LEVIT, SOLOMON GRIGOREVICH

(b. Vilkomir [modern Ukmerge], Lithuania, 6 July 1894; d. time and place unknown, probably in the Lubianka prison, Moscow, on or about 17 May 1938)

medical genetics.

Levit was the youngest of four sons born into a poor Baltic Jewish family. His invalid father worked as a night watchman. The only member of his family to receive an education, Levit worked his way through public school and subsequently the Vilkomir gymnasium by coaching and tutoring. He remained at home supporting his parents until the Germans attacked Lithuania in 1915, then moved to Petrograd to study law, and finally to Moscow after less than a year to study medicine.

Levit entered the Moscow University medical school in 1916. With the outbreak of civil war in 1918, he was drafted into the Red Army as a medic, but after falling ill with typhus he was demobilized and returned to his medical studies, Upon earning his degree in January 1921, he worked in the university clinic (1921–1928) and in D. D. Pletnev’s department of clinical therapy, first as an intern and then as a research assistant, and served on the university’s administrative board (1922–1925). In 1925 Levit was posted to Germany and worked under P. Rona (1921–1928) in his laboratory of physical and colloidal chemistry. In 1928 he was appointed docent. In his studies of clinical medicine, Levit devoted most of his attention to blood diseases and published a monograph in 1929 on hemorrhagic diathesis.

Levit joined the Communist Party in 1919 or 1920. In October 1924, together with a group of young research assistants, he set up the Circle of Materialist Physicians at the Moscow medical school and became its permanent chairman. In November 1926 the group was renamed the Society of Materialist Physicians and subsequently came under the auspices of the Communist Academy’s natural and exact sciences section, of which Levit was scientific secretary from 1 February 1926 until 16 April 1930.

In the mid 1920’s Levit was a strident advocate of Lamarckism and strongly supported it in his administrative work. In 1924 he called for a synthesis of Darwinism and Lamarckism, claiming that only two factors—the influence of the external environment and the inheritance of acquired characteristics— were capable of explaining the origin of new variations. In 1926 he suggested that opposition to Lamarckism was motivated by bourgeois political sympathies. His support for Lamarckism apparently stemmed form his conviction that if the human constitution was determined by an unchanging genotype impervious to environmental influence, the physician would be rendered therapeutically important.

By late 1927 Levit had reversed himself. One of the main reasons appears to have been H. J. Muller’s findings on X-ray mutagenesis, published in Science in July 1927. For Levit and other Marxists, what was most unappealing about the classic gene was its apparently abstract, immutable, immortal character; for them, Muller’s discovery demonstrated that the gene was material might be subject to human contorl. Levit devoted himself to the study of genetics under A. S. Serbrovskii’s direction, joining in work on mutations in the scute region of the X chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster and contributing to the “step-allelism” theory of gene structure. In the discussions at the Communist Academy in April 1929, Levit spoke with the enthusiasm of a recent convert, calling for an end to Lamarckian dominance over that academy’s biological research.

In late 1928 Levit left the Moscow University clinic and joined the staff of the Medico-Biological Institute (MBI) of the Commissariat of Public Health (Nakomzdrav), which had been formed in 1924 under the direction of V. F. Zelenin, a specialist in internal medicine. On 21 December, together with N. N. Malkova, Levit and Serebrovskii established at the MBI a kabinet (office) of human heredity and constitution directed by Levit. In a brief note in its first volume of research papers, published in 1929, Levit declared that the kabinet would study human chromosomes, human population genetics, and human pathological forms by using case histories, geneologies, and twin studies. The volume’s lead article, however, was a piece by Serebrovskii that made pathological for a socialist eugenics and advocated the application to human beings of the techniques of mass artificial insemination used in cattle and sheep breeding. Understandably, this article provoked criticism and ridicule in Marxist circles and among the wider public.

At the time of the first Five-Year Plan (1929–1932), there were widespread institutional reorganizations, ideological attacks on “bourgeois” experts, and their replacement by Communists. In March 1930 Levit replaced Zelenin as director of the Medico-Biological Institute. His kabinet of human heredity and constitution was expanded into the institute’s new Genetics Division, and it published a second volume (1930) that reflected the new ideological tenor of the times. Comprising fourteen research papers, the volume opened with an editorial by Levit that drew a sharp distinction between eugenics and anthropogenetics (the science of human heredity), and concluded with a long letter by Serebrovskii apologizing for some of the statements in his 1929 article.

