There were two branches of science that were fiercely condemned in the USSR, cybernetics and genetics. Stalin’s favorite biologist Trofim Lysenko persecuted Soviet geneticists, putting many of them to death or sending them to concentration camps.
Lysenko believed a variety of really bizarre things. One of the weirdest among them was his insistence that one species can spontaneously produce a completely different species. If you leave a pile of dirty laundry lying in a basket, the laundry might give birth to mice. Mind you, the idea wasn’t that the mice would get attracted to the dirty laundry and come to live in it from outside the basket. No, the belief was that the laundry would spawn the mice. According to this theory, wheat and rye gave birth to weeds. And a pine-tree could give birth to an apple-tree branch if it felt like doing so. This process was given the name of “a dialectical jump.”
Yes, this was the kind of scholarship the USSR produced in the 1940s-1950s. Soviet biologists would visit international conferences and cringe with shame while delivering these Medieval “discoveries” about bedclothes producing mice and wheat giving birth to weeds. Imagine how the scholars felt reciting this sort of thing in front of their more enlightened colleagues from other countries. They had to do it, though, to save their lives.*
Lysenko, however, was not as simple as he sounds. He also believed that genetically modified foods were inherently dangerous and that the early promise of GM could lead to unexpected and tragic results in the future. He believed that nature had to be studied and treated with respect and care. He passionately rejected the idea that nature existed solely so that human beings could use it for their own benefit. He warned that we would one day be very sorry for our uncontrollable exploitation of nature’s resources.
Everybody laughed at his suggestion that our planet is a single organism, whose every part was interacting with other parts, and that you can’t sacrifice one species without damaging other species. Everybody laughed when Lysenko said we cannot exploit nature without facing serious consequences as a result. These ideas seemed as funny as his belief in mice-producing bed sheets. They don’t seem as funny any more, do they?
* There is a beautiful novel called White Garments by Vladimir Dudintsev that tells about this in detail. I highly recommend it because it is amazing.
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