The illustration below is from the December 1953 issue of Mechanix Illustrated. So where did people get the still-never-demonstrated idea that radiation could cause genetic mutations, if not mutant beings? You can trace it all back radiation-scare fraudster Herman Muller and his bogus 1927 paper in Science magazine, “Artificial Transmutation of the Gene,” which led to Muller’s (undeserved) 1946 Nobel Prize.
Here is Muller’s 1927 paper. In it, he claims to have caused gene mutations by irradiating fruit flies. But remarkably…
… Muller’s paper contains no description of materials, methods or results — just his conclusions.
As University of Massachusetts-Amherst professor Ed Calabrese discusses in Episode 2, Episode 3 and Episode 4 of the Health Physics Society video series “The Historical Foundations of the Linear No-Threshold Dose-Response Model for Cancer Risk Assessment,” the smallest radiation dose to which Muller exposed his fruit flies was 100 million times greater than background radiation (the level we are all exposed to on Earth everyday). Nevertheless and as Calabrese shows, Muller caused no gene mutations. All he did was to blow lethal holes through fruit fly chromosomes and call them “gene mutations.”
Though Muller was finally debunked by 1932 — an additional stress that may have contributed to his 1932 suicide attempt (Episode 5) — he never admitted defeat. Consider this excerpt from the December 1953 Mechanix Illustrated article, in which he claims that there will be as many genetic deaths among Japanese atomic bomb survivors as deaths from the actual blasts:
To date, there has been no evidence of genetic damage among the atomic bomb survivors — nor in any species exposed to radiation in any experimental setting. More on all this in a subsequent article. But if you can’t wait, you can watch Episode 11, Episode 12, Episode 13 and Episode 14 of the HPS video series.
Below is the full December 1953 Mechanix Illustrated article.
