Princeton University

“Human Genetics in the Atomic Age; Or, How We Learned to Start Worrying and Love Mutation”  
Abstract
The second world war gave academic human genetics a reason for being. When the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mutation, long an area of active research in animal and plant genetics, suddenly acquired political and cultural valence. The figurehead in this was Hermann Joseph Muller. The 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to Muller in recognition of his 1927 proof of X ray induced mutation. The following year, Herluf Strandskov, a young but rather old-school twin geneticist from the University of Chicago, easily induced Muller to help establish a professional society for human genetics. In 1948, the American Society of Human Genetics held its first meeting; Muller was elected the first president and figurehead-in-chief; the officers (and subsequent presidents) were all sympathetic to or active in the genetic improvement of mankind. Muller’s presidential address was “Our load of mutations.” The eugenic message of this article has been noted, by Diane Paul among others. What I do in this paper is connect the dots, showing how his forum for this paper rose out of Cold War fears of mutation; illustrating how appropriate it was that Muller used the leadership of the ASHG as a bully pulpit; and suggesting that this legacy strongly colored the formative years of the society.
 

"Spaceship Earth"
Abstract
Why did scientists and lay people alike in the 1970s talk about the Earth in terms of a Spaceship? And in what way did this frame the environmental debate? With a point of departure in the famous earthrise image, this lecture reviews the history of “spaceship earth”. The photo came to represent a dream of a globe in ecological harmony, yet it was taken by a crew of astronauts sent out in space to demonstrate the superiority of the United States in a world divided by Cold War tensions. Spaceship earth was not a vague analogy or metaphor, but that it reflected instead efforts to build a closed ecosystem within the spaceship in order to secure the health of astronauts. In other words, the Earth was literally understood as being construed as the spaceship and the environmental havoc was caused by humans not behaving like astronauts. Environmental ethics became an issue of trying to live like astronauts by adapting space technologies such as bio-toilets, solar cells, recycling, and energy-saving devices. Technology, terminology, and methodology developed for spaceships became tools for solving environmental problems onboard Spaceship Earth. Spaceships came to represent the rational, orderly, and wisely managed contrast to the irrational, disorderly, and ill managed environments on Earth.