the climate of those days." Koestler's claims have been criticized by the scientific community. Gordon Stein noted: As a consequence of Noble's refutation, interest in Lamarckian inheritance diminished except in the Soviet Union where it was championed by Trofim Lysenko. Other interpretations Sander Gliboff, a historian of biology and professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University, has commented that although Kammerer's conclusions proved false, his evidence was probably genuine and he did not simply argue for Lamarckism and against Darwinism as the theories are now understood. Rather, beyond the scandal, the story shows us much about the competing theories of biological and cultural evolution and the range of new ideas about heredity and variation in early 20th-century biology and the changes in experimental approach that have occurred since then. In 2009, developmental biologist Alexander Vargas, Professor in the Department of Biology, University of Chile, suggested that the inheritance of acquired traits (Lamarckian inheritance) that Kammerer reported to observe in his toad experiments could be authentic and be explained by results from the emerging field of epigenetics. Kammerer could thus actually be considered the discoverer of non-Mendelian, epigenetic inheritance, with chemical modifications to parental DNA (such as through DNA methylation) being passed on to subsequent generations. Furthermore, In Vargas' view, the parent-of-origin effect, which was poorly understood at the time of Kammerer's, might be explained retrospectively, in relation to similar effects seen in other organisms. Professor Gliboff of Indiana University has subsequently argued that Vargas "constructed his model without first reading Kammerer's original articles" and is "seriously misinformed about what Kammerer did and what the results even were" so Vargas's "model... cannot explain the results... originally reported...". Gliboff goes on to challenge strong that Kammerer was given credit for discovery of parent-of-origin effect and states that "Vargas' historical inferences about the Kammerer affair... [and] negative reactions of geneticists... are unsupported and do not stand up to scrutiny". The reinterpretation of Kammerer's work, in light of epigenetics, remains thus controversial. References Further reading External links A collection of his texts – Paul Kammerer's site in Academia.edu 1880 births 1926 suicides Academy of Fine Arts Vienna alumni 20th-century Austrian zoologists Austrian Jews Lamarckism People involved in scientific misconduct incidents Scientists from Vienna Suicides by firearm in Austria