Mendel's Dwarf Read online

  1. M. Annett, “A model of the inheritance of handedness and cerebral dominance,” Nature, 1964.

  I got a first class degree. You expected that, didn’t you? I got a first, and I got a Medical Research Council grant, and I slid with ease into what I was destined for. No circuses for me. No schoolteaching, either. The true, abstract poverty of scientific research.

  “I am certain there will be no problem that we can’t overcome together,” the Professor of Molecular Biology said at interview. “None whatever.” He was referring to physical problems. Scientific ones were another thing altogether. I began my doctorate at Oxford in October of the year that Uncle Harry died.

  Harry Wise died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of ninety-something, while taking a shower. Longevity has a genetic element to it,1 as well as a good slice of luck: obviously Great-uncle Harry had a lot of luck. Equally obviously, he didn’t inherit his great-uncle Gregor’s corpulence or his failing heart … but then neither have I inherited Harry’s bony frame or his longevity: achondroplastics do not survive well beyond their fourth or fifth decade. I am awaiting the outcome with curiosity.

  The name on both Uncle Harry’s death certificate and his will was still Heinrich Weiss. Phenotype may be modified but it doesn’t change.

  The residue of my said moneys shall stand possessed in trust in equal shares (if more than one) for such of them my niece the said Emily Lambert and my great-niece the said Beatrice Lambert and my great-nephew the said Benedict Lambert as shall be living at my death provided …

  “He’s left the loot to us,” my sister Beatrice exclaimed. The final codicil had a romantic flavor to it:

  I desire that I be cremated and my ashes scattered to the wind from the seashore when the wind is blowing in a southeasterly direction.

  So it was that on a meteorologically apposite afternoon Beatrice, my mother, and I stood on the esplanade at Eastbourne, Beatrice holding aloft an urn supplied by the Eastbourne Crematorium and looking positively pre-Raphaelite in flowing dress and loose hair. Gulls hung in the wind at about the same height as us, eyeing us in case we had sandwiches. Mother held her hat on against the wind. “I think it’s morbid,” she kept saying. “That Wise family always was a bit touched. Why couldn’t he be put in the ground like anyone else?”

  But it all appealed to Beatrice. “It’s rather endearing. How far do you think he’ll get?” She had assumed that he wanted to be blown back toward Austria.

  “Pevensey?” I suggested.

  “That’s not even out to sea. Surely he’ll make Calais with this wind.”

  “Calais is miles away. Dieppe, more like.”

  “I once went to Dieppe with your father,” Mother said. “On a day return. I never dreamt we’d send Uncle Harry there.”

  The gulls screamed with laughter and derision at the whole absurd performance. Beatrice removed the top of the urn and peered in at him. She showed me a pile of grayish powder.

  “I don’t want to see,” warned Mother. “It’s not right, somehow. Like seeing him without any clothes on. Come on, get on with it. I’m dying a death, it’s that cold.”

  So Beatrice raised her arm. She called “Ready, steady … go!” as though someone were taking part in a race. Then she shook the urn, and Harry Wise sprayed out into the air like a little puff of washing powder. The gulls swooped expectantly, but even they didn’t read the wind correctly, for at that very moment there was a gust and a swirl, and the cloud of powder swept around and blew back in our faces.

  “Oh, how awful!” Mother protested, coughing and flapping. “I really think that’s the end!”

  We were back in his bungalow in time for tea. Mother fiddled in the kitchen while Beatrice and I conducted a rapid search through his desk for unpaid bills and the like. Beatrice opened drawers with relish. “It’s horrible going through the old boy’s stuff,” she complained unconvincingly. “I hope we don’t find dirty pictures or anything. I feel he might be watching.” It seemed better not to tell her that in a sense Uncle Harry was still present, ancestral dandruff in her hair and on her shoulders.

  While she went through the contents of the desk, I, partly in hope of those dirty pictures, partly with a sense of continuity with my distant Mendelian past, concentrated on the lower drawers. Perhaps there would be something, a scrap of a letter maybe, from Great-great-great-uncle Gregor. Among the papers—envelopes of dusty photographs, bundles of dusty letters all sequestered away in cardboard boxes—I came across the portrait photograph of Gottlieb Weiss with his first wife and the stout priest, the one taken in Vienna. Somehow it lacked the vividness I recalled from seeing it as a child. The figures appeared wooden and inert, the face of the cleric a patch of white, barely recognizable as the famous friar.

