I said 'I don't think I like winning.'
He seemed to think about this. Then he said 'You are very lucky.'
My father, who had overheard this conversation, said 'Not winning would seem to be an accomplishment extraordinarily easy to achieve.'
Dr Kammerer said 'Oh no, it is very difficult! Very paradoxical!'
I was pleased about this. I thought — Dr Kammerer, my mother and I, we are each a mutation that knows what the others are up to?
After tea my father took Dr Kammerer off to his study. Before he went Dr Kammerer said to my mother 'I will see you before I go?'
She said'Yes.'
I thought — But will he be able to survive, in this environment!
While he was gone I talked with my mother about what she knew about Dr Kammerer. He came from a prosperous Viennese family;
he had originally trained to be a musician but had turned to biology because of a passionate love for animals. He was often able to keep delicate animals alive for his experiments in circumstances in which others could not.
One of the experiments for which he had become famous just before the First World War (I learned about these in the weeks or months following the visit of Dr Kammerer) was to do with two species of salamander (small newt-like amphibians) known as Sala-mandra atra and Salamandra maculosa. The former are found in the European Alps, and the latter in the Lowlands. The two species have different breeding characteristics: the alpine female gives birth on dry land to two fully formed young salamanders; the lowland species gives birth in water to up to fifty tadpole-like larvae which only months later turn into salamanders. Kammerer's experiment had been to take alpine salamanders and to put them in lowland conditions and see whether, as a first step, they would acquire the breeding characteristics of lowland salamanders; and then, if they did, to see what would be the breeding characteristics of the offspring of these salamanders in so-called 'neutral' conditions — would they have inherited the acquired characteristics of their parents, or would they have reverted to the original breeding habits of their ancestors? Kammerer claimed that he had, first, succeeded in getting alpine salamanders to breed in lowland conditions in a lowland manner — they had produced, that is, tadpole-like larvae — and then the offspring of these salamanders in so-called 'neutral' conditions had continued to produce larvae: and so from this Kammerer suggested that they had inherited the acquired characteristics of their parents.
It seems to me now (you think it could not have struck me like this at the time?) that there was a dubiousness about these experiments and the claims that Kammerer seemed to make from them: for instance, what could have been the 'neutral' conditions in which offspring were placed that would have been suitable for demonstrating their inheriting (or not) the acquired characteristics? Might not the conditions provided be simply those that encourage the emergence of either one set of characteristics or the other? But what was striking about the objections to Kammerer on the part of mainstream biologists (this was what much later came particularly to interest me) was that they did not point out rationally, as they might so easily have done, the flaws in his arguments and procedures; they seemed intent on impugning emotionally his honesty
and even his sanity; they claimed that he was 'cooking' his results — even those that were so obviously tentative.
One of the difficulties about all this in 1923 was that Kammerer's experiments with salamanders had been done before the First World War; during the war his laboratory had been dismantled and most of his specimens destroyed; in the post-war inflation in Vienna he had found it impossible to get money to set up his experiments again. And then there was the fact that when other biologists tried to repeat his experiments, they could not keep alive long enough to get any results the animals that Kammerer had managed to keep alive through several generations. It was perhaps annoyance at this that drove mainstream biologists to hint that Kammerer must be a charlatan.
Nevertheless his reputation was still such that he was invited to Cambridge in 1923: he was only the second ex-enemy-alien to be invited to Cambridge since the war. (The first — you will be pleased at the coincidence! — had been Einstein.)
I picked up bits and pieces about all this at the time: I learned details later. But the picture I had in my mind about Kammerer did not have to be much amended later.
At the end of that day when he had played tennis on the lawn and after he had gone along with the rest of my father's guests — I had not properly said goodbye to him: I minded about this: I had run out on to the drive just in time to wave as he drove away; I think he waved to me; but of course it was more probable that he was waving to my mother -
— At the end of this day, when my mother and father and I were settling down to some plates of cold meat for supper, my father said -
'Well, what's the verdict?'
My mother said The verdict about what?'
'Dr Kammerer, of course.'
'He is certainly very charming.'
'Yes, "charming" is the word I would use myself
'You use it with a certain distaste.'
'It is not a word held in high regard in scientific circles.'
'But this afternoon we were not in scientific circles.'
'No indeed we were not.'
And so on.
This was the sort of conversation that had to be suspended while Watson the parlourmaid came in with dishes. Watson was a tall
craggy woman like a member of a military band. She would bang her plates and cutlery about at the sideboard like percussion.
The word 'charming' was one I had not heard my mother use before. I thought — Well, no, you could not call my father's friends charming: and my mother's friends, well, but their charm is like that of witches around a lukewarm cauldron. But Dr Kammerer was like a wizard with his hands round a crystal ball -
My mother said 'He played tennis very well.'
My father said 'He never moved.'
'How lovely to find someone who hardly needs to move!'
'Well in his line of business he certainly moves one or two pieces around on the board, when no one is looking, I can tell you!'
When my father and my mother went on like this I usually switched my attention off: but every now and then I cared about something enough to want to try to divert them.
I said 'But why do you think Dr Kammerer was able to keep his salamanders alive in captivity, while others could not?'
My father said 'That is indeed a subject on which we have little information.'
My mother said 'Perhaps he loved them.'
My father said 'Loved them!'
My mother said 'Haven't you heard that things are sometimes helped to stay alive if they are loved?'
Perhaps Watson clattered in or out again at this point with some dishes. I sometimes wondered — Might one of the reasons why people employ servants be so that they can be rescued at regular intervals from their dreadful conversations?
But now my father ploughed on. 'Yes indeed Dr Kammerer is said to have an amazing way with animals. Once, when he was out on one of his walks looking for specimens, he is said to have picked up a toad and to have kissed it.'
My mother said 'I'm sure it turned into a princess.'
Watson had become curiously quiet at the sideboard.
I said 'But you haven't answered my question.'
My father said 'What was your question?'
'Why do you think Dr Kammerer could keep his salamanders alive while you could not.'
I thought this quite brave. I knew that my father had tried, and failed, to reproduce some of Kammerer's experiments. To be able to ask a question like this, I was probably on the edge of tears.
My father said 'Are you suggesting that there was some flaw in
my handling of the breeding experiment? Do tell us. Do give us the benefit of your experience.'