soci 138

Chapter Title: How the Geneticists Learned to Start Worrying and Love Mutation Book Title: The Science of Human Perfection

Book Subtitle: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine

Book Author(s): NATHANIEL COMFORT

Published by: Yale University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt32bqd2.9

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130

5

How the Geneticists Learned to Start

Worrying and Love Mutation

on august 23, 1939, germany and the Soviet Union signed a nonaggres-

sion pact—and nearly two hundred Americans and four hundred other

scientists convened for the Seventh International Congress of Genetics in

Edinburgh. It was to have been held two years earlier, in Moscow, but it had

been delayed by politics dimly understood at the time. It was rescheduled

for the summer of 1938, delayed again, and planned for 1939. Soviet offi-

cials refused to sanction the meeting. Mendelian genetics was becoming

highly politicized in a climate of strong Communist Party support for

Trofim Lysenko, the agronomist who claimed to have created new species of

wheat in a single season through the special treatment of “vernalization.”

Mendelian genetics said it couldn’t be so, and so Mendelian genetics became

a political threat. Hermann Joseph Muller, the brilliant but prickly

Drosophila geneticist, had been working in the Soviet Union and had been

much enamored of the Soviet system—he had been on the original orga-

nizing committee for 1937—but as a staunch Mendelian he had run afoul of

Stalin and fled to Edinburgh in 1937. Now F. A. E. Crew, director of the

Institute of Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, offered to step

in and host the meeting. Muller would help him organize. By the time the

Congress at last came together, the world was on the brink of war. Anxiety

suffused the congress from the outset.1

One of the most memorable events of the meeting had a Marxist flavor.

Before the meeting, Science Service, the Washington, DC–based science

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 131

education and lobbying group, posed to the delegation the fundamental

problem of eugenics: “How could the world’s population be improved most

effectively genetically?” In response, Muller drafted a “geneticists’ mani-

festo,” a scientific counterpart to the revolutionary socialist documents he

found so romantic. Human genetic improvement, it said, would be accom-

plished through inbreeding and selection, carefully managed and carried

out in a context of a much more egalitarian and economically secure social

system, better reproductive technology for birth control and sterilization, an

educated population willing to improve itself and in agreement on the

direction that improvement should take, and much deeper knowledge of

the mechanisms of heredity. Muller’s fellow leftist biologists, including

J. B. S. Haldane, Lancelot Hogben, Julian Huxley, Herbert Spencer

Jennings, and the biochemist Joseph Needham, were glad to sign on to the

cause. Also on the list of signatories were Bronson Price, a population genet-

icist with the Census Bureau and a friend of Muller’s, as well as a fellow

Soviet sympathizer; Arthur Steinberg, a former student of L. C. Dunn’s; the

distinguished population geneticist Harold Plough; Caryl Haskins, the ento-

mologist, human-geneticist, and later president of the Carnegie Institution

of Washington; and the physician George P. Child.2

As the weeklong congress wore on, focusing on science became increas-

ingly difficult. Steinberg later wrote that buildings were sandbagged and gas

masks were handed out to the delegates. The French and the Germans left

the meeting early. Sections of the meeting were reorganized to accommo-

date a truncated timetable and abbreviated roster. Finally, it became obvious

that everyone had to leave. Many British and American delegates booked

reservations on the British passenger liner Athenia. The ship left Glasgow

on August 31, stopped in Liverpool, and sailed for New York on September 1,

the day the Germans invaded Poland. On September 2 it was torpedoed

260 miles off the Hebrides, the first ship sunk in the Second World War.

Several more Americans had found passage on the freighter City of Flint,

hastily outfitted for passengers. When the Athenia went down, the City of

Flint was near; it changed course and returned to fish survivors out of the

cold, gray Atlantic. Among the waterlogged and shivering scientists hauled

aboard were Bronson Price and Charles Cotterman. On ship, they saw

among their hosts Steinberg, Plough, and the young researcher who would,

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132 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

after the war, emerge as one of the saviors of human genetics: James V. Neel.

Neel must have been especially glad to see Cotterman, since they had

bunked together in Edinburgh. Later, Muller, still in Edinburgh, received a

postcard from his good friend Price: “That torpedo knocked me out of my

deck chair but left my fillings intact.”3

Thus are connections made, networks formed, agendas built: through the

happenstances of politics, friendship, and tragedy. Associations formed

before the war became key to developments postwar. Muller, already

agitating for an enlightened, socialist eugenics, emerged in the late forties

as America’s new leading monger of hereditary anxiety. And if Neel did not

personally rescue human genetics from the sharks, he was certainly a

paying passenger on the boat. His career choices and diplomatic style

became a model for human genetics in the postwar era. Muller and Neel

often disagreed on matters of policy, procedure, and theory. But they shared

a commitment to exploiting the opportunities of the atomic age to further

the study of human heredity.

The aftermath of the war created a new professional and public environ-

ment for human genetics. Suddenly, the relationship of heredity to human

health seemed an urgent matter. Pulled along on the current of postwar

public interest in science, professional geneticists who had shied away from

problems of human heredity in the 1930s were drawn back to them again.

Those human-geneticists long interested in human problems seized this

momentum to professionalize. Because human genetics continued to be

allied with eugenic goals of human improvement and directed evolution,

professionalization in human genetics was partly a question of whether and

how to institutionalize the social control of heredity. And yet the field’s

leaders also felt it essential to dissociate human genetics from earlier and

now disreputable views. They had to create, in other words, the feel of a fresh,

new, and ethically squeaky-clean field—without throwing out the eugenic

baby with the Nazi bathwater. By the time the Cold War had fully crystallized,

human-geneticists had a professional society, a journal, a new image, and a

vital public role. For they were now publicly acknowledged as stewards of the

human gene pool—just as Charles Davenport had longed to be.

* * *

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 133

Hermann Muller always seemed to be fighting someone. Born in 1890 in

New York City, he had participated in the exciting Drosophila work in

T. H. Morgan’s laboratory, informally at first, then, after 1912, as a regular

member of the group. Convinced that his fellow students Calvin Bridges

and Alfred Sturtevant were taking credit for his work, he had broken with

the Boss to strike out on his own. In the late teens, he had already identified

the great themes of his career: mutation, human improvement, and

socialism.4

As early as 1923 he had argued that “the basic mechanism of evolution” is

mutation. “And,” he continued, “since eugenics is a special branch of evolu-

tionary science it must be equally concerned with this problem.” At the

time, Muller called this process “mutational deterioration”—a technical

specification of the old eugenicist’s concern over “degeneration.” He also

became convinced that genes were material objects—which was far from

5.1 Theophilus Painter, Clarence Oliver, Wilson Stone, Hermann Joseph Muller, and many, many fruit flies, University of Texas, late 1920s. Courtesy of Lilly Library, Indiana University

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134 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

obvious at the time—and speculated that someday we might be able to grind

up genes in a mortar and analyze them. At the University of Texas, he

constructed baroque strains of Drosophila that allowed him to show at last

that X-rays induce mutations in the genetic material, demonstrating at once

the material nature of the gene and the social hazards of radiation. And he

began developing a “Bolshevik eugenics.” His increasing involvement with

socialist and communist politics forced him to leave Texas, and in 1932 he

found himself in Berlin, working with his Russian expatriate friend Nikolai

Timofeéff-Ressovsky. He urged Timofeéff to collaborate with the physicist

Karl Zimmer, also in Berlin, to use the combined power of physics and

biology to unravel the nature of the gene and of mutation. In 1935, with the

young quantum-mechanist Max Delbrück, Timofeéff and Zimmer

produced a multidisciplinary paper on the nature of gene mutation and

gene structure that is considered a founding paper of molecular biology.

Delbrück emigrated to the United States, pioneered the genetics of bacterio-

phage, and midwifed the nascent field of molecular biology, mentoring

many of its pioneers, including the young James D. Watson. Thus, though

Muller himself remained steadfastly unmolecular, he catalyzed the develop-

ment of a molecular approach that, decades later, began to realize his vision

of purposive control over human evolution.5

Leaving fascist Germany for communist Russia in 1934, Muller finished

Out of the Night, a popular book he had been working on since the twenties.

