She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity by Carl Zimmer Page B

hypothetical eternities in heaven or hell. Heredity—the continuity of life through the generations—was vast enough for him. “All things—plants, animals, and men—are already in eternity, traveling across the face of time,” he said.

CHAPTER 3
This Race Should End with Them
    V INELAND BEGAN as an idea for a perfect city.
    In 1861, a businessman named Charles Landis traveled from Philadelphia into the empty Pine Barrens of New Jersey. He bought twenty thousand acres and laid down a map of lots. He called it Vineland. Farmers bought land to grow crops on the fertile soil, and retired Civil War soldiers later came to work in new glass-manufacturing plants. The idea of Vineland endured into the twenty-first century, in the generous width of its main streets, in the triumphant design of its municipal buildings. But a new city has grown on top of Landis’s idea: a city that lost its factories, that turned its outlying farms into suburbs, that brought in immigrants not from New England but from Mexico and India.
    I came to Vineland on a bright cold day in February, driving along South Main Road, one of the original roads that ran along the city’s eastern edge. I passed a bleak, treeless row of gas stations, supermarkets, cell phone shops, and liquor stores. At the intersection with Landis Avenue, I pulled into a Wawa store parking lot and walked inside to buy a bag of peanuts. Car mechanics and home health aides were ordering sandwiches and coffee and lottery tickets. When I came back outside, I looked up at the grumpy, overheated winter sky. The clouds were tormenting the South Main traffic with tantrums of rain. My phone buzzed with a tornado warning for all of South Jersey. I pulled a wool cap onto my head and took a walk, eating peanuts for lunch.
    The convenience store driveway curved around a wedge of grass by the intersection. A massive rounded stone stood in the center of the wedge, surrounded by bushes and spotlights anchored into the wood chips. I walked over to inspect it. The stone was inscribed with a name: S. Olin Garrison. No explanation, no date. The drivers of the passing cars and trucks paid the tombstone no notice. I doubt any of them knew who S. Olin Garrison was, let alone why he was buried in front of a Wawa store.
    Turning my back to the noisy commercial strip, I looked eastward across a huge, empty field, crossed by a worn concrete path. I walked down the path, under a row of leafless trees that leaned over the left side. The trees had lost some of their boughs, and some were dead. But you could still sense that someone had planted them in grand, rational intervals long ago. The line of trees led my eye across the field to a pair of small, square gazebos in the distance, tilted on the frost-heaved earth. Beyond them was a scattering of old buildings. A late nineteenth-century edifice had a dome sprouting from one corner. Around it huddled a few old houses and outbuildings, falling into disrepair.
    I had spent the morning at a nearby historical society looking over photographs of this spot from over a century earlier. Now that I was at the spot itself, I could see it as it looked on an October morning in 1897. There was no Wawa store—no stores at all, for that matter. People passed by on foot, bicycle, or horseback. South Main Road and Landis Avenue bordered a 125-acre farm, with pumpkin patches, apple orchards, and asparagus beds. A high gate stood at the corner, with a name arching overhead: VINELAND TRAINING SCHOOL .
    I had come here, and cast my mind back, because the Vineland Training School holds an important place in the history of heredity. Within the walls of the school, Mendel’s research was applied to humans, with disastrous consequences. What happened here would influence thoughts about heredity for generations.
    In 1897, a path led from the gate into the school grounds, flanked by newly planted trees. The gazebos were plumb and freshly painted. The buildings bustled with two