  Finally I opened the last box of all. Inside it, on the top of a pile of papers, discolored and crisp with age, was a pamphlet of a dozen pages. It might have been a theater program, but it wasn’t. Across the cover was written

  GOTTLIEB WEISS’S

  ANATOMICAL CURIOSITIES

  “Oh dear,” Beatrice said as I showed it to her. Gottlieb and Heinrich Weiss, it transpired, had once run a freak show.

  At that moment Mother came in with the tea. “Didn’t you know?” she asked carelessly when she saw what Beatrice had found. “I thought Harry would have mentioned it. He was always going on about the past, the old bore.”

  Her offhanded manner did not deceive me. Gottlieb Weiss had run a circus of the deformed and the dispossessed, and with strange, Teutonic tact, Uncle Harry had kept the whole episode secret from me. I turned the pages. They were all there in the program, all illustrated and described in precise detail—the conjoined twins, “straight from Siam”; the bearded lady; the human gorilla; the giant; the family of midgets; the wart man, whose face (a blurred photograph bore witness) was peppered with a thousand papillae; the man-mountain (forty-three stone); the three-legged boy. There was even the cat-child, “half human, half feline, with the plaintive cry of a kitten,” although that particular act did not survive Manchester. It was expunged from the show and the parents were duly paid off, the fact recorded along with everything else in the leatherbound tome that I found in the bottom of the box. The records were precise. So too was the timetable, from London to Nottingham, to Manchester, to Liverpool, to Birmingham, and back to London for a grand display at the Hammersmith Palladium. Everything relating to the show was preserved there among Uncle Harry’s things: copies of contracts (… that the aforementioned Joseph, having the appearance of a chimpanzee, shall agree to display himself, naked but for a covering for the loins, for a fee of …), copies of flyers, a folder of press cuttings (“A remarkable if somewhat gruesome experience,” in the view of the Liverpool Daily Post), even a photograph (sepia, blurred) of the entrance to the show itself, with the name displayed in a curve of lights above the ticket booth:

  And in the foreground the owner and son, Gottlieb, now with a large beard, and his son Heinrich sporting a fine, curly mustache.

  The last tour was dated 1914. Perhaps the war and the changing of names put an end to it; whatever the reason, Gottlieb had metamorphosed into Godley by the time the next enterprise surfaced among Uncle Harry’s papers:

  DOCTOR GODLEY WISE

  Confidant of the Crowned Heads of Europe

  Adviser to Princes and Presidents

  Analyst of the Viennese School

  Descendant of the Founder of Genetics

  Lectures at the Masonic Hall, Pimlico.

  13th May 1922

  Admission free to all men and women of Intelligence & Culture

  About what did Great-grandfather Godley lecture? I opened a pamphlet and discovered that he lectured about the “Science of Human Genetics, founded on the new Mendelian Principles, being a Full Exposition of the Danger faced by the British Race through a Deterioration of its Genetic Stock.”

  Former freak-show manager Godley Wise had become a eugenicist. There was a list of initial subscribers to his society
. Did they, I wonder, ever see a satisfactory intellectual return on their investment? They included Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. G. B. Shaw, Mr. H. Belloc. Strange bedfellows, indeed.

  Great-great-great-uncle Gregor was sent to the University of Vienna in October 1851, to prepare for another attempt at the teaching examination. Nowadays Vienna is the overblown capital of a small, smug province, but then it was Imperial Vienna, the Vienna of the Habsburgs: Vienna, Wien, Viden, Bécs, a crucible, a melting pot of nations, a fusion of genes—German, Slav, Magyar, Gypsy, Jew, half a million souls, all the nations of Mitteleuropa bubbling, arguing, creating, protesting, seething together. The revolution of 1848 was a recent memory. The city was a place of intellectual turmoil and vitality, with the rationalists and democrats in conflict with the church and state. Sigmund Freud was on the way. So too was Vienna’s guilty secret, Adolf Hitler. It was to this city that the callow young priest from Heinzendorf set off on the night train from Brünn on October 27, 1851. He carried with him a letter from Abbot Napp to the minister Andreas von Baumgartner. What else did he bring from provincial Brünn to cosmopolitan Vienna? A fine-honed and perceptive mind? An incisive brilliance? An inspired imagination? Genius?

