Dan Graur is the author of the book Molecular and Genome Evolution (2016). Dan Graur has a very low threshold for hooey, hype, hypocrisy, postmodernism, bad statistics, ignorance of population genetics and evolutionary biology, and hatred of any kind. This blog is a diary of peeves, dislikes, antipathies, annoyances, and random feelings of contempt. Rarely, do I have good things to say.
Following a silly letter from Scotland, I found it necessary to state very, very clearly that all the opinions expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent the views of either my academic employer or the current Secretary of the Flat Earth Society.
Theophilus Painter (1889–1969) joined the faculty at the University of Texas in 1916 and except for a military stint during World War I stayed there his whole career. He was, in succession, instructor, associate professor, professor, distinguished professor, acting president (1944–1946), and president (1946–1952) of the University of Texas.
These days, he is remembered for three things (1) erroneously claiming that humans possess 48 chromosomes—an error that plagued human cytogenetics for 33 years, (2) his willingness to curry favor with corrupt politicians in Texas at the expense of academic freedom, and (3) his support of racist practices.
The number of human chromosomes
Probably the first effort to determine the chromosome number of humans was that of Hansemann (1891), who counted 18, 24 and more than 40 chromosomes in three cells. In between 1891 and 1932, many investigators published papers reporting various chromosome number in humans. With two exceptions, the counts were low, ranging from 8 to 24 as the diploid number. However, for a long time the most influential paper in human cytogenetics was that of van Winiwarter* (1912), who reported a chromosome number of 47 in males and 48 in females. He concluded that humans, like locusts, had an XX/X0 male sex-determining mechanism. Nine years later, de Winiwarter* (1921) confirmed his observations, and added a racial component to the findings by claiming that the diploid number of chromosomes in Africans was 24.
In the early 1920, Theophilus Painter decided to settle the question of chromosome number in humans. To do that, he enlisted the help of a physician at Texas State Insane Asylum to provide him with freshly harvested “testes.” Here are some excerpts from the Material and Methods section in his 1923 article:
“The material upon which this study is based was obtained from three inmates of the Texas State Insane Asylum through the interest and cooperation of Dr. T. E. Cook, a physician at that institution. Two of these individuals were negroes and one was a young white man. In all three cases, the cause for the removal of the testes was excessive self abuse… The operation for the removal of the testes was made, in all three cases, under local anesthesia. An hour or two prior to the operation, the patients were given hypodermic injections of morphine in order to quiet them. This was followed by local injections of Novocain in the operating room. None of the patients exhibited any interest or excitement during the operation, nor did they show any signs of pain except when the vas deferens and the accompanying nerves were cut. One of the negroes went to sleep during the operation.”
[There are two noteworthy sentences in this paragraph. The first refers to the main manifestation of the mental illness, which presumably caused these unfortunate souls to be forcefully interred in the insane asylum in the first place and subsequently subjected to the inhumane experiments of Theophilus Painter and his accessories. It was self abuse, i.e., masturbation, which was regarded originally as a Biblical sin (onanism) and then as a mental disease or as a cause of mental disease (e.g., Hagenbach 1879).
The second noteworthy sentence is the last one. It encapsulates a common racist canard used by slave owners since the 17th century, according to which black people are impervious to pain and can therefore be mistreated, beaten, and mutilated (Villarosa 2019). Many scientists, including Harvard’s rabid anti-Darwinian zoologist, Louis Agassiz, provided scientific support for this claim. Painter’s statement concerning “one of the negroes” falling asleep during the operation can be understood in this context.]
In 1923, Painter published his article. His conclusions were simple and straightforward: The spermatogonia of both the white man and the negroes has 48 chromosomes. Two of these chromosomes, X and Y, are unpaired.
And that was it.
For 33 years, from 1923 to 1956, every microscope-peering Tom, Dick and Harry saw the wrong number of chromosomes. For example, in 1947, P. C. Koller from the Royal Cancer Hospital in London noted that while some tumor cells exhibited great variation in chromosome number, many of them, such as cervical carcinoma cells retained “the normal 48 chromosomes.”
In 1934 Painter was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences for “meritorious work in zoology or paleontology.” Named after founder of the American Ornithologist Union, the medal was first awarded in 1917, and has since been awarded at irregular intervals.**
In 1955, Joe Hin Tjio, a Chinese-Indonesian working in the lab of Albert Levan at the University of Lund, perfect some advanced techniques to visualize chromosomes in human somatic cells. By using these techniques he discovered that humans have 46 chromosomes. With Tjio and Levan (1956), the human chromosome number was finally corrected. According to Trask (2002), the field of human cytogenetics was launched in 1956 with the following hesitant statement.
