AGOL, IZRAIL’ IOSIFOVICH

(b. Bobruisk, Russia, 20 November 1891; d. probably in Lubianka prison, Moscow, U.S.S.R. 10 March 1937)

genetics, philosophy of biology.

The son of a carpenter, Agol was born into a large Jewish family. His sister became involved in revolutionary activities during her teenage years, and he soon followed her example. After his graduation from a Vilnius gymnasium about 1909, he became active in radical politics. He made his living tutoring, composed poetry, and wanted to become a writer. In 1915 he joined the Russian Social Democratic Party, Shortly thereafter, he was drafted into the Russian army and fought in World War I.

At the time of the October 1917 revolution. Agol was in Belorussia, where he immediately got involved in party activities. He first worked as secretary of the local Bolshevik Party committee in Bobruisk, then in a party regional committee in Minsk, and after the formation of the Belorussian Soviet Republic (1919) he became a member of its Central Executive Committee. In 1919 in Vilnius he served as secretary of finance in the government of the short-lived Lithuanian-Belorussian Soviet Republic. During the civil war (1919–1921) he fought on the side of the Reds and served as assistant manager in the supply section of the 16th Army, stationed on the western front.

In 1921 Agol moved to Moscow, where he studied medicine at Moscow University and wrote articles for Pravda and later Trud.Upon graduating from the university in 1923, he worked as a psychiatrist, and at the end of 1924 he entered the Institute of Red Professors, where he first studied in the department of philosophy and then transferred into the department of natural science, graduating in 1927, From 1925 to 1928, Agol worked in the laboratory of B. M. Zavadovskii at the la. M. Sverdlov Communist University. There, focusing on morphogenesis and the possible inheritance of acquired characteristics, he learned surgical techniques for removing the thyroid glands of hens and attempted to repeat the experiments of Guyer and Smith on the inheritance of immune blood characteristics. In 1926 he wrote sympathetic obituaries of Paul Kammerer, characterizing him as a victim of the machinations of Western capital but expressing reservations about his views on the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Agol’s fascination with Marxist philosophy permeated his organizational, scholarly, and scientific work. In the mid 1920’s Soviet dialectical materialists agreed in their condemnation of “idealist” positions, but were beginning to split into two camps over whether the emphasis should be on materialism (the mechanists) or dialectics (dialecticians, or Deborinites—followers of A. M. Deborin). Agol sided with the Deborinites and published many articles, books, and pamphlets criticizing vitalistic and mechanistic approaches to embrvology, heredity, and evolution.

Since 1926 Serebroxskii had been advocating Morganist genetics as the only theory of inheritance fully consonant with dialectical materialism. Initially Agol did not entirely support Serebrovskii’s position, but he became a wholehearted convert after H.J. Mutter’s demonstration of X-ray mutagenesis in 1927. Agol attached himself to Serebrovskii’s genetics laboratory at the Moscow Zootechnical Institute and participated in his replication of Muller’s results, together with N. P. Dubinin. V. N. Slepkov, and V. E. Al’tshuler.

In late 1928 Agol was appointed to head the Timiriazev Biological Institute, a center of Marxist Lamarckian research under Glavnauka, the Central Administration oi’scientific Research Institutes of the Commissariat of Education. In 1929 he was elected to the Communist Academy and, at its meeting of 8–13 April 1929, he argued that genetics was the Deborinite approach to inheritance, criticized Lamarckism as “mechanistic,” and called for its official condemnation and its expulsion from the academy. Although this position was not supported by A. M. Deborin and O. lu. Schmidt. the organizers of the meeting, its final resolution instructed Agol to subordinate the work of the Timiriazev Institute to the Communist Academy, to discharge certain Lamarckians, and to organize within the Timiriazev Institute a genetics laboratory, lo be headed by A. S. Serebrovskii.

Agol became an important member of the staff of the laboratory, where Serebrovskii gathered a group of young biologists that included N. I. Shapiro. Together with N. P. Dubinin, B. N. Sidorrov, and others from Serebrovskii’s laboratory at the Moscow Zootechnical Institute, the group developed (1929–1931) a theory of gene structure known as step-allelism, based on complementation maps of the various alleles of the scute region, located at the tip of the X chromosome in Drosophila melanogaster.which influences the flys head and thoracic bristles. Although main of their interpretations proved unsound. theirs was one of the earliest attempts to analyze gene structure through complementation mapping. The theory is more fully discussed by Carlson (1966).

