 So, I'm Christopher Donahue, I'm the Historian of the National Human Genome Research Institute and the Program Manager of the History of Genomics Program, and I want to welcome all of you to the ninth NHGRI History of Genomics Program, History of Molecular Biology and Genomics Lecture Series. We are working on shortening that title. This lecture series is sponsored by the history of genomics, is sponsored by the History of Genomics Program and the National Human Genome Research Institute. The History of Genomics Program was initiated in 2012 by Eric Green to capture and preserve the history of the human genome project and of, after 2003, subsequent genomics programs. So towards this goal, the History of Genomics Program maintains an archive and conducts oral histories with staff and key members of the genomics community. And as importantly, it was soon realized that in order to ensure the legacy of the human genome project and genomics programs, the History of Genomics Program should actively facilitate lectures, symposium, and other public engagements with science in order to engage the scholarly community. And in particular, it is my emphasis that scientists and scholars of science should dialogue to mutual benefit. And the two talks today exemplify this. And it is now my great pleasure to introduce these two very interesting speakers. They're much more interesting than me. William de Young Lambert, our first speaker, is Professor of History at Bronx Community College focusing on the history of biology. William Lambert recently completed a book which describes the famous fly room of Thomas Hunt Morgan in Columbia University, where he and his students developed the chromosomal history of theory, theory of heredity. He also covers the effort by four scientists in particular to demonstrate how Drosophila genetics explained Darwin's day of evolution in nature. Doing so, de Young Lambert focuses on the relationship between scientists and the organisms they study, the rival theories to the fly worm view, the importance of the eugenics movement, which was at the peak of its influence in the United States at the time, as well as their beliefs about the USSR. Society then widely regarded as collectively undergoing the greatest scientific experiment in history. Our second speaker, Thomas Stöger, is currently doing his postdoctoral studies at Northwestern University as a data science scholar in the Center for Genetic Medicine and the Institute on Complex Systems. He focuses on using computational tools to understand the formation of knowledge. Stöger argues that comparatively little remains known about the processes that underlie the formation of knowledge within biology. Plausibly, he says, these processes involve characteristics of the studied biological systems, technical limitations, social forces among researchers, and choices of individual scientists, which we should always keep in mind. To understand the interplays of these processes, Stöger and his colleagues have been integrating major domain-specific resources and machine-building learning models that recapitulate past biomedical research. Recently, they demonstrated that a small set of chemical, physical, and biological properties of genes, and the knowledge about homologous genes from model organisms, actively predicts the number of publications on individual human genes, this is a startling claim. Expanding from this odd preservation, they are currently investigating under which conditions novel findings within model organisms translates to research on human genes and how laboratories shape the future choices of genes studied by individual scientists. There's a lot going on. Lastly, a few notes on timing. William will give his talk the fly room first, then there will be time for questions, a very short break for the AV, for people to set up their talks, and then Thomas will present his lecture, capturing the influence of model organisms through large-scale integration of biology, literature, and the scientific workforce. Then hopefully, there will be time for questions and some synthetic discussion at the end. This is a two-hour symposium type thing, in case you were wondering. As a final note, I wish to thank Chris Wetterstrand and Jen Montuth, who were of great, great help in organizing this event. I want to specifically acknowledge the CPLB camera crew and production staff that are here, and Ernesto, our photographer, and anyone from NHGRI specifically who is here at a very busy time in the institute. With that large preamble, I will then turn it over to you, William. Thank you. Okay, yes. I'm going to be talking about my book, The Fly Room, which covers, as he said, the evolutionary synthesis, or what's known as also the modern synthesis of genetics and Darwin's theory of natural selection. Now, what's important is that when this book begins, this book begins actually even before the rediscovery of mentalism, but when mentalism is rediscovered, these theories are seen as mutually exclusive, rather than mutually informative. The scientists who I profile and talk about, beginning with Thomas Hunt Morgan, the man who in 1933 is going to win essentially the Nobel Prize for all of this, these are the scientists who played a key role in showing that process, how that synthesis actually happened and declaring the synthesis as well. So beginning with Morgan, the leader, the founder of what would become The Fly Room, Morgan was from Lexington, Kentucky. This was the Athens of the South, descended on his mother's side from Francis Scott Key and on his father's side by John Hunt Morgan, this famous confederate general known as the Thunderbolt of the Confederacy or the King of Horse Thieves, depending upon which side of the Civil War you were on. I mean, I think it's quite interesting in that Morgan's