The Gene – An Intimate History

 

The Gene begins by Siddhartha Mukherjee begins with Mendel in the monastery, where he is perceived as slow, a good guy for the garden, not smart enough to be a teacher, but they gave him every chance, and he’s sent to study. Thus, to learn under no less than Doppler.

Yes, he comes to study under Christian Doppler. The brilliant mathematician and physicist - who argued that the pitch of sound or the color of light was not fixed but depended on location and velocity of the observer. An experimentalist whose work would influence Einstein’s perceptions in the following century, he very well have noticed a train whistle changing pitch as it approached and receded, to develop his theory by way of analogy. TV histories of this may suggest he hired a band, put them on a train, and demonstrated his theory to a fin-de-siecle crowd.

Mendel’s era was the tail end of Linnaean, the era when eager naturalists valiantly classified according to likeness. Naming has lost some of its panache, but it continues.

We leave Mendel aside and consider the homunculus and other historical conjectures on mechanisms of heredity. Back into time, so to speak. So, we go from Doppler to Pythagoras for a discussion of mathematical patterns and in the context of sexual differences. Pythagoras is followed by Plato and Aristotle. The pursuit of data patterns will become a touchpoint continual in this history.

Aristotle developed new notions on the Pythagorean scheme of patrilineal heredity. The author, in one of many illuminating sidenotes points out that Aristotle had a sense that there was an analogy to be made between the transmission of heredity and the transmission of information; a Century later, the biologist Max Delbruck would joke that Aristotle should have been given the Nobel Prize posthumously for the discovery of DNA! DNA once described showed the mechanism of storage of genetic information [messages] that was long sought. 

Then to the narrative enters Charles Darwin. His is a story with which I am familiar from numerous books. But amazing to me is Muckherjee’s ability to synthesize and rapidly present key-points, as in the passages noted in the rest of this blog post. 

[Side-Noting here that one of the few really deep scientific books I ever read-through was The Growth of Biological Thought by Ernst Mayr. Highly recommend!]

We find Darwin setting sail in the Beagle Brig sloop, he a natural historian that took with him on the voyage Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. The central idea there are natural forces shaping and reshaping the earth. Alert to the insight and prepared to find analogies, Darwin in Montevideo, Punta Alta, Tierra del Fuego, Lima and of course Galapagos was open to discovery. He found the Galapagos finches, mockingbirds, blackbirds, iguanas, and saw that “each variety is constant in its own island.” He returned to England, thought and wrote, but didn’t publish this.

He studied barnacles, dissected sea animals and so on , but was in 1859 spurred to publication finally by the work of Alfred Russel Wallace. [It would be interesting to read a book on this fellow, whose social status was quite different than Darwin’s in a place where social status carried a big stick.]

Wallace separately formulated a general theory about a mechanisms driving variation on islands. He sent his paper to Darwin. Who was nudged to finally write his own paper. Mentioning here an analog both Darwin and Wallace were influenced by – that is Rev. Thomas Malthus, the statistician and Sorcerer of what became Eugenics.

Darwin at Lyell’s urging, appeared together with Wallace, in a gentlemanly fashion, at the Linnaean Society where they both announced their discoveries at the same time – but to an audience that was not particularly enthusiastic about either study.

Darwin remains a hard read today. So it is interesting that author Mukherjee cites, Richard Owen on the topic of Darwin’s sparse theory construction. Owen, ‘Darwin's Frenemy,’ would use Darwin's own quote to describe the problematic nature of the Origin of the Species, which became a book. “One’s imagination must fill up very wide blanks,” Darwin said and Owen repeated. 

"The Gene" will set out to fill in the blanks.

Mukherjee builds his narrative by Reverse Russian Doll design. That is: 

Each historical science figure leads to a somewhat sequential insight in  another, with the theme of heredity evolving as the thread. I find there are big leaps that traverse the different fields of thought in the history of genetic science as told by Mukherjee. What’s learned in one area leads – with tuning – to developments in an other area. As history documents, science in the days discussed here was more a big undefined monolithic blob and less a highly specialized matter as in today's science world.