Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - III

Vavilov’s disappearance from the Plant Institute led to confusion. That month the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition awarded Vavilov a gold medal for services to Soviet agriculture. His colleagues couldn’t understand why the authorities would simultaneously arrest him. They wrote letters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the government, and the NKVD, vouching for his character and declaring that he was no spy. But a warning came that anyone who put his or her signature to the letter would be arrested for supporting a suspected “enemy of the people."

They hoped that Vavilov’s younger brother, Sergei, director of the Optical Institute, would be able to intervene but nothing came of it. Vavilov was dismissed from his position as director of the Plant Institute. Police arrived to search his office, then his apartment. A bogus story was circulated that had he visited Ukraine with a plan to cross the border and flee to the West, taking his scientific knowledge and findings with him. Trofim Lysenko's supporters were promoted to senior positions in the Institute and Vavilov's supporters were dismissed. 

All the while, Operation Barbarossa, the German plan for the invasion of Russia, had been in full swing. Nobody had any inkling that, within three months, Leningrad — formerly known as St. Petersburg —  would become the setting for the longest siege in recorded history. Hitler told his military chief of staff that Leningrad was not merely to be attacked, but was to be leveled, to become “uninhabitable.” By razing the city, the German army would eliminate a center of Bolshevism and nationalism. Also, according to Hitler, the German army would be spared “the necessity of having to feed the population through the Winter." The siege of Leningrad lasted for almost nine hundred days. 

The tactic to besiege a city is to soften up the people living there and to stop food and supplies entering the city. Starvation and hunger began in earnest as soon as the siege ring closed. It's estimated that upwards of one million people died, four times the number that died in the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. In 1942, every third person living in the city perished. Most died from starvation. 

Vavilov had instilled in his followers a keen sense of responsibility; many of the specimens in the seed bank, he taught them, were as irreplaceable as precious artworks. They could not easily be re-collected or, in some cases, replaced at all, as the landscapes from which they had been harvested had already been destroyed by human activity. His staff understood that preserving the collection was now their primary goal. 

Although  the siege of Leningrad is very well documented, it was not known for a while because there was a state-wide cover-up to minimize the amount of casualties and the suffering that had happened in the city. But by the 1960s and 1970s the details started coming to light from people who had kept diaries. These showed what it was like throughout September, October, November of the first few months of the siege. The cupboards started to empty, as the people started to face the terrible decision of maybe butchering their pets or doing whatever it is that they needed to do in order to get some calories into their bodies to prepare for the winter. 

These diaries were by ordinary people but the botanists who worked at the Plant Institute did not keep the same kind of records. Much of the information about them comes from the things that they wrote in the years afterwards, which were much more plain, perhaps because they were government employees. But what comes through is that, throughout this ordeal, these scientists overcame hunger and injury and risked their lives to protect the world's first seed bank. They were literally starving during the siege and yet they refused to eat the very seeds they were safeguarding throughout it. 

It was a brutal winter in 1941 and more calories were needed in trying to stay alive in such cold temperatures. But the botanists made a collective decision that they're not going to touch any of the seeds. There were more than a quarter of a million seeds and plants inside the Institute in little tins. Many of them were edible. There were nuts and things that they just could have taken off the shelf and eaten on the spot which would have prolonged their lives. Instead, they gathered up the seeds and put them in two of the rooms, stacked them up, and then bolted the door shut so that no one could get in and touch them.

Some of them died while at their desks while continuing their work. One scientist was found slumped at his desk and when one of his colleagues tried to rouse him by shaking his shoulder, a packet of almonds spilled out of his hands. He had died while sorting through these almonds and cataloging them while resisting the urge to eat them and stay alive. What is it that drove the scientists to such extreme levels of self-sacrifice that resulted in the loss of life of 19 of the botanists who worked there?

They knew that some of these seeds were irreplaceable, priceless. The habitats where some of these seeds had been collected had been lost and there was no way to get them back. So eating them would have been a betrayal of that work and of their colleagues. There was a sense that this was their life's work. After the war, a journalist asked why they chose not to eat the seeds or give them to the starving people. One of the botanists said (as quoted in The Forbidden Garden):

Imagine this scenario: Here you are, a writer, who has authored a book. You’ve put your all into it — your whole life. And suddenly, let’s say, there is a severe frost, and you find yourself in a room without firewood to keep warm, only your manuscript.… Now can you begin to understand the psychology of the situation? You are freezing to death: Will you destroy this, the only copy of your book? Would you die to preserve this work? Yes, or no? Will you give in to temptation? 

