The suicide attempt was unsuccessful, but it was symptomatic of his malaise. Muller was sick of America—its dirty science, ugly politics, and selfish society. He wanted to escape to a place where he could meld science and socialism more easily. Radical genetic interventions could only be imagined in radically egalitarian societies. In Berlin, he knew, an ambitious liberal democracy with socialist leanings was shedding the husk of its past and guiding the birth of a new republic in the thirties. It was the “newest city” of the world, Twain had written—a place where scientists, writers,
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