Notes

1. Adams, Education, 355.

2. James, Pragmatism, 62.

3. Adams, Education, 355.

4. Ibid., 381–82.

5. “Radium and Its Lessons” (Lancet); James, Meaning of Truth, 88: “Radium, discovered only yesterday, must always have existed, or its analogy with other natural elements, which are permanent, fails. In all this, it is but one portion of our beliefs reacting on another so as to yield the most satisfactory total state of mind. That state of mind, we say, sees truth, and the content of its deliverances we believe.”

6. Blakeslee and Avery, “Methods of Inducing Doubling,” 404, 408.

7. Recent scholarship on metaphor in science has emphasized that metaphor is not just representative, but performative, and that it “operates on the level of both scientific discourse and practice,” according to James J. Bono. Recent scholarship has also repeatedly highlighted that the literature on metaphor in science is vast and unwieldy, and it has accordingly become routine for scholars to apologize for not trying to define “metaphor” or to precisely delimit its role in science, while moving on to analyze the fascinating use of metaphors in empirical cases. See, for example, Mirowski, Natural Images in Economic Thought, 451; Dörries, Experimenting in Tongues, 3; Keller, “Language in Action,” 87; and Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?, 36. Rather than worrying about it, Bono suggests instead that a recognition of “the complexities and rich variations of embodiment leads us away from an account of metaphor that stresses its universal features and foundations . . . [and] leads us to acknowledge that schemas, metaphors, and metaphoric systems of meaning are themselves subject to and situated in the particularities and specificities of history, culture, discourse, and all sorts of webs of relations.” Bono, “Why Metaphor?,” 216. Classic sources specifically on metaphor in science include Hesse, “Models, Metaphors, and Truth”; Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By; and Bono, “Science, Discourse, and Literature.” Finally, as Jacques Derrida has noted, “This epistemological ambivalence of metaphor, which always provokes, retards, follows the movement of the concept, perhaps finds its chosen field in the life sciences. . . . Where else might one be so tempted to take the metaphor for the concept?” Margins of Philosophy, 261.

8. For all the historiographical contributions this study seeks to make to the history of genetics and of radioactivity, therefore, it also seeks to make a historiological contribution (Novick, That Noble Dream, 8).

9. Rheinberger, “Experimental Systems.”

10. Experimental systems are “systems of manipulation designed to give unknown answers to questions that the experimenters themselves are not yet able clearly to ask . . . vehicles for materializing questions.” Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, 28. Or, as he put it elsewhere, an experimental system is “the smallest functional unit of research, designed to give answers to questions which we are not yet able clearly to ask. It is a ‘machine for making the future.’ It is not only a device that generates answers; at the same time, and as a prerequisite, it shapes the questions that are going to be answered. An experimental system is a device to materialize questions. It co-generates, so to speak, the phenomena of material entities and the concepts they embody.” Rheinberger, “Experiment, Difference, Writing,” 309. For earlier work on “experimental systems,” see Kohler, “Systems of Production,” and Kohler, “Drosophila and Evolutionary Genetics.”

1. Rutherford, Radio-Activity, 13.

2. As historian of radioactivity Lawrence Badash has noted, “Radioactivity . . . was not regarded as a major discovery.” In what he called “an heroic age of radiations,” radioactivity, simply enough, “because it did not ‘do’ anything of particular note, did not stand out among this plethora of rays. . . . Still, the world was not so jaded with new elements to ignore the Curies’ claim.” Badash, “Radium,” 145–46.

3. Trenn, Self-Splitting Atom, 42.

4. Howorth, Pioneer Research, 83–84, 272–73.

5. Trenn, Self-Splitting Atom, 42.

6. Howorth, Pioneer Research, 90–91. As Spencer Weart has noted, “The connection between transmutation symbols and radioactivity was not only a matter of ancient traditions revived in modern laboratories; it also came through the deliberate use of imagery.” Weart, Nuclear Fear, 73.

7. Howorth, Pioneer Research, 87, 90. Pierre Curie, however, continued to use the term: “Here we have a veritable theory of the transmutation of simple bodies, but not as the alchemists understood it. Inorganic matter must have evolved, necessarily, through the ages, and followed immutable laws.” Curie, Madame Curie, 220.

8. Trenn, Self-Splitting Atom, 3; Badash, “‘Newer Alchemy,’” 89, 91.

9. Quoted in Howorth, Pioneer Research, 90.

10. Eve, Rutherford, 41. Rutherford described himself as having a “natural radioactivity.” Rutherford to Loeb, January 4, 1908, LOC, folder 13, “Rutherford, Ernest.”

11. Howorth, Pioneer Research, 98–99; see also Howorth, Greatest Discovery, 78. For more on the emerging market for radium as a commodity, see Rentetzi, Trafficking Materials.

12. Helium itself had only been discovered in 1895.

13. “Das war die chemische Sensation des Sommers 1903,” from Karl Kuhn, Natur und Kultur, cited in Howorth, Pioneer Research, 104.

14. Howorth, Pioneer Research, 149.

15. Badash, “‘Newer Alchemy,’” 92–93. Armstrong is quoted in Hampson, Radium Explained, 31.

16. Rutherford and Soddy’s early description of radioactivity explained only radioactive change within the atom, however, as did the Curies’ initial definition of “radioactive,” which meant spontaneously giving off radiation. The other attendant features of radioactivity—such as whether other particles were thrown off as a result of this internal transformation—had yet to be established (Trenn, Self-Splitting Atom, 14). By 1906, when Soddy presented a paper entitled “The Evolution of the Elements” at the BAAS meeting in York, he still found colleagues, such as Armstrong, “astonished” at what he had to report, and many of the older generation still refused to believe what they were hearing (Howorth, Pioneer Research, 149). For more on Soddy, see Merrick, World Made New; Kauffman, Frederick Soddy; Sclove, “From Alchemy to Atomic War,” and Freedman, “Frederick Soddy.” For more on Rutherford, see Jenkin, “Atomic Energy Is ‘Moonshine.’”

17. Thomson, What Is Physical Life?, 178–79.

18. For more on the nineteenth-century associations of cosmic and organic evolution, see Schaffer, “Nebular Hypothesis”; Lightman, “Evolution of the Evolutionary Epic”; and Secord, Victorian Sensation.

19. Badash has noted that the discovery of the transmutation of elements was not viewed with as much skepticism as one might expect (and as many secondary sources imply): “A careful search through the archives of the time . . . fails to support any such assertion!” Badash, “‘Newer Alchemy,’” 92.

20. Ibid., 95. As Rutherford noted early on, however, Lockyer’s theory of the evolution of matter was based “on evidence of a spectroscopic examination of the stars, and considers that temperature is the main factor in breaking up matter into its simpler forms. The transformation of matter occurring in the radio-elements is on the other hand spontaneous, and independent of temperature over the range examined.” Rutherford, Radio-Activity, 500.

21. Howorth, Greatest Discovery, 94.

22. Quoted in “Disintegration of the Atom.”

23. Soddy, “Evolution of Matter,” 12.

24. Soddy, “Radioactivity” (1905), 276.

25. Soddy, Matter and Energy, 244.

26. Rutherford to Loeb, February 3, 1907, LOC, folder 13, “Rutherford, Ernest.”

27. Cited in Weeks, Discovery of the Elements, 800.

28. Soddy, “Evolution of Matter,” 10–11.

29. “Mystery of Radium,” 10.

30. Soddy, “Evolution of Matter,” 41.

31. “Notes” (Electrician), 437.

32. Millikan, “Radium,” 9–10.

33. The equivalent words chosen as translations for these radioactive terms sometimes tend to obscure the resonant value these terms have in English: German’s halbwertszeit, for instance, and even French’s vie moyenne. I am fully aware that there may be different valences to this radium-life connection in different languages and cultures, and more work on these different contexts needs to be done. In the present work, I am primarily concerned with tracing these connections in the Anglophone context.

34. “The radiation of radium was ‘contagious’—contagious like a persistent scent or like a disease. It was impossible for an object, a plant, an animal or a person to be left near a tube of radium without immediately acquiring a notable ‘activity’ which a sensitive apparatus could detect. This contagion, which interfered with the results of precise experiments, was a daily enemy to Pierre and Marie Curie.” Marie Curie even referred to this problem as an “evil [that] has reached an acute stage.” Curie, Madame Curie, 220, 222.

35. Shenstone, “New Chemistry,” 521. See also Waters, “Radium and Human Life,” 329; Eve, “Infection of Laboratories by Radium,” 460–61; and Rona, “Laboratory Contamination”; as well as Burke’s observation that “the radio-activity is thus infectious, but the infected body recovers in the course of time,” in “Radio-Activity of Matter,” 126.

36. Hampson, Radium Explained, 15; emphasis added.

37. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first occurrence of the term “half-life” is with respect to radium, though Rutherford had made determinations of the rate of decay (without such a label) for thorium as early as 1900, according to Pais, Inward Bound, 121. Other terms—such as “radio-active periods”—coexisted with “half-life” in the early decades: see, for example, Rafferty, Introduction to the Science of Radio-Activity, 81. Soddy referred to “life periods,” as did Francis Venable in his Brief Account of Radio-Activity.

38. Soddy, “Present Position of Radio-Activity,” 53.

39. Rutherford, Radioactive Transformations, 148ff.

40. “Facts about Radium,” 966.

41. “Says Radium Is Modern Miracle,” 30.

42. Whetham, Recent Development of Physical Science, 236, 291; emphasis added.

43. Ibid.

44. Chamberlin, “Introduction,” 6.

45. “Science and Life,” 254.

46. Salomons, “Wonders of Radium Explained,” 13. Science also reported on this phenomenon, noting that it took about a month to reach maximum activity: “Radium” (Science), 347.

47. One article commenting on Curie’s interest in Crookes’s new invention, the spinthariscope, noted, “It was as if he had been allowed to assist at the birth of a universe—or at the death of a molecule.” Moffett, “Wonders of Radium,” 11. Compare this with a French source from a decade later, which declared, “Nous savons comment le radium meurt.” Houllevigue, La Matière, 119.

48. “Growth of Non-living Matter,” 590.

49. B. B. Boltwood commented in 1915 that the comparative ease of encountering and studying radium led to its being “considered and accepted as a standard or typical radioactive substance.” Boltwood, “Life of Radium,” 852.

50. Hammer, Radium, 16.

51. Curie, Madame Curie, 265.

52. In the case of all the others, he said, there is just too little evidence of their existence other than their radioactivity. Pais, Inward Bound, 116.

53. Soddy, Chemistry of the Radio-Elements, 44, 52.

54. Soddy, “Evolution of Matter,” 37; emphasis added. For more on such attempts to “grow radium” (including a letter from Rutherford to Soddy on June 20, 1904), see Soddy, “Life-History of Radium”; and Soddy, “Production of Radium from Uranium.”

55. Soddy, “Radio-Activity” (Electrician), 725.

56. Quoted in Howorth, Pioneer Research, 267.

57. “Says Radium Is Modern Miracle,” 30.

58. See, for example, Whetham, “Life-History of Radium”; Raveau, “L’origine, la longévité, et la descendance du radium”; Hahn, “Muttersubstanz des Radiums”; “The ‘Life’ of Radium”; Boltwood, “Life of Radium”; Turner, “Ionium, the Parent of Radium”; and Fajans and Makower, “The Growth of Radium C from Radium B.”

59. “For the present it seems preferable to refer to the body simply as the parent of radium.” Soddy, “Parent of Radium,” 256–74.

60. Howorth, Greatest Discovery, 89.

61. Soddy, “Evolution of Matter,” 13.

62. Ibid., 21. Trenn notes that λ would have to wait for later work by Einstein before it could become a truly atomic constant (Self-Splitting Atom, 130, 136, 142), while Pais notes that it was only in 1927 that it was discerned why different radioactive elements have the particular lifetimes they do (Inward Bound, 103).

63. Pais has suggested that work done on luminescent phenomena “made the lifetime concept familiar” for those working on questions surrounding “unstable systems of atomic dimensions” (Inward Bound, 121).

64. Howorth, Pioneer Research, 126.

65. Chamberlin, “Introduction,” 4.

66. Mendelsohn, Heat and Life, 8, 21.

67. Ibid., 95.

68. Hammer, Radium, 3.

69. Curie, Pierre Curie, 119.

70. See, for example, “To Make Luminous Drinks from Radium,” 2.

71. It was only when he realized that the “invisible phosphorescence” of his sample did not decrease over time once the external stimulus (sunlight) had been removed, and that it did not show the phenomenon of a “lifetime” like all other phosphorescent phenomena he had studied, that Becquerel realized he was facing an entirely new phenomenon.

72. Humboldt, Cosmos, 135, 202, 309, 342.

73. Otis, Müller’s Lab, 7.

74. Wood, “Scintillations of Radium,” 195.

75. Crookes, “Emanations of Radium,” 523.

76. Saleeby, “Radium and Life,” 226.

77. He goes on to describe “une hérédité d’éléments,” “la généalogie du radium,” and the discovery of radioactivity as not only the discovery of transmutation, but also the discovery of “l’élixir de vie.” He concludes, “Loin d’être une exception, une monstruosité de la nature, le radium n’est que la représentant le plus éminent d’une propriété, peut-être universelles de la matière.” Houllevigue, La Matière, xxiii, 123, 130.

78. Wood, “Scintillations of Radium,” 195–96.

79. De Kay, “Color Visions of the Kiowas,” SM13.

80. Lodge, “Radium and Its Lessons,” 85.

81. Bottone, Radium, 60.

82. Millikan, “Radium,” 9–10.

83. Wells, World Set Free, 22–23.

84. Maceroni, quoted in Morus, Frankenstein’s Children, 130–31.

85. Rutherford, Radio-Activity, 492; Rutherford, “Radium,” 390–96.

86. Eve, Rutherford, 107.

87. “New Rays Discovered,” 14.

88. Pais, Inward Bound, 105. The first such mention of these doubts followed Marie Curie’s discovery of polonium, when its energy proved even more intense than that of thorium.

89. Ibid., 109–11.

90. “Says Radium Is Modern Miracle,” 30. Comparisons to perpetual motion are legion in the literature of this period; see, for example, A. Frederick Collins, “Common Sense Applied to Radium,” SM4; H. Greinacher, “Ein neues Radium-Perpetuum mobile”; and Henri Poincaré’s “Éloge de Curie” delivered at the Académie des Sciences in Paris.

91. The rhyme in Punch continues: “Take but a pinch of the same, you’ll find it according to experts / Equal for luminous ends to a couple of million candles / Equal for heat to a furnace of heaven knows how many horsepower.” Keller, Infancy of Atomic Physics, 107.

92. Coues, Daemon of Darwin, 30–31.

93. Prior to the theory of atomic disintegration, it was even suggested in some quarters “that the energy of radium might be due to the analogous power of that element to derive its energy from outside sources by sifting out the molecules of different speeds impinging on it.” “Bacteria and Radio-Activity,” 127. For more on the afterlife of Maxwell’s demon in twentieth-century history of biology, see Keller, “Molecules, Messages, and Memory.” For more on the demon itself, see Leff and Rex, Maxwell’s Demon; and Canales and Krawjewski, “Little Helpers.”

94. Spengler, Decline of the West, 420, 423.

95. Wells, Tono-Bungay, 104, 183, 267.

96. “One also thinks of the ‘fatigue’ of metals, and the hysteresis or ‘memory’ of certain materials”: Gray, Advancing Front of Science, 215. For more on the history of the transition from “life-units” to “life-processes,” and on various attempts to characterize inanimate entities as potentially living, see Wilder, Life, especially chapter 8, “Does Life Inhere in Matter?” For a very useful scholarly account, see Lehman, Biology in Transition, 128, 133. See also Singer, History of Biology, 464, 573; Kay, “W. M. Stanley’s Crystallization of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus”; Lorch, “Charisma of Crystals in Biology”; and Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields.

97. Maurice Cornforth, Dialectical Materialism and Science, 47.

98. Lionel Beale, On Life, 52, 39.

99. Saleeby, “Radium and Life,” 226.

100. “Vitality acts in living centers upon matter only infinitely near the centre.” Beale, On Life, 41; cf. Beale’s argument against a belief in living atoms as more literally understood, 39.

101. Ibid., 58; emphasis added.

102. Dolbear, “Life From a Physical Standpoint.”

103. Even the ways in which radium is described as “constantly and without cessation throwing off from itself, at terrific velocity, particles of matter—Energy Force, Power—call it what you will,” owes its discursive roots to this hereditarian branch of the living atom tradition (Degnen, “Radio-Active Solar Pad.”) Just before introducing the term “gemmules,” Darwin refers in his pangenesis hypothesis, Chapter 27 of his Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, to his assumption that “the units [of the body] throw off minute granules which are dispersed throughout the whole system.” This talk of body parts “throwing off” hereditary particles returned in de Vries’s later discussion of mutation, in which some particularly mutable species were said to “throw off” new varieties and species. This use of language will be explored further in the Conclusion.

104. Lehman quotes Singer’s 1965 entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Underlying much biological thought of the early twentieth century was a sense that ‘the substance of life,’ like inert matter, must be resolvable into ultimate particles—‘quanta’ of life, comparable with ‘quanta’ of inheritance (Mendel) and ‘quanta’ of energy (Planck)”: Biology in Transition, 133. Similarly, the only nonbiological milestone in L. C. Dunn’s chronology of major events in the history of genetics is Planck’s discovery of the quantum: “Now, with the hindsight provided by discoveries of the last decade, we can see that ‘quantum biology’ might have been a better designation than ‘particle biology’ [for the study of heredity since 1900] . . . since the essential feature is the discrete nature of the elements first recognized by segregation and recombination.” Dunn, “Genetics in Historical Perspective,” 81; for a timeline, see the draft version of Dunn’s chapter in APS Dunn, box 7, 122.

105. “Artificial Biogenesis,” 705.

106. Jan Sapp has noted, “During the second half of the nineteenth century, many leading theorists postulated that underlying the structure of the cell there existed microscopically invisible living units standing somewhere between the cell and the ultimate molecules of living matter. These living units, or hypothetical ‘elementary organisms,’ were the starting point of every leading theory of heredity and development.” Sapp, Evolution by Association, 38.

107. Osborn, Origin and Evolution of Life, 6. By the second half of the century, François Jacob noted that the growth of genetics and biochemistry had “changed the centre of gravity of living bodies. Organisms were no longer thought of simply as organs and functions arranged in depth; they no longer appeared as curled round a source of life from which organization radiated.” Jacob, Logic of Life, 243.

108. “Radium” (Electrician), 277.

109. Quoted in Howorth, Greatest Discovery, 91.

110. Keller, Infancy of Atomic Physics, 103.

111. “A Prophet of Radium.”

112. “Mr. Soddy’s Views,” 5.

113. “Wells’s book indeed includes several near-verbatim renditions of Soddy’s prose.” Sclove, “From Alchemy to Atomic War,” 177. For more on Wells, see Seed, “H. G. Wells and the Liberating Atom.” Other than a 1906 reference in the London Magazine and Anatole France’s L’île des Pingouins in the following year, Wells’s book is among the earliest known references to an atomic explosion or bomb. It was Wells’s story that would motivate Leó Szilárd to join the Manhattan Project after reading the book in 1932.

114. Wells, World Set Free, 23.

115. Ibid., 25, 27.

116. de la Peña, Body Electric, 173–74. For more on radium as a commodity, see Rentetzi, “Packaging Radium, Selling Science.”

117. de la Peña, Body Electric, 175.

118. “Costly Particles of Radium,” 6.

119. de la Peña, Body Electric, 178.

120. Hammer, Radium, 16.

121. “Radio-Active Substances,” BR7.

122. See, for example, Soddy, “Present Position of Radio-Activity,” 47; and “Radium and Its Lessons.” The equation of matter and electricity was criticized by others.

123. Howorth, Pioneer Research, 104–5.

124. Iwan Morus has traced these earlier traditions of popular paid electrical lectures and demonstrations displaying rare electrical phenomena to the public in the British context in his Frankenstein’s Children.

125. de la Peña, Body Electric, 174, 9.

126. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 43. Weart traces this connection between radium and electricity even years later, citing a 1935 “movie serial, updating The Exploits of Elaine, [that] brought cowboy actor Gene Autry back from the dead in a ‘radium reviving room,’ although the apparatus also crackled with traditional electric sparks.”

