Hermann Joseph Muller (redirected from H. J. Muller)

Muller, Hermann Joseph 

Born Dec. 21, 1890, in New York; died Apr. 5, 1967, in Indianapolis, Ind. American geneticist.

Muller graduated from Columbia University in 1910. In 1915 he defended his doctoral dissertation on the mechanism of crossing-over. Between 1915 and 1925, Muller taught in several American higher educational institutions. From 1925 to 1932 he was a professor at the University of Texas. From 1933 to 1937, at the invitation of N. I. Vavilov, Muller worked in the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow. From 1937 to 1940 he taught genetics at the University of Edinburgh. From 1945 he was a professor at the University of Indiana.

In 1912–15, Muller (with T. H. Morgan, A. H. Sturtevant, and C. Bridges) contributed to the elaboration of the chromosome theory of heredity. He studied the lawlike regularities of mutation (1920–32) and demonstrated the possibility of artificially inducing mutations (1927) by means of X rays. These experiments created the groundwork for radiation genetics. Muller received the Nobel Prize in 1946. He was an honorary member of several foreign academies of sciences and scientific societies.

WORKS

Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future. New York, 1935.
In Russian translation:
Izbrannye raboty po genetike. Moscow-Leningrad, 1937.

REFERENCE

Carlson, F. A. “The Legacy of Hermann Joseph Muller (1890–1967).” Canadian Journal of Genetics and Cytology, 1967, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 436–48.

A. E. GAISINOVICH