The Seeds of Life Read online

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017 by Edward Dolnick

  Published by Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104.

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  DESIGNED BY LINDA MARK

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dolnick, Edward, 1952– author.

  Title: Seeds of life : from Aristotle to Da Vinci, from sharks’ teeth to frogs’ pants, the long and strange quest to discover where babies come from / Edward Dolnick.

  Description: New York : Basic Books, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016054195| ISBN 9780465082957 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780465094967 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Human reproduction—History. | Human reproduction—Mythology. | Human reproduction—Social aspects. | BISAC: SCIENCE / History. | HISTORY / Social History. | SCIENCE / Life Sciences / General.

  Classification: LCC QP251 .D59 2017 | DDC 612.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054195

  LSC

  E3-20170505-JV-PC

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Time Line

  PROLOGUE England in the Early 1630s

  PART ONE: PEERING INTO THE BODY ONE Onward to Glory

  TWO Hidden in Deep Night

  THREE Swallowing Stones and Drinking Dew

  FOUR Unmoored in Time

  FIVE “Double, Double Toil and Trouble”

  SIX Door A or Door B?

  PART TWO: THE SEARCH FOR THE EGG SEVEN Missing: One Universe (Reward to Finder)

  EIGHT Sharks’ Teeth and Cows’ Eggs

  NINE The Egg, At Last

  TEN A World in a Drop of Water

  ELEVEN “Animals of the Semen”

  PART THREE: RUSSIAN DOLLS TWELVE Dolls Within Dolls

  THIRTEEN The Message in God’s Fine Print

  FOURTEEN Sea of Troubles

  FIFTEEN The Rabbit Woman of Godliman

  SIXTEEN “All in Pieces, All Coherence Gone”

  SEVENTEEN The Cathedral That Built Itself

  EIGHTEEN A Vase in Silhouette

  PART FOUR: THE CLOCKWORK TOPPLES AND A NEW THEORY RISES NINETEEN Frogs in Silk Pants

  TWENTY A Drop of Venom

  TWENTY-ONE The Craze of the Century

  TWENTY-TWO “I Saw the Dull Yellow Eye of the Creature Open”

  TWENTY-THREE The Nose of the Sphinx

  TWENTY-FOUR “The Game Is Afoot”

  TWENTY-FIVE Caught!

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Illustration Credits

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  For Lynn, and Sam and Ben

  Night and day, the ignorant as well as the learned give themselves over to the pleasure of making children. But no one knows how he has engendered his own progeny.

  —VITTORE CARDELINI, Italian physician and author, 1628

  TIME LINE

  1490—Leonardo da Vinci makes a cutaway drawing of a man and woman having sex.

  1492—Columbus sets sail.

  1543—Andreas Vesalius publishes one of the masterpieces in the history of anatomy.

  1543—Copernicus says that the Earth goes around the sun, not vice versa.

  1628—William Harvey shows that the heart is a pump.

  1651—Harvey declares that “everything comes from the egg.”

  1669—Jan Swammerdam argues that God created all the generations of animals at the dawn of time, one inside the next like Russian dolls.

  1672—Regnier de Graaf (almost) proves that female mammals have eggs.

  1674—Antony van Leeuwenhoek sees countless “tiny animals,” invisible to the naked eye, in a drop of pond water.

  1677—Leeuwenhoek sees spermatozoa by the millions.

  1694—Nicolaas Hartsoeker draws a miniature man inside a sperm cell.

  1741—Abraham Trembley cuts a tiny organism called a hydra into pieces. Miraculously, each piece grows into a complete creature.

  1745—French scientists propose a new theory of how living organisms develop: life is regulated not by clockwork but by a force akin to gravity.

  1752—Ben Franklin flies a kite during a thunderstorm and proves that lightning is electrical.

  1770s—Lazzaro Spallanzani puts male frogs in boxer shorts.

  1776—American Revolution begins.

  1791—Luigi Galvani zaps frog legs with electricity.

  1818—Mary Shelley publishes Frankenstein.

  1827—Karl von Baer becomes the first to see a mammal’s egg.

  1837—Queen Victoria takes the throne.

  1830s–1860s—Cell theory emerges.

  1861–1865—The American Civil War lasts four long years.

  1875—Oscar Hertwig witnesses the union of sperm and egg.

  PROLOGUE

  ENGLAND IN THE EARLY 1630s

  IN CENTURIES TO COME THESE FIELDS AND WOODLANDS WILL shrink to tiny patches of green in a vast city. Londoners and tourists will feed ducks and swans here, and pose for giggling pictures. But today there are no crowds, no sightseers, no drifting sounds from the world outside. We are in an English royal park, the property of King Charles I. The king and his physician, William Harvey, are hunting deer. It is rutting season.

  Neither Harvey nor the king has heard of a “locked room mystery,” where a body is found in impossible circumstances. Perhaps a dead man is discovered in a study locked from the inside, with a knife plunged into his back. Neither man has imagined such a thing. They are about to.

