Perspectives

Anecdotal, Historical and Critical Commentaries on Genetics

Speaking Out About the Social Implications of Science: The Uneven Legacy of H. J. Muller

Elof Axel Carlson1 Distinguished Teaching Professor, Emeritus, Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, New York 11794-5215

ABSTRACT H. J. Muller (1890–1967) was unusual as a scientist because he spoke out on numerous occasions about the uses and abuses of genetics in society. In this article, I follow Muller’s efforts to do so and the consequences that they had on his career, his productivity as a research scientist, and his reputation. The shifting sites of Muller’s work—which ranged from Columbia University to Texas, from Berlin to Moscow and Leningrad, from Madrid to Edinburgh, and from Amherst to Indiana University—made his activism unusual. Muller paid a price for his activism, and his reputation today is still marred by what most historians would consider risky judgments and reversals of position about genetics and society. My analysis is not a defense but rather an evaluation of the circumstances that led him to these positions and an analysis of the consequences of challenging society when scientists believe their science is being ignored or abused.

had the good fortune to study genetics with H. J. was walking along the streets in Bloomington and saw the I Muller at Indiana University from 1953 to 1958. My cracks in the sidewalk as resembling larvae in my vials and dissertation was on the structure of the dumpy locus, bottles of flies. I told myself I had to break this monopoly and along the way I induced numerous alleles of that of science saturation and recover my appreciation for the gene using X rays and learned many of the skills of humanities. I forced myself to read Stendahl’s Charter- radiation genetics to detect gene mutations and chro- house of Parma as a return to the benefits of a good novel. mosome breakage. But there was more gain in working It was a struggle to do so after such a long lapse. in Muller’s laboratory than the skills that he imparted. There was Muller’s commitment to science, which was both inspiring and scary. He was in the laboratory 7 MULLER’S COMMITMENT TO SPEAKING days a week, frequently coming back after dinner. The OUT WAS LIFELONG lab was his life. He was constantly reading, writing, It was not until I worked on Muller’s biography that I collecting flies, designing ‘‘genetic schemes,’’ as he learned how much of his time was devoted to the social called them, for future experiments, and receiving uses of science and the potential abuses against which feedback from us and his technicians. One might as- he spoke out. I had just a glimpse of his dedication from sume that with so much of his time spent on science he looking at his publications, which we graduate students would have little time or interest in the world around received as a package each year. Muller personally came him (Carlson 1982; Schwartz 2009). It was certainly to our desks to drop off this annual bundle of reprints of true for many of us, as we immersed ourselves in our his articles. In those days there were no copy machines course work, our readings of journals, and our re- and sending out reports was considered a courtesy and search, to lose track of what was going on in the world a necessity. There were articles on science and values, around us. I rarely read newspapers or popular pe- on eugenics, on radiation protection, on science edu- riodicals during those days, and I recall one year when I cation, on the Lysenko controversy, on humanism, on religious attacks on evolution, and even on the pleasures uller 1Address for correspondence: P. O. Box 8638, Bloomington, IN 47407- of reading science fiction (M 1966; for selected 8638. E-mail: [email protected] social essays of Muller, see Muller 1973). In his class

Genetics 187: 1–7 ( January 2011) 2 E. A. Carlson on ‘‘mutation and the gene,’’ Muller rarely talked pol- pathies for Communism were well known despite his itics or about the social implications of genetics. I efforts to keep them out of his courses and his laboratory thought his few statements on the fallout controversy work. At the University of Texas in Austin, he served as an in his course ‘‘radiation genetics’’ were just that—asides, advisor (underground because of its negative reputation because of the national press coverage of the contro- in that era) for the National Student League, which the versies then abundant. The one exception was his FBI designated as a Communist-front organization. dramatization of the fallout controversy, which he com- Muller helped edit its newspaper, The Spark (named after pared to a poisoning by daily doses of arsenic in an un- Lenin’s Iskra). He also wrote some of the articles but did suspecting victim’s coffee. ‘‘Was it murder?’’ he asked, not sign them. He recruited Altenburg to distribute when describing the much-delayed aftereffects of com- copies of The Spark to students on the Rice campus. mercial, medical, and military radiation in our environ- Carlos Offermann was an active member of what the FBI ment. Most of Muller’s radiation course was devoted to designated as Muller’s ‘‘cell.’’ It did not help that Muller standard science describing the progress in the field had two post-doctoral students from the USSR, Solomon since its origins with the discovery of X rays in 1895. His Levit and Isador Agol, studying genetics in his laboratory. weekly lab meeting with rare exceptions devoted our When I read the issue of The Spark that Muller edited attention to new scientific articles that he read, experi- (a copy is in the Lilly Library), I was struck by how ments we might want to participate in, and progress on innocuous it sounded by today’s standards. It was a his own research. The rarity of his speaking out to us criticism of racism in the South and a defense of the about the social aspects of science made me think that, Scottsboro African American men who had been falsely overwhelmingly, Muller was an active scientist and only accused of raping a white woman. It was a criticism (this in a minor portion of his time was he involved in the was 1932) of U. S. economic policy, which had led to the applied social aspects of science. Depression, and it called for unemployment insurance From my readings of his correspondence in the Lilly and higher wages and unionization of jobs. The issue Library as I prepared his biography, I learned that included a plea for more scholarships or public sup- Muller was far more involved in social issues than I ported free education for college students. It also crit- thought he would have been when he was a young icized what Eisenhower a generation later called the scientist. This is the reverse of what I thought was the ‘‘industrial–military complex’’ that was often in favor of staging of a scientific career. I thought then (the 1950s) wars. that older scientists were more prone to speak out on But in the 1930s the FBI kept an eye on Communist issues because they had a lifetime of scientific work to activity, which it considered a threat to American society. back up their beliefs. That was not so for Muller and Offermann told me that Muller had considered joining many of his fellow students. Edgar Altenburg told me the Communist Party but decided against it because he that as undergraduates they ‘‘traded in their 3 Rs for the felt that he would be a more effective critic of American 3 Ss—science, sex, and socialism.’’ Calvin Bridges found society if he were not a member, reasoning that member- his social outlet in Greenwich Village by joining the ship would make anything he said suspect. Muller’s socialist circle that included Theodore Dreiser.2 Muller socialist sympathies came from his father’s side because and Altenburg (and future publisher Alfred Knopf) the Mullers were on the losing end of the 1848 revo- found special pleasure in the Peithologian Society at lutions that crushed socialism and restored the power of Columbia, which debated the issues of the day. Peithos monarchies in Europe. The Mullers had emigrated to the was the goddess of persuasion. It was not until the mid United States to start life anew. and late 1960s that college student involvement became Of course Muller was wrong not to sign the articles more common, in part motivated by having student lives or list himself as an advisor. It was also wrong for on the line with the Vietnam War and a national draft, Muller to violate the University of Texas faculty rules and in part motivated by the Peace Corps and the belief that all extracurricular activities by faculty had to be in the Kennedy credo that the individual can make a acknowledged by name in any printed form distrib- difference in changing the world. uted on campus. But for Muller it was a ‘‘catch-22.’’ To sign such documents would have made him vulnerable THE SPARK AFFAIR to charges of subverting the students of the University of Texas. It would be like handing a confession to the In Muller’s early life, he shifted from socialism to trustees. bolshevism after the Russian revolution. Muller’s sym-

2When I was a Hill Foundation Visiting Professor at the University of A TRAUMATIC YEAR OF PERSONAL AND Minnesota, I spoke with Mark Graubard who obtained a master’s degree SOCIAL UPHEAVALS with Bridges. He told me that Dreiser was considering a novel about Bridges and the fly lab. I checked with the archivist of Dreiser’s articles In 1932 Muller was fed up with life in the United and was told that no such manuscript exists. It may have been an idea of Dreiser’s that never made it to paper. They kept up their friendship and States. In part this was an outcome of his own per- occasionally corresponded. sonality. He had a failing marriage with his first wife, a Perspectives 3 mathematician who was fired from the mathematics Muller did not complete his work at Timofeef-Ressovsky’s department at the University of Texas after she married Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Hitler came to power Muller and