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

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.

I had the good fortune to study genetics with H. J. Muller at Indiana University from 1953 to 1958. My dissertation was on the structure of the dumpy locus, and along the way I induced numerous alleles of that gene using X rays and learned many of the skills of radiation genetics to detect gene mutations and chromosome breakage. But there was more gain in working 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 days a week, frequently coming back after dinner. The lab was his life. He was constantly reading, writing, collecting flies, designing “genetic schemes,” as he called them, for future experiments, and receiving feedback from us and his technicians. One might assume that with so much of his time spent on science he would have little time or interest in the world around him (Carlson 1982; Schwartz 2009). It was certainly true for many of us, as we immersed ourselves in our course work, our readings of journals, and our research, to lose track of what was going on in the world around us. I rarely read newspapers or popular periodicals during those days, and I recall one year when I was walking along the streets in Bloomington and saw the cracks in the sidewalk as resembling larvae in my vials and bottles of flies. I told myself I had to break this monopoly of science saturation and recover my appreciation for the humanities. I forced myself to read Stendahl's Charterhouse of Parma as a return to the benefits of a good novel. It was a struggle to do so after such a long lapse.

MULLER'S COMMITMENT TO SPEAKING OUT WAS LIFELONG

It was not until I worked on Muller's biography that I learned how much of his time was devoted to the social uses of science and the potential abuses against which he spoke out. I had just a glimpse of his dedication from looking at his publications, which we graduate students received as a package each year. Muller personally came to our desks to drop off this annual bundle of reprints of his articles. In those days there were no copy machines and sending out reports was considered a courtesy and a necessity. There were articles on science and values, on eugenics, on radiation protection, on science education, on the Lysenko controversy, on humanism, on religious attacks on evolution, and even on the pleasures of reading science fiction (Muller 1966; for selected social essays of Muller, see Muller 1973). In his class on “mutation and the gene,” Muller rarely talked politics or about the social implications of genetics. I thought his few statements on the fallout controversy in his course “radiation genetics” were just that—asides, because of the national press coverage of the controversies then abundant. The one exception was his dramatization of the fallout controversy, which he compared to a poisoning by daily doses of arsenic in an unsuspecting victim's coffee. “Was it murder?” he asked, when describing the much-delayed aftereffects of commercial, medical, and military radiation in our environment. Most of Muller's radiation course was devoted to standard science describing the progress in the field since its origins with the discovery of X rays in 1895. His weekly lab meeting with rare exceptions devoted our attention to new scientific articles that he read, experiments we might want to participate in, and progress on his own research. The rarity of his speaking out to us about the social aspects of science made me think that, overwhelmingly, Muller was an active scientist and only in a minor portion of his time was he involved in the applied social aspects of science.

From my readings of his correspondence in the Lilly Library as I prepared his biography, I learned that Muller was far more involved in social issues than I thought he would have been when he was a young scientist. This is the reverse of what I thought was the staging of a scientific career. I thought then (the 1950s) that older scientists were more prone to speak out on issues because they had a lifetime of scientific work to back up their beliefs. That was not so for Muller and many of his fellow students. Edgar Altenburg told me that as undergraduates they “traded in their 3 Rs for the 3 Ss—science, sex, and socialism.” Calvin Bridges found his social outlet in Greenwich Village by joining the socialist circle that included Theodore Dreiser.2 Muller and Altenburg (and future publisher Alfred Knopf) found special pleasure in the Peithologian Society at Columbia, which debated the issues of the day. Peithos was the goddess of persuasion. It was not until the mid and late 1960s that college student involvement became more common, in part motivated by having student lives on the line with the Vietnam War and a national draft, and in part motivated by the Peace Corps and the belief in the Kennedy credo that the individual can make a difference in changing the world.

THE SPARK AFFAIR

In Muller's early life, he shifted from socialism to bolshevism after the Russian revolution. Muller's sympathies for Communism were well known despite his efforts to keep them out of his courses and his laboratory work. At the University of Texas in Austin, he served as an advisor (underground because of its negative reputation in that era) for the National Student League, which the FBI designated as a Communist-front organization. Muller helped edit its newspaper, The Spark (named after Lenin's Iskra). He also wrote some of the articles but did not sign them. He recruited Altenburg to distribute copies of The Spark to students on the Rice campus. Carlos Offermann was an active member of what the FBI designated as Muller's “cell.” It did not help that Muller had two post-doctoral students from the USSR, Solomon Levit and Isador Agol, studying genetics in his laboratory. When I read the issue of The Spark that Muller edited (a copy is in the Lilly Library), I was struck by how innocuous it sounded by today's standards. It was a criticism of racism in the South and a defense of the Scottsboro African American men who had been falsely accused of raping a white woman. It was a criticism (this was 1932) of U. S. economic policy, which had led to the Depression, and it called for unemployment insurance and higher wages and unionization of jobs. The issue included a plea for more scholarships or public supported free education for college students. It also criticized what Eisenhower a generation later called the “industrial–military complex” that was often in favor of wars.