127. While in the case of electricity, distinctions were often made between electrical and galvanic phenomena (the electricity of life), with radium, these two realms—the putatively physical and that more inclined to the biological—were conflated from the very beginning.

128. This was in addition to showing how to make gold, facilitating interplanetary communication, and, perhaps presciently, determining “how the world will ultimately be destroyed.” Theodore Waters, “Radium and Human Life,” 328.

129. Morus, Frankenstein’s Children, 71.

130. de la Peña, Body Electric, 174–75, 109.

131. Sacramento Bee, November 7, 1903, quoted in de la Peña, Body Electric, 181.

132. Badash, “Radium,” 150.

133. Quoted in Badash, “‘Newer Alchemy,’” 91.

134. “Women and Radium,” 6.

135. “The Popular Interest in Radium,” 6.

136. Keller, Infancy of Atomic Physics, 106. The title of this section, “An Indecent Curie-osity,” is quoted from Keller, 108.

137. Ibid., 107.

138. Badash, “Radium,” 147, 150; Moffet, “Wonders of Radium,” cited in Howorth, Greatest Discovery, 85.

139. “Radium” (New York Times), 6.

140. Ackroyd, “Radium and Its Position in Nature,” 859.

141. “A Possible Use for Radium,” 338.

142. Hampson, Radium Explained, 32–33.

143. Badash, “Radium,” 148.

144. “Radium Energised Wool,” 389.

145. “Odor and the New Radiation,” 677.

146. And yet, the author continued, “it is only reasonable to suppose that instead of killing . . . microbes [radium] would act as a delightful stimulant, and it still remains for any investigator to prove the contrary.” Collins, “Common Sense Applied to Radium,” SM4; emphasis added. With respect to radium’s medical potential, the Lancet had cautioned already by 1909: “We utter this word of warning to those who expect too much from radium in the present state of our knowledge. Should it prove true that in radium we possess a method of combating malignant disease anywhere and everywhere we should rejoice indeed, but we urge that hopes should not be unduly raised.” “The Radium Institute,” 773.

147. “Do Men Radiate Light?,” 6.

148. “Radium was the rage.” A. S. Eve, Rutherford’s biographer, on meeting Rutherford in January 1903. Quoted in Badash, “‘Newer Alchemy,’” 91.

149. Hampson, Radium Explained, 32–33.

150. Harvie, “Radium Century,” 100; see also Landa, Buried Treasure to Buried Waste, 35–36.

151. Harvie, “Radium Century,” 100–104. For more on radium as commodity, see Rentetzi, “Packaging Radium, Selling Science.” For more on radium therapy, see Macklis, “Radithor and the Era of Mild Radium Therapy”; and American Institute of Medicine, Abstracts of Selected Articles on Radium and Radium Therapy. For more on radium and its relationship to the American public, see Lavine, First Atomic Age.

152. Allyn, “Costumes Treated with Radium Paint,” 6.

153. Badash, “Radium,” 147.

154. “Radium as a Preservative,” 5.

155. de la Peña, Body Electric, 174.

156. Shaw, The Doctor’s Dilemma, xxxii.

157. The epithet “Our Lady of Radium” was bestowed on Marie Curie by the American journalist Israel Zangwill in a batch of three short essays in the May 1904 Reader Magazine. See Kevles, Naked to the Bone, 26; and Badash, “Radium,” 147.

158. Clay, “Radium.”

159. “Religious Notices,” 9. A religious fascination with “spiritual radium” has persisted up to the present day: “There exists a great amount of ‘pitchblende,’ referring to all of those who profess belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. God loves His believers and if they persist in their hope they will be saved in the Day of the Lord . . . there must be found in the mass of believers a quantity of ‘radium’—people who will give their all that God’s will might be performed throughout His creation.” Trumpet Ministries, Inc., The Word of Righteousness, accessed June 1, 2014, http://www.wor.org/Books/r/radium.htm.

160. Adams, Education, 356.

161. Sharp, “Radium of Romance,” 69.

162. Russell, “Research in State Universities,” 853.

163. “‘Macbeth’ in ‘Pure Radium,’” 30.

164. “From the Lives of Players,” 21.

165. Corelli, Life Everlasting, 18.

166. Ibid., 19, 33.

167. “When Silence Is Golden,” 6; “Limit Their Size,” 1. A similar usage can be found in “The Cure,” 1.

168. On the 1950s radioeuphoria, see, for example, Weart, Nuclear Fear; and Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light.

169. “The Rays of Radium,” 6.

170. “Lost Radium Tube,” 5.

171. “Diamond Rays Pierce Paper,” 10.

172. “Crowds Gaze on Radium,” 3; “Popular Interest in Radium,” 6.

173. “Billiard Room Buzzings,” SM10.

174. Harvie, “Radium Century,” 100.

175. “Columbia St. Louis Exhibits,” 6. In fact, “the lectures and the exhibit of radioactive preparations and minerals were considered the outstanding attractions of the fair.” Badash, “Radium,” 148–49.

176. “‘Liquid Sunshine’ on Tap,” 6.

177. “The Roentgen ray has been of immense value in curing cancer,” Morton also noted, “but radium promises to go far ahead of it.” “To Make Luminous Drinks from Radium,” 2.

178. “Man Competing with Radium,” 209.

179. Clark, Radium Girls, 52; Harvie, “Radium Century,” 100–104; “Bottling the Sunshine,” 9.

180. Lavine has noted that as radium “began to become more commonly available at the clinic—and, to a much greater extent, when it became part of the spa culture—it acquired the characteristic of being not merely vital, but vital to the processes of life. When, during this period, spa-water sellers compared water without radium emanation to air without oxygen, they meant it literally.” Lavine, First Atomic Age, chap. 4.

181. “I think it is highly probable that there is radium in the sun. . . . The electrons given out by the sun sometimes strike our atmosphere and make a rare gas, called krypton.” Saleeby, “Radium the Revealer,” 88.

182. Wickham, Radiumtherapy, 15. When she saw an X-ray of her hand, one of the first X-rays ever made of a human being, Frau Roentgen spoke of having seen her own death: Kevles, Naked to the Bone, 38.

183. Kevles, Naked to the Bone, 70.

184. Field, “Radium and Research,” 764.

185. Saleeby, “Radium the Revealer,” 86.

186. “Revelations of Radium,” 490.

187. Le Bon, Evolution of Matter.

188. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 36–37. I am indebted to Weart’s research and analysis here; all publications mentioned in this paragraph are cited in Nuclear Fear, 37.

189. “Does the Dead Body Possess Properties Akin to Radio-Activity?,” 1201.

190. For more on the history of the N-ray controversy, see Klotz, “The N-Ray Affair”; and Nye, “N-rays.” The later mitogenetic ray controversy of the early 1920s can be viewed as a further transmutation of similar resonances between radiation and life; see chapter 6.

191. Nye, “N-rays,” 133.

192. Wilson, “Is Radium an Element?”

193. Proumen, Les Rayons X, Le Radium, Les Rayons N, 67; Clay, “Radium,” 234.

194. Nye, “N-rays,” 130, 132.

195. “Radio-Activity of the Animate,” 104.

196. Nye, “N-rays,” 125.

197. Klotz, “The N-Ray Affair,” 170.

198. Wood, “The n-Rays,” 530–31.

199. Burke, “The Blondlot n-Rays” (Nature, February 8, 1904), 365; Burke, “The Blondlot n-Rays” (Nature, June 30, 1904), 198.

200. Howorth, Pioneer Research, 146.

201. Ibid.

202. Ibid., 92.

203. Howorth, Greatest Discovery, 88.

204. Soddy, “Evolution of Matter,” 42.

1. “Scientist’s Great Discovery,” 1.

2. “A Radium Product That Seems to Live,” 1; Hale, “Has Radium Revealed the Secret of Life?,” 7.

3. “Origin of Life: Mr. Burke Describes His Experiments,” 5.

4. Hale, “Has Radium Revealed the Secret of Life?,” 7.

5. “They are introduced to admiring physicists as radiobes, the discoverer being too modest to name them after himself.” “Cambridge Radiobes,” 11.

6. As noted in chapter 1, for more on the nineteenth-century associations of cosmic and organic evolution, see Schaffer, “Nebular Hypothesis”; Lightman, “Evolution of the Evolutionary Epic”; and Secord, Victorian Sensation.

7. Burke, “Physics and Biology.” Burke’s planetary model of the atom, explicitly comparing the electron corpuscle to a planet and the positive nucleus to a sun, derived directly from his interlinking of the discourses of cosmic and organic evolution. Burke’s theories might sound like those of a crackpot, but Rutherford would develop his own planetary account of the atom four years later.

8. Strick, Sparks of Life, 192. Strick has masterfully explored the complexities of the debate in the late nineteenth century, including the relationship of spontaneous generation controversies to larger issues of “Darwinism” in Britain: Strick, Sparks of Life, 12, 191. The canonical source for a history of the spontaneous generation debates is Farley, Spontaneous Generation Controversy. See also Kamminga, “Studies,” and Kamminga, “Historical Perspective,” as well as Fry, Emergence of Life on Earth.

9. See Geison, “Protoplasmic Theory of Life.”

10. Strick, “From Aristotle to Darwin,” 54.

11. On Buffon, see Sloan, “Organic Molecules Revisited.” On Maupertuis, see Terrall, “Salon, Academy and Boudoir”; and Wolfe, “Endowed Molecules and Emergent Organization.” On Haeckel, see Haeckel’s Kristallseelen and Snelders’s “Zijn vloeibare kristallen levende organismen?”

12. For a list of examples, see Moriz Benedikt, Krystallisation und Morphogenesis: Biomechanische Studie (Vienna: Perles, 1904), 65, quoted in Thomas Brandstetter, “Imagining Inorganic Life.” For more on this early history of “synthetic biology,” see Campos, “That Was the Synthetic Biology That Was.”

13. Brandstetter, “Imagining Inorganic Life.”

14. Burke, Origin of Life.

15. Pycraft, “What Is Life?,” 500.

16. “Burke’s Own Account,” 43.

17. Burke, “On the Spontaneous Action of Radio-Active Bodies,” 79.

18. “Action of Radium on Beef-Gelatine,” 315. In fact, Burke had initially delayed publishing his results, as “so momentous a result as it seemed required careful confirmation, and much delay was also caused in taking the opinions of various men of science.” Burke, “On the Spontaneous Action of Radium,” 294.

19. Soddy had just become president at the previous meeting, on November 2. All subsequent quotes from this meeting are from Burke, “The Spontaneous Action of Radium and Other Bodies.”

20. “Burke’s Own Interpretation,” 535.

21. Burke, “The Spontaneous Action of Radium and Other Bodies,” 35.

22. Burke, Origin of Life, plates facing 98, 100, 102, 108, 110, 112.

23. “Origin of Life: Momentous Discovery,” 5.

24. Saleeby, “Science: The Origin of Life,” 668.

25. Saleeby, “Origin of Life,” 4.

26. “Origin of Life: Momentous Discovery,” 5.

27. Burke, “On the Spontaneous Action of Radio-Active Bodies,” 79.

28. “Radium and Vitality: ‘Radiobes,’” 1738.

29. “Cambridge Radiobes,” 11.

30. Burke, “Evolution of Life,” 185.

31. Burke, “Origin of Life,” 396–97; Burke, Origin of Life, 109–10.

32. The meaning of “half-life” at this time came via at least three distinct roots: the work of Soddy, Becquerel’s study of phosphorescence, and the work of Pflüger, discussed below.

33. “Radium and Life,” 10. Another newspaper asked, “Who is Burke? Is he a foreigner? In one of the continental papers, in a very capable editorial on the matter, his name is given as Johannes Butler Borksi, whilst the same article calls him Burke, later on.” “Spontaneous Generation,” 2.

34. Thomson et al., History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 159.

35. These “research students” were ordinarily awarded an M.A. degree after two years’ residence and the presentation of a original thesis. According to Thomson, “after a few years’ trial this was replaced by Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy), a new degree created by the University for their benefit.” Thomson, Recollections and Reflections, 136–37.

36. Kim, Leadership and Creativity, 98.

37. Thomson et al., History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 213; Burke, “On the Phosphorescent Glow in Gases.”

38. Burke’s work is cited in Kim, Leadership and Creativity, 189.

39. Thomson et al., History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 213. By 1905, Burke had been engaged in such experiments for six years.

40. Saleeby, “Origin of Life,” 4.

41. Kim, Leadership and Creativity, 132.

42. Kim, Leadership and Creativity, 121, 167; Thomson et al., History of the Cavendish Laboratory, 232.

43. A footnote in the text at this point reads, “In the same sense as the cell, although it may admit of being broken up into its constituent parts by exceptional means.”

44. Burke, “Radio-Activity of Matter,” 126, 129–31.

45. “Origin of Life: Mr. Burke Describes His Experiments,” 5.

46. In fact, just the year before his sensational announcement (1904), he had patented a neon lamp, and he continued with his interest in luminescence for years to come.

47. Burke, “On the Spontaneous Action of Radio-Active Bodies,” 79.

48. Quoted in Verworn, General Physiology, 306; emphasis added.

49. “Origin of Life: Momentous Discovery,” 5.

50. “A Fascinating Theme,” 3; “Origin of Life: Mr. Burke Describes His Experiments,” 5.

51. “Cambridge Radiobes,” 11.

52. “Origin of Life: Momentous Discovery,” 5.

53. “Origin of Life: Eminent Men,” 5.

54. “The Microbe’s Ancestor,” 6.

55. “Professor Burke’s ‘Radiobes,’” 6.

56. “A Fascinating Theme,” 3.

57. Saleeby, “Science: The Origin of Life,” 668.

58. Saleeby, “Radium the Revealer,” 85.

59. Saleeby, “Radium and Life,” 226–30.

60. “Origin of Life: Mr. Burke Describes His Experiments,” 5.

61. Ibid.

62. Pycraft, “What Is Life?,” 500.

63. Slocum, “Mr Burke and His Radiobes,” 1011.

64. “Clue to the Beginning,” 6813–14.

65. “Life’s Secret,” 5.

66. Burke, “The Spontaneous Action of Radium and Other Bodies,” 37.

67. Burke, Origin of Life, vi and chap. 7.

68. “Cambridge Radiobes,” 11.

69. Burke, Origin of Life, vi.

70. Ibid., 191.

71. “Origin of Life: Momentous Discovery,” 5.

72. “A Fascinating Theme,” 3.

73. “Life’s Secret,” 5; cf. “Origin of Life: Theology and the Radium Experiments,” 5; and “Origin of Life: Well-Known Theologian on Mr. Burke’s Experiments,” 3.

74. Hutton, “Origin of Life,” 5.

75. Pycraft, “What Is Life?,” 500. Then again, he said, arguments against spontaneous generation “cannot, strictly speaking, it is true, be met by any contradiction.” The contention was a metaphysical one. Burke, “Origin of Life,” 389–90.

76. Burke, Origin of Life, vi.

77. The word “sensational” is an actor’s category, and it was widely used to describe Burke’s discovery. James Secord has analyzed the use of this terminology in describing the impact of Chambers’s anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). More work would need to be done to ascertain whether the word had equivalently “sensorial” connotations in this particular turn-of-the-century context. See Secord, Victorian Sensation.

78. Hutton, “Origin of Life,” 5.

79. “Origin of Life: Eminent Men,” 5.

80. Lodge, “What Is Life?,” 668.

81. Brewster, “J. Butler Burke’s Own Explanation,” SM7.

82. Burke, “Evolution of Life,” 185.

83. Burke, Origin of Life, 81. One of Burke’s reviewers pointed out that Burke “uses ‘life’ in a very extended and unusual sense. He says, for example, that a flame is alive. . . . But then nobody supposes for a moment that a live flame is at all like a living plant. Mr. Burke attributes to his radiobes a sort of artificial life, midway between the life of a plant and the so-called life of a fire. He holds that we ought to recognize many different sorts of life. The life of flame is one sort, and the life of radiobes another, and the life of animals and plants still a third. He even holds that radium itself is, to some degree, alive.” Brewster, “J. Butler Burke’s Own Explanation,” SM7. Angela Creager has noted a similar dynamic in the later history of virology: “The rendering of viruses as experimental systems for understanding the ‘secrets of life’ was somewhat paradoxical; its advocates never claimed that viruses were alive.” Creager, Life of a Virus, 185.

84. Dana, “Origin of Life,” BR1.

85. Burke claimed to have produced something on the way to life, not life itself. Accordingly, he thought Bastian was claiming too much, too fast, and explicitly distanced himself from such work. “[Burke] denies the validity of the experiments of Bastian, (who also denies his) and does not think that there has yet been any actual demonstration of the production of living cells out of dead organic matter.” Dana, “Origin of Life,” BR1. Intriguingly, one author had noted as late as 1911 that Bastian might benefit from looking into the effects of radium on the spontaneous origin of life, as “there is at present much evidence of the importance of radium in earth-history.” Hall, “The Great Enigma,” 355. For more on Bastian’s prominent role in the history of spontaneous generation, see Strick, Sparks of Life.

86. Viewing “nutrition” in this way is not as much of a stretch as it might seem, given a physicist operating under a Spencerian definition of life and with Burke’s own understanding of an “organism” as “a structure, a nucleus and an external boundary or cell wall.” “Burke’s Own Interpretation,” 534.

87. Ibid. Cf. “Origin of Life: Mr. Burke Describes His Experiments,” 5.

88. “Origin of Life: Momentous Discovery,” 5. Indeed, one London newspaper had reported just the year before Burke’s experiments that “the biologists and physicists are getting into disputes over the definition of the boundary line separating their respective provinces, for the ‘neutral strip’ between them, once a terra incognita, is being explored from both sides.” “Growth of Non-living Matter,” 589.

89. “Origin of Life: Mr. Burke Describes His Experiments,” 5.

90. “Origin of Life: Momentous Discovery,” 5.

91. Burke, Origin of Life, 166.

92. “Origin of Life: Mr. Burke Describes His Experiments,” 5.

93. Ibid.

94. Burke, Origin of Life, vi; and Burke, “Origin of Life,” 397. Cf.: “Once there had been a continuous scale, but, unfortunately, the greater portion of these things had been eliminated. The most one could hope to do in the laboratory was to attempt to bridge over the gaps—fill them in completely we never should.” Burke, “The Spontaneous Action of Radium and Other Bodies,” 37.

95. “Origin of Life: Momentous Discovery,” 5.

96. “The Microbe’s Ancestor,” 6; emphasis added.

97. As Strick has noted, “the very slipperiness of the terms [in the spontaneous generation debates] and the changing definitions of many of them are crucial to how the debates turned. It is only by tracking the usage of the terms closely throughout that we can see when the ambiguity of a term, rather than actual empirical observations, is a source of disagreement as well as when deliberate changes in usage represent rhetorical strategies.” Sparks of Life, 12.

98. “Wonders of Radium Explained,” X4.

99. “Generation by Radium,” 1; Hale, “Has Radium Revealed the Secret of Life?,” 7; “The Microbe’s Ancestor,” 6.

100. “A Radium Product That Seems to Live,” 1. This despite the fact that New York Times a day before had rapidly conflated two meanings of “artificial life”—Burke’s and Loeb’s—and in so doing had removed the epistemological subtlety of Burke’s position; see “Generation by Radium.”

101. “A Cell-Killer as a Cell-Maker,” 6.

102. “Professor Burke’s ‘Radiobes,’” 6.

103. B. C. A. W., “Origin of Life,” 187.

104. “Action of Radium on Beef-Gelatine,” 315.

105. “Origin of Life” (Times Literary Supplement), 123.

106. “Action of Radium on Beef-Gelatine,” 315.

107. Hutton, “Origin of Life,” 5.

108. “Previous Experiments,” 5.

109. Nevertheless, he concluded, “I shall watch with interest Mr. Burke’s discovery in the hope that it may shed some light on the terra incognita which separates the organic from the inorganic.” Best, “Origin of Life,” 3.

110. Saleeby, “Science: The Origin of Life,” 668.

111. Saleeby, “Radium and Life,” 226.

112. “Origin of Life: Mr. Burke Describes His Experiments,” 5.

113. “A Cell-Killer as a Cell-Maker,” 6.

114. “Ramsay was the expert on disintegration,” Badash has noted, even though at times his research “was incompetent . . . [and his] public statements . . . misleading, for he was prone to exaggeration and self-glorification.” Badash, Radioactivity in America, 29.

115. Shenstone, “Origin of Life,” 409; see also Shenstone, New Physics and Chemistry, 359–60.

116. “Ramsay, Radium, and Burke,” 215.

