"for the discovery of the production of mutations by means of X-ray irradiation."
HERMANN JOSEPH MULLER WAS BORN IN NEW YORK CITY, ON December 21, 1890. He attended a public primary school in Harlem and the Morris High School in the Bronx. In 1907 he won a scholarship for entry into Columbia College, where he became interested in biology. He attributes his particular interest in genetics to reading a book on this subject by R. H. Lock. In 1909 he founded a students' biology club, in which Altenburg, Bridges, and Sturtevant participated, all destined to be distinguished geneticists. After graduation he held first a scholarship, then a teaching fellowship, in physiology, the latter at Cornell Medical College; he then taught zoology at Columbia, 1912-1915. From 1910 on he was a member of Morgan's research group and in 1912 he began to do original research in genetics. From 1915 to 1918 he was an instructor in the Rice Institute, Houston, under Julian Huxley. During this time and the two years following, when he instructed at Columbia, he elaborated methods for quantitative mutation study. In 1920 he went to the University of Texas as associate professor, becoming professor in 1925. His first evidence of mutations produced by X rays was obtained in 1926 and published in 1927. In 1932 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for a year in Oscar Vogt's Institute in Berlin, in Timofeeff's Department of Genetics. He then spent more than three years as Senior Geneticist at the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., first in Leningrad, later in Moscow. Then followed work in the Institute of Animal Genetics, University of Edinburgh (1937-1940), Amherst College (1940-1945) and Indiana University, where he accepted a professorship in the Zoology Department in 1945.