It made the case for “eutelegenesis,” a form of voluntary eugenics combined

with what would come to be called in vitro fertilization. The Soviet Union,

he imagined, was the ideal—perhaps the only—place to equalize opportu-

nity and implement a meaningful and just program of eugenic selection.

However, when Muller presented the book to Stalin, the Soviet leader

rejected it, and, Muller believed, ordered an attack against it. By that time,

Lysenko was on the rise, and Muller fled. He stopped briefly in Paris and

Madrid before securing a position with Crew at Edinburgh. Returning to the

United States in 1940, he obtained a position at Amherst College, but soon

got in trouble for his political activities once again. Friends worried that the

brilliant but irascible geneticist might be unemployable. Just as the war

ended, he received what must have been a very welcome offer from Indiana

University for a stable, tenure-track faculty position. He leapt at it.6

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 135

The move to Bloomington put Muller in the epicenter of the new

American human genetics. He was within driving distance of Columbus,

Ohio, where Laurence Snyder taught medical genetics at Ohio State

University. Snyder was the hub of a small but growing network of physi-

cians, geneticists, and zoologists interested in human heredity. Discovering

a taste for administration, in 1947 he moved to the University of Oklahoma

to become dean of medicine; his close colleague Madge Macklin moved to

Ohio State to fill his position. In Chicago, H. H. Newman turned over the

reins of their psychological twin research to Herluf H. Strandskov, a student

of the superb Chicago geneticist Sewall Wright. In Ann Arbor, Dice was

building momentum again with Snyder’s student Charles Cotterman and

the talented young physician-scientist Jim Neel. To the west, Eldon J.

Gardner opened a new institute at the University of Utah. Muller’s former

student Clarence P. Oliver had left the Dight Institute in Minneapolis to

begin a small human genetics program at the University of Texas in Austin.

After a short hiatus, the zoologist Sheldon C. Reed took the reins at the

Dight—and promptly concluded arrangements with Cold Spring Harbor to

transfer the bulk of the Eugenics Record Office data to Minneapolis, thus

completing the shift of eugenics and human genetics out of New York to the

upper Midwest. Snyder, Cotterman, Dice, and Strandskov, in particular,

drew Muller into their circle as they sought to professionalize American

human genetics.

Although much had changed institutionally in the 1940s, technically the

work was much the same as it ever had been. At the dawn of the atomic age,

American human genetics research would have been easily comprehensible

to Charles Davenport, Henry Goddard, or David Starr Jordan decades

before. Researchers were comparing twins, collecting pedigrees, seeking

Mendelian patterns, and trying to calculate the proportion of heterozygotes

in a population. The prewar optimism over human genetics stemmed

mainly from two things: the field’s recent institutional growth and the

explosion of knowledge of the genetics of blood groups.

The blood group field had grown so much, in fact, both in basic knowl-

edge and clinical application, that it was an utter mess. Back in 1941

Strandskov had written, “In no field of science is there greater lack of unifor-

mity with respect to the usage of symbols and greater lack of adherence to

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136 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

conventional genetic rules than in the field of human genetics.” The crux

of the problem was the blood groups, and the crux of blood groups was Rh,

the rhesus complex.7

The accepted scheme for classifying Rh alleles was an abominable

mash-up of two different systems. One, using cozy and familiar subscripts

of letters and numbers, had been proposed by the New York physician

Alexander Wiener. The other, austere and scientific with superscript

primes, had been developed by the English geneticists Robert Russell

Race and G. L. Taylor. Though the system was messy, physicians were

comfortable with it and saw no point in changing; Wiener, further, was

stubbornly convinced of the virtues of his system and loath to let it go. The

geneticists, led by Strandskov, were appalled by the sloppiness of the system

and sought to reform it to make it consistent and logical. By the mid-forties,

the Rh alleles had become a biomedical Gaza Strip—a tiny bit of terrain

claimed by two communities forced to live together by events larger

than they.8

The geneticists pressed for summit talks. In 1945 Snyder invited his

colleagues to form a national committee on blood group nomenclature to

sort out the mess and thereby enable the field to get some traction once

again. Among them was Herluf Strandskov. Since before the war, he had

been agitating for various measures to professionalize human genetics. As

long as they were systematizing human gene nomenclature, he suggested,

they ought to do the entire set of human genes and be done with it. The

committee might also consider pedigree symbols and questions of the “inte-

gration of research in human genetics.” Further, other countries were

adopting their own systems. British human-geneticists had formed a similar

committee. They insisted that human genetic nomenclature was a unique

problem that “should be recognised as totally different from that of any

other animal or plant.” A Canadian committee, however, wondered what all

the fuss was about. “We feel,” they wrote, “that the nomenclature of human

genes is, with few exceptions, developing in reasonable accord with the

usage most widely accepted in genetics, and that no real crisis in nomencla-

ture has yet arisen.” The nomenclature committee thus put a dog in an

international fight; the dry topic of naming genes was a wedge, a procedural

tool for promoting the professionalization of human genetics.9

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 137

Snyder convinced an apparently reluctant Muller to join the nomencla-

ture committee. He and Strandskov “dragged in Muller by the heels,”

Snyder told the historian Dan Kevles in 1983. Doing so was a coup for the

committee. “We got him in there to give some credibility to the whole

thing,” Snyder said. Getting Muller on the committee also helped integrate

him into the little network of North American human geneticists. Muller

shared the other men’s belief in the importance of basic research in human

genetics and agreed that negative eugenics was the necessary first step but

that positive eugenics was the ultimate and more important goal. A subtle

but significant change had occurred in eugenic theory in the preceding

years. As negative eugenics became medicalized, it came to take priority

over positive eugenics—not because it was seen as more important but

because it was more practical. Allan had written in 1936, “The only way to

attain the goal of positive eugenics is to actually practice negative eugenics.”

This idea lay at the heart of professional human genetics, and during this

crucial decade or so, Muller was its most expressive and trusted exponent.10

Snyder received Muller’s acceptance of nomination to the committee on

August 3. On August 6, the Enola Gay dropped its payload on Hiroshima.

Before the bomb, Muller’s main concerns had been the accumulation of

spontaneous mutations and background radiation, and sources of man-

made mutation such as X-ray machines. But when the bombs were dropped,

he wasted no time integrating this powerful new source of mutation into his

message.

In November 1945 Muller gave the Pilgrim Trust lecture, part of a distin-

guished but short-lived series hosted alternately by the Royal Society of

London and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He began by rehearsing

his long-standing argument about the dangerous accumulations of muta-

tions. “Probably,” he wrote in the published version, “the great majority of

persons possess at least one recessive gene, or group of genes, which, had it

been inherited from both parents, would have caused the death of the given

person.” This Muller dramatically called “genetic death.” If selection against

such recessive lethal alleles were relaxed and people were allowed to “live

and breed without limit,” he wrote, “their number would creep up and it

would be a case of treating everyone for everything.” And this was only the

baseline level of mutation. The situation would be made worse by

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138 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

“injudicious X-ray treatment, exposure to artificial radioactivity or to special

chemicals, or unwise average age of parenthood.” Muller speculated that

such factors could increase the mutation rate by a factor of three or more,

with a corresponding increase in the number of genetic deaths. “Artificial

radioactivity” from atomic bombs or other sources made a eugenics

program urgent. Like Francis Galton before him, Muller hoped that

eugenics would be voluntary. Further, he cautioned against being rigidly

hereditarian about genetic improvement. “The costly lesson taught us by the

terrible Nazi perversion of genetics,” he wrote, ought to serve as a reminder

to pay attention to the effects of the environment and to think carefully

about what qualities were important to foster in the human species.11

The atomic age inspired dramatic religious imagery and references. On

witnessing the Trinity test in the New Mexico desert, Robert Oppenheimer

was awed by the power of physics: “Now I am become Death,” he said,

invoking the Hindu god Siva, “the destroyer of worlds.” Muller, reflecting on

the power of atomic-age genetics, preferred biblical images of purity and

perfection. “Mankind,” he wrote, “is cursed or blessed with what has been

called ‘the divine discontent,’ which drives him ever further everywhere.”12

His positive eugenics was an expression of that divine discontent—framed

by scientific knowledge of the gene. It was an impulse to mold the intellect

and engineer the soul in an ever-ascending curve toward perfection.

