Hermann Muller: Genes, Flies, Bombs and a Better Life

Herman Joseph Muller was born in New York on 21st December 1890. His father trained as a lawyer but gave up to run the family business, an art foundry that specialised in quality statuettes and clock cases. Raised as a Unitarian, Herman went to school in the Bronx where he met his lifelong friend Edgar Hultenberg and in 1907 won a scholarship to nearby Columbia University. Here he met Thomas Morgan, a new professor with an interest in genetics, and two students, Calvin Bridges and Arthur Sturtevant. Morgan had been working with pigeons, a complex proposition that led him to dismiss mentalism and the chromosome theory, but by the time Muller graduated in 1910, Morgan and his team had been studying the inheritance of spontaneous mutations in the fruit fly Drosophila manadagastra and he was beginning to change his mind about chromosomes. Muller himself had graduated with a good degree but found it difficult to find a suitable job until he found a teaching post at Columbia in 1912. The progress the four of them made with the fly, including developing a way to actually locate the positions of the mutations on the chromosome, led them to writing a book together, The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity. It is seen by many as setting the foundations of modern genetics. He was tempted away from Columbia, where he felt he was not getting the recognition he deserved, to work for a few years at the Rice Institute in Houston, Texas. The prospect of a permanent appointment though brought him back to Columbia, but by 1919 he was off to Texas again, this time to the University of Austin, no permanent job having materialized. It was for a start a period of consolidation and he even branched out into twin studies with support from his new wife Jessie. They had a baby, David. In 1922 he travelled to Europe with Altenberg visiting England, France, Germany and learning a Drosophila culture in Moscow to promote work there. But the interest in mutations never really weakened. On his return he began to use x-rays in his work as a tool to weaken cells and so expose genetic deficiencies. But by 1924 he was considering looking at radiation as an agent of mutation. This possibility had already been considered by several other workers including Thomas Morgan, but dismissed. Muller himself thought that spontaneous mutation was probably a chemical effect influenced by temperature, but he could hardly ignore the fact that there was by now much evidence that radiation caused other changes in cells. Somehow he never got started on the radiation studies until late 1926, but almost soon as he did he found something quite dramatic and in just a few months he could write a short paper for the journal Science of his discovery that radiation did indeed cause mutations and more radiation produced more of them. The paper was so lacking in detail of his methods that many, including Morgan, were doubtful of what had actually been achieved. It took a much longer paper delivered in Berlin in September 1927 to get the full acknowledgement he deserved and needed. In the press it was presented as sensational. Man could now change at will his genetic material and even, it was claimed, speed up evolution. He returned to Austin something of a celebrity and took on more students. However, over the next three years things started to go seriously wrong at work and at home. At work his relationships with some close colleagues deteriorated and he was depressed by the persistent criticisms of his interpretation of mutations that came, in fact, from rather few people. At home his marriage to Jessie was breaking down. In 1932 he tried to commit suicide by an overdose of sleeping pills. He was found dazed and muddy, wandering in the hills by a search party of his students. To compound matters he upset the university authorities by supporting a left-wing student newspaper, The Spark. So it was probably a relief to everyone when he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and he decided to go to Europe for a sabbatical. He left the USA on 5th September 1932. He seemed to have planned to settle at least for a while in Berlin but soon appreciated that the Nazis were making the country unattractive for a free-thinking radical socialist scientist. Unable to return to the province in the USA he accepted an offer to go to Russia and work in the prestigious genetics unit of Nikolai Vavilov. So in September 1933 he, Jessie and David set off for This attempt at reconciliation failed. Jessie took David back to Austin in mid-1934 and they were soon divorced. Jessie was to marry one of Muller's students. The three years he spent in Russia were not particularly, by his standards, productive. He became enmeshed in the Lysenko affair and opposed the perversion of genetics that this represented. His friends and colleagues were purged in the wave of repression that swept the country. Stalin himself took exception to Muller's 1935 eugenic tract, Out of the Night, when he read it in 1937. It seemed time to leave and after a time in Spain working for the loyalists he did just that, taking refuge in the Institute of Animal Genetics in Edinburgh. Here he built up a small team of devoted co-workers and irritated some of the medical establishment with his views that radiation was dangerous. In 1939 he married Thea. In 1940, now aiming to put up with the dangers, inconveniences and indignities for an alien of war, he and Thea decided to leave for the USA. So in September, with the inevitable case of flies, they took the Boeing Clipper seaplane from Lisbon to New York. US academia was suspicious of a difficult man with a socialist background who'd spent time in Russia, so was probably a communist. Muller approached a few people but had no success in finding a job that matched his professional status. He spent a few years at Amherst College in Massachusetts as a temporary professor. When his contract there was terminated in 1945, and he was now in his mid-50s, the search for another job was frustrating and depressing, but it ended successfully when an offer of a permanent post came from Indiana University. Permanent was important because by then he and Thea had a new baby, Helen. He was to stay in Indiana until he retired in 1964, a settled two decades. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1946. The citation focused on the immense scientific value of his discovery of the ability of radiation to produce copious mutations, but it emphasised too that his contribution to the development of genetics had been much wider than that. In his presentation speech, Professor Casperson of the Royal Caroline Institute said, Mendel, Morgan and Muller together will always stand out as creators of the modern science of genetics. And he was now, Casperson said, more active than ever. Muller used his speech to state his views on the hazards of radiation. He would promote these vigorously over the coming decades, mainly in the context of nuclear weapon testing, another source of controversy and accolades. Apart from the reference to Stalin, I've not mentioned his lifelong advocacy of a fairly gentle eugenics, which started as a student at Columbia and only ended with his death. A fascinating story in itself. Or his welcome and enthusiastic support of the new genetics and the biochemistry that were to grow from quite different roots and dominate the stage in the second half of the 20th century. He died in 1967, proud to have contributed so much to the foundations of the science, and no doubt excited by the prospects ahead. If you're interested in learning more about this remarkable man and the history of genetics, you might like to look at my book, Genes, Flies, Bombs and a Better Life, in the footsteps of Herman Muller. Written for the general reader, it was published in 2016 by Peachpole Books and is available through Amazon.