The Double Gonad, die Umwelt des Keimplasmas, and the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics

Cheryl Logan
Departments of Psychology and Biology, University of North Carolina

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     Last modified: June 15, 2005
     Presentation date: 07/14/2005 4:00 PM in MACK 238
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Abstract
By 1910, the growth of the science of endocrinology offered the promise of a new way to address the question of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The stage had been set by the renowned Viennese physiologist Sigmund Exner. In 1904, Exner stated that unlike many features of organisms, sexual characteristics were not predetermined by the germ cells; rather, they were the flexible effects of inner secretions. Austrian Zoologist Hans Przibram made this theme central to the program that would guide research at the Institute for Experimental Biology in Vienna (the Vivarium). In 1911, in the first of a series of studies published under the title “Die Umwelt des Keimplasmas,” Przibram stated that the question of the inheritance of acquired characteristics had reached a new stage in its scientific development. Its importance turned on whether a cellular mechanism could be found by which environmentally induced changes in the soma could alter the soma in ways that in turn altered the germ plasm in a hypothetical process termed somatic induction. This goal, he said, required understanding of the physiology of the immediate local environment of the germ plasm, the inner world of the gonad. Przibram was at the time hiring endocrinologist Eugen Steinach to direct the Vivarium's Physiology Department. Following the anatomist Julius Tandler and others, Steinach vigorously pursued the idea that the gonad was a double gland: One part (the germ gland) was specialized for reproduction through gamete production, and the other (the puberty gland) contain specialized "interstitial cells" that produced the inner secretions that governed physical and psychic manifestations of sexuality. By 1920, evidence in favor of a double gland became the basis for the hypothesis that the inner secretions of the “puberty gland” could alter the germ cells in ways that fit the criteria for the somatic induction of hereditary changes. The double gland, however, also implied the physiological separation of reproduction and sexuality. I explore the debates about the interstitial cells that surrounded this hypothesis. I relate it to the Vivarium's commitment to an epigenetic approach that stressed experimental analysis of development and to social issues that surrounded the sciences of sexuality.

Multiple Paper Session:
Other papers in this session:
The multiple agendas of a physiologist. Sigmund Exner's reading of John Stuart Mill
Resources of Useful Plants and Patterns of Their Worldwide Distribution. Franz Unger's Bromatorische Linie (1857) between Humboldt's Plant Geography and the Vavilovian Gene Centres