Science: Cruel Trick

There came to light last week a letter revealing one of the cruelest tricks one civilized being could well play upon another. It was a letter left by the late Professor Paul Kammerer, famed biologist, who ascended a small hill near Vienna last month and shot himself. For a year the scientific world had reverberated with Professor Kammerer’s report that, by experiment upon frogs, he had proved to his immensely critical satisfaction that acquired characteristics, such as the loss of an arm, blotches on the skin, could be passed from one generation to another. It was contrary to all previous observations on the transference of physical characteristics and Professor Kammerer was hailed by some as brilliant genius, by others as deluded fool. Dr. G. K. Noble of the American Museum of Natural History examined Professor Kammerer’s depositions and in an article for Nature (British monthly) drew the lenient conclusion that someone may have tampered with Dr. Kammerer’s specimens. In particular, certain dark spots on some of the frogs might have been produced., not by inheritance, but by injecting a dark fluid under the skin, perhaps India ink. When he saw this suggestion, Dr. Kammerer, who had lately been offered charge of a new government laboratory in Russia and whose suicide was to be a shock and a mystery to the many scientists that had long held him in high esteem, investigated at once.

“All the facts are true,” said Dr. Kammerer’s last letter, referring to Dr. Noble’s article. Assistants, perhaps malicious, perhaps longing to see their master pleased, had tampered with the frogs. “The work of my whole life has been destroyed.”