Birth to death: Science and bioethics

Book reviews Biologists Under Hitler. By Ute Deichmann, translated by Thomas Dunlap. Pp335. Harvard University Press, 1996. ISBN 0 674 07404 1. Ute Deichmann, Research Fellow in the Institute for Genetics at the University of Cologne, has done for the history of the biological sciences what previous historians have done for physics and medicine: she traces the response of a group of professional scientists in Germany to the rise to power of the Nazis after 1933. Like two recent authors, Robert Proctor (on medicine) and Benno Muller-Hill (on scientists in general), Deichmann shows how many well-known biologists slipped easily, even eagerly, into aligning their research interests with the explicit goals of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). Specifically excluding studies of racial hygiene (on the grounds that this topic has been covered in other works), Deichmann shows how physiologists, cell biologists, plant and animal breeders, biochemists and a host of other biologists were eager to make their work relevant to Nazi political and social goals. For example, geneticists at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Breeding Research in Muncheberg were given considerable funds to develop new plants that could be used when the German resettlement program was carried out in the east (i.e. when Germans were to be given Lebensraum by the forcible increased removal of the inhabitants of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary). Others, like pioneer animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz actively embraced Nazi racial policies and geared their work specifically to support Reich ideology. Still others, like racial hygienist Otmar von Verschuer, the mentor of Josef Mengele, actively carried out experiments on inmates in concentration camps for research on the physiological response of individuals to various stressful conditions such as extreme cold, or used anatomical material from those murdered in the camps to study the genetic basis of specific pathologies in monozygotic twins. Even supposedly ‘pure’ and neutral biologists such as Hans Nachtsheim, a geneticist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology in Munich, proved to have a strongly tainted past: Nachtsheim knowingly participated in research on epileptic children obtained from a euthenasia center in Gorden, Brandenburg from 1942. Deichmann makes it clear that the Nazis developed a strong program for funding scientific research; they did not shun science or offtcially advocate the kind of pseudoscience with which they are often associated in popular accounts. The funding for science was particularly strong for the various

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institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, although less so for individual scientists working in universities. While the detailed descriptions of much of this work make somewhat tedious reading, their inclusion makes dramatically clear the extent to which biological business was carried out ‘as usual’ even during the height of the Nazi era. What is simultaneously provocative and chilling, are Deichmann’s accounts of how ordinary German (non-Jewish, of course) scientists continued their research work, or redirected it, after 1933 to maintain and/or augment their professional positions and funding. Such work, Deichmann insists, did much to help the overall political, social and economic aims, as well as the prestige, of the Nazi regime. If there is any single, most important take-home message from Deichmann’s book, it seems to me that it this: the path to moral ignorance and bankruptcy for scientists is a very slippery slope, especially when greased by the dangling carrot of research funds and increased power at a time when both money and new jobs are scarce. Scientists can be more easily ‘bought’ than most of us would like to believe. By demonstrating this fact so clearly, however, Deichmann provides at least the hope that we can (though, sadly, we may not) learn from the mistakes of our predecessors. Somewhat more problematical is the author’s attempt to assess the quality of the biological research carried out under the Nazis. The general impression one gets from Deichmann’s presentation is that the quality of science in Germany declined after 1933, but not as much as postwar German scientists tried to claim when they portrayed themselves as victims of Nazism along with workers, Jews, communists, gypsies and homosexuals. The decline that did occur may have been partly due to the emigration of a number of the best German scientists (especially Jewish) and partly to the Nazi’s attempt to control all scientific work through a central Research Council (the DFR). More intriguingly, the author suggests that the same moral lapses that allowed German biologists to overlook the dismissal of their Jewish colleagues, or to participate in research in behalf of the Nazi state, may have also given rise to, or supported, a lapse of concern for scientific rigor and for the critical opinion of the international scientific community. While biology in Germany after the Nazi take-over may not have been as outstanding as it was before 1933 (and especially before 1914) it did not all lapse into bogus racial theory or pseudo-science. Much of it was distressingly ‘normal’. Despite these compelling points, there are some peculiar aspects of Deichmann’s study. For one thing, there is a strange section thrown into the conclusion comparing

