Genetics Behind Barbed Wire: Masuo Kodani, Émigré Geneticists, and Wartime Genetics Research at Manzanar Relocation Center

Abstract

This article explores the sociopolitical backdrop of genetics research during the politically turbulent decades of the mid-20th century that saw the persecution, displacement, and relocation of unpopular minorities in both the United States and Europe. It explores how geneticists in the United States accommodated these disruptions through formal and informal émigré networks and how the subsequent war affected their research programs and their lives. It does so by focusing on the career and life of geneticist Masuo Kodani, who, as a Japanese American, found himself conducting unexpected cytogenetics research in Manzanar, a “relocation center,” or internment camp, located in the California desert, after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war, Kodani's subsequent career continued to be shaped by his experiences as a Japanese American and by the specific skills as a cytogeneticist that he demonstrated at a critical period in the history of 20th-century genetics. His many relocations in search of employment culminated in his work with the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission on human chromosomes, for which he is best known.

Just today, my best graduate student, Kodani, whom you met here, was removed to what is euphemistically called a Reception Center—in fact a concentration camp.

Letter to L. C. Dunn from Richard Goldschmidt, April 30, 1942

IN the history of genetics, Masuo Kodani (1913–1983) is best known for his work with the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in Japan (ABCC) (Figure 1), and for his discovery of a supernumerary chromosome in the testes of Japanese men, usually with epididymitis (Kodani 1957a), and in sterile men who had been exposed to atomic bomb radiation but showed no signs of illness (Kodani 1958; Kevles 1985; Lindee 1994). Kodani's observations received notable attention in scientific news circles (see “Find Extra Chromosome,” Science News Letter, June 21, 1958) and fueled debate about the karyotype of humans because of its timing. Consensus was only then being reached that the chromosome number was 46 (it had previously been thought to be 48); Kodani's report that three different chromosome numbers—48, 47, and 46—existed as variations in humans led to the growing interest not only in determining the numbers, but also in gauging what counted as normal chromosomal variation in the human karyotype (Kodani 1957a,b,c; Stern 1959). Kodani and his work thus became a small part of the complex history of determining the ordinary number of chromosomes in humans at a crucial stage in the history of human genetics (Kottler 1970; Tjio and Nichols 1985; Unger and Blystone 1996; Martin 2004; Lindee 2005).

Figure 1.—

Masuo Kodani, Hiroshima, Japan, October 1948. Photograph by George T. Sakoda, Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. Reproduced with permission of the Archives, Houston Academy of Medicine–The Texas Medical Center Library.

Kodani is also known for a famous image: he was the “other half” of a photograph that appeared in Life magazine on March 17, 1947, alongside drosophilist Curt Stern, once described as the “last survivor” of the “fly room” period of genetics (Neel 1987). Both were at the University of Rochester at the time, with Kodani, a newly minted Ph.D., serving as Stern's assistant on a research fellowship there. Their work culminated with a Science article reporting an “invisible” chromosome of Drosophila, a chromosome fragment induced by X rays that represented an independent chromosome but that was too small to be seen in metaphase plates of ordinary mitosis (Kodani and Stern 1946). Photographed by Herbert Gehr, one of Life magazine's most celebrated photographers, both were featured against a wall of well-ordered Drosophila milk bottles, looking like an enantiomeric couplet peering into their microscopes (Figure 2). The photograph was so compelling in its composition, so evocative of “modern science,” and so effective in expressing the promise of post-war genetics research, that it became part of the iconic imagery representing 20th-century American science. In this article, I focus on the figure of Kodani and his wartime experience immediately preceding this photograph. I explore his unusual wartime research, but also how he was supported and enabled by a group of émigré geneticists in America who had been part of the influx of intellectuals in the tumultuous decades of the 1930s and 1940s. After the war ended, Kodani's scientific career continued to be shaped by his wartime experience and by the sociopolitical reordering that took place immediately afterward. His experiences stemmed in part from his Japanese American background but also from the specific cytogenetic skills that he demonstrated that were required at the time.

Figure 2.—

Masuo Kodani and Curt Stern, Life Magazine, March 17, 1947. Photograph by Herbert Gehr, Time-Life Photographer. Original caption reads: “Operating on larvae of Drosophila, Drs. Masuo Kodani (left) and Curt Stern observe their work (below) through microscopes. With his right hand Dr. Stern pushes a tiny glass tube into larva. With his left he operates a long-tubed syringe which ingests embryonic eye tissue. Bottles in background contain 25,000 flies.”