After the war, Muller became America’s most famous biologist. In

October 1946 the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced that he

would receive that year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine “for the

discovery of the production of mutations by means of X-ray irradiation.” In

his banquet speech, Muller linked his old argument about genetic load to

the new threat of atomic radiation. “So long as we cannot direct mutations,

then, selection is indispensable,” he wrote, and, since most mutations are

harmful, “progress in the hereditary constitution” can be made “only with

the aid of a most thoroughgoing selection of the mutations that occur.”

He repeated his call for protection of the gonads during known exposure to

radiation, such as medical X-ray exams. And further, “with the coming

increasing use of atomic energy, even for peace-time purposes, the problem

will become very important of insuring that the human germ plasm . . . is

effectively protected from this additional and potent source of permanent

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 139

contamination.” The bomb, in other words, had ratcheted up the need for

eugenics manyfold.13

* * *

Twenty-five years Muller’s junior, Jim Neel became one of his principal

nemeses. Born in 1915 in Hamilton, Ohio, James Van Gundia Neel grew

interested in genetics while an undergraduate at Wooster College in the

thirties, where he worked on Drosophila under W. P. Spencer. He went on to

a Ph.D. in genetics at the University of Rochester, where he became the first

American student of the German expatriate Curt Stern. During the war,

Stern, it turned out, had been doing experiments on exposure to radiation as

part of the Manhattan Project. Rochester had been a center for biomedical

research related to atomic radiation. Fresh Ph.D. in hand, Neel had treated

himself to an Atlantic passage and attendance at the seventh international

genetics congress, which ended with that dramatic rescue aboard the City of

Flint. He spent the academic year 1941–42 at Columbia University on a

National Research Council fellowship, where he worked with L. C. Dunn

and the Russian transplant Theodosius Dobzhansky; the latter would also

do battle with Muller. On December 4, 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, Neel

applied to the medical school at Rochester. In his memoir, he wrote that he

figured that in a war, a physician would be more useful than a geneticist.

But in 1942 he visited the remains of the Eugenics Record Office.

Simultaneously impressed by the potential power of medical genetics and

the uselessness of much of the ERO data, Neel determined to help rebuild

the field. “It was a real gamble to believe I could bring the rigor of Drosophila

genetics into this arena,” he wrote. Medical training was part of that rigor,

although medicine was a larger part of Neel’s identity than his training.

Under the military’s accelerated program, he got a medical degree in two

years, finishing in September 1944 and then staying at Rochester for an

attenuated internship and residency. Neel was never very interested in clin-

ical work; his M.D. was a credential to do human biology.14

Lee Dice had been looking for someone like Neel; for years he had under-

stood that an ideal medical geneticist would have a Ph.D. in genetics and an

M.D. Searching for Herndon’s replacement at the Michigan Heredity Clinic,

he had considered Ray Anderson, who had gotten a Ph.D. doing Drosophila

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5.2 James V. Neel, who converted the Michigan Heredity Clinic into the Department of Human Genetics. Courtesy of Bentley Library, University of Michigan

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 141

genetics under Pete Oliver and was now working toward an M.D. with a

concentration in pediatrics. Anderson, however, chose to stay at the Dight.

Cotterman suggested his 1939 bunkmate and savior Jim Neel.15

Though young, Neel was supremely confident and authoritative—there

was little doubt that he could administer the medical activities of the

Heredity Clinic. However, he was becoming increasingly involved with the

largest human genetics experiment ever done. As soon as the Hiroshima

and Nagasaki bombs were detonated, radiobiologists began to organize to

study the effects. By the end of the year, a preliminary survey of the Japanese

survivors was completed. In 1946 a research team assembled by the

National Academy of Sciences–National Research Council began feasibility

studies for a longer-term project; Neel was involved. In the summer of 1946

President Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act, which transferred control

of nuclear materials from military to civilian hands and established an

Atomic Energy Commission to manage them. The AEC would be the prin-

cipal source of funding for human genetics research in the atomic age.

Among its projects would be an Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. In the

fall Neel and others made a reconnaissance trip to Japan; in January 1947

Neel went to Washington, DC, to present a plan for studying the genetic

effects on blast survivors.16

His research strategy was to seek evidence to refute a “null hypothesis”

that no long-term genetic damage had occurred to the survivors of the blasts.

No Japanese would be treated for any observed or anticipated effects. Thus

science trumped medicine; the plan relinquished the humanitarian high

ground in exchange for rational experimental design. Neel argued for his

plan as logically sound and scientifically conservative, as taking advantage of

a unique research opportunity. Further, he thought it politically important

for science to help quell public anxieties.17

Muller thought anxiety was the rational response to this new genetic

threat. He worried that the study was designed to mask real damage and

hence real risk of future harm. His years of work generating mutations with

radiation had persuaded him that a) genetic damage from the bombs was a

virtual certainty and b) it could well be difficult to detect. Sensationalist

media accounts whipped up fear about atomic genetic monsters, but to

Muller, the real danger was genetic death by a thousand cuts, the

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142 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

accumulation of many small, perhaps individually undetectable mutations

that collectively would lower fertility, vigor, and overall human quality. It was

the old eugenicist’s argument about degeneration, amplified by atomic radi-

ation. Muller argued for presenting a skeptical view of the genetics study, so

that if it found no evidence of genetic damage to the Japanese, the public

would not consider that the last word on the subject. In the end, the

committee approved the project with these unenthusiastic words:

Although there is every reason to infer that genetic effects can be produced and have been produced in man by atomic radiation, nevertheless the conference wants to make it clear that it cannot guarantee significant results from this or any other study on the genetic material. In contrast to laboratory data, this material is too much influenced by extraneous variables and too little adapted to disclosing genetic effects. In spite of these facts, the confer- ence feels that this unique possibility for demonstrating the genetic effects caused by atomic radiation should not be lost.18

It was the Cold War version of Lewellys Barker’s 1927 “polyhybrid heterozy-

gous bastards” argument. Humans are too complex, their social structures

too elaborate, the obstacles to gathering complete sets of reliable data too

great for field data to be trustworthy. From a scientific point of view, the

Japanese bomb survivors presented an extraordinary “natural experiment,”

an opportunity that would be irresponsible to squander. But natural

experiments are notoriously weak in their controls.

Neel had the ear of the government, but Muller had that of the public. He

took advantage of many speaking opportunities to spread his message of the

genetic dangers of radiation. In April, for example, he gave a version of his

Nobel speech in a plenary lecture for a conference on public health at the

New York Academy of Medicine; it was picked up by the New York Times with

the headline “Radioactive rays held peril to race.” The next month, he gave

a talk at the University of Illinois Medical School on “Human Erosion by

Mutations.” Herluf Strandskov came from the University of Chicago to hear

it. Afterward, he recruited Muller to his cause. “I enjoyed your lecture,”

Strandskov wrote in a follow-up note. “I am convinced, as I know you are,

that something must be done sooner or later to prevent the piling up of

detrimental genes in human germ plasm.” Getting down to business, he

wrote that he would be in Bloomington on Saturday, June 7. Could they have

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 143

lunch together? “What I should like to talk to you about is the possibility of

some informal meeting (at the Christmas meetings) at which we can

discuss certain human genetics problems.”19

The “human genetics problems” Strandskov wanted to discuss were profes-

sional rather than scientific. Over lunch, Strandskov secured Muller’s coopera-

tion to participate in a rump session on human genetics at the end of the

upcoming AAAS meeting, always held over the week between Christmas and

New Year’s. The main problems were four. Snyder would handle nomencla-

ture. Strandskov himself would discuss the need for a professional society.

Charlie Cotterman, whose famous “non-publications” were ironically symp-

tomatic of a meticulous and perceptive editorial eye, would lead discussion on

publication of results in human genetics and the need for a journal.