What are you asking me, you and all the others? You’re surprised? You’re perplexed? Yes, it was difficult to walk at that time. It was unbearably difficult to get up every morning, move your hands and feet.… But to refrain from eating the collection? That wasn’t difficult. No, not at all. Because it was impossible to eat your life’s work, the life’s work of your friends and colleagues. Do I really need to prove such an elementary, simple thing to you?

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - II

One of Vavilov's former pupils, a peasant horticulturalist named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, followed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory that organisms could acquire traits in their lifetimes from their environments. These qualities would then be passed down to the next generation. There was no need for genetic engineering or seed banks, which, Lysenko argued, represented a waste of time and resources: one simply had to train plants to meet one’s goals, a theory he named vernalization.

Lysenko's outlier theory resonated with the country's leader, Joseph Stalin. He liked the idea that plants, like workers, could be transformed by an act of political will. Stalin also liked that, unlike Vavilov, Lysenko came from peasant stock, and that his theories did not rely on academic laboratory work. Lysenko promised Stalin that he could meet the demand for improved crop varieties within three years, seven fewer than Vavilov estimated his work required to produce results.

Stalin's policies had induced famine and he needed quick solutions. So when, at a 1935 conference, Lysenko delivered a speech in which he vilified the scientific elite and promised quick-fix solutions to the problems of Soviet food production and distribution, his message was welcomed. Vavilov followed Lysenko's work closely but suspected that he had manipulated the results of his experiments to support his ideas. But since he was supported by Stalin, Lysenko sailed past Vavilov, who was his former teacher, through the ranks of the Soviet hierarchy.

Vavilov had begun to experience powerful opposition in the late twenties itself because of Stalin's attacks on the intellectual elite. Lysenko’s arrival on the scene increased the attacks. The seed bank was increasingly viewed as a wasteful drain on the state without tangible benefit. Vavilov’s expeditions began to be viewed as little more than expensive luxury tourist trips that cost millions. 

It was Vavilov, however, whose reputation prevailed internationally. His expeditions were covered by Western journalists, and, on his travels, he befriended dignitaries and world leaders. In Stalinist Russia, to be acclaimed by so many international writers and intellectuals could soon become a problem. Vavilov suspected that his close ties to Western science had brought him under the surveillance of the Soviet security services.

Science in Stalinist Russia seemed deeply politicized. He faced criticism for hiring staff to work at the seed bank regardless of their social background and Party affiliation. In October 1937, Pravda published an editorial that claimed “[Vavilov’s] expeditions have absorbed huge amounts of people’s money. We must declare that practical value of the collection did not justify the expenses.” Stalin began to imprison intellectuals on charges of being "enemies of the state,” banishing them to labor camps to be “reeducated” in accordance with Communist principles.

Vavilov wondered for how long he could lead the Plant Institute in such an oppressive climate. He continued his work with great determination, maintaining that discipline, not politics, should inform research and scientific collaboration. At a March 1939 staff meeting he said: “We shall go to the pyre. We shall burn. But we shall not retreat from our convictions.” 

Nevertheless, the past twelve months had been trying. International fame and status had pushed Vavilov unwillingly into the shadow world of Stalin-era politics. Stress had started affecting his health. The doorman noticed how he became short of breath whenever he climbed the building’s staircase. He had become increasingly prone to fits of rage, which burned out quickly, leaving him feeling awkward and embarrassed because it was not like him. The jealousy of his peers had affected his health and led him on several occasions to attempt to resign from his position as director of the seed bank.

On August 6 1940, he was out collecting samples on a mountainside near Ukraine with some colleagues.  A black car pulled up with three shady looking characters who tell him that he was needed on urgent business in Moscow. He got into the car and left with them. But it' was a ruse because these were members of the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, and they arrest him. He was never seen again in public. 

Some months later, to everybody's surprise, Hitler broke off the nonaggression pact that he had signed with Stalin and invaded Russia. Before this,  for the first part of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied. Stalin had received a lot of warnings from his various spies that Hitler will break the pact but for whatever reason, he had chosen not to believe them. 