“Before a renewed, careful control has been made of the chromosome number in spermatogonial mitoses of man, we do not wish to generalize our present findings into a statement that the chromosome number of man is 2n = 46, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this would be the most natural explanation of our observations.”
Some postscripts to Painter (1923)
In 1925, Theophilus Painter published a comparative study of chromosome numbers in mammals. There is one feature in Painter (1925) that is quite troubling. Despite the fact that he could not find differences between whites and blacks, he continued to report the identical results separately. It was as if he couldn’t believe that such different creatures have the same number of chromosomes.
Painter continued to publish scientific articles on chromosomes for the rest of his career. In fact, his last contribution was published two years after his death. Interestingly, he never mentioned Tjio and Levan (1956).
In the 1980s, T. C. (Tao-Chiuh) Hsu at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Huston, Texas, reexamined some of the original preparation, on the basis of which Painter based his erroneous chromosome count. According to Painter’s biographer Bentley Glass, Hsu found chromosomes that stuck together or clumped, chromosomes cut into segments by the microtome knife, and other artifacts which made it hard to tell how anyone can get any chromosome count out of these misshapen slides, let alone a clear chromosome count.
The continuing reporting of the incorrect chromosome count in the 1923–1956 period was attributed to “preconception” (Kottler 1974). The number was supposed to be 48, so subsequent investigators did everything possible to make their counts 48. Preconception aside, I am puzzled by the lack of criticisms of the drawings published by Painter. As everyone can see, it is impossible to tell how many chromosomes are in the drawing. I would agree that preconception was an important impediment to the delayed discovery of the correct human chromosome number, but I think that the reluctance to criticize so-called scientific authorities might have been equally important in thwarting scientific progress.
Academic freedom
In 1939, the board of regents of the University of Texas named Homer P. Rainey, a former President of Franklin College and Bucknell University as the 12th President of University of Texas, at the time not only the largest university in Texas, but the entire southern half of the United States. The makeup of the board of regents, however, soon changed due to appointments over the next several years by two extremely reactionary governors (even by Texas standards at the time), W. Lee O'Daniel and Coke R. Stevenson. The Board started to clash with Rainey in 1941, when several members of the Board pressured Rainey to fire four full professors of economics who espoused New Deal views. In 1942 the regents fired three untenured economics instructors and a fourth who had only a one-year appointment for having attempted to defend federal labor laws at an antiunion meeting in Dallas. Rainey protested their dismissals, and also protested the fact that tenure was weakened and funding for social science was cut completely. His communications to the Board of Regents were answered most rudely. For instance, Regent D. F. Strickland wrote Rainey that the president of the University of Texas had “no business suggesting anything to the regents” and that “if the abolition of tenure would make it more difficult to recruit out-of-state professors, Texas would be better off.” The most spectacular single issue dividing Rainey from the regents was the board’s repression of John Dos Passos’s USA and its efforts to fire the professor who placed the third volume of the trilogy on the English department’s sophomore reading list. The regents deemed the work subversive and perverted. Since the selection had been a committee decision, however, no one was fired, but Rainey was outraged at what he believed to be a witch-hunt. All this, along with the fact that he tried to move the Medical Branch from Galveston to Austin a couple years earlier, cause the board to fire him on November 1, 1944, without citing any reason.
After the firing, 8,000 students went on strike and protested in the campus and at the state capitol. Less than three months after Rainey’s firing, the governor appointed new board members. While the new members increased funding for social science and rehired the aforementioned fired professors, they did not re-hire Rainey. Several organizations, including the American Association of University Professors, the Southern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, and Phi Beta Kappa, reprimanded the university for firing Rainey. The censorship by the American Association of University Professors lasted nine years, until the organization was convinced that the regents changed their policies.
Enter Theophilus Painter. Following the dismissal of the university president who had defended academic freedom, the Regents of the University looked for a caretaker who could be expected to refrain from political action (or any other action) and at the same time would be of high academic reputation. A committee of three members of the faculty met with the Regents in order to make suggestions for a resolution of the difficulties, and Painter was one of the three.