Strandskov asked Muller to address problems of “international agreement and

cooperation.” The phrase was one of the terms that had replaced the prewar

language of social control. It was partly euphemism and rhetoric, but also

partly a more accurate description of postwar genetic policy. For geneticists—

and for Muller in particular—it carried heavy connotations of “fighter against

Lysenkoism.” Lysenko’s dogma had plagued Soviet genetics since the 1930s,

but it gained new vigor in the postwar era, as tensions between the Soviet

Union and the West mounted. Science and technology became symbols of

national pride; much of the Cold War was fought in laboratories. Physics and

engineering, of course, had the highest profile, but biology was becoming

increasingly important. “Mendelism-Morganism” became a political affiliation

as well as a scientific stance. A meeting of the Lenin All-Union Academy of

Agricultural Sciences, scheduled for Moscow in the first week of August 1948,

was a high-water mark for Lysenkoism. The meeting took place shortly after

the Eighth International Congress of Genetics in Stockholm. Muller was the

president of the Stockholm conference. Using his status as Nobel laureate,

and still carrying a grudge against Stalin for rejecting Out of the Night, Muller

attacked Lysenkoism as pseudoscience and sought to expose the ouster and

even death of distinguished Soviet Mendelians. Under Muller, the new Society

would be a bulwark against the corrosive forces of Lysenkoism and, more

generally, of genetics misconstrued for political ends.20

After the fall AAAS meeting, Strandskov sent a questionnaire to his

colleagues about the desirability and structure of a new society for

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144 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

human-geneticists. By mid-December he had some eighty returns, almost

all of which were positive. That winter, he, Strandskov, Snyder, and

Cotterman met and decided to press ahead and call into existence the

“Human Genetics Society of America,” so that they could begin naming

officers. This they did.

* * *

The human-geneticists seized the moment of perhaps the strongest support

for science in American history. It was widely believed that science had won

the war—with the atomic bomb, with radar, with computing and cryptog-

raphy, with penicillin and vaccines. In 1945 Vannevar Bush’s report Science:

The Endless Frontier spelled out a vision of science as vital for keeping the

peace and as a potent tool for postwar dividends in quality of life during

peacetime. Bush recommended such bold policy steps as the creation of a

federal science agency—this became the National Science Foundation in

1950—and big increases in support for science education. Physics, of course,

was the most glamorous science of the day, but developments in biology—

especially bacteriology and virology—were advancing rapidly. In the late

1940s, geneticists, microbiologists, radiobiologists, and biological physicists

capitalized on increased funding for research from federal agencies, espe-

cially the Atomic Energy Commission and the Department of Defense.21

Biologists took a cue from the physicists and became far more visible

politically. A loose coalition of politically liberal biologists increasingly spoke

out on questions of scientific cooperation and, especially, race. L. C. Dunn,

the longtime adviser to Frederick Osborn, and Theodosius Dobzhansky

were among the most outspoken. Ironically, they often took a stance in

opposition to Muller; the erstwhile communist was increasingly heard as a

voice of stasis and uniformity, and therefore conservatism. In 1950 the

United Nations Education, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

put out a controversial statement on race, with a follow-up and clarification

by geneticists and anthropologists a year later. The biologists asserted that

race was simultaneously a biological fact and a social myth—they wrestled

sincerely but somewhat naïvely with the implications of this dichotomy. The

conferences produced the term “ethnic group” to replace “race” in social

contexts, although not all geneticists considered this helpful. Most striking

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 145

was the argument—advanced primarily by the anthropologist Ashley

Montagu—that biology “proved” the nonexistence of race and even the

primacy of cooperation and brotherhood in human nature. The historian

Will Provine later interviewed many of these researchers and found that

biological dogma on questions such as the effects of race crossing was based

not on new data so much as on a changed political climate; the evidence was

the same as before the war, but the scientific truth had evolved with the

times. These activist-scientists joined committees, held conferences, made

reports, and received grants from agencies such as the Atomic Energy

Commission and the National Academy of Sciences–National Research

Council. Muller’s student H. Bentley Glass, in Baltimore, seemed to be on

every committee all at once—from the AEC Committee on the Genetic

Effects of Biological Radiation, to the BEAR committee, to the Pugwash

Conferences on Science and World Affairs. From mutation to race to disease

to population growth, human heredity was increasingly seen as funda-

mental to human problems and life in the atomic age.22

In this setting, the formation of a professional society concerned with the

stewardship of the human gene pool seemed of vital importance, even of

national security. Yet the field’s still-dodgy reputation freighted even

mundane matters such as membership policy with significance.

The founders faced two main problems with regard to membership. First,

the eugenic fringe. A new society needs a big membership to be viable, yet,

Muller observed to the rest of the group, “accepting all applicants might

imperil new society swarming it with amateurs, cranks, propagandists, like

woman who spoke at our meeting.” Available documents do not record the

identity of the woman, but she was of a type: “crank” and “propagandist”

were euphemisms for eugenics zealots who always seemed to come out of

the woodwork to call for the extermination of some social or ethnic group.

The organizers, and indeed nearly all human-geneticists of the time, self-

consciously distanced themselves from the propaganda and ideology of

earlier eugenics movements, yet they had no desire either to repudiate

eugenics entirely or to reject the substantial funding that wealthy eccentric

eugenicists could offer a fledgling profession.23

Even after filtering out the amateurs, cranks, and propagandists, the first

roster of members in August 1948 included Wickliffe Draper, the cagey

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146 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

white supremacist philanthropist; Samuel J. Holmes, the West Coast

anthropologist and author of the 1924 Bibliography of Eugenics; Frederick

Osborn, heir apparent to the eugenics movement, and racist anthropolo-

gists such as Carleton Coon and Earnest Hooton. During the war, Hooton

had written that the forbidden fruit was knowledge not of sex but of human

heredity and that “we had better get our teeth into this apple, . . . spit out the

worm-eaten parts, and chew the rest. Otherwise, we shall presently have no

teeth left and the already ravaged Garden of Eden will be overrun by morons,

criminals and atavistic brutes.” There remained, then, a significant faction

of charter members—many of whom wielded considerable financial or

intellectual power—for whom human genetics represented their hope for

racial purity. The Society held its collective nose and welcomed them in.24

The second membership problem was physician-scientist relations. Most

of the founders identified primarily as geneticists; to what extent should

they extend a hand to the medical community? Neel, the M.D./Ph.D., began

to be involved with the administration of the society, and he joined vigor-

ously in the membership discussions. “First of all,” he wrote to the others in

September 1948, “I feel strongly that we should at the outset strenuously

endeavor to increase the membership of medical men in this society. The

bulk of the work in medical genetics will be done by medical men.”

Cotterman apparently agreed, but Muller was opposed to granting M.D.s

full membership. Neel’s position was made more difficult by the fledgling

organization’s early alliances. Like many startup societies, they started as a

satellite of an established and much larger organization, which would

provide a stamp of recognition, a venue for meetings, and an initial pool of

members. The human genetics society hitched its wagon not to the AMA or

any other medical society but to the American Association for the

Advancement of Science (AAAS).25 Muller would appear to have won that

battle.

On September 11, 1948, the HGSA had its first meeting, in Washington,

DC, as a satellite to the annual AAAS meeting and supported by the AAAS.

