The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko
Cooper, Douglas
"The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko" society by pitting man against man in the Hobbesian sense of "war of all against all." Nothing would remain to restrain a man from expressing himself to the...
...We knew, of course, that the captain suffered from what we now know as paranoia, confronting Hornblower and the other lieutenants with an impossible situation...
...Renown...
...Rapoport was fired from his position, expelled from the Communist party, and forced to work as a laboratory assistant at a geological institute...
...Forester, and that the current viscount Hornblower has agreed to their release in honor of his illustrious ancestor...
...Since Marathon and Thermopylae, be writes, the west has stood for a nexus of values centered on individual dignity: certainly the total absence of such values is one of the most striking things to emerge from the recent reports of life in China...
...The Life and Times of Horatio Hornblower by C. Northcote Parkinson Little, Brown, $6.95 W E COUNT it a treat when we find a new book either about or by one of our favorite characters, so what shall we count it when we find one book combining two of them...
...Part of this'book was distributed hand-to-hand during the postwar attempts to discredit Lysenkoism...
...One does not ask impertinent questions...
...Forester, but an effort the latter "lacking this material would never have dared attempt...
...Only drastic social reform can save us...
...candidate at Harvard University, former editor of Counterpoint magazine, and an as socmte editor of The Alternative...
...So when Mr...
...you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you...
...This is easily proved...
...Parkinson shows...
...The question of the relative influence of environment versus ancestry is still with us, as are those who fear the verdict of science and act to suppress inquiry...
...It was left by the first Lord Hornblower himself, to be opened on the t00th anniversary of his death and explains what formerly could at most be guessed about the events centering on Captain Sawyer of H.M.S...
...How happy it is, then, that Mr...
...The truth is the opposite: it is the" name that made the law famous...
...the writing is a bit choppy, but compensated for by the wealth of details given by the author...
...Now, unquestionably this was a stroke of brilliance...
...Those who disagreed with Lysenko's neo-Lamarckism were labelled 'bourgeois biologists" and enemies of the people...
...between people of European ancestry are genetic rather than hereditary, and upholding the general validity of I.Q...
...In any event, his twelve volumes had pretty well blocked out Hornblower's rise from an orphan to Admiral and Lord...
...And, as Mr...
...We knew that Hornblower had convened a meeting of the officers, that the captain had learned of "it and searched for {hem, that he was incapacitated in a fall during the search, and later killed during the action in which Spanish prisoners took the Renown, and Hornblower retook it...
...W. Wesley McDonald Comrade Mountebank The Rise and Fall of T.D...
...That cost is too high...
...he died there a year later, in 1943...
...In 1969 he was incarcerated briefly in a mental institution, a typical cure for Russian dissenters, until the protests of his colleagues led to his release...
...Stalin and other Russian leaders preferred to believe that the environment ~as much more significant than heredity because they wanted to create the 'New Soviet Man" rapidly by altering the structure of Russian society...
...What Montesquieu and Rousseau lack is proper revolutionary impulses, Berman adds...
...And it is with great charm and with that C. Northcote makes his debut as a biographer, though it is certainly not insignificant that for his subject he is drawn back to Englandjs time of greatness...
...Parkinson drew the lesson in layman's slanguage, t h i s figure will invariably prove to be between 5.17 per cent and 6.56 per cent, irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done...
...It was poetic justice that Rapoport was the scientist commissioned by party leaders, right after Khruschev was ousted, to write a detailed denunciation of Lysenkoism which was widely published in the USSR...
...This is particularly unfortunate, for it gives ammunition to Hornblower's detractors...
...Genetics teaches that environment influences heredity only through occasional mutations (most of them useless) and through natural selection, the statistically greater success and reproduction of the more fit...
...Mr...
...There was no possibility of her exchanging roles with the man...
...Everyone remembers Parkinson...
...Yet if it had been entitled, say, "Smythe's Rule," it would have been known only to cognoscenti of public administration...
...His art life was extremely limited and usually designed for the creation of things of an essentailly practical nature, ~uch as weapons or eating utensils...
...Medvedev shows the cost borne by men when truth is sacrificed to ideology...
...Parkinson notes, "'the turning point of Hornblower's career was the recapture of the Renown, or so it seemed to his contemporaries...
...The women were even more oppressed, consigned to the duties ot mating, bearing children and cleaning and cooking...
...Scientists who wished to study genetics were harrassed and forced to do their work on the sly...
...Forester's...
...The most fascinating new information is in the extraordinary letter that led to discovery of the papers...
...It might also be, though it is not, subtitled, "A Fresh Installment in Parkinson's Exploits...
