Abstract

For the past two decades, matters biological have been given constant attention in our press - not only in specialized publications of natural science but in those aiming at the very broadest range of readers. After the meeting of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1948, biological questions were arbitrarily converted into problems of the most purely political nature, and the struggle against dissenters was waged in this field with no less bitterness and with essentially the same means and techniques as in the field of politics. There was the same attaching of derogatory labels for holding nonconforming views, the same reprisals against spokesmen for independent trends in science, the same persecution of honest people whose sole "guilt" lay in their disagreement with the views of Academician Lysenko and his followers, who called themselves "Michurinists." It sufficed merely to name a scientist - not even in the field of biology - a Morgan-Weismann-Mendelian, for the need to support the accusations against him with scientific argumentation automatically to disappear, while the individual who had been accused of the deadly sin of Morgan-Weismann-Mendelianism was immediately and just as automatically deprived of the opportunity to defend his views, prove them, or offer facts or theoretical arguments of whatever nature in support of them. In those melancholy times, it sufficed to label an honest man an enemy of the people to do away with him once and for all. The struggle in biology was a mirror image of what was then occurring throughout the land and was later defined as the cult of the individual, of Stalin