became pregnant. In those days women were in December 1932, and Nazi storm troopers roughed up considered unfit mothers if they worked. He also had the staff while searching for Communists and critics of many conflicts with his colleagues who switched from Hitler’s policies. Muller managed to sneak out a side other projects to fruit fly research after Muller’s success- exit. Muller chose, instead of returning to Texas, to ful demonstration of X-ray-induced mutations in 1927. accept an invitation from N. I. Vavilov to come to the His colleagues had now become his competitors in his USSR as a guest investigator. I do not doubt that this was own field. But he also had been a critic of the anti- seen by him as consistent with his desires. For many who evolution movement that followed the Scopes trial. supported Communism, the USSR was ‘‘the promised The Texas legislature narrowly defeated an attempt to land.’’ Vavilov’s position at the time was equivalent to impose an anti-evolution requirement in the biology that of the Secretary of Agriculture in the United States. classes of publicly supported institutions. Muller also He gave Muller an opportunity to set up, first in Lenin- created suspicion of his mental stability when he at- grad and then in Moscow, a large research program to tempted suicide in that year. He saved the suicide note support his research in radiation genetics. That began (also in the Lilly Library). It was crumpled and spattered to unravel in 1935 as an anti-genetics movement began with mud, but legible. In it he told Altenburg to take to flourish and spread from Odessa throughout the care of his last manuscript and to dispose of his books USSR. It was initiated by Trofim D. Lysenko, a Ukrainian and papers. He also wanted to donate $1000 to ‘‘the plantphysiologistwhopromotedthebeliefthathe Communist Party, USA.’’3 could ‘‘shatter the heredity’’ of plants and retrain them Today we treat Muller’s Communist sympathies with a with appropriate environments to assimilate a new here- hostile historical hindsight. But in 1932, Communism dity consistent with the training. He used a process called was seen as progressive by many liberal-minded people. vernalization, using ice water to shock the heredity of In the United States, the Communist Party took a strong winter wheat and convert it into spring wheat. He called stand against racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, class bias, this Michurinism (to honor Russia’s Luther Burbank), and the exploitation of the powerless. It also promoted but in the West it was called Lysenkoism and equated with many of the ideals that the Roosevelt Administration a discredited Lamarckism (Roll-Hansen 2004). would soon adopt—including Social Security and unemployment insurance. The Communist Party advocated the formation of trade unions and the regulation MULLER’S ANTI-COMMUNISM AFTER THE LYSENKO AFFAIR of industry to provide shorter working hours, worker safety, health insurance, and paid vacations. In 1932 Much later in Muller’s career—from 1948 to 1960 Communist governance was judged positively by many during the height of the Lysenko controversy—Muller liberals as they witnessed Lenin’s efforts to lift Russia attacked the destruction of genetics in the USSR. He from its Czarist past. It would be another 4 years before spoke out against the spread of Lysenkoism to the Iron Stalin began his reign of terror. And it was not until the Curtain countries and to some of the universities in 1939 Hitler–Stalin nonaggression pact that secretly Europe, including France and England where socialist divided up Poland and allowed Germany to initiate an sympathies were high. This time Muller received cri- attack on Poland that American Communists felt ticism from the Left. They felt he had become a betrayed and quit the Party in droves. reactionary. Even many liberal U. S. geneticists thought Muller’s opportunity to go to Germany on a Guggen- that Muller was being too political in his criticisms. heim Fellowship in 1932 defused a growing criticism of Muller accused Lysenko of being a charlatan and his Muller’s political views in the local Austin, Texas, news- followers of being gangsters ‘‘with guns in their papers. Hoping to return to the University of Texas in hands.’’4 HisAmericanandWesternEuropeancritics 1936, Muller sounded out the prospects of returning to felt that the issue of vernalization and ‘‘retraining’’ of his position. He was told that he could do so if he faced heredity that Lysenko advocated should be solved on a trial in the academic senate of violating the Univer- scientific grounds and not through polemical out- sity’s rules on faculty sponsorship of student groups. bursts. Muller’s feelings were strong and embittered Muller chose to resign. because his students, Levit and Agol, were executed as ‘‘Trotskyites’’ during the 1938 Stalin purge and his 3Muller wrote ‘‘OK’’ and ‘‘NoK’’ on the margins of his letters to closest friend there, Nicolai Vavilov, was arrested in Altenburg when Muller