...This is blatant mis-reading of history...
...He had no choice in his life's occupation but to follow in his ancestors' footsteps...
...Medvedev's point of view seems odd...
...14 The Alternative February, 1972 society by pitting man against man in the Hobbesian sense of "war of all against all...
...This produced the full-length biography, dedicated to Mr...
...Parkinson has discovered two boxes of Hornblower papers unknown to Mr...
...Fortunately, they do not have great political power, yet...
...Vavilov, a distinguished biologist and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, was arrested for his opposition to Lysenko's dogma and sentenced to ten years in prison...
...Medvedev's book opens with the words of N.I...
...One must have the fertile imagination of Rousseau to believe that the primitive savage in his forest was more free than the modern man...
...Naturally, if there are significant inherited differences between men, then the existence of poorer and richer classes will be partly due to differences in innate capabilities between men, rather than to exploitation" as defined by Marx...
...Others similarly imprisoned were Karpechenko, Levitsky, Govorov and Tulaikov...all of whom died while in prison...
...In fact, one of the reasons for Nikita K.'s dismissal was the state of Russian agriculture (especially the grain shortage of 1963), which in turn was partly caused by the crackpot schemes of Lysenko and his ilk...
...It's a pity that his history East and West is not as widely known as his Law, for it speaks to our day...
...Woman's liberation would have been incomprehensible in a society so restricted by nature to ageless patterns of life...
...Certainly, modern civilization offers more than this...
...The period of Stalinist terror is blandly referred to throughout as the era of "the personality cult...
...If we take this seriously, we must believe that according to Berman's thinking the present urban guerilla or Weatherman bomber would be the very model of an authentic man...
...His thesis is that east and west alternate in ascendancy over world civilization, each pushing back the other only to decay and retreat itself...
...During this period, an illeducated charlatan, T.D...
...Herrnstein in his classes at Harvard, they have called for his firing, picketed Atlantic Monthly and demanded that the magazine stop distributing the offending issue...
...Vavilov, "We shall go to the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not renounce our convictions...
...One hopes so, for there are several mysteries still to be cleared up...
...Parkinson, or so everyone wrongly understands, made his name famous by one great stroke of brilliance, which we know as Parkinson's Law...
...Librarians the world over, for example, persist in classifying Mr...
...Lerner, translater) Anchor Books, Doubleday, $2.50 W OULD YOU believe that for a quarter century, up to Khrushchev's dismissal in October 1964, the teaching of the principles of genetics was banned in Russia...
...Lysenko's theories were easily debunked in the West, but since all the Russian universities, research centers, newspapers, scientific journals and funds for research and teaching were under the control of the state, and since Lysenko had the backing of Stalin and later, Khrushchev, the Lysenkoists were able to hide their experimental failures and silence their opposition...
...That would be true, however, of half the men who enter the peerage...
...The new volume is of course the first complete biography of Lord Hornblower, whose sailing adventures against Napoleon were so well recounted by the late C.S...
...With this statement, Berman concludes with the most radical of all doctrines, that politics encompasses the totality of our lives, that nothing private remains...
...In the middle of all this prattle about equality, Berman introduces us to the most brazen elitism possible, revealing to us perhaps his secret desire to be part of that vanguard that would assume leadership of society...
...He is more outspoken in his criticism of Khrushchev than he is Stalin...
...The individual is felt to be more constricted in his freedom than ever before...
...Shortly thereafter, the great Russian biologist Rapoport was summoned by a party bureau and told to denounce the genetic theory of inheritance...
...If they had feared to take risks, if they had allowed obstacles to stand in their way, they would not have been fit to rule...
...tests...
...Naturally, one feared that the Hornblower chronicles would end with Mr...
...Mr...
...that whoever you are, or want to be...
...In the 1930s, Lysekno and others of his clique used pseudoscientific "experiments," coupled with political invectives against those who disagreed, t o consolidate their hold on Russian agribioiogy...
...Medvedev is the former head of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Institute of Medical Radiology at Obninsk...
...No matter how great his talent might be, he did not have the opportunity to become an executive, a jet pilot, a teacher or a poet...
...He was consigned by nature to perform the functions of a hunter or farmer...
...It is one more testimony to the power of a brilliantly contrived name...
...Lysenko by Zhores A. Medvedev (I.M...
...Forester's death...
...Such names have the advantages, but they can also be a burden...
...Not only have leftists harrassed Dr...
...Parkinson set out to write grand history, he was forced to specify that he was not in the least satirical...