ÉMIGRÉ GENETICISTS IN AMERICA

An ironic aspect of the iconic American photograph is that both of the individuals were from immigrant backgrounds; that was not, of course, unusual in the post-war scientific community in the United States. The interwar period had seen a massive influx of intellectuals, mostly from European countries fleeing Nazi persecution (Fleming and Bailyn 1969; Coser 1984; Ash and Sollner 1996). During the Second World War, many European émigrés in the physics community contributed directly to wartime research like the Manhattan project (Weiner 1969). The intellectual migration pattern was similar in the biological sciences, too, with geneticists such as Ernst Caspari, J. Werner Braun (not to be confused with the rocket scientist Werner von Braun), Hugo Iltis, Richard Goldschmidt, Victor Jollos, and Curt Stern being some of the best-known examples (Strauss and Roder 1983; Harwood 1993; Dietrich 1996). Sensitive to relocation and displacement issues that accompanied the political upheavals, these scientists were an integral part of both informal and formal assistance networks, organizations, and special committees that aided refugee relocation and assisted émigré scientists' transition to new careers and new lives in the turbulent decades of the 1930s and 1940s. The photograph of Kodani and Stern was, therefore, not only iconic of post-war genetics research, but also fairly reflective of the make-up of the post-war genetics community in the United States.

The photograph's historical significance lies in the contrasting wartime experiences of the two geneticists, stemming in part from their different national affiliations and individual circumstances. Both were associated with nations at war with the United States: Stern was from Germany while Kodani's family was from Japan. Stern not only survived the war years, but also found himself flourishing, eventually giving up his position at the University of Rochester to replace Richard Goldschmidt in the Department of Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1947, just after the war. During the war, he had been actively resisting pressures to reorient to wartime scientific research, going so far as to campaign both privately and publically for preserving some measure of independence for genetics research. At the peak of the war, for example, Stern solicited opinion from geneticists in zoology departments who had been actively engaged in the war effort for their opinions on non-war-related research. Stern later published an article in Science, based on findings that supported the maintenance of peacetime operations in genetics research (Stern 1944a). In a more popular venue, the Scientific Monthly, he also laid out his philosophy of basic research in an inspirational and rather romanticized article about the value of engaging in science in and of itself. Like the “leitmotif of the artist,” he wrote, “one underlying theme of science is complete self-sufficiency, the exhaustive living in the moment, the self-forgetting abandonment to a determination, the source of which is whol[ly] contained in the subject matter itself” (Stern 1944b, p. 96). He called for “a wider and deeper realization of the value of science as an expression of a detached essence of human existence” (Stern 1944b, p. 99). Even though it made no direct reference to the war effort, the article's appearance at the time reveals much about Stern's philosophy of scientific research, which preserved a measure of autonomy from politics, applications, or ends. In this approach, he was not unlike other scientists of his German class and educational background who romanticized the quest theme in science and urged some measure of scientific autonomy from the politics of the day. As Cathryn Carson (2010) has recently noted in her study of 20th-century German scientific culture, physicists like Werner Heisenberg seemed almost programmed to hold to such lofty ideals, despite the fact that those very same values might place them in ambiguous roles in the political culture of their day.

For Stern, expressing such ideals revealed not only that he had the time and peace of mind for such activities, but also that he was secure as an American, having attained citizenship status in 1939. That Stern could be so outspoken in the context of wartime conditions reflected his own status both as citizen and scientist in the United States. He was a well-regarded geneticist and held a full-time faculty position in the Department of Zoology at the University of Rochester all through the war years. He had also married a U. S. citizen, making his status even more secure. He was even “Americanized” in terms of his adopting the distinctive style of experimental genetics, having trained in the Drosophila laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan early in his career (Harwood 1993; Dietrich 1996). But as a good pragmatist, as Jonathan Harwood (1993) has noted, and as a German Jewish émigré with liberal leanings and a social conscience, Stern was acutely aware of the plight of fellow scientists, some of whose very lives were threatened by the war. Stern was active in efforts to assist them, and that was how Masuo Kodani became acquainted with Stern.

THE “JAPANESE QUESTION”: JAPANESE AMERICAN SCIENTISTS AND INTERNMENT DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

Unlike Stern, Kodani had a very different experience of the war. Japanese Americans in the early 1940s did not fit into the same kind of supportive infrastructure that had been assembled for European and especially for German refugees in the preceding decade. That infrastructure had begun to be laid as early as 1933 with the formal dismissal of Jewish civil servants in Germany and the formation of groups such as the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars and the Columbia Faculty Fellowship Fund, which were created to help to resettle them along with other European refugees or exiles (Duggan and Drury 1948; Bentwich 1953; Weiner 1969; see also Kuznick 1987 for more on these and other political or activist organizations led by scientists at this time). By the early 1940s as the effects of the war were seen, such organizations increased in number, widened their scope, and increased their activities to assist a variety of political refugees and exiles.

