Indiana Alumni Magazine
The Progress of Man
Hermann J. Muller, modern eugenics, and the bizarre saga of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank
By Daniel S. Comiskey
Hermann J. Muller’s career began in a laboratory, took a turn through a sperm bank, and rarely strayed far from the front page.
His discovery of the harmful effects of X-rays would win him the Nobel Prize in 1946, and his belief in the existence of chromosomes would become the foundation of modern genetics. Although short and balding, Muller may have been the most towering intellectual ever to teach at Indiana University.
He was also a eugenicist.
Muller's book Out of the Night described the potential of artificial insemination to remodel the human race. Although less shrill than some of his contemporaries, his remarks were prologue to one of the most outlandish, regrettable, and, in some ways, ahead-of-its-time breeding experiments in human history — the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank.
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