Strange Glow

by Timothy J Jorgensen

  Muller told Stalin:

  True we have today, rooted in the traditions from the bourgeois society of our past, the idea that our child must be derived from our own reproductive cells. … But with the gradual growth and understanding of the great social responsibilities and duties of reproduction, and of the separability [sic] of reproduction from the sexual act, these feelings will more and more come to be replaced by others equally strong and effective in furthering a high type of family.20

  He then went on to promise Stalin that such a program would convey rapid benefits:

  After 20 years, there should already be noteworthy results accruing for the benefit of the nation. And if at that time capitalism still exists beyond our borders, this vital wealth of youthful cadres, already strong through social and environmental means, but then supplemented even by means of genetics, could not fail to be of considerable advantage to our side.

  Muller included with his letter a copy of his recent book, Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future, which spelled out the details of his positive eugenics plan.21 Stalin read it, but was not pleased because the book was filled with Mendelian ideas. It seems that an anti-Mendelian geneticist, Trofim D. Lysenko (1898–1976), had Stalin’s ear and had convinced him that Mendelianism had anticommunist undertones.22 That Mendel himself was a Catholic monk was also seen as an affront to atheistic communism. Even putting these issues aside, the major problem with the book for the Soviets was that it argued against the possibility of inheriting characteristics acquired during life (e.g., exercising might make you stronger, but you wouldn’t have stronger offspring).23 The Soviets had drastically reformed their agricultural agenda and instituted programs to “teach” plants how to better acclimate to the Soviet Union’s harsh winters so they could produce hardier seeds for planting future crops. If acquired characteristics could not be inherited, it meant that the Soviet agricultural reforms were doomed to failure. Time would prove this to be so, but in the meantime the Soviets were sensitive to any criticism of their agricultural policies, even if made obliquely, as in Muller’s book. Because of this, Muller’s proposal for positive eugenics was dead in the water unless it could somehow be made compatible with genetic transmission of acquired characteristics, which it obviously could not. Muller’s letter and book had opened up a political can of worms that he was unable to close back up. His life in his new homeland would now become very precarious.

  Stalin condemned Muller’s book as being unfit for communist citizens and moved to suppress it. Fearing for his life, Muller left the Soviet Union in a hurry, traveled through different European countries for a couple of years, transporting 250 strains of fruit flies along with him, and ultimately returned penniless to the United States in 1939. He was finally offered an untenured position at Amherst College, where a heavy teaching load limited his research activities. Ultimately, he would find a long-term academic home at Indiana University, where he resumed his research in earnest.

  Communism had not created the utopia that Muller had foreseen. He found that communist social policy had polluted the science of genetics, largely through the efforts of Lysenko. While Lysenko and his fake genetics thrived under communism, Vavilov, Muller’s legitimate geneticist friend who had originally invited Muller to the Soviet Union, did not have the option of escaping to the United States when the crackdown on Mendelianism arrived. Instead, Vavilov became a marked man because of his “capitalist vision” of genetics and because of his close friendship with Muller. In 1940, while on a field trip to the Ukraine, Vavilov found that his research assistants had all vanished and were suddenly replaced by security police with a warrant for his arrest. Vavilov was accused of being a spy for the British and sentenced to death. Protests from scientific colleagues got his sentence reduced to 20 years of forced prison labor. He died in prison of malnutrition in 1943.24 Muller was devastated. He kept a picture of his friend Vavilov on his desk for the rest of his life.25

  Communism had politicized Mendelianism and perverted the science of genetics. Soon Muller would learn that genetics was equally capable of perverting social policy, and for that he would have to share some of the blame.

  While Muller had been in the Soviet Union, interest in genetics had risen in the United States. Although the public was largely ignorant of the Mendelian principles of inheritance, most educated people understood that genes were some type of biological component that allowed certain traits to be transmitted from one generation to the next. If a woman had a large nose, for example, just like her father’s, it was presumed that some gene was likely involved, and that the gene had been transmitted from father to daughter. Although the public was still fuzzy about exactly what genes were made of (as were the scientists), since the 1920s it had become well understood that the genes resided in the chromosomes of the father’s sperm and the mother’s egg.

  People also had some appreciation that there could be altered (mutated) forms of genes associated with certain distorted traits and these could be passed down from generation to generation. What little they did know about the inheritance of mutated genes and the effects on the progeny came largely from the ideas of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), the famous naturalist. Darwin’s theory on the evolution of species was based on the more likely survival of individuals carrying variations associated with favorable traits, and the likely demise of individuals carrying variations for unfavorable traits. Through this preferential selection of individuals carrying advantageous traits, Darwin argued that a species becomes more and more highly adapted to its environment with each new generation.

  Darwin became notorious in some quarters because his proposed biological mechanism for the creation of new species contradicted the literal account of creation in the Bible, and was, therefore, seen as being an affront to God’s role as creator of all things. Darwin published his theory in 1859, and it was hotly debated by the scientific and religious elites for some time. However, it didn’t really become socially controversial in the United States until questions arose about whether it was appropriate for Darwin’s ideas to be taught in public schools. These controversies ultimately resulted in highly publicized court dramas that were well covered by the newspapers in the 1920s, the most famous being the 1925 “Monkey Trial” of science teacher John Scopes (1900–1970), in Tennessee.26 With events like that, by the time Muller returned to America in 1939, hardly anyone had not heard about evolution, even if they didn’t have a very clear idea of what genes actually were. The public was also aware that most mutations were unfavorable, typically resulting in deformities, and it was these kinds of mutations that people feared in their own offspring.