As residents and citizens of the United States, Japanese Americans did not require the same kinds of assistance, which usually involved providing funds, logistical support, or employment opportunities to assist the relocation of Europeans to the United States; they were already in the United States and could therefore not be considered refugees or exiles, although they were increasingly facing a hostile climate and persecution in the early 1940s after the attack on Pearl Harbor, especially on the West Coast where ∼80% of Japanese Americans resided at the time. Nor did the organizations have an effective means of dealing with the state-sponsored solution to the growing hostility that led to the internment of >100,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans at special centers or “war relocation” camps. These relocation centers, constructed of hastily built dwellings resembling military style barracks with barbed wire fences, began to dot the American landscape in the West, housing the thousands of “evacuees” forcibly interned after February 19, 1942, when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 (Irons 1993; Daniels 1999, 2004; Burton et al. 2000).

Kodani was from Pasadena, California, and born in Los Angeles and was therefore a native-born U.S. citizen, but his wife Fumi was from Japan. Both had been students at the University of California, Berkeley (Masuo had graduated with a B.A. in Zoology in 1938). Fumi dropped out of classes and married Masuo in 1942, but Masuo remained a very promising doctoral student in the Department of Zoology. He was engaged in a project to study the structure of salivary gland chromosomes in Drosophila melanogaster in the laboratory of Richard Goldschmidt. He was a careful and meticulous cytogeneticist. His notebooks preserved in the papers of Curt Stern, in the Library of the American Philosophical Society, reveal a talent for precise record keeping and a close attention to detail.

Berkeley itself was a vibrant milieu for geneticists in the early 1940s. The administrative and scientific vision of Ernest Brown Babcock, who led the first Department of Genetics in the United States, was paying off, while other departments on the campus such as Zoology were actively recruiting geneticists with his support and urging. By 1934, Berkeley was ranked as one of six institutions deemed to be distinguished in terms of its doctorates in genetics (Smocovitis 2009); that distinction only increased after German émigré geneticists such as Goldschmidt and Werner Braun arrived to add more diverse perspectives. They frequently interacted with geneticists visiting the California Institute of Technology, who included international visitors such as Curt Stern, who was then temporarily in the United States. They were all active participants in the graduate program of genetics, which drew on geneticists located in the many units at Berkeley, but the younger and newer members came together informally in a fortnightly journal club known as Genetics Associated. Begun in the early 1930s, the club was led by Isadore Michael Lerner, then in the Poultry Husbandry Department and another émigré from the Soviet Union, who had entered the United States via Canada. Born in Harbin, Manchuria, Lerner was fluent in Russian and frequently surrounded himself with émigrés and friends such as Theodosius Dobzhansky, another frequent visitor to Berkeley, who was then at the California Institute of Technology working with Thomas Hunt Morgan's group. Genetics Associated began in the early to mid-1930s and included members from the varied units at Berkeley such as Alvin Smith, Donald R. Cameron, Everett Dempster, James Jenkins, as well as newer members such as Joachim Werner Braun. It also included G. Ledyard Stebbins, who arrived on the campus as “junior geneticist” to Ernest Brown Babcock in 1935 on the Crepis genetics research project, also known as “the plant Drosophila,” the attempt to find a plant counterpart to Drosophila (Smocovitis 2006, 2007, and 2009). In his recollections (Stebbins 1987, 2007), he noted that the group was instrumental in creating a sense of community for Berkeley geneticists as well as in fostering an open and creative interdisciplinary approach that employed new techniques to solving long-standing problems of heredity. Braun's addition to the group, for example, brought an awareness of newer methods and insights from microbial genetics, a new area for geneticists at the time.

Berkeley geneticists had thus been heavily influenced by the émigré experience and were closely tied both intellectually and socially to each other. When it became apparent that Goldschmidt's student, Kodani, was about to be interned, the group did what it could to retain him. Goldschmidt, his advisor, a German Jewish refugee, was no stranger to political persecution and upheaval (Richmond 1986). During the First World War, he had been interned, and even in the Second World War, as an immigrant in the United States, Goldschmidt had been declared an enemy alien, forced to obey strict curfews, and prohibited from a number of “verboten activities” (Goldschmidt 1960, p. 308). He began a campaign to prevent his student's relocation as early as February 5, 1942, by writing to Columbia geneticist L. C. Dunn (Letter to L. C. Dunn from Richard Goldschmidt, Feb. 5, 1942, and April 30, 1942. Dunn Papers, Series I, Box 14, Folder Richard B. Goldschmidt, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia) and by trying to find him a position on the East Coast. Dunn, at the time, was a linchpin in a number of sociopolitical organizations, including the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars (Gormley 2006). Goldschmidt's message to Dunn was that the problem of Japanese internment needed urgent attention as events on the West Coast were soon to have dire consequences for Kodani and for other scientists located there. A special subcommittee was formed to address the pending Japanese internment and to discuss the “Japanese question,” but little could be done for Kodani through that agency. A final desperate, but heroic, attempt by fellow graduate students to raise funds on the Berkeley campus took place for him, led by fellow student Lotti Steinitz, one of Babcock's students and herself a German Jewish émigré naturalized only in 1943, but that attempt ultimately failed. On April 30, 1942, Kodani was forcibly relocated with his wife, who was then pregnant with their first daughter, Jun. Because Kodani was from Los Angeles, their assigned destination was Manzanar.

