Sir

In his Book Review 'Making genetic history' (Nature 453, 1181–1182; 2008) of James Schwartz's In Pursuit of the Gene, Jerry Coyne claims that the US geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller was “the perennial underdog: Jewish, short, bald and with a high voice”. Bald and short he was, but his voice was more baritone than tenor. As for his Jewishness, Coyne is perpetuating a myth: Muller's father converted from Catholicism to become a Unitarian because of his liberal social and scientific views; his mother's side was of English ancestry, mixed Jewish and Anglican. Muller was raised Unitarian, became an atheist and took an interest later in his life in humanism.

Coyne casts me in the Iago role for poisoning the outlook of Schwartz about Muller through my “worshipful” biography. I pointed out Muller's insecurity, his suicide attempt, his difficult confrontational personality, his naïve embrace of Soviet communism, his almost ideological passion for positive eugenics and the reasons for his so-called 'priority complex'.

But I also admired Muller for his courage in the way he took on failed competing theories of the gene, and for his passion for what he believed to be scientific truth. How many scientists would have engaged in a public debate with Trofim Lysenko, calling him a charlatan, in the year of Stalin's purge trials?

I wish that all science was done in a friendly, cooperative and respectful manner. In the fly lab Muller shared with Thomas Hunt Morgan and his 'boys', this was not so. Any reading of the correspondence in many archives will reveal the discontent, rivalry and hard feelings that accompanied a genuine enthusiasm to share ideas. Science is very human. Both Schwartz and I tried to present it that way.