The Gene: Prologue–Part One

But my father knew—and I knew—that there was more than just avuncular love at stake for him in these visits.

Both my father and my grandmother believed that Jagu’s and Rajesh’s mental illnesses had been precipitated—even caused, perhaps—by the apocalypse of Partition, its political trauma sublimated into their psychic trauma.

Visions and voices had started to appear in his adolescence. The need for isolation, the grandiosity of the confabulations, the disorientation and confusion—these were all eerily reminiscent of his uncle’s descent.

A few weeks later, he committed a “crime” that was so comically egregious that it could only be a testament to his loss of sanity: he was caught flirting with one of the goon’s sisters (again, he said that the voices had commanded him to act).

My father had had at least two psychotic fugues in his life—both precipitated by the consumption of bhang...

By byte I am referring to a rather complex idea—not only to the familiar byte of computer architecture, but also to a more general and mysterious notion that all complex information in the natural world can be described or encoded as a summation of discrete parts, containing no more than an “on” and “off” state.

This theory was most evocatively proposed by the physicist John Wheeler in the 1990s: “Every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely...from answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits...; in short, that all things physical are information-theoretic in origin.”

The simple answer is that matter, information, and biology are inherently hierarchically organized: understanding that smallest part is crucial to understanding the whole.

The gene entrances English and American reformers, who hope to manipulate human genetics to accelerate human evolution and emancipation. That idea escalates to its macabre zenith in Nazi Germany in the 1940s, where human eugenics is used to justify grotesque experiments, culminating in confinement, sterilization, euthanasia, and mass murder.

Two technologies transform genetics in the 1970s: gene sequencing and gene cloning—the “reading” and “writing” of genes (the phrase gene cloning encompasses the gamut of techniques used to extract genes from organisms, manipulate them in test tubes, create gene hybrids, and produce millions of copies of such hybrids in living cells.)

The midtown real estate was far too valuable to house them, the emperor had decreed bluntly—and the monks were packed off to a crumbling structure at the bottom of the hill in Old Brno, the ignominy of the relocation compounded by the fact that they had been assigned to live in quarters originally designed for women.

Physics was taught by Christian Doppler, the redoubtable Austrian scientist who would become Mendel’s mentor, teacher, and idol.

What kept elephants from morphing into pigs, or kangaroos into beavers? What was the mechanism of heredity? Why, or how, did like beget like?

Occasionally, the feature transmitted through heredity was not even corporeal: a manner of walking, say, or a way of staring into space, or even a state of mind.

Since the homunculus had to mature and produce its own children, it had to have preformed mini-homunculi lodged inside it—tiny humans encased inside humans, like an infinite series of Russian dolls, a great chain of beings that stretched all the way backward from the present to the first man, to Adam, and forward into the future.

Men came from small men, as large trees came from small cuttings. “In nature there is no generation,” the Dutch scientist Jan Swammerdam wrote in 1669, “but only propagation.”

Limbs, torsos, brains, eyes, faces—even temperaments or propensities that were inherited—had to be created anew each time an embryo unfurled into a human fetus.

By what impetus, or instruction, was the embryo, and the final organism, generated from sperm and egg?

But the second problem, Herschel thought, was more tractable: Once life had been created, what process generated the observed diversity of the natural world?

The injunctions against the wrong kinds of investigation were so sharp that the parson-naturalists did not even question the myths of creation; it was the perfect separation of church and mental state.

Slung on a hammock bed above the salt-starched survey maps, he pored over the few books that he had brought with him on the voyage—Milton’s Paradise Lost (which seemed all too apposite to his condition), and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published between 1830 and 1833.

There were two or three varieties, but each subtype was markedly distinct, and each was endemic to one particular island.

Pigeons could be made to look like roosters and peacocks, and dogs made short-haired, long-haired, pied, piebald, bowlegged, hairless, crop-tailed, vicious, mild-mannered, diffident, guarded, belligerent.

