The guy who saddled the world with the junk science-fueled linear no-threshold model of carcinogenesis was a fraudster — as Ed Calabrese has well documented and JunkScience.com has spotlighted. But science fraud is really only part of Muller’s story. Before science fraud, there was Muller’s idea of eugenics-for-communism.
Muller wrote “Out of the Night” (pictured above) in 1936, while living in in the Soviet Union. He was a communist and, prior to leaving the US in 1932, was being investigated by the FBI for it. Muller fled the Soviet Union reportedly because “Out of the Night” displeased Stalin as it conflicted with Lysenko’s Lamarckianism and, after all, this was the period of the Great Terror.
“Out of the Night” is hard to come by. My copy cost me $70. Copies are available on Amazon.com for outrageous prices. See below.
But I bought it and read it so you don’t have to.
Like all writings by communists, “Out of the Night” is boring and stupid. It’s so bad, I hate to waste my time on it, but I had a request from a friend of JunkScience.
Fortunately, I found a review of the salient points of “Out of the Night” in the July 4, 1936 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Thankfully, JAMA summarized it so I don’t have to.
Basically, Muller wanted to have a eugenics based society fueled by a sperm bank stocked with sperm from great men — like Marx and Lenin.
Note that Muller didn’t think the sperm bank idea would work in a democratic society like the US because Americans would stock their sperm bank with the sperm of men like Babe Ruth, Rudolph Valentino and Al Capone. Muller envisioned a population bread for “comradeliness.”
Not mentioned in the JAMA review was Muller’s idea that women could be freed from child-bearing if human embryos could be grown in farm animals. Pure crazy.
Anyway, here’s the JAMA review.