  He never even took a degree. He attended Doppler’s lectures on experimental physics, and Franz Unger’s on botany, as well as a course in higher mathematical physics given by von Ettinghausen; but he never took a degree. Thus is genius educated. But the influence of Unger—an avowed and controversial evolutionist who earned the enmity of the Church—was decisive, as was the mathematics learned at the feet of the physicists. For a while the young friar acted as a demonstrator in Doppler’s Physical Institute. He also joined the Zoological and Botanical Society of Vienna. He listened and he thought. He acquired ideas, but little in the way of self-confidence; he acquired intellectual ambition, but little self-assurance.

  In 1853 he returned to Brünn, and in the spring of the next year he began work as an unqualified substitute teacher at the Brünn Modern School. He was thirty-one years old, the product of an approximate and inconsistent education; yet somewhere within him an ember glowed. He began to breed plants, fuchsias and others, in the back garden of the monastery.

  And peas …

  Pisum sativum, the garden pea, is a member of the Papilionaceae family, a workaday group with blossoms that dance like butterflies among the foliage. These papilionaceous flowers possess five petals: the large, vivid, and vivacious standard; the two wings; and two others that form the keel or carina, a sweet, sleek, and secretive sheath. Within, moist and fragile, lie the reproductive organs. No chance choice. You select your material with care. Being food plants, they come in a number of distinct varieties, and others have already crossed them artificially with success.2 The keel ensures self-pollination under normal conditions, so different strains are certain to be pure, and the flowers are large and therefore easily manipulated. Mendel watched and examined and thought. He had the mind of a chessplayer (he was a chessplayer) and he watched nature’s moves patiently.

  Is it possible to draw him out of the past, out of the shadows of the few photographs that remain, out of the vague stories of Uncle Harry, out of fusty recollection and textbook repetition? Can the man live in any sense? “Watch,” he said.

  Bratranek watched. Scrawny and self-satisfied, Bratranek smiled at the sight of the younger man down on his knees among the vegetables.

  “You must get down to see properly,” Mendel muttered. “It’s no use just standing around like a damned priest. Kneel before Mother Nature.”

  Complaining, Bratranek hitched up his skirts and knelt, while Mendel rooted among the chaos of stems and tendrils for a suitable flower to show. His fingers were grimy. Just like a peasant’s. Blood will out. “These here are the dwarfs. Obviously. Obviously they’re the dwarfs. Now what we do is …” He bit his lower lip and frowned with concentration, pulling open one of the immature flowers, peering at it through his gold-rimmed glasses, muttering almost as though addressing the plants themselves rather than the thin priest at his side. “There’s my little child. Remove the stamens”—scissors snipped—“and there we are. Gone. When she is ripe, that flower will become the female parent. Bag.” He snapped his fingers behind him. Bratranek handed over one of the paper bags that he had been given to carry. Mendel slipped it over the selected flower. “Now you may watch the transfer of pollen. The useful thing is that you get flowers at all stages of maturity. Fruit down at the bottom, mature flowers halfway up, unopened buds at the top. Couldn’t be better.”

  The friar clambered to his feet and led the way over to the line of tall plants, huffing and puffing and stumbling over the uneven soil of the bed, muttering as he went. “What did Bacon say? ‘Nature reveals her secrets when put to the torture,’ was that it? But it is not torture. It is a caress.” He grinned at Bratranek, a camel-hair paintbrush in his hand. “Nature reveals her secrets when she is stroked,” he said. He opened a mature flower and dabbed at it and held up the brush to show a tiny speck of golden pollen on the tip. “There. This”—returning to the dwarfs, kneeling down among the ragged stems once more—“goes here.” Another bagged flower was unveiled for a moment to reveal the sequestered flower. The paintbrush slipped in among the delicate petals like a tongue. Mendel scribbled something on the paper bag and put it back in place. “Female pure tall, crossed with male pure dwarf.”

  Bratranek look pained. “This is disgusting.”

  “It may be disgusting, but it’s natural. Wasn’t your Goethe an admirer of nature?”

  “The higher flights of the human spirit, not mere sex. Anyway, what is natural about this … manipulation?” Bratranek pronounced the word with distaste, as though the modifier genital were implied.

  “What on earth do you imagine plant breeders do, man? Cast spells?”

  “And once you’ve performed this … unnatural act?”