The AAAS did have some M.D. members, but they were a minority and

tended to be physician-scientists more than clinicians. They convened on

the campus of George Washington University in Foggy Bottom and at the

Federal Security Auditorium, two miles from the National Air and Space

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 147

Museum. The program was short: it was essentially a business meeting with

a lecture and social hour, but the society was launched.26

The highlight of the meeting was Neel’s plenary lecture, on one of the

classic problems of human genetics, “The detection of carriers of hereditary

disease.” Carrier detection was a problem for geneticists trying to distin-

guish different genetic constitutions with the same phenotype. For physi-

cians, it was analogous to the problem of asymptomatic carriers of infectious

disease. And it was a problem for eugenicists worrying about undetected

genes spreading through the population. The detection of carriers has

always been eugenicists’ key problem: the prospect of undetected carriers of

putatively single-gene conditions such as feeblemindedness gave the night

sweats to Harry Laughlin, Henry Goddard, and others of the Progressive

era. Neel’s talk thus played well before the wide range of interests in the

audience: the hard-nosed mathematical geneticists who liked a good tough

problem, the handful of medical men seeking to apply genetics in “real-

world” situations to relieve suffering; and the eugenically minded anthro-

pologists and others who could see it as getting to the heart of the problem at

last. Near the end, Neel remarked on the breadth of appeal of his subject. He

acknowledged the physical anthropologists, the physicians, and the mathe-

matical geneticists. He even recognized the eugenicists, albeit coyly, with

reference to the “sociological implications” of detecting a high proportion of

genetic carriers of disease. “For with this detection,” he concluded, “there

arise new lines of approach in the field of preventive medicine, and the soci-

ological consequences may be far reaching.” Neel did not spell out those

sociological consequences, but they of course would revolve around repro-

duction. Who should be allowed to have children? How do we estimate

genetic risk? Should genetics shape social policy?27

The society’s second meeting was better fleshed out. Held in New York at

the end of 1949, it was, like the first, a satellite to the big annual AAAS

meeting. With fifteen months to plan, the organizers were able to assemble

a full program of scientific papers. It was a representative cross-section of

problems in human genetics. Traditional modes of analysis from the old

eugenics days continued to predominate. D. C. Rife, another Snyder

student, presented a biometric study of whether you could tell Catholics

from Protestants from Jews based on height, weight, or gross head

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148 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

dimensions. The Utah group led by F. E. Stephens and Eldon Gardner

compared pedigrees. Clarence Oliver, now in Texas, presented his studies

on twins. Alexander Wiener spoke about blood groups and nomenclature.

Race (Jim Neel and colleagues), sex (I. J. Greenblatt and L. Gitman), and

mental deficiency were touchstones, as ever. Eye diseases (Harold Falls of

Michigan) had always been a major category of hereditary disease, and still

were. Most of the diseases examined were simple Mendelian ones, but what

we now call complex genetic disease was also well represented, with obesity

(E. L. Reynolds), diabetes (Arthur Steinberg and R. M. Wilder), breast cancer

(Oliver), and such mental diseases as “manic-depressive psychosis” and

schizophrenia (Franz Kallmann). On the last evening, the organizers made

a gesture to the eugenic origins of the field by holding a “Biologists’ Smoker”

at the American Museum of Natural History, home of the Galton Society.

* * *

At this second meeting, Muller gave the society’s first and grandest presiden-

tial lecture; it set the tone for two decades’ worth of thinking on heredity,

mutation, and society. The published version, “Our Load of Mutations,” is a

sprawling eugenic tour de force and his most important and widely read

essay. Although Muller was always primarily interested in hereditary

improvement, like Frederick Osborn, William Allan, and other contemporary

eugenicists, he understood that negative eugenics—the prevention of

defectives—was the practical first step. Pragmatically, they all recognized that

such negative eugenics was both technologically more feasible and socially

more acceptable than positive eugenics. Indeed, the atomic bomb allowed

Muller and others to create a sense of urgency that eugenicists had missed in

the recent several decades. And the president’s podium at the ASHG meeting

gave Muller a pulpit. From it, he preached a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon

that recalls earlier arguments about genetic purity (see chapter 2).

The essay begins by taking aim at physicians, citing what he calls the

“prevailing view,” quoted from a 1947 essay in JAMA, that mutation as a

direct cause of disease is extremely rare and, further, is difficult to detect;

thus the conclusion that medical men need not pay serious attention to

genetics. Muller rebutted that mutation was in fact both detectable and far

more common than widely believed. Using statistical arguments, he

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 149

estimated the number of genes in man, the rate of mutation per gene

(borrowing values from Drosophila), and the average selective disadvantage

of a given mutation. He estimated that the average human being had eight

mutations. Because, as Muller had always believed, the great majority of

all mutations are disadvantageous, these eight mutations conferred a

20 percent genetic disadvantage over an idealized “all-normal man.” That

meant, he wrote, that “most of us have a nearly 20% chance of death or of

reproductive inefficacy, from genetic causes.” This was the “genetic load,” a

percentage measure of an individual’s distance from genetic perfection.28

Although he saw the nobility of medicine’s humanitarian life-saving

impulse, he found poignant the conflict between individual and population

that lay at the core of medical genetics. “We must admit,” he continued,

“that modern methods do result in the saving for reproduction of many

mutant genes which otherwise would have been eliminated by the defects

they produced.” The suggestion that medical technology would compensate

for this gradual genetic deterioration was, he wrote with ecclesiastical

imagery, “as effective as trying to push back the flowing waters of a river

with one’s bare hands.” There was exactly one way to avoid “the fiasco of a

full fledged resumption of ordinary natural selection,” namely “purposive

control over reproduction,” taking control of our own evolution, refusing to

leave to nature and chance the genetic choices that are made with each

conception.29

Muller was adamant that there should be no coercion: controlling our

evolution must occur “through the freely exercised volition of the individ-

uals concerned, guided by their recognition of the situation and motivated

by their own desire to contribute to human benefit in the ways most effec-

tive for them.” It was, then, a Galtonian eugenics, nestled in a bed of

socialism. But he was realistic about the social evolution that must accom-

pany the project. “A deep-seated change in mores would be necessary,” he

admitted, as well as “a far more thoroughgoing and widespread education of

the public in biological and social essentials.” Muller, increasingly drawn

into contact with doctors, recognized the level of cooperation required for

systematic human improvement. Voluntary reproductive control, he wrote,

is the “necessary complement to medicine and all other ‘euthenic’

practices.”30

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150 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

A believer in top-down solutions, Muller took it for granted that effecting

this change should be a government educational project. But the opposite

seemed to be happening: he believed that government agencies were using

propaganda to minimize public motivation for eugenic change. Drawing on

his experience with the ABCC, he argued again that the Japanese data would

probably show no effect of radiation on the children of blast survivors. He

recognized that such “negative” findings had public relations value for the

Atomic Energy Commission: “Assertions have in fact been made that if posi-

tive results are not found there, this will have a salutary influence in quieting

public fears concerning the genetic dangers of radiation.” In Muller’s view,

this was simply nurturing complacency at a moment of rapidly escalating

danger. Humans were being exposed to radiation from many man-made

sources, some of which were medical: fluoroscopic screening, ovary radia-

tion to rupture Graafian follicles and induce ovulation, and irradiating the

testes as a long-term form of male contraception; use of penetrating radia-

tion and radioisotopes in medicine; X-rays in shoe stores; industrial applica-

tions; and of course atomic energy, whose use and the use of its by-products

“is only at the beginning of a great process of expansion.” Educating people

about these risks, he wrote, was literally of vital importance, “one of the first

duties of those who appreciate the significance of genetics in human

affairs.”31

In the long term, for Muller as for nearly all eugenicists before or since,

mental traits were the ultimate target. “Most of us will agree,” he asserted,

that “it is the world of the mental life that counts by far the most, the rest

being pretty much subsidiary.” If a little intelligence is good, more must be

better. Looking forward to a positive eugenics, he wrote, “Greater intellec-

tual capacity, and along with it kindlier natural feelings, are surely the

greatest biological needs of all humanity.” Muller was even willing to accept

some physical infirmity if it piggy-backed on mental improvement; recom-

bination would uncouple them eventually, he said, and the negative traits

could be winnowed out. For these and many other reasons, Muller

concluded that although genetic mutations may not be a direct cause of

disease, they are of vital importance to our health. To call mutation a negli-

gible cause of disease in man, as JAMA had done, was foolishly blinkered.

“None of us can cast stones, for we are all fellow mutants together.”32

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 151

Muller’s atomic rhetoric of genetic purity touched off a rockslide of

similar arguments and warnings. Acolytes such as the population geneti-

cists James F. Crow and Newton Morton at Wisconsin carried on his view of

an ideal genetic man diminished by his load of mutations. The Muller-Crow-

Morton view became known derogatorily as the “classical” position—a term

intended to connote stuffiness and obsolescence. Theodosius Dobzhansky,

a Russian who had emigrated to the United States in 1927 to study

Drosophila population genetics under T. H. Morgan, gave the position its

ironic name. Tarring Muller’s position as hidebound and reactionary,

Dobzhansky argued that genetic diversity, not homogeneity, was the health-

iest condition for a species. He painted his view as “balanced,” that is, liberal

and open-minded. Though the two men feuded through the 1950s over the

nature of mutation and selection, they agreed that atomic radiation made

human control of evolution necessary. In a 1958 book, Radiation, Genes, and

Man, written with his student Bruce Wallace, Dobzhansky asserted that

radiation safety measures, such as the isolation and shielding of nuclear

reactors, were often prohibitively expensive. The “practical man,” wrote

Dobzhansky and Wallace, was likely to demand “relatively stern eugenic

measures rather than expensive safety procedures.” One must be careful,

they continued, to avoid the “folly” of earlier eugenic policies, yet, faced with

the responsibility of caring for people with genetic disorders, society was

likely to demand “the authority to prescribe rules of conduct that will tend to

keep the incidence of inherited disorders as low as possible. . . . Involved is

some type of regulation of human reproduction and family life.” These

passages were underlined in ruler-straight red pencil in Bentley Glass’s copy

of the book. Glass, who had done his Ph.D. with Muller and a postdoctoral

fellowship with Curt Stern (Jim Neel’s Ph.D. adviser), had eugenics views

closer to Dobzhansky’s than to Muller’s. Writing in 1955 in Johns Hopkins

Magazine, he discussed eugenic methods candidly, considering the advan-

tages of institutionalization, sterilization, and birth control as negative

eugenic measures, rejecting the application of cattle-breeding methods, for

example, as socially repugnant, and settling on a more Galtonian program

such as a tax system inversely graded to family size. Glass ended wistfully,

remarking that the geneticist, like the physicist, had more power than

wisdom. He urged caution and care: eugenic progress would come in time.33

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152 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

Among the most moderate voices in American eugenics in the fifties and

sixties was that of Frederick Osborn, who kept himself backstage as the

secretary-treasurer, although he effectively led the American Eugenics

Society. Taking a moderate stand allowed Osborn to boost the society’s

membership and recruit the support of leading scientists once again. Glass,

for example, joined the organization in 1958. Dobzhansky contributed the

foreword for Osborn’s The Future of Human Heredity (1968), writing that

“eugenics has a sound core”; it merely needs to be pursued judiciously,

fairly, and knowledgeably. Osborn could not have agreed more. In contrast

to Muller’s socialist eugenics, Osborn mounted a case for a democratic

eugenics, founded on principles of equality of opportunity and a free

market. Under Osborn’s leadership, the American Eugenics Society moved

ever closer to the position of professional human genetics.34

* * *

Cotterman, meanwhile, had been working to assemble a journal. The

founders understood that the journal was critical to the society’s success. In

practical terms, receiving it would be the main reason for many to become

members. Further, it would become the voice of the society, articulating

better than policy statements or press releases the society’s policy and stance

on complex issues. Publishing a house organ is a standard way to consoli-

date a community around a set of standards or principles and to advertise.

The debates and negotiations over the journal of the ASHG illustrate the

tensions between M.D.s and Ph.D.s as human genetics professionalized, as

well as the founders’ artful crafting of a clean professional reputation as they

did the dodgy back-room deals that are sometimes necessary to keep a new

venture in the black.

Whereas Neel cared enough about doctors to earn a medical credential,

Muller remained an animal geneticist at heart; he saw physicians as a

conquest. When, in 1948, Neel had suggested to Muller that they make a

concerted effort to recruit M.D.s to the new society, he proposed that they

use the journal to demonstrate their commitment to medicine. Though

Muller agreed, his phrasing suggested colonization rather than cooperation.

“The importance of showing medical men that we mean business in their

field,” he replied, “is such that I thought it should be made obvious to them

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 153

that we do have a medical editor in an important place in the Board of

Editors.” Muller suggested Neel himself as the medical editor of the new

journal; Neel declined, not unreasonably citing overextension.35

The founders needed seed money to launch the journal. Membership

dues would never cover the cost. The society did have a small pool of money

from a few life memberships they had sold. But Dice urged Strandskov not

to squander the organization’s only buffer on the journal. Don’t spend the

monies from the patrons and life members, he urged; invest it and spend

only the income. Dice wanted Strandskov to apply to a foundation for a

grant. Frederick Osborn found the money. He had been instrumental in the

reorganization of the Eugenics Research Association, the outreach arm of

Cold Spring Harbor’s Eugenics Record Office, as the Association for

Research in Human Heredity, which specialized in negative eugenics and

medical genetics. Osborn arranged for the ARHH to contribute $2,400 to

the society toward starting up the new journal. The journal would in fact

launch, although they recognized that it would not take long to burn

through that first bit of cash; more funding would be needed shortly. But for

the moment they could press ahead.36

Cotterman was a perfectionist: the same quality that kept him from

publishing his own work made him a meticulous, if slow, editor. His fussiness

began with the journal’s title. Deeply concerned about its role in the diplomatic

relations with M.D.s, Cotterman suggested calling it The Journal of Human

and Medical Genetics. “It is rather long,” he admitted. “But,” he continued, “I

do feel that the word MEDICAL will aid considerably in accomplishing one of the

Society’s aims, viz. getting genetics to medical people, and also will have some

sales value. Putting the words THE JOURNAL OF in front of HUMAN AND MEDICAL

GENETICS seems to me to reduce somewhat the sense of redundancy in HUMAN

AND MEDICAL.” Cotterman wanted the medical men to feel included. He was

shouted down by colleagues arguing that, logically, human genetics subsumed

medical genetics, so it was unnecessary to be explicit. His proposal provoked a

searching philosophical debate. Was human genetics inherently medical? Did

human genetics subsume medical genetics? Snyder thought so. He preferred

the simpler Journal of Human Genetics. “I think that everyone, including physi-

cians and librarians, know [sic] by now that human genetics includes much

that is medical.” A. J. Carlson professed to be “both perplexed and confused”

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154 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

by the proposal. “If the term human genetics does not include clearly all the

aspects of the genetics of man in which the medical phases of health and

disease are involved, then I do not understand either genetics or the English

language.” Such rationalism masked a latent chauvinism. “Human genetics”

was a biologist’s term; it differentiated the Ph.D.s from the M.D.s. To be fair,

human genetics did include nonmedical areas such as anthropology and

psychology. But like the association with AAAS rather than the AMA, this

small gesture reflected a victory for those who saw medicine as an application

of science, rather than science as the handmaiden of medicine. American

Journal of Human Genetics it was.37

Cotterman designed the cover, and then he raised another symbolic issue:

the matter of a frontispiece or dedication. In a January 1949 note to

Strandskov, Snyder, and Muller, he floated the idea of using a portrait of

William Allan. It can only have been an act of diplomacy; the two men were

intellectual opposites. As a geneticist, Allan was as homespun and practical

as Cotterman was sophisticated and abstract. Allan often chastised academic

geneticists such as Cotterman for being out of touch with what he consid-

ered the real world. For his part, Cotterman was bored with the informal,

subjective style of medical geneticists such as Allan. Muller was unfamiliar

with Allan—a sign of how removed Muller was from the medical side of

things. Cotterman had other suggestions: perhaps Charles Davenport or

Dr. Barbara Burks—during the 1930s, she was one of the most active scien-

tists at the Eugenics Record Office—although he noted that the Journal of

Heredity had recently given them similar honors. Francis Galton was never

even mentioned; almost certainly, the eugenic connotations were too strong.

“If we cannot find a big enough figure for a dedication,” Muller asked, “why

have one?” Once again, his voice carried. They omitted the frontispiece.38

The first issue appeared in September 1949. The masthead was heavy

with heredity clinic personnel: Nash Herndon from Wake Forest, Madge

Macklin, now at Ohio State, and Norma Ford Walker from Toronto were all

on the board. They were joined by Bronson Price, the New York physician

and blood group expert Alexander Wiener, and Horace W. Norton. Neel did

not appear, but Muller had his M.D.s.