mother was actually, she considered naming him John, but was just worried because the stories of General Morgan are just absolutely renowned. One of my favorite goes that he, at the height of the Civil War, he gallops in through the front of the family estate in Hopemont and leans down off his horse and kisses his wife and then charges out the back with federal troops right behind. That probably didn't happen, but it might as well have, because that gives you some sense of really the colorfulness, the character that Morgan was. She thought that's just too much pressure to put on a child to name him that. In a way, she was right in the sense that in 1970, finally, the University of Kentucky names this biology building, the Morgan Building on campus, and this is recounted in the local newspapers. Most people assume it's being named after the general rather than his grand-nephew who had won the Nobel Prize. And I think also the Francis Scott Key heritage is significant in that Morgan, he's among the very first ever to receive a PhD in zoology from Johns Hopkins University. So as you know before that, if you wanted doctoral degrees, you had to go to Europe. So this is as well, and what we're going to see with Morgan and what he does with his students, it is very much this kind of a declaration of independence in American science. And that is really the Germans and the British who lead studies in evolution and heredity and what we see now is the United States really taking the lead and never really looking back. Now the two other, the two core students of the Fly Room, there's actually three who I'll talk about come to Mueller next, but starting with Sturtevant, Sturtevant was, he and Bridges, the reason that they end up in Morgan's lab is that for the one and only time in his career, Morgan needs a professor at Columbia, he takes over the introduction to biology class for a colleague who's gone on sabbaticals. The one time he teaches this class and Sturtevant and Bridges happen to be students in this class. Sturtevant, he's sort of Morgan's protege, like Morgan, he's from the South, he's from a horse farm in Alabama. And the interesting thing about Sturtevant is that he's the man who's going to end up constructing the first map of a chromosome map where genes are located on a chromosome. He was colorblind and this was discovered when he was a kid. He goes out strawberry picking and he comes back with this empty pale and they're like, what's wrong with this child? They realize he can't see, can't see colors. But what, when you think about that, so he couldn't see colors, but he spends his day leading against the fence and he knows how the horses are all related, you know, who's the stallion, who's the mare, who's the, who's the foal. And so what he's, he's can't see the colors, but he's seen the patterns. And this is what he's sort of usually doing and that's what the map is. The first chromosome map is really a pattern of where genes are located. Using the statistical data of how frequently they're inherited together, he constructs this map of the chromosome. Now, that happens later. The reason Morgan invites him into his lab is because of what you see are these pages I have in the background of the slide. Morgan doesn't discuss genetics in his class because it's so new. It's not the kind of thing you, the name had only recently been invented by Bateson in England. It's not the kind of thing you teach to undergraduates, but Sturdyven on his own is conducting this independent study of the pedigree records of the English thoroughbred and the American trotting horse at the New York Public Library downtown. And which I think is also kind of interesting, like I was saying, that dynamic of the United States, you know, taking the lead ahead of Britain in particular in evolution and heredity. And once again, he compares the trotting horse, the genealogy of the trotting horse and the thoroughbred shows it to Morgan and Morgan says, well, you know, I think I might have a place for you in my laboratory. And by this time, Morgan has already begun working with Drosophila flies and he's already discovered the white-eyed mutant fly. So he sees that Sturdyven would definitely benefit from being his, he would benefit very much from having Sturdyven in his lab. Now, Bridges is a little bit more complicated of a story. Bridges is very difficult for a historian to do research on because he led this extremely colorful life, so colorful that when he dies, Morgan and Sturdyven destroyed all his papers. They destroyed all of his personal papers. And it's really because there are very few, when you read the secondary sources and you see stories about Bridges, there's very few that don't contain references to either like women or alcohol and mostly it's both. I mean, he was really a bit of a wild man or more like a boy, I think. His daughter, you see here, Bridges had two kids and he was a son who dies in a kitchen fire at age three. I don't know the circumstances. Then his daughter, Betsy Bridges, and what she says about him, oh, I'm sorry, that font looks crazy. It's a different version of PowerPoint. I did not choose that font in case you're wondering. I apologize for the ridiculousness of that font. But she said, I didn't want to be like him. I didn't want to be like him at all. He was always very kind of boyish. He was not socialized, I would say. He'd never really been into any kind of small talk. And the rest of the quote is cut off, unfortunately, but it said it horrified me. She saw that in front of her terms, she visited him in his lab one time. And she said his whole world was this little white space beneath the microscope, because they would draw the shades to be able to see what was beneath their microscopes better in those days. And so that's all he saw. He