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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD Moscow in a light plane to witness the new Soviet society firsthand. He must have liked what he saw, because - after his discovery that radiation makes mutations (a discovery that would later win him a Nobel Prize) - he moved to Moscow to help establish modern genetics in the Soviet Union. But by the middle 1930s a charlatan named Trofim Lysenko had caught the notice and then the enthusiastic support of Stalin. Lysenko argued that genetics - which he called 'Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism', after some of the founders of the field - had an unacceptable philosophical base, and that philosophically 'correct' genetics, genetics that paid proper obeisance to communist dialectical materialism, would yield very different results. In particular, Lysenko's genetics would permit an additional crop of winter wheat - welcome news to a Soviet economy reeling from Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture. Lysenko's purported evidence was suspect, there were no experimental controls, and his broad conclusions flew in the face of an immense body of contradictory data. As Lysenko's power grew, Muller passionately argued that classical Mendelian genetics was in full harmony with dialectical materialism, while Lysenko, who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and denied a material basis of heredity, was an 'idealist', or worse. Muller was strongly supported by N.I. Vavilov, erstwhile president of the Ail-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. In a 1936 address to the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, now presided over by Lysenko, Muller gave a stirring address that included these words: If the outstanding practitioners are going to support theories and opinions that are obviously absurd to everyone who knows even a little about genetics - such views as those recently put forward by President Lysenko and those who think as he does - then the choice before us will resemble the choice between witchcraft and medicine, between astrology and astronomy, between alchemy and chemistry. In a country of arbitrary arrests and police terror, this speech displayed exemplary - many thought foolhardy - integrity and 250

Antiscience courage. In The Vavilov Affair (1984), the Soviet emigre historian Mark Popovsky describes these words as being accompanied by 'thunderous applause from the whole hall' and 'remembered by everyone still living who took part in the session'. Three months later, Muller was visited in Moscow by a Western geneticist who expressed astonishment at a widely circulated letter, signed by Muller, that condemned the prevalence of 'Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism' in the West and that urged a boycott of the forthcoming International Congress of Genetics. Having never seen, much less signed, such a letter, an outraged Muller concluded that it was a forgery perpetrated by Lysenko. Muller promptly wrote an angry denunciation of Lysenko to Pravda and mailed a copy to Stalin. The next day Vavilov came to Muller in a state of some agitation, informing him that he, Muller, had just volunteered to serve in the Spanish Civil War. The letter to Pravda had put Muller's life in danger. He left Moscow the next day, just evading, so he was later told, the NKVD, the secret police. Vavilov was not so lucky, and perished in 1943 in Siberia. With the continuing support of Stalin and later of Khrushchev, Lysenko ruthlessly suppressed classical genetics. Soviet school biology texts in the early 1960s had as little about chromosomes and classical genetics as many American school biology texts have about evolution today. But no new crop of winter wheat grew; incantations of the phrase 'dialectical materialism' went unheard by the DNA of domesticated plants; Soviet agriculture remained in the doldrums; and today, partly for this reason, Russia - world-class in many other sciences - is still almost hopelessly backward in molecular biology and genetic engineering. Two generations of modern biologists have been lost. Lysenkoism was not overthrown until 1964, in a series of debates and votes at the Soviet Academy of Sciences - one of the few institutions to maintain a degree of independence from the leaders of party and state - in which the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov played an outstanding role. Americans tend to shake their heads in astonishment at the Soviet experience. The idea that some state-endorsed ideology or popular prejudice would hogtie scientific progress seems 251

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD<br />

Moscow in a light plane to witness the new Soviet society<br />

firsthand. He must have liked what he saw, because - after his<br />

discovery that radiation makes mutations (a discovery that would<br />

later win him a Nobel Prize) - he moved to Moscow to help<br />

establish modern genetics in the Soviet Union. But by the middle<br />

1930s a charlatan named Trofim Lysenko had caught the notice<br />

and then the enthusiastic support of Stalin. Lysenko argued that<br />

genetics - which he called 'Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism',<br />

after some of the founders of the field - had an unacceptable<br />

philosophical base, and that philosophically 'correct' genetics,<br />

genetics that paid proper obeisance to communist dialectical<br />

materialism, would yield very different results. In particular,<br />

Lysenko's genetics would permit an additional crop of winter<br />

wheat - welcome news to a Soviet economy reeling from Stalin's<br />

forced collectivization of agriculture.<br />

Lysenko's purported evidence was suspect, there were no<br />

experimental controls, and his broad conclusions flew in the face<br />

of an immense body of contradictory data. As Lysenko's power<br />

grew, Muller passionately argued that classical Mendelian genetics<br />

was in full harmony with dialectical materialism, while<br />

Lysenko, who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics<br />

and denied a material basis of heredity, was an 'idealist', or<br />

worse. Muller was strongly supported by N.I. Vavilov, erstwhile<br />

president of the Ail-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.<br />

In a 1936 address to the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, now<br />

presided over by Lysenko, Muller gave a stirring address that<br />

included these words:<br />

If the outstanding practitioners are going to support theories<br />

and opinions that are obviously absurd to everyone who<br />

knows even a little about genetics - such views as those<br />

recently put forward by President Lysenko and those who<br />

think as he does - then the choice before us will resemble the<br />

choice between witchcraft and medicine, between astrology<br />

and astronomy, between alchemy and chemistry.<br />

In a country of arbitrary arrests and police terror, this speech<br />

displayed exemplary - many thought foolhardy - integrity and<br />

250

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