1927–1939: American science writers shape public approaches toward genetic modification in response to Hermann J. Muller’s fruit fly experiments

1. Controlling evolution

In 1936, Waldemar Kaempffert (1936a) shared the following prediction in The New York Times,

When some future historian contrasts our barbaric twentieth century with his own happy era he will not stint himself in praising Muller. “To his monstrous fruit flies we trace the first deliberate, successful scientific interference with the processes of heredity by external agencies.”

Kaempffert was a leading American science writer of the interwar period who served as the newspaper’s Science and Engineering editor. Together with other science journalists, Kaempffert erroneously depicted the geneticist Hermann J. Muller as the first scientist to ever produce an artificial variation of a living organism. By exposing carefully designed fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) stocks to doses of X-ray radiation, Muller dramatically increased the frequency of lethal mutations, allowing for its quantitative scoring and rate determination that had far-reaching implications for the discipline of genetics. These findings catapulted him into international fame within mere months and eventually earned him the Nobel Prize in Medicine. In the summer of 1927, Muller (1927a) published a summary of his experimental findings in Science magazine under the sensational title “Artificial Transmutation of the Gene.” He offered a detailed account of his work in a paper presented a few weeks later at the Fifth International Congress of Genetics in Berlin (Muller, 1927b). The magazine Science News-Letter reported how Muller “stood up before a distinguished audience […] and in the most unsensational language imaginable broke the news of one of the most sensational researches ever conducted in the whole field of biology” (Thone, 1927). The managing editor of Science Service, a non-profit science news distribution agency founded and generously endowed by the newspaper mogul Edward W. Scripps, wrote:

It is agreed on all sides at the gathering of scientific men that the past year has been one of revolution in the study of heredity among living things, comparable with 1859, when Darwin published The Origin of Species, and 1900, the year of the rediscovery of Mendel’s law. (Davis, 1928)

“If, even with our present meager knowledge and skill, a Muller can predict that with a given dosage of X-rays a wingless race of fruit flies shall be born, surely we are on the road toward controlling human evolution,” wrote Kaempffert (1928a). Like many other science writers, he expected Muller’s experiments to set the pace for the genetic engineering of human bodies: “By similar mechanical interference, but more intelligent and more surely directed, the geneticist of the next century may create new men—beings who will be immune to tuberculosis, heart disease and the nervous breakdowns that wear us out” (Kaempffert, 1930). American science writers extrapolated the findings from Muller’s fruit fly research to human heredity in reference to widespread public fantasies of controlling human evolution circulating since the early 1920s (MacDonald, 1925; “Man, the Captain,” 1921; Thorne, 1924). The investment of these journalists in the vision of humanity’s scientific improvement is particularly striking when contrasted with the minimal press coverage dedicated to the concurrent work of the geneticist Lewis J. Stadler on maize and barley (Curry, 2015; Curry, 2016: 30–55) or the experiments on cultivated tobacco by Thomas H. Goodspeed and Axel Olson (Curry, 2016: 35–48).

Their interpretation of Muller’s research brings to mind eugenics, a popular sociopolitical movement that promoted selective breeding as a solution to the threat posed by carriers of unwanted traits (Keller, 1985; Kline, 2001; Largent, 2008; Paul, 1995; Stern, 2005). The fantasies of hereditary improvement were in part prompted by Muller whose critical stance toward mainline eugenics served as a canvas for the accommodation of his work among the American audiences (Paul, 1987). The geneticist’s engagement with reform eugenics and readiness to bridge the theoretical gap between fruit fly and human genetics lead him to numerous speculations about the role of genetics in social development. In a letter to Charles B. Davenport, Muller wrote, “I have never been interested in genetics purely as an abstraction, but always because of its fundamental relation to man–his characteristics and means of self-betterment” (quoted in Ludmerer, 1969: 340). Muller shared his vision of biological principles applied to human societies in a slim volume Out of the Night. A Biologist’s View of the Future. As the century progressed and the eugenic reform materialized in sterilization and immigration laws implemented across the country, numerous scientists and science writers rejected eugenics as based on questionable convictions about heredity (Allen, 2011; Harwood, 1987; Ludmerer, 1969). Despite their reservations, the American science journalists produced representations of Muller’s sensational experiments that indicated genetics and eugenics to occupy a shared discursive space for articulating fantasies about improving human bodies and societies through the control of hereditary disorders.