117. Ramsay, “Can Life Be Produced by Radium,” 556.

118. Ramsay, “Radium and Its Products,” 57. Transmutation via radioactivity and the production of radium was often alluded to as the secret of the alchemists or the philosophers’ stone at this time. George Darwin commented in 1905, for example, that “we are surely justified in believing that we have the clue which the alchemists sought in vain”: Darwin, “Address of the President,” 232. See also Saleeby, “Radium the Revealer,” 85.

119. “Wonders of Radium Explained,” X4.

120. Rudge took photographs from a few minutes after the initial contact of the radium with the gelatin to several days and “in some cases weeks later.” Rudge, “Action of Radium,” 380.

121. Ibid.; Rudge, “On the Action of Radium,” 258–59. See also Burke, “The Spontaneous Action of Radium and Other Bodies,” 33ff.

122. Rudge, “Action of Radium,” 381.

123. Ibid., 382.

124. Ibid., 384.

125. Rudge’s earliest criticisms of Burke’s work were recorded at the same meeting of the Röntgen Society at which Burke presented his work, in December 1905. See Burke, “The Spontaneous Action of Radium and Other Bodies,” 37ff.

126. Loeb, Organism as a Whole, 39.

127. Pauly, Controlling Life, 115–16.

128. Loeb, Organism as a Whole, 210.

129. B. C. A. W., “Origin of Life,” 187–89.

130. Burke, “The Spontaneous Action of Radium and Other Bodies,” 38.

131. B. C. A. W., “Origin of Life,” 190.

132. Pycraft, “What Is Life?,” 500; Thomson, “Radiobes and Biogen,” 1–3.

133. “What is to be made of this, for example? ‘If more progress is not made in this borderland it is, as we fear, of the awe and dread which in these departments of knowledge each professor entertains towards each.’” Shadwell, “Origin of Life,” 123.

134. B. C. A. W., “Origin of Life,” 190, quoting Burke, Origin of Life, 187.

135. Thomson, “Radiobes and Biogen,” 1–3.

136. In an even more damning criticism, he concluded, “Sentences could be quoted which sound well but are unintelligible when analysed closely. The volume must be looked at as we look at an impressionist picture of which we enjoy the general effect but which we dare not examine in detail. We must especially avoid searching for a satisfactory proof of the existence of the radiobe, to which Mr. Burke owes his latter-day reputation.” Schuster, “New Books,” 5.

137. Mallock, Immortal Soul, 25, 167.

138. Ibid., 169, 180, 262, 265.

139. Ibid., 271, 396, 416.

140. Yarker, “W. H. Mallock’s Other Novels,” 190.

141. Burke, “Artificial Cells,” 355.

142. Ibid., 357–58.

143. “Origin of Life: Momentous Discovery,” 5.

144. Burke, “Artificial Cells,” 357.

145. Ibid., 355–56.

146. Ibid., 358–59.

147. Aleksandr Oparin later described Leduc as having been “allured by the wraith of external resemblance.” Oparin, Origin of Life, 56.

148. Burke, “Artificial Cells,” 359.

149. Burke, “On the Spontaneous Action of Radium,” 294. Dubois claimed to have first announced his discovery in an academic lecture he gave on November 3, 1904; Burke’s announcement was his May 25, 1905, letter to Nature. See Slocum, “Mr. Burke and His Radiobes,” 1011–12.

150. “Some critics have suggested that these forms I have observed may be identified with the curious bodies obtained by Quincke, Lehmann, Schenck, Leduc and others in recent times, and by Rainey and Crosse more than half a century ago; but I do not think, at least so far as I can at present judge, that there is sufficient reason for so classifying them together. They seem to me to have little in common except, perhaps, the scale of being to which as microscopic forms they happen to belong.” Burke, “On the Spontaneous Action of Radium,” 294.

151. Ibid.

152. “Origin of Life: Mr. Burke Describes His Experiments,” 5.

153. “Flotsam and Jetsam,” 87.

154. Burke, “Evolution of Life,” 178.

155. Ibid., 179, 188, 179–80. Burke soon included psychology under the purview of biology as well.

156. As one reviewer summed it up, “He contends that he has produced something which gives a clue to the origin of life, or rather to its nature; for if his argument be correct, life has no origin.” “Origin of Life” (Times Literary Supplement), 123.

157. Moore later provided a similar argument in a different context: “Although Pasteur has conclusively proven that life did not originate in certain ways, that does not exclude the view that it arose in other ways. The problem is one that demands thought and experimental work, and is not an exploded chimera.” Moore, Origin and Nature of Life, 163. William Ritter’s later critique of origin-of-life work—that it created things that could not be living because they did not come from living things—is contradicted by Burke’s argument that there are many possible modes of origin. See Ritter, Unity of the Organism. This question of the essential historicity of life would return with Gager’s work on the effects of radium on plants (described in chap. 3).

158. Burke, “Evolution of Life,” 176.

159. Burke, “Correspondence—The Origin of Life,” 560.

160. Only fleeting references to Burke’s sensational work have survived in laboratory correspondence. A letter to Rutherford from George F. C. Searle—held to be “the Laboratory’s most influential teacher for several generations”—refers to Burke’s experiments as having “caused a little amusement” at the Cavendish. This letter is dated September 14, 1905, which means it would have just followed Burke’s summer of fame: Cambridge University Library, MSS ADD 7653 S50, cited in Kim, Leadership and Creativity, 166.

161. Burke, “Artificial Cells,” 357.

162. Burke, “Some Fruitless Efforts to Synthesise Life,” 304.

163. Thomson et al., History of the Cavendish Laboratory, appendix.

164. Kim, Leadership and Creativity, 171–72.

165. Soddy, “Radioactivity” (1907).

166. One commentator held, for example, that “an artificial specimen must be capable of a cell formation which then goes on to reproduce itself by cell division or mitosis, and then continues to do so independently for successive generations. If it can do nothing of the kind, then this supposed living substance is a delusion.” Thomson, What Is Physical Life?, 58.

167. Saleeby, “Radium and Life,” 229.

168. “Life by Chemical Action,” 8.

169. For an earlier iteration of this dynamic from the history of electricity, see Secord, “Extraordinary Experiment.”

170. “Scientists Discuss the Origin of Life,” 5.

171. See Brooke, “Wöhler’s Urea and Its Vital Force?”; and Kohler, “History of Biochemistry.”

172. The historian John Farley had hinted that there was a continuity between spontaneous generation and origin-of-life research, but stopped short of giving a full account. Strick has added further details and noted that there is a “deceptive impression of discontinuity between 1880 and 1920, the time when Oparin commenced theorizing on the origin of life, that has dominated histories of the subject”: Strick, Sparks of Life, 191. Along these lines, this chapter is a further effort to show how Burke’s use of radium and his creation of radiobes were crucial in the reorientation of his own discourse from “spontaneous generation” to a new focus on the question of experimental access to the historical.

173. Burke, Emergence of Life, 4; Burke, Mystery of Life, 132.

174. Burke, “Evolution of Life,” 189.

175. Ibid., 190.

176. Davis, “Review of Burke’s Emergence of Life.”

177. “Mr. J. B. Butler Burke,” 6.

178. Burke, Mystery of Life, 132.

179. Clement, “Translator’s Introduction,” 11, 28.

180. Becquerel, “L’action abiotique,” cited in “A Radio-Hypothesis of Life’s Origin,” 23.

181. Burke, Emergence of Life, 4.

182. Burke, Mystery of Life, 147.

183. “Mr. J. B. Butler Burke,” 6.

1. Moffet, “Wonders of Radium,” 14.

2. Harding, “Dr. MacDougal’s Botanical Feat,” SM1.

3. MacDougal, “Trends in Plant Science.”

4. MacDougal, “Heredity.”

5. Ibid., 521.

6. Johannsen, “Genotype Conception of Heredity,” 141. Johannsen remained interested in the work of MacDougal and Gager and visited the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in October or November of 1911.

7. Strick, Sparks of Life. See also his Origin of Life Debate.

8. MacDougal, “Origin of Species by Mutation” (Torreya, July 1902), 99–100; Korschinsky, “Heterogenesis und Evolution,” 273. Intriguingly, both Burke and MacDougal were interested in producing artificial cells; MacDougal deployed artificial cell setups in his laboratory in order to better model osmotic and other processes in living cells.

9. Kellogg, Darwinism To-Day, 327.

10. A fascinating story remains to be told of the fuller history of “mutation”—from at least its transformation of earlier medieval discourses of the “marvels” and “wonders” associated with the preternatural to the nineteenth-century discourse of “sports” and “monsters.” Radium, having been discovered at just this decades-long transition from talk of monsters to talk of mutants, experienced its own parallel discursive instability, as it was described alternatively as a “monstrosity of nature” or, as Soddy put it, that which underwent a process of “transmutation” itself. While a full history of the concept of biological mutation has yet to be written, for partial attempts see Mayr, Growth of Biological Thought; and Mayr, Animal Species and Evolution. As Mayr has noted, “The term ‘mutation’ has had a tortuous history”: Animal Species and Evolution, 168. Lock claimed a century ago that “perhaps the earliest use of the actual word ‘mutation’ in this sense is to be found in ‘Pseudodoxia Epidemica’ by Dr. Thomas Browne” of 1650, in the chapter “Of the Blackness of Negroes.” Lock also claimed that “the actual observation of variations of this kind is of quite recent date, and their recognition is largely due to the exertions of Bateson”: Lock, Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, 123. Others have found possible precursors to the mutation theory in the late nineteenth century in Meehan, “Hybrid Oaks,” 55; and Kerner, Die Abhängigkeit der Pflanzengestalt von Klima und Boden (MacDougal et al., Mutations, 76). For more on the cultural history of mutation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Campos and Schwerin, Making Mutations.

11. See, for example, MacDougal, “Alterations in Heredity” (Botanical Gazette), 242. MacDougal viewed de Vries’s mutation theory as being “a logical step from his earlier contribution to the subject of electrolytic dissociation of salts in solutions.” He noted, in fact, that the “essential feature” of de Vries’s theory was the existence of “separable, measurable characters.” MacDougal, “Activities in Plant Physiology,” 464.

12. Moore, “Deconstructing Darwinism.”

13. “Or, to put it in the terms chosen lately by Mr. Arthur Harris in a friendly criticism of my views, ‘Natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.’” De Vries, Species and Varieties, 825–26.

14. De Vries, Species and Varieties, 550.

15. De Vries, “Principles of the Theory of Mutation,” 81.

16. Lock, Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, 313.

17. Gager, “Review of The Mutation Theory,” 740.

18. Piper, “Botany,” 895–96.

19. Theunissen, “Closing the Door,” 241–42. For more on the reception of the mutation theory, see Allen, “Hugo de Vries and the Reception of the ‘Mutation Theory,’” and Sharon Kingsland, “Battling Botanist.”

20. Theunissen, “Closing the Door,” 241.

21. Gager, Heredity and Evolution in Plants, 117.

22. Quoted in Gager, Heredity and Evolution in Plants, 115.

23. Gager, “Review of The Mutation Theory,” 740; emphasis added.

24. Gager, Heredity and Evolution in Plants, 117–18.

25. Harding, “Dr. MacDougal’s Botanical Feat,” SM1.

26. Maienschein, Transforming Traditions in American Biology.

27. MacDougal, “Origin of Species by Mutation” (Torreya, May 1902), 65.

28. MacDougal, “Discontinuous Variation,” 223.

29. MacDougal, “Trends in Plant Science,” 490.

30. MacDougal, “Alterations in Heredity” (Botanical Gazette), 241–43.

31. Ibid., 242.

32. MacDougal et al., Mutations, 61.

33. MacDougal, “Mutation in Plants,” 770.

34. MacDougal, “Discontinuous Variation,” 224.

35. MacDougal et al., Mutations, 76.

36. “The use here of the name Oenothera for species belonging to the genus Onagra (Tournefort, Adanson, Spach) is according to the decision of Dr. J. N. Rose in a recent paper (1905), where he points out, and with good reason, that Oenothera biennis should be considered as the type of the genus.” Anna Murray Vail, “Identity of the Evening Primroses,” in MacDougal et al., Mutations, 66.

37. MacDougal, “Origin of Species by Mutation” (Torreya, June 1902), 83.

38. MacDougal, Mutants and Hybrids, 32.

39. MacDougal et al., Mutations, 3.

40. MacDougal, Mutants and Hybrids, 3.

41. MacDougal et al., Mutations, 61.

42. MacDougal also found Raimannia odorata to be a suitable test species.

43. MacDougal, “Alterations in Heredity” (Botanical Gazette), 242.

44. MacDougal, Mutants and Hybrids, 51.

45. Ibid., 33.

46. MacDougal, “Origin of Species by Mutation” (Torreya, June 1902), 83.

47. Ibid.

48. MacDougal et al., Mutations, 2.

49. MacDougal, “Heredity,” 520.

50. Ortmann, “Facts and Interpretations in the Mutation Theory,” 185.

51. Kingsland, “Battling Botanist,” 486.

52. MacDougal, “Origin of Species by Mutation” (Torreya, July 1902), 98–99.

53. See, for example, Lock, Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, 146. For more on MacDougal, see Patricia Craig, “Daniel MacDougal.”

54. de Vries, Species and Varieties, viii–ix.

55. Howorth, Greatest Discovery, 29–30.

56. Quoted in Pais, Inward Bound, 122.

57. Ibid.

58. Coen, “Scientists’ Errors,” 192.

59. Ibid.

60. See, for example: I. Bernard Cohen, “Scientific Revolution”; Ian Hacking, “Was There a Probabilistic Revolution 1800–1930”; and M. Norton Wise, “How Do Sums Count?”; in Krüger et al., Ideas in History.

61. Kingsland, “Battling Botanist,” 492.

62. Pais, Inward Bound, 112.

63. Johannsen, “Genotype Conception of Heredity,” 158.

64. Quoted in Thomson, Heredity, 90–91.

65. Webber, “Effect of Research,” 598.

66. Thomson, Heredity, 93–94.

67. Bateson, Materials for the Study of Variation, 18. One reviewer later noted that “Mendelism, as expounded by Professor Bateson and his school, is the application of the atomic conception to organised life.” “The Mendelian Theory,” Standard (London), April 27, 1909.

68. As L. C. Dunn once noted, “There is little doubt that the most important methodological contributions to and from genetics have been logical and statistical ones by which theoretical models have been prepared for testing. . . . This was a result of the discovery, itself due to statistical thinking, of the atomic and molecular organization of matter.” Dunn, “Genetics in Historical Perspective,” 76. Erwin Schrödinger would also later pick up on this theme: “The significant fact is the discontinuity. It reminds a physicist of quantum theory—no intermediate energies occurring between two neighbouring energy levels. He would be inclined to call de Vries’s mutation theory, figuratively, the quantum theory of biology. We shall see later that this is much more than figurative. The mutations are actually due to quantum jumps in the gene molecule.” Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 46. See also “The Quantum of Evolution” in chapter 5.

69. Darwin, “Address of the President,” 228.

70. Of course, Darwin’s creative leap was not uniformly embraced: as Edward B. Poulton noted, “I do not, of course, doubt that there is reality in the analogy between the evolution of States and of species, but it is not, I submit, close enough to justify the author’s reasoning from one to the other.” Poulton, “Theory of Natural Selection,” 50.

71. Darwin, “Address of the President,” 230.

72. Ibid., 228.

73. Ibid., 229.

74. Thomson, What Is Physical Life?, 179–80.

75. Conklin, “Problems of Evolution,” 126, 127–28; emphasis added.

76. Conklin, “Mechanism of Evolution,” 57.

77. Davenport, “Form of Evolutionary Theory,” 451.

78. Conklin, “Mechanism of Evolution,” 58. For more on the presence-absence theory, see Shull, “‘Presence and Absence’ Hypothesis”; and Swinburne, “The Presence-and-Absence Theory.”

79. Muller, “Reversibility in Evolution,” 263.

80. Davenport, “Form of Evolutionary Theory,” 459.

81. Ibid., 463.

82. Ibid., 463–64.

83. MacDougal, “Trends in Plant Science,” 489.

84. Richards, “Recent Studies,” 289.

85. “If we except those actively working on radium, the belief in transmutation is for the most part confined to the American textbooks.” “Radium and Helium.”

86. de Vries, “The Aim of Experimental Evolution.”

87. Gager, “Effects of Radium Rays on Plants,” 1007.

88. Wilson, “Cell in Relation to Heredity and Evolution,” 111.

89. Harding, “Dr. MacDougal’s Botanical Feat,” SM2.

90. Gates, “Mutation in Oenothera,” 600, 662.

91. Gates, “Mutations and Evolution,” 77.

92. MacDougal, Mutants and Hybrids, 80; cf. “The instability seems to be here as permanent a quality as the stability in other instances.” de Vries, Species and Varieties, 543–45, 564. De Vries had found eight types of mutants, seven of which were constant while the eighth, O. scintillans, appeared only eight times and was the most unstable of them all, in a constant process of throwing off other mutants (Thomson, Heredity, 93). O. scintillans was first named in de Vries, “Recherches Experimentales”; “Sur L’Origine des Espèces,” and was said to “continuously and consistently g[i]ve rise to a variety of forms in its progeny, which included the parent and its mutants.” MacDougal, “Heredity,” 512.

93. MacDougal, “Heredity,” 523.

94. Kingsland, “Battling Botanist,” 487.

95. Richards, “Recent Studies,” 291.

96. Morgan, Experimental Embryology, 32.

97. MacDougal, “Direct Influence of the Environment,” 115, 128.

98. MacDougal, “Organic Response” (American Naturalist), 6.

99. See Fujimura and Clarke, eds., The Right Tools for the Job; Muriel Lederman and Richard M. Burian, “Introduction”; and Hull et al., eds., PSA 1994.

100. MacDougal, “Discontinuous Variation,” 225.

101. MacDougal, Mutants and Hybrids, 31.

102. Gager, “Effects of Radium Rays on Plants,” 989.

103. MacDougal, “Alterations in Heredity” (Botanical Gazette), 244.

104. Even Soddy had written in 1913 on the “biochemical effects of radioactivity”: Soddy, “Radioactivity” (1913), 323.

105. MacDougal et al., Mutations, 62–64, 2–3.

106. “The discovery of the mutants in the seedling stage when only two or three small leaves are present is difficult for the first time, although after becoming accustomed to the typical forms and learning the aspect of the things to be looked for it is comparatively easy to recognize the better-known mutant types. Even then the mutants previously seen are much more readily distinguished than those known only by descriptions.” MacDougal, Mutants and Hybrids, 31. See also Kohler’s description of a similar dynamic among the drosophilists regarding the tacit knowledge required to identify mutations in the Morgan lab in Lords of the Fly. It was precisely this sort of subjective bias that Muller sought to avoid in his experimental technique (see chap. 5).

107. George Harrison Shull later complained, “The practice prevailing among taxonomists of ascribing a hybrid origin to a newly discovered form, which, in outward anatomical characters, is between two known species, is extremely pernicious and is not justified by facts obtained in cultural work.” Shull, “The Fluctuations of Oenothera Lamarckiana and Its Mutants,” in MacDougal et al., Mutations, 58.

108. MacDougal, Mutants and Hybrids, 90.

109. MacDougal, “Alterations in Heredity” (Botanical Gazette), 241. As MacDougal also noted, “The derivative of Oenothera biennis, first obtained in 1905, has now been tested to the fifth generation, hybridized with the parental form, and cultivated under the most diverse conditions. No reasonable doubt as to its character remains.” “Alterations in Heredity” (CIW Year Book), 63. See also MacDougal, “Organic Response” (American Naturalist), 18.

110. MacDougal, Mutants and Hybrids, 31, 243.

111. MacDougal, “Discontinuous Variation,” 210.

112. For more on the shifting meanings of mutation, see Campos and Schwerin, Making Mutations.

113. MacDougal, “Discontinuous Variation,” 220.

114. Piper, “Botany,” 895. Elsewhere, MacDougal noted that “De Vries assumes that any group of individuals which are independent, self-perpetuating and sufficiently distinct by taxonomic characters to meet the requirements of systematic botany constitutes a species irrespective of origin, and in the consideration of his results the importance of his conclusions is not lessened materially whether the forms with which he has dealt are considered as species or varieties so long as they are shown to consist of distinct and independent individuals capable of transmitting certain characters which are assumed to be constant within the limits of ordinary fluctuating variation.” MacDougal, “Origin of Species by Mutation” (Torreya, May 1902), 66.

