Hermann Joseph Muller

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Hermann Joseph Muller
Foreign Member of the Royal Society[1]
  • 1963 Humanist of the Year (American Humanist Association)
    • Scientific career
    FieldsGenetics, molecular biology
    Doctoral advisorThomas Hunt Morgan
    Doctoral studentsCharlotte Auerbach
    H. Bentley Glass
    Clarence Paul Oliver
    Elof Axel Carlson
    Wilson Stone
    Guido Pontecorvo

    Hermann Joseph Muller (December 21, 1890 – April 5, 1967) was an American

    nuclear testing
    , which resulted in greater public scrutiny of these practices.

    Early life

    Muller was born in

    atheist.[5] He excelled in the public schools. At 16, he entered Columbia College. From his first semester, he was interested in biology; he became an early convert of the Mendelian-chromosome theory of heredity—and the concept of genetic mutations and natural selection as the basis for evolution. He formed a biology club and also became a proponent of eugenics; the connections between biology and society would be his perennial concern. Muller earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1910.[6]

    Muller remained at Columbia (the pre-eminent American zoology program at the time, due to E. B. Wilson and his students) for graduate school. He became interested in the Drosophila genetics work of Thomas Hunt Morgan's fly lab after undergraduate bottle washers Alfred Sturtevant and Calvin Bridges joined his biology club. In 1911–1912, he studied metabolism at Cornell University, but remained involved with Columbia. He followed the drosophilists as the first genetic maps emerged from Morgan's experiments, and joined Morgan's group in 1912 (after two years of informal participation).[7]

    In the fly group, Muller's contributions were primarily theoretical—explanations for experimental results and ideas and predictions for new experiments. In the emerging collaborative culture of the drosophilists, however, credit was assigned based on results rather than ideas; Muller felt cheated when he was left out of major publications.[8]

    Career

    In 1914,

    Oenothera lamarckiana that were the basis of Hugo de Vries
    's theory of
    lethal mutations. In 1918, Morgan, short-handed because many of his students and assistants were drafted for the U.S. entry into World War I, convinced Muller to return to Columbia to teach and to expand his experimental program.[9]

    At Columbia, Muller and his collaborator and longtime friend Edgar Altenburg continued the investigation of lethal mutations. The primary method for detecting such mutations was to measure the sex ratios of the offspring of female flies. They predicted the ratio would vary from 1:1 due to recessive mutations on the X chromosome, which would be expressed only in males (which lacked the functional allele on a second X chromosome). Muller found a strong temperature dependence in mutation rate, leading him to believe that spontaneous mutation was the dominant mode (and to initially discount the role of external factors such as ionizing radiation or chemical agents). In 1920, Muller and Altenburg coauthored a seminal paper in Genetics on "modifier genes" that determine the size of mutant Drosophila wings. In 1919, Muller made the important discovery of a mutant (later found to be a chromosomal inversion) that appeared to suppress crossing over, which opened up new avenues in mutation-rate studies. However, his appointment at Columbia was not continued; he accepted an offer from the University of Texas and left Columbia after the summer of 1920.[10]

    Muller taught at the University of Texas from 1920 until 1932. Soon after returning to Texas, he married mathematics professor

    I.Q. Muller was critical of the new directions of the eugenics movement (such as anti-immigration), but was hopeful about the prospects for positive eugenics.[12][13] In 1932, at the Third International Eugenics Congress, Muller gave a speech and stated, "eugenics might yet perfect the human race, but only in a society consciously organized for the common good".[14]

    Discovery of X-ray mutagenesis

    In 1926, a series of major breakthroughs began. In November, Muller carried out two experiments with varied doses of X-rays, the second of which used the crossing over suppressor stock ("ClB") he had found in 1919. A clear, quantitative connection between radiation and lethal mutations quickly emerged. Muller's discovery created a media sensation after he delivered a paper entitled "The Problem of Genetic Modification" at the Fifth International Congress of Genetics in Berlin; it would make him one of the better-known public intellectuals of the early 20th century. By 1928, others had replicated his dramatic results, expanding them to other model organisms, such as wasps and maize. In the following years, he began publicizing the likely dangers of radiation exposure in humans (such as physicians who frequently operate X-ray equipment or shoe sellers who radiated their customers' feet).[15]

    His lab grew quickly, but it shrank again following the onset of the

    Third International Eugenics Conference in New York has been credited with marking the end of Galtonism, and perhaps even eugenics itself, as a popular movement in the sciences. H. Bentley Glass, a contemporary observer and Ph.D. student of Muller's, would say Muller's speech "just about finished the activity of the Eugenics Society".[17] Muller told the assembled that eugenic ideals could no longer be achieved, because the capitalistic system produces the wrong motives of individual action, and he disdained the natures of the dominant class, and the type of society they were creating.[18]

    Work in Europe

    In September 1932, Muller moved to Berlin to work with the Russian expatriate geneticist

    Leningrad. There, at the Institute of Genetics, he imported the basic equipment for a Drosophila lab—including the flies—and set up shop. The institute was moved to Moscow in 1934, and Muller and his wife were divorced in 1935.[19]

