Word: lysenkoism
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These rude views are advanced in a new book called Heredity and Its Variability, by the U.S.S.R.'s T. D. Lysenko (King's Crown Press; 50?). In the ancient heredity v. environment feud, Comrade Lysenko is definitely an environment...
...which, says Lysenko, is nonsense. Heredity, he believes, changes spontaneously-and can be changed artificially. His key chapter has the thundering Marxian title "The Liquidation of the Conservatism of the Nature of Organisms." He explains that a plant variety often gets into a rut. Thus, it tries to produce descendants exactly like itself. But buried in its germ plasm are characteristics which have been suppressed because they did not benefit the plant in its accustomed environment. All that is needed to bring these buried characteristics to light is to "liquidate the plant's conservatism...
...Lysenko and his followers at the Soviet's All-Union Institute of Selection & Genetics claim to have disestablished tomatoes, potatoes, wheat and barley. Their conservatism vanquished, the plants could be grown in almost any part of the mighty Soviet Union: e.g., a tomato was deeply shaken by a grafted liaison with a nightshade. It became so enterprising that, sown outdoors in May, it ripened its fruits before the early frost of Moscow...
...Lysenko's "disestablishment" methods really work, the world has a powerful method of adapting plants and animals to the needs...
...Formal genetics" has also been attacked in Russia by Professor T. D. Lysenko, a practical trial-&-error plant breeder of the school of Luther Burbank. It has been defended by Professor N. I. Vaviloff, an academic geneticist of international repute. The letter-writing students admired practical Lysenko, scorned academic Vaviloff. That the Kremlin Government does not know just what to make of this howdydo is evident from the fact that both Lysenko and Vaviloff have been permitted to air their views in the Soviet press...