was just so focused. And outside of that, his behavior, this thing of being like a boy, like a kid, that comes up in every single anecdote of anyone who ever knew Bridges. He just completely, when I finally got some insight into Bridges because I was complaining about this problem of being unable to find data on him to Robert Kohler, who maybe Lords of the Fly is a wonderful book if you guys are interested in Drosophila genetics. And I was saying, you know, I am so frustrated that Sturvent and Bridges Morgan would have done that, destroyed his papers. And he said, well, you know, Bridges was very good friends with Theodore Dreiser, you know, the American author of American Tragedy and Sister Kerry. He said, you know, and Dreiser saved some letters and they weren't available yet when I was doing my book, but you should. And indeed, I was able to get two full folders of letters from Dreiser to Bridges and for the first time, like, you know, Bridges' voice comes out. And he was, you know, there's one story, a letter in particular that goes on for like 13 pages where he's describing how when he gets on the train in Pasadena, because by now the lab is out in California, Morgan's moved out to Caltech. And the first day on the train, he meets this woman who just has fallen in love with him and she's the heir to this fortune. Her father is the third wealthiest man in India and they're on the outs because he wanted to marry her to the Prince of Wales, but she said no, so, but now she's in, you know, in the United States where she's also acting in movies and she's discovered these oil fields and he's writing all this to Dreiser. And you're reading it and you're thinking, this is totally ridiculous. You know, and of course, so what later comes out, you can imagine. I mean, she's a con artist. She was, you know, taking advantage of him, but he really had that completely childlike mentality in addition to being, you know, of course, the scientist that he was. And I think it's because he didn't have a childhood at all. His father was Leonard Blackman, who marries this woman, Elizabeth, or Leonard Bridges, who marries Elizabeth Blackman. And Elizabeth Blackman had a sister, Amelia, who actually stole Leonard from her sister and not only that but stole her sister's wedding dress and goes running off and they die when he's only three years old. So he's orphaned and he's raised by his grandma, his grandma, Anne, and his aunt, Marion, who prefer to keep him around for chores. They don't send him to school. And he among the large, he spends large chunks of his day because Aunt Marion, she loves to sew but she can't walk. And you know how the sewing machines in those days, you had to run a trundle. So he would just sit under the sewing table for hours and hours, so he's 14 years old. That's what he did all day long. So finally he has another aunt, fortunately this aunt, Marion, who sends him copies of the youth's companion. I show you a copy of that up there on the left. It was like sort of an edifying educated magazine for young boys. Just finally she says he's got to go to school. So finally only when he's 14 years old does he finally start going to school and then he graduates high school when he's 20, which is not bad. And he applies to Cornell in Columbia and goes to Columbia because it allows him to be living near his aunt. So that's Bridges. And how exactly it is that he catches Morgan's attention, I don't know. There's no record of it. All I know is that Morgan apparently Bridges had inherited a little bit of money so he invested it in a phony gold mine scheme and lost all his money. So for that reason, there must be more to it than that. But Morgan gives him a job as the bottle washer for the fly. So he's in charge in the center of the room. He has a sink where he washes the bottles when they're done examining the Drosophila flies. Now that's then how he catches Morgan's attention because one day they hand him a bottle to wash. I'm showing you relative size of fruit flies there. One day they hand him a bottle to wash and he spots a vermilion-eyed mutant fly in the bottle that they had missed. And it was probably Sturtevant since Sturtevant was colorblind. And so then Morgan invites him in. And so they then become really Morgan's, the two core members of the fly room. And Morgan also, he has evenings over at his home where he invites students to come and they read pieces of literature, like copies of, they read Darwin, they pass the book around, take turns reading, serve as them crackers and cider and beer and that kind of thing. And the night they present Sturtevant's chromosome map, another person who shows up, this guy Herman J. Muller. Now he's so excited, apparently Muller just jumps up and down. He's so, so excited by what he's seen here because he really is well. He's dropped by the fly room whenever he can because he's just fascinated by what they're doing. He doesn't initially get invited to become a member of Morgan's lab because he has to work, he has to work full time to support himself in addition to take his studies. So he doesn't have the hours that Morgan would require for full time membership in the fly room. But then finally he is able to get a scholarship and Morgan allows him in. Now the relationship, even Muller, there's a lot that's been written on Muller. He's the only one that's going to go on to win his own Nobel Prize for discovering the mutagenic impact of radiation. But the thing, if there's something that comes up again and again about Muller, it's that he just had what they call the priority complex. He was apparently always very, very jealous and upset and convinced that other people were stealing his ideas. And you know this continual throughout his career, whoever he's with, he's always just obsessed with the notion that people