Cold War Rhetoric of the Lysenko Era Essay -- Politics Communism Commu

The Cold War Rhetoric of the Lysenko Era During the Cold War, the Soviet Union forced its biologists to support the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which opposed the conventional theory of genetics accepted by the scientists in America and most of the world. This theory that environmentally induced changes to an organism’s physical or biochemical traits could be passed on to its offspring was the main tenet in Lamarck’s work during the early 1800s. It was accepted by most biologists during Lamarck’s time, until the work of Darwin on evolution by natural selection in the mid-1800s and the discovery of Mendel’s work on heredity in the early 1900s lead most biologists to discount Lamarck’s theory. However, in 1948, the Soviet Union officially supported the paradigm of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which they called the â€Å"Michurin teaching† (Lysenko 33). Michurin was a Russian scientist who worked during the late-1800s to improve and create new varieties of plants and introduce them to areas of severe climate in Russia (Bakharev 6). His principle that â€Å"we cannot wait for favours from Nature† and that instead, â€Å"we must wrest them from her,† was based on his interpretation that Marxist dialectical materialism taught â€Å"how to actively influence Nature and how to change it† (Bakharev 6-8). The revival of his theories in the mid-1900s was tied to the fate of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Lysenko gradually gained power until he became the president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (LAAAS) in 1941 (U.S. Department of Commerce 2). His address to the 1948 session of LAAAS marked the beginning of the Soviet state’s official support of the Michurin teaching and it’s suppression o... ... Soviet Science.† Russian History 21.1(1994): 49-53. Russia Academy of Science Bibliographies. Langson Lib., U of California, Irvine. 27 May 2004 Soyfer, Valery N. Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science. Trans. Leo Gruliow and Rebecca Gruliow. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Soyfer, Valery N. â€Å"New light on the Lysenko era.† Nature 339 (8 June 1989). Russia Academy of Science Bibliographies. Langson Lib., U of California, Irvine. 27 May 2004 United States. Dept. of Commerce. Office of Technical Services. Lysenko, Michurinism, and Soviet biology. Washington, 1960. Zirkle, Conway. Death of a Science in Russia; the fate of genetics as described in Pravda and elsewhere. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949.