Hermann Muller

Welcome to a DNA history cache devoted to the talented and controversial American geneticist Hermann Muller. This is one in a series of puzzle caches honoring the largely underappreciated group of scientists whose work has led to world changing DNA discoveries. It starts all the way back with Gregor Mendel, who showed that “genes/traits” are passed on to offspring, one from mom and the other from dad. Four years after Gregor Mendel published his groundbreaking 1865 paper, Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher first isolated DNA from bloody hospital bandages. In 1882 Walther Flemming observed the movements of chromosomes during cell division. He called the process mitosis, coming from the Greek word for “thread.” Sadly Gregor’s paper was not an instant success. It took until the year 1900 for his work to be re-discovered. At this stage, scientists had formed no links between the thread-like substance DNA and Gregor’s “genes” passed down through reproduction.

Hermann Muller was born in 1890 in New York City. He excelled in public school, separating himself from his classmates early on. He entered Columbia University (then Columbia College) at the young age of 16. From the very beginning Hermann wanted to study biology. Like many others, he was inspired by the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in 1900. After receiving his bachelor's degree in 1910, he continued on with graduate school, also at Columbia. Two years after receiving his Bachelor's from columbia, he was offered a graduate position in Thomas Hunt Morgan’s lab, the famous “Fly Room.”

Hermann found himself in a hostile work environment, in which his boss Thomas Morgan openly favored his lab-mates Calvin Bridges and Alfred Sturtevant. Muller was favored the least. Morgan found Hermann shifty, quiet, and disengaged from the other members of the lab. Eventually, all three students would argue fiercely, unleashing a cycle of envy and destructiveness that would rage on through the genetics world for decades. Though not the favored student, Muller made contributions to Morgan’s groundbreaking discovery that genes reside at specific locations on chromosomes, confirming that genes exist in defined locations on specific chromosomes. However, hermann was left out of several MAJOR publications, vexing him to no end.

In 1914 Hermann took a position at the recently founded Rice University in Houston Texas. He continued his work in fruit flies, focusing on the rate of mutations. In 1918 Thomas Hunt Morgan convinced Muller to return to Columbia to teach and continue his research. The request was largely because Morgan found himself short-staffed due to so many of his students being drafted into World War I. Muller only worked at Columbia for two years before his contract ran out and he was not re-hired.

In 1920 Hermann took a position at the University of Texas in Austin, where his major contributions to genetics would take place. He had been studying mutants fruit flies since his time working for Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University. The biggest problem studying mutants was that they didn’t occur very often. Fly geneticists had to wait for an observable mutation to occur spontaneously. Muller decided that the fastest way to advance the understanding of fly genetics would be to find a way to speed up the production of mutants. It was in Texas that Hermann began experimenting with the effects of Radium and X-rays on the mutation rate in fruit flies. When he first tried exposing flies to x-rays, he killed all of the flies. He then tried lowering the amount of x-ray exposure. He exposed male flies to x-rays, then mated them with non x-rayed females. He then waited for the maggots to develop. The results were astounding.

“Even a cursory look confirmed a striking result: the newly born flies had accumulated mutations, dozens of them, perhaps hundreds. It was late at night, and the only person to receive the breaking news was a lone botanist working on the floor below. Each time Muller found a new mutant, he shouted down from the window, “I got another.” It had taken nearly three decades for Morgan and his team to collect about fifty fly mutants in New York. As the botanist noted, Muller had discovered nearly half that number in a single night.” (Mukherjee, 2016)

In 1926 Muller’s lab published a study showing that exposing living creatures to doses of radiation causes genetic mutations. Hermann’s publication proved that genes had to be made of matter. It was now clear that a “gene,” whatever it was, was capable of transmission and change in its chemical properties. Herman’s lab grew quickly, but then shrank during the great depression and stock market crash of 1929.

Herman Muller was in many ways an odd man. His social skills were clunky and off-putting. Furthermore, he had controversial political and social beliefs. He was openly anti-capitalism, even going so far as to help publish an illegal student newspaper named “The Spark” while at the University of Texas. He also was an early supporter of eugenics, the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.

Dr. Muller thought that if fly genes could be altered with small doses of radiation, then human genes could be changed as well. Hermann wasn’t alone, in fact eugenics had captivated many scientists during the 1920s. As an undergrad, Muller started a “Biological Society” to support eugenics. This concept of eugenics goes back to Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist who had read Charles Darwin’s famous book on the origins of species which was published in 1859 and focused on the sections describing artificial selection. E = 4 He conceived of a world where there was far less suffering and disease, where those negative traits would be selectively bred out of the population.

“The purpose of eugenics was to accelerate the selection of the well fitted over the ill-fitted, and the healthy over the sick. To achieve this, Galton proposed to selectively breed the strong. Marriage and reproduction he argued, could be controlled by compiling a human studbook, of sorts. Men and women would be selected from this “golden book” and bred to produce the best offspring, similar to livestock and farm crops.” (Mukherjee, 2016)

Hermann Muller’s support for eugenics decreased as he saw the disturbing rise of negative eugenics used in the United States. That’s right, even here in the United States! Indiana was the first state to pass a law allowing sterilization of inferior citizens in 1907, followed by Washington and California two years after. The Eugenics movement really took-off with the work of Harvard-trained zoologist Charles Davenport in 1910. He wrote a book called Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, that sparked a nationwide movement. By 1912 the Eugenics Record Office created confinement center “colonies” where the genetically unfit were imprisoned. These colonies included imprisoned epileptics, criminals, deaf-mutes, dwarfs, schizophrenics, manic depressives, and those suffering through eye, bone, and muscle defects. The idea was that by preventing people with “defective traits” from reproducing, future generations would not have to deal with the suffering and trauma of these diseases/disorders.

