Greymouth Evening Star. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1949. “Assault On Human Knowledge”

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 February 1949, Page 4

Greymouth Evening Star. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 26, 1949. “Assault On Human Knowledge”

THERE is humour to be found even in * today’s international situation. But it is grim humour. That all-powerful political body, the Central Executive Committee of the Russian Communist Party, assuming to itself the powers of final arbitration in all things human, has declared that Lysenko is right and every other scientist is wrong. And, of course, according to the Communist creed, what the Communist Party says is truth, anfl that is all there is to be said on any particular subject.' Io the field of science “Lysenkoism” must be accepted by all good Communists under threat of “liquidation” as heretics. . s . . Trofim Denisovich Lysenko is a Russian, scientist; he is also a Communist, which fact explains a lot. Briefly, his theory is that hereditary characteristics are controlled by environment. Thus, according to Lysenko, heredity can be controlled by altering environment. If Lysenko s theory is correct —and it is held by the overwhelming majority of reputable scientists to be patently absurd —Russian plants and animals, and even Russians, can now be bred directly along the Marxist-Lenin line, rid of all bourgeois tendencies they might otherwise have inherited. All this fits in' with the Communist theory that Marxism is right and admits no argument. Thus is learning and research prostituted in a slave State. The Morgan-Mendeliah theory is accepted by most reputable scientists as lhe basis of the science of genetics—that branch of biology which deals with heredity, variation, development, and evolution. This theory holds that the hereditary characteristics of the individual, plant, or. animal are referable to the genes from which it derived existence. But Lysenko says this theory is wrong. It was to the controversy which the Russian scientist has started that Dr O. 11. Frankel, chief research officer of the Wheat Research Institute in Christchurch, referred in an interview which we published yesterday following his return from the International Congress of Geneticists at Stockholm. Dr Frankel said that the attitude of the Russian delegates and their satellites at the Congress was flatly that all who accepted the Lysenko theory were, right and those who did not were wrong. Normal scientific discussion being thus ruled out, argument became sterile. In any event, Dr Frankel added, the theory was patently absurd and had no following other than that which rested either on blind faith or compulsion. All scientific text-books for use in Russia are being re-written, and those scientists who supported the generally-accepted Morgan-Mendelian doctrine. have either hastily repented, have been Pilled, or have been banished. Many of them had established Russia’s reputation for leading the

world in genetics research. These acts of “liquidation” have caused a wave of protest among scientists outside Russia. Recently it was reported that a distinguished American geneticist. Dr IT. J. Muller, had

followed the example of Sir Henry Dale, a leading British contemporary, and resigned his honorary membership of the Russian Academy of Sciences, lie worked for four years at the Institute of Genetics in Moscow and is Ilins exceptionally well placed to estimate the full significance of the Communist pronouncement on “Lysenkoism.” It is not a question, he lias written, “of a controversy between scientists, or a dispute over lhe relative merits of two scientific theories,” but rather of “a brutal attack on human knowledge.” The same conclusion was reached by Sir Henry Dale. • It is clear that the iron curtain has fallen in the realm of science. Between those' who assert, as the Russians do, that science has its party line that must be enforced, and those who still, believe that knowledge must be pursued for its own sake alone, there is no possible meeting ground. Indeed, what meeting ground is there between the fanaticism of Communism and the sanity of democracy?