115. “It is not so much the extreme types of leaves which give to a plant its characteristic appearance and appeal to the systematist, as the type to which the majority of the leaves belong.” MacDougal, Mutants and Hybrids, 44.

116. Ibid., 85.

117. MacDougal, “Organic Response” (American Naturalist), 36.

118. Ibid., 18.

119. MacDougal, “Heredity,” 518–19.

120. MacDougal et al., Mutations, 78.

121. MacDougal, “Heredity,” 516.

122. MacDougal et al., Mutations, 84.

123. Coen, “Scientists’ Errors,” 180.

124. Ibid.

125. Craig, “Daniel McDougal,” 39, footnote 6; MacDougal et al., Mutations, 90.

126. MacDougal, “Alterations in Heredity” (Botanical Gazette), 256.

127. MacDougal et al., Mutations, 87.

128. After a stint as professor of botany at the University of Missouri (Columbia) from 1908 to 1910, Gager returned to New York City, this time to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where he remained as director until his death in 1943. “Gager, Dr. Charles Stuart.”

129. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 76.

130. Ibid., 76–77. See, for example, Dubois, La création de l’être vivant et de lois naturelles, and Dubois, “Radioactivité et la vie.” Gager even cites the priority dispute between Dubois and Burke, noting that Dubois claimed priority because similar effects could be produced with nonradioactive bodies.

131. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 77.

132. Ibid., 81–83.

133. Gager, Heredity and Evolution in Plants, 43. Such an emphasis on the historicity of life would later find a keen defense elsewhere as well, as in Ritter’s Unity of the Organism. See also Moore’s and Ritter’s arguments in the context of Burke’s findings, mentioned in chapter 2.

134. Gager, “Review of The Mutation Theory,” 740.

135. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, v. One can only wonder if Mr. Lieber was the inspiration for the name of Mallock’s character Mr. Hugo, in An Immortal Soul, as mentioned in chapter 2.

136. Gager, “Influence of Radium Rays.” Cold Spring Harbor director Charles Davenport was interested in Gager’s radium-coated rods, or “radium pencils,” as a means to “remove electrical charge from paraffin ribbons.” Davenport to Gager, December 5, 1909, APS Davenport, series 1, box 40, folder 1, “Gager, C. Stuart.” Moreover, while scholars like Angela Creager have recently emphasized how the medicinal uses of radioactive materials in the late 1930s and the 1940s gave physicists of the time “a strong incentive to build bridges with physicians and biomedical researchers”—uniting cyclotrons with hospitals, for example—similar ties were already extant in the early days of radium-based experimental biological research. Researchers at the time regularly thanked both hospitals and colleagues in physics departments for their supplies, and the links between physics and biology—radium and life—were as real and institutional as they were metaphorical. Creager, “Tracing the Politics,” 370.

137. “If the radium is in a sealed tube, it cannot make anything outside it radioactive. The effects you observe can only be ascribed to the penetrating rays passing through the glass viz. β and γ rays.” Rutherford to Gager, June 2, 1907, BBG, box 3, folder 12, “Misc R.”

138. Gager, “Effects of Radium Rays on Plants,” 987.

139. Gager, Plant World, 113.

140. Gager, Relation between Science and Theology, 16–21.

141. Gager, Heredity and Evolution in Plants, 82.

142. Gager, “Influence of Radium Rays,” 223–24.

143. Gager, “Some Physiological Effects of Radium Rays,” 773.

144. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 22.

145. Ibid., 56. Marie Curie had even reported by 1903 that Friedrich Giesel had observed radium-treated leaves to “turn yellow and wither away.” Curie, Radio-Active Substances. See also “Radium and Vegetation,” Leavenworth Times, December 6, 1903, cited in Lavine, First Atomic Age.

146. Caspari, “Die Bedeutung des Radiums,” 37.

147. Gager, “Influence of Radium Rays,” 224.

148. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 253.

149. Gager, “Some Physiological Effects of Radium Rays,” 778. Gager noted elsewhere that “the irregularities produced by radium rays in karyokinesis do not seem to call for any special explanation in addition to that suggested in discussing the abnormalities of tissues and organs in chapter 16. Such irregularities are only a morphological expression of physiological disturbance, and it may be seriously questioned whether we are justified in expecting the morphological appearance and behavior of chromosomes to explain things, any more than do variations in leaf-margins, or other purely structural facts. The problem of the causes of variation and inheritance lies deeper than morphology.” Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 272.

150. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 245, 237.

151. Gager, “Influence of Radium Rays,” 224, 228, 230.

152. Ibid., 231.

153. Ibid., 228.

154. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 228. Gager’s language is echoed by Alexander, who writes that a “large single dose [of radiation] which does not kill also leaves a permanent mark which is revealed as premature ageing.” . . . “Some investigators believe that atomic radiations hasten the onset of typical senile alteration and can be considered to accelerate aging.” Alexander, Atomic Radiation and Life, 91–92.

155. Nordau, Degeneration, 552–53.

156. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 274. Cf. “Influence of Radium Rays,” 232, and “Some Physiological Effects of Radium Rays,” 763–64, 778.

157. “Correcting Nature.”

158. “Sleeping Plants Wakened by Radium.”

159. Gradenwitz, “Forcing Plants by Means of Radium,” 77.

160. “Lorsqu’il s’agit d’une radiation existant à dose élevée dans le milieu ambient où évoluent les êtres vivants, on peut se demander l’effet de l’absence de cette radiation. C’est la radioexpérimentation negative.” Guilleminot, Rayons X et Radiations Diverse, 121.

161. Gager, “Effects of Radium Rays on Plants,” 999, citing Blaauw and van Heyningen, “The Radium-Growth-Response of One Cell.”

162. Further exploration of this shifting context is called for: does the later success in “negative” radioexperimentation (in order to study what Gager would later call a “deradiation response”) have more to do with changing notions of “background radiation” than it does with the simple possibility of a new kind of experiment? While an earlier generation may well have viewed the residual radiation of all things as potentially mutagenic, later successes may have had more to do with operational definitions of a background equivalent of zero when no new mutants appeared as a result of natural radiation. This would then have defined a “sufficiently” shielded environment.

163. Richards, “Recent Studies,” 289.

164. “Have you tried soaking peony seeds in various solutions of acids and alkalies? I think you would be more apt to secure acceleration of germination in a manner that would be useable in practice by such methods, rather than by radium.” Gager to L. C. Glenn, November 2, 1918, BBG, box 4, folder 5, “G.”

165. Gager, “Effects of Radium Rays on Plants,” 1004. For more about other later induced-mutation research in horticulture and agriculture, see Helen Curry, “Accelerating Evolution.”

166. Richards, “Recent Studies,” 298.

167. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 260.

168. Gager, “Effects of Radium Rays on Plants,” 988.

169. “To have been a ‘stimulating’ factor which the lapse of more than twenty years has not effaced is an assurance that the efforts of those early days were not in vain.” Charles W. Hargitt to Gager, October 21, 1916, BBG, box 3, folder 7, “Misc H–I–J.”

170. W. E. Castle to Davenport, May 22, 1908, APS Davenport, series I, box 10, folder 5, “Castle, William E.”

171. Chamberlin, “Introduction,” 4.

172. Davenport to De Vries, March 22, 1904, APS Davenport, series I, box 93, folder 1, “Vries, Hugo de.”

173. Davenport to De Vries, April 27, 1904, ibid.

174. Gager, “Effects of Radium Rays on Plants,” 999.

175. In Secord’s view, “sensational” acted simultaneously as a term of notability and sensory application in the case of the anonymously published evolutionary epic Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation: Secord, Victorian Sensation. See “Mind the Gap,” in chapter 2, for a discussion of “sensation” in the context of Burke’s findings.

176. B. C. A. W., “Origin of Life,” 190.

177. Doyle, On Beyond Living.

178. MacDougal to Gager, December 17, 1908, and MacDougal to Gager, December 21, 1908, BBG, box 3, folder 9, “Misc M.”

179. MacDougal to Gager, November 7, 1908, BBG, box 3, folder 9, “Misc M.”

180. MacDougal to Gager, November 27, 1908, ibid.

181. MacDougal to Gager, December 7, 1908, ibid.

182. MacDougal, “Direct Influence of the Environment,” 128.

183. MacDougal, “Trends in Plant Science,” 487–95.

184. MacDougal to Gager, December 7, 1908, BBG, box 3, folder 9, “Misc M.”

185. “Department of Botanical Research,” 70.

186. Note that the statistical genotype-phenotype distinction was not proposed by Johannsen until 1911; it did not attain its current genetic expression and meaning until years after its initial populational meaning. Johannsen, “Genotype Conception of Heredity.”

187. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 247.

188. Ibid., 247, 254.

189. Ibid., 255–56.

190. Ibid., 235–36.

191. MacDougal, “Origin of Species by Mutation” (Torreya, May 1902), 67.

192. Gager, Heredity and Evolution in Plants, 43.

193. “But though the mutation theory is a direct outgrowth of the hypothesis of intracellular pangenesis, it fortunately does not stand or fall with the latter, for no scientific theory ever had a firmer foundation in fact—in experimental evidence—than that of mutation.” Gager, “Review of The Mutation Theory, vol. 2,” 493.

194. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 237.

195. Pond, “Review,” 810.

196. That is, apart from efforts that accidentally succeeded in artificially replicating a de Vriesian “mutating period”—though whether Gager’s account left room for a “mutating period” is not fully clear. It is also unclear whether Gager’s reworking may have unwittingly unleashed the bugbear of requiring joint mutating periods, a phenomenon that de Vries’s mechanism of intracellular pangenesis was already able to account for but which was not yet clearly related to the rest of Gager’s understanding.

197. MacDougal, “Organic Response” (Science), 97.

198. “Curious Modifications in Plant Life Possibly Due to Radium,” 6.

199. Spillman saw this as a confirmation of sorts of his own earlier explanation of “the interesting work of McDougall [sic] in which mutants were produced by chemical stimulants.” “Mutation” at this time could be accounted for, at least in part, by such chromosomal irregularities. The very distinctions between gene-level and chromosomal-level effects that contributed to the fall of the mutation theory were, at least until the waning years of the mutation theory’s popularity, well within the rubric of “mutation,” as we will see in chapter 4. Spillman, “Mendelian Phenomena without De Vriesian Theory,” 216.

200. Gager, Heredity and Evolution in Plants, 73.

201. White, “Heredity, Variation, and the Environment,” 967. This chapter in Gager’s General Botany was written by Orland E. White, curator of plant breeding and economic botany at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

202. Cleland, “Genetics of Oenothera.”

203. Gates, “Mutations and Evolution,” 26.

204. Sturtevant, A History of Genetics, 70.

1. Thomson, Heredity, 98–99.

2. “The Law of Vast Numbers,” 308.

3. Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, 105–6. According to Alfred Sturtevant, “Morgan’s interest in genetics seems to have stemmed, at least in large part, from a visit to de Vries’s garden in Holland (probably in 1900). In 1903 he wrote ‘No one can see his experimental garden, as I have had the opportunity of doing, without being greatly impressed.’” Sturtevant, “Thomas Hunt Morgan,” 290.

4. George Ledyard Stebbins’s later reference to Crepis as the “plant Drosophila” is thus a historical twist from the moment when Oenothera was the model case for Drosophila. For more on E. B. Babcock’s work on Crepis, including his relationship to the Morgan school, see Smocovitis, “The ‘Plant Drosophila,’” 303ff. Others have attributed the term “plant Drosophala [sic]” to Nikolai Vavilov; see F. A. Varrelman to E. W. Sinnott, Oct 3, 1932, Sinnott Papers, Yale University, box 7, folder 135.

5. Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, 147–48; Sturtevant, “Thomas Hunt Morgan,” 292. A few years later, Morgan even subjected some 31,168 flies to etherization before concluding that it seemed “highly probable therefore that ether has no specific effect in producing mutations in Drosophila ampelophila . . . and one is inclined to look elsewhere for a solution of the problem.” Morgan, “Failure of Ether,” 708, 710.

6. Fernandus Payne to Ernst Mayr, February 11, 1972, APS Genetics Collection, box 3, “Payne, Fernandus, to Ernst Mayr” folder. Comparing this with Kohler’s account, it seems unclear whether Payne used X-rays or radium: “In a single batch of X-rayed flies he found several flies with wing defects that seemed to be inherited; however, he did not continue the experiment, apparently because the physicists at Columbia would not let him use their radium source.” Kohler, Lords of the Fly, 38.

7. “Problems of Radiobiology with Emphasis on Radiation Genetics,” lecture, Oregon State College, Biology Colloquium, April 21, 1951, APS Stern, box 34.

8. Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, 147–48.

9. “Beaded Wings.—In May, 1910, a number of flies, pupae, larvae and eggs of Drosophila were subjected to radium rays. One fly was produced, the marginal vein of whose wings was beaded.” Morgan, “The Origin of Nine Wing Mutations in Drosophila,” 497. See also Dexter, “Analysis of a Case of Continuous Variation,” 716. According to Blakeslee, Morgan’s “work was not followed up apparently because the numbers of mutants were small and the effects not specific.” Blakeslee, “Twenty-Five Years of Genetics,” 36.

10. Morgan to Davenport, June 11, 1910, APS Davenport, series I, box 72, folder 2, “Morgan, T. H.”

11. Others have claimed that the white-eyed mutation came first, in January 1910. Green, “The ‘Genesis of the White-Eyed Mutant.’” The truncate mutant also came from radium treatment. Carlson, Mendel’s Legacy, 173.

12. MacDougal, “Organic Response” (Science), 97.

13. “Prof de Vries has kindly consented to take down the radium with him for your use. There is about 12 mgms in the . . .—pure RaBr₂. . . . In an experiment, place . . . containing Ra beads[?] on top of radium or radium on one side. The effective radiation will be mostly gamma, and a little β. It is not possible for use of α rays.” Rutherford to Loeb, July 18, 1906, LOC, box 13, “Rutherford, Ernest.”

14. Loeb and Bancroft, “Some Experiments,” 782.

15. Spillman, “Notes on Heredity,” 512.

16. Loeb and Bancroft, “Some Experiments,” 781.

17. Loeb, in what Nathan Reingold has characterized as a “touchy but friendly moment over the question of priority” in the use of radium to produce mutations, wrote back that he “had not the slightest idea that you ever had worked with radium and still less, treated your flies with it.” Moreover, he continued, “I was under the impression that your mutations had sprung up accidently just as De Vries’s had and I got my first intimation that you had treated your flies in any way, through McDougal’s article.” Reingold, “Jacques Loeb, the Scientist,” citing Loeb to Morgan, March 16, 1911.

18. As Morgan asked Loeb, “Doesn’t that make you want to go?!” March 16, 1911, cited in Reingold, “Jacques Loeb.”

19. Morgan, “Failure of Ether,” 708.

20. “As a beginning student [in Morgan’s lab], Sturtevant also tried to produce wing mutants using radium.” Kohler, Lords of the Fly, 38; “Radium Experiment with ‘Big Smooth Black’ Fruit Flies,” CIT Sturtevant, box 16, folder 1.

21. Kohler, Lords of the Fly; and Kohler, “Drosophila and Evolutionary Genetics.”

22. Morgan instead attributed the failure to the effects of inbreeding; only in 1914 would he begin to make the association between irradiation and sterility. Muller, by contrast, would later design his experimental setup in such a way that he was looking for sterility in order to detect induced mutations.

23. Morgan, “Failure of Ether,” 708–9. Like many biologists, Morgan was a novice when it came to radioactive phenomena (“emanations” came from radium, not X-rays). As Gager had already noted by this time, “The use of the plural ‘emanations’ to designate all the rays and influences coming from radium has been somewhat common in biological papers. It has no warrant, is only confusing, and should be abandoned.” Gager, “Some Physiological Effects of Radium Rays,” 763.

24. Bridges and Morgan, The Third-Chromosome Group, 37. According to Curt Stern, “With this carefully worded conclusion the development of radiation genetics was arrested, to lead to birth only 17 years later.” “Problems of Radiobiology,” APS Stern, box 34.

25. Morgan to Blakeslee, May 27, 1935, CIT Morgan, box 1, folder 4; emphasis added.

26. Morgan, “Failure of Ether,” 709–10.

27. Morgan to Blakeslee, May 27, 1935, CIT Morgan, box 1, folder 4.

28. Fernandus Payne to Ernst Mayr, February 11, 1972, APS Genetics Collection.

29. Morgan, “Failure of Ether,” 711.

30. Carlson, Mendel’s Legacy, 173.

31. Morgan, “Genesis of the White-Eyed Mutant,” 92.

32. The introduction of chance into considerations of genetic phenomena is a well-known advance of the first third of the twentieth century, most often associated with a spate of remarkable work by population geneticists in that period (including “genetic drift”). Such considerations also influenced experimental studies of mutation.

33. Morgan, “Failure of Ether,” 710. Kohler uses “breeder reactor” as a technical term from the production of nuclear energy; confusingly, this usage is not directly related to the “breeding” of organisms. Kohler, Lords of the Fly, 47.

34. Davenport’s comment here, in the annual report of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Genetics, and apparently unrelated in tone and in its use of analogy to the surrounding text, serves as yet another surprising instance of the powerful resonances between radium and life. “Department of Genetics” (1922), 94.

35. “Again, studies made at this Station on the evolution of the chromosomal complex, especially in the flies, have led to the general conception that evolution has proceeded not primarily by modifications of the series of visible organisms whose evolution is the goal of our researches, but rather evolution has proceeded by changes in the ‘germ-plasm,’ the chromosomes, and that these changes have occurred in some cases apparently owing to its intrinsic properties—as radium changes into lead—and sometimes under the influence of intracellular change, such as are induced by hybridization, and sometimes, perhaps, by extreme conditions external to the germ-cell.” “Department of Experimental Evolution and Eugenics Record Office” (1920), 107.

36. Gates, “Mutations and Evolution,” 74.

37. For more on the complicated legacy of the de Vriesian mutation theory, see Dunn, “Genetics in Historical Perspective,” and the various series of investigations conducted by Renner, Cleland, and Bradley. See especially Cleland, “Genetics of Oenothera”; see also Campos, “‘Complex Recombinations.’”

38. Gager, “Present Status of the Problem.” His review came just before a war-related “hiatus” in radium-based publications from 1915 to 1920.

39. Davenport to de Vries, March 2, 1916, APS Davenport, series I, box 93, folder 2, “Vries, Hugo de.”

40. MacDougal et al., Mutations, 62. Gager and Blakeslee remained in frequent contact over the years, sharing experimental instrumentation (radium “needles”) and visiting each other as time and circumstance allowed (even staying at each other’s homes). There are also many commonalities between Blakeslee’s work and that of E. B. Babcock, who spent much of the 1930s similarly interested in studying chromosomes to gain insights into plant evolution. As Smocovitis notes, Babcock inaugurated an “inventive and ambitious phylogenetic and evolutionary study of a plant genus that fully embraced available genetical knowledge—the first such study seriously attempted in plants.” Smocovitis, “The ‘Plant Drosophila,’” 314.

41. Blakeslee to de Vries, April 7, 1933, APS Blakeslee, “Vries, Hugo de,” box 21; “Lebenslauf of A.F.B.,” p. 3, APS Blakeslee, “Biographical Materials,” box 25, folder 2.

42. On the occasion of de Vries’s eighty-fifth birthday, Blakeslee wrote to him, “It is a pleasure to have known such a founder of modern genetics who has been an inspiration to my own work.” Blakeslee to de Vries, May 24, 1933, APS Blakeslee, “Vries, Hugo de,” box 21. And in a letter to de Vries’s wife, Blakeslee recalled that “at the quarter centennial of the founding of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden I pointed out an instance of his wonderful prevision in suggesting in 1904, in an address at the dedication of our Department here, that attempts be made to induce mutations by the use of X-rays and radium. My own researches owe much to him. In a measure, I feel that I have been carrying on the torch which he has laid down.” Blakeslee to Mrs. de Vries, May 23, 1935, APS Davenport, series I, box 93, folder 2, “Vries, Hugo de.”

43. “Seventy-Five Years of Progress in Genetics,” p. 15, APS Blakeslee, “Lectures, Papers, Etc.,” box 23, folder 35.

44. “Lebenslauf of A.F.B.,” p. 6, APS Blakeslee, “Biographical Materials,” box 25, folder 2.

