Some early stirrings (1950 ff.) of concern about environmental mutagens.

Perhaps it would be of interest to members of the Environmental Mutagen Society (EMS) to eavesdrop on my correspondence with H. J. Muller almost 50 years ago. I will, for the most part, let the letters speak for themselves, with a few brief comments and footnotes. Perhaps most remarkable is the pace of correspondence, which is a match for email today; perhaps the US Post Office was using its fastest ponies between Madison and Bloomington. At any rate, my letter, posted March 15, was responded to by the next day, and my reply again by Monday, March 20, 1950-all for a 3-cent stamp. The general background of research on chemical mutagens, and particularly on Charlotte Auerbach’s wartime discoveries about mustard gas, have been reviewed by Auerbach herself [ 19731, Sobels [ 19751, and Beale [ 19931. I can recall hearing about Auerbach’s work as a student at Columbia, promptly on the publication of her 1944 paper in Nature. Although this was ostensibly on mustard oil (sic), ally1 isothiocyanate, there was a wellfounded rumor that war gases were the real objects of inquiry. Either way, the work put paid to the dogma that genes were somehow outside of chemical metabolism. Now that virtually every compound seems to have an effect on mutation, one way or another, it is hard to recall the idealization of “the gene” as accessible only to the most intrusive insults like those of X-ray, as first discovered by H. J. Muller in 1927, and which won him his Nobel Prize only in 1946. We are glad to learn from Beale [1993] that it was Muller who encouraged Auerbach to begin her studies of mutagenesis even before the war started in 1939. I cannot resist briefly quoting her recollection of me (from her letter of May 29, 1979, congratulating me on my election to the Royal Society). She had met me at the 195 1 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium [Lederberg et al., 19511 and recalls “when you were a very young, very bright, very arrogant, and very likable chap, who talked from 7 PM to 1 AM on transduction.” What would it have taken for a 26-year old to appear eager and enthusiastic rather than arrogant? Perhaps deference, if not silence.