THE “GOOD EARTH”: KODANI AND THE CYTOGENETICS OF GUAYULE AT MANZANAR “RELOCATION CENTER”

The sonorous word “Manzanar” (which meant apple orchard in Spanish) belied its true meaning: it was virtually synonymous with the forcible state-sponsored isolation, estrangement, and alienation of >100,000 Japanese Americans and resident Japanese, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It was one of 10 “war relocation centers,” as they were euphemistically termed, that housed “evacuees” or “orphans of the war”(Manzanar Free Press, September 10, 1943), in the isolated desert environment of Owen's Valley, California. The camp was subsequently made famous by many historical accounts, testimonials, and photographs such as those by the American photographers Ansel Adams, whose photographs captured the vistas of the American West, and Dorothea Lange, whose somber images of the Great Depression are now indelibly etched in the American memory. Their photographs do much to convey the isolation and the dusty, grimy, and oppressive living conditions of the >10,000 residents of Manzanar (Adams 1944; Finlay 2009).

The round-up of Japanese and Japanese Americans was haphazard, tumultuous, and disorganized, leading to the forcible internment of an astonishingly diverse and skilled group of people. Up to 62% of the residents of Manzanar were U.S. citizens, representing some three generations of Japanese Americans. Most were employed in successful businesses, the fishing industry, farming, home services, medical and health professions, law, engineering, and education as well as the arts. A large number of those interned had exceptional technical skills as machinists, technicians, engineers, and scientists of varied backgrounds. The number of agriculturalists, horticulturalists, nursery managers, gardeners, and farmers was especially striking, given the traditional interests in Japanese gardening and cultivation; as many as 45% were in some kind of agricultural or horticultural practice (Adams 1944).

Fellow scientists on the West Coast were distraught at the brutal process that isolated so many of their colleagues without reason. No one was more distressed than Robert A. Emerson, a pacifist, social democrat, and Quaker and a plant physiologist at the nearby California Institute of Technology (he was later made famous by his discovery of the “Emerson enhancement effect” in plant physiology). At Emerson's instigation and urging, the skills of the Japanese nurserymen, horticulturalists, agriculturalists, chemists and others were put to use in trying to solve the problem of the rubber shortage, a vital issue involving national security at the time (Rabinowitch 1961). Along with the support of other scientists at the California Institute of Technology, such as Fritz Went (another plant physiologist) and Robert Millikan (a Nobel-prize-winning physicist and then president of the California Institute of Technology), Emerson was instrumental in launching an initiative in Manzanar to redirect efforts to find a viable alternative to rubber from Hevea braziliensis, sources of which had been cut off during the war. As shown by Mark Finlay (2009), American industrialists, chemists, and agriculturalists eagerly looked for alternatives during the Second World War after traditional sources in Southeast Asian plantations were cut off by the war.

One promising alternative was Parthenium argentatum Gray, the small desert shrub known as guayule, which was known to produce latex. As the shortage of Hevea rubber became imminent, efforts to both harvest wild guayule and to cultivate it to convert the latex to quality rubber intensified in the United States, with the establishment of formal agencies like the Emergency Rubber Project assigned to the task. A large number of initiatives were launched around guayule, especially in California where the shrub seemed to flourish and where migrant labor was readily available. The best known of these was in Salinas—the so-called “salad bowl” of America—and run out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It brought thousands of acres into cultivation. At Emerson's initiative and with the sponsorship of the California Institute of Technology, the project known as “Little Guayule” was placed under the leadership of Morganlander Shimpe Nishimura, a nuclear physicist from Berkeley (Kageyama 2009). Direction for research was additionally provided by Kenji Nozaki, while the nursery propagation and field work was supervised by Walter T. Watanabe (Manzanar Free Press, March 20, 1943). Beginning in 1942, ∼40 individuals interned at Manzanar devoted their energies and skills to the guayule project, which included cultivation, breeding, and developing new methods of extraction and purification. Despite the concerted efforts to undercut what was both a scientific and humanitarian project in the beginning (Finlay 2009), it continued to 1943, when the initial plantings bloomed in a nursery created in Manzanar and when additional support was given through the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, and the University of California at Los Angeles (Manzanar Free Press, March 20, 1943). Portions of the camp were turned to breeding efforts and propagation, while a chemical laboratory was made out of Ironing Room 6. Ironing Room 35 was converted into a breeding laboratory, and the lath house became a small nursery for the plants (Manzanar Free Press, September 20, 1943).

