Legendary UT Science Professor Made Politically Incorrect (T)exit Long Before the Longing Lust for Nobel Fame by UT

A UT biology professor recently said "it feels good, even if it’s 1/2,000^th of a Nobel Prize" because she had been a one-time lead author on the UN climate committee which shared the 2007 Peace Prize with Al Gore. Such a longing and lust for a Nobel academic connection is not new for the University of Texas at Austin. Former UT chemistry professor and non-Nobelist Norman Hackerman was eulogized in 2007 as one who "would alter the landscape of higher education and scientific research in Texas forever" (American-Statesman June 21, Oct. 13). While a UT-Austin professor has never won a Nobel for research done at UT, Ferid Murad at the UT System's Houston Health Center won a 1998 Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine for research done at Virginia in 1976. Steven Weinberg, UT physics professor, won the prize in 1979 for his research at Harvard; and the late Ilya Prigogine from Brussels was given a joint appointment at UT, after he'd won for chemistry research elsewhere in l977.

The one UT professor whose research done at Austin did win a Nobel Prize, was Hermann Muller, who was tossed out of UT in 1936, but his UT research later received the prize at Indiana in 1946 in medicine/physiology. (Hackerman also left UT in 1970 amidst UT administrative upheavals.) During previous campus convulsions 70 years ago, possibly the most internationally acclaimed professor in UT history, Professor Muller was kicked out of UT and took with him his Austin research on  x-rays of gene mutation in fruit flies. Julian Huxley once called Muller  "the greatest living geneticist"; and among all Nobel Prize Winners, L J. Ludovici, in 1957, ranked him alongside Churchill and Einstein.

Muller, the independent thinking UT science refugee, who fled Austin, offended both the Left and Right in his time. In his search for scientific truth, he suffered the abuses of power which nearly thwarted his intellectual mission. He was dismissed from both UT and the Soviet Union for being politically incorrect.  Although his work "filled one of the last major gaps in the evidence of Darwin's theory of natural selection," according to Encyclopedia Americana, his name and fame were largely neglected or forgotten in the heated UT campus debate a decade ago on the naming the new molecular biology building now named for UT football hero-alum and Freeport-McMoRan CEO Jim Bob Moffett and his wife Louise who, with his company, donated $3 million for the campus structure. Ironically, it was Muller's research at UT in the early l920s that provided "in large measure, the world view which molecular biology has adopted," according to SUNY biology professor Elof Carlson.

Muller taught at UT during a stormy time. Texas and U.S. patriots were disturbed by his sympathy and enthusiasm for the new Russian Communist regime after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. After World War I, Muller had flown 800 miles into the USSR interior to deliver a suitcase of genetic cultures to a Russian biologist and was hailed by the Soviets as "The Father of Genetics." In the US, he was not so popular when he criticized the competitive individualism of American capitalism, unemployment, inequalities, and private profit and advocated a more collective, cooperative, socialist society through the social direction of biological evolution at the time of the Scopes Trial on evolution in Tennessee.

Conservative traditionalists were understandably aghast at Muller's radical and unorthodox ideas, which included: saving and storing sperm, artificial insemination, contraception, plastic embryos outside the womb, replacement of body parts, the separation of love from marriage and reproduction, greater freedom for women, the possible  artificial production of living matter, life beyond the planet earth, and science replacing religion and God. UT regents and others in Texas were understandably troubled by such notions in his 1935 book Out of the Night: A Biologist's View of the Future, published while he was on leave from UT as Senior Geneticist at the Institute of Genetics and Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

Called "mental dynamite" by some reviewers, the book said, among other things, that "We do still have Stone Age brains" but through the implantation of favorable genes, "it would be possible for the majority of the population to become of the innate quality of such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen, (and) Marx...." If genetics were misused, he predicted, it might lead to producing "Billy Sundays, Valentinos, Jack Dempseys, Babe Ruths, even Al Capones." He also criticized "the cruder and immediate appeals of football games, Holy Roller revivals, staged political elections, race rivalry, and the like." Such opinions expressed in football country and the Bible Belt during racial segregation did not endear him to those responsible for the state university.