In Pursuit of the Gene

188 ¨ THE FLY ROOM
world-renowned Nobel laureate, refused to leave Sturtevant’s account unchallenged.
“I want to thank you for having singled me out for the special
compliment,” he wrote Sturtevant with ironic detachment, “but at the
same time to point out that I did occupy a regular desk in the ‘fly-room’,
for a longer time than I think any of those mentioned ...occupied one,
namely, from Sept. 1912 until Sept. 1915 ...Mydesk was in the southwest
corner of the room, just south of Bridges’ desk. Do you not remember
that?” 9 Sturtevant’s reply, if he ever wrote one, has been lost, but he was apparently
chastened, for a few years later he revised his account of the fly
room for inclusion in his History of Genetics, now allowing that Muller had
had a place in the inner sanctum: “Beside the three of us,” Sturtevant
wrote, “others were always working there—a steady stream of American
and foreign students, doctoral and postdoctoral. One of the most important
of those was H. J. Muller, who graduated from Columbia in 1910.” In
the next sentence, he allowed that Muller had taken “a very active part in
the Drosophila work.”
For Muller, unlike Sturtevant, the discoveries made in the early days of
the fly room had been a prelude to discoveries of his own of equal or even
greater significance. Even in the height of the turbulent 1930s, when he
lived and worked first in Hitler’s Germany and then in Stalinist Russia, he
managed to continue to keep his research going at a feverish pitch and play
a central part in the continuing development of genetics; however, he did
not have energy left over to defend himself against efforts by Morgan et al.
to discredit him. As a result, Morgan and Sturtevant largely succeeded in
shaping the perception of Muller for much of the twentieth century, but in
the end, Muller’s boundless supply of new ideas and energy could not be
suppressed.
¨ ALREADY AS A YOUNG BOY Hermann Joseph Muller was steeped in
the scientific view of the world. Forty years later, he still vividly recalled the
day his father taught him the theory of natural selection:
When I was about eight years old, my father took me to the American
Museum of Natural History, and, as I well remember, made clear to me,
through the simple example of the succession of fossil horses’ feet shown