2. Evolution and religion

Hermann J. Muller’s experiments with Drosophila mutations hit the newsstands at the time when the American press was deeply engaged in the topic of science and religion, as evidenced in the extensively covered 1925 Scopes trial which focused on the question of evolution (Bowler, 2007; Larson, 2003, 2006; Moran, 2012; Numbers, 1998). In her comprehensive study of science stories in American magazines between 1910 and 1955, Marcel C. LaFollette (1990) indicated that during the second half of the 1920s, a third of lead articles examined scientific topics in relation to religion (p. 152). In the wake of the Scopes trial, different interpretations of evolution circulated in the American public sphere; from reductionist biological investigations to theistic representations (Clark, 2008). One of them connected evolution to cosmic rays, a field of study represented by Robert A. Millikan, one of the leading figures of the American scientific community during the interwar period; a recognized experimental physicist, Nobel Prize winner, and celebrity scientist who situated cosmic rays in the religious-scientific current he championed. Millikan’s colleagues ridiculed his public engagement activities, going so far as to define a milli-kan measuring one-thousandth of a unit of publicity (Keller, 1979: 150). According to LaFollette’s estimation, between 1920 and 1926 Millikan contributed one-sixth of all scientific articles published in the popular Scribner’s Magazine (1990: 33). The science editor Waldemar Kaempffert knew Millikan personally, as evidenced by their correspondence which, even if unsubstantial, spans over two decades. ¹

For Millikan, cosmic rays demonstrated that “the process of creation is now going on in the heavens and that the earth, instead of being a disintegrating world as has long been believed is a changing, continuously evolving one.” This statement landed on the first page of The New York Times and Los Angeles Times a few months after the news of Muller’s experimental findings (“Creation Continues,” 1928; “World Yet in Creation,” 1928). Kaempffert (1928a) followed with a feature article entitled “Super X-Rays Reveal the Secret of Creation,” published in the widely circulated Sunday edition of The New York Times. The following press representations of cosmic rays echoed Millikan’s view, describing the phenomenon as a “Scientific Proof of God” and “mighty token of Creation’s workshop” (Carr, 1925; Millard, 1929; “Millikan Sees Rays as Clue to Creation,” 1929). The editors of The New York Times asserted that nothing could affect “the cosmic optimism of the science that not only has such practical application but has faith in a continuing creation and that cooperates with ‘a Creator continually on the job’” (“Cosmic Optimism,” 1930). Muller’s interpretation of heredity as potentially controllable by scientists thus collided with Millikan’s campaign for recognizing the role of cosmic radiation in generating evolutionary change that manifested the divine order of nature.

3. Cosmic rays and mutations

Science journalists instantly connected Muller’s mutation research with the study of cosmic rays, often confusing the mutagenic properties of these radiation types. That alignment originated with Muller, who in an address to the National Academy of Sciences connected his study with Millikan’s cosmic rays and presented a hypothesis regarding the potential impact of natural radiation on the genomes of living organisms. “Dr. Muller reported that the cosmic rays and the radium rays were, as far as he knew, the only things occurring in nature which might disrupt the chromosomes and thus disturb the plan fixed by nature for the individual,” noted The New York Times (“Altered Heredity,” 1928). “Chromosomes and genes–who knows but they are the playthings of the terrific forces that tear down and build up atoms in stars millions of light-years distant and in the process create Millikan’s rays,” asked another contributor (“Cosmic Rays and Evolution,” 1928). Press representations frequently contrasted the mutations induced by exposure to X-rays with the potent cosmic radiation credited with producing natural variation. Science writers who examined Muller’s and Millikan’s experiments emphasized the superiority of the natural cosmic rays over the artificial X-ray radiation (“Altered Heredity,” 1928). A staff writer of The New York Times inquired,

If man’s feeble laboratory X-rays can switch evolution from one track to another, what may not be expected of the more powerful gamma rays or radium or those cosmic rays that Professor Millikan finds are able to pierce 18 feet of lead or 200 feet of water. (“Cosmic Rays and Evolution,” 1928)

Under the influence of Millikan’s religious-scientific narrative, the mutagenic properties of cosmic rays were presented to reveal the environment as evolving and manifesting the order inherent to nature’s design. In this context, Muller’s X-ray radiation was most often depicted as enforcing disorder by “upsetting nature’s plans” and producing mutations for which “nature had no use.” The New York Times wrote:

The evidence is strong that the vast majority of artificial variations, many of them monstrosities, are unfit for this world. Natural selection kills them off. And so it will probably prove to be if ever we attempt to ‘improve’ the human species by thwarting nature with the aid of Frankensteinian science. (“Topics,” 1928)

Science journalists described Muller’s experiments as “invading cells and effecting a profound change in living things,” permanently “juggling the chromosomes” and “tampering with life forces.” Directing X-rays to living organisms, Muller was “[i]nterfering with the normal processes of the germ plasm” and haphazardly “shuffling the genes.” Scientists who followed Muller were depicted as “snatching from nature her prerogative of devising new species of animals,” “bending Nature to the scientific will,” or, as indicated above, “thwarting nature with Frankensteinian science.” Genes “had been struck and twisted or sliced” by Muller, a scientist who was “willing to shake dice with nature.” By 1928, the term “mutation” began to function as a synonym for deformation. The expression “monstrosity” left the confines of the botanical jargon where it conveyed an abnormality of growth and entered the popular register to signify an abnormally structured organism; Muller produced artificial “monstrosities, or what the biologist prefers to call mutations.” ² “Nature has no use for monstrosities,” remarked Kaempffert in The New York Times, dramatizing Muller’s experiments to almost quote verbatim a description the geneticist had offered in a popular magazine, Evolution (1931):

