In Pursuit of the Gene

272 ¨ TRIUMPH OF THE MODERN GENE
the flies would die of the heat if they were left sitting on the pier, Muller
begged the pilot to return. Instead he radioed Lisbon, but the white box was
not there. When all hope was lost, the steward suddenly came running in
with the white enamel box. It had been brought to the pantry, of course,
where the bread was kept. 106
¨ IN NEW YORK MULLER and Thea moved into a run-down hotel near
Columbus Circle and Muller began looking for a position, but just as
Huxley had warned, no offers were forthcoming. The problem, Muller believed,
was that Morgan and Sturtevant with the support of one or two of
his former Texas colleagues had successfully spread the impression that he
was “bad in his personal relationships, clamoring for credit, unable to make
good anywhere, suffering from a persecution complex, unstable as well as
red and underhanded and over rated.” 107 But still there were some people
who appreciated the breadth and depth of his contributions, including
Harold Plough, who had done some of the pioneering X-ray studies on
Drosophila. When Plough heard of Muller’s plight, he prevailed upon his colleagues
at Amherst to give Muller a one-year research appointment in
the biology department, which Muller immediately accepted. 108 When the
months continued to pass without further offers, Muller suspected that he
had been blacklisted by the major universities for his involvement in the
Spark affair, but he also recognized that he had many other vulnerabilities,
including “Russia, my book, my ‘disappearance,’ my divorce and my having
aroused the opposition of Morgan—a factor the effects of which I see growing.”
Still he felt “by no means beaten yet,” and he was determined to continue
searching for a job in genetics. 109
In the meantime, Altenburg was convinced that the best hope was to
take on Morgan and Sturtevant, whom they both believed to be the driving
force behind calumny of Muller, and to write another textbook for Holt in
which he laid out the truth in regards to the early history of the Drosophila
room. “As I see it,” he wrote Muller in the early spring, “I am the only
person in a position to tell the truth, since the Baur paper [Muller’s neverfinished
history of Drosophila] has not been published and you yourself could
not very well give the facts in a text since a text is supposed to be imper-