In May 1930 the agency of the Commissariat of Education in charge of science, Glavnauka, nominated Levit for a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study in the United States. He left for New York on 19 December 1930, arrived a month later, and spent 1931 working in the laboratory of H. J. Muller in the zoology department of the University of Texas at Austin. Also working there was I. I. Agol, another party member who had won a Rockefeller grant through Glavnauka to study with Muller. Meanwhile, in connection with the imposition of a new party line in the Soviet Union, Levit, Agol, and Serebrovskii were under increasing ideological attack as “Menshevizing idealists.”

In January 1932, while Levit was en route home from Texas, he was replaced as director of the MBI by the acting director, B. B. Kogan, who suspended genetics research at the institute and turned it to purely clinical pursuits. Upon Levit’s arrival in Moscow on 22 February, he was informed that he had lost his job. For the next six months he found work in the department of pathological physiology of the Second Moscow Medical Institute. We do not know what went on behind the scenes during those months. Levit published an article that year strongly critical of racism, fascism, and social Darwinism, which may have brought him back into official favor. V. P. Eforimson reports that when Levit recruited him to work on human genetics at the MBI in mid 1932, Levit said that the party central committee had instructed him to create an institute of human genetics.

In any event, on 15 August 1932 the MBI was reopened and Levit was once again its director. The institute’s new mission was to study problems of human biology, pathology, and psychology from a genetic viewpoint, and it included new divisions of cytology, internal secretions, and neurology, and offices of roentgenology, anthropometrics, and psychology. Levit organized a genetics course for physicians, first offered at the MBI during the academic year 1933–1934, which included lectures on Mendelism, Morganism, sex determination, mutations, population and evolutionary genetics, twin studies, human genetics, and medical cytology, and four lectures on “bourgeois eugenics and its class character.” By 1934 the institute had been given the name of Maxim Gorky, and seemed productive and secure.

Although Levit’s research program had emerged intact from the ideological disruptions of the early 1930’s, the rise of nazism in Germany created problems in Stalinist Russia for an enterprise historically tied to eugenics. An institute conference held on 15 March 1934 seemed to settle on the right language and approach. A series of programmatic papers by Levit and others called for the establishment and expansion of a new discipline in the Soviet Union, to be called “medical genetics,” as a way of improving human health and combating fascist pseudoscience. The final resolution of the conference called for the creation of academic and clinical departments, teaching materials, and courses to retrain physicians.

In March 1935 the institute was renamed the Maxim Gorky Scientific Research Institute of Medical Genetics (MGI). In July its impressive fourth volume of research was sent to press, presenting the work of some thirty staff members or affiliates of the institute during 1934 and early 1935. The 543– page tome opened with an important review article by Levit that analyzed the genetic component of a host of diseases and critiqued international findings on the genetics of human traits and illnesses. The twenty-five original research papers included studies of hereditary factors in asthma, allergies, pernicious anemia, diabetes, stomach ulcers, and breast cancer. In addition, a remarkable series of papers on pairs of identical twins analyzed their electrocardiograms (107 pairs), height and weight (129 pairs), and fingerprints (234 pairs). One paper, reporting attempts to train identical twins to perceive differently, was co-authored by the head of the institute’s new psychology division, A. R. Luria, now considered by many to have been one of this century’s greatest psychologists. When it was published in 1936, the volume was arguably the best single collection of original research on human heredity that had appeared anywhere.

Much of this work was developed in close consultation with H. J. Muller, who had come to Leningrad in late 1933 at Nikolai Vavilov’s invitation to head a laboratory at the new Institute of Genetics of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. In 1934 Muller was a featured speaker at the conference convened by Levit’s institute to inaugurate “medical genetics.” Later that year both the academy and Vavilov’s institute were moved to Moscow. The shortage of suitable space in the city forced the Levit institute to move to more cramped quarters, but Muller’s presence in the capital opened new possibilities for collaboration.

Muller had come to the Soviet Union in the hopes of creating a socialist eugenic society along the lines described by Serebrovskii in 1929. In Out of the Night, published in Britain and the United States in 1935. Muller proposed a large-scale program of human artificial insemination, using the sperm of eugenically selected male donors. In the spring of 1936, perhaps on Levit’s suggestion, he sent a copy of the book to Stalin, together with a long letter proposing that the Soviet Union adopt such a plan. Muller also played a central role in organizing the Seventh International Congress of Genetics, scheduled for Moscow in 1937. Against the opposition of important political authorities, he hoped to give human genetics a central role at the congress, confronting the German delegation over nazi race biology and highlighting the excellent Soviet work of the Levit institute. With this in mind, Muller saw to it that Levit was on the organizing committee of the congress, nominated him as its general secretary, and gave Levit his proxy when he was out of Moscow.