Muller set the tone for the journal with an introduction that was, charac-

teristically, overlong, combative, meticulously argued, and well

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 155

substantiated, with a prescience that was almost a stylistic tic with him. He

began by damning eugenics. In a section headed “Errors to Be Avoided,” he

wrote that something “flourished increasingly in the ‘eugenics’ of such

racist propagandists as Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant, and Fritz Lenz.

Finally, blossoming out into the Nazism of Hitler, it led to such excesses as

to involve itself and a considerable portion of the world in ruin.” The diplo-

matic Cotterman questioned the reference to Lenz, who not only was still

alive but was a member of the society. He wrote to Muller, mentioning that

he had discussed the essay with Lee Dice, and “raised the question as to

whether you hadn’t been perhaps ‘a bit rough’ on Fritz Lenz, and I wondered

how he (Lenz) would ‘take it.’ I reminded Dr. Dice that we were at present

exchanging reprints with Dr. Lenz. Dr. Dice quickly sat on me for being so

timid, and remarked: ‘as for the reprints, we’ll exchange reprints with the

Devil himself.’” Lenz, touchy about his Nazi past, fired off a defensive letter

to Muller, but Muller stood his ground. (Lenz was not the only ex-Nazi strug-

gling to return to professional good graces. Otmar von Verschuer was

mounting a systematic campaign to rehabilitate his reputation, and Hans

Nachtsheim was on the UNESCO committee on race.)39

Muller’s essay continued by elaborating what became a standard scientific

take on eugenics: it was bad because the science was bad; it got too tangled

up with politics. It is ironic and oddly touching that one of the most politi-

cally engaged biologists in the country should strive so earnestly to distill

science to an intellectual, apolitical essence. He articulated a remarkably

flexible and subtle understanding of the relationship between genes and

environment, explaining that it makes no sense to argue which is more

important; this fact, however, by no means implies that hereditary improve-

ment is moot, or that it is futile to try to disentangle hereditary from envi-

ronmental effects. Looking to the future, Muller hoped someday to map the

human germ plasm, as had been done with Drosophila, and he pointed to

the little clusters of blood group genes, strewn along the human X chromo-

some, as evidence of progress. He hoped for many new markers along the

chromosomes, but predicted that before that genetic knowledge came, there

was “bound to be a great increase in cytological knowledge.” Indeed, the

minor discoveries were already being made that would lead, five years

hence, to that great increase (chapter 6).40

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156 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

Notwithstanding his criticism of eugenics as an obsolete social move-

ment, Muller closed the inaugural essay in human genetics’ flagship journal

with a plea for cautious, compassionate, scientific eugenics. He defined

eugenics in a Galtonian way, as “the social direction of human evolution.”

He called it a profound and important subject that would, in due time, be

worked on seriously. It needed to be done, he wrote, carefully, calmly,

humanely, and above all scientifically—without racial or class bias or undue

emphasis on superficial traits. Much more knowledge needed to be gath-

ered; much more basic research was the answer. Muller left no doubt in

1950 that great strides toward a science of human perfection had been

made, and he saw the direction for the future.41

Cotterman backed Muller’s essay with Neel’s paper from the first ASHG

meeting, on hereditary carriers of disease, and filled out the issue with arti-

cles that were heavily medical in orientation. C. W. Rucker contributed an

article on color-blindness and sex-linked nystagmus, a form of involuntary

eye movement. Clarence Oliver wrote an article on the genetics of tooth

deficiency, a topic that Claude Nash Herndon had once laughed at as typical

of egghead Ph.D. geneticists. Herndon himself contributed an article on

hereditary muscular dystrophy derived from the Appalachian studies.

Cotterman contributed an article on a new blood group, A3B, and there were

articles on dominant hereditary ataxia and hereditary angioneurotic edemi.

The early ASHG community was cozy, more medical than Muller might

have liked, and firmly anchored in the heredity clinics of the 1940s.

The afterglow of putting out the first issue was short-lived. The $2,400

from the Eugenics Research Association had been only about half of what

they needed to get the journal on a secure footing. Further infusions would

be needed fast. Neel was, in principle, charged with raising funds for the

journal, but, Strandskov wondered aloud to Muller, perhaps Franz Kallmann

would be a more effective choice? Kallmann was a German expatriate and

psychiatrist who had relocated to New York, where from 1937 to 1965 he ran

the first psychiatric genetics clinic in the United States, at the New York

State Psychiatric Hospital—the descendant of the Pathological Institute

directed by Adolf Meyer and ancestor of today’s Columbia University

Department of Psychiatry. He made real contributions to psychiatric

genetics, most notably a 1946 paper that established a genetic role in

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 157

schizophrenia. He also hove resolutely to his belief in the importance of

eugenics; every year from 1949 to 1964, he wrote a review article on psychi-

atric genetics called “Heredity and Eugenics.” He was added to the board of

directors following the 1949 meeting. It was apparently Strandskov who

lined up the Coolidge Foundation to support the journal in year two; they

came through with $4,000. For the moment, calamity was averted.42

Meanwhile, Cotterman himself was having trouble. Never emotionally

very stable, in July 1950, “based wholly on a personal problem,” he resigned

both from the editorship of the journal and from his faculty position at

Michigan, effective in October. That fall, he took a hiatus from the journal

and traveled west, ending up at the University of California campus in

Davis, near Sacramento. Even those close to him never understood exactly

why he left, but as the department secretary put it, “it seemed to us he

wanted to be free from contacts with various and sundry patients and able to

devote himself entirely to problems which interested him without having to

spend time on problems thrust upon him.” In 1951 he returned to Michigan

for a few months, then took an enormous backlog of manuscripts and holed

up at the YMCA in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, to finish volume 3 of the

journal. “With another 5 or 6 weeks of solitary confinement in my YMCA

cell,” he wrote to Lee Dice at the end of June, “I think I’ll be pretty well

caught up. I preferred to work here this summer because of (1) the confine-

ment, (2) the cheaper room ($6.75 per week), and the better restaurants,

etc.” When he finished, he headed back to Davis, where by 1952 he had

obtained a position in the veterinary school.43

Then, disaster: in March 1951 the Coolidge people pulled their funding,

despite having intimated that they would offer a second year’s support. They

were shifting their funding priorities to “the training of young men who are

interested in the welfare of mankind in southeast Asia”—an area of vital

importance as the Korean War heated up. The Cold War giveth and the Cold

War taketh away. “This news presents a critical situation,” Strandskov told

the directors. “We can’t operate without some outside help unless we curtail

our activities.” They were forced to consider combining or dropping some

issues of the journal until more support could be found.44

In May another angel was found. Again it was Secretary-Treasurer

Strandskov, aided by Dice, who lined up the support. Strandskov was coy

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158 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

