In Pursuit of the Gene

106 ¨ REDISCOVERY
planning to publish his own paper on Mendel’s laws and the progeny of hybrids,
and it was a terrible jolt to find that De Vries had already published
on the same topic. What made it even more difficult for Correns was that
this was not the first time that De Vries had beaten him to the punch. In
fact, the previous issue of Comptes Rendus contained an article by De Vries on
a subject of great interest to both men, and De Vries had managed to publish
first in that case as well. But this time was different, and the normally
mild-mannered Correns later recalled the fury he felt when he discovered
that De Vries’s article did not contain a single reference to Mendel’s paper,
although it was absolutely clear that De Vries had read it. 2 This time,
Correns was convinced, the attention-hungry De Vries had gone too far.
Hoping to destroy the cheater once and for all, Correns set immediately to
work. He received De Vries’s reprint on Saturday morning, April 21, and
mailed off his own finished article on the evening of the 22.
Even the title, “G. Mendel’s Laws concerning the Behavior of Progeny
of Varietal Hybrids,” was meant to call attention to Mendel’s priority and
highlight De Vries’s deception. “The same thing happened to me which
now seems to be happening to de Vries,” Correns wrote in the first paragraph.
3 “I thought that I had found something new. But then I convinced
myself that the Abbot Gregor Mendel in Brünn, had, during the sixties, not
only obtained the same result through extensive experiments with peas,
which lasted many years, as did de Vries and I, but had also given exactly
the same explanation, as far as that was possible in 1866.”
Not content to set the record straight, Correns was determined to expose
the magnitude of De Vries’s duplicity, and he believed he had irrefutable
proof of it. It was either the height of arrogance or stupidity, but De
Vries had had the audacity to use Mendel’s exact terminology for the alternative
forms of a trait. When it came to describing the phenomenon of
dominance in his own paper, Correns could not resist taking a dig: “This
one may be called the dominating, the other one the recessive, anlage.
Mendel named them in this way, and by a strange coincidence, de Vries
now does likewise.”
In a calmer state, Correns might have thought twice before committing
himself in print to the implication that De Vries was a plagiarist. Even