...Chief among this is the mysterious absence of the present viscount Hornblower from Burke's Peerage and Landed Gentry," one of the standard lists of British nobility...
...But call it :'Parkkinson's Law" by C. Northcote Parkinson, and the phrase if not the formula will be known everywhere...
...Nothing would remain to restrain a man from expressing himself to the point of annihilating his fellow man...
...find a pigeon and bet he can't remember the law: 100 (2Kin § L) % X= YN Yes, that is Parkinson's Law, describing the growth rate of bureaucracies...
...Parkinson tells us of the existence of yet another box of Hornblower papers he has not yet tracked down, which suggests that other volumes may follow...
...Real reform is possible only if an intellectual and spiritual vanguard, who possess a higher form of consciousness,' can manipulate the oppressed but confused masses into action...
...Medvedev makes it quite clear that centralized state control of science was primarily responsible for the reign of Lysenkoism, and this may serve as a warning to those who have had few qualms about governmentsponsored research in the U.S...
...Douglas W. Cooper Douglas Cooper is a Ph.D...
...Herrnstein observes that the connection between I.Q., performance, success and inheritance might lead, in our meritocracy, to a hereditary elite...
...Also the single-mindedness and primitive energy portrayed by these same reports add to his observation that the east is rising, that the west has entered its time of decay...
...Forester...
...this may be because the material "dealing with Stalin was written earlier, when the country was even more repressive than it is now, or the downgrading of Khrushchev may reflect the party line...
...That is one of the many puzzles about The Life and Times of Horatio Hornolower, by C. Northcote Parkinson...
...Np, this isn't a quotation from Hitler or Lenin but from the pages of this book...
...The American government has less power over science than does the Russian government, and America has a greater dedication t o academic freedom, but there are American parallels, unfortunately...
...as Rapoport tried to defend genetics, he was countered with a quotation from comrade Molotov's recent speech...
...Either Medvedev is provincially patriotic about Mother Russia or he was careful not to be too The A l t e r n a t i v e F e b r u a r y , 1972 15 critical of the socialist state even in these writings which were smuggled out of the country...
...Lysenko, controlled the biological sciences to such an extent that some of his critics were jailed, others fired from their jobs and none allowed to publich material criticizing Lysenkoism, a fraudulent theory which did immense harm to Russian agriculture...
...The roots of self are dying, cries Berman still...
...Typical of the period is this vignette: In a speech for the 31st anniversm'y of the Russian revolution (1948), deputy premier Molotov praised, among other things Russian, Lysenko's achievements...
...Why do you think that Molotov knows genetics better than I?" he replied...
...Or would it be truer to say that his future was made by the death of Captain Sawyer...
...Thus, Berman offers us the new man as the model of authenticity, 1" homme revolte, "the man who gains his freedom and becomes himself by striving to both liberate himself and his fellowmen from a social system that alienates them all...
...A different sequence of events might have led me to the gallows instead of the House of Lords...
...Lysenkoism, or Michurinist biology," was a variant of Lamarck's disproven theory that acquired characteristics can be inherited...
...Sawyer was more than merely a lunatic, he was a danger to the service and a tyrant to his shipmates," Hornblower's letter says in defense...
...Certainly one of the arguments of this book is that the social and political trend of history has been a movement away from a primitive freedom toward a more restrictive, oppressive, subsequently inauthentic society...
...In the 100th anniversary letter, we learn that Horoblower had planned the meeting as a trap for the captain, had personally kicked him down the hatchway, and indeed ordered him put out of misery duringthe recapture...
...It should be clear by now," he writes, that the approach to modern society I have found in Montesquieu and Rousseau prefigures Marxism in many deep ways...
...The multiplicity of things to do, or not to do permits us all to express ourselves in more ways than ever imaginable to the simple savage...
...In the September {971 issue of Atlantic Mot~thly...
...Life was short and brutish, there was no time to think of liberation...
...Harvard Psychology Professor Richard J. Herrnstein published an article on the genetic influences on I.Q., documenting the conclusion that eighty per cent of the differences in I.Q...
...Shortly after World War II, scientists who had the knowledge and courage to oppose Lysenko tried to discredit his doctrines, but they were unsuccessful in the political maneuverings necessary to weaken Lysenko's grip on Soviet biology...
...In this book, therefore, we have all the ingredients of true radmalism: a call for revolution, an atomistic individualist doctrine, a hankering for the destruction of all presently existing social structures..'All these seekers after authenticity are just beginning to learn a fact of life which our first seekers always knew...
...A rather .melancholy view of our times is no bar to a lively joie de vivre, as Mr...
Vol. 5 • February 1972 • No. 5
