Science: Party Line

Professor Julian Huxley went to the Moscow Science Celebrations in 1945 and was enormously impressed with the Soviet attitude toward science. It seemed to him that his Russian colleagues enjoyed freedom of discussion, were generous in their appreciation of British and other foreign scientists, and were “anxious to exchange ideas, results and visits.” Summing up, Huxley said: “It is certainly clear that without the U.S.S.R., neither a world political organization nor the world’s intellectual life can flourish successfully.”

That was four disillusioning years ago. Now, in Britain’s venerable Nature magazine, Professor Huxley has recorded his changed opinion. Recent events demonstrate, he says, “that science is no longer regarded in the U.S.S.R. as an international activity of free workers whose prime interest is to discover new truths and new facts, but as an activity subordinated to a particular ideology and designed only to secure practical results in the interests of a particular national and political system . . . The new social-political orthodoxy is . . . inimical to the free spirit of science. There is now a scientific party line in the U.S.S.R., and those who stray from it do so at their peril.”

With the patient care of a scientific researcher gathering evidence, Professor Huxley reviews the enslavement of Soviet scientists. The test case is biology, his own science. He tells how, step by step, Trofim Lysenko, a “scientifically illiterate” plant-breeder, was enthroned as absolute boss of Soviet biology with all his opponents “dismissed or disgraced.” Dr. Huxley knows Lysenko and considers him a better politician than a scientist. In conversations he found that Lysenko and his followers “simply do not talk the same language as Western men of science.” Much of Professor Huxley’s long article consists of quotations from Soviet official scientific bodies and officially approved scientists. They clearly show that Soviet scientists are no longer free to seek for truth; they must seek for “truth” which pleases the Communist hierarchy. Lysenko himself said to Huxley: “If you want to get a particular result, you will get it.”