And what monstrosities! Flies with eyes that bulged, flies with eyes that were sunken; flies with purple, white, green brown and yellow eyes; flies with hair that was curly, ruffled, parted, fine, coarse; flies that were bald; flies with extra legs or antennae or no legs or antennae; flies with wings of every conceivable shape of wing or with virtually no wings at all; big flies and little flies; active flies and sluggish flies; sterile flies and fertile flies. (Kaempffert, 1935)

“Most of these mutations […] die because they depart too radically from the norm. Nature does not want them. But the nearest to the norm survive,” asserted Kaempffert (1936b) in another feature.

In the very first article about Muller’s experiments, a New York Times journalist wrote:

The sensational character of Professor Muller’s achievement may be best appreciated if we imagine him producing 100 entirely new species of human beings, some with no legs at all, some with arms of unequal length, some with other abnormalities. Biologically speaking, it makes no difference whether the subject of an experiment in controlled evolution is a fruit fly or a man. (“Cosmic Rays and Evolution,” 1928)

The language employed by science journalists to accommodate Muller’s work reveals their uncertainty about such attempts at genetic modification of living organisms. Readers of national newspapers were exposed to the vision of a scientist who “disarranged nature’s plans and specifications for the building of the individual,” producing organisms “which had their constitutions disordered before birth by the X-rays [and] grew up with a great variety of abnormalities” (“Altered Heredity,” 1928); the vision of a scientist creating monsters. On the other side of the Atlantic, one would read about how “[r]ecent advances in experimental genetics have conjured out of the mists of nightmarish fantasy a Frankenstein monster and dragged it into the lighted circle of ultimate probability” (Autosome, 1932). That fantasy found its most explicit articulation in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, a 1932 novel that offered a most compelling vision of biological control. Alongside ectogenesis, Huxley described the artificial production of genetic mutations through exposure to X-ray radiation, low temperature, and alcohol. The novel electrified American audiences and spurred a number of science fiction stories that dramatized artificial mutagenesis. ³ The enthusiasm science writers exhibited for the prospect of controlling evolution was curbed by their reflections about the eugenic reform, as well as Millikan’s influential vision of evolution that offered an attractive frame of reference for discussing the role of science during the Depression Era. “The present state of genetics and history both teach that man is a dangerous animal, but never more dangerous than when he undertakes to direct his own evolution,” warned Kaempffert (1932b).

4. Conclusion

The American press had at first engaged with the scientific control of heredity at the dawn of the twentieth century when the American followers of Hugo de Vries’s immensely popular mutation theory promised the production of new plant varieties “at will” or “to order” (Curry, 2016; Endersby, 2013; Rouyan, in press). Two decades later, the public fascination and revulsion with mutations intermingled as Muller’s research offered the possibility of manipulating evolution and, in a dialog with Millikan’s divine cosmic rays, revealed the potential results of artificial mutagenesis as monstrous and unnatural. Muller’s experimental use of X-ray radiation was received in the context of expanding knowledge about the genes as carriers of hereditary traits, the implications of which were only beginning to dawn on the American science writers. Kaempffert (1932a) narrated one of such implications in his review of Lancelot Hogben’s Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science: “It turned out that every one of us is the carrier of bad genes, that insanity is concealed in every family, that monstrosities may break out anywhere at any time.”

By accelerating the rate of mutation, Muller’s experiments not only interfered in the natural order but revealed the intrinsic disorder of living organisms, exposing the inherent potential for “monstrosity” in fruit flies and, by extension, humans. Science journalists accommodated Muller’s novel concept of biological mutation in the frequently overlapping categories of “new species” and “monstrosities,” continuing the line of association that linked the problem of mutation with the contemporary debates between the proponents of gradualism and saltationism in evolution. They moreover formulated a novel definition of genetic mutation that encapsulated the promise and peril of genetic engineering which extended throughout the “century of the gene” (Keller, 2000) and materialized in the images of Frankenstein’s monster as that century came to a close. These images have been prevalent in the work of scholars who have examined the public perceptions of genetic modification in reference to mass media representations since the late 1990s. The case presented in this article indicates the existence of a common thread in the history of this media framing, offering contemporary sociologists of science a valuable point of reference in studying the role of contemporary mass media in communicating biotechnology research.