Soviet genetics / by Alan G. Morton.

  • Morton, A. G. (Alan G.)
Date:
1951
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Soviet genetics / by Alan G. Morton. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    THE GENETICS CONTROVERSY IN PERSPECTIVE II agriculture which is often imperfectly appreciated in this country. Collective farmers look to their regional research insti¬ tutes and to scientists in general for active help and are likely to be highly critical if they do not get it or if it is ineffective. At the same time many collectives take part in experimental work which is part of the research programme of an institute. Every collective farm possesses a small laboratory primarily for routine control work but where some research work can be done according to local initiative. Each farm usually employs a trained agronomist and a zoo-technician. Thus the link between science and practice is a very close and living one, and this fact has an important bearing, as we shall see, on those scientific developments which it is the purpose of this book to discuss. It is no exaggeration when Lysenko speaks of Soviet science as becoming the possession of the broadest sections of the working people—from workers in thousands of collective- farm laboratories to workers in research institutes and academies. In the field of genetics and plant-breeding there was enormous activity and work on a very considerable scale in many research institutes. Most of this work was from the beginning based on orthodox genetical theory, and was directed and carried out by scientists thoroughly trained in Mendelian genetics. I should like to emphasise this point, because the suggestion has been quite widely made that Lysenko and his followers are not sufficiently acquainted with Mendelian genetics, especially the most recent developments, and that their criticisms are based on misapprehensions and are therefore wide of the mark. But it must be remembered that right up to 1948 almost all univer¬ sity teaching and all courses of higher instruction in biology were based on orthodox genetical theory. In fact all Soviet biologists received a much more thorough grounding in Mendelian genetics than most students get in this country, where less emphasis is placed on genetics in biological teaching. The idea that Soviet biologists are ignorant of foreign work could only be entertained by those who have never taken the trouble to open a Russian scientific journal. Anyone who makes the effort would find not only references to the most recent work on genetics published in British, American and other foreign
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