are falsely taking, wrongly taking credit for things that he thought of first. And I could never quite put my finger on, you know, where is this coming from? Maybe this insecurity or what exactly it was. Until finally I come across this letter from Theodosus Dobzhansky, who's another guy I'm going to be talking about. He's another scientist I cover in my book who he's from Russia, from the Soviet Union. And he's writing back and forth to his friends and colleagues in the USSR of his adventures in the United States. And he describes this visit to Muller's lab at Austin, Texas like in like 1929 or something. And he describes how he says, you know, Muller is like he constantly talk, even as he's working on one thing, he'll then be, also begin describing what he could possibly do next with what he's studying right now. And then beyond then what he could also then maybe do after that is just this constant flow. He said Muller is like an endlessly flowing fountain that you could drink from constantly and always still feel thirsty. And I thought of it as like, I think that explains everything. Because so clearly, if you're working in the laboratory with Muller, he is just full on constantly expressing his ideas verbally even as he's working. So if you're working there with him, surely you're going to listen and say, well, that's actually a good follow up on some of the things that he had to suggest. And of course there's not enough hours in the day for Muller to do everything that Muller would like to do, you know. So I think that's where that whole priority complex comes from. And as you'll see that cartoon that Dubjansky draws for Yuri Filipchenko, his mentor, that's because that's describing Muller's relationship with Morgan. He says whoever works under Morgan cannot work under Muller, because by this time Muller's long been on the outs with the other members of the fly room because he just doesn't get along with them very well at all. Now he is actually finally rescued, if you will, from the fly room by someone who he actually is quite close with, best friends throughout his entire life. And that is Sir Julian Huxley. Huxley is the grandson of Darwin's bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, you know, the man who is famous for offending evolution. And sort of in the same way as, you know, Morgan's mother didn't want to name him after the general, Huxley is continually afflicted his entire life with this anxiety, you know, the pressure to live up to the Huxley family name, to make a name for himself in science. And unfortunately for Huxley, he really doesn't have the mentality of a scientist. He doesn't, he's too much of a, he's fascinated by many things all at once, but he doesn't have the discipline that you would need to just simply focus on any one thing and bring it through. You know, he starts out by wanting some immediate successes, but one of which is famously he claims to have recreated this ancestral form of the Mexican salamander, which is publicized in the front page of the Daily Mail as, you know, oh, young Huxley has discovered the elixir of life, you know, hyping up the implications of his research. And A, he quickly realizes that the study had already been done. He's simply replicated research and B, it doesn't have nearly the significance that he thought it did. But fortunately what he then ends up doing is writing an article to sort of explain what exactly he'd done and then demonstrates this real talent, which will then go on throughout his life of writing science for a popular audience. And he is really, Huxley is more, I would say, known as, he's more famous for being a scientist than for anything that he ever actually really accomplishes as a scientist for sure. His one, though, very significant piece of contribution is his revision of Darwin's theory of sexual selection with his studies of birds, in particular the courtship habits of the crested grebe. You see those images there on the left or on the right, rather, I guess, where, and so what he's doing, what he shows, Darwin has said that the males play an active role and the female role is purely passive. They just have the power of choice. And what Huxley shows with his grebes and then in his other bird studies as well as that, no, actually, the females as well are doing courting. And with grebes, the males and females are virtually indistinguishable. So he shows that these behaviors are going both ways and so he, that's what he does. And the thing with Huxley as well in all of his publications on bird behavior, what I found is that he's talking about himself. He's always talking, you know, he also, you know, his studies of sexual habits of birds, he has numerous affairs. He is always, because of this continual anxiety, he's in and out of mental institutions, you know, taking rest cures and then, evidently, when you read the things that he's publishing and saying about birds, it's really Huxley's writing about, Huxley. And so these are really great sort of entrants into his personality. Now, one of his colleagues in Britain, and of course, Huxley, he's the one who ends up publishing Evolution, The Modern Synthesis, which is really the book that declares the synthesis of genetics and natural selection by 1940. So he really sort of plays that sort of statesman of science-like role. Now, another phrase says, son of aristocracy, British scientific aristocracy, who plays a much more of an important role scientifically in all this, is his schoolmate from Eaton and Oxford, J.B. is Haldane. Haldane is the son of John Scott Haldane, you see over there, who is this famous Scottish physiologist who was well, he did all of these studies, respiratory studies to construct better gas masks and respirators and diving suits, you know, for mountain climbers and for deep