Customer Reviews

In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA

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Science (like evolution) is winners' history: we live in a world of things that work, and the reason things work is that they've been successful. The history of science is fascinating because it's all about the sheer contingencies that somehow combined to give modern understanding its aura of inevitablity. Nothing's more fun than to get a glimpse of brilliant people who not only didn't know what we know, but who thought hard about things that never even occurred to us. To really understand science, to understand the ideas and not just to make use of them, you have to go deeply into the history of science and see what ideas looked like before they won (or lost). Schwartz, an amazingly good writer who does really understand science, and also understands narrative (he writes like a novelist), makes the thinking, the debates, the brilliant wrong ideas, the surprises about which ones were right, fresh and exciting. The history (based on original archival work and interviews with some of the players in the story, as well as their survivors) is fascinating on its own, but will also be valuable for anyone interested in what an exciting new idea looks like. Most exciting new ideas don't pan out; but all the winners were exciting once, and this book shows how and why.

I liked this book a lot the first time I read it. After finishing the book, there were many details, and not a few key points, that I had not consigned to memory, so I read it again. It was so good the second time that I read it a third time. This is a great book---Schwartz writes science history as though it were a fast-paced detective story with a plethora of personal details and exciting subplots. I am reminded of Elof Axel Carlson's fine history, Mendel's Legacy: The Origins of Classical Genetics, which the reader might also find complementary to Schwartz' account.

The subtitle is slightly inaccurate. The book is really about genetics from Thomas Hunt Morgan, Hugo de Vries, and William Bateson to Hermann Muller, although there are very interesting chapters on Galton, Weldon, and Mendel. Hermann Muller is clearly the standout figure in this whole saga, and the book could have been entitled "The Age of Hermann Muller: Precursors and Contemporaries."

Despite the skill of the author, this book cannot be read by everybody. This is because the scientific concepts involved, although carefully explained by Schwartz, are complex and subtle, and most people simply do not get enough pleasure from thinking hard to render learning them worthwhile. This pains me deeply. Why can we all appreciate music, art, literature, sports, sex, humor, and cuisine, while only a minority get equal pleasure from science? It is probably this imbalance that accounts for the presence of post-modernism in academia, creationism in popular ideology, and the indomitable tendency for truth to be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. The most heart-rending story in this book is Schwartz' account of how the anti-genetics quack Lysenko won the heart of Stalin, leading to the destruction of Soviet agriculture and the persecution of the most talented and dedicated scientific agronomists, including Muller's host in Russia, Vavilov, who died of torture and starvation in a Soviet prison (his lesser-known colleagues were simply shot). A similar anti-science/anti-technology ideology condemned many millions to starvation in Mao Tse Tung's infamous "politics in command," period in Chinese history.

The standard story is that the monk Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of genetic segregation, publishing a monograph on the subject in 1865. This monograph was widely ignored, and Mendel's laws were rediscovered in the early years of the next century. Schwartz argues that Mendel's writings were rediscovered, although more than one scientist claimed independent discovery of the laws of genetic segregation. Moreover, Mendel was not just a simple monk whose work slipped under the radar. Mendel actively promoted his work, but it was opposed by many who considered it to be at variance with the facts. Even as late as 1925, there were many prominent anti-Mendelians, and the opposition to his genetic principles was based solidly on empirical evidence. For instance, de Vries, one of the rediscoverers of Mendel's laws, later came to believe that most genetic inheritance was not Mendelian. De Vries followed the lead of the French hybridist Millardet, who found that in many plants that bred true for several generations, crosses with related species led to two highly stable hybrids, a phenomenon ostensibly incompatible with Mendelian laws. De Vries' Oenothera Lamarckiana, which he cultivated and studied over many generations, was one of these plants, and de Vries developed a complex theory of discontinuous mutation based on hybridization.

It was characteristic of virtually all biologists of the period to hold strongly to particular models of genetic inheritance, despite the fact that the evidence was deeply ambiguous and appeared incompatible with all models. Muller held an unshakable belief in the universality of Mendel's laws. Indeed, his phenomenal success stemmed from his unwavering faith, together with great observational and experimental skills. Eventually he worked out the correct model of Oenothera Lamarckiana and other "false hybrids," finding that these plants were obligate heterozygotes because both homozygotes at the relevant locus were lethal.