45. Ibid., 4; see also Blakeslee to de Vries, April 7, 1933, APS Blakeslee, “Vries, Hugo de,” box 21.

46. “Lebenslauf of A.F.B.,” p. 5, APS Blakeslee, “Biographical Materials,” box 25, folder 2.

47. Sinnott, “Albert Francis Blakeslee” (NAS Biographical Memoirs).

48. “Lebenslauf of A.F.B.,” p. 5, APS Blakeslee, “Biographical Materials,” box 25, folder 2.

49. “I am not sure that we could find sufficient greenhouse space here for the experiments. It would not take, of course, more than eight or ten linear feet of bench space to do quite a bit of work.” Gager to Blakeslee, February 7, 1923, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 4. For more on Blakeslee’s greenhouse, see Kimmelman, “Mr. Blakeslee Builds His Dream House.”

50. Blakeslee to Morgan, May 22, 1935, CIT Morgan, box 1, folder 4.

51. “Evolution to Order,” radio broadcast “under the auspices of Science Service, over the Columbia Broadcasting System,” Thursday March 24, 1938, APS Blakeslee, box 23, “Lectures, Papers, Etc.: Adventures in Science” folder.

52. “Lebenslauf of A.F.B.,” p. 6, APS Blakeslee, “Biographical Materials,” box 25, folder 2. Though not in all respects: as Blakeslee later wrote to a colleague, “some of these species [of Datura] give very poor germination—sometimes not over a tenth of one percent.” Blakeslee to O. L. Inman, December 11, 1934, CSH Blakeslee, “Blakeslee, Albert—1934” folder. Blakeslee later became interested in animal polyploidy, but found this a considerably more difficult task, as animals were “functionally dioecious.” Blakeslee to Emmeline Moore, November 15, 1937, CSH Blakeslee, “Blakeslee, Albert—1937” folder.

53. “Lebenslauf of A.F.B.,” p. 5, APS Blakeslee, “Biographical Materials,” box 25, folder 2. According to Sinnott, Blakeslee had encountered “one or two Jimson weeds which were different from the typical ones and had begun to study them” while at Storrs. Sinnott, “Albert Francis Blakeslee” (APS Year Book).

54. Blakeslee, “Globe Mutant.”

55. Blakeslee and Avery, “Mutations in the Jimson Weed,” 115.

56. Ibid., 115–20.

57. Ibid., 119. As Blakeslee later recounted in 1921, “It may be mentioned that the tetraploid datura was called ‘New Species’ before its tetraploid nature was suspected. It satisfied the requirements of an independent species. The pollen was relatively good, and the mutant formed a distinct race, self-fertile and fertile inter se, while practically sterile with the parent stock.” Blakeslee, “Types of Mutations,” 263.

58. “Lebenslauf of A.F.B.,” p. 6, APS Blakeslee, “Biographical Materials,” box 25, folder 2.

59. Sinnott, “Albert Francis Blakeslee” (NAS Biographical Memoirs), 9, 8.

60. Blakeslee and Bergner, “Methods of Synthesizing Pure-Breeding Types,” 571.

61. Blakeslee and Avery, “Mutations in the Jimson Weed,” 111.

62. “Department of Genetics” (1922), 95. Sinnott recalled that “it was characteristic of him, too, that he provided his collaborators with good support and left them free to work out the ideas, helping them in whatever way he could. In the true sense of the word the Datura program was a cooperative one. Its head was no dictator, but simply primus inter pares.” Sinnott, “Albert Francis Blakeslee,” 1. Demerec noted that although Blakeslee “was very generous about sharing the credit for research accomplishments with his collaborators and assistant, and most of his papers were published under joint authorship, Blakeslee adhered strictly to the policy that materials accumulated by him must be used only under his control and in his laboratory. This attitude imposed severe limitations on the general study of Datura, and prevented the development of other groups of investigators working with that plant. Datura research is consequently becoming a lost art. But Blakeslee’s material still has rich potentialities for the solution of many problems in genetics and speciation, and could be used to good advantage.” Demerec, “Albert Francis Blakeslee,” 4.

63. Blakeslee, “Variations in Datura,” 18.

64. Blakeslee et al., “Chromosomal Duplication,” 388–90.

65. “Department of Genetics” (1921), 108.

66. Demerec, “Albert Francis Blakeslee,” 1.

67. Blakeslee, “Mutations in Mucors,” 278, 284.

68. Intriguingly, Blakeslee held that the “failure” of a particular mutation in the adzuki bean “to appear more than once in so large a number of individuals indicates that it is a variation genotypic in nature, since it could scarcely be attributed to the reappearance of a character through normal segregation nor be considered a mere modification induced by environmental factors.” The sheer rarity of the mutation was an argument for its genotypic, rather than its chromosomal, basis. Blakeslee, “A Unifoliolate Mutation in the Adzuki Bean,” 155.

69. Blakeslee, “Variations in Datura,” 31; emphasis added.

70. Ibid., 27.

71. Blakeslee, “Types of Mutations,” 255. Blakeslee later realized, of course, that duplication was not the only means of producing mutations. Following Calvin Bridges’s work on nondisjunction, he acknowledged that there was room for a “rather novel study of trisomic, tetrasomic and pentasomic inheritance.” Blakeslee, “Variations in Datura,” 27.

72. Relating the existence of these chromosomal types to geographic distribution patterns also did much to help illuminate the evolutionary history of Datura. Sinnott, “Albert Francis Blakeslee”(APS Year Book), 394–98.

73. “Department of Genetics” (1921), 101.

74. “Department of Genetics” (1922), 93; emphasis added.

75. “Department of Experimental Evolution and Eugenics Record Office” (1920), 110.

76. “Department of Genetics” (1922), 93.

77. Davenport to de Vries, February 5, 1924, APS Davenport, series I, box 93, folder 2, “Vries, Hugo de.”

78. “Department of Genetics” (1921), 103.

79. Ibid., 109.

80. “Department of Genetics” (1922), 93–94.

81. Blakeslee, “Variations in Datura,” 27.

82. Wells, Huxley, and Wells, Science of Life, 594.

83. Thomson, Outline of Natural History, 716–17.

84. Morgan to Osborn, December 26, 1917, cited in Reingold, “Jacques Loeb, the Scientist,” 125.

85. Getzendaner, “A Hypothesis of ‘Valence,’” 428.

86. Stubbe, History of Genetics, 220–21.

87. MacDougal concluded that “this generalization, which is essentially of a physiological character, even when applied to inorganic substances, gave the basis for the researches upon descent which have been carried out with such notable results.” MacDougal, “Hugo De Vries,” 0–1.

88. Punnet, Mendelism, 62.

89. “New Light on Mutation,” 355.

90. Gates, “Mutations and Evolution,” 33.

91. Ibid., 218.

92. Loeb, Organism as a Whole, 241–44.

93. Hogben, Nature of Living Matter, 73, 77.

94. The article in question may have been what later became Blakeslee’s “Globe Mutant.”

95. Blakeslee to Shull, April 15, 1921, APS Blakeslee, “Shull, George H.,” box 19, folder 3.

96. Shull to Blakeslee, April 17, 1921, ibid.

97. Neel to Stern, July 30, 1940, APS Stern, “Neel, James V.,” box 19, folder 2. For more on the meanings of “mutation” in Neel’s later work as a member of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, see Lindee, “What Is a Mutation?”

98. Shull to Blakeslee, April 26, 1921, APS Blakeslee, “Shull, George H.,” box 19, folder 3.

99. Blakeslee, “Types of Mutations,” 254.

100. Ibid., 261; citing Waagen, “Die Formenreihe des Ammonites subradiatus,” 185–86.

101. For a case of tetraploidy, for example, not to be considered a mutation was a significant alteration of de Vries’s theory, as de Vries himself considered the origin of Oenothera gigas to be “the one absolutely typical case of species-formation in all my cultures.” He prefaced his remark by saying, “Please tell Miss Lutz that I enjoyed her discovery of the double number of chromosomes in Oenothera gigas immensely.” De Vries to Davenport, December 31, 1907, APS Davenport, series I, box 93, folder 1, “Vries, Hugo de.” Blakeslee went on to insist, however, that “the occurrence of tetraploidy would therefore be no more a mutation than the doubling of chromosomes at the origin of the sporophyte from the gametophyte ferns.” Blakeslee, “Types of Mutations,” 262–63.

102. Blakeslee, “Types of Mutations,” 262–63.

103. Ibid., 266.

104. Ibid., 262, 265–66.

105. Hurst, Mechanism of Creative Evolution. The term “transmutation” was revived two decades later for still another phenomenon: “In Neurospora, Aspergillus, and yeast, intragenic recombination occurs by a mechanism that can be interpreted as miscopying of small segments of genetic material. This process differs from conventional crossing over in that a single event does not result in reciprocal products and also by the fact that it does not necessarily lead to recombination of genetic markers close to and on opposite sides of the genes within which it occurs. It is proposed that this be called ‘transmutation.’” Beadle, “The Role of the Nucleus in Heredity,” 13, 25.

106. Dunn to Blakeslee, February 10, 1932, APS Blakeslee, “Dunn, Leslie C.,” box 8, folder 1.

107. “Department of Genetics” (1921), 104.

108. Blakeslee even cited Muller’s work on balanced lethals, which he said “strongly suggests that such of the Œnothera mutants as are not caused by chromosomal duplication are due to cross-overs from a balanced lethal condition.” Blakeslee, “Types of Mutations,” 257, 260, 262.

109. Gager to Hugo Lieber, January 12, 1909, BBG, box 3, folder 8, “Misc K–L”; cf. Gager to Lieber, November 13, 1908, ibid.

110. Gager and Blakeslee, “Induction of Gene and Chromosome Mutations,” 424.

111. Ibid. As Blakeslee would later advise a researcher at the Smithsonian Institution’s Division of Radiation and Organisms, “If you are interested in testing out the effects of different wave lengths of radium energy I think it would be very important, from a genetic standpoint, to get a good Versuchsthier.” Blakeslee to Florence E. Meier, November 14, 1934, CSH Blakeslee, “1939” folder.

112. “Department of Genetics” (1921), 109.

113. Sinnott and Blakeslee, “Structural Changes,” citing Blakeslee, “Types of Mutations,” and Blakeslee, “Variations in Datura,” 17.

114. Sinnott and Blakeslee, “Structural Changes.”

115. Blakeslee to Halsey J. Bagg, March 15, 1921, BBG, box 9, folder 9, “C. S. Gager, Research, 1921–1928” folder. Gager’s wife was Bertha Bagg Gager.

116. Blakeslee asked Gager this question some years later, in 1923, as they were testing the effects of radioactive soil on Datura, though the question was undoubtedly on both their minds when they began their first experiments in 1921. Gager’s response was of a piece with his earlier findings—“I think there is no reason to expect any results from growing plants in soil containing radioactive residues other than a stimulation or acceleration of growth”—but also indicated that he would want to carry out experiments along those lines. Blakeslee to Gager, February 13, 1923, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 4; Gager to Blakeslee, February 15, 1923, ibid.

117. Among the two most common mutants of Oenothera were giant Oenothera gigas and dwarf Oenothera nanella forms.

118. “Dr. Blakeslee has now brought over from Cold Spring Harbor his plants of Jimson weed, and I shall be able to subject them to the radium treatment at any time when you can conveniently let me have the preparations.” Gager to Bagg, April 14, 1921, BBG, box 9, folder 9, “C. S. Gager, Research, 1921–1928” folder.

119. Gager to Blakeslee, July 7, 1921, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 2.

120. Gager to Blakeslee, March 30, 1922, ibid., box 10, folder 3, and February 20, 1923, box 10, folder 4.

121. Gager to Blakeslee, June 10 and July 7, 1921, ibid., box 10, folder 2.

122. Blakeslee to Gager, September 18, 1922, ibid., box 10, folder 3.

123. Blakeslee to Gager, November 19, 1921, ibid., box 10, folder 2.

124. Gager to Blakeslee, December 6, 1922, ibid., box 10, folder 3.

125. Gager and Blakeslee, “Chromosome and Gene Mutations,” 76.

126. Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 256.

127. Gager and Blakeslee, “Chromosome and Gene Mutations,” 76.

128. Blakeslee to Gager, December 3, 1923, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 4.

129. Gager and Blakeslee, “Chromosome and Gene Mutations,” 75–76.

130. “Department of Genetics” (1929), 45.

131. Blakeslee, “Control of Evolution and Life Processes in Plants,” 59.

132. Quoted in “Department of Genetics” (1922), 98.

133. Blakeslee also acknowledged, however, that some mutations were not expected to be mendelizing. Blakeslee to Gager, January 14, 1923, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 4.

134. Gager to Blakeslee, January 4, 1923, ibid.

135. Blakeslee to Gager, January 14, 1923, ibid. Twenty-five years later, Gager’s work was all but unknown: “I am not personally familiar with the literature in this country dating back to Rusby and Gager on the effects of radioactivity on plants. I am acquainted with a considerable amount of work on the influence of x-rays and other penetrating radiation on the growth of plants.” James Bonner, on behalf of Lewis J. Stadler, to Harold Arnold Wolff, February 23, 1948, UMC Anderson, folder 4.

136. Gager to Blakeslee, January 3, 1927, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 6.

137. Mavor, “Production of Non-Disjunction by X-Rays.”

138. Blakeslee to Gager, January 14, 1923, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 4.

139. Ibid.

140. “Radium Experiment with ‘Big Smooth Black’ Fruit Flies,” CIT Sturtevant, box 16, folder 1.

141. Blakeslee to Gager, January 14, 1923, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 4.

142. Blakeslee to Gager, February 25, 1927, ibid., box 10, folder 6.

143. “Department of Genetics” (1929), 45.

144. Gager and Blakeslee, “Chromosome and Gene Mutations.”

145. Ibid., 75.

146. Gager and Blakeslee, “Induction of Gene and Chromosome Mutations,” 424; Blakeslee, “Distinction between Primary and Secondary Mutants in Datura,” 389.

147. Gager and Blakeslee, “Chromosome and Gene Mutations,” 78.

148. Mavor, “Attack on the Gene,” 358.

149. Gager and Blakeslee, “Chromosome and Gene Mutations,” 79.

150. Blakeslee and Avery, “Methods of Inducing Doubling,” 404, 408. Blakeslee began to use the language of “genetics engineering” after he turned to using colchicine as a mutagen in the mid-1930s. These efforts grew out of and were deeply steeped in his earlier work using radium as a mutagen.

151. There was some confusion four years later over why precisely this mutant was given that name. Gager to Blakeslee, March 4, 1927, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 6.

152. Blakeslee to Gager, February 5, 1923, ibid., box 10, folder 4.

153. Gager and Blakeslee, “Chromosome and Gene Mutations,” 78. Blakeslee later noted that Buchholz had identified two other gene mutations: “an albino which is of little use to us, and swollen which acts curiously for a recessive,” both of which “came from the earlier treatment by Gager.” Blakeslee to Buchholz, May 9, 1929, APS Blakeslee, “Buchholz, John T.,” box 4, folder 12.

154. Gager and Blakeslee, “Chromosome and Gene Mutations,” 78. Recall that MacDougal had invented the concept of mutation frequency so as to avoid precisely this sort of dependency.

155. Ibid., 79.

156. Blakeslee to Gager, September 5, 1933, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 10. By 1927, Blakeslee had published some eighty articles.

157. Ibid.

158. “Department of Genetics” (1929), 45. By 1933, however, his tune had changed, and in a letter to Gager on September 5, he remarked that he had identified some of these same characteristics as a “series of types due to gene mutations” that “affect all parts of the plant.” Blakeslee to Gager, September 5, 1933, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 10.

159. Demerec, “Albert Francis Blakeslee,” 4.

160. Blakeslee to MacDougal, February 15, 1923, APS Blakeslee, box 14, “MacDougal, D. T.”

161. Ibid.

162. Stadler, “Induced Mutations in Plants,” 1264.

163. Lewis Stadler to Karl Sax, December 17, 1931, UMC Stadler, folder 5. Stadler also grappled with the nature of mutation in his work. Like Shull (who attempted to coin the term “anomozeuxis”), Stadler was one of many who struggled with the right words to describe the phenomena they were observing. In an early grant application, he indicated that he intended to complete “studies of the cytological effects of X-rays with special reference to the production of chromosomal mutations and aberrant types of chromosome behavior.” And elsewhere, under the heading of “fallacious,” he once listed “mutations a single class.” In his typed lecture notes, he referred to “Mutation” as “In sense of ‘gene mutation’” and “Chromosomal ‘mutations’ later,” also noting, “Line drawn strictly between gene mutations and chromosomal aberrations.” But on another occasion, when referring to “chromosome doubling or other chromosome irregularities,” he wrote: “Strictly speaking, these are not mutations, but they are inherited variations of just as much practical value.” Fascinatingly, Stadler would later even seek to relabel “the hypothetical transformation of a gene to an allelic form . . . as ‘transmutations,’” presaging Hurst’s coinage. Stadler, “Comparison of Ultraviolet and X-Ray Effects on Mutation.”

164. Sinnott and Blakeslee, “Structural Changes”; Sinnott, “Albert Francis Blakeslee” (NAS Biographical Memoirs), 1; Demerec, “Albert Francis Blakeslee,” 3–4; Smith, “Albert Francis Blakeslee,” 307. Decades later, Jim Crow would still refer to Blakeslee’s research as “a mountain of work on the jimsonweed, Datura . . . a most convincing demonstration that translocations were an important part of the evolutionary process.” Crow, “Sixty Years Ago: The 1932 International Congress,” 299.

165. Spillman had proposed four distinct types of “variation”: the Mendelian recombination of characters; fluctuation due to the environment; the discontinuous hereditary “irregularities in the distribution of chromosomes . . . amenable to the action of natural selection” (or, as he also labeled it, in light of the new understanding of what was going on cytologically with Oenothera, “de Vriesian mutation”); and finally, what he called “fundamental change in . . . the germ plasm,” which he believed to be “by far the most important type of evolutionary change.” W. J. Spillman, “Mendelian Phenomena without De Vriesian Theory,” 216. Ten years later, the corn geneticist Edgar G. Anderson wrote to the drosophilist Alfred H. Sturtevant in 1920, “You have no statement in the introductory part of this chapter regarding the meaning of the term mutation. There are several conceptions of mutation and that held by the Oenothera people is not quite the same as yours.” Anderson to Sturtevant, March 16, 1920, UMC Anderson, folder 45.

166. Muller, “Artificial Transmutation of the Gene.”

167. Blakeslee to Gager, July 31, 1927, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 6.

168. It took Gager a little over a month to give his blessing for Buchholz to continue the work. “The worst that could have happened (if I had not approved) was that you would both have been arrested and fined, but I should probably have been too busy to have pushed the matter!” Gager to Blakeslee, September 2, 1927, APS Blakeslee, “Gager, C. Stuart,” box 10, folder 6. Buchholz and Blakeslee turned to using both X-rays and radium, as well as heat, in their experiments. By 1936 they were publishing further results: “Lebenslauf of A.F.B.,” p. 6, APS Blakeslee, “Biographical Materials,” box 25, folder 2.

169. Blakeslee, “Twenty-Five Years of Genetics,” 35.

1. Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, 171. See also works by Carlson, especially “Unacknowledged Founding.” For a more popular take on Muller, see Schwartz, In Pursuit of the Gene.

2. At the age of about 17, Muller had even written a short story entitled “In the Cause of Science,” in which—after quoting a description of Swedenborg’s vorticle theory of the universe and its claims that all time and space “radiate” from an “infinitesimal finite point” (see Clay, “Radium,” and chap. 1)—the protagonist heads off in search of a rumored strontium mine. (Muller records the protagonist as generally having had “queer ideas of amusement.”) Strontium is not naturally radioactive, although the young Muller seems to have had other ideas in mind. “In the cause of science,” 1907, LL, series VI, box 1.

3. “Autobiographical notes [prepared for Vavilov],” 1936, LL, series II, box 1. Lock’s glossary definition of “mutation” defines it as “the sudden origin of a new species at a single step”: Lock, Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, 327.

4. Carlson, Mendel’s Legacy, 204, footnote 212. Carlson also notes that during these years, due to financial exigencies, “Muller had to work as a Wall Street clerk, rush to work eating a sandwich on the subway to teach classes at night in English as a second language for immigrants, and tuck in the time to go to his classes and study at Cornell for his master’s degree,” in addition to supporting his mother.

