Hermann Joseph Muller
American biologist (1890–1967)
Hermann Joseph Muller (December 21, 1890 – April 5, 1967) was an American geneticist who was awarded the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the discovery of the production of mutations by means of X-ray irradiation". Muller warned of long-term dangers of radioactive fallout from nuclear war and nuclear testing, which resulted in greater public scrutiny of these practices.
Early life
Muller was born in New York City, the son of Frances (Lyons) and Hermann Joseph Muller Sr., an artisan who worked with metals. Muller was a third-generation American whose father's ancestors were originally Catholic and came to the United States from Koblenz. His mother's family was of mixed Jewish (descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews) and Anglican background, and had come from Britain. Among his first cousins was Alfred Kroeber (father of Ursula Le Guin) and first cousins once removed was Herbert J. Muller. As an adolescent, Muller attended a Unitarian church and considered himself a pantheist; in high school, he became an atheist. He excelled in the public schools. 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.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hermann Joseph Muller” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.