    In the USSR, Muller supervised a large and productive lab, and organized work on medical genetics. Most of his work involved further explorations of genetics and radiation. There he completed his eugenics book, Out of the Night, the main ideas of which dated to 1910.[20] By 1936, however, Joseph Stalin's repressive policies and the rise of Lysenkoism was making the USSR an increasingly problematic place to live and work. Muller and many of the Russian genetics community did what they could to oppose Trofim Lysenko and his Larmarckian evolutionary theory, but Muller was soon forced to leave the Soviet Union after Stalin read a translation of his eugenics book and was "displeased by it, and...ordered an attack prepared against it."[21] By this time, Muller had already asked for a leave of absence. News of the Lysenko trials had reached the United States, and his son David was being raised there, after his divorce.[22] In the official declaration by the Institute, biological determinism was rejected: "The development of society is subject not to biological laws but to higher social laws. Attempts to spread to humanity the laws of the animal kingdom are an attempt to lower the human being to the level of beasts."[23]

    Muller, with about 250 strains of Drosophila, moved to University of Edinburgh in September 1937, after brief stays in Madrid and Paris. In 1938, with war on the horizon, he began looking for a permanent position back in the United States. He also began courting Dorothea "Thea" Kantorowicz, a German refugee; they were married in May 1939. The Seventh International Congress on Genetics was held in Edinburgh later that year; Muller wrote a "Geneticists' Manifesto"[24] in response to the question: "How could the world's population be improved most effectively genetically?" He also engaged in a debate with the perennial genetics gadfly Richard Goldschmidt over the existence of the gene, for which little direct physical evidence existed at the time.[25]

    Later career

    Muller's house in Bloomington, Indiana

    When Muller returned to the United States in 1940, he took an untenured research position at

    Indiana University.[26] Here, he lived in a Dutch Colonial Revival house in Bloomington's Vinegar Hill neighborhood.[27]

    In 1946, Muller was awarded the

    one gene-one enzyme hypothesis.[28] In Muller's Nobel Prize lecture, he argued that no threshold dose of radiation existed that did not produce mutagenesis, which led to the adoption of the linear no-threshold model of radiation on cancer risks.[29]

    The Nobel Prize, in the wake of the

    nuclear testing. Muller and many other scientists pursued an array of political activities to defuse the threat of nuclear war. With the Castle Bravo fallout controversy in 1954, the issue became even more urgent.[citation needed] In 1955, Muller was one of 11 prominent intellectuals to sign the Russell–Einstein Manifesto, the upshot of which was the first 1957 Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, which addressed the control of nuclear weapons.[30][31] He was a signatory (with many other scientists) of the 1958 petition to the United Nations, calling for an end to nuclear weapons testing, which was initiated by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling.[30]

    Muller's opinions on the effect of radiation on mutagenesis were used by Rachel Carson in her book Silent Spring,[32] however, his opinions have been criticized by some scientists; geneticist James F. Crow called Muller's view "alarmist" and wrote that it created in the public "an irrational fear of low-level radiation relative to other risks".[33][34] It has been argued that Muller's opinion was not supported by studies on the survivors of the atomic bombings, or by research on mice,[35] and that he ignored another study that contradicted the linear no-threshold model he supported, thereby affecting the formulation of policy that favored this model.[29]

    Muller was elected to the

    Darwin-Wallace Medal in 1958 and the Kimber Genetics Award of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, of which he was a member, in 1955.[38][39] He served as president of the American Humanist Association from 1956 to 1958.[40] The American Mathematical Society selected him as its Gibbs Lecturer for 1958.[41] He retired in 1964.[42] The Drosophila basic units of inheritance, their chromosomal arms, are named "Muller elements" in Muller's honor.[43]

    H. J. Muller and science fiction writer

    first cousins once removed; his father (Hermann J. Muller Sr.) and her father's mother (Johanna Muller Kroeber) were siblings, the children of Nicholas Müller, who immigrated to the United States in 1848, and at that time dropped the umlaut from his name. Another cousin was Herbert J. Muller, whose grandfather Otto was another son of Nicholas and a sibling of Hermann Sr. and Johanna.[44]

    Legacy

    In a recent retrospective article about Muller's contribution, James Haber[45] wrote as follows:

    Drosophila geneticist, Hermann Muller, envisioned the fundamental principles that such a molecule must have: to be auto-assembling and to be mutable but then again stable. He followed his prescient review of these properties with a remarkable prediction: learning about the hereditary material and its properties would not come from studying Drosophila, but from studying bacteria and their bacteriophages.