5. Lock, Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, 225; Allen, Thomas Hunt Morgan, 308.

6. Lock, Variation, Heredity, and Evolution, 23.

7. Ibid., 19, 127.

8. Ibid., 156.

9. “Autobiographical notes [prepared for Vavilov],” 1936, p. 7, LL, series II, box 1.

10. Probably a course taught by Pegram, during the period 1907–1912. See Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, 33.

11. “Basis of the theory of the gene: The experimental evidence concerning the properties of the gene,” LL, series II, box 1. This piece, dated December 23, 1936, was one of Muller’s efforts against Lysenkoism.

12. “Some recent work in heredity. Draft/notes for Rice Institute lecture,” ca. 1916, LL, series II, box 1.

13. Handwritten draft manuscript with Muller’s own strikethroughs: “Applications and prospects. Discussion of eugenic views and human evolution,” 1916, p. 17, LL, series II, box 1. Cf. Muller’s remark regarding Calvin Bridges: “United we stand—divided we might all fall but Bridges.” “An Episode in Science,” lecture given at the Biological Laboratory of the Brooklyn Institute, Cold Spring Harbor, July 25, 1921, APS Davenport, series I, box 72, “Muller, H. J.” Muller seemed to like bridges in general; as he later told James Neel, regarding another genetical matter, “This ratio is arrived at by way of two ‘bridges.’” Muller to Neel, December 7, 1956, APS Stern, “Neel,” folder 6.

14. “The Essential Facts of Heredity,” ca. 1917–1918, LL, series II, box 1.

15. “An Episode in Science,” pp. 4–5. A similar account appears in Russian under the title “Results of a Decade of Genetic Research on Drosophila.” In a 1947 lecture at Oak Ridge, Muller acknowledged that as a youth he had read Soddy “on the revolutionary possibilities of the control of atomic energy.” CSH Muller, box 6, folder 7.

16. Elsewhere, to make the point, he asked his audience whether they would choose to save a beaker full of human eggs for a limited time or the whole universe without humans in it indefinitely. “Recent Findings in Heredity,” ca. 1916, LL, series II, box 1.

17. Ibid., 23. Muller’s mode of description drew on a long-standing discursive tradition in hereditary theory that spoke of an “organizing principle” of a nucleated cell that “radiates” influence in every direction. See, for example, Freke, On the Origin of Species by Means of Organic Affinity, 29.

18. “Recent Findings in Heredity,” p. 35; emphasis added.

19. “Lecture, re: a general survey of the gene,” ca. 1927, LL, series II, box 1; emphasis added. Blakeslee would make similar comments in 1949: “Chromosomes are the most precious material in the world and it is worth our while to learn all we can about them.” “Seventy-Five Years of Progress in Genetics,” p. 18, APS Blakeslee, “Lectures, Papers, Etc.,” box 23, folder 35.

20. Mendel’s own choice of word for the hereditary factors, it should be noted in passing, was elemente. See chapter 1 for more on the connection between living atoms and atoms of life.

21. “It may be calculated from these experiments that a large proportion of the genes in Drosophila must have a stability which—at a minimum value—is comparable with that of radium atoms. Radium atoms, it may be recalled, have a so-called ‘mean life’ of about two thousand years.” Muller, “Mutation,” 109.

22. Ibid.

23. Schultz, “Radiation and the Study of Mutation in Animals,” 1239.

24. Muller, “Quantitative Methods in Genetic Research,” 417.

25. Comfort, Tangled Field, 44.

26. Getzendaner, “A Hypothesis of ‘Valence,’” 429.

27. Muller, “Variation,” 44–45.

28. Wells, Huxley, and Wells, Science of Life, 475, 477. By 1929, Wells et al. were convinced that the “living atom” tradition, at least as concerned species, was faulty. Species were not “a natural unit at all like an atom, or a quantum.” The tradition could still apply with great utility, however, to the Mendelian theory (387–88).

29. As Herbert Spencer Jennings described the situation just prior to Muller’s 1927 announcement, “A few genes mutated, as a few of the atoms of radiant metal disintegrate; in both cases no outside agent appeared to be at work.” Jennings, Genetics, 347. See chapter 1, as well as the works of the Russian mutation theorist S. I. Korschinsky (Korzhinskii), who had once noted in his What Is Life (1900) that all organisms contain “some deep, secret force . . . poured throughout the organic world, glimmering in every molecule of the plasm and blazing as a flame in human reason . . . it is life.” Korzhinskii, “Chto takoe zhizn?,” 56–57, cited in Daniel Todes, Darwin without Malthus, 72, 189, footnotes 46–47.

30. Muller, “The Gene as the Basis of Life,” 919; emphasis added.

31. “Lecture, re: a general survey of the gene,” ca. 1927, LL, series II, box 1.

32. Muller, “Need of Physics,” 210.

33. Like radium before them, genes also became increasingly intimately associated with fundamental questions of thermodynamics. As Muller would later note, “It is only the Maxwell demon of selection inherent in gene duplication, that is, the differential multiplication of the mutations, which brings order out of mutations’ chaos despite itself.” Muller, “Gene,” 30. Elsewhere, in an even more dramatic echo of this discourse, he claimed that “we fooled the demon god inside of life, and took it unawares, and hit the gene.” “Lecture, re: a general survey of the gene,” ca. 1927, LL, series II, box 1, 13–14.

34. Needham, Order and Life, 26.

35. Huxley, Evolution, 48, 27.

36. Muller to Huxley, March 27, 1918, LL, series I, “J. S. Huxley,” “1917–1918” folder.

37. “The newer biology. Lecture at Rice Institute,” 1916–1918, LL, series II, box 1.

38. “Data notebook: Temperature induced mutations,” July–August 1919, LL, series VI, box 1; emphasis added.

39. “Data notebook: Chem[istry],” September 1921–October 1922, p. 35, LL, series VI, box 2.

40. Muller, “Present Status of the Mutation Theory,” 6.

41. “The Methods of Genetics in Their Application to Problems of Life and Evolution,” ca. 1942, p. 11, LL, series II, box 2.

42. Muller, “The Gene,” 12.

43. Muller, “Nature of the Genetic Effects,” 392; emphasis added.

44. Muller, “Measurement of Gene Mutation Rate,” 281.

45. Muller, “Present Status of the Mutation Theory,” 6.

46. “The empirical question of whether such mutations had actually been produced, had already been the subject of much controversy, with the literature of which I had been familiarizing myself.” “Autobiographical notes [prepared for Vavilov],” 1936, pp. 7–8, LL, series II, box 1.

47. “The Influence of X-Rays upon Heredity,” no date, but after 1931, p. 5, LL, series II, box 7.

48. Muller, “Effects of Roentgen Rays,” 307.

49. “Old literature on radiation” or “Early x-ray literature (before 1926),” ca. 1933, LL, series II, box 1.

50. Ibid. Gager’s work is here cited five times, at least once prominently in relatively large script, and another time with several lines of notes.

51. Muller, “Effects of Roentgen Rays,” 312–13.

52. According to Jim Crow’s recollection of what his graduate professor, J. T. Patterson, told him, “Muller was completely convinced from a study of the literature that X-rays could produce mutations. His fear in advance of the experiments was not that X-rays would fail to produce mutations, but that cell-killing effects might predominate and mask the mutagenic effects he was seeking.” Crow, “Some Reflections on H. J. Muller”; emphasis added.

53. Muller, “Method of Evolution,” 489. Not all of these efforts seemed to Muller to have led to success: already by 1920 he had written that “the oft-suggested possibility of artificially influencing the kind of mutation that occurs (cf. Stockard, Tower, MacDougal, Kammerer, Guyer) would seem to recede indefinitely, unless some unique method is found which does not merely consist in an acceleration or intensification of the ordinary process of mutation.” Muller, “Further Changes in the White-Eye Series of Drosophila,” 470.

54. As Carlson and others have frequently noted, Muller was keenly aware of issues of priority. Muller wrote, “S. Gager [sic] and A. F. Blakeslee in a paper published early in 1927 (before Muller’s findings had been officially announced) reëxamined some of their earlier work on the Jimson weed, and found evidence in it that several gene mutations had appeared in progeny of plants that had been treated with radium. Later, Blakeslee and his co-workers produced numerous gene and chromosome changes in this organism. . . . Since 1928, additional species of plants, of widely different kinds (maize, wheat, cotton, primroses, snapdragons, etc.) have been used, with positive results, and also several other species of insects.” Muller, “Effects of Roentgen Rays,” 313.

55. “Elimination of the X-chromosome from the egg of D[rosophila] m[elanogaster] by x-rays,” LL, series II, box 1.

56. “PROPOSED EXPERIMENTS WITH MIRABILIS jalapa,” October 1922, LL, series VI, box 2, “Texas,” folder 1.

57. Muller and Painter, “Cytological Expression of Changes,” 193.

58. Muller referred to a prior “long succession of experiments on the effects of ionizing radiation on the hereditary material. It is true that certain suggestive results were reported.” He cites J. Dauphin, Gager, Morgan, and Loeb and Bancroft, but explains away their contributions. He refers to the work of Blakeslee and Gager in more detail, saying they “were able to show that many so-called ‘chromosome mutants’ had indeed been produced by the radiation, but most of these were types having an entire but normal extra chromosome, brought about by nondisjunction, an already known effect of radiation. . . . There was however one case of a structurally changed chromosome, and two cases of recessive visible mutations.” Muller, “Nature of the Genetic Effects,” 391.

59. Muller and Altenburg, “Study of the Character,” 213.

60. Without “a thorough course of inbreeding beforehand, or else to have run at least half a dozen different pairs of parallel lines of the control and treated series, and to have obtained a definite difference in the same direction between the two lines of each pair,” Muller argued, “it can be proved by the theory of ‘probable error’ that the differences observed may have been a mere matter of random sampling among genic differences originally present.” Muller, “Variation,” 46.

61. Muller to J. S. Huxley, December 13, 1919, LL, series I, “J. S. Huxley,” “1919–1920” folder. Muller wrote elsewhere, “There is, to be sure, enough work to show that the real mutations are ‘rare’—whatever that term may mean; but, so far as an approximate quantitative determination of the rate of factor change is concerned, it is not possible, from the published work, to determine even its general order of magnitude. Some special scheme of crossing is required for this purpose.” Muller, “Rate of Change”; see also Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, 112.

62. Muller, “Variation,” 44.

63. Muller, “Measurement of Gene Mutation Rate,” 283–84, see also 281.

64. As he would later write in 1927, much of the earlier research into induced mutation “has been done in such a way that the meaning of the data, as analyzed from a modern genetic standpoint, has been highly disputatious at best; moreover, what were apparently the clearest cases have given negative or contrary results on repetition.” Muller, “Artificial Transmutation of the Gene,” 84.

65. Moreover, he concluded, “it would be absurd and scholastic to try to classify mutations according to the nature of their effects. A mutation can do practically anything that life can do—or at least a little of it, for life is built out of mutations.” Muller, “Method of Evolution,” 488.

66. Muller’s constriction of the meaning of mutation to the level of the gene was the logical extension of Edward M. East’s own earlier reduction of the word “mutation” from large-scale de Vriesian mutations “to any inherited variation, however small.” It also paralleled the genically oriented work of population geneticists such as R. A. Fisher in the 1920s. East, “Mendelian Interpretation,” cited in Comfort, Tangled Field, 42.

67. Muller, “An Oenothera-Like Case in Drosophila,” 621.

68. de Vries to Loeb, June 25, 1919, LOC, box 3, “De Vries.”

69. “An Episode in Science,” APS Davenport, series I, box 72, “Muller, H. J.” folder.

70. Muller, “Effects of Roentgen Rays,” 307. Elsewhere, Muller indicated that the reasons for his later success “in obtaining more conclusive results . . . lay in the great developments which both genetic technique and genetic theory, based on studies of nonirradiated material, had by that time undergone. These made discriminations between mutagenesis, on the one hand, and both environmentally induced ‘modifications’ and genetic effects of inbreeding, on the other hand, more precise, and also made the analyses into different classes of heritable changes more informative.” Muller, “Nature of the Genetic Effects,” 391.

71. Muller, “Effects of Roentgen Rays,” 307; emphasis added.

72. Compare with MacDougal’s comment that while identifying mutants is “difficult for the first time,” it becomes easier over time (MacDougal, Mutants and Hybrids, 31); Blakeslee’s ability to “pick out . . . mutants unerringly” (Sinnott, “Albert Francis Blakeslee” [NAS Biographical Memoirs], 9, 8); and Kohler’s description of the role of observation in his Lords of the Fly, mentioned in chap. 3. For another interpretation of the “mutant gaze,” see Campos, “Mutant Sexuality: The Private Life of a Plant.” See also Muller’s reference to the “personal equation” in identifying mutations later in this chapter.

73. Muller to J. S. Huxley, December 13, 1919, LL, series I, “J. S. Huxley,” “1919–1920” folder. See also Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, 112. Curiously, Muller seemed to think that mutations were just as rare as MacDougal did, despite being able to identify many more. As MacDougal had noted in 1902, “Mutations are enormously rare in comparison with the fluctuating variations described above, and this very rarity has led to an underestimation of their value in the origin and development of species, according to de Vries’s conclusions.” MacDougal, “Origin of Species by Mutation” (Torreya, July 1902), 99. See also Muller, “Data notebook: Temperature induced mutations,” July–August 1919, LL, series VI, box 1.

74. “Autobiographical notes [prepared for Vavilov],” 1936, p. 7, LL, series II, box 1.

75. Muller, “Measurement of Gene Mutation Rate,” 301.

76. Muller to Huxley, June 28, 1920, LL, series I, “J. S. Huxley,” “1919–1920” folder.

77. Muller to Huxley, May 4, 1922, LL, series I, “J. S. Huxley,” “1921–1925” folder.

78. “Autobiographical notes [prepared for Vavilov],” 1936, pp. 7–8, LL, series II, box 1.

79. Muller, “Variation,” 46.

80. Ibid., 46–47.

81. Muller, “Mutation,” 106.

82. Muller, “Method of Evolution,” 489–90.

83. Ibid., 490–91. No devil, but perhaps a demon. See the discussion of thermodynamic considerations in chapter 1. See also Keller, “Molecules, Messages, and Memory.”

84. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, 84, footnote 224.

85. Later researchers such as James Neel, however, were to view even X-rays as a “rather gross and crude” tool that probably acted “through a dozen different channels both directly and indirectly on the chromosomes.” Neel to Stern, January 11, 1941, APS Stern, “Neel, James V.,” folder 2.

86. Muller to Altenberg, ca. October 22, 1924, CSH Muller, box 1, folder 2.

87. Just what role Muller thought radiation could play in his experiments is complicated. Although Carlson has noted that Muller was “stimulated” by J. W. Mavor’s discovery in the early 1920s that X-radiation affected the frequency of crossing over, it was not initially obvious to Muller that radiation would be successful as a mutagen, despite the deep association he found between life and radiation. Carlson argues that Muller was not entirely committed to a plan of radiation mutagenesis until later. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, 137–39.

88. Muller to Altenburg, November 12, 1924, LL, series I “Edgar Altenburg,” 1919–1929 folder.

89. Carlson, “Legacy of Hermann Joseph Muller”; see also Carlson, “Unacknowledged Founding,” footnote 39.

90. E. G. Anderson had already been actively using X-rays for some years in the early 1920s to follow up on Mavor’s discoveries of nondisjunction. Anderson to R. A. Emerson, June 1, 1923, Cornell University, Department of Plant Breeding Records, box 1, “E. G. Anderson” folder. See also letters from January 21, 1924, and November 3, 1925.

91. As early as 1904, Whetham had remarked that the “superficial similarity between Becquerel rays and Röntgen rays” had “proved for the most part misleading.” Nevertheless, he concluded, “the relations between the two branches of the subject are so intimate that it is impossible to study satisfactorily the phenomena of radio-activity without a knowledge of the results previously and simultaneously reached” in the investigation of X-rays. Whetham, Recent Development of Physical Science, 200.

92. Lord, Radium, 67.

93. Ibid., 69.

94. Quoted in Robards, Practical Radium, 112.

95. “One of the essential differences between the ‘X’ rays and Radium is, that while the quality of the rays from a Crooke’s tube varies considerably from time to time, the output from the Radium is quite constant.” “Vital Effects of Radium,” cited in Hotblack, A New Activity?, 20.

96. In fact, he thought, it was the β-rays that “appear to be those which are of great importance in the medical application of radium as a curative agent.” Lord, Radium, 74, 50.

97. Soddy, Science and Life, 98. Cf. “The trouble with the use of X-rays up to this time has been that they are not as penetrating as the so-called ‘gamma rays’ of radium.” “Improved X-rays for Cancer Work,” 7.

98. Breit, “Radium—Lost and Found,” SM35. By 1932, radium went for up to $70,000 per gram.

99. Biological researchers using radium regularly thanked both hospitals and colleagues in physics departments for their supplies at this time. This suggests that the links between physics and biology—radium and life—were as real and institutional as they were metaphorical, decades before the later medicinal uses of radioactive tracers linked cyclotrons with hospitals; see Creager, “Tracing the Politics,” 370; and Creager, Life Atomic.

100. Hessenbruch, “The Commodification of Radiation,” 7, 9.

101. “The term γ-ray is used when the radiations are given off by radioactive substances, while they are called X-rays when produced in special high-voltage equipment.” And again: “Radium gives off 2 MeV γ-rays (these are the same as X-rays), and it can therefore be used instead of these high-voltage machines as a source for high-energy radiation.” Alexander, Atomic Radiation and Life, 1, 141.

102. Lavine, First Atomic Age, 244.

103. Muller, “The Effect of X-Rays and Radium on the Germ Plasm,” CSH Muller, box 4, folder 13.

104. Blaauw and van Heyningen, “The Radium-Growth-Response of One Cell”; Gager, “Some Physiological Effects of Radium Rays,” 763; Gager, Effects of the Rays of Radium on Plants, 269.

105. Packard, “Effect of Radium Radiations.”

106. Levine, “Cytological Studies on Irradiated Tissues,” 290; emphasis added.

107. Morgan, Experimental Embryology, 33.

108. In fact, by 1938, X-rays had so eclipsed radium that even Blakeslee, one of the most successful geneticists ever to experiment with radium, could marvel at the misplaced enthusiasm for radium demonstrated by an Argentinian Guggenheim fellow, commenting that “most of us who have used [radium] have discarded [it] on account of the difficulty of measuring it.” Blakeslee to Henry A. Moe, January 14, 1938, CSH Blakeslee, “Blakeslee, Albert—January–June 1938” folder.

109. “Autobiographical notes [prepared for Vavilov],” 1936, pp. 7–8, LL, series II, box 1.

110. Muller, “Effects of Roentgen Rays,” 306.

111. Muller, “Method of Evolution,” 490–91. Newspaper reports describing Muller’s experiments also readily equated the two for their readers: “The physical and chemical composition of the genes may be changed by X-rays or gamma-rays of radium.” “Evolution Process Is Aided by X-Rays,” 3. Later authors agreed: “From a biological point of view X- and γ-rays need be considered merely as a means of releasing high-energy electrons within the object which is being irradiated whatever its chemical constitution . . . only the energetic X- and γ-rays are able to strip off electrons from every type of atom to produce ions.” Alexander, Atomic Radiation and Life, 141.

112. Kaempffert, “Darwin After 100 Years,” SM10.

113. Muller, “Method of Evolution,” 491.

114. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, 138; Muller to Huxley, June 20, 1924, LL, series I, “J. S. Huxley,” “1921–1925” folder.

115. Muller to Hartman, May 6, 1927, CSH Muller, box 1, folder 21.

116. deJong-Lambert, The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research, 12.

117. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, 145.

118. Keller, “Physics and the Emergence of Molecular Biology,” 398. Elsewhere, Keller has noted, “Indeed, after Rutherford’s success in 1919 in inducing a transmutation of the elements, Muller pursued his own search for a means of inducing mutation with that precedent directly in mind, even entitling his discovery of X-ray induced mutations ‘Artificial Transmutation of the Gene.’” Keller, Century of the Gene, 152, footnote 10. As Carlson has noted, “Muller was aware of the parallel of his biological work to the transmutation of elements first induced artificially by Rutherford in 1919.” Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, 147. Loeb had proclaimed to Rutherford upon the announcement of this discovery, “How all biological work shrinks into insignificance when measured by the progress you have made.” Loeb to Rutherford, June 10, 1919, LOC, box 13, “Rutherford, Ernest.”

