Word: lysenkoism
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Russian scientists, like Russian artists, must toe the party line. Soviet biologists who disagree with the scientifically naive theories of T. D. Lysenko, Communism's pet geneticist, run the risk of being "disciplined." The penalty for arguing is demotion, imprisonment or worse (TIME, Sept. 6). Economists and statisticians who have deviated from the official line have also suffered. But until recently, Russian physicists were left alone. The Soviet Union, struggling desperately to make an atomic bomb, needed all its physicists...
...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...
...last week in Budapest by a TIME correspondent, Haldane took temporary refuge in his lack of exact information. (The genetics controversy, which has become a cause célèbre in Soviet Russia, has not been fully reported in Budapest.) Until he could be sure, said Haldane, that Lysenko's current theories are unscientific and that opponents had been punished for disagreeing, he would make no decision. "I don't think a political body," he said, "should decide scientific, theories. I want evidence that those who disagreed were punished." He would not decide where he stood until...
Nazi Genetics? This winter Haldane plans to lecture on genetics in Communist-dominated Prague. "I shall say just what I think in Prague," he declared stoutly, "and if what I say does not agree with Lysenko, it's just...
...deviates from the party's scientific line. The line itself is none too clear, and devout Communist geneticists may eventually get into trouble if they stick to it. Last week Nobel Prizewinning Dr. H. J. Muller, a leading U.S. geneticist, pointed out a doctrinal time bomb that threatens Lysenko's followers. The Lysenko doctrine, said Muller, teaches that the heredity of organisms is shaped by their environments. When applied to the evolution of man, said Muller, this doctrine means that "you would have to believe that colonial peoples, peoples who have not reached the development of the rest...