H J Muller

Abstract

Described as a ‘rare genius’ by one of his close friends, Hermann Joseph Muller was one of the pioneers of modern genetics in the early decades of the twentieth century. Although his work on mutagenesis and mutations fetched him widespread recognition and glory, thanks to the Nobel Prize he received in 1946, the depth and breadth of his contributions to genetics and allied areas of biology are far more impressive. To many, he brought about a paradigm shift in the way experimental genetics was done. Even the way in which geneticists name genes — the standard genetics symbols and notation is largely as proposed by Muller. From school textbooks to advanced genetics research in genetics labs, from mutation to the mechanism of species formation, the intellectual outputs of Muller are omnipresent in the domain of genetics. His life is an inspiring story of a person waging an immense struggle against personal and political nightmares and yet, almost heroically solving some of the most challenging and fundamental problems in biology at the time. If the early work of William Bateson [1], Thomas Hunt Morgan [2] and others initiated the follow-up to the resurrection of Mendel’s laws, it was largely completed by Muller. The purpose of this article is to summarize some of his key contributions to biology.