Big Clod, Tiny 🎈 @wallhackio@cat.family

@Lucy @wallhackio a lot of it is the drosophila geneticist lore because they were all working together but there’s also other crazy shit that happened like a guy that was trying to make a cultivar of brassica (genus that includes a million vegetables from broccoli to turnips) and I forget which plants he was breeding but he wanted one that had a large edible leaf part and a large edible root and instead he got plants with tiny leaves and tiny roots and they sent him to the gulag

@Lucy @wallhackio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Joseph_Muller muller in particular had a pretty wild life including becoming a eugenicist, then moving to Berlin, then protesting the Nazis, then deciding that eugenics would never work under capitalism, then getting investigated by the FBI and going to the Soviet Union, then proceeding to piss off Stalin (at the time the Soviet Union was pro-Lamarckianism which is basically the idea that environmentally influenced traits are inherited, like that giraffes stretched their necks to eat fruit from tall trees and that made their offspring have longer necks), then deciding that eugenics was bad and also not as easy as it sounded and eventually going back to the US where he spent a lot of time criticizing the use of radiation due to its mutagenic effects

@wallhackio @Lucy now that I’m thinking about it there was a lot of drama in early genetics, another guy Calvin Bridges was a total hoebag and he apparently slept with the wife of Alfred Sturtevant and was rumored to have died of syphilis. this was confirmed when my advisors postdoc advisor managed to track down his death certificate, which he had framed in his office