Pigeons could be made to look like roosters and peacocks, and dogs made short-haired, long-haired, pied, piebald, bowlegged, hairless, crop-tailed, vicious, mild-mannered, diffident, guarded, belligerent.

A population’s inherent inclination to expand would be severely counterbalanced by the limitations of resources; its natural wont met by natural want.

For Darwinian evolution to work, the mechanism of inheritance had to possess an intrinsic capacity to conserve information without becoming diluted or dispersed.

The existence of dominant and recessive alleles for a trait contradicted nineteenth-century theories of blending inheritance: the hybrids that Mendel had generated did not possess intermediate features. Only one allele had asserted itself in the hybrid, forcing the other variant trait to vanish.

He bred short-tall hybrids with short-tall hybrids to produce third-generation progeny.

Behind the epic variance of natural organisms—tall; short; wrinkled; smooth; green; yellow; brown—there were corpuscles of hereditary information, moving from one generation to the next.

Like Fermat—the odd French mathematician who had tantalizingly scribbled that he’d found a “remarkable proof” of his theorem, but failed to write it down because the paper’s “margin was too small”—Darwin had desultorily announced that he had found a solution to heredity, but had never published it.

Weismann had surgically excised the tails of five generations of mice, then bred the mice to determine if the offspring would be born tailless.

But like Mendel, he began to scour the countryside around Amsterdam to collect strange plant variants—not just peas, but a vast herbarium of plants with twisted stems and forked leaves, with speckled flowers, hairy anthers, and bat-shaped seeds: a menagerie of monsters.

Reading the paper, he must have felt that inescapable chill of déjà vu running through his spine: the “certain Mendel” had certainly preempted de Vries by more than three decades.

“I too still believed that I had found something new,” he would later write, with more than a tinge of envy and despondency.

Doubly convinced by Mendel’s experimental data, and by his own evidence, Bateson set about proselytizing. Nicknamed “Mendel’s bulldog”—an animal that he resembled both in countenance and temperament—Bateson traveled to Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, giving talks on heredity that emphasized Mendel’s discovery.

His father was a wealthy banker in Birmingham; his mother was the daughter of Erasmus Darwin, the polymath poet and doctor, who was also Charles Darwin's grandfather.

For Galton, the word eugenics was an opportune fit—“at least a neater word...than viriculture, which I once ventured to use.” It combined the Greek prefix eu—“good”—with genesis: “good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities.”

In 1859, Galton read Darwin's Origin of Species. Rather, he “devoured” the book: it struck him like a jolt of electricity, both paralyzing and galvanizing him.

Like many members of the Victorian elite, Galton and his friends were chilled by the fear of race degeneration (Galton’s own encounter with the “savage races,” symptomatic of Britain’s encounter with colonial natives throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had also convinced him that the racial purity of whites had to be maintained and protected against the forces of miscegenation).

The location was symbolic. With nearly eight hundred rooms and a vast, monolithic façade overlooking the Thames, the Cecil was Europe’s largest, if not grandest, hotel—a site typically reserved for diplomatic or national events.

The second presentation—even larger in its scope and ambition—was presented by the American contingent.

A cursory mental examination, performed on April 1, 1920, by two doctors, classified her as “feebleminded.”

White eugenicists in America had long convulsed with the fear that African slaves, with their inferior genes, would intermarry with whites and thereby contaminate the gene pool—but laws to prevent interracial marriages, promulgated during the 1860s, had calmed most of these fears.

Writing the 8–1 majority opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. reasoned, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

As the front of the American eugenics movement advanced from imprisonment to sterilization to outright murder, European eugenicists watched the escalation with a mix of eagerness and envy. By 1936, less than a decade after Buck v. Bell, a vastly more virulent form of “genetic cleansing” would engulf that continent like a violent contagion, morphing the language of genes and inheritance into its most potent and macabre form.