119. Muller, “Artificial Transmutation of the Gene.” Cf. Muller, “The Production of Mutations by X-Rays.”

120. Muller, “How Evolution Works,” 13. Cf. Muller, “Method of Evolution,” 491–92.

121. Muller, “How Evolution Works,” 14.

122. Ibid., 491; Carlson, “Unacknowledged Founding.” Elsewhere, Carlson notes that in his 1927 paper, Muller “claimed a 15,000% increase over spontaneous mutation frequency, the production of over 100 new mutations, the similarity of X-ray mutations to those obtained spontaneously, the susceptibility of sperm as well as eggs to X-ray mutagenesis, and the large number of fractional mutations or mosaics which implied a ‘precocious doubling’ of the sperm chromatid.” Carlson, “H. J. Muller (1890–1967).”

123. Coulter, “X-Ray Mutations,” 110.

124. Faber, “X-Rays Form New Life.”

125. Wells, Huxley, and Wells, Science of Life, 1477.

126. Huxley, “Where Darwin’s Theory Stands Today,” SM5.

127. Muller, “Quantitative Methods in Genetic Research,” 419.

128. “News and Views,” 658.

129. Hanson and Heys, “Effects of Radium,” 115–16.

130. Hanson and Heys, “Analysis of the Effects,” 202.

131. “This Number Is Devoted to the Discussion of the Effects of X-rays,” introduction.

132. Mohr, Heredity and Disease, 190; Hanson and Winkleman, “Visible Mutations,” 277.

133. With exceptions, of course. Demerec would soon complain, “I think that Muller’s work must be repeated. His paper given at the Congress made me just mad. Big conclusion are drawn, but the data given are so meager that very little could be taken as proven.” Demerec to Anderson, December 20, 1927, UMC Anderson, folder 17. Sturtevant would also complain, “I was very doubtful about Muller’s claims for X-ray production of mutation, until I saw Weinstein’s results . . . [but] the data look O. K. to me if taken in connection with Muller’s sketchy account.” Sturtevant to Anderson, January 21, 1927, UMC Anderson, folder 45.

134. Carl G. Hartman to Muller, August 2, 1927, CSH Muller, box 1, folder 21. L. C. Dunn would also later describe this work as Muller’s “big thunder”: “The Reminiscences of L. C. Dunn (1961),” Columbia Center for Oral History, Columbia University, 346. According to Carlson, “overnight, Muller had become a world figure, and the excitement of man’s first alteration of living matter strengthened the hope he had long nourished that this would also provide the power for man’s control of his own evolution.” Carlson, “Unacknowledged Founding,” 163.

135. Sinnott and Dunn, Principles of Genetics, 192.

136. Broadcast, “Open University, A second level course; S299/6—Genetics: The Phage School; Tape No.: BLN16FW802,” April 21, 1976, CIT Delbrück, box 32, folder 1.

137. Hollaender, Radiation Biology, v; “Genetic Eff. of Rad. on Man,” 1953, APS Stern, “Stern, C.,” “Radiation Genetics,” box 36, folder 1.

138. Crow and Abrahamson, “Mutation Becomes Experimental.”

139. Carlson, The Gene, xi, 3, 252; emphasis added.

140. Sapp, Genesis, 141. Sapp’s sequence echoes that of Ernest Everett Just: “Moreover, it was soon learned, both for animals and for plants, that mutations can be induced not only by Roentgen rays but also by radium and by ultra-violet rays.” Just, “On the Origin of Mutations,” 61.

141. In more recent work, Carlson has softened his account considerably, saying that “what was original was not the idea of trying it, but of proving it.” In the process, however, Carlson misconstrues the nature of Blakeslee’s findings, declaring that “Blakeslee, like Morgan, could not really tell if he had induced any mutations. Over the years, the contradictory results would not be resolved until Muller (and independently, a year later, L. J. Stadler) showed that X rays were indeed mutagenic.” Carlson, Mendel’s Legacy, 173, footnote 34.

142. Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, 153; Muller to Altenburg, July 14, 1928, LL, series I, “Edgar Altenburg,” “1919–1929” folder.

143. “The Secret of Life,” 52.

144. Neel to Stern, July 30, 1940. Neel also wrote to Stern in early July 1940, saying that the study of chromosomal aberrations had taken center stage: “CSH is swell. Learning a lot. Practically everybody here in the fly group—which I know best—is interested in the chromosomal rearrangement problem.” APS Stern, “Neel,” folder 2.

145. Hunt, “Dr. Muller and the Million Human Time-Bombs.”

146. “Lecture, re: a general survey of the gene,” ca. 1927, LL, series II, box 1.

147. “Evolution to Order,” radio broadcast “under the auspices of Science Service, over the Columbia Broadcasting System,” Thursday March 24, 1938, APS Blakeslee, “Lectures, Papers, Etc.: Adventures in Science,” box 23, folder 2.

148. Goodspeed, “The Effects of X-Rays and Radium on Species of the Genus Nicotiana,” 254.

149. Muller, “Further Studies on the Nature and Causes of Gene Mutations,” 213.

150. Dunn, “Genetics in Historical Perspective,” 43–44.

151. “Genetic Eff. of Rad. on Man,” 1953, APS Stern, “Stern, C.,” “Radiation Genetics,” box 36, folder 1.

152. As Jack Schultz later noted, “Ideally, for the quantitative study of mutations en masse, it would be desirable to detect all types of variants. This would include the lethal effects, the ordinary visible mutants, and the very slight types. Of these, the last present the greatest difficulty for measurement with any accuracy; there are at present no data available which permit even an estimate of their frequency. . . . For the ‘visible’ mutations, it is equally clear that criteria may differ from experiment to experiment, and notoriously from observer to observer. The frequency of occurrence of visible mutation might be determined with accuracy in an organism in which all the possible types of variation were known, and they could be distinguished from developmental accidents due to nongenetic influences. Even in Drosophila melanogaster, however, genetically the best studied of all animals, it is not possible to do this yet.” Schultz, “Radiation and the Study of Mutation in Animals,” 1211.

153. Blakeslee, “Mutations in Mucors.”

154. Sinnott, “Albert Francis Blakeslee,” NAS Biographical Memoirs, 9, 8.

155. Gager, Plant World, 99; Woods, “Botany and Human Affairs,” 573.

156. As late as 1933, Blakeslee wrote, “I think it will be very difficult to separate the genetical from the cytological aspects since we are coming to the point where we cannot make clear a distinction we once thought between the gene and the chromosomal mutations.” Blakeslee to Benjamin Duggar, February 18, 1933, APS Blakeslee, “Duggar, Benjamin,” box 8, folder 3.

157. Ford, The Study of Heredity, 96.

158. “An Episode in Science,” APS Davenport, series I, box 72, “Muller, H. J.” folder.

159. Avery, Satina, and Rietsema, Blakeslee, vii.

160. Muller, “Genetic Variability,” 499. De Vries would not agree. He had written to Loeb a few months earlier, saying, “I have wholly retired from active business, but am still cultivating my beloved Oenothera’s and find that they are always true to their principles, despite the rather curious and vague objections of Morgan and others. But I do not like to be taken into public discussions.” De Vries to Loeb, March 17, 1919, LOC, box 3, “De Vries.”

161. Blakeslee, “Twenty-Five Years of Genetics,” 35.

162. Blakeslee, “Ideals of Science,” 591.

163. “Seventy-Five Years of Progress in Genetics,” p. 21, APS Blakeslee, “Lectures, Papers, Etc.,” box 23, folder 35; emphasis added. A very similar sentence was published in Blakeslee, “Chromosomes, Chemical Stimulators, and Inhibitors of Normal and Abnormal Plant Growth,” 43.

164. Blakeslee, “Control of Evolution and Life Processes in Plants,” 59–60. Blakeslee would later note that Gager’s “single experiment with radium emanation obtained an increase in non-disjunctional types and a couple of recessives out of a number so small as not to be surely significant statistically.” Blakeslee, “Twenty-Five Years of Genetics,” 36.

165. “Gager and Blakeslee now report mutations of various types following the treatment of Datura with radium rays.” Coulter, “X-Ray Mutations,” 111.

166. “Following my work on flies, Whiting has obtained positive results by the use of X-rays on wasps. Blakeslee, Buchholz and the others of this group have a mass of interesting results from X-rays and radium applied to the Jimson-weed, Datura, that extended the findings concerning lethal as well as visible mutations to dicotyledonous plants.” Muller, “Method of Evolution,” 495–96.

167. Stadler, “Mutations in Barley Induced by X-Rays and Radium.” According to Carlson, Muller “often remarked to his classes that it was only luck that he, and not Stadler, was the first to come out in print with the clear evidence for radiation-induced mutations”: Carlson, “H. J. Muller (1890–1967).” Muller worried in 1939 that Stadler might mistake his motives in other matters because of this matter of priority: Muller to Darlington, July 3, 1939, Darlington Papers, Oxford University, box 110, folder J.130. And a decade later, in 1949, he wrote, “We have done parallel work on the problem of mutations and their artificial production, he with plant and I with animal material”: Muller to Loyalty Board, June 17, 1949, CSH Muller, box 1, folder 17. According to Jim Crow, Muller’s “greatest contribution . . . was not the discovery of radiation mutagenesis. L. J. Stadler independently demonstrated this in barley at about the same time; radiation was in the air. Muller’s great contribution was the invention of techniques that would make mutagenesis experiments feasible. Prior to Muller there was no systematic, objective, and quantitative way of measuring mutation rates.” Crow, “Some Reflections.”

168. Indeed, it was Muller’s discussions with Stadler and others that would ultimately cause Muller to begin to question the viability of a firm distinction between point mutations and exceptionally minor chromosomal rearrangements, as well as the nature of the position effect.

169. Blakeslee to Morgan, May 22, 1935, CIT Morgan, box 1, folder 4.

170. Muller and Altenburg, “Study of the Character,” 213.

171. “Elimination of the X-chromosome from the egg of D[rosophila] m[elanogaster] by x-rays” (1921, but these particular pages are dated around 1923), LL, series II, box 1.

172. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, Muller was presented with a 600-page blank book as a “reverse Festschrift.” Fascinatingly, the theme of “blanks”—from gunshots to empty spaces on the page—pervades Muller’s work. In 1918 he had even sent a humorous “mad lib”–style letter full of blanks to Huxley, recounting a recent family picnic; see Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society, 106, 406.

173. Patterson, “X-Rays and Somatic Mutations,” 261.

174. Muller, “Method of Evolution,” 496.

175. “History of Genetics” (unpub.), XI-5, CIT Sturtevant, box 24, folder 1.

176. Dobzhansky to Demerec, April 2, 1934, APS Demerec, “Dobzhansky, Theodosius,” box 7, folder 3.

177. “We cannot get irradiation done here and ordinarily whenever I want to get flies irradiated I have to take a trip to Greenfield, 17 miles away, with them, so this would spare me that trip.” Muller to Stern, February 1, 1944, APS Stern, “Muller, Hermann J.,” box 18, folder 5. Muller preferred radium especially for “our low intensity work because of the greater ease with which it can be used to give low intensities constantly over a long period.” He emphasized again, however, “that there is in fact no quantitative or qualitative difference between x-ray + radium effects, for a given total dose in r units.” Muller to Stern and W. P. Spencer, October 12, 1943, APS Stern, “Muller, Hermann J.,” box 18, folder 4.

178. Muller, “Heribert Nilsson’s Evidence,” 166.

179. “Proposals for Investigations Concerning the Genetic Effects of Radium,” 1933, LL, series VI, box 2.

180. Hanson and Heys, meanwhile, had undertaken experiments to establish “just what elements in radium and X-rays are responsible for the results obtained.” They found that the γ-rays alone, of the radium emanations, were sufficient to produce lethal mutations in Drosophila—just as earlier investigators had long suspected. Earlier investigators attributed this ability to the γ-rays’ “penetrance”; Hanson and Heys attributed it to the impact of β-particles produced when γ-rays passed through living matter. Hanson and Heys, “Effects of Radium,” 115–16.

181. “Proposals for Investigations Concerning the Genetic Effects of Radium,” 1933, LL, series VI, box 2.

182. As G. Failla noted in 1936, “Ionization is the only thing we know of to which, rightly or wrongly, we may attribute all other effects of radiation. Hence, any attempt at a correlation of the biological effects of radiation requires of necessity a quantitative knowledge of the ionization in the living materials studied. But this essential information is very difficult to obtain.” Failla, “Ionization and Its Bearing on the Biological Effects of Radiation,” 106.

183. “Biological Effects of X-Rays,” 382.

184. Hanson and Heys, “Analysis of the Effects,” 212.

185. “Lecture, re: a general survey of the gene,” ca. 1927, LL, series II, box 1.

186. Blaauw and van Heyningen, “Radium-Growth-Response,” 403–17.

187. Muller, “The Production of Mutations by X-Rays,” 724; emphasis added.

188. Schultz, “Radiation and the Study of Mutation in Animals,” 1250, citing Muller, “Radiation and Genetics.”

189. “Dr. Hermann Muller is Dead,” New York Times, April 6, 1967, 39.

1. That is, there is more work to be done in making such language central to historical analysis, rather than simply deploying it for its radiant descriptive charm.

2. “Radium was to claim its victims too,” Abraham Pais has noted, “but the story of its early physiological impact is incomparably less harrowing than that for X-rays. I know of no lethal injuries caused by exposure to radioactive material in the pre–World War I years.” Pais, Inward Bound, 99.

3. Breit, “Radium—Lost and Found,” SM35.

4. Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia, believed to have been caused by her long-term exposure to ionizing radiation. Lavine, First Atomic Age, chap. 4.

5. Emery, “Roll of Martyrs to Science Is Increasing,” XX5; “How the Men Who Devote Themselves to Humanity Are Often Overlooked,” E6; “New Radium Disease Found”; and “Death Stirs Action on Radium ‘Cures,’” 12. According to Pais, “The bad years for radium came in the late nineteenth-twenties (radium was more plentiful by then) when numerous reports appeared of persons severely injured or killed by internally deposited radioactive substances.” Pais, Inward Bound, 100. For more on the longer history of radium in American life, see Lavine, First Atomic Age; Clark, Radium Girls; and Mullner, Deadly Glow.

6. Hotblack, A New Activity?, 36. As Lavine has suggested, “Radium, more and more directly personified in the press the more ‘evil’ it became, lashed out against its captors, burned those who embraced it, and killed its own ‘mother.’ Where x rays had technicians, it had handlers, and when it was lost, the ‘radium hound’ was called in to track the prey.” Lavine, First Atomic Age, 179.

7. Ibid., 41.

8. For more on the commercialization of radium in American industry, see Rentetzi, “The U.S. Radium Industry.”

9. Letter dated August 4, 1938, LL, series I, “Correspondence (General),” “August 1938” folder.

10. Gager to W. C. Curtis, February 27, 1928, BBG, box 9, folder 9, “C. S. Gager, Research, 1921–1928.”

11. W. C. Curtis to Gager, March 10, 1928, ibid.

12. Communication No. 2, March 8, 1928, “To the group of investigators interested in securing a fund for support of research upon the ‘Effects of Radiations upon Organisms,’” ibid.

13. APS Stern, “National Committee on Radiation Protection and Measurements,” folder 1. For more on the history of radiological protection, see Hacker, The Dragon’s Tail and Elements of Controversy; Walker, Permissible Dose; and Jolly, “Thresholds of Uncertainty.” Lavine has suggested that radium and X-rays had different regulatory profiles: “Radiation had almost always involved an external agency to regulate it, and this became more and more true as the years wore on. Exactly the opposite was true with radium . . . the distribution of radium and other radioactive substances (or their imitators) tended to be decentralized. . . . Radium . . . was a western phenomenon, conjuring up alpine vistas and mountain springs, and was scarcely discussed for long in any context without a nod to its geological origins. It resided in a geographic region, while x rays were better understood as belonging merely to specific rooms, such as the doctor’s office or the physics laboratory.” Lavine, First Atomic Age, chap. 4.

14. As Muller had written to Stern, “Hanson’s work . . . was done at my suggestion and in consultation with me.” Muller to Stern, January 14, 1947, APS Stern, “Muller, Hermann J.,” box 18, folder 8. Reference is made to Hanson’s 1928 abstract in Anatomical Record 41, 99, and to his more detailed joint publication with Heys, “An Analysis of the Effects of the Different Rays of Radium in Producing Lethal Mutations in Drosophila.”

15. The chairman of the executive committee of Cancer Control Organisation for Edinburgh and South-East Scotland wrote to Muller on March 7, 1938, “I have taken steps to arrange for 70 mgms. of radium being made available for your use.” Muller acknowledged receipt on April 5. See also letters from F. A. E. Crew to Muller, in LL, series I, “Correspondence (General),” “March 1938,” “April 1938,” and “July 1938” folders.

16. “April 28, 1939. Muller’s Genetics and Society,” LL, series I, “Correspondence (General),” “April 16–31, 1939” folder.

17. Letter dated April 5, 1938, LL, series I, “Correspondence (General),” “April 1938” folder. Muller to Stern and W. P. Spencer, October 12, 1943, APS Stern, “Muller, Hermann J.,” folder 4.

18. Frank Thone, Science Service Editor in Biology, wire report, November 1, 1946, LL, series VII, box 1, “1946 Nobel—misc” folder.

19. Demerec to Blakeslee, July 6, 1940, APS Demerec, “Blakeslee,” box 3, folder 5.

20. As Blakeslee wrote to a colleague, “These grants run out, however, July 1 and, since the Radiation Committee, from which he [Cartledge] has received a single grant terminating June 30, has officially in its publications stated that its support from now on would be for study of the physical side of radiation rather than the biological side, there are no more funds from this source.” Blakeslee to Ernst Bessey, May 28, 1936, CSH Blakeslee, “Blakeslee, Albert—1936” folder.

21. “Lebenslauf of A.F.B.,” p. 6, APS Blakeslee, “Biographical Materials,” box 25, folder 2. Blakeslee also noted that “Dr. Demerec and Dr. Kaufman are using the Xray machine nearly every day to induce mutations in Drosophila. They analyze the mutations by the changes in the salivary chromosomes.” Blakeslee to W. D. Coolidge, General Electric Laboratories, Schenectady, July 5, 1939, CSH Blakeslee, “Blakeslee, Albert—1939” folder.

22. W. C. Curtis to Gager, February 18, 1928, BBG, box 9, folder 9, “C. S. Gager, Research, 1921–1928” folder.

23. F. A. E. Crew to Muller, July 8, 1938; R. Lamy to Muller, July 7, 1938; and K. MacKenzie to Muller, July 15, 1938, LL I, “Correspondence (General),” “July 1–15 1938” folder.

24. Bacq and Alexander, Fundamentals of Radiobiology, 2.

25. “Improved X-rays for Cancer Work,” 7.

26. Israel Klein, “Science Tries to Equal Radium’s Terrific Power by Electricity,” NEA Service (January 5, 1928), quoted in Lavine, First Atomic Age, 238.

27. Brunngraber, Radium, 398, 408.

28. “Giant Cancer Tube Tried Out,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1931, A1, quoted in Lavine, First Atomic Age, 238.

29. “Atom-Bomb By-Product Promises to Replace Radium as Cancer Aid,” 1.

30. Calabrese and Baldwin, “Radiation Hormesis,” 57; Curry, “Accelerating Evolution,” chap. 6.

31. “New Elixir Found for Plant World,” 17. Compare with Alexander in 1957: “Radium gives off 2 MeV γ-rays (these are the same as X-rays), and it can therefore be used instead of these high-voltage machines as a source for high-energy radiation. With the development of atomic energy, man-made isotopes have become available in large quantities and radium is no longer the only source of high-energy γ-rays.” Alexander, Atomic Radiation and Life, 141. Lavine has suggested that radium and X-rays “developed very distinct identities over the course of their first half-century: by the 1940s, radium’s profligate energy seemed even weirder and wilder (and more sinister) than they had at first glance in 1903, while the x-ray had been steadily ‘tamed’ until the threats it had first suggested in 1896 seemed remote indeed to most Americans.” Lavine, First Atomic Age, 22.