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - I

The Bureau of Applied Botany and Plant Breeding, a botanical institute dedicated to the study of  plant life, was founded in the city of Petrograd in 1894. (The city is successively named Petrograd, Leningrad and St. Petersburg.) In March, 1921, a thirty-three-year-old man named Nikolai Vavilov, a bright young star in Russian science, was appointed as director of the penniless institute.  His dream was to turn the institute into the world’s first seed bank, a facility to store and preserve seeds for future use in agriculture, research, and conservation. 

Vavilov's inquisitiveness about the natural world drew him to biology. In 1906 he joined the Timiryazev Academy of Agriculture in Moscow. He developed a longing to see his theoretical work produce material benefits. He learned that Russian farmers reaped the poorest harvests anywhere in Europe. He knew that around half the harvest depended on the quantity of fertilizer used to feed the crop, and a quarter on the method of cultivation. The final quarter, however, depended on the quality of the seed grain. If he could improve the varieties of grain — higher yielding, better adapted, and more resistant — it might be possible for Russian farmers to improve their yields.

IN 1913 Vavilov went to England and met top geneticists there. Bateson, who had coined the term genetics just eight years earlier, had a profound influence on Vavilov's thinking. He was particularly impressed by the idea that potentially valuable wild varieties of wheat, rye, barley, and other crops had been overlooked by farmers in bygone centuries. Bateson believed these previously plants might carry invaluable genetic qualities that could be bred into today's crops.

When Vavilov arrived at Petrograd (then called Leningrad), he found out that the small collection of seeds at the Plant Institute had all but been destroyed. Looters had got into the building and eaten some of the seeds. He acquired a three-story nineteenth-century tsarist palace grand enough to house the world’s first seed bank. He collected a staff of keen, dedicated individuals committed to his vision. He took no interest in a person’s background, whether they came from peasant stock or a more well-heeled background. 

At that time, Russia was gripped by nationwide famine. WWI had led to a civil conflict that had crippled the country’s food production. Inflation, profiteering, the collapse of food supplies, and the breakdown of authority had led to a political coup that had brought to power the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. Drought and crop failures worsened these human-made problems and hundreds of thousands of ordinary people were now starving to death.

Everywhere conflict, natural disaster, and the destruction of habitat threatened to make certain types of plants extinct. Once destroyed, these specimens and their unique characteristics would be irretrievably lost; no amount of genetic tinkering could bring them back. The extinction of unexamined plant varieties could mean the loss of world-changing medicines, or varieties that could enable communities and nations to protect themselves against famine.

Vavilov mounted a series of expeditions to collect and catalog ancient, domesticated varieties of wheat, barley, peas, lentils, and other crops. He also sought their wild relatives, which, he reasoned, might prove useful in his experiments to breed unique varieties. He went to Iran, US, Mongolia, the Mediterranean, Italy, the Middle East, western China, Japan and many other countries in search of seeds and sent samples back to the Plant Institute to be sorted, cataloged, and stored. 

Vavilov's aim was to cross-breed different varieties of possibly overlooked crops to make supercrops, as we would term them today. So he would breed types of wheat, for example, that are disease-resistant or have a very high yield or able to withstand different climates. In twenty years, the Institute had become renowned throughout the world. The idea of a seed bank was novel, and the long-term value of a repository of genetic plant material had yet to be fully understood at the time. 

He got many prestigious awards. In Britain he was an elected member of the Royal Society of London, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and an honorary member of the Linnean Society of London and the Royal Horticultural Society, and of the Royal Society of Biology. In the United States he became a member of the American Geographical Society, and an honorary member of the Botanical Society of America. He was awarded honorable associations and honorary doctorates in Germany, India, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria. 

By 1934, Vavilov had established more than four hundred research institutes and numerous stations around the Soviet Union. His journal, the Bulletin of Applied Botany, Genetics and Plant Breeding, had become a leading international publication in its field. Under his direction, the Soviet Union had become the world leader in plant breeding showing how countries might protect their populations from famine and starvation. 

But storm clouds were gathering. 

Hiroo Onoda - II

By the time Onoda returned to Japan, he became something of a legend in Japan. People wanted to see a  man who was still living in 1944! Or at least only a few days out of it. A man who for the past thirty years must have been carrying around in his head the forgotten wartime propaganda of those times. Japanese publishers were keen for the rights to Onoda’s story. He astonished most of them byturning down some of the more handsome offers and choosing a publisher whom he admired because of its youth magazines, which he had enjoyed in prewar times. 