As the need to find high-yielding strains or to breed favorable characteristics into guayule accelerated, the plant itself became the focus of scientific attention. Its geographic variation, its relation to its closest relatives, and its breeding patterns, indeed its basic natural history and biology, drew the attention of researchers. Preliminary findings began to reveal that the plant was a hybridizer that appeared to form polyploids and that occasionally showed apomixis (a form of asexual reproduction common in some plants). Its geographic variation pattern and the interplay of hybridization, polyploidy, and apomixis in fact bore notable parallels to the hawksbeard plant, Crepis, which had been the object of study for Babcock's group at Berkeley since 1915. The same kinds of analyses were called for in guayule (Stebbins and Kodani 1944).

George Ledyard Stebbins, Jr., one of the principal researchers in the Crepis project with Babcock, began a study on the cytogenetics of the plant for his wartime research. Having been designated 4F in the draft ranking (he had three small children) and because Berkeley administrators such as Claude B. Hutchison, Dean of the College of Agriculture, retained as many faculty as they could during the war years, Stebbins did not serve in active duty. His own research at the time was the breeding of better forage grasses for California agriculturalists; he was also rapidly becoming an expert on the occurrence and interplay of polyploidy, apomixes, and hybridization in some plants, knowledge of which could be employed in breeding improved cultivars. His 1938 publication with Babcock on the American species of Crepis broke open the story of plant evolutionary biology by demonstrating how the phenomena of polyploidy, apomixis, and hybridization functioned as integrated genetic systems (Babcock and Stebbins 1938). Late in 1942, Ledyard Stebbins made his first trip to Manzanar; his impressions made for a long and “fascinating letter” to his father, retired in Santa Barbara. Stebbins's observations in the letter were described as being made in a “clear and forceful manner” by Maunsell Van Rensselear, the Director of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, who had been shown the letter by Stebbins senior and who had written him back (Letter to George Stebbins from Maunsell Van Rensselear, December 2, 1942, Library and Archives of the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, Santa Barbara, CA). Regrettably, the letter from Stebbins to his father has been lost, although we may infer from other correspondence that what he had seen had brought out strong emotions in Ledyard Stebbins. However he felt about the politics of Manzanar, he took on his wartime assignment in earnest, and he began to examine samples of guayule from varied geographic locales from which seeds were obtained and subsequently grown in the Manzanar nurseries. Until that time, the only work done on the cytology of the species had been by Russian workers, all of whom thought that the haploid number was n = 36. Stebbins noted some variation in that number from only the first three strains that he examined, indicating that further study was necessary. A similar study was needed for a close relative, mariola, or Parthenium incanum, which appeared to form hybrids with P. argentatum. Since it was thought likely that the hybrid progeny would backcross, the possibility of introducing genes for greater hardiness and vigor existed for P. argentatum.

With Babcock's sponsorship at Berkeley, Stebbins began a collaboration with Kodani, who already had extensive experience and training in cytogenetics with Goldschmidt on the salivary chromosomes of Drosophila and who provided special skills in the Manzanar project. He was in fact formally placed in charge of the breeding and flower biology portion of the guayule research because he was “an experienced geneticist and cytologist”(Manzanar Free Press, March 20, 1943). A portion of the hospital space in Manzanar was converted into a workable cytogenetics laboratory where a large volume of material that had primarily been collected elsewhere but grown in Manzanar was examined by Kodani and others (Manzanar Free Press, March 20, 1943). Somatic counts were taken from sections of root tips using the technique developed early for Crepis research (Babcock et al. 1937), using vigorously growing seedlings in six-inch pots at Berkeley, while other sections of root tips were taken from cuttings made in the guayule nursery in Manzanar. Meiosis was studied using aceto-carmine smear preparations from plants grown in the fields in Manzanar. Studies of meiosis in guayule proved to be challenging because of the large number of chromosomes that crowded together into large masses. A number of meiotic irregularities that had been reported in the early work of the Russians reappeared in the material.