  Harvey is a small man with raven-black hair and dark, darting eyes. Ambitious, impatient, and, as a friend put it, notoriously “hot-headed,” he radiates intensity. He is destined to soar into the medical pantheon for proving that the heart is a pump that sends the blood circulating around the body through an intricate network of arteries and veins.

  Charles is slender, handsome, solemn, utterly convinced that God has set him above other mortals and that “the king can do no wrong.” He is destined to die at the hands of the English people, his head chopped off by a masked executioner and then held aloft by the hair while the crowd whoops in glee and gasps in shock at what it has done.

  HARVEY HAD PUBLISHED HIS ACCOUNT OF THE HEART IN 1628, A few years before the hunting excursion. The world denounced him. “It was believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained,” Harvey complained, “and all the physicians were against his opinion.” For a man as combative as Harvey, that disdain served more as a spur than a rebuke. Harvey remained all his life a staunch “seeing is believing” man. Let others prattle on.

  For uncounted ages, the heart had been the seat of the soul and the home of the emotions and insights that set humankind above other creatures. (When we talk today about a “kind heart” or a “cold heart” or speak of learning a poem “by heart,” the idioms are fossils of bygone beliefs.) What the sun was to the sky or the lion to the jungle, the heart was to the body. Now Harvey had demonstrated that this noble organ was in trut
h a wet and slimy machine.

  The world would come around to Harvey’s view, though not for another two decades. In the end, the admiration would be universal. One dazzled follower would celebrate Harvey in verse: “Thy Observing Eye first found the Art / Of all the Wheels and Clock-work of the Heart.”

  At the time of his hunting venture with the king, that fame still lies ahead. Harvey is embattled, not acclaimed. But he knows what he has accomplished, even if the medical world has yet to catch on. With the riddle of the heart solved, Harvey has turned his attention to the greatest mystery of all. Since humankind’s earliest days, men and women have wondered how new life comes into the world. How does sex lead to babies? Harvey intends to find out. He will learn, precisely, how mating creates life.

  He will start by studying deer, as a matter of practicality, though humans are the real prize. The king is an avid horseman and hunter who, as Harvey notes happily, “is wont for Recreation and Health sake to hunt almost every week.” Harvey has managed to enlist his king as his ally.

  The king’s huntsmen bring down a doe. Harvey, the most renowned anatomist of the age (and one of the last great anatomists to rely on what he can see with his naked eye), pushes close. Now he will show the king, who “much delighted in this kind of curiosity,” the secrets of conception and pregnancy. Together, they will gaze on a deer embryo in its earliest days. They are about to see—what has never been revealed to anyone before—a small, round, glistening globule like an egg without a shell.

  Harvey thrusts his knife into the doe’s belly and cuts her open. Steam from the hot body rises into the chilly air. Harvey peers inside the animal’s womb, first avidly and then perplexedly. The king looks over his physician’s shoulder. They see… nothing!

  No sign of semen, no embryo, nothing whatever to distinguish this doe from any other, though Harvey and all the king’s huntsmen have no doubt that she is pregnant. Harvey calls the king in closer and points out that there is “no seed at all residing in their Uterus.”

  In the coming days, Harvey repeats the procedure again and again, always with the same result. Despite the most careful search, he never sees any semen in these newly mated does; he never sees any odd bits that might represent the female’s contribution to conception; he never sees any changes in the deer’s ovaries; he never sees any hint of an embryo.

  Could it be that Harvey, the king, and the huntsmen have all somehow deluded themselves? Perhaps they have been carefully studying deer who have not mated after all.

  Harvey devises a test. This time he will wait for the end of breeding season, when there can be no doubt that he is dealing with pregnant females. He will take a group of females, pick a few at random to dissect, and leave the others alone. (This is another breakthrough: Harvey is one of the first experimenters—by some accounts, the first—to use a “control” group.)

  Why go to so much bother? Because whatever Harvey sees in the bodies of the cut-open deer, chosen randomly, he would presumably also see if it were possible to peek inside the bodies of the living deer.

  With the king’s permission, Harvey takes a dozen females and pens them up, so he can keep track of them. He chooses several at random to sacrifice and dissects them. As usual, he finds nothing whatever. Now he waits and watches the remaining deer. At the customary time, they deliver fawns.

  None of this makes sense. There can be no doubt that males produce semen. Everyone knows what it looks like. It is a real, physical, commonplace substance. Everyone knows it is essential for pregnancy. How could it be that, when the male impregnates the female, the semen vanishes? Where is the semen? Where is the embryo?

  Stranger still, it is fact-minded, dogged William Harvey, the least flighty of men, who has delivered this bizarre news. With his revolutionary picture of the heart, he had showed in the most irrefutable way that he could explain the body’s workings in naturalistic, down-to-earth terms. And now here is Harvey himself proclaiming the death of common sense!

  The royal gamekeepers, angry and disbelieving, weigh in. “They peremptorily affirm that I was first mistaken myself,” Harvey growls, “and so had drawn the King into my error, and that it could not possibly be.”

  The deer were pregnant. There was no physical evidence whatsoever. It could not possibly be. But it was.