Muller’s behavior may inadvertently have helped make Levit and his institute vulnerable. In late 1936, as a new wave of purges was gaining momentum, party members who had been accused of “Menshevizing idealism” and had spent time abroad were especially at risk. On 13 November 1936 the party official in charge of science in Moscow, Ernst Kol’man, staged a public meeting to denounce Levit as an abettor of nazi doctrines. At the session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences held 19–27 December 1936, Muller raised the issue of human heredity despite explicit political instructions that he was not to do so. This indiscretion led Lysenko’s supporters to attack genetics as a fascist pseudoscience, and one ominously remarked that Levit had already been “unmasked.” At the time of the purges, such language had dangerous implications. Informed by Vavilov that he might be arrested, Muller hastily left the Soviet Union in March 1937. That month Stalin delivered a speech calling for “the liquidation of Trotskyites and other double-dealers,” and shortly thereafter Lysenko’s closest aide published a commentary declaring Levit to be such a person.

On 5 July 1937 Levit was removed as director of the MGI. That fall his internal passport was sus-pended, and he remained in Moscow awaiting his arrest. It finally came during the night of 11 January 1938, when agents of the secret police (NKVD) seized him at his apartment and took him to the Lubianka prison. Subsequent communications from Levit to his family indicated that he was accused of being an American spy. That spring all communication ceased. In May and June a Narkomzdrav commission investigated his institute, concluding that it should continue to exist, but it was instead demoted to the status of a laboratory of medical genetics and finally liquidated in autumn 1939. As a result of these events, much of the research done by the institute from 1935 through 1937 was never published, the world’s premier center of medical genetics was abolished, and the Soviet Union permanently lost its leadership in the field.

As is the case with many purge victims of the late 1930’s, the date and place of Levit’s death are difficult to establish with precision. An official NKVD notice to his family dated 17 May 1938 indicated that Levit had been denied the right of correspondence. More than five years later, during World War II, his family was officially notified that he had died on 21 December 1943 of a “brain hemorrhage” (the usual cause of death given for those who had been shot in the head, a standard form of NKVD execution). For a number of reasons, however, this later date is unlikely, and it is probable that Levit was executed on or about 17 May 1938 at the Lubianka prison in Moscow.

During Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign of the mid 1950’s, Levit’s family and several of his former colleagues petitioned to have his name cleared, and he was officially rehabilitated on 13 September 1956. Since the mid 1960’s, when Soviet genetics was reborn. Levit has gradually come to be recognized in the Soviet Union as a founder of medical genetics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. For Levit’s work in the 1920’s, see “Evoliutsionnye teorii v biologii i marksizm” (Marxizm and theories of biological evolution), in Vestnik sovremennoi meditsiny, 1925, no. 9; Problema konstitutsii v meditsine i dialekticheskii materializm (Dialectical materialism and the problem of constitution in medicine), Trudy kruzhka Vrachei-materialistov I-ogo MGU za 1925–1926 gg., no. 2 (Moscow, 1927); Gemorragicheskie diatezi (Hemorrhagic diathesis; Moscow, 1929); and “O poniatii bolezni” (On the concept of disease), in Estestvoznanie i marksizm, 1929, no. 1, 93–105. For his research on Drosophila under Serebrovskii’s direction, see “Stupenchatyi allelomorfizm u Drosophila melanogaster, V. Mutatsiia scute⁹ i vopros ob allelomorfakh-analizatorakh” (Step-allelomorphism in Drosophila melanogaster, 5. The scute⁹ mutation and the question of allelomorph analyzers), Zhurnal eksperimental’noi biologii, ser. A, 6, no. 4 (1930), 287–299.