Agol gained an international reputation for his work on scute⁴. which overlapped other alleles and disproved the hypothesis that the various “step-alleles” were subgenes that could be linearly arranged. This work land his party membership) led Glavnauka to nominate him for a Rockefeller Foundation International Fellowship to study in the United States. Together with Solomon G. Levit. Agol spent 1931 working with Midler at the Zoology Department of the University of Texas in Austin. Agol’s descriptions of communism and the Soviet Union may have influenced Muller’s politics; in 1933 he moved to the Soviet Union and worked there until 1937.

While Agol was in Texas, ideological shifts were taking place in his homeland. At the time of the first Five-Year Plan (1929–1932), the Communist Party began to exert direct control over all aspects of Soviet life, and a new and more rigid party line was beginning to be imposed. In particular, the views of Deborin, which had apparently triumphed in 1929, were now considered an unacceptable ideological deviation. As a militant Dehorinite, Agol came under attack as a “Menshevizing idealist.” No information is available about his activities in the months following his return to the Soviet Union in earh 1932. By the fall, however, the ideological storm had abated. Agol was posted to Kiev and worked in the All-Ukrainian Association of Marxist Leninist Scientific Research Institutes, serving as its vice-president (1933–1934). In 1934 he was elected to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in genetics. Within that academy’s Institute of Zoology and Biology he organized a genetics division, which he directed (1934–1936).

In 1936 Agol returned to Moscow to accept a high administrative post in Glavnauka. Later that year, however, the purges began in earnest, and party members who stood accused of earlier ideological deviations and had worked abroad were especially at risk. On 19 December 1936 Pravda announced that Agol had been arrested as a “Trotskyite bandit,” a “Menshevizing idealist,” and an “enemy of the people,” He was shot on 10 March 1937—the das after his mentor, Muller, left Russia. Thereafter Agol officially became an “unperson” in the Soviet Union, and censors deleted his name even from lists of scientific references. Although he was rehabilitated in the 1950’s he is rarely mentioned in Soviet sources.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works, Agol’s publications on the philosophy of biology include F. Engel’s (Moscow, 1920); “Dialektika i metafizika v biologii” (Dialectics and metaphysics in biology), in Pod znamenem marksizma 1926, no. 3, 118–150; “Pamiati professora P. Kammerera” (In memory of Professor P, Karmnerer). in Antireligioznik.1926. no. II. 29–30: “Predislovie” (Preface), in Paul Kammerer, Zagadka nasledstvennosti (Moscow and Leningrad, 1927), iii-viii (translation of Das Rätsel der Vererbung); Dialekticheskii metod i evoliustsionnaia teoriia (Dialectical method and evolution theory; Moscow and Leningrad, 1927); “problema organicheskoi tselesoobraznosti” (The problem of organic purposiveness), in Estestvozanie i marksizm, 1930, no. 1 (5), 3–20; “Neovitalizm” (Neovitalism), in Bol’shaia sovetsskaia entsiklopedia, XI (Moscow, 1930), 255–288: “Darvin i darvinizm” (Darwin and Darwinism), ibid., XX (Moscow, 1930), 442–470; and Vitalizm i marksizm (Vitalism and Marxism), 3rd ed. (Moscow, 1932).

For examples of his publications on genetics, see “Poluchenie mutatsii rentgenovskimi luchami u Drosophila memlanogaster” (Mutations induced in Drosophila melanogaster by X rays), in Zhurnal eksperimental’ noi biologii ser. A, 4 , no 3–4 (1928), 161–180, written with A. S. Serebrovskii, N. P. Dubinin. V. N. Slepkov, and V. E. Al’tshuler; “Stupenchatyi allelomorfizm u Drosophila melanogaster” (Step-all allelomorfizm Drosophila melanogaster), ibid., 5 no. 2 (1929), 86–101; and “K voprosu o zarodyshevom puti u Drosophila melanogaster” (Concerning the embryonic development of Drosophila melanogaster), ibid., 6 no. 4 (1930), 369–372.

For Agol’s account of his childhood, see Khochu zhit’: Provest’ (I want to live: A narrative: Moscow. 1936)

II. Secondary Literature. There are no secondary works on Agol, but there are occasional references to him in Elof Axel Carlson, The Gene (Philadelphia, 1966) and Genes, Radiation, and Society (Ithaca. N. Y. 1981); A. E. Gaissinovitch. Zarozhdenie i razvite genetiki (The birth and development of genetics; Moscow. 1988) and “The Origins of Soviet Genetics and the Struggle with Lamarckism. 1922–1929,” Mark B. Adams, trans., in Journal of the History of Biology, 13 , no. 1 (1980), 1–51; and David Joravsky. Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917–1932 (New York, 1961).

Mark B. Adams