Muller's explanation of "false hybrids" also undermined de Vries' elaborate theory of discontinuous mutation, and left the field for Muller and others (especially Altenberg) to develop the correct theory of heritable point mutations. But, I don't want to reveal too much of the plot, which would take away some of the fun for the reader.

I wanted to be interested in this book, but I kept finding myself putting it down, and only with much effort was I able to finish. The writing style is fairly accessible. However, the content seems to be a little too compressed. There are many players involved and many bits of biology to keep track of. The subtitle may also be better stated as "Darwin to DNA (exclusive)" The discussion of DNA is passed over quickly in a final epilogue.

The book approaches science through a very personal approach, putting forth much of the "behind the scenes" relationships and competition that took place to arrive at the better understanding of genetics. The story is built through the history of the intertwined relationships of many of the great biologists, starting with Darwin and going on to nearly the present day. The focus is on a few significant players, providing at times fairly detailed biographies of both personal and scientific life.

Unfortunately, it falls short in trying to do too much. With so many people covered, it became difficult to sort one from the other. The details of their discoveries also was jumbled and not explained in clear detail. For somebody with an existing knowledge of the key discoveries and discoverers, this book would likely provide enjoyable insights in to the background of the discoveries. However, as a human biography or an introduction to the origins of genetics, it falls flat.

As one of the other reviewers has noted, if you don't know much about genetics before you start reading this book, you won't know much when you finish.

The definite highlight of the book is the story of Herman Muller. The account of his time in the Soviet Union in the '30s reads like a very good thriller novel.

The book basically finishes with his winning the Nobel Prize, and almost as an afterthought, in an epilogue, Avery's proof that DNA carry the genetic information in chromosomes and the Watson-Crick description of the double helix are discussed.

The other highlight is the account of Gregor Mendel and his work on peas. I'd subscribed to Fisher's argument that his results were just a little too good, and wondered whether he was the first case of scientific fraud, but Schwartz managed to convince me that Mendel probably had an idea that his results should give a 3:1 ratio, so he counted peas until he got close to that ratio, instead of counting a predetermined number of seeds, as would be done today.

One quibble I have with the Kindle edition; the publisher chose not to include any of the illustrations, instead referring the reader to the printed version. If I had the printed edition, I wouldn't be reading the Kindle version (or perhaps I would; I have both hardcover and Kindle copies of Richard Dawkins' "The Greatest Show On Earth", and I still haven't opened the printed version, preferring the convenience of the Kindle version).

It was a good read and I think most biologists would want it on their bookshelf. I think non-biologists will also enjoy it but may have trouble keeping up with the characterers and teh science. For better or worse, the author follows the available information (e.g., readily obtained articles in early Science and Nature) more than the most important discoveries. In particular most of the work by Galton and Weldon was wrong..and it is not necessarily clarified until later in unexpected places. for exampleGalton's graph on page 38 is suddenly explained on page 201. Galton made a fundamental error in looking at the statistical distribution of lots and lots of peas of a species and though he had discovered something important when big peas and little peas from the populations produced peas that tended to the mean....if you have ever shelled peas, you know that pea size is partly determned by the location withing the pod and on the plant and when they were harvested....of course there is no real inherited difference between the big ones and the little ones. Also compare p. 113 with 218. It seemed to me that the cytologists were on the verge of discovering Mendel's law circa 1874(Leopold Auerbach, p. 147 compare p.75) to 1883 (Edouard van Beneden p. 150). The Galton-Weldon work was pointless between 1885 and 1905 except as an exercise in statistical analysis. I would like to read much more about Lamarck (who is trivilized on p. 76), Haeckel (mentioned only in passing), and Boveri (the first [and possibly correct] theory of cancer...aneuploidy). The author clearly admires Muller taking his side in all cases. Muller was certainly important and it is surpising that the author does not spend more time on his 1946 Nobel Lecture and its impact on cancer research (the mutation theory of cancer) and cancer risk assessment (linear, no-threshold) that bloomed in the period 1946-1970). I would also like to read about the Millers, DNA repair (XP), and Hayflick before putting the book down....prehaps in the next book???