Muller began to question whether Sir Galton had made a fundamental error in his theory of eugenics. Hermann realized that positive eugenics was only possible in a society that had achieved complete equality. Any other society would used differences between gender, race, and religion to persecute others. Sure enough, this is what happened in the United States and horrifically in Nazi Germany.

During the early 1920s eight states had laws on the books that required sterilization of “inferior” citizens. In “Pennsylvania, Kansas, Idaho, Virginia, California.. there have been sterilized a considerable number of individuals.. many thousands of sterilization operations have been performed by surgeons in both private and institutional practice.” By 1924 citizens in many states could be legally detained and forcibly sterilized for many things, including feeblemindedness. The term feeblemindedness came in three variations: idiot, imbecile, and moron. That’s right! These three terms were supposed to be used as firmly defined categories for “cognitive disability.” In fact, they eventually were used as an excuse to remove undesirable groups from the population, including immigrants, orphans, prostitutes, vagrants, petty criminals, dyslexics, feminists, and rebellious adolescents. Eugenics was used as an excuse to remove pretty much anyone whose behavior or appearance was not considered socially acceptable.

“Feebleminded women were sent to the Virginia State Colony for confinement to ensure that they would not continue breeding and thereby contaminate the population with further morons and idiots” (Mukherjee, 2016). On March 29th 1924, the state of Virginia authorized the sterilization of the feebleminded. The first big eugenics court case involved a rebellious but intelligent young woman Carrie Buck. Despite being showing no cognitive disabilities, Carrie was placed in the Virginia state colony for the feebleminded. The case Buck vs. Bell made it all the way to the Supreme Court where in 1927, the court wrote the following decision upholding her forced sterilization.

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

Hermann Muller abandoned any hope that eugenics would be the means to an American disease-free eutopia. As Muller’s research in Texas shot him into the international spotlight, his personal life was falling apart. His marriage failed and his collaboration with his former boss Thomas Morgan and labmates at Columbia ended in bitter animosity. Hermann started receiving lots of local push-back for his openly socialist beliefs. The underground newspaper that Muller helped publish The Spark was promoting civil rights for African Americans, immigrant education, and voting rights for women, ideas which were taboo and demonized in Texas at the time. These factors left Hermann feeling more isolated and alienated than ever.

“Muller disappeared from his lab one morning and could not be found in his classroom. A search party of graduate students found him hours later, wandering the woods in the outskirts of Austin. He was walking in a daze, his clothes wrinkled from the drizzle of rain, his face splattered with mud, his shins scratched. He had swallowed a roll of barbiturates in an attempt to commit suicide, but had slept them off by a tree” (Mukherjee, 2016).

Following his failed suicide attempt, Muller felt he needed to escape the persecution he was feeling in the United States. He decided to move to Berlin Germany, a place more sympathetic to his socialist ideals. He first intended to move for short time to work with Russian geneticist Nnikolay Ressovsky, but ended up staying in Europe for 8 years. In 1932 Muller made the move to Germany, shipping thousands of strains of flies with him. He had no idea that the his new home-base of Berlin would soon become a tragic example of negative eugenics with the rise of Adolf Hitler and systematic murder of over 6 million jews by the Nazis.

Hermann fled the politics of Germany in 1933 to St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad) Russia. In Russia/USSR Muller briefly reconciled with his wife, but eventually divorced in 1935 when the Institute of Genetics was moved to Moscow. He ran a large lab in Moscow until 1936, when Joseph Stalin read a translation of Muller’s book and was displeased by it. In order to avoid possible murder or imprisonment, he fled to Endinburgh Scotland. By 1938 it was clear that war was on the horizon in Europe, so Muller frantically searched for a job back in the states. He accepted a position at Amherst college and moved to Massachusetts in 1940. L = 4 Muller continued to research mutation rates at Amherst until 1945, but his contract was not renewed. He took his final position at Indiana university a year later.

In 1946 Muller received the Nobel Prize for “the discovery that mutations can be induced by x-rays.” He received this award just after WWII was ended with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The entire world had become understandably fearful of nuclear war and radiation poisoning. Hermann became an outspoken opponent of the use of nuclear weapons. He was instrumental in the 1958 petition to the United Nations, which called for an end to nuclear weapons testing. Hermann Muller died of congestive heart failure in 1967.

NAB CD.EFG W10H JK.LMN

A = Hermann Muller fled Germany in 193__

B =

C= Muller worked at Amherst until 194__

D = Herman Died in 196__

E =

F = How many years did Hermann Muller spend in Europe?

G = Hermann began his work in the “Fly room” in 191__

H =

J = Gregor Mendel’s first and last academic paper was published i 186__ in an obscure journal.

K = Muller was 1__ years old when he began college at Columbia University.

L =

M = In 19__4 Muller took a position at Rice University in Houston Texas.

N =

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