Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Papers on the Soviet genetics controversy. Source: Wellcome Collection.
10/16 page 10
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Papers on the Soviet genetics controversy. Source: Wellcome Collection.
![The Soviet Genetics Controversy by JOHN R. BAKER, D.Sc. Reader in Cytology in the University of Oxford [This paper appeared in Time and Tide, and is reproduced here by permission of the Editor. A fuller account of this con troversy will be found in my book, Science and the Planned State (1945 ; Allen and Unwin (London) ; Macmillan (New York).] Rather a tactless old genius wrote his defence of the Copernican system in the form of a dialogue in which the Aristotelian disputant was made to appear stupid. Unfortunately the Pope thought that satire was being directed against himself and naturally there was trouble with the Catholic Church. That was more than three hundred years ago, but we have never heard the last of it. Things are happening to-day that will change the perspective in which we view the familiar story of Galileo. It is no longer one man or one particular doctrine that falls under the ban of a central authority, but a major branch of science and all its exponents in a large country. To become acquainted with the broad principles of genetics, the study of heredity, is a considerable undertaking : to grasp the idea that the earth moves round the sun is very much easier. It is for this reason that the significance of the Soviet genetics controversy may easily be under-estimated by many well-informed people who have not interested themselves in this particular subject. Genetics is the science that deals with the way in which variations are inherited from parents to offspring and to more remote descendants. This science, founded by Gregor Mendel in the garden of a Moravian monastery only 82 years ago, has become one of the most actively-pursued and exact of all the branches of biology. In 1902 an American named Sutton, who never made any other important contribution to knowledge, pointed out that the postulated ‘ genes ’ or factors of inheritance seemed to be handed on from parent to offspring in exactly the same way as the chromosomes, which were already well-known constituents of every living cell. Thus arose the science of cyto genetics, by a marriage between cytology (the study of cells) on](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b1803214x_0010.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