about the patron’s identity at first. But eventually it became clear that the

benefactor was Wickliffe Draper, the leading philanthropic supporter of

eugenic causes in the twentieth century, through the vehicle of his Pioneer

Fund. Draper’s $4,000 gift bailed out the journal again and enabled it to get

on its feet. Strandskov was so happy that he wanted to sing Draper’s praises

in the journal, but Draper knew his reputation and did not want to bring

ignominy to the society. They thanked him discreetly, by making him a “life

member” in the society. Only the inner circle of the society knew that the

nation’s most rabid eugenicist had saved the day.45

Such gestures enabled Draper to keep a finger on the pulse of human

genetics as it professionalized. He contacted many of the directors of

medical or human genetic enterprises with offers to endow chairs or

research projects. Most turned him down, but Nash Herndon and Wake

Forest University found it in their hearts to accept the eugenic philanthro-

pist’s largesse. Herndon was a respected and well-liked member of the

human genetics community. He had run the Wake Forest Department of

Medical Genetics since Allan’s death in 1943. He also headed the North

Carolina eugenics society. Under his directorship, the rate of eugenic steril-

ization in North Carolina increased during the 1950s; most of those steril-

izations were performed on poor whites. Herndon was an avowed eugenicist

but not a white supremacist. Draper first funded Herndon’s fieldwork, in

1950–51, at a level of about $100,000 per year. Then, in 1953–54, Herndon,

Draper, and Wake Forest negotiated an endowed professorship. Draper

stipulated only that the recipient not explicitly disavow his views, which

included “To seek to have race and immigration laws maintained, enforced,

and strengthened” and “To justify (explore) by scientific research the atti-

tudes they reflect.” Herndon was comfortable with that, and the donation

went through in 1955. Aware of the inflammatory nature of his views,

Draper insisted that the donation remain anonymous—perhaps they might

call it the Harry Laughlin Chair, he suggested, or, failing that, the Charles

Davenport Chair. The university and Herndon, however, were mindful of

the reputation those men had, so in 1956 Herndon became simply the

endowed “Professor of Medical Genetics.” Thus, as professional human

genetics emerged, the most medical of the American human genetics

programs had the strongest ties to old-fashioned, racialized Progressive

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 159

era–style eugenics. But an increasing sense of diplomacy masked those ties,

as human-geneticists remade their image in a medical mold.46

The California banker and ardent eugenicist Charles M. Goethe took a

different approach to backing the fledgling field. He preferred to sprinkle

little gifts among the many, like some Dickensian benefactor tossing

pennies to the poor. Graduate students in human genetics were among his

favorites. For years, he sent Lee Dice small checks to buy Thanksgiving

turkeys for Heredity Clinic students. And through the fifties, he sent checks

to the ASHG treasurer, for gift memberships for students with high eugenic

potential. “Gentlemen,” he wrote to Eldon Gardner, the society secretary,

in 1959,

Whenever I can spare another $24 I plan to send you check for further memberships in ASHG with the hope you will use it for membership for someone struggling for a higher degree, particularly while he accepts the responsibility of fathering at least 3 children or say replacement.

My own experience is that practically all of such not only are themselves of high IQ but that they have selected wives more companionable because of equal ability.47

The society cashed the checks.

Draper and Goethe understood the value of discretion; some lobbying

groups were not so circumspect. In 1947 the organization Birthright, a

eugenics group “exclusively devoted to promoting selective sterilization”

based in Princeton, New Jersey, sought permission to print condensations

of articles from the Journal. After the war, Birthright had helped lead a small

boom in eugenic sterilizations, particularly in North Carolina, Virginia, and

Georgia. Like most eugenics groups in the country, its members followed

the activities of the society closely and regularly contacted human-

geneticists. A couple of years later, the group asked Muller for permission to

reprint his article “Genetic Prophylaxis.” He agreed, but he refused their

complimentary membership. “I am thoroughly in sympathy with the

general aims of your Society,” he admitted. Nevertheless, for political

reasons, he could not risk public association. “I feel it very important, for

winning the approval of groups who may well become dominant in the not

distant future, that eugenics be so far as possible freed from the flavor

acquired through its having been associated with Nazism.” In response to

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160 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

the 1949 request, Herndon said, according to Cotterman, “I am sure that

you know as well as I do that so-called eugenics organizations vary from the

‘lunatic fringe’ to some that are on a fairly sound basis. Birthright has long

been one that has been well out on the fringe.” The society refused

Birthright’s request to reprint the articles. The lines were not clearly drawn,

however. Not long after, Birthright changed its name to the Human

Betterment Association, a phrase with resonances of Kellogg’s conferences

decades earlier. In 1952, when Goethe offered to buy Lee Dice—then presi-

dent of the ASHG—a membership in the Human Betterment Association,

Dice thanked him but replied that he was already a member.48

The tension between scientific and medical approaches to human

heredity suffused the rapidly professionalizing field of human genetics.

Hermann Muller had been a godsend to the fledgling field. Selected before

Hiroshima as spokesman and figurehead for the new society, he became

one of the best-known American biologists with his Nobel Prize in 1946.

For a few years, his passionate rhetoric and brilliant analyses placed human

genetics firmly on the nation’s front pages. In its first years, he was the face

of human genetics. But the torch soon passed to Jim Neel. Where Muller

relied on arguments of degeneration, Neel framed human improvement in

medical terms that more surely set the direction of the profession.

In 1958 Neel published his own version of Muller’s “Our Load

of Mutations” argument. “Atomic Age culture,” he wrote, not only was

profoundly altering our environment but, most important, was accelerating

the rate of change of that environment. Mutation rates and selective pres-

sure were mounting to levels never before seen. At the same time, advances

in medicine were diminishing our adaptability through humanitarian

efforts. Modern medicine was in effect “thwarting the evolutionary mecha-

nism for ridding the human species of the undesirable genes which are

constantly arising.” In other words, “at the very time when the species

stands in urgent need of evolving to meet changing conditions, the medical

profession may unknowingly be interfering with these necessary adjust-

ments.” Medicine, in short, was dysgenic—it was the same argument that

had been made for decades. Few American scientists understood better than

Neel the fundamental tensions in genetic medicine, the Garrodian versus

the Galtonian. In forging a partnership between medicine and science, it

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H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . . 161

constantly pitted the needs of the individual against those of the population.

“In our concern for the individual,” Neel asked, “have we forgotten to set up

the team which has as its concern the species as a whole?” That was one

point on which Muller would have vigorously nodded his assent.49

* * *

The atomic bomb was the best thing that had ever happened to human

genetics. First, it released the war’s inhibition on professional development.

Herluf Strandskov had been trying to rally his heredity clinic colleagues into

forming a society since before Pearl Harbor, but it simply wasn’t viable until

after the war. The sense of a new era having begun at the end of the war,

then, is partly an artifact of the war itself having all but shut down the

nascent field in 1941. But the bomb also provided a powerful new rationale

for expansion and thereby accelerated the field’s growth and professional-

ization. Anxiety over radiation drew professional geneticists back toward an

interest in human heredity and particularly mutation. The bombs dropped

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki provided a natural experiment that fueled years

of research and debate and invigorated the field intellectually. And the fear

of future bombs, perhaps dropped on America, suddenly made mutation a

major health concern. Degeneration of the germ plasm, the bugaboo of

generations of eugenicists, now had a frightening, real-world source. The

founders of the American Society of Human Genetics used nuclear anxiety

adroitly, to professionalize and garner funding, and particularly to shift the

debate away from the human improvement that they longed for and toward

the pragmatic, seemingly more attainable goal of preventing the unfortu-

nate or undesired from being born. Up until now, enhancement had seemed

the more benign eugenic strategy; elimination of the unfit had connotations

of state control, bigotry, and even genocide. For the rest of the twentieth

century, practices long associated with negative eugenics would be seen as

the more benevolent, because they were medical, while enhancement

acquired frightening connotations of building a master race.50

Negative eugenics had changed, of course, since the Progressive era.

Most important, coercion had yielded to persuasion. Moving negative

eugenics into the medical sphere allowed for a gentler, more volunteeristic

negative eugenics. Persuasion was considered not just a right but a duty of

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162 H O W T H E G E N E T I C I S T S L E A R N E D . . .

the responsible physician; patients sought their doctor’s advice actively and

eagerly. But increasingly doctors and patients alike believed that the ulti-

mate decision belonged to the individual—so long as the individual was

sound of mind. The eugenic targets, too, had become more precise and

specific: retinitis pigmentosa or peroneal atrophy, rather than blindness or

crippling; amaurotic idiocy rather than feeblemindedness. Finally, the

object of eugenic practice was shrinking. In the 1860s Francis Galton had

described a plan for population improvement and the concomitant relief of

suffering, because he believed populations to be more malleable than indi-

viduals. Immigration laws, too, operated at the level of populations.

Sterilization and birth control can address human amelioration and

improvement at either the level of populations or that of individuals,

depending on how they are implemented. Both as medical and as eugenics

practices, they permitted the shift from populations to individuals, making

it unnecessary to worry about who gets married or moves next door. By the

1950s, physicians and scientists were beginning to conceive eugenics prac-

tice in terms of genes. From then on, molecular-level approaches to human

amelioration—and betterment—would be the ultimate, if elusive, goal.

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