Word: denisovich
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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J.B.S. Haldane, Britain's leading geneticist and a staunch Communist, has been beset for some time now by a problem of basic loyalties. Should he follow the Moscow-approved genetics line of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (briefly, that environment controls the heredity of organisms)? Or should he follow the Morgan-Mendelian theory (that the genes in the reproductive cells control heredity), generally accepted outside the U.S.S.R., but formally denounced by Soviet officialdom as unscientific and un-Marxist...
...Communist high command, acting through the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, has declared that the genetics of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (briefly, that environment controls the heredity of organisms) is the only genetics that may be taught in Soviet institutions. The Morgan-Mendelian theory (that heredity is controlled by genes in the cells), generally accepted outside the U.S.S.R., has been forbidden and its adherents disciplined...
...finally won this longstanding argument is Geneticist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rose to his present eminence by being able to make his science toe the party line. Although Lysenko has gained increasing recognition in Russia, most Western and some Soviet geneticists have regarded his party-line genetics as scientifically naive...
...scientist-darling of Communist theologians is Soviet Academician Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Lysenko's basic idea seems to be that living forms (like nations) need to be shaken up by a kind of genetic revolution. Thus shaken, a tomato or wheat plant is capable of very rapid development. In proving this thesis, Lysenko is short on controlled experimentation and long on thundering Marxist phrases like "The Liquidation of the Conservatism of the Nature of Organisms" (TIME, Feb. 11, 1946). Many non-Communist geneticists consider him a politically motivated fraud...