Word: lysenkoism
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...announcement from Moscow was blunt: Trofim Denisovich Lysenko had been relieved as director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The very name of the man who had been fired came back into the news like a memory of the past. But then Geneticist Lysenko had always been a man of the past. He rose to his position of power in Soviet science in the 1930s by preaching Lamarckism, the 18th century belief that plants and animals can transmit to the next generation characteristics they acquire in their own lifetime...
Across the world, Lysenko's fellow scientists scoffed at his theories; heredity, they believe, is controlled by genes in the reproductive cells and remains unchanged throughout an individual's life. But Lysenko had something else beside his dogma going for him. He was an exceedingly skillful Communist-style politician, and his views held great appeal for Joseph Stalin. They abetted Stalin's will to believe that hereditary traits can be changed in a planned society. For more than a quarter of a century, as those views controlled Soviet biological research and were written into Soviet textbooks, they...
...Siberia. With Stalin to back him, Lysenko became absolute dictator of Soviet biology, including agricultural research and development. In 1940 he sent his opponent, Professor Nikolai I. Vavilov, Russia's leading geneticist, to die in Siberia. He purged or silenced other critics in universities and laboratories. While Stalin lived, no one dared to disagree with Lysenko. His primitive exercises in plant and animal breeding had few successes, and lack of dogma-free research contributed heavily to the poor performance of Soviet agriculture...
...with Paāques' innocuous profiles of government ministers and long-winded explanations of French diplomatic thinking until their instructor could provide them with more valuable information. For his part, Paâques insisted that his pupils at least be apt. When an embassy official named Lysenko became his contact in 1959, Paâques complained crabbily about the Russian's "lesser intellectual capacity" and Lysenko's banal insistence on teaching him how to use a microcamera...
Such a scheme would work reciprocally. As of now, if present U.S. demands were suddenly accepted, we might be forced to accomodate any scientist-politicians the Russians might choose to send. Lysenko is not an isolated case in the Russian scientific establishment, and it would be infinitely preferable if the State Department could choose those Soviet Academicians who have some record of objectivity...