Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

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
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