Painter recalled that he was asleep, when he was asked to return to the meeting with the Board of Regents. He was asked to become the acting president of the university and like a damsel in distress he “reluctantly” agreed, despite the fact that “his research program was at a critical stage.” Later, Painter agreed to serve as president with the stipulation that the term would last only until a satisfactory president could be found. It took 8 years for the university to find a satisfactory president.
During these years, Theophilus Painter obediently and somewhat offhandedly carried the oppressive, racist, misogynist, and discriminatory policies of the Texas Governors and their appointees at University of Texas Board of Regents. The question of academic freedom seems not to have been raised again during his reign, but of course these were the heydays of McCarthyism and academic freedom was not a priority. Of particular interest is Painter’s undermining all attempts by black students to enter the University of Texas. As a consequence, he will forever be known as the small-minded racist bureaucrat in Sweatt v. Painter.
Sweat v. Painter
Painter was president of the University of Texas when Texas resident Heman Marion Sweatt applied for and was denied admission to the Law School due to his race. Subsequently, Painter was the named defendant in the civil rights case Sweatt v. Painter, 339 U.S.629 (1950), which proved an integral stepping stone in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas 347 U.S. 483 (1954), that held that “separate is inherently unequal” and led to the integration of America’s public schools.
The “separate but equal” doctrine of racial segregation was established in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896), in which a majority of seven justices upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation laws for public facilities as long as the segregated facilities were equal in quality. A single justice dissented, while another decided not to take part in the case. The decision legitimized the many state laws reestablishing racial segregation that had been passed in the American South after the end of the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877).
The underlying case originated in 1892 when Homer Plessy, an “octoroon” (person of seven-eighths white and one-eighth black ancestry) resident of New Orleans, deliberately violated Louisiana’s Separate Car Act of 1890, which required “equal, but separate” train car accommodations for white and non-white passengers.
In May 1896, the Supreme Court issued a 7–1 decision against Plessy ruling that the Louisiana law did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, stating that although the Fourteenth Amendment established the legal equality of white and black Americans, it did not and could not require the elimination of all social or other “distinctions based upon color”. The Court rejected Plessy’s lawyers’ arguments that the Louisiana law inherently implied that black people were inferior
“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction on it.”
So, there you have it. Enforced racial segregations has nothing to do with discrimination. If blacks are considered inferior it is because blacks decided that they are inferior. Plessy v. Ferguson is widely regarded as one of the worst decisions in U.S. Supreme Court history. Despite its infamy, the decision itself has never been explicitly overruled.
Sweatt v. Painter involved a black man, Heman Marion Sweatt, who was refused admission to the School of Law of the University of Texas, whose president was Theophilus Painter, on the grounds that the Texas State Constitution prohibited integrated education.
On February 26, 1946, Sweatt and Painter, along with representatives from the NAACP and other university officials, met at University of Texas Main Building. Sweatt presented his college transcript to Painter and asked for admission to the law school. Painter said that the school could not officially accept the transcript for consideration, but that he would seek counsel from the state’s attorney general.
In a letter to Texas Attorney General Grover Sellers, Painter wrote: “This applicant is a citizen of Texas and duly qualified for admission to the Law School at the University of Texas, save and except for the fact that he is a negro.” In a response that came several weeks later, Attorney Sellers upheld the constitutionality of segregation in education, but added that if separate but equal facilities could not be provided, Sweatt must be admitted to the law school of University of Texas. Painter, as was his life-long habit, decided to do nothing that will enrage the governor and the board of regents. In May 1946, Sweatt filed a case against Painter and the university in the county court. Among those representing him: a lawyer from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund named Thurgood Marshall.
According to law and given that no school for black people existed in Texas, the Travis County district judge should have granted the plaintiff a right of mandamus, i.e., ordered the University of Texas to properly fulfill their official duties and admit Sweatt to the Law School. Instead, Painter and the Travis County Judge conspired to drag the case for six more months, during which they tried to bribe Sweatt with the promise of covering his tuition at a school outside of Texas. When this ploy failed, the state hastily created a law school for black students only, which it established in Houston at the Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University). The judge, then, ruled that Sweatt has no reason to sue, since “a separate and equal school” exists in Texas. This ridiculous decision was affirmed by the Court of Civil Appeals, the Texas Supreme Court, and several federal courts.
