Word: botanists
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Insights & Irreverence. One day last week, an odd procession of professors paced the place, each carrying a cornstalk. They looked like primitive rain worshipers. In a sense they were. Happy fugitives from many a brain-drying university, they were free to ponder-corn. And to their mentor. Botanist Edgar Anderson of St. Louis' Washington University, corn is the kernel of everything...
...casually, work in private studies with a sweeping view of the Bay area and a pool of typists to unscramble their scribblings. When a scholar feels he has something worth discussing, he pins a note on the bulletin board, expounds to whoever shows up. The talk is seldom trivial. Botanist Anderson, the corn man, was grappling last week with his unique specialty: a complex new method for "seeing" evolution as it actually happens...
...concentrate his education with a career in mind: his wife must usually adapt hers to him. Consequently, it is better that the girl come out of school with a wide-ranging background (even at the expense of its being a little nebulous) rather than emerging a rigidly intellectually formed botanist or medieval philosopher or drama critic or anything else...
...Lysenko has the resistance and recuperative power of ragweed. A practical botanist of some skill, he concentrated on improving corn, and thereby worked his way into the graces of corn-loving Nikita Khrushchev, a practical man with a built-in contempt for academics. When he saw tall corn nurtured on a particularly thrifty mixture of manure and factory fertilizers, Khrushchev proclaimed: "Biological disputes should be settled in the fields. Comrade Lysenko has shown astonishing results." No sooner had Khrushchev called for a drive to overtake the U.S. in milk production than the practical Lysenko was out in his barns feeding...
...official Botanical Journal had disparaged the old tree grafter's views, Khrushchev interrupted: "The editorial staff should be replaced." When the speaker then added that some Soviet scientists last year had said Lysenko was "through both in theory and in practice." Khrushchev cut in: "Tsitsin [a distinguished botanist in the Academy of Sciences] said it. He should have been asked at a party meeting why he spoke that way." Lysenko himself was invited to speak. He attacked Alexander Nesmeyanov, president of the Academy of Sciences (TIME Cover, June 2) and V. A. Engelhardt, head of its biology section...