But in the 1930s the FBI kept an eye on Communist activity, which it considered a threat to American society. Offermann told me that Muller had considered joining the Communist Party but decided against it because he felt that he would be a more effective critic of American society if he were not a member, reasoning that membership would make anything he said suspect. Muller's socialist sympathies came from his father's side because the Mullers were on the losing end of the 1848 revolutions that crushed socialism and restored the power of monarchies in Europe. The Mullers had emigrated to the United States to start life anew.

Of course Muller was wrong not to sign the articles or list himself as an advisor. It was also wrong for Muller to violate the University of Texas faculty rules that all extracurricular activities by faculty had to be acknowledged by name in any printed form distributed on campus. But for Muller it was a “catch-22.” To sign such documents would have made him vulnerable to charges of subverting the students of the University of Texas. It would be like handing a confession to the trustees.

A TRAUMATIC YEAR OF PERSONAL AND SOCIAL UPHEAVALS

In 1932 Muller was fed up with life in the United States. In part this was an outcome of his own personality. He had a failing marriage with his first wife, a mathematician who was fired from the mathematics department at the University of Texas after she married Muller and became pregnant. In those days women were considered unfit mothers if they worked. He also had many conflicts with his colleagues who switched from other projects to fruit fly research after Muller's successful demonstration of X-ray-induced mutations in 1927. His colleagues had now become his competitors in his own field. But he also had been a critic of the anti-evolution movement that followed the Scopes trial. The Texas legislature narrowly defeated an attempt to impose an anti-evolution requirement in the biology classes of publicly supported institutions. Muller also created suspicion of his mental stability when he attempted suicide in that year. He saved the suicide note (also in the Lilly Library). It was crumpled and spattered with mud, but legible. In it he told Altenburg to take care of his last manuscript and to dispose of his books and papers. He also wanted to donate $1000 to “the Communist Party, USA.”3

Today we treat Muller's Communist sympathies with a hostile historical hindsight. But in 1932, Communism was seen as progressive by many liberal-minded people. In the United States, the Communist Party took a strong stand against racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, class bias, and the exploitation of the powerless. It also promoted many of the ideals that the Roosevelt Administration would soon adopt—including Social Security and unemployment insurance. The Communist Party advocated the formation of trade unions and the regulation of industry to provide shorter working hours, worker safety, health insurance, and paid vacations. In 1932 Communist governance was judged positively by many liberals as they witnessed Lenin's efforts to lift Russia from its Czarist past. It would be another 4 years before Stalin began his reign of terror. And it was not until the 1939 Hitler–Stalin nonaggression pact that secretly divided up Poland and allowed Germany to initiate an attack on Poland that American Communists felt betrayed and quit the Party in droves.

Muller's opportunity to go to Germany on a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1932 defused a growing criticism of Muller's political views in the local Austin, Texas, newspapers. Hoping to return to the University of Texas in 1936, Muller sounded out the prospects of returning to his position. He was told that he could do so if he faced a trial in the academic senate of violating the University's rules on faculty sponsorship of student groups. Muller chose to resign.

Muller did not complete his work at Timofeef-Ressovsky's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Hitler came to power in December 1932, and Nazi storm troopers roughed up the staff while searching for Communists and critics of Hitler's policies. Muller managed to sneak out a side exit. Muller chose, instead of returning to Texas, to accept an invitation from N. I. Vavilov to come to the USSR as a guest investigator. I do not doubt that this was seen by him as consistent with his desires. For many who supported Communism, the USSR was “the promised land.” Vavilov's position at the time was equivalent to that of the Secretary of Agriculture in the United States. He gave Muller an opportunity to set up, first in Leningrad and then in Moscow, a large research program to support his research in radiation genetics. That began to unravel in 1935 as an anti-genetics movement began to flourish and spread from Odessa throughout the USSR. It was initiated by Trofim D. Lysenko, a Ukrainian plant physiologist who promoted the belief that he could “shatter the heredity” of plants and retrain them with appropriate environments to assimilate a new heredity consistent with the training. He used a process called vernalization, using ice water to shock the heredity of winter wheat and convert it into spring wheat. He called this Michurinism (to honor Russia's Luther Burbank), but in the West it was called Lysenkoism and equated with a discredited Lamarckism (Roll-Hansen 2004).