sea divers and for miners of coal and tin. And Haldane, his whole approach to science was very much that Victorian where you test yourself, like how are you going to know how chlorine gas will affect you unless you breathe it yourself and find out and take notes on what you're experiencing. And so he constructs this home laboratory where his student, his children, Haldane, and then you see his sister there, Naomi Mitchison, she goes on to be a very famous author. He, this glass trunted room inside the house that he uses to test poison gas on himself and the children are given instructions. If you see me passed out on the floor, drag me by my feet from the room and only once I'm out of the room begins CPR and that's just what they grow up with. That's, that's bad. And he takes his son to visit to do this lecture on mentalism very early on and Haldane and his sister Naomi become fascinated by genetics and they, and they're very much, that's the family estate, is very much sort of the Downton Abbey, the Haldanes of the local royal clan in the Scottish Highlands, you know, they're very prominent. And they, they have all these guinea pigs and they're doing these genetics experiments. The guinea pigs are all over the front lawn. They're very colorful, very, very fascinating childhood. And Haldane as well, he fights in World War I. Huxley does everything he can to avoid serving in the war as do a lot of them. Haldane eagerly joins the war. He loves, he's among the, probably maybe the only people I've ever met who remember World War I as being great fun is the way he describes it, great fun. Manufacturing his own bombs and charging the enemy trenches. I mean, it really seems to have provided a great outlet for him. But it changes him in a sense according to his sister that he never gets to know people really ever again after the war because he loses too many close friends. And he also then like his father, he adopts that habit of testing himself. Like he writes, he as well is very well known as a popular science writer. He writes a lot. He writes the book Daedalus, which ends up becoming the inspiration for all this Huxley's brave new world. And he also has an essay on being one's own rabbit. Whereas he puts it, a rabbit can't tell you how it feels. So you have to experiment on, on yourself. And he very much regards himself in the abstract. I mean, he really is someone who has a hard time relating to people. And I think it's then very quite fitting, I guess, that his major contribution is the mathematics of natural selection. He's one of, along with Sewell Wright and Ronald Fisher, the founders of the mathematical side of population genetics. They actually produce the math, the equations, to show you how that flyroom genetics actually functions on the outside. It can actually work in nature. He also is someone who really truly enjoys, you know, the eugenics movement. You can't talk about this time period without talking about eugenics. And he kind of famously satirizes the eugenics movement with, by writing like one essay in particular where he points out that while wealthier people tend to reproduce at much smaller rates, whereas the poor and impoverished produce at an exponentially higher rates. So the best way, for example, if you are a southerner and you wish to reduce the population of Negroes, well, you should just simply make them rich. If you give them money and allow them to lead more privileged lives, they'll stop reproducing. So these are the types of arguments he enjoys making. Now, the major, in terms of covering eugenics and what's going on in the relationship between eugenics and genetics in my book, this is where Leslie Clarence Dunn comes in. Dunn, he actually is turned away from the fly room. He goes applying his junior year of Dartmouth. He'd like to work in Morgan's lab. And Morgan, he's a botany student. He doesn't know anything about genetics, so Morgan isn't interested. So instead Dunn goes to work under William Castle at Harvard University. And so Castle is running the Bussey Institute in Cambridge, which is essentially a farm that's converted into a laboratory. So at the Bussey, they're not studying fruit flies. They're studying rats and mice and guinea pigs. And there's horses and dogs. So it's a completely different milieu to be studying genetics. And so his work in genetics proceeds much more slowly. And then he also gets attracted initially. He's very interested in eugenics because it makes a lot of sense to this early generation. They say, why wouldn't you use genetic knowledge to do something about human diseases? It makes total sense. So he becomes fascinated by it, but very quickly also very much disillusioned. He ends up where he takes part in a eugenics study of Hawaiians with this anthropology professor at Harvard, Ernest Hooten. And he quickly realizes, so he has this research partner who goes to Hawaii for the summer, brings back this mess of measurements on the height of people and their lips and the clavicles, all that kind of stuff. And he says, this is just totally useless. I don't know what to do with this. But he publishes it anyway because he has to. And then he's forced to see this stuff being then presented at the second International Congress of Eugenics in New York City where he works as a facilitator. And as he recalls in his oral history, he says, this is where I saw the lunatic fringe of the movement. And he realizes that the people who for the most part are interested in eugenics are not scientists at all. This has nothing to do with what genetics is actually all about. So what's interesting then with Dunn is he goes on, he starts with Edward East and Donald Jones had recently published a study of hybrid corn showing that you increase yields by outbreeding inbred varieties. So he decides to try exactly