Towards a holistic understanding of the organism: The model organisms of German genetics in the twenties

Alexander Schwerin
Abteilung für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, TU Braunschweig

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     Last modified: June 15, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/17/2005 11:00 AM in ROZH 105
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Abstract
In my talk I will study the dynamic experimental configuration of "mutational genetics" from its beginnings in the twenties by comparing the work of "comprehensive" geneticists as Alfred Kühn and Günther Just, of the "pragmatic" geneticists Hans Nachtsheim and Paula Hertwig, and researchers in-between, like Timoféeff-Ressovsky. My particular aim is to understand how the introduction of radiation as a tool to artificially induce mutations created an experimental dynamics that took hold of a wide variety of researchers separated by discipline, style, and technique.
There has been some puzzling about German science in the twenties ever since Paul Forman’s study on the cognitive context of German physics. In this line Anne Harrington and Michael Hau pointed to national characteristics in the life sciences that were part of the "holistic gaze". Similar, Jonathan Harwood confronted the comprehensive tradition of thinking with a group of geneticists marked as being pragmatic and orthodox Mendelians.
Since the focus of all these studies ends at the eve of National Socialism it remains an open question how German hereditary research moved on in the thirties. In 1934, the geneticist Nikolai Timoféeff-Ressovsky made arguments about the dawn of a "modernized and genetically founded organismic wholeness", thus pointing towards a convergence rather than an ideologically driven confrontation of, roughly said, romantic and technocratic biologists in Nazi Germany. To understand this development it is necessary to have a fresh look at the conceptual reconfigurations of genetics in the twenties, and to consider rearrangements in research practice that may have affected both "pragmatic" and "comprehensive" genetics.
To achieve this, I will take a look at a series of modifications in genetic research that happened after the description of artificial mutations by Hermann J. Muller in 1927. Beyond the disciplinary rising of radiation biology these modifications resulted in a complex of discursive and non-discursive practices that may be summed up as the "mutational dispositive". There is a historiographic consensus about the meaning of mutational biology for genetics going evolutionary. But the grand narrative of the "new" synthesis covers up the variety of research problems and methodological styles present at the time. The possibility to induce artificial mutations by radiation had two main consequences. First, it freed geneticists from being bound to the mutant strains geneticists had previously isolated through traditional breeding techniques. The genetic space of experimental representation broadened to accommodate a wide variety of model organisms, including some, which were of interest to neighbouring disciplines, like physiology and pathology. Second, the introduction of artificial mutation through radiation resulted in the combination of experimental genetics with other experimental traditions, notably comparative anatomy and "Entwicklungsmechanik". The model organisms of genetics became multiplied and bridged different research problems and communities. Modelling, then, often comprised different aims as the modelling of developmental processes and the construction of an experimental platform for studying human heredity.

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
Between Genetics and Biometry: Franz Boas’ Concept of a ‘Family Line’, 1890-1912
From Plant Breeding to Heredity. Clones and Pure Lines
Genealogy and human heredity in Germany around 1900
Animal Breeding and its Influence on the Identity of Genetics