MULLER'S ANTI-COMMUNISM AFTER THE LYSENKO AFFAIR

Much later in Muller's career—from 1948 to 1960 during the height of the Lysenko controversy—Muller attacked the destruction of genetics in the USSR. He spoke out against the spread of Lysenkoism to the Iron Curtain countries and to some of the universities in Europe, including France and England where socialist sympathies were high. This time Muller received criticism from the Left. They felt he had become a reactionary. Even many liberal U. S. geneticists thought that Muller was being too political in his criticisms. Muller accused Lysenko of being a charlatan and his followers of being gangsters “with guns in their hands.”4 His American and Western European critics felt that the issue of vernalization and “retraining” of heredity that Lysenko advocated should be solved on scientific grounds and not through polemical outbursts. Muller's feelings were strong and embittered because his students, Levit and Agol, were executed as “Trotskyites” during the 1938 Stalin purge and his closest friend there, Nicolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1939 and sent to Siberia to die in prison. Muller had strong feelings of loyalty, and he was not willing to pretend that Lysenkoism was a scientific debate. To Muller, it was a Communist Party-endorsed movement that had already determined by state fiat which course to steer for Russian agriculture and science.

The Spark affair and the Lysenko affair are examples of Muller's political beliefs and how he expressed them at the time. His 180° turnaround was based on his convictions about how genetics worked. In the case of his work at the University of Texas, Muller was a foe of the basic assumptions about genetics applied to society. He rejected the American eugenics movement, which was largely the work of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin were the chief advocates of that movement from about 1915 to the mid-1930s (Carlson 2001). In his paper “The dominance of economics over eugenics” at the Third International Conference on Eugenics held at the American Museum of Natural History, Muller (after spirited correspondence with Davenport who wanted to bar Muller's paper) denounced the American eugenics movement as sexist, racist, and based on spurious elitism (Muller 1933). It was not that Muller opposed eugenics as a whole. He championed it for those traits that would lead to more intelligent, healthier, more long-lived individuals with a sense of leadership and social conscience. When he went to the USSR at Vavilov's invitation in 1932, he completed his book Out of the Night. On Levit's advice, Muller had the manuscript translated into Russian and sent it with a 30-page letter to Stalin in 1936 (Muller 1936). Muller hoped that he could initiate a positive eugenics program in the USSR. Even if Lysenko had not started his movement to destroy classical genetics in the USSR, there were many Soviet geneticists who had a wary eye for eugenics. Hitler's Nazi Party had embraced eugenics under the name of race hygiene. While Muller denounced Nazi eugenics as vigorously as he had denounced the work of the American eugenics movement, that response was not sufficient for many Soviet intellectuals. They believed in environmental determinism more than in genetic determinism for human behavior and feared that lip service to gene–environment interaction would be subverted by eugenics measures to sterilize the alleged “unfit” or create genetic-based class distinctions.

Just as Communism is seen today through its failings and excesses against individual liberties, so too was eugenics before the end of the Second World War seen in a different light. In the 1920s almost all intellectuals, both conservative and liberal, applauded the eugenics movement. It was seen by those on the Left as progressive, with science having an opportunity to direct human evolution in a progressive direction—healthier children, more talented and intelligent children, and longer life expectancies—among those advocating positive eugenics such as Muller and Julian Huxley. Eugenics was seen as a necessary culling of “the unfit” by those who favored negative eugenics such as Davenport and Laughlin at Cold Spring Harbor's Eugenics Record Office. The endorsements came from American presidents (Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover) as well as noted journalists, college presidents, industrial leaders, and even social workers such as Margaret Sanger. It is also difficult for us to realize that before 1945 it was widely believed that the state was more important than the individual and that states had the right to institutionalize their failed citizens, sending them to asylums upon being declared insane, placing them in prisons upon conviction, putting them in poor houses when they were destitute, and deporting them if they were immigrants who were deemed troublemakers. In the United States, all of these practices were common in the 1880s to 1920s. The courts upheld the right of the state to vaccinate its citizens and the right of the state to sterilize its “unfit” people. Muller, like many in the eugenics movement, hoped that education would be the major path to the success of the eugenics movement. He believed that just as we learned to separate sexual activity from procreation by adopting, voluntarily, family planning, so too would we learn to separate the genetic heritage of the child from the process of procreation, using the sperm (or eggs) of those superior to ourselves. To Muller, this seemed no more unlikely than the adoption of Sanger's birth control movement, which rapidly spread across the United States and the rest of the World in a single generation.

