The Gene: An Intimate History - Siddhartha Mukherjee Page 0,54

was falling apart. His marriage faltered and failed. His rivalry with Bridges and Sturtevant, his former lab partners from Columbia University, reached a brittle end point, and his relationship with Morgan, never warm, devolved into icy hostility.

Muller was also hounded for his political proclivities. In New York, he had joined several socialist groups, edited newspapers, recruited students, and befriended the novelist and social activist Theodore Dreiser. In Texas, the rising star of genetics began to edit an underground socialist newspaper, The Spark (after Lenin’s Iskra), which promoted civil rights for African-Americans, voting rights for women, the education of immigrants, and collective insurance for workers—hardly radical agendas by contemporary standards, but enough to inflame his colleagues and irk the administration. The FBI launched an investigation into his activities. Newspapers referred to him as a subversive, a commie, a Red nut, a Soviet sympathizer, a freak.

Isolated, embittered, increasingly paranoid and depressed, Muller disappeared from his lab one morning and could not be found in his classroom. A search party of graduate students found him hours later, wandering in the woods in the outskirts of Austin. He was walking in a daze, his clothes wrinkled from the drizzle of rain, his face splattered with mud, his shins scratched. He had swallowed a roll of barbiturates in an attempt to commit suicide, but had slept them off by a tree. The next morning, he returned sheepishly to his class.

The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, but it was symptomatic of his malaise. Muller was sick of America—its dirty science, ugly politics, and selfish society. He wanted to escape to a place where he could meld science and socialism more easily. Radical genetic interventions could only be imagined in radically egalitarian societies. In Berlin, he knew, an ambitious liberal democracy with socialist leanings was shedding the husk of its past and guiding the birth of a new republic in the thirties. It was the “newest city” of the world, Twain had written—a place where scientists, writers, philosophers, and intellectuals were gathering in cafés and salons to forge a free and futuristic society. If the full potential of the modern science of genetics was to be unleashed, Muller thought, it would be in Berlin.

In the winter of 1932, Muller packed his bags, shipped off several hundred strains of flies, ten thousand glass tubes, a thousand glass bottles, one microscope, two bicycles, and a ’32 Ford—and left for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. He had no inkling that his adopted city would, indeed, witness the unleashing of the new science of genetics, but in its most grisly form in history.

Lebensunwertes Leben (Lives Unworthy of Living)

He who is bodily and mentally not sound and deserving may not perpetuate this misfortune in the bodies of his children. The völkische [people’s] state has to perform the most gigantic rearing-task here. One day, however, it will appear as a deed greater than the most victorious wars of our present bourgeois era.

—Hitler’s order for the Aktion T4

He wanted to be God . . . to create a new race.

—Auschwitz prisoner on Josef Mengele’s goals

A hereditarily ill person costs 50,000 reichsmarks on average up to the age of sixty.

—Warning to high school students in a Nazi-era German biology textbook

Nazism, the biologist Fritz Lenz once said, is nothing more than “applied biology.”I

In the spring of 1933, as Hermann Muller began his work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, he watched Nazi “applied biology” swing into action. In January that year, Adolf Hitler, the Führer of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, was appointed the chancellor of Germany. In March, the German parliament endorsed the Enabling Act, granting Hitler unprecedented power to enact laws without parliamentary involvement. Jubilant Nazi paramilitary troops marched through the streets of Berlin with firelit torches, hailing their victory.

“Applied biology,” as the Nazis understood it, was really applied genetics. Its purpose was to enable Rassenhygiene—“racial hygiene.” The Nazis were not the first to use the term: Alfred Ploetz, the German physician and biologist, had coined the phrase as early as 1895 (recall his sinister, impassioned speech at the International Conference on Eugenics in London in 1912). “Racial hygiene,” as Ploetz described it, was the genetic cleansing of the race, just as personal hygiene was the physical cleaning of the self. And just as personal hygiene routinely purged debris and excrement from the body, racial hygiene eliminated genetic detritus, thereby resulting in the creation of a healthier and purer race.II In 1914, Ploetz’s colleague Heinrich Poll, the geneticist, wrote: “Just as the