asked Edgar Altenburg to send his correspon- 1939 and sent to Siberia to die in prison. Muller had dence to me for the biography that I was preparing. Altenburg first asked Muller to edit the collection. Muller wanted everything to be preserved, strong feelings of loyalty, and he was not willing to and his notation was chiefly to protect colleagues’ personal privacy. While pretend that Lysenkoism was a scientific debate. To he put the ‘‘NoK’’ on his support for the Communist Party, he put ‘‘OK’’ for blaming his intended suicide on ‘‘Morgan and his gang of sycophants,’’ a very damning, if not paranoid reflection on his compe- 4Letter from H. J. Muller to E. Altenburg, October 12, 1948. Lilly tition with Sturtevant and Morgan. Library, Muller Archives, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 4 E. A. Carlson

Muller, it was a Communist Party-endorsed movement port and Laughlin at Cold Spring Harbor’s Eugenics that had already determined by state fiat which course to Record Office. The endorsements came from Ameri- steer for Russian agriculture and science. can presidents (Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover) as The Spark affair and the Lysenko affair are examples well as noted journalists, college presidents, industrial of Muller’s political beliefs and how he expressed them leaders, and even social workers such as Margaret at the time. His 180° turnaround was based on his Sanger. It is also difficult for us to realize that before convictions about how genetics worked. In the case of 1945 it was widely believed that the state was more his work at the University of Texas, Muller was a foe of important than the individual and that states had the the basic assumptions about genetics applied to society. right to institutionalize their failed citizens, sending He rejected the American eugenics movement, which them to asylums upon being declared insane, placing was largely the work of the Eugenics Record Office at them in prisons upon conviction, putting them in poor the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. houses when they were destitute, and deporting them if Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin were the chief they were immigrants who were deemed trouble- advocates of that movement from about 1915 to the makers. In the United States, all of these practices were mid-1930s (Carlson 2001). In his paper ‘‘The domi- common in the 1880s to 1920s. The courts upheld nance of economics over eugenics’’ at the Third In- the right of the state to vaccinate its citizens and the ternational Conference on Eugenics held at the right of the state to sterilize its ‘‘unfit’’ people. Muller, American Museum of Natural History, Muller (after like many in the eugenics movement, hoped that edu- spirited correspondence with Davenport who wanted to cation would be the major path to the success of the bar Muller’s paper) denounced the American eugenics eugenics movement. He believed that just as we learned movement as sexist, racist, and based on spurious elitism to separate sexual activity from procreation by adopt- (Muller 1933). It was not that Muller opposed eugen- ing, voluntarily, family planning, so too would we learn ics as a whole. He championed it for those traits that to separate the genetic heritage of the child from the would lead to more intelligent, healthier, more long- process of procreation, using the sperm (or eggs) of lived individuals with a sense of leadership and social those superior to ourselves. To Muller, this seemed no conscience. When he went to the USSR at Vavilov’s in- more unlikely than the adoption of Sanger’s birth vitation in 1932, he completed his book Out of the Night. control movement, which rapidly spread across the On Levit’s advice, Muller had the manuscript translated United States and the rest of the World in a single into Russian and sent it with a 30-page letter to Stalin in generation. 1936 (Muller 1936). Muller hoped that he could initiate a positive eugenics program in the USSR. Even if THE RADIATION CONTROVERSY Lysenko had not started his movement to destroy classical genetics in the USSR, there were many Soviet One other controversy engulfed Muller after his geneticists who had a wary eye for eugenics. Hitler’s Nazi return to the United States. The dropping of atomic Party had embraced eugenics under the name of race bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to a public hygiene. While Muller denounced Nazi eugenics as awareness of atomic energy. As part of its attempt to vigorously as he had denounced the work of the restore a more positive name to applied physics, many American eugenics movement, that response was not physicists wanted a ‘‘peaceful atom.’’ They urged gov- sufficient for many Soviet intellectuals. They believed in ernment support for the development of nuclear environmental determinism more than in genetic de- reactors to provide an environmentally friendly source terminism for human behavior and feared that lip service of electric power. In the life sciences, the ‘‘peaceful to gene–environment interaction would be subverted atom’’ found its way into radioisotope studies of metab- by eugenics measures to sterilize the alleged ‘‘unfit’’ or olism and pathology. It permitted the use of some create genetic-based class distinctions. isotopes to target cancers (especially radioactive iodine Just as Communism is seen today through its failings and thyroid tumors). Muller embraced these with enthu- and excesses against individual liberties, so too was siasm. But he felt that care should be taken to keep the eugenics before the end of the Second World War seen dose as low as possible for those who worked in nuclear in a different light. In the 1920s almost all intellectuals, power plants and that health-care providers should be both conservative and liberal, applauded the eugenics more cautious in how they administered radiation and movement. It was seen by those on the Left as pro- when they use radiation for human health procedures. gressive, with science having an opportunity to direct Muller encountered resistance from physicians who felt human evolution in a progressive direction—healthier that he was treading on their turf and had no medical children, more talented and intelligent children, and background to do so. He encountered resistance from longer life expectancies—among those advocating industries using radiation to detect metallic flaws in positive eugenics such as Muller and Julian Huxley. shipbuilding and other applications to industry. He Eugenics was seen as a necessary culling of ‘‘the unfit’’ encountered even more opposition from the designers by those who favored negative eugenics such as Daven- of nuclear plants who felt that Muller’s demands for Perspectives 5 emissions of low doses were too costly and unnecessary. continues to be respected for his contributions to Most of all, he found political opposition to his warning molecular biology and basic chemistry. Even supporters that a runaway arms race and continued escalation of of Nazi race hygiene programs and some of the par- tests of nuclear weapons on land or in the atmosphere ticipants in human experimentation in World War II, was putting the entire world’s population at risk (Muller such as Adolph Butenandt (who received a Nobel 1968). laureate for his work on steroid hormone synthesis) or Muller’s views were complex on the radiation contro- Hans Nachtsheim (who demonstrated haplo-diploidy versy. He rejected Edward Teller’s argument that low for sex determination in bees) are barely blemished for doses of radiation were harmless to human health. He their errors of judgment about how they participated in also rejected Linus Pauling’s views that nuclear weapons a war effort (Weiss 2006).5 tests were harmful to the health of humanity. Muller The price Muller paid for sounding off on controver- argued instead that the doses from worldwide fallout sial issues was considerable. He was forced to resign were so low that the individual risks were negligible. from the University of Texas in 1936. He had to flee the Pauling had multiplied that low risk by the world’s USSR (by volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War) population in billions of people. This amounted to after publicly denouncing Lysenko at the December several thousand deaths from induced cancers and 1936 Lenin All-Union Agricultural Academies of Scien- future genetic deaths from induced gene mutations. ces meetings in Moscow. He spent the next 9 years trying Muller countered that these unintended deaths would to find a permanent job and was fortunate that Dean have to be accepted as the price to pay for military Fernandus Payne at Indiana University recruited him in preparedness. He felt Teller erred in denying them and 1945 and was willing to overlook his past errors and Pauling erred in stressing them without weighing them controversies. Muller was so despondent in 1945 while against the risks of nuclear war. Only when the mega- trying to find an academic position as he faced termi- tonnage of hydrogen bombs reached startling propor- nation of his contract at Amherst that he wrote a letter to tions did Muller advocate a ban based on atmospheric Barbara McClintock who told me that the letter was so testing. alarming in its despair that she burned it. ‘‘Did I do right?’’ she asked me. Muller’s difficulty in finding employment included the belief that he was still an advo- HOW TO ASSESS MULLER’S SCIENTIFIC ACTIVISM cate of Soviet policies. He did not publically denounce This list of Muller’s involvement in social issues leaves Lysenkoism until 1948 at the International Congress of me breathless and I can only admire the energy Muller Genetics held in Stockholm. By that time Muller be- must have summoned to rise to the occasion and speak lieved his students and colleagues there either had out on social issues. Despite those thousands of hours been arrested or shifted out of the field of genetics so devoted to social applications of science, Muller pro- speaking out about his experiences could not serve as duced a prodigious number of articles on basic genetics. further punishment for them. Until then, Muller be- While all but a very few scientists suffer from not being lieved that public criticism by him of Lysenkoism in the remembered as generations move into new activities West would jeopardize the lives or careers of those who and new centuries, Muller is still recognized as the befriended him in Leningrad and Moscow. founder of radiation genetics. Most of his contributions Muller had the singular honor, if I can call it that, of to classical genetics (e.g., interference and coincidence being considered a double agent by Willard Libby, in crossing over, dosage compensation, gene–character whom I interviewed and who admitted that he had relations in variable traits, ‘‘Muller’s ratchet’’ in evolu- banned Muller as a U. S. delegate to the Atoms for Peace tionary biology) are largely unassigned by personal Conference in Geneva in 1955. Libby believed that name as are most contributions to science. For histor- Muller was using the Lysenko affair to cover his mission ians of science, Muller continues to generate interest to sabotage the U. S. nuclear weapons program. Muller because of his forceful personality and his numerous was also suspected of being a double agent by the USSR scientific disputes with colleagues. after he resigned from the Soviet Academy of Sciences It is difficult to assess the effect of going public on the in protest over the Lysenko affair. They accused of him enduring reputation of a scientist. Where that outreach of coming to the USSR to sabotage their agricultural is based on spurious elitism, as in the eugenics advocacy program! The irony of these suspicions and attributions of Davenport, it seriously damaged Davenport’s legacy was not lost on Muller. When J. T. Patterson wrote to as an objective scientist. J. B. S. Haldane, despite his occasionally outrageous personality, survived and out- 5Butenandt was appointed to head the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute that lasted his mistakes embracing Communism because his funded the experiments of Otmar von Verschuer and Josef Mengele on mathematical genetics was sound and important. I twins at Auschwitz. Butenandt defended Verschuer, who was acquitted at would also argue that Great Britain was more tolerant his trial. Hans Nachtsheim was accused of participating in studies of high- altitude illness using pressure chambers on prisoners at Dachau. He was of Communist political criticism from its scientists than never indicted on charges of war crimes and shifted to human genetics was the United States (Dronamraju 1985). Pauling after the war. 6 E. A. Carlson

Muller that he needed a good photo portrait of him for eugenics were fairly consistent. As an undergraduate in their University of Texas Hall of Fame, he replied, ‘‘I was 1911, he favored positive eugenics to bring about a glad to know that at last I was to be hung in Texas and human-directed evolution of an ever-more intelligent, not hanged there.’’6 healthy, caring, and talented humanity. He felt that way Thomas Morgan, Alfred Sturtevant, and Bridges did on his deathbed in 1967. What changed were his not have much to say in public on scientific issues of ideological and political beliefs. He shifted from his public concern, and none had a partisan political Unitarian upbringing to atheistic humanism. He shifted outlook on life as Muller did for most of his career. from Communism to fierce anti-Communism but at Muller would not be Muller if he had refrained from heart his social outlook remained liberal or socialist. stating his beliefs that science mattered and deeply What was even more of a surprise to me were the impacts affected society. He told us that biology was the most of the shifts from country to country and campus to subversive science because it dealt with the fundamen- campus on his basic science. It was as if Muller were an tals of who we are, which was bound to offend both insect undergoing metamorphosis and each new religion and the state. Muller paid many prices for his change in location led to a dumping of old problems partisanship of causes and his criticisms of society. It was to work on and the development of new approaches to not just the difficulties of obtaining jobs when he his research. Among other accomplished geneticists, needed them. Muller was seen by some of his contem- I would consider George Beadle’s life similar to poraries as a trouble maker, a drawback because Muller’s in the energizing effect that each shift to a universities like to avoid negative publicity. Muller was new location had on his career (Berg and Singer 2003). seen by some as contaminated by his eugenics beliefs. Very few geneticists have shifted to a half dozen or more These critics did not see any difference between positive institutions in their careers, so the sample size is small for eugenics and negative eugenics because they assumed