Читать книгу How to Construct Your Intellectual Pedigree - Elof Axel Carlson - Страница 12

Hermann Joseph Muller (or H. J. Muller for almost all his publications) was born in NYC in 1890 and died in Indianapolis in 1967. He received a scholarship and attended Columbia University for his undergraduate work in zoology. His most influential teacher during those undergraduate years was Edmund Beecher Wilson. He then got an MA at Cornell University and in 1912 returned to Columbia to work with Thomas Hunt Morgan. Muller was a founding member of the Fly Lab as Morgan’s group was called. They worked out many of the features of classical genetics. Muller’s PhD was on a phenomenon called coincidence and interference which was used to prepare accurate maps of genes on a chromosome. He taught at Rice Institute and then at the University of Texas where his most famous work, demonstrating that X-rays induced gene mutations took place. He helped establish the field of radiation genetics and worked on gene size and number, the functional classification of genes, and the time of origin of gene mutations. For this work he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1946. He was controversial in his efforts to promote radiation protection especially during the Cold War. He advocated positive eugenics but denounced the negative eugenics movement as racist, sexist, and based on false assumptions on how social status arises. Muller also taught in the USSR, at Edinburgh, at Amherst College, and at Indiana University. Elof Carlson was Muller’s student from 1953 to 1958. Among Muller’s other MA, PhD, and postdoctoral students are: Bentley Glass, Clarence P. Oliver, Wilson S. Stone, George Snell, Raissa Berg, Guido Pontecorvo, Charlotte Auerbach, Alexandra Prokofeyeva, S. P. Ray Chaudhuri, Daniel Raffel, Carlos Offermann, Irwin Oster, Abraham Schalet, Seymour Abrahamson, Wolfram Ostertag, Dale Wagoner, Shanta Iyengar, Rafael Falk, William Trout III, and Sara Frye. He also mentored Carl Sagan who spent a summer in Muller’s laboratory.