[fishtank]

“Muller was born in New York City, the son of Frances (Lyons) and Hermann Joseph Muller, Sr., an artisan who worked with metals. He excelled in the public schools. His mother’s family was Jewish, and had come from Britain, while his father’s was Catholic and German.[4] As an adolescent, he attended a Unitarian church and considered himself a pantheist; in high school he became an atheist. At 16 he entered Columbia College. From his first semester he was interested in biology; he became an early convert of the Mendelian-chromosome theory of heredity — and the concept of genetic mutations and natural selection as the basis for evolution. He formed a Biology Club and also became a proponent of eugenics; the connections between biology and society would be his perennial concern. Muller earned a B.A. degree in 1910.[5]”

[fishtank]

"His lab grew quickly, but it shrank again following the onset of the Great Depression. Especially after the stock market crash, Muller was increasingly pessimistic about the prospects of capitalism. Some of his visiting lab members were from the USSR, and he helped edit and distribute an illegal leftist student newspaper, The Spark. It was a difficult period for Muller both scientifically and personally: his marriage was falling apart, and he was increasingly dissatisfied with his life in Texas. Meanwhile, the waning of the eugenics movement, ironically hastened by his own work pointing to the previously ignored connections between environment and genetics, meant that his ideas on the future of human evolution had reduced impact in the public sphere.[12]"

Both paragraphs from wikipedia...

[knarf]

Hmmm ... maybe THAT’S the reason for taking the radium dialed watches off of the wrists of normal, everyday Americans ... we were bursting with brilliance in the ‘50’s