THE RADIATION CONTROVERSY

One other controversy engulfed Muller after his return to the United States. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to a public awareness of atomic energy. As part of its attempt to restore a more positive name to applied physics, many physicists wanted a “peaceful atom.” They urged government support for the development of nuclear reactors to provide an environmentally friendly source of electric power. In the life sciences, the “peaceful atom” found its way into radioisotope studies of metabolism and pathology. It permitted the use of some isotopes to target cancers (especially radioactive iodine and thyroid tumors). Muller embraced these with enthusiasm. But he felt that care should be taken to keep the dose as low as possible for those who worked in nuclear power plants and that health-care providers should be more cautious in how they administered radiation and when they use radiation for human health procedures. Muller encountered resistance from physicians who felt that he was treading on their turf and had no medical background to do so. He encountered resistance from industries using radiation to detect metallic flaws in shipbuilding and other applications to industry. He encountered even more opposition from the designers of nuclear plants who felt that Muller's demands for emissions of low doses were too costly and unnecessary. Most of all, he found political opposition to his warning that a runaway arms race and continued escalation of tests of nuclear weapons on land or in the atmosphere was putting the entire world's population at risk (Muller 1968).

Muller's views were complex on the radiation controversy. He rejected Edward Teller's argument that low doses of radiation were harmless to human health. He also rejected Linus Pauling's views that nuclear weapons tests were harmful to the health of humanity. Muller argued instead that the doses from worldwide fallout were so low that the individual risks were negligible. Pauling had multiplied that low risk by the world's population in billions of people. This amounted to several thousand deaths from induced cancers and future genetic deaths from induced gene mutations. Muller countered that these unintended deaths would have to be accepted as the price to pay for military preparedness. He felt Teller erred in denying them and Pauling erred in stressing them without weighing them against the risks of nuclear war. Only when the megatonnage of hydrogen bombs reached startling proportions did Muller advocate a ban based on atmospheric testing.

HOW TO ASSESS MULLER'S SCIENTIFIC ACTIVISM

This list of Muller's involvement in social issues leaves me breathless and I can only admire the energy Muller must have summoned to rise to the occasion and speak out on social issues. Despite those thousands of hours devoted to social applications of science, Muller produced a prodigious number of articles on basic genetics. While all but a very few scientists suffer from not being remembered as generations move into new activities and new centuries, Muller is still recognized as the founder of radiation genetics. Most of his contributions to classical genetics (e.g., interference and coincidence in crossing over, dosage compensation, gene–character relations in variable traits, “Muller's ratchet” in evolutionary biology) are largely unassigned by personal name as are most contributions to science. For historians of science, Muller continues to generate interest because of his forceful personality and his numerous scientific disputes with colleagues.

It is difficult to assess the effect of going public on the enduring reputation of a scientist. Where that outreach is based on spurious elitism, as in the eugenics advocacy of Davenport, it seriously damaged Davenport's legacy as an objective scientist. J. B. S. Haldane, despite his occasionally outrageous personality, survived and outlasted his mistakes embracing Communism because his mathematical genetics was sound and important. I would also argue that Great Britain was more tolerant of Communist political criticism from its scientists than was the United States (Dronamraju 1985). Pauling continues to be respected for his contributions to molecular biology and basic chemistry. Even supporters of Nazi race hygiene programs and some of the participants in human experimentation in World War II, such as Adolph Butenandt (who received a Nobel laureate for his work on steroid hormone synthesis) or Hans Nachtsheim (who demonstrated haplo-diploidy for sex determination in bees) are barely blemished for their errors of judgment about how they participated in a war effort (Weiss 2006).5

The price Muller paid for sounding off on controversial issues was considerable. He was forced to resign from the University of Texas in 1936. He had to flee the USSR (by volunteering to fight in the Spanish Civil War) after publicly denouncing Lysenko at the December 1936 Lenin All-Union Agricultural Academies of Sciences meetings in Moscow. He spent the next 9 years trying to find a permanent job and was fortunate that Dean Fernandus Payne at Indiana University recruited him in 1945 and was willing to overlook his past errors and controversies. Muller was so despondent in 1945 while trying to find an academic position as he faced termination of his contract at Amherst that he wrote a letter to Barbara McClintock who told me that the letter was so 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 advocate of Soviet policies. He did not publically denounce Lysenkoism until 1948 at the International Congress of Genetics held in Stockholm. By that time Muller believed his students and colleagues there either had been arrested or shifted out of the field of genetics so speaking out about his experiences could not serve as further punishment for them. Until then, Muller believed that public criticism by him of Lysenkoism in the West would jeopardize the lives or careers of those who befriended him in Leningrad and Moscow.

