An unacknowledged founding of molecular biology: H. J. Muller's contributions to gene theory, 1910–1936
The origins of molecular biology are numerous and diverse. Three major routes, however, stand out in having attracted its contemporary practitioners. These may be characterized as the genetic, the structural, and the philosophic origins of molecular biology.' In 1953 all these approaches were united in a single world-view through the double helix model of DNA.2 Genetics, like the later founding of molecular biology, also cannot be associated with a single origin. The nineteenth-century history of genetics consisted of the independent activities of plant breeders, cytologists, and evolutionists, and it was not until 1915 that the theory of the gene (then called the factorial