The Secret of Life

Monday, Jul. 14, 1958

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Thomas Hunt Morgan's work won a Nobel Prize, and his laboratory was probably the first in the U.S. to which European scientists and students made serious pilgrimages. Genetic knowledge dredged out of fruit flies had an enormous effect on plant and animal breeding. Geneticists believe that a great bronze statue of a Drosophila. suitably mutated, should be erected in some such place as Iowa, where farm production has been greatly expanded by genetically sophisticated corn.

The gospel of fruit-fly genetics and its many practical applications reached young Student Beadle at the University of Nebraska, mostly through Professor Franklin D. Keim, who was working on hybrid wheat. Beadle helped Keim in summers, and when he graduated from college in 1926, Keim got him a graduate assistantship at Cornell at $750 a year. George Beadle still intended to become some sort of agricultural expert, but when he started working at Cornell with Professor Rollins Adams Emerson, founder of the ''corn school'' of genetics, he found the work so fascinating that he could not leave it. He never returned to agriculture above the backyard garden level.

Enter Radiation. About this time a new thing happened to genetics. Since the beginning, geneticists had regretted the scarcity of mutated flies, corn. etc.. to work with. The scarcity ended in 1926 when Professor Hermann J. Muller. now of Indiana University, discovered that X rays applied to fruit flies or any other living organism, create a wealth of mutations, apparently by damaging the genes in their chromosomes. Muller, too, won a Nobel Prize, and soon most genetics laboratories had X-ray machines and were buzzing with dwarfed, twisted, crippled or half-alive fruit flies whose ancestors had been Xrayed.

When Muller made this discovery, he may have heard a roll of distant thunder, but he could not have known what it meant. In the year 1926, long before Hiroshima, no man-made radioactivity was at large on earth outside the range of X-ray machines and radium capsules, and none was expected. No one suspected that in less than 20 years the mutation-producing effects of radiation would be a worldwide worry.

The new wealth supplied by Mullers X rays gave genetics a big boost, and Beadle felt the benefit along with his colleagues. After getting his doctorate (in genetics) at Cornell in 1931, he went to the California Institute of Technology on a National Research Council fellowship. Dr. Morgan, grand maestro of the fruit flies, had moved there in 1928 to head the biology section, and several of his keenest disciples had come with him. Young Dr. Beadle found himself in the best genetic society.

Teaming up with Alfred H. Sturtevant, one of Morgan's men, Beadle worked for three years on corn and fruit-fly genetics. But he felt vaguely that something was wrong, that perhaps corn and fruit-fly chromosomes were almost worked out. His friend Professor Boris Ephrussi, a visiting embryologist from the University of Paris, agreed. Both decided that genetics had become too isolated; what it needed was ideas from other sciences.