In Transit With Darwin and DeVries

Those of you who know me well know that I can't stand to waste time! Faced with the prospect of a 12 hour layover in Amsterdam it struck me as the perfect opportunity to perform additional historical research for my forthcoming book on the history of genetics and genomics. Last summer I learned quite a bit about Hugo DeVries, a famous Dutch botanist (1848-1935) who is arguably one of the founders of genetics. Last summer, with the help of my Dutch scientific collaborator Sicco, I was able to visit the former sites of DeVries' home and experimental garden. We also made the acquaintance of Erik Z (note: for reasons of privacy I do not use last names for living persons in my blog), who is the world's leading expert on the life of Hugo DeVries. Erik has just submitted his massive thesis after over 10 years of work, and as he is not defending it until September, it was a perfect time for him to show us the Hugo DeVries archives at the University of Amsterdam's Biology Center. It turned out to be a very fortuitous time for a visit, as the archives are being moved soon, and they will not be as freely and informally available. I thought we would spend a few hours there but when one is given the opportunity to hold and read an original letter by Charles Darwin to DeVries (see my hands holding the letter in the photo!) it is hard to leave. We saw photo albums, DeVries' notebooks, his collected works, the contents of his own library, as well as a large collection of correspondence that DeVries received, as well as some letters that he wrote (the photo shows Erik in the archives holding a "long" letter from DeVries' head gardener who was in China). In particular we were interested in the extensive correspondence between DeVries and Miss Palmer, a high school biology teacher assigned as DeVries' "assistant" when he spent 2 summers teaching at UC Berkeley (we don't know for sure if she was anything more than that!). Reading the 30-plus year history of correspondence between them added a layer of mystery to the scientific details. It was not only a privilege to have the opportunity to peruse the archives, but because of the "downsizing" of the library, we were able to buy some rare historic scientific books for 1 euro each.