Was it possible, Sam wrote him, that given his background and their shared interests, he could be of some use at the institute? Secretly, he thought they also shared a disgust with what was going on in their country, the mad inequities that seemed to be destroying every good thing. In Russia, Sam thought, science might assume its rightful role, and scientists, instead of being separated into little fiefdoms ruled by petty kings, would work under the shelter of the state, free to follow their best ideas. He was thrilled when Muller, so enthusiastic himself about the Soviet experiment, found money for a position in which Sam was, if not quite an independent investigator, more than a student.
Soon Sam was living in Leningrad, exploring chromosomal rearrangements and learning that many of the apparent point mutations caused by X-ray treatment were actually recombinations of broken fragments. Segments were lost, segments were duplicated; he began to get a sense of what size a gene might be, and how it might function when moved to a new position. What if natural mutations were actually rearrangements of the particles in the chromosomes, rather than changes to the particles themselves? Muller proved to be an excellent guide. Not a teacher, as Axel had been; not really a friend, like Avery; he was clearly Sam’s superior, but he was accessible and kind, and Sam was thrilled to be working with someone he’d admired for so long.
It hardly mattered that, with housing short everywhere, Sam had to sleep in the corners of other scientists’ rooms, for a while in a bed behind a curtain in the laboratory, later in a basement hall. Everything was crowded, everyone was improvising; he was glad to be part of the common flow, and even the struggle to find supplies was worth it — such work, for such a purpose! Surrounded by Russians day and night, he learned the language quickly. And when the institute was moved to Moscow, Sam went too, leaving behind several friends and a woman with whom he’d had a brief affair.
Writing to his mother — he tried to write home twice a month — he described the farmers and engineers he met, the German Jews who’d sought refuge in the Soviet Union as the Nazis rose to power, the ardently socialist Englishmen and discontented Americans. He met men who’d soldiered in several wars, including one who’d fought against Germans at the beginning of the Great War and then later, in the province of Archangel, with the Reds against Americans. He showed me the white cotton overcoat he’d worn, Sam wrote, which had made him invisible in the snow. He claimed that once, as he’d been scrounging for food in the streets, he’d seen an American soldier leap from the top of a gigantic wooden toboggan run and onto the ice below. Really, I am living in the most remarkable place.
That winter, as the snow fell and fell — he was never warm, no one had enough fuel — Sam thought often of that soldier suspended in the air. Leaping from, or leaping toward? For all the hardships of daily life here, he still felt freer than he had since his time in Axel’s lab, and he moved through Moscow with a sense he hadn’t had in years of everything being interesting. At the Medico-Genetics Institute he saw hundreds of pairs of identical twins — how eerie this was, each face doubled! — being studied like laboratory mice. He visited collective farms, and he met a geneticist named Elizaveta who’d discovered a remarkable mutant fly a few years before Sam arrived. Walking toward her bench was like walking into Axel’s lab for the first time, the air dense with the smells of ether and bananas and flies fried on lightbulbs, the atmosphere of delight. Elizaveta, who had long, narrow, blue-green eyes below the palest brows, said she knew that genes controlled development: but were they active all the time, or did each act only at a particular period of development, and lie dormant otherwise?
At meetings — so many meetings! — he listened to talks about the practical applications of genetics to agriculture and the Marxist implications of the theory of the gene. Once, in a dark room after a day of lectures, he watched a film called Salamandra, about an idealistic scientist who’d demonstrated Lamarckian inheritance in salamanders but was then betrayed by a sinister German who tampered with his specimens to make it look as though his results had been faked. Denounced, deprived of his job, he lived in exile until rescued by a farsighted Soviet commissar who proved his work had been right all along. Partway through, Sam grasped that this was a transposition of the life and fate of Kammerer, who’d killed himself after a researcher proved that some of his results had been faked. By then, his own big mistake seemed very far away.
Working all the time, excited by the new experiments in the lab, he ignored what was happening out on the streets until, after a while, even he couldn’t avoid knowing about the party members being persecuted and executed, those who disagreed with Stalin disappearing. Intellectuals and scientists from different fields began to disappear as well, including geneticists, some of them Sam’s own colleagues. The director of the twins study vanished and his institute was dissolved. Elizaveta, more cautious than some, gave her flies to Sam and slipped away to her grandmother’s village. Geneticists had failed, Sam read in the papers, to serve the state by providing the collectives with new crops and livestock that could thrive in difficult climates and relieve the food shortages. They were stuck in bourgeois ways of thought. If a society could be transformed in a single generation, if the economy could be completely remade, why couldn’t the genetic heritage of crops or, for that matter, of man, be transformed as well?
In this context, Lamarck was a hero; and also Kammerer (Sam could see, now, why he’d been shown that film); and also the horticulturist Ivan Michurin, who’d claimed that through some kind of shock treatment he could transform the heredity of fruit trees, allowing their growth farther north. Trofim Lysenko, pushy and uneducated, rose up from nowhere to extend Michurinism beyond what anyone else could have imagined. Lysenko hated fruit flies, he knew no mathematics, he found Mendelian genetics tedious. Even his grasp of plant physiology was feeble. How could Sam take him seriously? Lysenko claimed that heredity was nothing so boringly fixed as the Mendelians said, but could be trained by the environment, endlessly improved. At a big meeting Sam attended at the end of 1936, Muller tried to rebuff Lysenko by clearly restating Mendelian genetics and outlining the institute’s research programs. Lamarckian inheritance, Muller explained, could not be reconciled with any of the evidence they’d found.
Sam was amazed when some in the audience actually hissed, and more so when, after Lysenko responded by dismissing all of formal genetics, those same people stood and cheered. Genetics was a harmful science, Lysenko said, not a science at all but a bourgeois distortion, a science of saboteurs. Muller and his like were wrecking socialism, preventing all progress, whereas he would now completely refashion heredity! His Russian was failing him, Sam kept thinking; Lysenko couldn’t be saying this. What should be so, must be so? Yet his friends heard the same thing. Those who doubted him, Lysenko said, were criminal. A theory of heredity, to be correct, must promise not just the power to understand nature but the power to change it.