It is confirmation, if confirmation were ever needed, that Mendel repeated the
Pisum
work on other, unrelated species and got the very same results. It also drags Darwin into the equation. Mendel is shouting his findings to Nägeli, and still the idiot takes no notice. The correspondence dribbles on for a few years, but the work is beyond all recovery now. Mendel has lost his way. He is fiddling around with unsuitable material and ill-defined characteristics and corresponding sporadically with a botanist who hasn’t understood his findings at all. He is at sea again, but wandering vaguely without map or compass and with no hope of finding land.

The last extant letter to Nägeli comes after a gap of a full three years:

Highly esteemed Sir and Friend
,

Despite my best intentions I was unable to keep my promise given last spring. The
Hieracia
have bloomed and faded here once again without my having been able to pay them more than a few fleeting visits. It is a real grief to me that I have to neglect my plants and my bees so completely. Since I have a little spare time at present, and since I do not know whether I shall have any next spring, I am sending you today some material from my last experiments in 1870 and 1871 …

It is rare that a man is genuinely ahead of his time. Even the greatest discoveries in science are made in their appropriate time. Crick and Watson proposed a structure for DNA when Franklin and Wilkins were just focusing in on the thing themselves (Crick and Watson more or less filched the vital information from the other two), and just when the whole world of biology was waiting for it. Darwin was mulling over natural selection, going round and round in circles in fact, just at the time that Wallace was thinking the same thoughts, just at the time men like Huxley were ready to take up the flag and turn the defense of natural selection into some kind of crusade. Few are ahead of their time … but Gregor Mendel was. He was so far ahead (and this is the litmus test) that even when he spelled it out and people read the argument (for example Nägeli, for example Focke) they still couldn’t grasp the importance. They could see what he had done, they could understand exactly what he had found (they would have to have been defective not to, so clear and concise is Mendel’s writing), and yet they could not perceive the significance. When finally his time did come, three men (de Vries, Correns, von Tschermak) stumbled over the great paper all in the same year, all quite independently of one another, all having repeated, more or less, the experimental work. The world of scientific thought had finally caught up with the fat friar.