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...
...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...
...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...
...A rather .melancholy view of our times is no bar to a lively joie de vivre, as Mr...
...Forester...
...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...
...It is one more testimony to the power of a brilliantly contrived name...
...That would be true, however, of half the men who enter the peerage...
...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...
...This is particularly unfortunate, for it gives ammunition to Hornblower's detractors...
...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...
...The roots of self are dying, cries Berman still...
...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 truth is the opposite: it is the" name that made the law famous...
...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...
...How happy it is, then, that Mr...
...Parkinson notes, "'the turning point of Hornblower's career was the recapture of the Renown, or so it seemed to his contemporaries...
...Parkinson shows...
...Forester's death...
...Parkinson set out to write grand history, he was forced to specify that he was not in the least satirical...
...Not only have leftists harrassed Dr...
...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...
...Forester, but an effort the latter "lacking this material would never have dared attempt...
...Forester's...
...This is easily proved...
...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...
...Rapoport was fired from his position, expelled from the Communist party, and forced to work as a laboratory assistant at a geological institute...
...Naturally, one feared that the Hornblower chronicles would end with Mr...
...between people of European ancestry are genetic rather than hereditary, and upholding the general validity of I.Q...
...14 The Alternative February, 1972 society by pitting man against man in the Hobbesian sense of "war of all against all...
...There was no possibility of her exchanging roles with the man...
...Librarians the world over, for example, persist in classifying Mr...
...Lysenko by Zhores A. Medvedev (I.M...
...Or would it be truer to say that his future was made by the death of Captain Sawyer...
...that whoever you are, or want to be...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Lysenkoism, or Michurinist biology," was a variant of Lamarck's disproven theory that acquired characteristics can be inherited...
...Everyone remembers Parkinson...
...Parkinson, or so everyone wrongly understands, made his name famous by one great stroke of brilliance, which we know as Parkinson's Law...
...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...
...tests...
...Now, unquestionably this was a stroke of brilliance...
...This produced the full-length biography, dedicated to Mr...
...In the September {971 issue of Atlantic Mot~thly...
...Shortly thereafter, the great Russian biologist Rapoport was summoned by a party bureau and told to denounce the genetic theory of inheritance...
...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...
...He was consigned by nature to perform the functions of a hunter or farmer...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Forester, and that the current viscount Hornblower has agreed to their release in honor of his illustrious ancestor...
...That cost is too high...
...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...
...W. Wesley McDonald Comrade Mountebank The Rise and Fall of T.D...
...Medvedev's book opens with the words of N.I...
...Why do you think that Molotov knows genetics better than I?" he replied...
...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...
...Woman's liberation would have been incomprehensible in a society so restricted by nature to ageless patterns of life...
...He is more outspoken in his criticism of Khrushchev than he is Stalin...
...His thesis is that east and west alternate in ascendancy over world civilization, each pushing back the other only to decay and retreat itself...
...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...
...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...
...Those who disagreed with Lysenko's neo-Lamarckism were labelled 'bourgeois biologists" and enemies of the people...
...Medvedev is the former head of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Institute of Medical Radiology at Obninsk...
...What Montesquieu and Rousseau lack is proper revolutionary impulses, Berman adds...
...But call it :'Parkkinson's Law" by C. Northcote Parkinson, and the phrase if not the formula will be known everywhere...
...It's a pity that his history East and West is not as widely known as his Law, for it speaks to our day...
...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...
...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...
...Parkinson has discovered two boxes of Hornblower papers unknown to Mr...
...candidate at Harvard University, former editor of Counterpoint magazine, and an as socmte editor of The Alternative...
...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...
...Only drastic social reform can save us...
...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...
...Certainly, modern civilization offers more than this...
...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...
...One does not ask impertinent questions...
...Yet if it had been entitled, say, "Smythe's Rule," it would have been known only to cognoscenti of public administration...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...Medvedev's point of view seems odd...
...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...
...Douglas W. Cooper Douglas Cooper is a Ph.D...
...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...
...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...
...the writing is a bit choppy, but compensated for by the wealth of details given by the author...
...This is blatant mis-reading of history...
...Fortunately, they do not have great political power, yet...
...Mr...
...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...
...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...
...Herrnstein observes that the connection between I.Q., performance, success and inheritance might lead, in our meritocracy, to a hereditary elite...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...A different sequence of events might have led me to the gallows instead of the House of Lords...
...Np, this isn't a quotation from Hitler or Lenin but from the pages of this book...
...That is one of the many puzzles about The Life and Times of Horatio Hornolower, by C. Northcote Parkinson...
...He had no choice in his life's occupation but to follow in his ancestors' footsteps...
...Renown...
...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...
...The individual is felt to be more constricted in his freedom than ever before...
...he died there a year later, in 1943...
...The women were even more oppressed, consigned to the duties ot mating, bearing children and cleaning and cooking...
...Vavilov, "We shall go to the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not renounce our convictions...
...Mr...
...One must have the fertile imagination of Rousseau to believe that the primitive savage in his forest was more free than the modern man...
...Nothing would remain to restrain a man from expressing himself to the point of annihilating his fellow man...
...as Rapoport tried to defend genetics, he was countered with a quotation from comrade Molotov's recent speech...
...In any event, his twelve volumes had pretty well blocked out Hornblower's rise from an orphan to Admiral and Lord...
...With this statement, Berman concludes with the most radical of all doctrines, that politics encompasses the totality of our lives, that nothing private remains...
...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...
...The period of Stalinist terror is blandly referred to throughout as the era of "the personality cult...
...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...
...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...
...During this period, an illeducated charlatan, T.D...
...Part of this'book was distributed hand-to-hand during the postwar attempts to discredit Lysenkoism...
...Life was short and brutish, there was no time to think of liberation...
...Such names have the advantages, but they can also be a burden...
...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...
...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...
...you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you...
...And, as Mr...
...Scientists who wished to study genetics were harrassed and forced to do their work on the sly...
...So when Mr...
...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...
...Medvedev shows the cost borne by men when truth is sacrificed to ideology...
...One hopes so, for there are several mysteries still to be cleared up...
...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...
Vol. 5 • February 1972 • No. 5