  DARWIN’S KIN

  Further contributing to public consciousness of genetic defects was the growth in eugenic ideas, similar to the ones that Muller had promoted to the Soviets. Eugenics wasn’t original to Muller, he simply used his scientific credentials to promote it. The eugenics movement was actually the brainchild of Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton (1822–1911), who was interested in the implications of Darwin’s theory on the human condition. He concluded that the human species was no longer benefiting from the survival of the fittest because social practices allowed even the most physically unfit individuals to survive and reproduce, which permitted disadvantageous genes to be continually maintained within the human gene pool,27 rather than being selectively eliminated. This allegedly contributed to the genetic deterioration of the human species.

  As we’ve already seen, Muller was a disciple of eugenics. Not content to simply advance the basic science of genetics, he always sought to promote the practical implications of his work. The practical implications of Roentgen’s discovery of x-rays were readily apparent to everyone, scientist and nonscientist alike. The human relevance of discoveries in fruit fly genetics, however, was more obscure, and Muller saw eugenics as a vehicle through which his work might have much broader implications for mankind.

  Unfortunately, Muller was as naive about eugenics as about communism
. He promoted the concept of positive eugenics, where men with supposedly good genes would be encouraged to donate their sperm, and socially conscious women with purportedly good genetics would volunteer to be receptacles of the donations. He was convinced that once people realized that they were, in effect, the repositories of genetic information for future generations, they would choose reproductive behaviors that benefited, rather than harmed, their future descendants. But it was negative eugenics that was the more straightforward approach to achieving the same results. Muller acknowledged that negative eugenics would work equally well, yet he somehow thought this nefarious form of eugenics would never be employed in a “civilized” society. However, while positive eugenics required people’s voluntary and ongoing cooperation, negative eugenics could be irreversibly imposed upon people in the form of forced sterilizations, castrations, and even murder of the genetically undesirable. In retrospect, it’s hard to understand how Muller and other prominent scientists who promoted eugenics were so naive to think that negative eugenics would never be used.

  The reality was that the eugenic movement eventually sought to improve the human gene pool by actively preventing those with apparently bad genes from reproducing. In practice, eugenics fanatics promoted mandatory sterilization of anyone they judged genetically unfit.28 The Nazis used eugenic ideas as a rationalization not only for their purges against Jews and “Gypsies”—racial and ethnic groups they judged to be weak—but also for their persecution of Aryan Germans they considered genetically defective, such as people with mental disabilities. (Muller himself would have been seen as genetically unfit by the Nazis, since his mother was Jewish.) The Nazis took their eugenic policies well beyond forced sterilization,29 and used it as justification for all types of atrocities, including mass executions of the “unfit.”30

  Nazi atrocities made eugenics a dirty word, and the alleged science underlying it has been largely debunked as severely flawed,31 so few people talk about eugenics anymore. Nevertheless, the legacy of eugenics is that the common people who had witnessed its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s were now well aware of the notion that it was possible for gene pools to be contaminated with various mutations that contributed to deformities and disease. It was bad enough to think that these mutations could be introduced to the gene pool through random genetic errors, and more terrifying still to think that radiation could actually produce an added mutation burden that would be passed around forever, producing diseases and deformity in anyone unlucky enough to be randomly dealt a mutant joker from the deck of all available genes. Radiation’s mutagenic effects were thus seen as adding more jokers to the deck, and thereby increasing everyone’s probability of drawing a hand with a joker. It was believed that radiation, because of its alleged ability to pollute the human gene pool, put everyone at increased risk of producing defective offspring, even those who were never directly exposed to the radiation themselves.

  This was the mindset of the public in the years right after the atomic bombing of Japan. Everyone was expecting a breed of monsters to be released on society when the bomb victims reproduced, and Muller’s public statements were not allaying any of their fears.

  Winning the Nobel Prize in 1946 retrieved Muller from his relative obscurity and put him directly in the public eye. He leveraged his new fame. Putting his disreputable ventures into communism and eugenics behind him, he started telling the enamored public about the social implications of his work.32

  In March of 1949, Muller addressed the US Conference of Mayors in Washington, DC, and told them he expected more deaths in the aftermath of the atomic bombing in Japan than had occurred at the time of the bombings. He said this would be due to debilitating hereditary defects that would occur in subsequent generations, and that they could affect whole populations for thousands of years. In short, the atomic bombing of Japan had released a genetic calamity on the world. He warned: “With the increasing use of atomic energy, even for peacetime purposes, the problem will become very important of insuring that the human germ plasm [i.e., gene pool] … is effectively protected from this additional and potent source of permanent contamination [i.e., radiation].”33 Such a warning from a Nobel Prize winner gave people pause. But, alas, as he had been about communism and eugenics, Muller would be wrong about radiation too. His dire predictions made to the mayors, and sensationalized by every major news organizations, would never happen.