that same thing with chickens because his first job is at the Stores Agricultural Research Institute in Connecticut. And he finds the S&D as well with chickens. If you outbreed inbred varieties, you increase hatchability. Not only do you increase the number of eggs, but the number of eggs that are actually viable and produce chicks. So this actually works. And then what he's going to end up going on to do with that is then make an argument about human diversity as well, that we are better off essentially outbreeding inbred varieties of humans. This is racial diversity. And he becomes one of the first people to really publish and write about race from the genetic standpoint. And then he also plays a very important role in then helping really shut down the eugenics movement. His second son, his personal stake in all this as well, is that his second son is born with cerebral palsy, which though not a genetic disorder, you have no doubt how eugenics would have regarded someone who had cerebral palsy. And so he ends up then taking part in a commission that shuts down the eugenics record office on Cold Spring Harbor. He undertakes an investigation of the Journal of Heredity, which is publishing an extremely large amount of eugenics articles, which have nothing to do whatsoever with really, they'll have really serious straightforward genetics next to an article like on the eugenics of war, making a completely amorphous eugenics argument. And so he as well helps reform the Journal of Heredity to make it into a much more serious publication. Now, his efforts in all of this are going to be his partner ends up being Theodosius Dobjanski, with whom he then ends up as colleagues at Columbia University by the end of the 1930s, which is after my book ends when Morgan is awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933. But this is what happens later. Dobjanski, if Haldane is the one who I use to treat the quantitative side of population genetics, showing how this stuff actually works in the outdoors in nature, Dobjanski is the man who is doing the qualitative side of that research. Initially, with his studies of the fruit fly, the wild cousin of Drosophila Melanogaster, Drosophila Pseudo-Obscura. Dobjanski's whole story is fascinating. He comes to the United States in 1927 on a Rockefeller Fellowship fully intending to return to the Soviet Union. I mean, why wouldn't he? 1927 is still letting his diet only. Recently, the new economic policy is still in place. There's a relatively greater level of cultural and economic freedom that the next year, the year after he leaves, is when it all begins under stalling with the industrialization, the collectivization, the arrest. Genetics comes under attack as fascist science. So within no time at all, he's sort of thinking he really probably does not want to go back to the Soviet Union. And meanwhile, Morgan realizes that Dobjanski is, by far and away, the most talented student he's ever been given by Rockefeller. And so he does everything he can to actually keep Dobjanski. And it's very tense. I mean, this whole, it's fascinating. When reading his correspondence with his friends and colleagues back in the Soviet Union, all of whom are waiting on him, when are you coming back? Because the reason he's been sent is he's the most promising young geneticist in the Soviet Union. You know, you've got Nikolai Vavilov. You've got Chetverikov. You have Filipchenko, his mentor. And Dobjanski's the one who they're carrying on to come back and really help build genetics in the Soviet Union. But he just keeps extending it out another year and another year to the point where he almost, he and his wife, Natasha, they almost get sent back in 1933. Because by that time, Morgan has hired him to work as a professor at Caltech. And he's given Natalia Dobjanski a job as bottle washer or maintaining the flyroom stocks. And so they go over to the border to Canada to get a work visa. They all have permanent visas they can stay. But he had made this really crucial mistake years before when he first got his visa to come to the United States. He had to do it in Latvia because the Soviet Union and the United States did not have diplomatic relations. And they asked him at the time, do you want a student or a professor visa? And he said, I don't care. Give me whatever you want. And so they gave him a student visa. But because of that, then when he's in Canada, they said, you're breaking the law. You're not allowed to work. So then they come back close to getting deported back. And that would have been a death sentence. If he and his wife had had to go back to the Soviet Union, they would not have survived. But fortunately then, they get in touch with Robert Millick and the president of Caltech who happens to know Herbert Hoover is able to then to arrange to overturn the decision and they get allowed. And then finally, he's free. He's allowed to stay. And it's interesting for me to kind of parallel that with his studies of pseudo-obscura because what happened, so initially, he's interested in seeing how genes are spread in nature. And you see here this map I've shown you. Those are maps of he would set out cups of mashed bananas on wire stands at distances in the habitat of the Drosophila flies and then just capture and release experiments. So he releases them, then he recaptures his flies in these cups at the end of the day. And of course, the initial problem he faces is, it's one thing, your fly's in the lab. You know these are your flies. If you're studying flies in their habitat in nature, how do you know which flies are yours? How do you tag a fly, right? So initially they actually try with nail polish, but that doesn't, it cripples the flies. The flies can't fly because they have nail polish. So he then figures out, he learns of this