Hermann Joseph Muller

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Hermann Joseph Muller bigraphy, stories - American biologist

Hermann Joseph Muller : biography

December 21, 1890 – April 5, 1967

Hermann Joseph Muller (or H. J. Muller) (December 21, 1890 – April 5, 1967) was an American geneticist, educator, and Nobel laureate best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation (X-ray mutagenesis) as well as his outspoken political beliefs. Muller frequently warned of the long-term dangers of radioactive fallout from nuclear war and nuclear testing, helping to raise public awareness in this area.

Former graduate students

  • H. Bentley Glass
  • C.P. Oliver
  • Wilson Stone
  • Elof Axel Carlson
  • Seymour Abrahamson
  • William Edgar Trout III
  • Dale Eugene Wagoner
  • Sara Helen Frye
  • Abraham P. Schalet
  • Irwin I. Oster
Former post-doctoral fellows
  • George D. Snell
Worked in lab as undergraduates
  • Carl Sagan
  • Margaret Edmondson
People who worked in his lab in Indiana [http
//www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/lilly/mss/subfile/mullerindiana.html]

Biography

Early life

Muller was born in New York City, the son of Frances (Lyons) and Hermann Joseph Muller, Sr., an artisan who worked with metals. He excelled in the public schools. His mother’s family was Jewish, and had come from Britain, while his father’s was Catholic and German.http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1946/muller-bio.html?print=1 As an adolescent, he attended a Unitarian church and considered himself a pantheist; in high school he became an atheist. 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 B.A. degree in 1910.Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 17-37

Muller remained at Columbia (the pre-eminent American zoology program at the time, thanks 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).Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 37-69

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.Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 70-90; for more on the culture and norms of the fly lab, see .

Career

In 1914, Julian Huxley offered Muller a position at the recently founded William Marsh Rice Institute, now Rice University; he hurried to complete his Ph.D. degree and moved to Houston for the beginning of the 1915-1916 academic year (his degree was issued in 1916). At Rice, Muller taught biology and continued Drosophila lab work. In 1918, he proposed an explanation for the dramatic discontinuous alterations in Oenothera larmarckiana that were the basis of Hugo de Vries’s theory of mutationism: "balanced lethals" allowed the accumulation of recessive mutations, and rare crossing over events resulted in the sudden expression of these hidden traits. In other words, de Vries’s experiments were explainable by the Mendelian-chromosome theory. Muller’s work was increasingly focused on mutation rate and 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.Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, pp 91-108