32. As Angela Creager has noted, “Radiation itself was a critical tool, but it was more than a tool. In part this was an effect of novel technologies: radiation was produced in ever-increasing amounts by the new instruments of nuclear physics, from cyclotrons in the 1930s to reactors and nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 1950s.” Creager, “Commentary on ‘Tools’”; see also Creager and Santesmases, “Radiobiology in the Atomic Age”; Creager, “Tracing the Politics”; and Creager, Life Atomic.

33. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 172, quoting Ruth Ashton, “The Sunny Side of the Atom,” CBS Radio, June 30, 1947.

34. Sinnott, “Albert Francis Blakeslee”(NAS Biographical Memoirs), 13; Calabrese and Baldwin, “Radiation Hormesis,” 57; Cook, “Dr. Muller Receives Nobel Medicine Award,” 325ff.

35. Calabrese and Baldwin, “Radiation Hormesis,” 57.

36. Muller, “Radiation and Genetics,” 240.

37. “Basis of the theory of the gene: The experimental evidence concerning the properties of the gene,” LL, series II, box 1; Muller, “The Gene,” 6–7. For more on material versus operational understandings of the gene, see Falk, “What Is a Gene?—Revisited.”

38. Muller, “Radiation and Genetics,” 240.

39. Cockerell, “Radiation and Genetics,” 476.

40. Muller, “Radiation and Genetics,” 241.

41. Muller tried to develop this theory of radium storage in a few different ways to see if he could get any mileage out of it, and he reported that experiments testing the possibility of innate radium storage in fruit flies were conducted by Mott-Smith, but had brought negative results. Muller was left to conclude that “natural mutations” had perhaps not so much to do with the absorption of radiation as he had first thought. We have, he said, “to accept as more probable the alternative that the great majority of natural mutations have as their primary cause some other process or processes than the absorption of radiation. Thus we seem to be obtaining a negative answer to the query which I raised in 1927 as to whether natural radiation fashions the building-blocks of evolution.” Muller, “Radiation and Genetics,” 242.

42. Burke, “Physics and Biology,” 81.

43. Muller, “Need of Physics,” 210.

44. “Inverted Synapsis of Genes as Evidence for the Periodic Character of their Mechanism of Attraction,” by H. J. Muller and D. Raffel, November–December 1934, LL, series II, box 1.

45. Muller, “Need of Physics,” 211.

46. Cf. “All such radiation originates at some gene locus, from which it travels outward at a presumably finite rate.” Ibid., 4–5.

47. Ibid., 211.

48. Muller, “Method of Evolution,” 498.

49. Even as late as 1936, in a letter to Stalin in which he proposed a new system of eugenics for the USSR, Muller noted, “Now by making step after step in this way, through several generations, a level is soon reached by great numbers which correspond with that of the genetically best equipped individuals of today, or which, by combining with the varied gifts of the latter, in sum total even surpasses them. And this in turn supplies a kind of genetic tonic, as it were, a vitalizing element that diffuses out to mix with the whole population.” “Letter to Stalin (1936),” LL, series II, box 1, republished as Glad, “Hermann J. Muller’s 1936 Letter to Stalin.” Muller frequently reiterated to varied audiences his interest in a sort of ultimate “intelligent control over biological evolution”: “Work of the Department of Mutation and the Gene from September 1933 to December 1936,” CSH Muller, box 5, folder 13.

50. “Department of Genetics” (1932), 33.

51. Brunngraber, Radium, 345.

52. Weart, Nuclear Fear, 49; see also Hollaender, “The Problem of Mitogenetic Rays,” 919–59.

53. “The Effects of Roentgen Rays Upon the Hereditary Material (1933),” p. 18, LL, series II, box 1.

54. “Inverted Synapsis,” p. 4, LL, series II, box 1.

55. Wainwright, “Historical and Recent Evidence for the Existence of Mitogenetic Radiation”; Stern, “Mitogenetic Radiation: A Study of Authority in Science.”

56. Seifriz, “The Gurwitsch Rays,” 307.

57. “Imprisoned in each of these cells is a force many thousand times more powerful than the pull of gravity, a force that seems to be the ultimate source of all life and energy.” Stout, Secret, 4.

58. Pais, Inward Bound, 116. As Ralph Stayner Lillie put it in 1945, “In both physics and biology a ‘nuclear’ influence is generally conceived as one which originates in a small, centrally situated area and controls processes in the immediate surroundings.” Lillie, General Biology and Philosophy of Organisms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), quoted in Lehman, Biology in Transition, 97.

59. Hoffman, The Life and Death of Cells, 89, 99.

60. “Fission” in nuclear physics was explicitly coined with reference to biological phenomena. According to Elisabeth Rona, the American microbiologist William Arnold was at Bohr’s laboratory in Copenhagen in January 1939 when he was asked to observe on the oscillograph the experimental splitting of atoms of uranium: “We could see the tall spikes produced by the energetic fragments of the splitting. [Otto] Frisch turned to me and asked, ‘What do you call the splitting of bacteria?’ I answered, ‘Fission.’ This term henceforth was used to describe the splitting of uranium into fragments.” Rona, How It Came About, 44. In a Caltech press release in 1951, Delbrück would later reappropriate the term as if it had first come from physics: “‘At the gene level we seem to have a binary fission mechanism,’ or reproduction by splitting of parent gene.” CIT Delbrück, box 3, folder 4.

61. Along these lines, even Kary Mullis’s invention of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) may be another echo of this legacy. As historian of molecular biology Michel Morange has noted, the name PCR was “chosen not at random but because of its reference to nuclear chain reactions. In both its spirit and the person of some of its founders, molecular biology is the descendant of the physics of the 1930s and 1940s.” Morange, A History of Molecular Biology, 242. See also Morange’s note on references to “deoxyribonucleic bombs,” which “exploded” in Kary Mullis’s head after his discovery: 319, footnote 32.

62. Muller, on gene evolution, Oak Ridge, April 8, 1947, CSH Muller, box 6, folder 7.

63. “For the problem of the evolutionary process is not just the problem of life. It is the problem of the cosmos itself.” Kaempffert, “Darwin After 100 Years.” Other examples abound.

64. Darlington, Recent Advances in Cytology, 246, 334.

65. “The central problem of biology—the essential ‘secret of life’—lies in the genes themselves: their composition and structure, how they are autocatalytically synthesized, and how they may have first originated from lifeless matter.” Plunkett, Outlines of Modern Biology, 667; see also Lehmann, Biology in Transition, 134.

66. Problems of Radiobiology with Emphasis on Radiation Genetics,” lecture, Oregon State College, Biology Colloquium, April 21, 1951, APS Stern, box 34.

67. According to Max Delbrück, the theory “was a masterly summation of all the existent data on mutation, both radiation-induced and spontaneous.” CIT Delbrück, box 22, folder 2. See Crowther, “Biological Action of X-Rays”; Lea, Actions of Radiations on Living Cells; Summers, “Physics and Genes”; and Summers, “Concept Migration.”

68. Delbrück, “Radiation and the Hereditary Mechanism,” 361–62.

69. Summers, “Concept Migration”; Creager, Life of a Virus, 192;

70. Stent, quoted in Summers, “Concept Migration.”

71. For more on this work, see Sloan and Fogel, Creating a Physical Biology.

72. As Delbrück had noted, “It was all a matter of bridging physics and genetics at that time—there just weren’t any people who could do that.” Delbrück, “How It Was” (May–June 1980): 22.

73. Beyler, “Targeting the Organism,” 267–68.

74. As early as 1931, Muller had “ruled out a target-theory measurement of gene size from x-ray induced mutations” in Drosophila: Carlson, “Unacknowledged Founding,” 159. Indeed, Muller is said to have held target theory “in low regard” in light of the results of his own radiation work because its approach to measuring the size of a gene within a cell was based on the assumption of a one-to-one correspondence between incidents of ionizing radiation and mutation, when in fact no such correspondence existed. (Building on his earlier criticism of the approach from the results of his studies of one locus in 1931, Muller calculated in 1940 that “about 200 to 600 ionizations occurred per gene per mutation at higher doses.”) Carlson, “H. J. Muller (1890–1967),” 20.

75. As Guido Pontecorvo noted in 1958, “Though this first application of physical ideas to a particular set of problems did not work out too well, the whole outlook in theoretical genetics has since been perfused with a physical flavour.” And: “In the years immediately preceding WWII, something quite new happened: the introduction of ideas (not techniques) from the realm of physics into the realm of genetics, particularly applied to the problem of the size, mutability, and self-replication of genes.” Pontecorvo, Trends in Genetic Analysis, 2. Cf. “DNA Damage and Repair.” For an early account, see Fleming, “Émigré Physicists and the Biological Revolution.” See also Keller, “Physics and the Emergence of Molecular Biology.”

76. Summers, “Concept Migration.”

77. Bohr, “Light and Life.”

78. As Delbrück would later say, “Such findings were vaguely reminiscent of the ‘wholeness’ of the atom, or the stability of the stationary states. The stability of the gene and the algebra of genetics suggested something akin to quantum mechanics.” From a lecture entitled “Light and Life III,” given at the inauguration of the New Carlsberg Laboratory, Copenhagen, September 27–28, 1976. Quoted in Shropshire, Max Delbrück, 94. But see McKaughan, “The Influence of Niels Bohr on Max Delbrück.”

79. “Light and Life,” New York Times, 70.

80. Delbrück to Pontecorvo, March 12, 1968, CIT Delbrück, box 17, folder 32. “Do you have a copy of Delbrück & Timofeef’s write-up of our Copenhagen discussion on the mechanism of mutation? It was 5-pages of mimeographed sheets.” Muller to Carlos Offermann, September 28, 1937, CSH Muller, David Muller series, box 5, folder 48.

81. Bohr, Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge, 2.

82. Ibid., 9.

83. Delbrück, “How It Was” (March–April 1980): 25.

84. Kay, “Quanta of Life.” See also Kay, “Secret of Life”; Kay, “Conceptual Models and Analytical Tools”; Fischer and Lipson, Thinking About Science; and Roll-Hansen, “The Application of Complementarity to Biology.”

85. Delbrück, “How It Was” (May–June 1980): 21ff.

86. Delbrück, “Problems of Modern Biology in Relation to Atomic Physics,” chap. 8.

87. Stent, “Max Delbrück,” 9.

88. Miller, “Max Delbrück, 1906–1981,” 269.

89. Ernst-Peter Fischer, “Max Delbrück: A Physicist Who Looked at Biology” (talk delivered at the Phycomyces meeting at Cold Spring Harbor, August 1982), p. 6, CIT Delbrück, box 49, folder 4. As early as 1922, Muller himself had wondered whether bacteriophage might be, in its essence, a gene. Viruses such as phage, as molecules that could replicate and mutate, and existing in that half-alive realm between the organic and the inorganic, seemingly shared many features with radium. Much more could be said about the role of the virus as a half-living entity and the “importation of specific tools and concepts” to study it, “as well as on the analogies being made to other systems,” as Creager has noted in the case of Wendell Stanley (The Life of a Virus, 317). In 1936, Blakeslee even suggested to Stanley that he try X-rays to induce mutations in his crystalline virus: Blakeslee to Stanley, January 21, 1936, CSH Blakeslee, “Blakeslee, Albert—1936” folder. See also Podolsky, “The Role of the Virus in Origin of Life Theorizing,” and the discussion in chapter 1.

90. Schrödinger, What Is Life?, 34, 47, 63. Mark Adams has noted that when Schrödinger’s work was translated into Russian, it “provoked great interest.” Soviet nuclear physicists perceived a “close analogy . . . between nuclear physics in the period 1900–1935 and the physico-chemical study of heredity as it was beginning to develop. . . . The analogy between molecular genetics and nuclear physics was repeated again and again by Soviet physicists: as the first-half-century was dominated by physics, the second would be dominated by molecular biology; as the study of the atomic nucleus had dominated the scientific scene, so too would the study of the nucleus of the cell.” Adams, “Genetics and the Soviet Scientific Community,” 223–24.

91. Delbrück to Bohr, April 14, 1953, CIT Delbrück, box 3, folder 29.

92. Inspired by Stanley’s work on the crystallization of tobacco mosaic virus, Delbrück wrote “a short memorandum to himself entitled ‘Riddle of Life’” in August 1937. Olby, Path to the Double Helix, 236. In his Nobel lecture of 1969, Delbrück proclaimed, “Molecular genetics, our latest wonder, has taught us to spell out the connectivity of the tree of life in such palpable detail that we may say in plain words, ‘This riddle of life has been solved.’” Delbrück, “A Physicist’s Renewed Look at Biology,” 1312. See also Delbrück, “Riddle of Life (1937),” CIT Delbrück, box 36, folder 1. The terms “enigma,” “riddle,” and “secret”—so frequently used by an earlier generation to describe the mysteries of radium—were also frequently used to describe the phenomena of life prior to the emergence of “code” talk. For more on “code” language in the history of molecular biology, see Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?

93. Received accounts include McKaughan, “The Influence of Niels Bohr on Max Delbrück”; Kay, “Secret of Life”; and Roll-Hansen, “The Application of Complementarity to Biology.”

94. White, “Heredity, Variation and the Environment.” This chapter of Gager’s General Botany was written by Orland E. White, the curator of plant breeding and economic botany at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. White acknowledged that Muller’s paper had been “freely used in writing this survey,” and his wording was taken almost verbatim from Muller’s paper “Mutation,” published in 1923. Another commentator had also used Muller’s analogy in 1929: “It has even been argued that all genes ought to be expected to change sooner or later, just as an atom of radium changes in the course of 2,000 years or so until it ends as a dross of lead. As the radium atom ‘runs down,’ so one might expect such an active chemical structure as the gene to ‘run down,’ although the ‘life’ of most genes is long—probably several thousand years at least.” Popenoe, The Child’s Heredity, 264.

95. “The Doctrine of the Gene,” ca. 1936, p. 2, LL, series II, box 1.

96. Reprinted as Muller, “Genetic Nucleic Acid,” 144 and as Muller, “Genetic Nucleic Acid: Key Material.”

97. “The turnover or metabolism occurring in the other material of a cell represents, we might say, the fire that the genetic material keeps going outside itself, to get that other material to work for it, in the service of its own distinctive goal: its own survival and replication. Thus metabolism is not the essence of life but a kind of upper-level expression of life after the genetic material has succeeded in making for itself a workshop of protoplasm.” Muller, “Genetic Nucleic Acid: Key Material,” 14.

98. Blakeslee and Avery, “Methods of Inducing Doubling,” 404, 408. For a synthetic account of the history of colchicine in mutation breeding, see Curry, “Making Marigolds”; see also Curry, “Accelerating Evolution,” chap. 4; and Goodman, “Plants, Cells, and Bodies.” Muller was also one of the foremost proponents of a vision of genetic engineering: “We may after all make some headway on this sector of the biological battlefront,” he noted in 1927. “We cannot make life—far from it; we probably can, however, remake it.” “Lecture, re: a general survey of the gene,” ca. 1927, p. 21, LL, series II, box 1.

99. Quoted in Comfort, Tangled Field, 93.

100. McClintock devised novel cytogenetic and phenotypic-level descriptions of mutation to capture other hereditary phenomena that Muller had been uncertain how to explain. As Comfort has argued, “McClintock . . . saw her theory as an alternative to the chemical-change-in-the-gene model. Muller’s model posited autonomous, particulate genes, in which the mutations were ‘true’—that is, chemical. McClintock’s postulated an integrative genome in which genes acted in suites, controlled by regulatory elements. In her Carnegie report of that year, she wrote that her investigations ‘cast doubt on interpretations that postulate a “true gene mutation,” that is, a chemical change in a gene molecule,’ and suggested that phenotypic change was rather the result of reversible inhibition and modulation of genes.” Comfort, Tangled Field, 134. Muller, however, was not always able to recognize these theories as based on non-genocentric first principles of mutation.

101. Comfort, Tangled Field, 85. As Muller would later write, “What a relief it is for us mutation workers to know that the mutable genes are in a different class from . . . ‘ordinary gene mutations,’ after all.” Muller to McClintock, October 27, 1948, quoted in Comfort, Tangled Field, 134.

102. “Evolution Process Is Aided by X-Rays,” 3. Stadler argued that most mutations induced by X-ray treatment were “not representative of natural mutation in general. This special class may be wholly or largely made up of mechanical or extra-genetic change,” resulting primarily in chromosomal derangements, not gene mutations. He also claimed that “the conclusion that mutations are the result of chemical changes within the gene is not inevitable. Certainly the extension of this conclusion to induced mutations in general is very questionable.”

103. Delbrück, “A Physicist Looks at Biology,” 188.

104. This idea might once have sounded much like Bateson’s discredited presence-absence theory in genetics—that all mutational changes were losses from originary particulate hereditary wholes—but this theory had long been in disrepute; see chapter 3.

105. Muller, “Development of the Gene Theory,” 77ff.

106. Luckey, Hormesis with Ionizing Radiation; Mattsonn and Calabrese, Hormesis; Calabrese and Baldwin, “Radiation Hormesis”; Upton et al., “The Health Effects of Low-Level Ionizing Radiation.”

107. It is very difficult to make any precise claims about the birth of “radiophobia.” The dangers of radiation had been known for decades, and yet at some point between the 1920s and the 1940s, popular and scientific conceptions began to change. Weart’s literature review is the best explanation of this shift, but even he is justly wary of an overly simplistic answer, and attributes it to a general period of transformation: Weart, Nuclear Fear, 53, 387. See also Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, and Creager, Life Atomic, 145.

108. Grobman, Our Atomic Heritage, 62, 73.

109. Muller, “Our Load of Mutations.” See also Paul, “Our Load of Mutations Revisited.”

110. For example, “The neutral rate of evolution would then be merely a function of the mutation rate, which was thought to be a random process analogous to radioactive decay.” Dietrich, “Paradox and Persuasion,” 105–6.

111. Keller, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death, chap. 2; see also Masco, “Atomic Health.”

112. Brunngraber, Radium, 387–88.

1. Adams, Education, 425–26.

2. McElheny, Watson and DNA, 70.

3. Watson later remarked, at a “Perspectives in Genetics” event at Harvard University on March 4, 2005, that Crick had marched into the Eagle pub in Cambridge on February 28, 1953, to announce that they had found the “secret of life.” Crick never remembered saying this. Channeling Muller, Watson remarked, “I don’t know whether Francis called it the secret of life. He had to say it. So I had taken a little liberty on putting those words in his mouth. As a highly intelligent person he couldn’t be there without saying it, it was too good not to be true.” Watson, personal communication. Crick did remember going home, however, “and telling my wife Odile that we seemed to have made a big discovery. Years later she told me that she hadn’t believed a word of it. ‘You were always coming home and saying things like that,’ she said, ‘so naturally I thought nothing of it.’” Crick, “Crick Looks Back on DNA,” 667.

4. Creager, Life of a Virus, 12.

5. Besides which, as Lily Kay has argued, “the path to the double helix completely by-passed the program of radiation genetics.” Kay, “Secret of Life,” 497.

6. Are we, like Burke, “sometimes apt to be carried away by a flow of language which suggests rather than conveys” our meaning? Or is our tale of the secret of life, like Watson’s, “too good not to be true”?

7. Rheinberger, “Experimental Systems,” 77–78. For a clear and excellent summary of Rheinberger’s most recent works, see Dörries, “Life, Language, and Science.”

8. Riles, The Network Inside Out, 5. I am also reminded here of Michel Foucault’s claim that there is a “whole backwash of history to which words lend their glow at the instant they are pronounced.” Foucault, Order of Things, 315.

9. Rheinberger, “Experimental Systems,” 69.

10. Novick, That Noble Dream, 8.

11. In some respects this book builds on the work of Everett Mendelsohn, who in his Heat and Life traced a nascent single connection out through its ramifications and transformations over time, examining the interplay of new and old and of thought and technique. As he says of the heat-life connection, and I might say in some respects of the radium-life connection, “Furthermore, the scope of the problem broadens to such an extent . . . that we can no longer view the changes in a single theory, but become involved in the mutual influences of a number of interacting theories.” Mendelsohn, Heat and Life, vii.

12. Quoted in Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 305. Loy was referring to Gertrude Stein.

13. After all, radium was described as “constantly and without cessation throwing off from itself, at terrific velocity, particles of matter,” just as Darwin described gemmules as having been “thrown off,” and just as de Vries’s particularly mutable species were said to “throw off” new varieties and species (see chaps. 1 and 3). So, too, the associations of radium and life “threw off” novel experimental systems.

14. For more on the later history of radiobiology, and how such radioactive traces led to radioactive “tracers,” see Creager, Life Atomic.