Muller, H. J. 1890-1967.

Geneticist and Nobel prize laureate. Muller was born and schooled in New York City, receiving an A.B., M.A. and in 1915 his Ph.D. from Columbia University. His first faculty appointment was at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He then accepted a two-year appointment as instructor at Columbia hoping it would lead to a permanent position. In 1920, however, Muller accepted an offer from the University of Texas. In Austin his experiments on fruit flies ( Drosophila ) first showed that exposure to radiation caused mutation in living organisms. This work would earn Muller the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Muller applied for and won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1932 and left the U.S. in September to spend a year at the only Drosophila laboratory in Europe which was doing parallel work, Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Brain Research. As the Nazi take over of the German government, the persecution of Jews, and the burning of forbidden books increased through 1933, Muller accepted a position at the Institute of Genetics in Leningrad. He had been elected a corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, under whose auspices and budget basic research was carried out in the USSR, and in Leningrad for the first time he had an appointment as a full-time research scientist without teaching responsibilities. In December, 1934, he and his research group moved to Moscow. By 1936 Stalin was beginning his reign of terror with hundreds of arrests and executions, including prominent scientists who were falsely accused of Trotskyism. Stalin began influencing the outcome of scientific research and bitter disagreements with Trofim D. Lysenko, whose theories on genetics reflected party line politics, pushed Muller to enlist in the Spanish Republican cause as the best way of getting out of the Soviet Union. Although he worked for just eight weeks in Madrid during the spring of 1937, his service provided the immunity he needed for a permanent departure from the USSR in good standing and with the least damage to the reputations of his Russian colleagues.

...