Science: When Gene Meets Gene

War is the science of how best to depopulate the earth. Genetics is the science of how best to populate it. Last week the Science of Genetics received more than its normal amount of attention:

“Complete Sadness.” In Edinburgh 500 members of the International Genetical Congress met to discuss chances of creating healthier, more intelligent human beings. Absent from the meeting for political reasons best known to the Soviet Government were 50 Russian delegates, including the head of the Congress, famed Professor Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, who is out of favor in Russia because he does not believe in the long-outmoded inheritance of acquired characteristics (TIME, June 26). Communists prefer to believe in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Called home from the meeting were all the European delegates. Professor Gunnar Dahlberg of Sweden was the only one who stubbornly refused to leave.

To replace Professor Vavilov, delegates elected Professor F. E. Crew of the University of Edinburgh, who said: “The atmosphere of the Congress has been turned to one of complete sadness. Nothing, however, can put out the light of science. . . .”

Genius and Kallikaks. Whether children inherit temperament, intelligence, musical talent or various diseases is a genetic question that has long worried Manhattan Freelance Journalist Amram Scheinfeld. To solve his problems he consulted a score of famous U. S. geneticists, read several hundred treatises on heredity. This week Journalist Scheinfeld published the first sound, popular treatise on the facts & fictions of heredity.*Main theme of the book is that heredity and environment are a dynamic combination, that development of personality is not governed exclusively by one or the other. Some of his points:

> Snobs who brag of their ancestry betray their ignorance of genetics. Each person receives 24 chromosomes from each parent, an average of twelve chromosomes from his grandparents, six from his greatgrandparents, only one or two from his great-great-great-grandparents. “If you claimed descent from Miles Standish, the odds may be 20 to one that you are no more related to him than is any one else in town.”

>In 1898 sociologists discovered two family clans living in New Jersey. “One branch comprised upright, intelligent, prosperous citizens; the other abounded in degenerates, mental defectives, drunks, paupers, prostitutes and criminals.” Both clans were descendants of Martin Kallikak, a soldier in the Revolution. After the war, Kallikak, who was of good stock, married a Quakeress, had seven respectable children. But before his marriage he had fathered a child of a feeble-minded servant girl. This roistering son, known to the neighborhood as “Old Horror,” sired ten worthless offspring, who in turn were responsible for several generations of notorious Kallikaks.

Deriding the claims of old-fashioned sociologists and asking “What’s wrong with this picture?” (see cut), Mr. Sheinfeld points out that the differences between the “worthy Quakeress and the feeble-minded slattern” cannot account for the differences between the two Kallikak clans. For Old Horror, who was presumably feebleminded, could not, by the law of genetics, have inherited his feeble mind from one parent alone. Only “recessive” genes are involved in feeblemindedness, “which means that such genes must come from both parents for the effect to assert itself.” Hence “the worthy Martin Kallikak Sr., himself had to be carrying such genes of feeblemindedness . . . and the ‘good’ Kallikaks also received some of those genes.” Most probably, concludes Mr. Scheinfeld, bad environment was a major factor in producing bad Kallikaks.

*YOU AND HEREDITY — Stokes — $3.