A Look at the Life of Geneticist Hermann J Muller - Part II

October 27, 2016 • by Nicole Elmer
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Left: Muller in his UT office, BIO 325. Right: Muller in 1922.


In addition, Muller had by now opted to sponsor the newspaper the UT National Student League wanted to distribute. It was called "The Spark" and represented the left-wing views of the League, but it would not be permitted at the university. Despite the possible repercussions he could face at the time, Muller opted to help get it into print and distributed. He was unaware that the FBI had had infiltrated the National Student League, and also had Muller under surveillance. The FBI made this involvement known to then President of UT Austin, who was only relieved to know Muller would be leaving soon for Berlin.

With all of this stress, by the end of 1932, Muller and his wife, Jessie, had agreed to a separation.

GONE FROM TEXAS

With these mounting pressures, Muller went overseas to Germany. However little he took Hitler seriously at first, Muller soon faced the reality of the danger of Nazi takeover when the Nazis vandalized the institute where Muller was working. Muller opted to accept an invitation to establish a genetics laboratory in the Soviet Union where interest in genetics was growing.

Muller's five years in the Soviet Union changed a lot for him. Free of teaching duties, he became senior geneticist at the Soviet Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Genetics in Leningrad and Moscow. He had a lot of support and built a lab to initiate a focus on gene function explored through the "position effect," the position effect implying that the functioning of a gene is to a certain extent at least dependent upon what other genes are in proximity. Muller felt an admiration of Soviet life and socialism, and even Jessie and their son David came to live in an attempt to reconcile the marriage.

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Muller at a masquerade party in Edinburgh, 1939. He is the pirate lying on his side at the very bottom. (Photo from the Lilly Library, Indiana University)

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Top left:  Muller with staff and a cat in the Fly Room at Indiana University (Photo from the Lilly Library, Indiana University) Bottom left: Muller and his son David in 1940. Right: Muller with wife Thea and daughter, Helen, around 1946. (Photo from the Lilly Library, Indiana University)

In 1964, Muller would suffer a severe heart attack that affected his health greatly. In the following years, his health would worsen, eventually leading him to the hospital for kidney failure on his 76th birthday. Muller’s condition did not improve, and he decided that he no longer wished to live, something he accomplished by refusing to eat. He died in Bloomington on April 5, 1967.  

Herman Muller was a scientist passionate about his work, and equally passionate about speaking out against the abuses of science. He helped usher the careers of many of his students on whom he made a deep impression. Muller also found himself directly involved in some of the most tumultuous times in history, from the era of the Great Depression and tolerance of racism in the US, to the anti-Semitism and book burnings of Nazi Germany, to Stalin's purges. Despite his troubled and intense life, Muller left a lasting impression on the field of genetics, much of this influential work happening while here on the UT campus.

INTERESTING TRIVIA

- UT’s first female Ph.D. in Zoology (1931), Bessie League, assisted in Muller's lab. Her office number in BIO was room 313.

- Muller and science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin are second cousins.

- Carl Sagan worked in Muller’s lab at Indiana University during the summer of 1954.

- At a time when air conditioning was decades away, the "constant temperature room" in UT’s "Fly Room" was kept at 69 degrees year round for raising Drosophila during the hot Austin summers.

- Muller’s granddaughter, Chandra Muller, is a professor in the Department of Sociology at UT.

- Muller’s son, David E. Muller (1924-2008), speaks frankly about his father in these video recordings on the Oral History Collection project from The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (http://library.cshl.edu/oralhistory/interview/scientific-experience/becoming-scientist/discussions-his-father/)

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