The case ultimately reached the US Supreme Court. Robert Carter and Thurgood Marshall presented Sweatt’s case. The case rested on the fact that the two schools were not even comparable, let alone equal. The University of Texas Law School had 16 full-time and 3 part-time professors, while the black law school had 5 full-time professors. The University of Texas Law School had 850 students and a law library of 65,000 volumes, while the black law school had 23 students and a library of 16,500 volumes.
Thurgood Marshall would go on to build a case around the idea of intangibles. Beyond differences in square footage of classrooms and numbers of faculty, course offerings, and books in the library, a separate facility for black students lacked opportunities to debate ideas with other students, a critical part of learning.
“The modern law school is operated so the student can understand ideas of all stratas of society, so he can go out and be of service to his community, his state and his nation,” argued Marshall, a future Supreme Court justice.
On June 5, 1950, the court ruled unanimously that under the Equal Protection Clause, Sweatt must be admitted to the university. Chief Justice Fred Vinson referenced intangibles in the opinion:
“The law school, the proving ground for legal learning and practice, cannot be effective in isolation from the individuals and institutions with which the law interacts. Few students and no one who has practiced law would choose to study in an academic vacuum, removed from the interplay of ideas and the exchange of views with which the law is concerned."The Supreme Court reversed the lower court decision, saying that the separate school failed to qualify, both because of quantitative differences in facilities and experiential factors, such as its isolation from most of the future lawyers with whom its graduates would interact. The court held that, when considering graduate education, experience must be considered as part of "substantive equality.”
Sweatt enrolled at the law school that fall, but dropped out before completing his second year. His legal struggles affected his health and his marriage. He later earned a masters degree in social work from Atlanta University and went on to have a career with the Urban League. He died in 1982.
On June 14, 2005, the Travis County Commissioners voted to rename the courthouse as the Heman Marion Sweatt Travis County Courthouse in honor of Sweatt’s endeavor and victory.
And what about Theophilus Painter? Nothing of note happened to him afterwards. He returned to his lab, continued to publish insignificant papers, and died of old age on returning from a hunting trip.
The purpose of this note is to remind young people of an unsavory character in the history of genetics and to ask them to look around for small minded Painters, recognize their bigotry, and expose their vileness.
Notes
*In the literature, three versions of the name are found: Hans de Winiwarter (French), Hans van Winivarter (Flemish), and Hans Winivarter. This is most probably due to the fact that the guy was Belgian, so he used both the French honorific “de” and the Flemish honorific “van.”
**The last medal recipient was Günter P. Wagner (2018).
References
de Winiwarter, H. 1921. La formule chromosomale dans l’espèce humaine. C. R. Seances Soc. Biol. Fil. 85:266 –267. Ford CE, Hamerton JL. 1956. The chromosomes of man. Nature 178:1020–1023. Gartler S.M. 2006. The chromosome number in humans: A brief history. Nature Rev. Genet. 7:655–660. Glass B. 1990. Theophilus Painter (1889–1969): A Biographical Memoir. National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC ((http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/painter-theophilus-shickel.pdf). Hagenbach AW. 1879. Masturbation as a cause of disease. Journal Nerv. Mental Dis. 6:603-612. Hansemann D. 1891. Über pathologische Mitosen. Arch. Pathol. Anat. Physiol. 123:356-370. Koller PC. 1947. Abnormal mitosis in tumours. Brit. J. Cancer 1:38–47. Kottler MJ. 1974. From 48 to 46: Cytological technique, preconception and the counting of the human chromosomes. Bull. Hist. Med. 48:465–502. Painter TS. 1923. Studies in mammalian spermatogenesis. II: The spermatogenesis of man. J. Exp. Zool. 37:291–336. Painter TS. 1925. A comparative study of the chromosomes of mammals. Am. Nat. 59:385-409. Painter TS. 1971. Chromosomes and genes viewed from a perspective of fifty years of research. Stadler Symp. 1-2: 33-42. Ruddle FH. 2004. Theophilus Painter: First steps toward an understanding of the human genome. J. Exp. Zool. 301A:375–377 Tjio JH, Levan A. 1956. The chromosome number of man. Hereditas 42:1–6 Trask BJ. 2002. Human cytogenetics: 46 chromosomes, 46 years and counting. Nature Rev. Genet. 3:769–778 van Winiwarter H. 1912. Études sur la spermatogenèse humaine. Arch. Biol. 27: 91-189. Villarosa L. 2019. Myths about physical racial differences were used to justify slavery—and are still believed by doctors today. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/racial-differences-doctors.html