Onoda kept neither diary nor journal, but his memory seems to have been remarkable. Within three months of his return, he had dictated two thousand pages of recollections ranging from the most important events to the tiniest details of jungle life. In July, 1974, articles began running in serial form in a weekly. His memoir, entitled No Surrender: My Thirty - Year War was published in Japanese and English translation. He himself made sketches for all of the diagrams and drawings in this book, as well as for many others appearing in a Japanese children’s edition.

He writes in his memoir that in a normal military school in Japan, recruits were taught not to think but to lead troops into battle, resolved to die if necessary. The sole aim was to attack enemy troops and slaughter as many as possible before being slaughtered. Soldiers were supposed to give their lives for the cause, not grovel in enemy prison camps. However, he was recruited for secret operations and the training he got was different: the aim was to stay alive and continue to fight as guerrillas as long as possible, even if this entailed conduct normally considered disgraceful. He says: 

I came to the conclusion then that I would probably go off to the Philippines and carry on my guerrilla warfare in the mountains until I died there all alone, lamented by no one. Although I knew that my struggle would bring me neither fame nor honor, I did not care.

In 1959, 15 years after he went to Philippines, a search party left behind newspapers and magazines. Onoda and his surviving friend thought that the newspapers were doctored up by the American secret service to eliminate any news they did not want them to see. For them, the newspapers seemed to confirm that the war was still going on. Why? Because they told a lot about life in Japan. Their thinking was that if Japan had really lost the war, there should not be any life in Japan. Everybody should be dead.

When they arrived in the Philippines in 1944, the phrase ichioku gyokusai (“one hundred million souls dying for honor”) was on everybody’s lips in Japan. This phrase meant literally that the population of Japan would die to a man before surrendering. They took this at face value. They sincerely believed that if one Japanese were left alive, Japan could not have surrendered. The wartime newspapers all played this idea up in the strongest possible language. He writes: 

I was virtually brought up on this kind of talk. Reading the 1959 newspapers in this same frame of mind, the first thought I had was, “Japan is safe, after all. Safe and still fighting!” The newspapers offered any amount of proof. Wasn’t the whole country wildly celebrating the crown prince’s marriage? ... There was nothing here about one hundred million people dying. Japan was obviously thriving and prosperous. Who said we had lost the war? 

They had been stuck in 1945. Only after Onoda returned to Japan and looked out the window of his hotel at the streets of Tokyo did he realize that he had been living in an imaginary world. On his return he was cheered by a crowd of up to 8,000 people – a moment that was played out live on NHK, the country's national broadcaster. At that time, more progressive views of the war, which included atonement for crimes, were becoming more widely held. His re-emergence offered a useful propaganda tool for the country's powerful conservatives about old Japanese virtues of bravery, loyalty, pride and commitment that had been widespread during wartime.

He returned to a hero’s welcome in Japan, but found himself unable to adjust to modern life there. He received back pay from the Japanese government for his twenty-nine years on Lubang, but it amounted to very little. He moved to Brazil for a calm life of raising cattle on a ranch. In May of 1996, Hiroo Onoda returned to Lubang, and donated $10,000 to the school there. He then married a Japanese woman, and the two of them moved back to Japan from Brazil to run a nature camp for young people. On 16 January 2014, Onoda died of heart failure at the age of 91.

Onoda wasn't the only soldier who found it difficult to believe that the war had ended. Many Japanese groups continued fighting long after the country's surrender. Twenty-one soldiers were rounded up on the island of Anatahan in 1951. Teruo Nakamura, a Taiwanese-Japanese soldier, endured 29 years in the jungle after the end of World War Two, on Morotai, in present-day Indonesia. The key difference, says Seriu, is that many other Japanese holdouts "found ways to live in the formerly occupied country," and even started families in some cases. Onoda, on the other hand, "refused to live in collaboration with the inhabitants [of Lubang]."

Hiroo Onoda - I

On December 17, 1944, the Japanese army sent a twenty-three year old soldier named Hiroo Onoda to the Philippines to join the Sugi Brigade. He was stationed in the Philippines, and his orders were to carry out guerrilla warfare. At that time, the Asian leg of WWII was raging and his mission was to destroy Lubang island's (approximately seventy-five miles southwest of Manila) airstrip and the pier at its harbor ahead of the Allied invasion. 

Before leaving, his division commander told him that under no circumstances was he to give up his life voluntarily; however long the war lasts, so long as he has one soldier, he has to continue to lead him even if he has to live on coconuts. It turned out that Onoda was exceptionally good at following orders, and it would be 29 years before he finally laid down his arms and surrendered.