  Although he acknowledged that “many of the [mutation rates] are only very roughly known even for Drosophila (fruit flies), and we are admittedly extrapolating too far in applying this to man,” Muller nevertheless came up with some scary estimates of radiation-induced mutation rates for humans based on his fruit fly data. He combined his latest fruit fly findings, which suggested the existence of a phenomenon he called partial dominance even for recessive genes, with some equations of theoretical geneticist C. H. Danforth; these suggested a slow rate of elimination of deleterious mutations from a population, and Muller concluded that every newly arising mutation ultimately resulted in the death of at least one descendant. Since he also estimated an extremely high mutation rate of “one newly arisen mutant gene in ten germ cells,” the implications of excess mutations in the population caused by radiation exposure were enormous.

  Despite the fact that Muller acknowledged he was working from a “state of ignorance” about mutation rates in humans, he nonetheless felt there was a need to “remain on the safe side.” Other scientists were concerned that Muller’s extrapolation to humans went well beyond what could be gleaned from the fly data. The chairman of the Radiological Committee of the British Medical Council cautioned Muller: “It is a pity to apply the results of experiments on insects directly to man without any qualification. … In the absence of proof it would greatly strengthen the argument if a suitable proviso were inserted before the question of applicability to man was discussed.” But Muller refused to attach any caveats to his assertions regarding the allegedly high risk to humans of inheritable mutations. Rather, he retorted, “The burden of proof is on the other side, with those who wish to show that man is not like a fruit fly in these matters.”34

  In the absence of any data other than for fruit flies, it was impossible to challenge Muller’s assertions. The blathering back and forth about whether fly data could be equated with higher organisms amounted to no more than idle talk in the absence of data. Only data would settle the issue. Luckily data soon appeared, and it came from the Chicago Health Division of the Manhattan Project.

  OF MICE AND MEN

  In 1941, as a consequence of Muller’s 1927 findings with fruit flies and the concerns it raised, the Chicago Health Division of the Manhattan Project received a new secret assignment:35 to determine how much radiation a man could absorb daily, without increasing his chances of having abnormal children.36 The scientists then began an inheritable mutation project with mice to duplicate Muller’s radiation studies on fruit flies. The project, headed by Donald R. Charles, was located at the University of Rochester in New York State. Starting with over 5,000 male and 20,000 female mice, the researchers bred hundreds of thousands of offspring, examining each for 170 different traits that might be susceptible to mutation.37 When some deformity was noticed that might be a mutation, the affected mouse was further bred to determine whether that defect could be inherited by its offspring. If the defect was inheritable, it was counted as a bona fide inheritable mutation.

  What they found was not reassuring. The lowest dose tested was 130 mSv.38 The results showed that offspring of male mice that had been irradiated to 130 mSv and bred with unirradiated females had mutation rates approximately three times the natural background mutation rate. At the highest dose tested (2,380 mSv) there were nearly nine times as many radiation-induced mutations as background mutations. It was not possible to push doses much higher than this, because higher doses produced sterility. Ninefold was high, but it wasn’t nearly the 150-fold increase in mutations that Muller had seen at doses that nearly produced sterility in
fruit flies.

  The interpretation of these findings was that there was a practical limit to the level that mutations could be increased by radiation, and the ceiling for the mutation level was determined by the threshold dose for inducing sterility. Once sterility was induced, there would be no progeny, either normal or mutated.

  These findings in mice came out just as the Life Span Study (LSS) was planning the design for its study of inheritable mutations in atomic bomb survivors. Muller was asked to consult on the project. He and James V. Neel (1915–2000), the lead epidemiologist on the inheritable mutation project of the LSS, sat down and crunched the numbers with regard to what they might expect to find among atomic bomb survivors if mutation rates in humans were similar to those in mice.39 They estimated that there would be about 12,000 children born in Japan for which either one of both parents had been exposed to bomb radiation. And they estimated that the average dose for the exposed parent would be 3,000 mSv. (The real average dose turned out to be less than 300 mSv.) Using these assumptions, coupled with the mouse mutation rates, they estimated that between 36 and 72 children would be born with an abnormality due to the bombing. These would be in addition to the background inheritable mutations expected among a group of 12,000 children, which was about 120 (1%).

  This meant that they could expect to find only 192 children out of 12,000 children (1.6%), or less, with inheritable abnormalities in the bombed cities (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), versus 120 (1.0%) in the unbombed control city (Kure). Based on these numbers, Muller became skeptical that any epidemiological study, no matter how well designed, could detect such a small difference (1.6% versus 1.0%). He told the other scientists that the planned epidemiological study represented “a dangerous situation from the standpoint of the general and scientific public, who would be prone to assume that if no effect could be demonstrated, there must not have been one.”40 Since the human study would most likely find nothing, Muller suggested that a parallel study in animals be conducted, perhaps in monkeys, where all scientific parameters could be more tightly controlled. Such a study would have the higher sensitivity needed to detect this anticipated level of difference.