Word: lysenkoism
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Last week, in his first official statement, he released a blast at Chemist Spitzer. Spitzer, he said, had recently written a letter to the Chemical and Engineering News protesting the magazine's panning of Soviet Geneticist Trofim Lysenko. Spitzer argued that Lysenko's experiments in genetics, on which Moscow now bases its biological party line (TIME, Sept. 6), and which most of the world's geneticists consider unscientific, had not had a fair examination in the U.S. Then he went on to defend Soviet policy on science and culture in general...
...Soviet Russia . . . have died in concentration camps, or by other means, because they would not accept the untruths that Dr. Spitzer has chosen to espouse . . . Dialectical materialism! A better name would be dialectical murder . . . Any scientist who has such poor power of discrimination as to choose to support Lysenko's . . . genetics against all the weight of evidence against it is not much of a scientist, or, a priori, has lost the freedom that an instructor or investigator should possess...
...genetics. But under Stalin the great school of Soviet geneticists led by Nikolai Vavilov has been utterly destroyed. Its members, who agreed in general with Western geneticists, have been disgraced and removed from their university posts. Some have died in forced labor camps. An obscure plant-breeder named Trofim Lysenko has been raised by the Soviet state to a sort of genetic dictator. Any Russian scientist who wants to work in genetics must bow low to Lysenko, though his doctrines are scientifically naive (TIME...
...scientific light and hope. Western genetics, following Mendel and Morgan, teaches that the inherited characteristics of living organisms are largely controlled by genes passed down from parents to offspring. During sexual reproduction the genes are shuffled, but except in the case of accidental mutations they are not changed. Lysenko teaches that the form of an organism is determined by the environment in which it develops. He claims to have modified plant species merely by moving them around Russia. (Western geneticists have tried & tried, with no success, to repeat his experiments...
...Academy of Sciences, explained: "A Soviet scientist considers any successful work as impossible, in any field of knowledge, without a thorough mastery of the laws of dialectical materialism." Professor Vavilov is something of an authority on such matters. His brother Nikolai, a famous Russian geneticist and an opponent of Lysenko, disappeared mysteriously about 1942 and is believed to have died in a concentration camp...