End of Lysenko?

Since 1948 Academician Trofim D. Lysenko has dominated the biological and agricultural sciences of the Soviet Union. His theory that plants can be changed fundamentally by changing their environments was scoffed at by the world's geneticists, but it had a strong appeal to his wishfully-thinking bosses. Backed by political favor, Lysenko gained so much power that his word was close to law. Scientists who opposed him were thrown out of their positions. Some disappeared.

Last week Lysenko himself seemed on the way out. Pravda, speaking with the full authority of the Communist Party, told about a complicated squabble among Soviet scientists. It began when V. C. Dmitriev, an adherent of Lysenko, applied to the Institute of Genetics for a doctor's degree. Pravda printed a letter from a nonparty man, Professor S. Stankov, who testified that Dmitriev's doctoral dissertation was "unsound."

At first the institute refused to grant the degree, but Lysenko is the institute's head. When his favorite was turned down, said Professor Stankov, Lysenko intervened "with his customary sharpness," condemning Dmitriev's critics as "Weismannists."* On Feb. 20 the institute reconsidered. The degree was granted, and Professor Stankov' denounced the action as "a mockery of Soviet science."

Pravda did not tell exactly what happened next. It merely printed a note from "the editor" saying that the members of the institute had met recently for a third time. Taking into account "supplementary material" about Dmitriev, they had stripped him of his newly granted degree.

*From Geneticist August Weismann (1834-1914) of Freiburg University, author of the germ-plasm theory of heredity.

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