A couple of months after Onoda came to Lubang, the Allied forces defeated the Japanese. As they moved inland, Onoda and the three other guerrilla soldiers in his group retreated into the dense jungle. They survived by rationing their rice supply, eating coconuts and green bananas from the jungle, and occasionally killing one of the locals’ cows for meat which would sometimes bring them into conflict with the locals. It was upon killing one of these cows that one of the soldiers found a note left behind by a local resident, and it said, “The war ended on August 15. Come down from the mountains!”

The guerrilla soldiers decided that it was an Allied propaganda trick to coax them out of hiding. They got several such messages over the years - fliers were dropped from planes, newspapers were left, and they got letters from relatives with photos. Each attempt was viewed by the soldiers as a clever hoax constructed by the Allies. They braved jungle heat, incessant rain, rats, insects, and the occasional armed search party for years. Any villagers they sighted were seen as spies, and attacked by the four men, and over the years a number of people were wounded or killed by them. 

In a few years, one of the soldiers left and one was killed. The two remaining soldiers operated under the conviction that the Japanese army would eventually retake the island from the Allies, and that their guerrilla tactics would prove invaluable in that effort. On October of 1972, one of the remaining soldiers was killed by a Filipino police patrol. Onoda escaped back into the jungle, and was now alone in his delusional mission. 

He had been declared legally dead about thirteen years earlier but after this skirmish, it was concluded that he was still alive. More search parties were sent in to find him, however he successfully evaded them each time. But in February of 1974, after Onoda had been alone in the jungle for a year and a half, a Japanese college student named Norio Suzuki managed to track him down.

Onoda and Suzuki became good friends. Suzuki tried to convince him that the war had ended long ago, but Onoda explained that he would not surrender unless his commander ordered him to do so. Suzuki convinced Onoda to meet him again about two weeks later in a prearranged location. Suzuki returned to the island with Onoda’s one-time superior officer, Major Taniguchi. Onoda came in his uniform, wearing his sword and carrying his rifle, 500 rounds of ammunition, and several hand grenades. Major Taniguchi, who had long since retired from the military and become a bookseller, read aloud the orders:

Command from Headquarters, Fourteenth Area Army. Orders from the Special Squadron, Chief of Staff’s Headquarters, Bekabak, September 19, 1900 hours.

“1. In accordance with the Imperial Command, the Fourteenth Area Army has ceased all combat activity.

“2. In accordance with Military Headquarters Command No. A–2003, the Special Squadron in the Chief of Staff’s Headquarters is relieved of all military duties.

“3. Units and individuals under the command of the Special Squadron are to cease military activities and operations immediately and place themselves under the command of the nearest superior officer. When no officer can be found, they are to communicate with the American or Philippine forces and follow their directives.

“Special Squadron, Chief of Staff’s Headquarters, Fourteenth Area Army, Major Yoshimi Taniguchi.”

Onoda waited for some time feeling sure Major Taniguchi would come up to him and whisper, “That was so much talk. I will tell you your real orders later.” After all, Suzuki was present, and the major could not talk to him confidentially. He waited for some time but when the major remained silent, he realized the impossible: This was no trick - Japan had really lost the war! After a moment of quiet anger, Onoda pulled back the bolt on his rifle and unloaded the bullets, and then took off his pack and laid the rifle across it. When the reality of it sunk in, he wept openly.

By the time he formally surrendered to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos in 1974, Onoda had spent twenty nine of his fifty two years hiding in the jungle, fighting a war that had long been over for the rest of the world. He and his guerrilla soldiers had killed some thirty people unnecessarily, and wounded about a hundred others. But they had done so under the belief that they were at war, and consequently President Marcos granted him a full pardon for the crimes he had committed while in hiding.

Kokura's luck

In Fluke: Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, Brian Klaas says that we give simplified, rational explanations for the world. We like to imagine that we can understand, predict, and control the world. We tend to ignore or minimize the importance of arbitrary, tiny changes that can have a huge impact on our lives. Some of these events we will never realize were consequential. Yet, when we try to explain the world, we ignore a truth: but for a few small changes, our lives and our societies could be very different. 

He gives an example. On October 30, 1926, Mr. and Mrs. H. L. Stimson checked into Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Japan. During their six-day stay, they soaked the beautiful sights in Kyoto - its historic temples, lovely gardens, the mudstone hill, the Japanese maples and ginkgo trees in full bloom... But that tourist visit turned out to be the most consequential sightseeing trip in human history.

