Paul Kammerer was a Viennese biologist whose researches just after the end of the first World War supported the Lamarckian theory of inheritance. This claimed that characteristics acquired by parents during their lives were passed on to their offspring. He used the midwife toad, Alytes obstetricians, as experimental animal in his most conclusive experiments. The results of the midwife toad experiments were subsequently shown to have been faked and Paul Kammerer took his own life in 1926. Kammerer claimed that he was personally innocent of the falsification.
The French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) first developed the theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics. According to this theory, if I devote myself to serious bodybuilding, develop a physique like Arnold Schwarzenegger and then father children, my offspring can inherit my acquired physique.
Our modern understanding of genetics shows that Lamarck was wrong. We now know that genetic information resides in our genes in the form of DNA and the information encoded in our DNA cannot be re-written by the activities we undertake in our lives. However, the matter was not so cut and dried in Kammerer's time and belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics was spread widely through the scientific literature.
Kammerer got results in early work on salamanders that supported the theory of Lamarckian inheritance, but his best-known work was obtained using the midwife toad. This toad differs from other toads by mating on land, rather than in water. Toads that mate in water develop dark "nuptial pads" on their feet, thickened horny swellings that are necessary to get a firm grip on the slippery female's body. The male midwife toad does not possess these nuptial pads.
In his experiments Kammerer denied access to land to his midwife toads and forced them to mate in water for several generations. He observed that the males eventually developed dark nuptial pads and he claimed that these pads were inherited by their male offspring.
At the time there was lively debate in the scientific literature between proponents of Lamarckism and supporters of Mendelism, with the Mendelian scientists fast gaining ground. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) had shown that genetic information was carried from one generation to the next via units of heredity we now call genes. He showed that those units, each controlling a bodily characteristic, can independently sort and segregate between generations and that a characteristic can be temporarily hidden in one generation but reappear again in a subsequent generation.
This Mendelian model was incompatible with the plasticity inherent in the Lamarckian model of heritability. The Mendelian scientists strenuously disputed Kammerer's claim and several articles were published in scientific journals supporting one or other side of the argument.
Kammerer's results with the midwife toad were enthusiastically received in the Soviet Union where Lamarckism completely dominated biology under the influence of the geneticist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976). Kammerer was offered a post at the University of Moscow, which he accepted.
In 1926, an American herpetologist (one who studies reptiles and amphibians), GK Noble, came to Vienna and examined a preserved midwife toad from Kammerer's experiments. Noble found that an injection of Indian ink had been used to colour the nuptial pads.
After Noble's exposure of the fraud Kammerer admitted the hoax in a letter to the Soviet Academy of Science in September 1926. He claimed that he had not personally faked the results and that he did not know who was responsible. Shortly afterwards Kammerer killed himself with a pistol shot to the head. He was 46 years old.
Arthur Koestler wrote a well-known book on the affair called The Case of the Midwife Toad (Random House, New York, 1972). Koestler believed that the hoax was perpetrated by one of Kammerer's enemies, but after Kammerer had demonstrated this specimen at a lecture in England in 1923. Koestler also believed that Kammerer had indeed observed the development of nuptial pads on midwife toads forced to copulate in water over several generations.
In any event, Kammerer's experiment was ill conceived. Even if he did observe the development of nuptial pads in the midwife toad, this would not have proved the case for Lamarckian inheritance. The explanation for such an observation would be that the genes for the production of nuptial pads are present in the midwife toad but are normally inactive. However, under the extreme environmental stimulus of being forced to breed in water, these genes are switched on.
Kammerer was an unconventional, flamboyant man with flashing verbal skills, artistic inclinations and great dedication to his biological research. He was also fascinated by coincidences and believed that along with physical causality there is another principle in the universe which makes like things converge in space and time.
For what it's worth, I don't think Kammerer participated in the hoax and I suspect his suicide was a tragic reaction to his belief that his reputation as a scientist was ruined.
• William Reville is associate professor of biochemistry and director of microscopy at UCC