Science: Gloomy Nobelman

A major problem of the Atomic Age: the effect of radiation on the human species. Scandinavian scientists may have recognized this last week when a committee of them awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology to 55-year-old Professor Hermann J. Muller of Indiana University, leading authority on radioactive mutations. Nearly 20 years ago he discovered that fruit flies treated with X rays produced "mutated" (changed) offspring. The discovery made him famous among biologists, but the general public never took it personally. No one dreamed that in less than a generation the human...