Fast forward nineteen years. The Nazis surrendered on May 7, 1945. The focus now shifted to the Pacific where the Asian leg of the war showed no sign of ending. But in the hills of New Mexico, the scientists and soldiers saw a potential savior: the atomic bomb, a new weapon of unimaginable destruction. No successful test had yet been carried out to demonstrate the weapon’s full potential, but everyone involved knew they were getting close. 

On May 10, a group of 13 physicists and generals gathered at a top-secret location code-named Site Y three days after the Nazis had surrendered. This group would decide which cities should be chosen to introduce the bomb to the world. They thought that targeting Tokyo wasn’t a good idea, as heavy bombing had already devastated the new capital. After weighing up the alternatives, they decided that the first bomb would be dropped on Kyoto.

Why Kyoto? It was home to new wartime factories, including one that could churn out four hundred aircraft engines per month. Furthermore, leveling a former capital would deal a crushing blow to Japan’s morale. Kyoto was an intellectual hub with an educated population, home to the prestigious Kyoto University. Those who survived would, the committee supposed, recognize that this weapon represented a new era in human history and that the war had already been lost. 

The committee also agreed on three backup targets: Hiroshima, Yokohama, and Kokura. The target list was sent to President Truman. On July 16, 1945, a successful test explosion of the atom bomb was carried out in rural New Mexico. Military strategists consulted detailed maps of Kyoto and decided on ground zero for the explosion: the city’s railway yards. But, on August 6, 1945, the bomb code-named Little Boy fell from the sky not on Kyoto, but on Hiroshima killing 140,000 people, most of them civilians. 

Three days later, on August 9, another atom bomb code named Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, adding roughly 80,000 casualties to the horrifying death toll. But why was Kyoto spared? And why was Nagasaki — a city that hadn’t even been considered a top-tier bombing target — destroyed? Astonishingly, whether over 200,000 people lived or died depended on the nostalgia of a tourist couple and a cloud.

The intended blast in Kyoto site was only half a mile away from the Miyako Hotel, where Mr. and Mrs. H.L. Stimson had stayed two decades earlier. By 1945, Mr. H. (Henry) L. Stimson had become America’s secretary of war, the top civilian overseeing wartime operations. When the Target Committee picked Kyoto for destruction, Stimson put his foot down. He insisted that there was “one city that they must not bomb without my permission and that was Kyoto.” Yet, despite his insistence, Kyoto kept reappearing on the targeting list. 

The Generals kept saying that Kyoto was a nerve center of the Japanese war machine and needed to be bombed. Stimson went straight to the top. He met with President Truman twice in late July 1945, each time outlining his vehement opposition to destroying Kyoto. Truman finally relented and Kyoto was taken out of consideration. The final targeting list contained four cities: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and a late addition, Nagasaki. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima instead of the original target of Kyoto. 

The second bomb was to be dropped on the city of Kokura on August 9. But as the B-29 bomber approached the city, an unexpected cloud cover made it dicult to see the ground below. The pilot circled, hoping the clouds would clear. When they didn’t, the crew decided to attack a secondary target rather than risking a botched drop. As they approached Nagasaki, that city was also obscured by cloud cover. With fuel running low, they made one last pass, the clouds parted at the last possible minute and the bomb was released. 

Nagasaki’s civilians were doubly unlucky: the city was a last-minute addition to the backup targeting list, and it was leveled because of a tiny window of poor weather over another city. If the bomber had taken off a few minutes earlier or a few minutes later, countless residents of Kokura might have been incinerated instead. To this day, the Japanese refer to “Kokura’s luck” whenever someone unknowingly escapes from disaster.

Biological luck - IV

The problem is that, even with all this knowledge about how the brain is formed, it is still not possible to make a precise prediction about behaviour. Perhaps such a prediction is possible at the statistical level of groups, but not when it comes to individuals. It is easy to predict what will happen to a person when a particular bone is broken. But in the case of behaviour, this level of precision is not possible. You can’t say for certain that a person who was abused repeatedly as a child will become an abusive adult.

When someone has extensive damage in the frontal cortex, you can say with certainty that their social behaviour will be inappropriate. But if you take someone who has had a very difficult childhood with abusive parents, malnutrition, etc. you can predict that the outcome won’t be good, but not much beyond that. Why is it that you can predict the effects of a fractured leg exactly but effects of various social factors on behaviour is difficult to predict?  Both cases are dependent on biological factors that are quite well understood. The difference is that they are qualitatively different biology.