    Global policy

    He was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a

    Constitution for the Federation of Earth.[48]

    Personal life

    Muller had a daughter, Helen J. Muller, now a professor emerita at the

    University of Illinois and at New Mexico State University, died in 2008 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. David's mother was Jessie Jacobs Muller Offermann (1890–1954), Hermann's first wife. Helen's mother was Dorothea Kantorowicz Muller (1909–1986), Hermann's second wife, who came to the U.S. in 1940 as a German Jewish refugee.[3] He had a brief affair with Milly Bennett.[49]

    Notable former students
    Former postdoctoral fellows
    • George D. Snell
    Worked in lab as undergraduates

    Bibliography

    • Herman Joseph Muller, Modern Concept of Nature (SUNY Press, 1973).
      ISBN 0-87395-096-8
      .
    • Herman Joseph Muller, Man's Future Birthright (SUNY Press, 1973).
      ISBN 0-87395-097-6
      .
    • H. J. Muller, Out of the Night: A Biologist's View of the Future (Vanguard Press, 1935).
    • H. J. Muller, Studies in Genetics: The Selected Papers of H. J. Muller (Indiana University Press, 1962).

    See also

    References

    1. S2CID 61317945
      .
    2. ISBN 978-0-8014-1304-9
      .
    3. ^ a b c d Elof Axel Carlson (2009). "Hermann Joseph Muller 1890–1967" (PDF). National Academy of Sciences.
    4. ^ "Hermann J. Muller – Biographical". NobelPrice.org.
    5. ^ "A Biographical Memoir" (PDF). nasonline.org.
    6. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 17–37
    7. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 37–69
    8. ISBN 978-0-226-45063-6
      ..
    9. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 91–108
    10. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 109–119
    11. ^ Hamilton, Vivien (2016). "The Secrets of Life: Historian Luis Campos resurrects radium's role in early genetics research". Distillations. 2 (2): 44–45. Retrieved March 22, 2018.
    12. ISSN 0066-4197
      . Retrieved March 9, 2023.
    13. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 120–140
    14. ^ "The Eugenics Crusade What's Wrong with Perfect?". PBS. October 16, 2018. Retrieved November 4, 2018. There is no scientific basis for the conclusion that the socially lower class have genetically inferior intellectual equipment. Certain slum districts of our cities are factories for criminality among those who happen to be born in them. Under these circumstances, it is society, not the individual, which is the real criminal and which stands to be judged. Eugenics might yet perfect the human race, but only in a society consciously organized for the common good.
    15. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 141–164
    16. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 165–183
    17. ^ , Glass, Bentley. (Discussion) The American Journal of Human Genetics, Volume 6: pp.187-188. (1954).
    18. ^ Hardin, Garrett. Nature and Man's Fate, pp.228-229, Rinehart & Company, Inc., New York, Toronto
    19. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 184–203
    20. ^ H. J. Muller, Out of the Night: A Biologist's View of the Future (New York: Vangard, 1935), p. v.
    21. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 204–234; quotation from p 233, correspondence from Muller to Julian Huxley, March 9, 1937
    22. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, p. 335
    23. ^ Hardin, Garrett. Nature and Man's Fate, pp.217, Rinehart & Company, Inc., New York, Toronto
    24. ^ "The 'Geneticists Manifesto'," originally published in Journal of Heredity, 1939, 30:371–373; reprinted in H. J. Muller, Studies in Genetics: The Selected Papers of H. J. Muller (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 545–548.
    25. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 235–273
    26. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 274–288
    27. ^ Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory. City of Bloomington Interim Report. Bloomington: City of Bloomington, 2004-04, 90.
    28. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 304–318
    29. ^
      S2CID 4708210. Archived from the original
      (PDF) on August 2, 2017. Retrieved December 30, 2011.
    30. ^ a b John Bellamy Foster (2009). The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet, Monthly Review Press, New York, pp. 71–72.
    31. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 336–379.
    32. OCLC 934630161
      .
    33. S2CID 83821609
      .
    34. ^ "Calabrese says mistake led to adopting the LNT model in toxicology". Phys.org. January 23, 2017.
    35. ^ "Les leçons inattendues d'Hiroshima / Afis Science - Association française pour l'information scientifique". Afis Science - Association française pour l’information scientifique. Retrieved January 15, 2024.
    36. ^ "Hermann Joseph Muller". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. February 9, 2023. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
    37. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
    38. ^ "Hermann Muller". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved March 14, 2023.
    39. ^ "Kimber Genetics Award". National Academy of Sciences.
    40. ^ "Past AHA Presidents". American Humanist Association. July 16, 2023.
    41. MR 0095766
      .
    42. ^ "Hermann Muller and Mutations in Drosophila". U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Scientific and Technical Information. Archived from the original on February 2, 2015.
    43. PMID 30166445
      .
    44. ^ Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp. 10–11
    45. PMID 36843148
      .
    46. ^ "Letters from Thane Read asking Helen Keller to sign the World Constitution for world peace. 1961". Helen Keller Archive. American Foundation for the Blind. Retrieved July 1, 2023.
    47. ^ "Letter from World Constitution Coordinating Committee to Helen, enclosing current materials". Helen Keller Archive. American Foundation for the Blind. Retrieved July 3, 2023.
    48. ^ "Preparing earth constitution | Global Strategies & Solutions | The Encyclopedia of World Problems". The Encyclopedia of World Problems | Union of International Associations (UIA). Retrieved July 15, 2023.
    49. ISBN 978-1-107-10627-7
      . Retrieved January 16, 2020.

    External links


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