In Pursuit of the Gene

TRIUMPH OF THE MODERN GENE © 247
lab until four or five in the morning, and Jessie was growing ever more estranged
from him. In the summer of 1930, while Jessie was visiting her family
in Kansas, he puzzled over what had gone wrong in their marriage, “You
do not know how keenly I have felt, all along, having to be with you and
yet separated from you—trying to get isolation. I think it is really that,
not being together so much, but being together while we must be a source
of irritation to each other of that kind and so little together essentially
that has been trying.” 14 Although he hoped that they might turn over a
new leaf when she returned, it seemed that they had already drifted too far
apart, and the arrival of three new lab members, two Russians and a German,
marked the beginning of a new era for Muller both professionally and
personally.
The two Russians, Israel Agol and Solomon Levit, had both trained
in classical genetics under Serebrovsky, whom Muller had met in his 1922
trip to Leningrad. Levit, who had a medical degree as well as a graduate degree
in genetics, was the head of his own institute for human genetics
in Moscow and was a far more serious person than the flamboyant Agol,
who had a particular passion for cars, wrecking two of them during his
stay in Texas before the rental company refused to give him another. 15 The
third new member of the lab was Carlos Offermann, who had been educated
in Argentina after his family emigrated from Germany. While Muller
treated Agol and Levit as equals, he took a more paternal attitude toward
Offermann, who was younger, less self-confident, and suffered from a spinal
deformity, the result of a massive dose of X-rays wrongly administered
in a German hospital to treat a childhood spine injury.
Agol and Levit were obligated to return to the Soviet Union when
their one-year Rockefeller fellowships ran out, but Offermann’s plans, like
Offermann himself, were much more fluid. When he arrived in Texas he
was in his late twenties, but he had a youthfulness about him that made
him appear far younger. In addition to his boyish good looks, Carlos had a
charm that married women seemed to find nearly irresistible. Men seemed
to like him too, and even husbands he’d cuckolded tolerated him, finding it
difficult to conceive of the youthful Carlos, with his extremely slight physique
and physical disability, as a serious threat.
By the summer of 1931, when Offermann left to take a summer course