Free Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley Page A

He said 'As a matter of fact, I think what I would love is some tea!'
    My father said 'Ah, it's a business keeping fit!'
    We sat on deckchairs on the lawn. Dr Kammerer sat next to my mother. He glanced at her sideways quickly from time to time; my mother seemed to know that he was doing this but to be pretending not to know; but in such a way that Dr Kammerer would know that she knew. I was thinking - If Dr Kammerer is some mutation, is it that he knows, without talking, what people are up to?
    Sometime in the course of tea Dr Kammerer turned to me and said 'You do not like tennis?'
    I said 'Not really.'
    He said 'Why not?'
    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