After surveying a large volume of plants, Stebbins and Kodani (1944) published their results in an article in the Journal of Heredity with the broad title “Chromosomal Variation in Guayule and Mariola” (the cover of the article was featured alongside wartime advertisements targeting geneticists to donate books to the war effort). It was the first thorough cytogenetical study of this potentially important crop plant. The results showed a staggering complexity of forms, mating patterns, and phylogenetic history that included a large variance in somatic chromosome numbers (36, 38, 54, 72, 74, and 108–111 for P. argentatum and 2n = 54, 72, and 90 for P. incanum), the study of which led Stebbins and Kodani to conclude that the two species composed a polyploid series on the basic number of x = 9. Plants with 108–111 chromosomes appeared to be progenies of those with 2n = 72 or 74 and were thought to be autotriploids with respect to their parents. Plants with 36 chromosomes included one individual plant from a 72-chromosome strain thought to be a haploid derived by parthenogenesis or pseudogamy. They also found that strains of guayule with 54, 72, and 74 chromosomes were likely of autopolyploid origin but had likely undergone secondary modification through rearrangement of chromosome segments and introgression with mariola. Finally, Stebbins and Kodani concluded that pollen and seed fertility were fairly well correlated with meiotic irregularities.

Although the Journal of Heredity study was the only formal publication to come from the collaboration between Stebbins and Kodani on the cytogenetics of guayule, it became part of a cluster of important scientific articles that grew out of research on the biology of the plant that involved Manzanar [see, for example, Nishimura et al. (1944), for the breakthrough article on the propagation of guayule involving the use of plant hormones]. Certainly, it was a source of pride for Ralph P. Merritt, the Manzanar Project Director who praised the “small group of highly trained evacuees” who “brought to fulfillment, the scientific work on plant breeding and rubber production on guayule,” in a section of the final director's report that he titled “The Good Earth” (Merritt 1945).

In addition to being formally in charge of the cytogenetics and breeding project, Kodani was also employed as a teacher of biology and zoology in the high school in Manzanar after the beginning of 1944. In a letter of recommendation, the chief of community management found him “conscientious” and noted that he was “exacting in class room work and punctual in all his assignments.” He was eventually promoted to night school principal and continued to earn strong recommendations for being an “alert, conscientious, and intelligent young man” (Letter to Curt Stern from Martin P. Gunderson, August 21, 1945, Folder Masuo Kodani, Curt Stern Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia). His employment history combined with his research on the cytogenetics of guayule and his Berkeley work with Richard Goldschmidt figured prominently at the end of the war when he secured a research fellowship funded by the Rockefeller Foundation to serve as assistant at the University of Rochester with Curt Stern on his Drosophila research (Letter to Martin P. Gunderson from Curt Stern, August 28, 1945, Folder Masuo Kodani, Curt Stern Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia). Goldschmidt's recommendation had figured prominently, although Kodani did not formally submit his final doctoral dissertation until June 1946, well after the war and after he had taken up the position with Stern. Kodani's dissertation was composed of a series of detailed studies of the structure of the salivary gland chromosome in Drosophila (Kodani 1946), much of which had already appeared in print (Goldschmidt and Kodani 1942).

The war had obviously derailed Kodani's career and delayed his receiving his degree by several years. His advisor Goldschmidt was relieved, however, that the ordeal appeared over, writing to Stern that he was glad that Stern had given him “the job” and that, despite the fact that he “might have some prisoner's complexes still” (something he knew about and that he thought would pass quickly), he would not “regret it” (Letter to Curt Stern from Richard Goldschmidt, September 5, 1945, Folder 5, Curt Stern Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia).

POST-WAR FALLOUT

Although the war was over, peace eluded Kodani. As soon as November of 1945, just as he appeared to be back on track on a promising career at the University of Rochester, he faced yet another crisis. His wife was declared an illegal immigrant after her release from Manzanar because her student permit gaining her entry to the United States was no longer valid; the Kodanis had not filed for a renewed student permit as Fumi was now responsible for the care of her two children, and the entire family had relocated to New York, making a return to her previous studies at Berkeley difficult. Despite the fact that she was married to a U.S. citizen, and despite the fact that both her daughters (a second daughter. Marie, was born in 1945) had been born in the United States and were U.S. citizens, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) made it difficult for her to remain. Indeed, they demanded that she submit further evidence of why she “should not be required to depart from the United States” (Letter to Curt Stern from A. J. Karnuth, February 14, 1946, Folder Masuo Kodani, Curt Stern Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia). In one chilling document addressed to Congressman James W. Wadsworth of the U.S. House of Representatives by T. B. Shoemaker, acting commissioner (and part of the INS), in reply to an inquiry launched by Curt Stern, the reasons for her undesirability were made clear: her immigrant student permit was no longer valid under Section 4 of the Immigration Act of 1924, and in keeping with that, the commissioner stated:

Mrs. Kodani is therefore, illegally residing in the United States and there is no provision of the law whereby she can adjust her status to remain indefinitely or permanently in this country with her husband and children because she is of a race ineligible to citizenship and therefore inadmissible to permanent residence. It is suggested that she make arrangements to depart from the country at the earliest practicable date (Letter to the Honorable James W. Wadsworth from T. B. Shoemaker, April 1, 1946, Folder Masuo Kodani, Curt Stern Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia).

