Word: lysenko
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Though the Kremlin proclaims its allegiance to science, Soviet researchers are stifled by ideological tests and Communist doctrines. A prime example: the Stalin-blessed rule of a charlatan, the late Trofim Lysenko, over all biological research in the Soviet Union. Brooking no opposition to his discredited genetic theories, Lysenko dealt severely with scientific dissidents, putting Soviet biological science years behind that in the West...
...ablest students I see are headed for law or medicine. Recruitment into science is no longer of the ablest but of the upper middle level. It's been going on for five or six years." One important reason, says Riesman, "is egalitarianism. We have a Lysenko lobby in this country-the Clamshell Alliance and others who think science is harmful, who feel guilty about it and try to paralyze it. They think it's more important to distribute jobs among the needy than to do exotic research. There's a lack of the sense of glory...
Voinovich's Kievstone cops approach seems anachronistic. But the jabs are rapid and effective. Krasnoye is a model of petty bureaucracy populated by the pompous, the incompetent and the foolish. A self-proclaimed scientific genius and follower of Lysenko, named Gladishev, for example, devotes himself to creating a hybrid plant that will grow potatoes underground and tomatoes above. He also believes in excrement as a wonder vitamin that could benefit mankind if only people would overcome their squeamishness. There are send-ups of education, collective farms, newspapers, law enforcement and party organizations. Voinovich's definition of an official...
...early 1960s, Lysenko found a new patron in Nikita Khrushchev, who was desperately eager to overtake American agriculture. But Lysenko's star was already dimming. From the West came word of spectacular new advances in genetics. Lysenko's reputation was also undermined by Soviet geneticist Zhores Medvedev's samizdat (underground book) The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, which documented Lysenko's falsification of data and character assassination. Finally, when Khrushchev fell -in part because of his disastrous farm policies-so did Lysenko. The onetime czar of Soviet agriculture spent his declining years at a research...
Died. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, 78, doctrinaire chief of the Soviet science establishment under Joseph Stalin whose half-baked genetic experiments and theories were later denounced as fraudulent (see SCIENCE...