The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code Read Online Free PDF

describing the pea experiments would become collateral casualties.
    Mendel died in 1884, not long after the church-state imbroglio; his nurse found him stiff and upright on his sofa, his heart and kidneys having failed. We know this because Mendel feared being buried alive and had demanded a precautionary autopsy. But in one sense, Mendel’s fretting over a premature burial proved prophetic. Just eleven scientists cited his now-classicpaper on inheritance in the thirty-five years after his death. And those that did (mostly agricultural scientists) saw his experiments as mildly interesting lessons for breeding peas, not universal statements on heredity. Scientists had indeed buried Mendel’s theories too soon.
    But all the while, biologists were discovering things about cells that, if they’d only known, supported Mendel’s ideas. Most important, they found distinct ratios of traits among offspring, and determined that chromosomes passed hereditary information around in discrete chunks, like the discrete traits Mendel identified. So when three biologists hunting through footnotes around 1900 all came across the pea paper independently and realized how closely it mirrored their own work, they grew determined to resurrect the monk.
    Mendel allegedly once vowed to a colleague, “My time will come,” and boy, did it. After 1900 “Mendelism” expanded so quickly, with so much ideological fervor pumping it up, that it began to rival Charles Darwin’s natural selection as the preeminent theory in biology. Many geneticists in fact saw Darwinism and Mendelism as flatly incompatible—and a few even relished the prospect of banishing Darwin to the same historical obscurity that Friedrich Miescher knew so well.

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The Near Death of Darwin
Why Did Geneticists Try to Kill Natural Selection?
    T his was not how a Nobel laureate should have to spend his time. In late 1933, shortly after winning science’s highest honor, Thomas Hunt Morgan got a message from his longtime assistant Calvin Bridges, whose libido had landed him in hot water. Again.
    A “confidence woman” from Harlem had met Bridges on a cross-country train a few weeks before. She quickly convinced him not only that she was a regal princess from India, but that her fabulously wealthy maharaja of a father just happened to have opened—coincidence of all coincidences—a science institute on the subcontinent in the very field that Bridges (and Morgan) worked in, fruit fly genetics. Since her father needed a man to head the institute, she offered Bridges the job. Bridges, a real Casanova, would likely have shacked up with the woman anyway, and the job prospect made her irresistible. He was so smitten he began offering his colleagues jobs in India and didn’t seem to notice Her Highness’s habit of running up extraordinary bills whenever they went carousing. In fact, when out ofearshot, the supposed princess claimed to be Mrs. Bridges and charged everything she could to him. When the truth emerged, she tried to extort more cash by threatening to sue him “for transporting her across state lines for immoral purposes.” Panicked and distraught—despite his adult activities, Bridges was quite childlike—he turned to Morgan.
    Morgan no doubt consulted with his other trusted assistant, Alfred Sturtevant. Like Bridges, Sturtevant had worked with Morgan for decades, and the trio had shared in some of the most important discoveries in genetics history. Sturtevant and Morgan both scowled in private over Bridges’s dalliances and escapades, but their loyalty trumped any other consideration here. They decided that Morgan should throw his weight around. In short order, he threatened to expose the woman to the police, and kept up the pressure until Miss Princess disappeared on the next train. Morgan then hid Bridges away until the situation blew over. *
    When he’d hired Bridges as a factotum years before, Morgan could never have expected he’d someday be acting as a goodfella