such comparisons on the effects on career output. that to work both types of eugenics would have to be I have one final thought on the social applications of coercive. Muller certainly rejected that coercion, espe- science. When I was at UCLA and headed the program cially when he revived eugenics in the late 1950s as that took invited speakers to dinner after their presen- ‘‘germinal choice,’’ where the users would be the ones tations, I accompanied Pauling during a 5-day stay when selecting sperm from sperm banks and should have as he gave a different lecture for each of 5 days. This was much information as possible in making an informed in the mid-1960s when the United States was engaged in choice. I personally felt unpersuaded, the older I the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement was in became, that most social traits had significant genetic full swing. At one of these presentations, a graduate underpinnings that merited a eugenics solution. But student asked Pauling what he would recommend to quite a few articles still appear today favoring such graduate students about getting involved in the anti-war genetic interpretations of human behavior. Most histor- movement. Pauling said ‘‘Do your dissertation. Get your ians would evaluate Muller’s efforts at radiation pro- Ph.D. Your voice will have more clout if you have your tection to be his most successful political activism. But research credentials as an accomplished scientist. Let us during the Cold War those who were fearful of Com- older scientists take the criticism. There will always be munism distrusted Muller’s views on radiation protec- crises later on where your voices can be heard.’’ There tion and still saw him as a subversive. Muller was called was a silence, almost like a disappointment that Pauling before the House Committee on Un-American Activities picked up, so he added a modification. ‘‘Of course, and testified about his past. He sided with a ‘‘better dead when the crisis is so significant, there may be times when than Red’’ outlook after the disappointment of his 4 participation in protest cannot be avoided.’’ That is the years in the USSR (IU Daily Student 1953).7 dilemma for every scientist with a concern about the When I finished writing the Muller biography, I was welfare of society or how science is used in society. For surprised by its challenge to my prior beliefs. I had Muller it was a lifetime commitment that required an originally thought that Muller’s social applications of abundant amount of energy, a very efficient use of time, science would shift as he moved from Columbia Univer- and a capacity to endure despite withering criticism and sity to the University of Texas and from there to Berlin, setbacks. Moscow, Leningrad, Madrid, Edinburgh, Amherst, and Indiana University. They did not. Muller’s views of LITERATURE CITED Berg,P., and M. Singer, 2003 George Beadle, An Uncommon Farmer: The Emergence of Genetics in the 20th Century. Cold Spring Harbor 6Letter from H. J. Muller to Carl Hartman, October 2, 1954. Lilly Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, NY. Library, Muller Archives, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Brown, J. 1953 Teach youth to recognize Communist threat: 7I tried to get the actual testimony and record of the session, but it may Muller. Indiana Daily Student LXXXVII No. 108 z175: 1–2. not be available to the public. I had my brother-in-law, a congressman, try Carlson,E.A., 1982 Genes, Radiation, and Society: The Life and Work of togetitformein1980andhecouldnot.Muller’saccountofitwas H. J. Muller. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY. reported in the Indiana Daily Student on March 17, 1953. The hearing Carlson, E. A., 2001 The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea. Cold Spring was March 14, 1953. Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, NY. Perspectives 7

Dronamraju,K., 1985 The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane. Aber- Muller, H. J., 1973 Man’s Future Birthright: Essays on Science and Humanity, deen University Press, Aberdeen, Scotland. edited by E. Carlson. State University of New York Press, Albany. Muller, H. J., 1933 The dominance of economics over eugenics. Roll-Hansen,N., 2004 The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science. Hu- Sci. Mon. 37: 40–47. manity Books, Amherst, NY. Muller, H. J., 1936 Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future. Schwartz,J., 2009 In Pursuit of the Gene: From Darwin to DNA. Har- Vanguard Press, New York. vard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Muller, H. J., 1966 Studies in Genetics. Indiana University Press, Weiss, S. F., 2006 Human genetics and politics as mutually beneﬁ- Bloomington. cial resources: the case of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for An- Muller, H. J., 1968 The Radiation Danger. Colorado Quarterly 6: thropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics during the Third 229–254. Reich. J. Hist. Biol. 39: 41–88.