  “I will harvest the hybrid peas and plant them out. They will all be tall. The tall dominates the dwarf, you understand?”

  “If you know the result already, what’s the point?”

  “But when they self-pollinate and we get the hybrid generation,3 then we shall see. I have a theory, you see? The dwarfs that have vanished in the first generation will reappear in the second, one dwarf for every three tall plants on average. It is all a question of probability. Just like the lottery. I used to play the lottery in Vienna, What is the chance of a winning ticket, eh? Pretty small. Here the probability of getting a dwarf factor or a tall factor from a hybrid parent is one-half. One-half multiplied by one-half gives one-quarter. The probability of being dwarf is one-quarter. It is no more than a matter of logic.”

  Bratranek seemed unimpressed. “Mathematics in botany? What on earth is it all about? And when do you expect all this?”

  “The first pods in a week’s time … and the hybrids planted out next year. Then I get the first hybrid generation the year after that. Oh, believe me, I would like some way of creating two crops per year, but …” Mendel shrugged. “That’s not the way with the pea.”

  A bell rang from beyond the monastery building. “Naturae enim non imperatur, nisi parendo,” said Bratranek.

  Mendel gathered up his things and followed his companion across the court. “ ‘Truly nature may not be commanded, except by obeying her.’ Have I got it right?”

  “More or less. Also Bacon; but Francis, not Roger.”

  “But the thing I don’t yet understand … one of the things, anyway … is where all these different varieties come from. Nobody thinks about this. They are just ordinary seeds available from any supplier in the town. They breed true, so they are stable; but do they arise in some manner? Sports, they call them. How do they arise? This surely has some bearing on the question of speciation. How do they arise?”

  Bratranek shrugged. “I really don’t see that it matters much. Would all this apply to animals? That’s the main point. Man, even. Would it apply to man? I mean, in man you have gradations of height, don’t you?
” Bratranek opened the door into the building.

  Mendel muttered and fussed outside, kicking mud off against a stone. “You don’t, you know,” he said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “In man. You don’t have gradations of height. Not in this sense.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m taller than you by …” Bratranek drew himself up as though to measure the matter. “A few inches at any rate. And Pavel …”

  “Dwarfs, you fool, not you and me. Circus dwarfs.” Mendel pushed past him through the door. “Come. I’ll show you.”

  “You’re keeping circus dwarfs in your room?”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  They went up the back stairs, Mendel in his socks, Bratranek clumping up behind in muddy shoes. “You’ve got a hole in your heel,” Bratranek said, but Mendel ignored him. He was standing in front of the door to his room, searching for his key among the folds of his soutane. When he discovered it, he gave a small grunt of satisfaction, as though finding it were not always the case. As the door opened, a smell assaulted Bratranek, the warm and fusty smell of acetamide. “Those mice. No wonder the abbot complained.”

  “They don’t smell as bad as he does.”

  The room was spacious but full, full of desk and papers, a trunk, two upright chairs, a table with a brass microscope on it and a box of microscope slides, a wardrobe, a row of old and battered boots against the skirting board, some seedlings in a tray, and, beneath the window, a row of five wooden cages. Sawdust was strewn on the floor in front of them. The mice scrabbled at the wire grilles with tiny, exact claws. Behind the noise of their scrabbling, there was another sound, a small crying like the sound of nestling birds. Mendel crouched down in front of the cages.

  “It’s exactly the same,” he said, poking his finger at one of the small noses. “I’ve just completed the first generation from the hybrids. It’s exactly the same. I crossed an albino mouse with a dark brown one, and all the offspring were dark brown. Three males and four females. From them I made three pairs of brother with sister.” He looked around. “That was six weeks ago. These three cages.” He pointed. Mice scrabbled. Bratranek bent down to look. In the backs of the cages the mothers could been seen on their nests. Beneath two of them, small, pinkish blots writhed and squealed. “A total of nineteen pups,” Mendel explained. “Their hair is just appearing, so you can tell already. The hybrid parents were all brown, but some of the young are albino. Just as with the peas. The albino disappears in the hybrids, but comes out in the next generation, just as with the peas. There are five albinos and fourteen brown. Of course it isn’t a large enough sample yet. Not like the peas. But the ratio is two and four-fifths to one. Just the same as the peas, the same three-to-one ratio. It really is the most basic mathematics.”