Paul_Kammerer

Paul Kammerer

Paul Kammerer (August 17, 1880 in Vienna – September 23, 1926 in Puchberg am Schneeberg) was a renowned Austrian biologist who studied and advocated the discredited Lamarckian theory of inheritance – the notion that organisms may pass to their offspring characteristics they have acquired in their lifetime. He began his academic career at the Vienna Academy studying music but graduated with a degree in biology.

Work

Like many of his generation, Kammerer undertook numerous experiments, largely involving interfering with the breeding and development of amphibians. He interested himself in the Lamarckian doctrine of acquired characteristics and eventually reported that a Midwife toad was exhibiting a black pad on its foot - 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 scientific journal Nature. He reported that the black pad actually had a far more mundane explanation: it had simply been injected there with Indian ink. Six weeks later, Kammerer committed suicide.

Aftermath

Interest in Kammerer revived in 1971, when he became the subject of a book by Arthur Koestler, The Case of the Midwife Toad. Koestler surmised that Kammerer's experiments on the midwife toad may have been tampered with by a Nazi sympathizer at the University of Vienna. Certainly, as Koestler writes, "the Hakenkreuzler, the swastika-wearers, as the [Austrian] Nazis of the early days were called, were growing in power. One of the centers of ferment was the University of Vienna where, on the traditional Saturday morning student parades, bloody battles were fought. Kammerer was known by his public lectures and newspaper articles as an ardent pacifist and Socialist; it was also known that he was going to build an institute in Soviet Russia. An act of sabotage in the laboratory would have been ... in keeping with the climate of those days."

Also, the toad had been brought to England by Kammerer to be displayed during lectures not long before, as a specimen of an acquired characteristic. During this visit it had been handled by eminent pro-Darwinian zoologists, all of whom detested the possibility of Lamarckianism being valid. None of the irregularities discovered by Noble were detected at the time, and since Noble claimed the injected ink was rather conspicuous this suggests that the "act of sabotage" had been committed shortly before Noble's visit to Vienna, when Kammerer was no longer working at the institute.

As a consequence of the fraud, interest in Lamarckian inheritance diminished except in the Soviet Union where it was championed by Lysenko. The orthodox view among the biological establishment remains that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited.

This is in the face of much other laboratory work of Kammerer's over several years with, for example, sea squirts and salamanders where just such inheritance was demonstrated. Many biologists from all over Europe visited him in Vienna and photographs and reports of his work were widely available. Kammerer himself regarded the possible inheritance of a pad on the foot of a male midwife toad as of relatively minor significance in the argument for Lamarckian inheritance. He approved the inspection of the specimen which was found to have been fraudulently tampered with, and expressed great astonishment when the fraud was made known to him.

Seriality theory

Kammerer's other passion was collecting coincidences. He published a book with the title Das Gesetz der Serie (The Law of the Series; never translated into English) in which he recounted 100 or so anecdotes of coincidences that had led him to formulate his theory of Seriality.

He postulated that all events are connected by waves of Seriality. These forces would cause what we would perceive as just the peaks, or groupings and coincidences. Kammerer was known to, for example, make notes in public parks of what numbers of people were passing by, how many carried umbrellas, etc. In reviewing the book, Albert Einstein called the idea of Seriality "Interesting, and by no means absurd."

Koestler reported that when researching his biography of the coincidence collector, Kammerer, he himself was subjected to "a meteor shower" of coincidences. It was as if Kammerer's ghost were grinning down at him saying, "I told you so!"

Notes

Gliboff, Sander (2005). ""Protoplasm...is soft wax in our hands": Paul Kammerer and the art of biological transformation". Endeavour 29 (4): 162–7.
Sermonti, G "Epigenetic heredity. In praise of Paul Kammerer". Riv. Biol. 93 (1): 5–12.
Lachman, E (1976). "Famous scientific hoaxes". The Journal of the Oklahoma State Medical Association 69 (3): 87–90.
Meinecke, G (1973). "[The tragedy about Paul Kammerer. A scientific psychological example]". Die Medizinische Welt 24 (38): 1462–6.
Hirschmüller, A (1991). "Not Available". Medizinhistorisches Journal 26 (1-2): 26–77.