Hermann Joseph Muller Research Paper

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Geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller [or H. J. Muller as he identiﬁed himself in his articles] was born in New York on December 21, 1890. His Catholic paternal grandparents had emigrated to the United States from Coblenz in the Moselle Valley of Western Germany after their unsuccessful support of the Revolution of 1848. Muller’s ﬁrst cousins also became well-known: Alfred Kroeber as an anthropologist, and Herbert J. Muller as a literary critic. Muller’s maternal grand- parents were partly Jewish, partly Episcopalian and had emigrated from England. Muller was raised as a Unitarian but considered himself an atheist or humanist. Muller was educated at Columbia College, receiving a BA in 1910 and his Ph.D. in 1916. He was recruited by Julian Huxley, then the ﬁrst Chair of the Zoology Department at the Rice Institute. From 1918 to 1920 he ﬁlled in for his mentor, Thomas Hunt Morgan while Morgan was on sabbatical from Columbia. In 1920 Muller joined the faculty at the University of Texas, where he did his Nobel prize experiments, and then left in 1932 for an eight-year sojourn in Europe, where he spent a Guggenheim Fellowship year in Berlin, became a visiting investigator at Leningrad (1933–4), headed a laboratory in Moscow (1935–7), and then spent a year in Spain as a volunteer during the Spanish Civil War. He was a guest investigator at the University of Edinburgh from 1937 to 1940 and then returned to the United States as an ad interim professor at Amherst College for the war years. He was recruited by Indiana University in 1945, won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1946, and spent the rest of his career, until retirement in 1964, at Indiana University. He died in Indianapolis, Indiana, April 5, 1967. He was married ﬁrst to Jessie (nee Jacobs) Muller, a professor of mathematics by whom he had a son David, who also became a professor of mathematics. He was married a second time to Dorothea [Thea] (nee Kantorowicz) Muller, a physician. Their daughter, Helen, became a professor of public health (Carlson 1982).

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1. Major Contributions To Genetics

Muller’s most noted contribution was the induction of mutations in fruit ﬂies using x-rays (Muller 1928); this was the sole research organism of his career. Others had tried earlier, with no success or with ambiguous results. It was Muller’s gift for designing genetic stocks that clinched the case and opened the ﬁeld of radiation genetics. Muller was also well regarded for contributing, with Morgan, Alfred Henry Sturtevant and Calvin Blackman Bridges to the founding of classical genetics, that body of work that brought together the theory of the gene, the chromosome theory of heredity, breeding analysis, cytogenetics, and genetic mapping, along with explanations for new phenomena such as X-linked inheritance and nondisjunction of chromosomes.

Muller considered his greatest achievement to be the recognition of the gene as the basis of life through its unusual property of copying its errors, oﬀering this as a mechanistic basis for the variations that make evolution possible. He also clariﬁed what he called gene-character relations, showing by experimental means that complex character traits in fruit ﬂies, such as variable wing shape, could be analyzed successfully into their genetic and environmental components (Altenburg and Muller 1920). Muller devoted considerable attention to estimating the size and shape of genes, the number of genes in a chromosome or in an organism’s genome, and the properties of genes when studied through their various mutations. He made substantial contributions to human genetics, including estimates of genetic damage from mutations, the amount of mutations on average each person carries, and the fate of those mutations over generations (Muller 1962).

2. Social Controversies Over Genetics

Muller was not typical of his generation of scientists. He took a position on social issues that arose from the impact of genetics on society. He is perhaps best known for ﬁrst raising a concern about the harmful eﬀects of radiation on a population exposed to diﬀerent doses of radiation (Muller 1957). He interpreted the symptoms of radiation sickness from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as a consequence of induced chromosome breaks leading to a cycle of breakage, reunion of broken pieces, and subsequent re-breakage resulting in cell death, a phenomenon he had independently worked out in fruit ﬂies while in Edinburgh and that Barbara McClintock had worked out in maize while then at the University of Missouri. Muller fought vigorously to protect the public from the hazards of nuclear radiation at a time when those in the health professions, industry, and the military sought to ignore all except the highest doses of exposure to radiation.

During the Cold War he was accused by the Soviet Union of having been an American spy sent to wreck Soviet genetics, at the same time that he was regarded by the Atomic Energy Commission and the Eisenhower administration as a Soviet spy sent back to the US to wreck the development of the hydrogen bomb program by alarming the public over the dangers of nuclear radiation. Muller had debated with Troﬁm D. Lysenko in 1936 in Moscow and had had to ﬂee the USSR after denouncing Lysenko as a charlatan. Muller’s dubious distinction on both sides of the Cold War stems from his initial attraction to socialism and communism (although he never joined the Communist Party), and his denunciation of communism after his disillusionment, having seen what life was like under the Stalinist USSR. Although he loathed Stalinism he never abandoned the ideals of socialism by which social justice would be part of society rather than left to chance.