When a bone shatters, the steps leading to inflammation and pain that will affect the person’s effort to walk immediately, is easy to know. That straight line of biology won’t be altered by variation in his genome, his prenatal hormone exposure, the culture he was raised in, or when he ate lunch. But all of those variables can influence social behaviours in our life i.e. the biology of the behaviours is always dependent on a number of factors that don’t affect something like a broken bone.

Let us suppose there is someone suffering from depression. Could you have predicted today’s behaviour by knowing about her biology? Suppose you know what version of the serotonin transporter gene she has. That probably gives you a predictive power of about 10 percent. Suppose you also know that she suffered from a traumatic event in childhood. Maybe your predictive power becomes 25 percent. Suppose you know in addition that she is living alone in poverty? Maybe now you have 40 percent predictive power. 

Suppose you also know the average level of stress hormones in her bloodstream today, if she’s living in an individualist or a collectivist culture, if she is menstruating (which typically exacerbates symptoms in seriously depressed women, making it more likely that they’ll be socially withdrawn). Maybe the predictability is now above 50 percent. If you add more factors, many of which have not yet been discovered, eventually your biological knowledge will give you the same predictive power as in the fractured-bone scenario. Science still knows about only a handful of those internal forces. 

Suppose you’re born to a poor, single mother. You are overwhelmingly likely to be born into poverty and stay there.  The stress hormones in your mother’s blood-stream will seep into your blood-stream through the placenta when you are in the womb thus affecting the development of your brain. The stress that your mother faces means that there  a good chance of her leaving you neglected, abused, and living in a crime-ridden neighbourhood. All this stress will further impact the development of the brain, specifically the frontal cortex. 

This early-life adversity thus makes it more likely that you’ll be spending the rest of your life in environments that present you with fewer opportunities than most. The type of brain you are saddled with make you less able to benefit from those rare opportunities — you may not understand them, may not recognize them as opportunities, may not have the tools to make use of them or to keep you from impulsively blowing the opportunity. Fewer of those benefits make for a more stressful adult life, which will change your brain into one that is unluckily bad at resilience, emotional control, reflection, cognition . . .

This continuous stream of interconnected factors ensures that luck does not average out over time. More luck later in life in most cases does not undo the effects of bad luck in early in life. Instead our world virtually guarantees that bad and good luck are each amplified further. A report in the NYT says that a large-scale research study found that social mobility hadn’t changed much over time. To a large extent, your overall life chances can be predicted not just from your parents’ status but also from that of your great-great-great-grandparents. 

When you look across centuries, at social status broadly measured — not just income and wealth, but also occupation, education and longevity — social mobility is much slower than many thought.  This is true whether you consider capitalism, democratization, mass public education, the decline of nepotism, redistributive taxation, the emancipation of women, or even, as in China, socialist revolution. The just world hypothesis is a lie. I can’t help agreeing with Elizabeth Bennet in Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, "The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it ..."

All the nurses that I have had will have led difficult lives. Some will have a drunkard as a father or husband, some will be single mothers with their children in some hostel, some would have been ill-treated by a previous employer... It will be apparent that I have had far more lucky life. But, in spite of knowing all this, if somebody shouted at me now for what I think are trivial reasons, I often let my irritation get the better of me. A few minutes later, I will feel disappointed with myself and will tell myself that I should have exercised better self-control. 

I will think that if I had the person’s genes and life experience and an identical brain, I would have behaved in the same way as he or she did. In that situation, I could imagine a nurse going to an IIM and me being a nurse. It is a fallacy to think that our behaviour is independent of our personal histories. This present that I have now would not have been possible without the past that I had. Your personal history is not in the past but in the present "YOU". Our minds are the end products of all the biological moments that came before. But it is mighty hard to act according to this knowledge as I keep finding out. In a speech to Princeton graduates in 2012, Michael Lewis says:

In a general sort of way you have been appointed the leader of the group. Your appointment may not be entirely arbitrary. But you must sense its arbitrary aspect: you are the lucky few. Lucky in your parents, lucky in your country, lucky that a place like Princeton exists that can take in lucky people, introduce them to other lucky people, and increase their chances of becoming even luckier. Lucky that you live in the richest society the world has ever seen, in a time when no one actually expects you to sacrifice your interests to anything.