1920s CONTROVERSIAL EPIGENETICS. The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics

New York, Washington: Boni and Liveright, 1924. First English edition.

1924 FIRST ENGLISH EDITION ACCOUNT OF EXPERIMENTS IN EPIGENETICS BY PAUL KAMMERER, "ENIGMATIC AND TRAGIC FIGURE IN THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY"

8 3/4 inches tall hardcover, original red blindstamped cloth binding, gilt title to spine, deckled edges. 414 pages, 43 illustrations, including color and folding plates. DEDICATION: "To Dr. Ernest W. MacBride, D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.S. Professor, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London; the Highly Meritorious Disciple of the Doctrine that Acquired Characteristics are hereditary , and an Indefatigable Champion of the Truth, With an Expression of the Sincerest Admiration of the Author." [ERNEST WILLIAM MacBRIDE FRS(1866 - 1940) was a British/Irish marine biologist, one of the last supporters of Lamarckian evolution]. Corners bumped, light surface wear to covers and spine ends, occasional foxing, overall very good minus.

PAUL KAMMERER (1880 - 1926) was an Austrian biologist who studied and advocated the Lamarckian theory of inheritance - the notion that organisms may pass to their offspring characteristics they have acquired in their lifetime. Kammerer's work in biology largely involved altering the breeding and development of amphibians. Kammerer succeeded in making midwife toads breed in the water by increasing the temperature of their tanks, forcing them to retreat to the water to cool off. The male midwife toads were not genetically programmed for the underwater mating that necessarily followed and thus, over the span of two generations, Kammerer reported that his midwife toads were exhibiting black nuptial pads on their feet to give them more traction in this underwater mating process. While the prehistoric ancestors of midwife toads had these pads, Kammerer considered this an acquired characteristic brought about by adaptation to environment. Claims arose that the result of the experiment had been falsified. The most notable of these claims was made by Dr. G. K. Noble, Curator of Reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History, in the journal Nature. Noble, after a microscopic examination, claimed that the black pads actually had a far more mundane explanation: they had simply been injected with Indian ink. In a letter Kammerer stated that after reading Noble's paper he reexamined his specimen and confirmed that India ink had been injected into the pads, and suggested that his specimens had been altered by a laboratory assistant. There is still doubt about whether an obliging (or hostile) assistant was responsible for the forgery, but Kammerer's scientific credibility was nevertheless irremediably damaged. Six weeks after the accusation by Noble, Kammerer committed suicide in the forest of Schneeberg, Science historian Peter J. Bowler has written that most biologists believe that Kammerer was a fraud, and even among those who believe he was honest claim he misinterpreted the results of his experiments.

CITED BY MOORE & DECKER in More Than Darwin (2009): "Kammerer was hailed as a successor to Charles Darwin, and Kammerer's work was described as "the greatest biological discovery of the century." One newspaper noted, "Professor Kammerer's work on the inheritance of acquired characteristics has startled the world.... His resuits are in the forefront of discussion today in biological circles. We all want to believe his facts if they are true. It means so much to the educator, and society in generaL if they are true. After Kammerer's death, the Soviet Union produced a film titled Salamandra that ended with. Kammerer's triumphant arrival in the Soviet Union."

CITED BY MILNER in Darwin's Universe (2009): "Kammerer's story was the focus of The Case of the Midwife Toad (1971) by Arthur Koestler, who suggests it was not Kammerer, but an overzealous assistant who attempted to restore faded markings by inking the 15-year-oid specimens. In the 1920s, his popular lectures about evolving ourselves into a vastly superior species caused a sensation. According to Koestler, when many German, British, and American scientists were using Mendelism to justify racist eugenics-preventing "inferior" groups from breeding-Kammerer championed a more benign program. Now that he had proven the reality of Lamarckian inheritance, he believed, all peoples could make evolutionary progress by improving their social environments. To this day, the debates and uncertainties continue. Historians and scientists agree on one fact about Paul Kammerer: He was one of the most ambiguous, enigmatic, and tragic figures in the history of biology."

CITED BY A. O. VARGAS: Did Paul Kammerer discover epigenetic inheritance? a modem look at the controversial midwife toad experiments. J. Exp. Zool. (Mol. Dev. Evol.) 312B:667-678 (2009): "Paul Kammerer, a renowned Lamarckian experimentalist in the early 20th century, committed suicide in 1926, shortly after an article published in Nature (Noble, '26) presented evidence suggesting he could have committed fraud in his experiments of inheritance of acquired traits in the midwife toad, Alytes obstetricians. These demanding experiments spanned several years and have never been properly re-attempted. The case remains unsolved: several different authors have considered that Kammerer's experiments were probably authentic, but the shadow of doubt has made any citation of his work objectionable. His entire scientific legacy nowadays is thus nonexistent, and Kammerer is more often noted as a historic example of Lamarckian scientific fraud. Here, I point out some aspects of the description of Kammerer's midwife toad experiments in his book The Inheritance of Acquired traits that shows remarkable resemblances to currently known epigenetic mechanisms, which are very unlikely to have been a fabrication of Kammerer's imagination."

CITED BY WEISSMANN in "Epigenetics and Alma Mahler" in Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter (2012): "I'm afraid that Kammerer's story remains pertinent today, when our journals print retractions of articles that have sported manipulated images, duplicated data and fabricated authorship. Somebody desperately wants them to be okay! We live, these days, with virtual reality and biased avatars; it's hard to pick out fact from faction. Fraud tends to be ignored by those who agree with the conclusion it reaches, whether facts support it or not. For a lie to persist, or to be resurrected like the midwife toad, there has to be an audience that requires belief."