biology under the Nazis to that under the Bolsheviks in the USSR - particularly focusing on the Lysenko case. The alleged purpose of this comparison is to show that whereas the communists tried to control the content of biological theory - at least in genetics - the Nazis maintained a much more hands-off approach to the actual nature of an individual’s research. Although careful to avoid taking a moral relativist position with regard to the Nazis, Deichmann does play into exactly the sort of anti-communist mentality that characterized much of Nazi ideology. Her survey of the Lysenko case and the conditions under which the communist party gave official sanction to what many felt at the time was a bogus biological theory (inheritance of acquired characteristics) is too brief and too superficial to provide any understanding of the very different economic and social context in which biological theory developed in Germany and the Soviet Union. There is also a peculiar ‘Epilogue’ which consists of a letter written by physicist Lise Meitner from England to her former colleague Otto Hahn, in Berlin (though apparently never delivered to him) just after the war, explaining why international scientific opinion was so outraged by the behavior of many German scientists during the Nazi period. The letter itself is quite interesting, but it is presented with no comment or justification for its inclusion. The book has a useful appendix with thumbnail biographical sketches of several hundred biologists (mostly, but not exclusively German) mentioned in the book. Despite some shortcomings, Deichmann’s book is an important reminder to us today that unless scientists remain both politically and morally aware of their work and the context in which it is used, co-option can always be just around the comer. Garland E. Allen

Birth to Death: Science and Bioethics. Edited by D.C. Thomasma and T: Kushner. Pp. 382. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Hardback f4O.OO/US$54.95; paperback f 14.95/$19.95. ISBN 0 521 46297 5/ 55556 6. With the approach of the millennium there has been a flurry of interest in the ethics of science and especially the consequences of medical progress. In this book, many authors have looked at their areas of special interest and at how the applications of science have changed the world - especially the relationship of humans to other species and the environment.

Copyright 0 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-9327/96/$15.00.

The ability to reason, an alphabetic written language and easily manipulated Arabic numerals were the requirements for the development of modem science. The tools were put together in the Renaissance and the years that followed. Initially, the probing and curiosity of brilliant polymaths unveiled the mysterious nature of planetary movements and the physical and chemical laws of nature. With Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood the stage was set for an understanding of human and animal biology. More recently, the arrangement of DNA, how it replicates and the relationship of the nucleic acids to the essential amino acids and protein structure have been demonstrated. By analogy to the alphabet and numerals, they reveal the key to an understanding of the most basic aspects of the life process. Science itself is neutral, the advances are the fruits of curious and usually very patient and persistent men and women, but the applications have completely changed in the world. There is almost nowhere that has not yet been contaminated by western civilization. Instant communication is possible worldwide - the atrocity in Tianenmen Square was witnessed by probably more than a billion people with access to television. Weapons of destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, could wipe out most of life. The human population is increasing in a geometric pattern. Many species of animals and plants have been destroyed or are facing extinction. The atmosphere is polluted, unrenewable vital resources are consumed in a profligate manner, supplies of food and especially water may soon have dwindled to a dangerous level. There is a potential for new plagues of AIDS and prion disease. It is with this background that the authors have looked especially at medical advances. The enthusiasm of neo-natalogists permits survival of minute infants, many of whom have lasting incapacity. The infertile can sometimes produce children without the normal sexual precedings. Organs can be transplanted, but there is a shortage that has produced a whole series of moral dilemmas. People can be kept alive far beyond previous expectations, often severely incapacitated mentally, physically or both. Death frequently occurs in an environment of high technology rather than the surroundings of home and family, and the family itself is threatened. The authors of this text have done a good job. They have looked in depth and with serious concern at each of the subjects mentioned above, and they have attempted to make constructive suggestions. To those interested in the moral and ethical dilemmas of modem high-tech medicine and surgery, this book will be of interest but it should not be forgotten that medicine, although important, is only one of the areas where modem technology has applied the discoveries of pure science in ways which are menacing to us all. Roy Calne