  PART ONE

  PEERING INTO THE BODY

  “It is quite a three pipe problem, and I beg that you won’t speak to me for fifty minutes.”

  —ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, “The Red-Headed League”

  ONE

  ONWARD TO GLORY

  BY THE LATE 1600S, THE ERA WHEN THE SCIENTIFIC WORLD began to take on its modern shape, explorers had circled the globe and mapped the heavens. They had calculated the weight of the Earth, traced the paths of comets that cut the sky only once in a lifetime, and divined the secret of the Milky Way. They had uncovered the mathematics at the heart of music and discovered the laws of perspective, so that an artist armed only with a paintbrush could pin reality to his canvas. But for thousands of years, long after Columbus and Magellan and Galileo, the deepest scientific riddle of all lay unsolved.

  Where do babies come from? Such geniuses and creators of the modern era as Leonardo da Vinci and Isaac Newton did not know. They knew, that is, that men and women have sex and as a result, sometimes, babies, but they did not know how those babies are created. They did not know that women produce eggs, and when they finally discovered sperm cells, they did not know that those wriggly tadpoles had anything to do with babies and pregnancy. (The leading theory was that they were parasites, perhaps related to the newly discovered mini-creatures that swam in drops of pond water. This was Newton’s view.)

  Not until astonishingly recent times—in 1875, in a seaside laboratory in Naples, Italy—was the mystery of where babies come from finally solved.

  Until then everything to do with conception and development was wrapped in darkness. For centuries, scientists struggled to find out if the woman merely provides a fertile field for the man’s seed, or if she produces some kind of seed of her own. They did not know how twins come to be. (Too much semen? Two bouts of sex in quick succession? Sex with two different men?) They did not know if conception is more likely on the night of a full moon or a new moon or if timing makes any difference at all. They did not know, though they assumed, that a baby has only one father, as it has only one mother. They did not know why babies resemble their parents, and sometimes one parent more than the other.

  Where do we come from? How does life begin? These were the most urgent of all scientific questions. The world is festooned with mystery and miracle. But not everyone has wondered why the stars shine or why the Earth spins. Every person who has ever lived has asked where babies come from. For millennia, the deepest of thinkers (and every ordinary person) had pondered this cosmic riddle.

  No one had a clue.

  PART OF THE REASON FOR THE PERPLEXITY WAS STRAIGHTFORWARD. We tend to forget how astonishing the story of life truly is. We’ve heard the explanation so often that we take it to be common sense. Every fourth grader knows where babies come from. Both parents contribute equally, we learn early on, the mother providing an egg and the father sperm. Each month one of a woman’s ovaries releases an egg, which travels through a Fallopian tube toward her uterus. If a couple has sex at the right time, some of the millions of sperm cells in a man’s semen make their way from her vagina and cervix toward that egg. One of those sperm cells may fuse with the egg. In time that newly merged cell divides into two joined cells, and then into four and eight and so on. After nine months, a new human being bursts, howling, into the world.

  The truth is so far-fetched that it is a wonder that anyone believes it.

  In textbook accounts of science, far-seeing researchers systematically gather facts and pile them in sturdy and imposing towers. The story of sex and babies was nothing like that steady advance toward a goal. The scientists who finally solved the case ventured off course for decades at a time. They raced at
top speed down long, dark alleys chasing suspects who turned out to have airtight alibis. They concocted elaborate scenarios that collapsed in fantasy. They wandered in a daze, stymied by observations they could not fit into any pattern. They found some clues by deep and careful investigation and others by tripping over them as they raced in the wrong direction in the dark.

  Progress came in fits and lurches, but that is the way with all true mysteries. Only in old-school television does insight arrive on cue, just in time for the closing credits. The problem was not that the scientists were incompetent—they were human and fallible, but many were dazzlingly intelligent, and nearly all were diligent—but that the truth was so well concealed.

  To crack the case, scientists would need new tools, notably the microscope, and new ideas, notably the insight that the body is made of cells, trillions upon trillions of them, which all arise from a single progenitor. More than tools and ideas, they would need whole new ways of thinking. Suppose, for a moment, that some early savant had somehow leapt to the true conclusion that a living organism begins as a single cell. What then? Immediately scientists would have found their path blocked by a Sphinx posing a bewildering follow-up riddle—how does that single tiny cell “know” how to transform itself into a gurgling, six-pound baby?

  Tackling that question would have required these early scientists to understand that a living organism could assemble itself! Through most of the history of the world, this was unthinkable, as outlandish as the idea that a cathedral could build itself. Today it is a concept hammered into every student who takes high school biology.

  The path to that insight was tangled and difficult. It required, among other things, drawing analogies from machines like player pianos and, later, computers, that carried out complicated actions by following instructions written in code. In the twentieth century, such mechanical devices would lead to the discovery that life itself followed instructions written in a genetic code. But in the 1600s and 1700s no such machines existed; no one could look at the ghostly motions of a player piano’s keys, governed by a musical roll, and shout, “Eureka!”