Logan, Cheryl A. (Author)
Rutgers University Press
Physical Details: x + 245 pp.; ill.
Language: English
Early in the twentieth century, arguments about nature and nurture pitted a rigid genetic determinism against the idea that genes were flexible and open to environmental change. This book tells the story of three Viennese biologists---Paul Kammerer, Julius Tandler, and Eugen Steinach---who sought to show how the environment could shape heredity through the impact of hormones. It also explores the dynamic of failure through both scientific and social lenses. During World War I, the three men were well respected scientists; by 1934, one was dead by his own hand, another was in exile, and the third was subject to ridicule. Paul Kammerer had spent years gathering zoological evidence on whether environmental change could alter heredity, using his research as the scientific foundation for a new kind of eugenics---one that challenged the racism growing in mainstream eugenics. By 1918, he drew on the pioneering research of two colleagues who studied how secretions shaped sexual attributes to argue that hormones could alter genes. After 1920, Julius Tandler employed a similar concept to restore the health and well-being of Vienna's war-weary citizens. Both men rejected the rigidly acting genes of the new genetics and instead crafted a biology of flexible heredity to justify eugenic reforms that respected human rights. But the interplay of science and personality with the social and political rise of fascism and with antisemitism undermined their ideas, leading to their spectacular failure.
...MoreDescription On three Viennese biologists: Paul Kammerer, Julius Tandler, and Eugen Steinach.
Review Leng, Kirsten (2014) Review of "Hormones, Heredity, and Race: Spectacular Failure in Interwar Vienna". Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences (pp. 110-111).
Review Stoff, Heiko (2014) Review of "Hormones, Heredity, and Race: Spectacular Failure in Interwar Vienna". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 238-239).
Similar Citations
Article
Logan, Cheryl A.;
(2007)
Overheated Rats, Race, and the Double Gland: Paul Kammerer, Endocrinology and the Problem of Somatic Induction
(/isis/citation/CBB000773240/)
Article
Coen, Deborah R.;
(2006)
Living Precisely in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
(/isis/citation/CBB000671265/)
Article
Naoyuki 尚之 Soma 相馬;
(2019)
[Productive Eugenics in Interwar Vienna: The Case of Paul Kammererʼs Eugenics] 戦間期ウィーンの「創造的優生学」: パウル・カンメラーの優生思想
(/isis/citation/CBB793968262/)
Book
Klaus Taschwer;
(2016)
Der Fall Paul Kammerer: Das abenteuerliche Leben des umstrittensten Biologen seiner Zeit
(/isis/citation/CBB823031709/)
Book
Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt;
(2018)
The Science and Politics of Race in Mexico and the United States, 1910-1950
(/isis/citation/CBB428499522/)
Book
Turda, Marius;
Weindling, Paul;
(2007)
“Blood and Homeland”: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900--1940
(/isis/citation/CBB000772111/)
Article
Tom Quick;
(2020-03-18)
The Making of a New Race in the Early Twentieth Century Imperial Imaginary
(/isis/citation/CBB351278938/)
Article
Sime, Ruth;
(2013)
Marietta Blau: Pioneer of Photographic Nuclear Emulsions and Particle Physics
(/isis/citation/CBB001320401/)
Article
Kröner, Hans-Peter;
(1999)
Von der Vaterschaftsbestimmung zum Rassegutachten: Der erbbiologische Ahnlichkeitsvergleich als “österreichisch-deutsches Projekt” 1926-1945
(/isis/citation/CBB000111948/)
Book
Staum, Martin S.;
(2011)
Nature and Nurture in French Social Sciences, 1859--1914 and Beyond
(/isis/citation/CBB001251424/)
Book
Livio Sansone;
(2022)
La Galassia Lombroso
(/isis/citation/CBB789501643/)
Book
Amir Teicher;
(2019)
Social Mendelism: Genetics and the Politics of Race in Germany, 1900-1948
(/isis/citation/CBB585433440/)
Book
Dorr, Gregory Michael;
(2008)
Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia
(/isis/citation/CBB000951061/)
Book
Keith Wailoo;
(2021)
Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette
(/isis/citation/CBB653382427/)
Article
Gliboff, Sander;
(2010)
Did Paul Kammerer Discover Epigenetic Inheritance? No and Why Not
(/isis/citation/CBB001024796/)
Article
Mastroianni, George R.;
(2006)
Kurt Gottschaldt's Ambiguous Relationship with National Socialism
(/isis/citation/CBB000610113/)
Book
Slavet, Eliza;
(2009)
Racial Fever: Freud and the Jewish Question
(/isis/citation/CBB001035655/)
Chapter
Hofer, Veronika;
(2002)
Rudolf Goldscheid, Paul Kammerer und die Biologen des Prater--Vivariums in der liberalen Volksbildung der Wiener Moderne
(/isis/citation/CBB000430158/)
Article
Rose, Anne C.;
(2005)
Putting the South on the Psychological Map: The Impact of Region and Race on the Human Sciences during the 1930s
(/isis/citation/CBB000660317/)
Thesis
Edwards, Barrington Steven;
(2001)
W. E. B. Du Bois, empirical social research and the challenge to race, 1868-1910
(/isis/citation/CBB001562601/)
Be the first to comment!