At Woods Hole, though, surrounded by interesting strangers pursuing so many different ideas, the truth had begun to seem more complex again, which made him read Kammerer’s claims with real curiosity. Axel had taught him to question everything — didn’t that include the beliefs that were quickly becoming conventions in their field? At night, roasting oysters on the beach, he and his classmates talked about Kammerer and speculated on the reasons why some biologists attacked him so furiously. Even those opposed to his conclusions were disturbed by that. They were all flirting with socialism then, some more than flirting; they sympathized when Kammerer complained that no one gave him a fair hearing. With the Great War just over, no one wanted to hear that inheritance wasn’t everything, or that race and class characteristics passed on through generations might be altered.
Tiny, darkly tanned Ellen Eliasberg, a fellow student in Sam’s invertebrate course, was moved by Kammerer’s passionate statements about the necessity of man passing on what he acquired in the course of his lifetime to his children and his children’s children. Sam was caught up by her arguments — and, at the same time, fascinated by the bad temper Duncan’s advisor showed whenever anyone mentioned Kammerer’s work.
“The leopard can change his spots?” he’d say mockingly. “Fathers can pass what they’ve learned to their sons? Why not just reject every bit of science done in the last century? Why not go right back to Lamarck and his folklore? Cave fishes and deep-sea dwellers lose their eyes because they don’t need them in the dark; moles have poorly developed eyes because they’re in burrows most of the time; if an organ isn’t used, it conveniently disappears, and if it’s used often — why not point to the giraffe stretching his neck to reach for higher leaves? — it gets bigger. How long has that been believed? And yet Payne bred fruit flies in the dark for sixty-nine generations, without the slightest change in their eyes or behavior. In my own lab, we’ve seen well over one hundred new types arise spontaneously, with no environmental influence, each breeding true from the start. Overnight — literally, overnight! — eyeless flies have appeared from normal parents, by an obvious change in a single hereditary factor.”
Then he’d say that the popular press was being fooled, once again, and foolishly misleading the public (here Sam thought of his mother; had she sorted this out?); he’d say Kammerer was a charlatan and a publicity seeker and perhaps even a fraud. He ranted so wildly that even Duncan looked uneasy, and Sam saw, for the first time, what might happen when the passion required to defend a new set of ideas went too far.
But he wanted to work, simply to work, and he tried to stay focused on that. The old wooden house where he bunked that summer was less than a block from the lab, surrounded by sand and scrubby pines, but during his first weeks he went there only to sleep. Every minute he could steal from his course and his jobs he spent designing an experiment that might prove or disprove what Kammerer contended. Instead of Kammerer’s slow-growing salamanders and midwife toads, Sam decided to use his swiftly reproducing flies. And he’d work with their eyes, not only because variations in eye color had been the first and best-documented of the mutations observed in fruit flies but also because eyes and their development had always been central to these discussions.
He used fly cultures he’d kept for Axel, techniques he’d learned in his lab, a procedure he’d seen Duncan do in a different context. With a needle he ground to a very sharp point and then heated, he touched — just touched — the center of the red eye of a lightly etherized female fly; then he touched the other eye and laid the fly on a dry piece of paper, which he put into a little vial. A couple of hours later, he transferred the treated flies to a food bottle. In the few that survived the procedure he watched how the Malpighian tubules turned deep red and stayed that way. So: injury to one organ, the eye, caused what appeared to be a permanent change in another organ: an acquired characteristic.
Later, he mated the treated females to normal males and proceeded as usual. Amid the next generation he found a few mutants — yellow body, narrow eyes, twisted penis — as expected. And also, unexpectedly, seventeen flies, both male and female, with red Malpighian tubules. This was peculiar, and completely compelling: what did it mean? Immediately, he started breeding these to each other. None of their offspring showed the red tubules, but that might mean nothing; the trait was likely recessive, and he had only a small sample.
Duncan and most of the other students had a sense of what he was doing; they wandered in and out of the open labs and they all talked not only while they worked but also during their outings. Still, no one knew the details until the director asked him to give a presentation at one of the season’s last Friday night gatherings. He was nervous when he spoke — undergraduates were rarely asked to speak in front of the whole community — and he referred to earlier work that he hoped might support his own. In particular, a recent symposium that many in his audience had attended and that had examined this crucial question: could an injury to one generation cause an effect that was inherited by the next?
Swiftly, he moved through those other researchers’ results. One had demonstrated the transmission of acquired eye defects in rabbits, which seemed to have the characteristics of a Mendelian recessive. Others had shown what seemed to be inheritable effects of injury from alcohol, lead, radium, and X-rays. Perhaps, though, this was parallel induction: had a physical agent acted simultaneously on both the germ cells and the somatic cells, producing changes independently in each, or had the change induced in the body actually affected the germ cell? Which was the mechanism at work with Sam’s flies, and would either case argue for evolution directly guided by the environment? Sam saw Duncan in the audience, listening intently and taking notes, although he didn’t ask any questions afterward. Other hands did wave, though, and Sam was pleased with the way he guided the passionate, occasionally contentious, but civil discussion that followed.
In September, when he returned to college and reported all this to Axel, Axel shook his head and said he wished Sam had consulted him before throwing himself at such a controversial issue. He should never, Axel said, have presented this to so many eminent scientists before testing his hypotheses more thoroughly. Then he said that while he didn’t yet trust Sam’s results, they were intriguing and Sam should push the work forward. He’d supply the flies and the other materials; when the time came, he’d help Sam write up the results. “Although it would have been better,” he added, “if you’d done even more while you were still at Woods Hole.”