Requiem for a Charlatan

Ever since J.G. Mendel made genetics into a science, indisputable evidence has accumulated that characteristics acquired during the life of an organism cannot be inherited by its offspring. But Lysenko, who denied even the existence of genes and chromosomes, was not interested in scientific evidence; to support his claims that one generation of wheat or cattle could be trained to have offspring suited to the Siberian cold, he had more per- suasive methods: "Whoever believes in the theories of Mendel and Morgan," exclaimed he in 1948, "is doubting the illustrious future of Communism!"

And Stalin saw to it that nobody would doubt that illustrious future. Labs were closed, scientific work de- stroyed. Scores of distinguished Soviet geneticists disap- peared into the Gulag Archipelago; most of them were never heard of again. Pointing out in public that the Jews have been circumcised for 5,000 years without effect on the next generation could mean arrest and eventual death. Radio Moscow blared forth songs attacking the decadent "Morganists-Weissmanists;" Lysenko was showered with medals, offices, awards and honors; the work of Michurin, a Russian fruitgrower and forerunner of Lysenko's genetic witchcraft, was relentlessly extolled.

But far from changing the laws of nature, the propa- gandists could not even convince the Russian people or the other serfs of the Soviet Empire. "Michurin," they cracked in whispers, "crossed earthworms with hedge-hogs to produce barbed wire. . . You know what he died of? He broke his neck when he fell off one of his strawberries." Today, hundreds of square miles with eroded top soil in Siberia, a long chain of ruined harvests, and an immeasurable amount of human suffering stand as monuments to the fact that the laws of nature cannot be changed by a political ideology.

A democracy cannot kill off people in concentration camps for doubting an official version of science. But its fashion-setting intellectual elite can harass a Harvard professor with charges of racism because he showed that the learning abilities of carrier pigeons are determined by heredity rather than environment; they can bring about the prohibition of a New Hampshire nuclear power plant for the ostensible protection of a larva that has nothing going for it but a Latin name; they can give outsized publicity to a theory that abuses thermodynamics to argue the inevitable downfall of capitalism; they can preach that true wealth is brought about by a no-growth economy; and they can run bureaucracies on the idea that an industrial giant can live on the energy produced by sunbeams and summer breezes.

Lysenko is dead, but Lysenkoism the subordination of science to ideology lingers on; nurtured by "scientists" who do not seek truth, but only one-sided scraps of evidence to prop up their preconceived superstitions.