Race was clearly the 700-pound gorilla in the room, a fact of life that determined not only the Kodani's experience of the war but also their life in post-war America. As his direct supervisor and as chair of the Department of Zoology, Stern left no stone unturned in his attempt to gain immigration status for Fumi so that Masuo would remain. He wrote tirelessly to varied officials and lobbied the President of the University of Rochester, who sought legal advice from the Legal Aid Society (Letter from B. E. Soleu to Alan Valentine, April 8, 1946, Folder Masuo Kodani, Curt Stern Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia). When that failed, he wrote directly to Senator James Mead and formally requested either approval of a renewed permit for Fumi to resume her studies, now at the University of Rochester, or the more desirable passage of an “Act of Congress to authorize naturalization” so that “a very great hardship” would not come to “three American citizens,” namely her husband and two children (Letter to Senator James Mead from Curt Stern, April, 1946, Folder Masuo Kodani, Curt Stern Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia). There are no known historical documents that explain precisely what happened, but Masuo Kodani and his family managed to remain in the United States through 1947, during which time the iconic photograph of Kodani and Stern was taken. Clearly the tranquility and orderliness of that image belied the difficult circumstances that lay behind it.

In 1947, Stern accepted the offer of a position to replace the retiring Richard Goldschmidt at Berkeley. He offered a research assistantship to Kodani, but advised him that it would be better to take a fellowship elsewhere, one that would enable him to engage in more independent research. He recommended him strongly for a National Research Council Fellowship in Cancer Research to be held at the Laboratory of Cytology at the University of Wisconsin run by C. Leonard Huskins, the Canadian plant geneticist; his Berkeley friend Lotti Steinitz was already there. Stern praised him for the “significant work on the chemistry of secretion of the salivary cells in the fruit fly” and noted that he “is in the process of correlating these chemical findings with microscopical studies. While with me he has analyzed a very great number of complicated chromosome rearrangements produced by X-radiation.” He additionally noted that Kodani was a “very hard worker” and that he had “excellent relations with everyone” (Letter to Hayden C. Nicholson from Curt Stern, July 21, 1947, Folder Masuo Kodani, Curt Stern Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia).

Fumi's uncertain status weighed on Masuo heavily, however. He did not know what to do or where he could find a safe haven for his family. He wrote to his friend Lotti that he had “decided to go with Dr. Stern.” Staying in California, he wrote “would be the safest” thing to do because when—not if—a sudden deportation order came, it “would be easier for us to respond to the order” because of proximity to San Francisco (Letter to Lotti Steinitz from Masuo Kodani, March 26, 1947, Folder 38, Lotti Sears Papers, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri/The State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, MO). After reflecting on the situation and also while trying to negotiate a livable salary (he and Fumi had been struggling to raise their family on a meager income), he decided to take up the offer from Wisconsin. Kodani thus moved to the Department of Botany at the University of Wisconsin, under the direction of Huskins in plant genetics research, but then gave that up when the invitation came from James V. Neel that fall to join him at the ABCC (Figure 3). By December 15, 1947, he was on his way to Los Angeles, where he temporarily left his wife and two daughters with other family members, before leaving for Japan on January 2, 1948.

Figure 3.—

Discussion Group, Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, Hiroshima, Japan, 1949. James Van Gaudia Neel, Samuel J. Kimura, Wayne H. Borges, Masuo Kodani (shown leaning forward). Photograph by George T. Sakoda, Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. Reproduced with permission of the Archives, Houston Academy of Medicine–The Texas Medical Center Library.

His research at Wisconsin, although brief, was nonetheless exciting. Chemical secretions from salivary glands, he found, stimulated the growth of onion roots. After obtaining commercially produced ribose nucleic acid and testing it on the onion roots, Kodani reported to Stern, “to my surprise I discovered that it induces a number of astonishing changes in the morphology and mitotic behaviors of the chromosomes in the root tip” (Letter to Curt Stern from Masuo Kodani, Folder Masuo Kodani, December 10, 1947, Curt Stern Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia). That paper, subsequently published in the Journal of Heredity, added to the excitement beginning to surround the biological activity of nucleic acids in the late 1940s (Kodani 1948). Kodani thought that they were biologically active from the start of his research.