Levit’s principal publications on human genetics appeared in four volumes, which he edited or coedited, issued by his institute. In Trudy Kabineta nasledstvennosti i konstitutsii cheloveka pri Mediko-biologischeskom institute (Works of the Office of Human Heredity and Constitution of the Medico-Biological Institute), I (Moscow, 1929), co-edited by A. S. Serebrovskii, see especially “Genetika i patologiia (v sviazi s sovremennym krizisom meditsiny)” (Genetics and pathology in relation to the current crisis in medicine), 20–39; and “Materialy k voprosu o stesplenii genov u cheloveka” (Material on gene linkage in humans), 40–50. In Trudy Geneticheskogo otdeleniia (b. kabineta nasledstvennosti i konstitutsii cheloveka) pri Mediko-biologischeskom institute (Works of the Genetic division [Formerly the Office of Human Heredity and Constitution] of the Medico-Biological Institute), II, co-edited by A. S. Serebrovskii, issued as Mediko-biologicheskii zhurnal, no. 4–5 (Moscow, 1930), see especially “Chelovek kak geneticheskii ob’ekt i izuchenie bliznetsov kak metod antropogenetiki” (The human as a genetic object and the study of twins as a method of anthropogenetics), 273–287.

In Trudy Mediko-biologicheskogo nauchno-issledovatel’skogo Instituta imeni M. Gor’kogo (“Works of the Maxim Gorky Medico-Biological Research Institute”), III (Moscow and Leningrad, 1934), see “Nekotorye itogi i perspektivy bliznetsovykh issledovanii” (Some results and prospects of twin studies), 5–17; “Genetika sakharnogo diabeta” (The genetics of diabetes mellitus), 132–147, written with L. N. Pesikova; and “Kriticheskie zamechaniia po povodu raboty Goldena ‘O khromosomnykh aberratsiiakh u cheloveka’” (Critical comments on Haldane’s “On Cytological Abnormalities in Man”), 235–238. Finally, in Trudy Mediko-geneticheskogo nauchno-issledovatel’skogo instituta imeni M. Gor’kogo (Works of the Maxim Gorky Scientific Research Institute of Medical Genetics), IV (Moscow and Leningrad, 1936), see “Predislovie” (Preface), 5–16; “Problema dominantnosti u cheloveka” (The problem of dominance in humans), 17–40; and “Obuslovlen li diabetes insipidus ‘khoroshim’ dominantnym genom?” (Is diabetes insipidus caused by a “good” dominant gene?), 149–158, written with L. N. Pesikova.

Levit published other articles in the 1930’s, notably “Darvinizm, rasovyi shovinizm, sotsial-fashizm” (Darwinism, racial chauvinism, and social fascism), in P. I. Valeskaln and B. P. Tokin, eds., Uchenie Darvina i marksizm-leninizm (Darwinism and Marxism-Leninism; Moscow, 1932), 107–125; “Antropogenetika i meditsina” (“Antropogenetics and Medicine”), in Konferentsiia po meditsinskoi genetike: Doklady i preniia (Conference on Medical Genetics: papers and proceedings), issued as a supplement to Sovetskaia klinika, 20, no. 7–8 (1934), 3–16; “Tsitologiia i meditsina” (Cytology and medicine), in Uspekhio sovremennoi biologii, 3 no. 1 (1934), 50–57; and “Sovremennoi sostoianie problemy dominantnosti” (The current status of the problem of dominance), ibid., 3, no. 2 (1934), 208–228.

II. Secondary Literature. In English, see Mark B. Adams, “Eugenics in Russia, 1900–1940,” in Mark B. Adams, ed., The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (New York, 1990), 153–216; A. E. Gaissinovitch, “The origins of Soviet Genetics and the Struggle with Lamarckism, 1922–1929,” Mark B. Adams, trans., in Journal of the History of Biology, 13, no. 1 (1980), 15–18, 49–51; and occasional references to Levit in Elof Axel Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society (Ithaca, N. Y., 1981); David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917-1932 (New York, 1961) and The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass., 1979); and Zhores A. Medvedev. The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, I. Michael Lerner, trans. (New York, 1969).

In Russian, see V. P. Efroimson, “K istorii izucheniia genetiki cheloveka v SSSR” (On the history of the study of human genetics in the USSR), in Genetika, 1967, no. 10, 114–127; A. E. Gaissinovich, Zarozhedenie i razvitie genetiki (The birth and development of genetics; Moscow, 1988), 239–322; and E. K. Ginter, “Nachal’nye etapy razvitiia sovetskoi meditsinskoi genetiki” (Early stages of the development of medical genetics), in Meditsinskii referativnyi zhurnal, sec. XXI, 1985, no. 10, 1–7.

Mark B. Adams