mutant strain of flies that was bred in the lab that has these really distinct cinnamon eyes that you can't miss them. So he can use these flies. The problem is because they're a laboratory artifact, they don't behave, they don't have the same habits as pseudo-obscura flies in nature would have. They just breed and feed whenever they want to. They don't follow the rhythms of the flies in nature. So his concern is that if they don't follow the rhythms of the flies in nature, they're not gonna survive, they're gonna get killed. But what he discovers is that when he releases the flies immediately they just behave so they'd always been free. They'd always, and I love that whole kind of metaphor because he's now also finally free in the United States. He never has to go back to the Soviet Union. And so that as I said, that's in 1933, which then is the year that Morgan wins the Nobel Prize. Now, the way it goes with Morgan is that the he was, they could only award Nobel Prizes at the time to a maximum of three people. And the fly room members were four. So they couldn't give it to all of them or give it to none of them, so they give it to Morgan. And he knows that, he's keenly aware of the fact that the only reason he's given the prize alone is because of this logistical problem with giving credit. So what he, he's famously, he hates to be photographed. And so when the newspaper requests to have his photograph he says, okay, but only if I can be photographed around young children, I don't want my photograph taken alone. And as I said with eugenics, the way in which, to most people, genetics and eugenics were the same thing. The story in the New York Times when Morgan has given the prize says that he's been given the prize for eugenics, for his studies of eugenics and human medicine. They don't say genetics at all. So Morgan, he wins the prize and then he splits the prize money just to show his own sort of feelings about who deserves credit. He splits the prize money between himself, Sturtevant and Bridges. Bridges who use it to build, this by this time Bridges taken up a new hobby. He builds sports cars. And he uses, invests all the money in constructing this car called Lightning Bug which is this streamlined, there's all kinds of articles written about this car of Bridges and it's just a streamlined style design, amazing automobile and if we have time, I actually have some film footage of Lightning Bug in action if we wanted to show it. So that's what Bridges does. And Bridges dies at age 49. He dies very young of everything, of everything he's been doing with himself, of alcoholism, and syphilis and everything else. And that's actually where I end the book is with Bridges' funeral and Morgan winning the prize. Now it's also Sturtevant. The Sturtevant is always presumed to be Morgan's credits, everyone's sort of waiting. So now that Morgan has won the prize, when's he gonna retire? And then when's he gonna name Sturtevant as successor? Sort of all eyes are on Sturtevant and then all the behinds these eyes are lines wandering over the question, well, when? And then it's like, if, is he gonna give it to Sturtevant or not? And he does not. In the end, Morgan actually chooses someone else. And so Sturtevant just has to then work into this other person and eventually retires. And by this time, Muller's long gone from the fly room and for the rest of his life, we'll blame all those guys for really taking, he at one point, Muller writes to his wife, who later divorces him. He writes her and says, there's a rumor that Morgan and I are being awarded the Nobel Prize. He thinks that he and Morgan alone are gonna be awarded it and it just goes to Morgan. But, and then as I said though, Muller's the only one who then does go on to win his own prize. Now, it just so happens that it's actually a week ago today, I was in Bernal giving a talk as well about Dubjansky and I, of course, when in Bernal, how can you not go to the Mendel Museum? And what's interesting is they have this timeline of the history of genetics in the Mendel Museum. And of all these people I was just talking about, the only two that are on this timeline, as you see here, are Muller and Morgan. And of course, they're right next to each other, trapped for posterity on the timeline together at the Mendel Museum in Bernal. And you see those amazing cushion chairs, the chromosome cushion chairs. They're not for sale in the gift shop, unfortunately. And there you go, that's the fly room. So, I'm done. Thank you. Thank you. Questions, and if you have a question, just say who you are and, in particular, where on campus you're from, or if you're not on campus, say I'm off campus. So, questions, comments? Jen. I've been through, I mean, the Huxley papers are in Paris and in Texas. For Haldane, you have to go to London and to Edinburgh, Scotland. Muller papers are in Bloomington, Indiana. So many, many years of research and getting sources from numerous archives around the country and around the world. So, I started writing this book, it took 14 years. And a big chunk of that was really just gathering all the data and then organizing the data. Then you have all these files and all these papers and all these articles and all these letters and then you have to put it all in order so that you can then construct your narrative from that order. Because I tell it in chronological order as a story, as a narrative. Well, with the fly room members, then it's very much, they're all in one room together. You know, and as they're working, they're talking aloud about what they're finding. And it's very much. And what's interesting is that then when Morgan moves, he's invited to found the biology division at California Institute of Technology. And so then he's given this, you know, this building with three floors and all