woods, soaked by a night of rain, his head still foggy from the barbiturates he’d swallowed to kill himself.
Burned out, humiliated, Muller abandoned Texas for Europe. There he did a bit of a Forrest Gump tour of totalitarian states. He studied genetics in Germany until Nazi goons vandalized his institute. He fled to the Soviet Union, where he lectured Joseph Stalin himself on eugenics, the quest to breed superior human beings through science. Stalin was not impressed, and Muller scurried to leave. To avoid being branded a “bourgeois reactionary deserter,” Muller enlisted on the communist side in the Spanish Civil War, working at a blood bank. His side lost, and fascism descended.
Disillusioned yet again, Muller crawled back to the United States, to Indiana, in 1940. His interest in eugenics grew; he later helped establish what became the Repository for Germinal Choice, a “genius sperm bank” in California. And as the capstone to his career, Muller won his own unshared Nobel Prize in 1946 for the discovery that radiation causes genetic mutations. The award committee no doubt wanted to make up for shutting Muller out in 1933. But he also won because the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945—which rained nuclear radiation on Japan—made his work sickeningly relevant. If the fly boys’ work at Columbia had proved that genes existed, scientists now had to figure out how genes worked and how, in the deadly light of the bomb, they too often failed.
3
Them’s the DNA Breaks
How Does Nature Read—and Misread—DNA?
A ugust 6, 1945, started off pretty lucky for perhaps the most unlucky man of the twentieth century. Tsutomu Yamaguchi had stepped off his bus near Mitsubishi headquarters in Hiroshima when he realized he’d forgotten his
inkan,
the seal that Japanese salarymen dip in red ink and use to stamp documents. The lapse annoyed him—he faced a long ride back to his boardinghouse—but nothing could really dampen his mood that day. He’d finished designing a five-thousand-ton tanker ship for Mitsubishi, and the company would finally, the next day, send him back home to his wife and infant son in southwest Japan. The war had disrupted his life, but on August 7 things would return to normal.
As Yamaguchi removed his shoes at his boardinghouse door, the elderly proprietors ambushed him and asked him to tea. He could hardly refuse these lonely folk, and the unexpected engagement further delayed him. Shod again,
inkan
in hand, he hurried off, caught a streetcar, disembarked near work, and was walking along near a potato field when he heard a gnat of an enemybomber high above. He could just make out a speck descending from its belly. It was 8:15 a.m.
Many survivors remember the curious delay. Instead of a normal bomb’s simultaneous flash-bang, this bomb flashed and swelled silently, and got hotter and hotter silently. Yamaguchi was close enough to the epicenter that he didn’t wait long. Drilled in air-raid tactics, he dived to the ground, covered his eyes, and plugged his ears with his thumbs. After a half-second light bath came a roar, and with it came a shock wave. A moment later Yamaguchi felt a gale somehow
beneath
him, raking his stomach. He’d been tossed upward, and after a short flight he hit the ground, unconscious.
He awoke, perhaps seconds later, perhaps an hour, to a darkened city. The mushroom cloud had sucked up tons of dirt and ash, and small rings of fire smoked on wilted potato leaves nearby. His skin felt aflame, too. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves after his cup of tea, and his forearms felt severely sunburned. He rose and staggered through the potato field, stopping every few feet to rest, shuffling past other burned and bleeding and torn-open victims. Strangely compelled, he reported to Mitsubishi. He found a pile of rubble speckled with small fires, and many dead coworkers—he’d been lucky to be late. He wandered onward; hours slipped by. He drank water from broken
Burned out, humiliated, Muller abandoned Texas for Europe. There he did a bit of a Forrest Gump tour of totalitarian states. He studied genetics in Germany until Nazi goons vandalized his institute. He fled to the Soviet Union, where he lectured Joseph Stalin himself on eugenics, the quest to breed superior human beings through science. Stalin was not impressed, and Muller scurried to leave. To avoid being branded a “bourgeois reactionary deserter,” Muller enlisted on the communist side in the Spanish Civil War, working at a blood bank. His side lost, and fascism descended.
Disillusioned yet again, Muller crawled back to the United States, to Indiana, in 1940. His interest in eugenics grew; he later helped establish what became the Repository for Germinal Choice, a “genius sperm bank” in California. And as the capstone to his career, Muller won his own unshared Nobel Prize in 1946 for the discovery that radiation causes genetic mutations. The award committee no doubt wanted to make up for shutting Muller out in 1933. But he also won because the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945—which rained nuclear radiation on Japan—made his work sickeningly relevant. If the fly boys’ work at Columbia had proved that genes existed, scientists now had to figure out how genes worked and how, in the deadly light of the bomb, they too often failed.
3
Them’s the DNA Breaks
How Does Nature Read—and Misread—DNA?
A ugust 6, 1945, started off pretty lucky for perhaps the most unlucky man of the twentieth century. Tsutomu Yamaguchi had stepped off his bus near Mitsubishi headquarters in Hiroshima when he realized he’d forgotten his
inkan,
the seal that Japanese salarymen dip in red ink and use to stamp documents. The lapse annoyed him—he faced a long ride back to his boardinghouse—but nothing could really dampen his mood that day. He’d finished designing a five-thousand-ton tanker ship for Mitsubishi, and the company would finally, the next day, send him back home to his wife and infant son in southwest Japan. The war had disrupted his life, but on August 7 things would return to normal.
As Yamaguchi removed his shoes at his boardinghouse door, the elderly proprietors ambushed him and asked him to tea. He could hardly refuse these lonely folk, and the unexpected engagement further delayed him. Shod again,
inkan
in hand, he hurried off, caught a streetcar, disembarked near work, and was walking along near a potato field when he heard a gnat of an enemybomber high above. He could just make out a speck descending from its belly. It was 8:15 a.m.
Many survivors remember the curious delay. Instead of a normal bomb’s simultaneous flash-bang, this bomb flashed and swelled silently, and got hotter and hotter silently. Yamaguchi was close enough to the epicenter that he didn’t wait long. Drilled in air-raid tactics, he dived to the ground, covered his eyes, and plugged his ears with his thumbs. After a half-second light bath came a roar, and with it came a shock wave. A moment later Yamaguchi felt a gale somehow
beneath
him, raking his stomach. He’d been tossed upward, and after a short flight he hit the ground, unconscious.
He awoke, perhaps seconds later, perhaps an hour, to a darkened city. The mushroom cloud had sucked up tons of dirt and ash, and small rings of fire smoked on wilted potato leaves nearby. His skin felt aflame, too. He’d rolled up his shirtsleeves after his cup of tea, and his forearms felt severely sunburned. He rose and staggered through the potato field, stopping every few feet to rest, shuffling past other burned and bleeding and torn-open victims. Strangely compelled, he reported to Mitsubishi. He found a pile of rubble speckled with small fires, and many dead coworkers—he’d been lucky to be late. He wandered onward; hours slipped by. He drank water from broken
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