In Pursuit of the Gene

CHAPTER 11
Oenothera Reconsidered
¨ AFTER THREE YEARS in the lab of Thomas Hunt Morgan, Muller
was dying to get away. In 1915, even before he’d officially been granted a
degree, he leapt at the opportunity to join Julian Huxley (grandson of Darwin’s
friend and ally Thomas Huxley) in the biology department of the
newly created Rice Institute in Houston. Sharing a passion for Darwin and
eugenics, the high-strung, 28-year-old, Oxford-educated Julian Huxley and
Muller were a natural pair, and it was a great disappointment to Muller
when, a year later, Huxley decided that it was his duty to return to England
and join the Britain war effort against Germany. 1 In Huxley’s absence, Muller
became acting head of the department and persuaded his faithful friend
Altenburg to join him on the Rice faculty.
At Rice, Muller’s first priority was to once and for all time put an end
to the doubts about the universality of Mendel’s laws. While the truncate
case had been solved by the end of 1913, the inheritance of beaded wings,
the other most frequently cited example of allegedly non-Mendelian in-