these rooms. And what's really frustrating to Dubjansky, Dubjansky by then is a member of the group, is that then he says, Morgan says to Dubjansky, okay, say who do you want to share a lab with? Dubjansky's like, I don't have to share a lab with anyone. We have all this space. Why do I have to? But Morgan wants to recreate that environment, you know, where they're all together and they're all discussing as they're working. They're all reading one another. And they're in touch with one another. Like for example, with, because, you know, Don, as I mentioned, is working with chickens, then he's in touch with Huxley, because Huxley, they're all, they all, all these people are friends or rivals that they have these very complex relationships. And so they are very often writing back and forth to one another. For a while, Huxley actually is interested in seeing if he could, if Don could give him some space at Columbia to begin undertake studies of this shrimp, gameras, churruxy. He wants to conduct these genetic studies, and then he kind of loses interest in that, as Huxley tends to do. And how then as well isn't much of a laboratory scientist. He's a very, very important in terms of the mathematical side of things, but he gets his mouse stalks all mixed up and he doesn't have that kind of methodical organizational ability. But yes, they are very much in touch with one another. It's probably easier. Oh, suffer, yes. So that was the family motto of the Haldane clan. Literally, literally carved above the garden wall of the family estate in Oxford. It was, you know, yeah, and it makes, and so the father, he was called John Scott Haldane. They called him Uffer, the children. That was his nickname was Uffer. And of course, he teaches his son to subject himself to breathing point. During World War I, they're both commissioned by the British government to design the gas mask that's then used by British troops. They breathe all this stuff themselves. They have to go to bed for days. They incapacitate themselves. During World War II, Haldane undertakes these studies of submarines for the British government where he subjects himself to these severe, he has seizures, you know, these severe atmospheric pressures and he gets sick and he's vomiting. He has to, you know, and he's doing this to himself. He ends up permanently, in this case, during World War II, he ends up crippling himself permanently from seizures. And it's just like using yourself as the guinea pig, if you will. And yeah, so I love that irony of suffer and offer. And Naomi, she was a great resource as well because she's a very prolific writer. So I was able to, you know, where do I get the information from? Reading all of her books, you know, she writes a lot about the family and her brother. They all keep in touch. Yeah, I mean, one question I had, there's a lot of discussion about, what is, you know, small lab? Well, it's such a small world that they're operating in. I mean, because for a very long time, when people look at genetics, you know, particularly before, you know, it then goes to, you know, like, Dubjansky, you know, breaking down the walls of the fly room, if you will, and showing this stuff does actually work outside. Before that, you know, many biologists just look at genetics and they say, well, you know, it almost seems like an end unto itself. Well, what application does this have for anything? It's almost like they've created a closed system where it all makes sense amongst them, but no one, other biologists, don't really see what you can really do with it, you know, and it's only finally, and that's what Morgan is giving credit for then, it finally is like, oh, this actually has application to medicine, you know, and physiology, and oh, you can, you know, once you can attach it to evolution, oh, genetics actually finally explains Darwin's theory of natural selection, because Darwinism had gone completely out of fashion by the early 20th century, regarded as sort of an also-ran in history of science. It's a huge, yeah. Well, yeah, like, you know, like that thing of, you know, whoever works under Mueller cannot work under Morgan. That, you know, is pretty clear, these different, so many people end up going through Morgan's lab. He become, by the time he's out of Calvary Institute of Technology, he has all of the alumnus, it's pretty enormous, the number of people who actually work under him. And with Morgan, really the story is that he, he wins the prize for having been convinced of things that he started out thinking were wrong, and it takes all these people to show him that. He doubts Darwin, he doubts Mendel, he doubts the gene. He doesn't believe in any of these things. He's very, it's interesting for me because there's this kind of an idea that both Jabzansky and Sturdivit describe, where they say there's two kinds of scientists. There's skeptics and there's romantics. And the skeptic is unwilling to accept any new idea until the evidence becomes absolutely overwhelming, whereas the romantical throw up anything. And whatever, you know, and even if you have to conduct a hundred experiments and none of them go well, the one when it does is the one, you know, that it's worth everything. And Sturdivit says that was Morgan. And initially I was like, that doesn't make any sense. Morgan doubted everything. He doubted Mendel, he doubted Darwin, you know. But then I realized that with Morgan he had to have it shown to him. And that's what all these people do. They show him. And so he sort of, there's a certain genius to that, I guess, of being the facilitator, the person who actually then is able to inspire all these people to bring all of this knowledge to you and then you can create the system or the milieu in which it then has the impact that it does. That would be the way I see it.