Muller had the singular honor, if I can call it that, of being considered a double agent by Willard Libby, whom I interviewed and who admitted that he had banned Muller as a U. S. delegate to the Atoms for Peace Conference in Geneva in 1955. Libby believed that Muller was using the Lysenko affair to cover his mission to sabotage the U. S. nuclear weapons program. Muller was also suspected of being a double agent by the USSR after he resigned from the Soviet Academy of Sciences in protest over the Lysenko affair. They accused of him of coming to the USSR to sabotage their agricultural program! The irony of these suspicions and attributions was not lost on Muller. When J. T. Patterson wrote to Muller that he needed a good photo portrait of him for their University of Texas Hall of Fame, he replied, “I was glad to know that at last I was to be hung in Texas and not hanged there.”6

Thomas Morgan, Alfred Sturtevant, and Bridges did not have much to say in public on scientific issues of public concern, and none had a partisan political outlook on life as Muller did for most of his career. Muller would not be Muller if he had refrained from stating his beliefs that science mattered and deeply affected society. He told us that biology was the most subversive science because it dealt with the fundamentals of who we are, which was bound to offend both religion and the state. Muller paid many prices for his partisanship of causes and his criticisms of society. It was not just the difficulties of obtaining jobs when he needed them. Muller was seen by some of his contemporaries as a trouble maker, a drawback because universities like to avoid negative publicity. Muller was seen by some as contaminated by his eugenics beliefs. These critics did not see any difference between positive eugenics and negative eugenics because they assumed that to work both types of eugenics would have to be coercive. Muller certainly rejected that coercion, especially when he revived eugenics in the late 1950s as “germinal choice,” where the users would be the ones selecting sperm from sperm banks and should have as much information as possible in making an informed choice. I personally felt unpersuaded, the older I became, that most social traits had significant genetic underpinnings that merited a eugenics solution. But quite a few articles still appear today favoring such genetic interpretations of human behavior. Most historians would evaluate Muller's efforts at radiation protection to be his most successful political activism. But during the Cold War those who were fearful of Communism distrusted Muller's views on radiation protection and still saw him as a subversive. Muller was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and testified about his past. He sided with a “better dead than Red” outlook after the disappointment of his 4 years in the USSR (IU Daily Student 1953).7

When I finished writing the Muller biography, I was surprised by its challenge to my prior beliefs. I had originally thought that Muller's social applications of science would shift as he moved from Columbia University to the University of Texas and from there to Berlin, Moscow, Leningrad, Madrid, Edinburgh, Amherst, and Indiana University. They did not. Muller's views of eugenics were fairly consistent. As an undergraduate in 1911, he favored positive eugenics to bring about a human-directed evolution of an ever-more intelligent, healthy, caring, and talented humanity. He felt that way on his deathbed in 1967. What changed were his ideological and political beliefs. He shifted from his Unitarian upbringing to atheistic humanism. He shifted from Communism to fierce anti-Communism but at heart his social outlook remained liberal or socialist. What was even more of a surprise to me were the impacts of the shifts from country to country and campus to campus on his basic science. It was as if Muller were an insect undergoing metamorphosis and each new change in location led to a dumping of old problems to work on and the development of new approaches to his research. Among other accomplished geneticists, I would consider George Beadle's life similar to Muller's in the energizing effect that each shift to a new location had on his career (Berg and Singer 2003). Very few geneticists have shifted to a half dozen or more institutions in their careers, so the sample size is small for such comparisons on the effects on career output.

I have one final thought on the social applications of science. When I was at UCLA and headed the program that took invited speakers to dinner after their presentations, I accompanied Pauling during a 5-day stay when he gave a different lecture for each of 5 days. This was in the mid-1960s when the United States was engaged in the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement was in full swing. At one of these presentations, a graduate student asked Pauling what he would recommend to graduate students about getting involved in the anti-war movement. Pauling said “Do your dissertation. Get your Ph.D. Your voice will have more clout if you have your research credentials as an accomplished scientist. Let us older scientists take the criticism. There will always be crises later on where your voices can be heard.” There was a silence, almost like a disappointment that Pauling picked up, so he added a modification. “Of course, when the crisis is so significant, there may be times when participation in protest cannot be avoided.” That is the dilemma for every scientist with a concern about the welfare of society or how science is used in society. For Muller it was a lifetime commitment that required an abundant amount of energy, a very efficient use of time, and a capacity to endure despite withering criticism and setbacks.