Before the Backbone. By Henry Gee. Pp. 346. Chapman & Hall, 1996. f35.00. ISBN 0 412 48300 9. Where did we come from? Most natural historians have a clear notion of our immediate ancestry, and a vaguer one of our place within the mammals. More distant still, the tetrapod lines merges with the fishes of Devonian age. But what before that? This book takes the story of our descent to its earliest days, when the backbone was a novelty, and when some of the closest evolutionary cousins were relatives of the sea squirts, or the acorn worm, or even allies of starfish and sea urchins. This is a deeply buried history which happened ~00 million years ago or more, and it is perhaps not surprising that almost every candidate that might be suggested as the chordates’ closest relative has been popular at one time or another. The evidence is derived from many sources, some of it classical zoology and embryology, some of it up-to-the-minute work on the domains governed by homeobox genes, some of it palaeontology. Henry Gee has admirably mastered a formidable library of scattered reference to bring this timely book together. It is not, it has to be said, an easy read. Whether it would be possible to write an accessible account of what is inevitably a convoluted and technical argument is a moot point. The reader has to get his mind around complex homologies, try to recall the fate of cells, and think of a biological world where ancestral left can become descendant right, up can become down, and even the term ‘head’ can mean different things in different animals. It is a little intimidating to have to grapple with this mutable world. The language required to do it is complex: ‘Hox expression and neural crest are both “somatic” inventions, imposed on a preexisting “visceral” pharyngeal chassis found in enteropneusts, which have pharyngeal slits but not neural crest’ and the like. Oddly, the scholarly notes are often easier to understand than the main text. But it is an interesting story, and an object lesson in the problems of trying to reconstruct distant evolutionary links. The jokers in the tale are some strange animals known only as fossils - carpoids. The evolutionary significance of these creatures has been championed for thirty years by Dick Jefferies, who places them at the very base of the tree of descent that leads to vertebrates, sea squirts, and that laboratory favourite, amphioxus. If he is right, these bizarre, plated, lop-sided animals are the invertebrate equivalent of Archaeoptelyx or Lucy. There are some intriguing links that Gee points up: these strange fossils might explain the curiously asymmetric development of amphioxus, which had been noted with some perplexity by the great nineteenth-century anatomists. It would be good to think that ancient fossils can still complement the work of develop-

Palaeontologists, geneticists. mental zoologists and geneticists should read this book and learn from it. Richard Fortey

Edward Frankland. By CA. Russell. Pp. 535. Cambridge University Press, 1996. f65.00. ISBN 0 521 49636 5. Russell gives us more than a conventional portrait: in this well-produced book we have a landscape with figures. Every history of chemical theory has to refer to Frankland in connection with the concept of valency and the discovery and use of organometallic compounds. However, his work was as various as that of any of his contemporaries, wider in some socially significant aspects than most. Students of branches of history other than that of science will value this book for its detail of his family life, his personal associations, and his confrontations not only with other leading scientists of his day but also with adminstration and authority. It is the treatment of these many relationships and their interaction with Frankland’s development as a chemist that give the book its character as a Victorian historical landscape. This is not just a chronicle of accepted views on contributions to chemical theory. Russell’s earlier work on valency remains of permanent value, but here he goes further. It is a pleasure to see how Frankland’s involvement in collaboration and controversy contributed to the eventual clarification of a concept towards which so much of chemical theory had been moving. Some of the other figures in Russell’s landscape are men of great stature like Kekule and Kolbe. Many are not chemists but physicists (Tyndall) or biologists (Darwin). This would have been a useful contribution to Victorian history even without the chemistry. Russell has worked hard for many years on novel sources, found not by mere serendipity but by biographical skill, and a sense of the importance of place. Russell knows how to explain not only what happened but why it happened in a particular setting, be it a suburban college, a German university, a famous club or the top of Mont Blanc. There are clubs and clubs, and Russell goes into some detail about the X-Club, that curious scientific analogy to the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, with its small number of friends, conspiring to influence publication and advancement, and finally dying of its own exclusiveness. However varied Frankland’s scientific life may have been, to the man himself it was his personal and family life that mattered. Here Russell is impressive in balancing Frankland’s achievements with a personal life in which his illegitimacy affected his self-esteem and his affection for his family sustained his efforts. He had to manoeuvre his own advancement in the chemical hierarchy but he eventually occupied many

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