Download or read book Lysenko s Ghost written by Loren Graham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko became one of the most notorious figures in twentieth-century science after his genetic theories were discredited decades ago. Yet some scientists, even in the West, now claim that discoveries in the field of epigenetics prove that he was right after all. Seeking to get to the bottom of Lysenko’s rehabilitation in certain Russian scientific circles, Loren Graham reopens the case, granting his theories an impartial hearing to determine whether new developments in molecular biology validate his claims. In the 1930s Lysenko advanced a “theory of nutrients” to explain plant development, basing his insights on experiments which, he claimed, showed one could manipulate environmental conditions such as temperature to convert a winter wheat variety into a spring variety. He considered the inheritance of acquired characteristics—which he called the “internalization of environmental conditions”—the primary mechanism of heredity. Although his methods were slipshod and his results were never duplicated, his ideas fell on fertile ground during a time of widespread famine in the Soviet Union. Recently, a hypothesis called epigenetic transgenerational inheritance has suggested that acquired characteristics may indeed occasionally be passed on to offspring. Some biologists dispute the evidence for this hypothesis. Loren Graham examines these arguments, both in Russia and the West, and shows how, in Russia, political currents are particularly significant in affecting the debates.
Download or read book The Lysenko Controversy as a Global Phenomenon Volume 2 written by William deJong-Lambert and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-06 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines the international impact of Lysenkoism in its namesake’s heyday and the reasons behind Lysenko’s rehabilitation in Russia today. By presenting the rise and fall of T.D. Lysenko in its various aspects, the authors provide a fresh perspective on one of the most notorious episodes in the history of science.
Download or read book The Lysenko Controversy as a Global Phenomenon Volume 1 written by William deJong-Lambert and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-21 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume covers the global history of the Lysenko controversy, while exploring in greater depth the background of D. Lysenko’s career and influence in the USSR. By presenting the rise and fall of T.D. Lysenko in a variety of aspects—his influence upon art, unrecognized predecessors, and the extent to which genetics continued in the USSR even while he was in power, and the revival of his reputation today—the authors provide a fresh perspective on one of the most notorious episodes in the history of science.
Download or read book Stalinist Genetics written by Dmitri Stanchevici and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stalinist Genetics focuses on the rhetoric of T. D. Lysenko, the founder of an agrobiological doctrine (Lysenkoism) in the Stalinist Soviet Union. Using not only scientific but also political and ideological arguments, Lysenko achieved an official ban on Soviet Mendelian genetics. Though the ban was brief and Lysenkoism, as a leading biological doctrine, was eventually deposed in favor of Mendelism, Lysenkoism remains a paradigmatic example of pernicious political interference in science. In this study, the critical orientation for reading Lysenko's major speeches is constitutional rhetoric. It combines Kenneth Burke's dialectic of constitutions and rhetoric of the subject. Painting a nuanced picture of intellectual, economic, ideological, and political life in the Soviet Union of the 1930s and 1940s, the book demonstrates how the rhetorics of Lysenkoism and Mendelism interacted with Stalinist culture in the fight for dominating Soviet science. The reader will learn how Lysenko's constitutional rhetoric created a space where scientific terms transformed into political and ideological ones, and vice versa. The book also shows how, in a dialectical flip, the Lysenkoist rhetoric eventually turned from tool to master. Contrary to Lysenko's intentions, his language gave his opponents, Soviet Mendelians, grounds on which to defend their science and criticize Lysenkoism. Stanchevici forcefully reasserts the blurriness of the boundaries between science and politics, and argues that scientific language reveals more plasticity and adaptability to the political situation than has hitherto been assumed. Intended Audience: Scholars in rhetoric, history, and philosophy of science; graduate or upper-division undergraduate course in the rhetoric of science or technical communication.
Download or read book The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov written by Peter Pringle and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-05-13 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, acclaimed journalist and author Peter Pringle recreates the extraordinary life and tragic end of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century. In a drama of love, revolution, and war that rivals Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Pringle tells the story of a young Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who had a dream of ending hunger and famine in the world. Vavilov's plan would use the emerging science of genetics to breed super plants that could grow anywhere, in any climate, in sandy deserts and freezing tundra, in drought and flood. He would launch botanical expeditions to find these vanishing genes, overlooked by early farmers ignorant of Mendel's laws of heredity. He called it a "mission for all humanity." To the leaders of the young Soviet state, Vavilov's dream fitted perfectly into their larger scheme for a socialist utopia. Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, a handsome and seductive young professor, as he became an Indiana Jones, hunting lost botanical treasures on five continents. In a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, Vavilov built the world's first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that was the envy of scientists everywhere and remains so today. But when Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov's dream turned into a nightmare. This son of science was from a bourgeois background, the class of society most despised and distrusted by the Bolsheviks. The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin's dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage. Stalin's collectivization of farmland caused chaos in Soviet food production, and millions died in widespread famine. Vavilov's master plan for improving Soviet crops was designed to work over decades, not a few years, and he could not meet Stalin's impossible demands for immediate results. In Stalin's Terror of the 1930s, Russian geneticists were systematically repressed in favor of the peasant horticulturalist Trofim Lysenko, with his fraudulent claims and speculative theories. Vavilov was the most famous victim of this purge, which set back Russian biology by a generation and caused the country untold harm. He was sentenced to death, but unlike Galileo, he refused to recant his beliefs and, in the most cruel twist, this humanitarian pioneer scientist was starved to death in the gulag. Pringle uses newly opened Soviet archives, including Vavilov's secret police file, official correspondence, vivid expedition reports, previously unpublished family letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to bring us this intensely human story of a brilliant life cut short by anti-science demagogues, ideology, censorship, and political expedience.
Download or read book The Rise and Fall of T D Lysenko written by Zhores A. Medvedev and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents the story of the Soviets from 1937-1964 in three ways; historically, by the author as a witness, and by the author as an active participant to the final stages of Lysenkoism, which he helped to topple.
Download or read book Stalin and the Scientists written by Simon Ings and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the finest, most gripping surveys of the history of Russian science in the twentieth century.” —Douglas Smith, author of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Stalin and the Scientists tells the story of the many gifted scientists who worked in Russia from the years leading up to the revolution through the death of the “Great Scientist” himself, Joseph Stalin. It weaves together the stories of scientists, politicians, and ideologues into an intimate and sometimes horrifying portrait of a state determined to remake the world. They often wreaked great harm. Stalin was himself an amateur botanist, and by falling under the sway of dangerous charlatans like Trofim Lysenko (who denied the existence of genes), and by relying on antiquated ideas of biology, he not only destroyed the lives of hundreds of brilliant scientists, he caused the death of millions through famine. But from atomic physics to management theory, and from radiation biology to neuroscience and psychology, these Soviet experts also made breakthroughs that forever changed agriculture, education, and medicine. A masterful book that deepens our understanding of Russian history, Stalin and the Scientists is a great achievement of research and storytelling, and a gripping look at what happens when science falls prey to politics. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2016 A New York Times Book Review “Paperback Row” selection “Ings’s research is impressive and his exposition of the science is lucid . . . Filled with priceless nuggets and a cast of frauds, crackpots and tyrants, this is a lively and interesting book, and utterly relevant today.” —The New York Times Book Review “A must read for understanding how the ideas of scientific knowledge and technology were distorted and subverted for decades across the Soviet Union.” —The Washington Post
Download or read book Heredity and Its Variability written by T. D. Lysenko and published by The Minerva Group, Inc.. This book was released on 2001-12 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic of Stalinist aberrant genetic theory, horticulturist Lysenko rejected orthodox genetics in favor of the theories of those of the Russian horticulturist I. V. Michurin (d. 1935). Among his theories were that wheat raised under certain conditions produce seeds of rye and that theoretical biology must be fused with Soviet agricultural practice. He was the total autocrat of Soviet biology from 1948 through 1953, and believed that through inherited characteristics Stalinism would create a 'new man'. Lysenko held that heredity can be changed by husbandry, a theory that had disastrous impact on Soviet agriculture. He was dismissed from his post as director of the Soviet Institute of Genetics.
Download or read book Soviet Genetics written by Alan G. Morton and published by . This book was released on 1951 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Death of a Science in Russia written by Conway Zirkle and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-11-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
Download or read book Soviet Genetics and World Science written by Julian Huxley and published by . This book was released on 1949 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work explores the research of genetics conducted by Soviets and Trofim Lysenko and its validity, through the context of the author, a British scholar.
Download or read book Lysenko s Ghost written by Loren Graham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index.
Download or read book The Lysenko Affair written by David Joravsky and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lysenko affair was perhaps the most bizarre chapter in the history of modern science. For thirty years, until 1965, Soviet genetics was dominated by a fanatical agronomist who achieved dictatorial power over genetics and plant science as well as agronomy. "A standard source both for Soviet specialists and for sociologists of science."—American Journal of Sociology "Joravsky has produced . . . the most detailed and authoritative treatment of Lysenko and his view on genetics."—New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Soviet Genetics written by and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Lysenko Effect written by Nils Roll-Hansen and published by Prometheus Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ukrainian agronomist T. D. Lysenko (1898-1976) was the leader of an influential Soviet agrobiological school that rejected standard genetics and instead promoted a brand of pseudoscience that held sway among Soviet biologists for over twenty-five years. The dominance of Lysenko's pseudoscientific ideas has been characterized as the biggest scandal of 20th-century science. That it happened under a regime that took particular pride in building its policy on science makes the affair particularly interesting, even for Western observers free from totalitarian governments. The Soviet Union was the first country with a government policy and large-scale public support for science. Agricultural science was a main showcase for this unprecedented investment in science. In this in-depth study of Lysenkoism, historian of science Nils Roll-Hansen seeks to understand how Soviet biology went so wrong. Unlike other scholars who have studied Lysenko's influence, Roll-Hansen argues that the corruption of Soviet biology should not be explained primarily as the result of Stalin's despotism and the willful intervention of party hacks into the objective methods of science. Because of ideological and economic pressures to produce tangible benefits to society, says Roll-Hansen, Soviet biology, under Lysenko's leadership, succumbed to a wishful-thinking syndrome, which paved the way for Lysenko. By such thinking scientific objectivity was compromised in favor of ideas that accorded with progressive political ideals and economic goals as determined by the ruling politburo. Roll-Hansen draws provocative parallels between Lysenko's bad science in mid-20th-century Russia and attempts by Western theorists today to construe science in social constructivist terms or to exercise political control over scientific research. Based on archival materials not previously accessible, The Lysenko Effect is both a valuable contribution to the history of science and an instructive case study in the ways in which ideals of social progress can skew the results of objective science in any society.
Download or read book The Lysenko Controversy as a Global Phenomenon written by William DeJong-Lambert and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Acquired Traits written by Raisa Berg and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1990 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: