Transcript
The geneticists were ready to give up. They were tramping through a forest near Austin, Texas. It was January 1932, the depths of the Great Depression. They were cold and exhausted. And with every passing step, they grew more convinced that their colleague Hermann Muller had killed himself.
It wasn’t hard to imagine why. Muller’s marriage had disintegrated. Local newspapers were denouncing him as a communist.
Still, you never expect to find a suicide note. The whole department had been scouring Austin since yesterday, hoping against hope they weren’t too late.
The crazy thing was, his colleagues didn’t even like Muller. Frankly, he was an asshole. But no one could deny he was a brilliant asshole. And the thought of a mind like his, just disappearing from the world? It made them shiver.
Finally, someone spotted something. A body. People started running, stumbling along, drawn by the shouts.
Muller was lying beneath a tree. He’d clearly been outdoors all night; his face and suit were streaked with mud. But, he was alive, if barely.
When his colleagues lifted him, he protested with slurred words—the result of all the sleeping pills he’d swallowed. But they trudged him out and got him to a hospital just in time.
Afterward, Muller tried to play the incident off like nothing had happened. He even insisted on teaching his classes the next day. He was always tough, and promised to bounce back.
But in truth, that night in the woods wasn’t even the low point for Muller. In fact, it only kicked off five more years of serial crises. Muller would soon lose his wife and a Nobel Prize, and have scary run-ins with both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
And in retrospect, his personal suffering wasn’t even the worst of it. Muller was one of the most important geneticists ever. But his paranoia and abrasive personality led to one of the all-time missed opportunities in science. Because if he hadn’t been such an asshole, then maybe, just maybe, we’d already have a cure for cancer.
Hermann Muller was born into a Jewish family in New York City in 1890. His father died of a stroke when the boy was ten. So Muller had to take odd jobs to support his mother and sister. He ran errands for hotels and banks, and taught English to immigrants at night.