Kodani stayed with Neel and the ABCC in Japan through the early 1950s, collecting data on the survivors of the blast (Lindee 1994), and while it was steady employment (at least for him), it nonetheless led to instability at home. In 1952, his wife Fumi, now relocated with her two children in Japan, wrote to Kodani's former mentor Stern and implored him to find a position for Masuo in the United States, fearing that he would leave her permanently for his new female research assistant at the ABCC, Kumiko, whom he had trained (Letter to Curt Stern from Fumi Kodani, December 14, 1953, Folder Fumi Kodani, Curt Stern Papers, Library of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia). In 1953, Kodani asked for an extension to stay in Japan for another year (he was then in Nagasaki and Stern once again provided a letter of support), and in 1954 he moved to the medical school in Tokyo where he stayed temporarily before returning to the United States to take yet another position in the Department of Urology, at the College of Medicine at the State University of Iowa. He subsequently took temporary positions at the Mergenthaler Laboratory for Biology at Johns Hopkins University, the Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine. He divorced his wife Fumi, and with the children reaching the age of consent, cut ties with his family and married his assistant Kumiko.

In 1962, disaster hit again, this time involving his new wife who was denied an immigration permit. He considered moving her to Mexico and seeing her occasionally from his position in Southern California. In September of 1962, returning from a meeting in Corvallis, he and Kumiko learned that the Immigration service had turned down yet another reapplication for her, stating that there was “not enough ground” to recognize a “hardship case.” Kodani despaired, writing to his friend Lotti Sears that: “The commissioner of Immigration at Washington wrote to Senator Williams of New Jersey who asked the Immigration to consider our case.” He continued “Kumiko and I have reconsidered the situation and we have just about made up our mind to stop the fight. Simpler and much less expensive way to face the situation is for her to leave USA. Since it would be extremely difficult for me to continue our work without her help and virtually impossible to find a trained help here, I have decided to leave the country too to where we might be able to work together. We are now trying to go to Canada. Atomic Energy of Canada at Chalk River is one place to consider ” (Letter to Lotti Sears from Masuo Kodani, September 18, 1962, Folder 38, Lotti Sears Papers, Western Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri/The State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia, MO).

But with the encouragement and assistance of his old Berkeley friend Lotti Sears and especially her husband Ernest Sears, who were both at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, Kodani subsequently relocated to the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the School of Medicine at the University of Missouri, Columbia, continuing to publish with Kumiko in cytology. His many career shifts and relocations apparently distanced him from his earlier contacts in cytogenetics research, apart from some brief contacts with his past mentor Stern.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

Masuo Kodani's experiences during the Second World War and in the political reordering or “fallout” after the war might be considered simply those of a specific individual in a given time and place, but they actually tell us a great deal about the kinds of upheavals that many qualified geneticists experienced during the war years. That Kodani was a talented and promising cytogeneticist at a time in the history of genetics when chromosomes were the focus of intense study certainly played an active role in his recruitment to the guayule cytogenetics project in Manzanar, but also subsequently in his fellowships and in his recruitment to the ABCC. That he was able to work in these areas was in part due to the network of émigré geneticists who themselves had experienced political upheaval, relocation, and even societal prejudices of their own. That Kodani was imprisoned, his career derailed, his entire life turned upside down (contributing likely to the dissolution of his family), and that he was subsequently relocated a number of times was due in large measure to his belonging to an unpopular American minority at the time. These experiences—as unique and circumstantial as they appear to be—were in fact too common to geneticists in the decades of the 1930s and 1940s and even well into the Cold War period, which saw a new political order emerge that made liminal subjects of scientists like Kodani. Neither attaining the status of lead researcher in a stable work environment, nor being rendered entirely invisible in the scientific power structure at the time, Kodani occupied a social and intellectual space where his skills could be exploited and his insights make the occasional news, but where he was nonetheless doomed to play the role of temporary assistant or associate in any laboratory setting. The extent to which Kodani permanently suffered a “prisoner's complex,” as denoted by Goldschmidt, is unknown, but is certainly worthy of consideration.

Thus, despite the wishes of scientists like Stern to transcend the grim political circumstances of the day, war, politics, and prejudices prevailed and fundamentally shaped not only individual careers, but also trajectories of scientific research: Kodani moved from Drosophila to Parthenium to Allium to Homo, not because of any clearly defined scientific problematic that he had articulated, but because of the political circumstances that determined his employment. In doing so, however, Kodani's research career, as capricious and contingent as it appears to be, followed a dominant stream in the history of 20th-century genetics that saw the transition from the classical genetics of the “fly room,” to plant genetics in agricultural settings, to the human and medical genetics that dominated the second half of the 20th century. Clearly driven by an unusual combination of wartime pressures and war-related fears and prejudices, projects like the guayule cytogenetics program at Manzanar, which saw qualified researchers heroically aide the war effort behind a barbed wire fence, would almost certainly not have taken the form that they did in peacetime. That they did so speaks to the need to continue our exploration of the history of genetics within the broader historical contexts of war, nationhood, and identity and to recognize it as a science deeply embedded in a sociopolitical milieu.