3. Muller’s Conﬂicting Appraisals Of Eugenics

Muller is least well regarded for his views on eugenics. Muller was idealistic and shared many of Francis Galton’s views on the need for a positive eugenic program in which the ablest males would be encouraged to produce a more than average number of children. Muller advocated this through what he later called germinal choice, which would use frozen sperm retained for a generation before being thawed and used (Muller 1961). He opposed the American eugenics movement that was led by Charles Benedict Davenport and Harry Laughlin in the United States as racist, sexist, and elitist. He denounced that movement in a speech at the third, and last, International Congress of Eugenics held in New York in 1932 (Muller 1934). Muller had naively believed that in the USSR he would ﬁnd a society in which merit, not class, would determine who were the genetically well-endowed individuals who could contribute to sperm banks. He published a popular book, Out of the Night (1935), and had it translated into Russian and sent it to Premier Stalin. The arrest and execution of two of Muller’s students, and the hostile response of the pro-Lysenko audience at the debates over Soviet genetics, made him seek a graceful exit by joining the International Brigade.

Muller failed all his life to convince either scientists or the public that eugenics was necessary to compensate for the accumulation of mutations in human populations that were no longer subject to the pressures of natural selection (see Muller 1950). However, he shunned coercive eugenics policies and those based on compulsory sterilization of what were then called ‘the unﬁt.’

4. Muller’s Philosophical Views On Science And The Gene

Muller’s genetic insights on the gene were resisted in his own day, when he was considered a zealot and the term genetic determinism had not yet been coined. His view of the gene as the basis of life has permeated the thinking of molecular biologists who see in DNA the same basis for life as he did in the gene (see Muller 1929). By ‘the gene as the basis of life’ Muller intended scientists to recognize that all other components of life are made by genes and that only genes had the capacity to retain their copying capacity, despite being altered by the mutation process. This phrase also implied that all of evolutionary life could be traced back to the ﬁrst replicating molecule with this capacity. Muller never ignored the environment in the expression of genetic traits. He realized that a gene could be modiﬁed by other genes, and by such environmental components as temperature, humidity, and nutrition; this was evidenced in the various traits he studied in fruit ﬂies. He made similar arguments for the expression of genetic diversity conditioned by genetic modiﬁers as well as environmental factors, both uterine and extrauterine, in the expression of human traits such as intelligence, creativity, and personality. He was one of the ﬁrst to study a pair of separated identical twins (in 1925) and to recognize how diﬃcult it would be to isolate all the major factors, genetic and environmental, that distinguished the careers, aptitudes, and lives of these two subjects (Muller 1925).

Muller’s philosophy of science was that of a reductionist. He believed science could interpret nature, that there was an external reality, and that both theory and experimentation were essential for science to be eﬀective. He rejected mysticism, holism, vitalism, and the belief that scientiﬁc reality was a social construction. At the same time he was aware of the biases that society could impose on complex issues often thought by non-scientists to be ‘scientiﬁc’, and he resisted and rebuked those who believed that intelligence testing was free of bias or that eminence or success in the ﬁnancial world (or in a capitalist society in general) was largely a matter of merit rather than privilege and unequal opportunities. These views made Muller seem, to his critics, contradictory, a turn-coat, paranoid, or muddled in his thinking.

Bibliography:

Altenburg E, Muller H J 1920 The genetic basis of truncate wing—an inconstant and modiﬁable character in Drosophila. Genetics 5: 1–59
Carlson E 1982 Genes, Radiation, and Society: The Life and Work of H J Muller. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
Muller H J 1925 Mental traits and heredity. Journal of Heredity 16: 433–48
Muller H J 1928 The problem of genic modiﬁcation. In: Verhandlungen des V. Internationalen Kongresses fur Vererbungswissenschaft, Berlin, 1927. Supplementband I der Zeitschrift fur Induktive Abstammungs-und Vererbungslehre, pp. 234–60
Muller H J 1929 The gene as the basis of life. In: Proceedings of the International Congress of Plant Sciences, August 1926. Ithaca, NY, pp. 897–921
Muller H J 1934 The dominance of economics over eugenics. In: A Decade of Progress in Eugenics: Proceedings of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, New York. Williams and Wilkins, New York, pp. 138–44
Muller H J 1935 Out of the Night. Vanguard Press, New York
Muller H J 1950 Our load of mutations. American Journal of Human Genetics 2: 111–76
Muller H J 1957 Damage from point mutations in relation to radiation dose and biological conditions. In: Eﬀect of Radiation on Human Heredity. World Health Organization, Geneva, pp. 25–47
Muller H J 1961 Human evolution by voluntary choice of germ plasm. Science 134: 643–9
Muller H J 1962 Studies in Genetics. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN