Science: Dear Teacher …

Professor Anton R. Zhebrak is a Soviet geneticist who has enjoyed international respect. Like most reputable scientists, he has believed in the Morgan-Mendelian theory of genetics (i.e., hereditary characteristics are controlled by genes which cannot be altered by ordinary environmental conditions). That belief made him a heretic in Russia, where science must take the Communist view that Environment Is All. Last year Zhebrak was roundly denounced by Pravda for admitting in the U.S. weekly, Science, that many Russian geneticists still uphold Mendel’s laws (TIME, Sept. 22).

During the last fortnight Professor Zhebrak has recanted his heresy. “I, as a party member,” said he in a letter to Pravda, “do not consider it possible for me to retain the views which have been recognized as erroneous by the Central Committee of our party.”

With Zhebrak’s capitulation, a debate that has gone on in Russia for over a decade came to an end. Henceforth, all vegetables, flowers and other plants in the U.S.S.R. will grow straight along the Marxian line. Under the vigorous influence of their Communist environment, they will cast off all Western bourgeois tendencies that might make them follow their heredity.

The man who finally won this longstanding argument is Geneticist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rose to his present eminence by being able to make his science toe the party line. Although Lysenko has gained increasing recognition in Russia, most Western and some Soviet geneticists have regarded his party-line genetics as scientifically naive.

This summer, at the eight-day meeting of the Lenin Academy, Lysenko rose to insist on his views once again. Several scientists, including Professor Zhebrak, tried to start the old argument. It was then that Lysenko sprang his big surprise: his theory had been officially endorsed by the Central Committee.

Taking its cue, the Academy hastily dashed off a note to Scientist Stalin: “You, our dear leader and teacher, have helped Soviet scientists day in, day out, to develop our progressive materialist science serving the people in all its labors and exploits, a science expressing the ideology and lofty aims of the man of the new Socialist society . . . Advanced biological science rejects and pillories the erroneous idea that nature cannot be guided by the human control of conditions.”

Last week the Academy swung into action. It purged itself of two of its most noted members: Physiologist L. A. Orbeli and Morphologist I. I. Shmalgauzen; liquidated a laboratory on cytogenetics (the study of cell formation), and accused its director, world-famous Geneticist N. P. Dubinin, of having taken “antiscientific positions.” All textbooks on biology were ordered rewritten; teaching will be oriented to the Lysenko doctrine.