The original impetus for the Human Genome Project came almost a decade earlier, however, from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) shortly after World War II. The atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, left many survivors who had been exposed to high levels of radiation. The survivors of the bomb were stigmatized in Japan. They were considered poor marriage prospects, because of the potential for carrying mutations, and the rest of Japanese society often ostracized them. In 1946 the famous geneticist and Nobel laureate Hermann J. Muller wrote in the New York Times that "if they could foresee the results [mutations among their descendants] 1,000 years from now …, they might consider themselves more fortunate if the bomb had killed them."
Muller had firsthand experience with the devastating effects of radiation, having studied the biological effects of radiation on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. He predicted similar results would follow from the human exposure to radiation. As a consequence, the Atomic Energy Commission of the DOE set up an Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission in 1947 to address the issue of potential mutations among the survivors.
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