Must read!-----When the Soviet Union Chose the Wrong Side on Genetics and Evolution | Science| Smithsonian Magazine

When the Soviet Union Chose the Wrong Side on Genetics and Evolution | Science| Smithsonian Magazine

• "Science cannot long remain unfettered in a social system which seeks to exercise control over the whole spiritual and intellectual life of a nation. The correctness of a scientific theory can never by adjudged by its readiness to give the answers desired by political leadership". --Charles A. Leone, "Lysenko versus Mendel," Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, 1952.

Whenever I hear that some political figure has attempted to legislate science to suit the convenience of their political beliefs—and this happens fairly frequently, even here in the United States—I think back to biology class and the story of Trofim Lysenko in the early years of the Soviet Union.

Lysenko, Joseph Stalin's director of biology, was head of a group of animal and plant breeders who rejected the science of genetics...
Michurinist biology, which later morphed into Lysenkoism, was convenient for a Soviet government trying to engineer the perfect social utopia. Under this system, they thought they could quickly force plants and animals, even the Soviet people, into forms that could serve practical requirements...

Lysenko came to dominate Soviet biology with a 1948 speech—prepared in part by Stalin himself—in which Lysenko denounced Mendel and declared proponents of such science to be enemies of the people. Scientists who disagreed with Lysenko's theories were purged—some were sent to the gulags while others simply disappeared..."