The Pedo Scientist
Things you learn when you decide to do some innocuous reading about the biosphere.
I’ve been reading a book called The Cosmic Oasis about life on earth — how it began and developed and how we’ve been systematically annihilating it. The book has a great brief section about the history of the “science” of life and how it developed over the last several thousand years, from the Greeks onward. One thing I noticed is that scientists from the Russian Empire — and then, briefly, from the Soviet Union — were sometimes on the pioneering edge of this stuff, developing early theories about how life emerged and how the planet’s biological systems worked.
Vladimir Vernadsky was one such guy. He’s famous now for developing his own concept of the biosphere more than half a century before something similar, the Gaia Theory, was elaborated by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. But there’s another guy, too. Someone I didn’t know about at all: Konstantin Merezhkovski. He was one of the first to synthesize existing research and theorize that today’s eukaryotic cells — the ones that make up animals and plants and fungi and other types of organisms — were created through symbiosis rather than pure hereditary trial-and-error evolution. He theorized that what happened was this: sometime in the distant past a simple organism swallowed some bacteria, which then merged with the cell to create a more powerful hybrid life form. He called it symbiogenesis. As I understand it his theory is essentially accepted as truth these days. Symbiogenesis is, for instance, is how chloroplasts (the cellular organs that do photosynthesis in plants) and mitochondria (the cellular organs that power our bodies) got into these cells: more than a billion years ago some bacteria were ingested by a eukaryote cell, but instead of being digested they were put to beneficial use and have lived happily in mutualistic support ever after, all while as keeping their own own DNA structures and mainting their old school methods for reproduction: simple splitting of the cell. This symbiogenesis all took place at least a billion years ago.
So in a way Merezhkovski is a big deal in a society obsessed with figuring out who was first: Who was the genius who first cracked the code of creation?
The Cosmic Oasis didn’t give much in the way of a biography for Merezhkovski, except to call him “sinister and depraved.” Sinister and depraved? Tell me more.
Well, I looked him up and…
Well, here’s a capsule description of his, eh, wild life from a Russian book about him:
…the Russian scientist and marginal philosopher, “the Russian Marquis de Sade,” who appears as an “absolutely negative person,” as a symbol of evil, as a person deprived of a single positive trait, as a real refutation of the aphorism about the incompatibility of “genius“ and “villainy.” A pedophile who raped about thirty little girls (aged 3 years and older) and left notes about this in his secret diary; an informer who collaborated with the secret political police and for many years informed on his colleagues at Kazan University, where he worked in 1903-1914; a staunch anti-Semite who brought the ”Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to Kazan, one of the active, albeit secret creators of the Union of the Russian People in Kazan…
Yeah, he was a real character. A serial pedophile who eventually had to flee Russia because of the allegations mounting against him. Using a false passport, he at some point sailed to the United States — to New York. But he didn’t stay in the city for long. There were too many Russians around and he was afraid of being recognized. So he kept moving west and settled for a time on a farm in Southern California, where apparently he tried to rape a 12-year-old farmer girl. Booted off the farm, he did research for a few years in Los Angeles and Berkeley.
While on the run in America, he wrote a sci-fi novel that incorporated his pedophilic fantasies into a story about a utopian future where, through careful scientific breeding, smart benevolent men finally created heaven on earth: old men surrounded by naked children who never age and a eugenically bred caste of servants to take care of them — all living in near harmony with nature. Sounds like a paradise!
After America he made his way back to Europe, all while continuing his work. In 1918, after the Russian Revolution, he moved to Switzerland. There, alone and broke and his scientific genius attacked but mostly ignored, he committed what appears to have been a highly ritualized suicide. He tied himself to his bed and inhaled some sort of poison gas — but only after settling his hotel bill in full. Sexually abusing children is one thing. But to skip out on your bills? What will people say?
