In 1902, three prominent Jewish biologists established the Biologische Versuchsanstalt (BVA) in then Austro-Hungarian Vienna. Now an international team led by Professor Oded Rechavi of Tel Aviv University (TAU) has been awarded a $1.2 million grant by the prestigious Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) to follow in their footsteps.

HFSP is known for its highly competitive selection process, approving only 4% of proposals submitted each year, and the team’s project is exceptional, both scientifically and historically.

“We propose a unique study, combining history and cutting-edge biology, focused on the BVA, one of the most groundbreaking institutes of the early 20th century,” says Professor Rechavi of the School of Biochemistry, Neurobiology, and Biophysics at TAU’s George S. Wise Faculty of Life Sciences. Their proposal stood out with a focus on conducting long-term experiments in live animals, a new concept in biological study of the early twentieth century.

The BVA founders emphasized the importance of biology as an empirical and quantitative science on the one hand, and of studying animals in habitats as natural as possible on the other. The BVA was also innovative with the implementation of advanced methods for climate control, allowing researchers to carefully study the influence of the environment on biology.

“The BVA gained notoriety through Paul Kammerer, who claimed that environmental factors influenced inheritance and was later accused of fraud,” Professor Rechavi says. “However, other respected researchers at the BVA also studied the inheritance of acquired traits — without disproof. Tragically, the scandal and the Nazi persecution of the institute’s Jewish members led to its collapse.

“As modern genetics emerged, the entire concept of acquired trait inheritance was pushed aside until recent discoveries in epigenetics brought it back into scientific discourse.”

For nearly a century, the idea of inheriting acquired traits was considered scientific heresy. But in the past 15 years, research in epigenetic inheritance has breathed new life into this controversial topic. Professor Rechavi characterized a molecular mechanism enabling the transgenerational inheritance of acquired traits in the highly useful model organism, the C. elegans nematode, via small RNA molecules. The next challenge is to demonstrate that similar mechanisms exist across other species, potentially reshaping our understanding of evolution.

This is where the BVA’s historical work becomes newly relevant. “The papers published by BVA researchers made headlines but were largely ignored because, for a long time, few believed in non-genetic inheritance,” Professor Rechavi explains. “The question is: can we replicate their experiments using modern tools and knowledge? For example, one of BVA director Hans Przibram’s most promising studies involved growing rats in a warm climate over generations to observe whether the environment can affect their offspring body and tail size. We plan to recreate this experiment as one of our first steps.

“Today’s improved temperature control systems and the ability to account for genetic variation could allow our team to isolate true epigenetic effects from purely genetic one, potentially validating theories that were ahead of their time more than a century ago.”