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The Lysenko Affair
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Book Synopsis The Lysenko Affair by : David Joravsky
Download or read book The Lysenko Affair written by David Joravsky and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2010-12-15 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Lysenko affair was perhaps the most bizarre chapter in the history of modern science. For thirty years, until 1965, Soviet genetics was dominated by a fanatical agronomist who achieved dictatorial power over genetics and plant science as well as agronomy. "A standard source both for Soviet specialists and for sociologists of science."—American Journal of Sociology "Joravsky has produced . . . the most detailed and authoritative treatment of Lysenko and his view on genetics."—New York Times Book Review
Download or read book Lysenko’s Ghost written by Loren Graham and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-04-11 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lysenko became one of the most notorious figures in twentieth-century science after his genetic theories were discredited decades ago. Yet some scientists now claim that discoveries in epigenetics prove that he was right after all. Loren Graham reopens the case, to determine whether new developments in molecular biology validate Lysenko’s claims.
Book Synopsis The Lysenko Controversy as a Global Phenomenon by : William DeJong-Lambert
Download or read book The Lysenko Controversy as a Global Phenomenon written by William DeJong-Lambert and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research by : William deJong-Lambert
Download or read book The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research written by William deJong-Lambert and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-02-10 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book uses the reaction of a number of biologists in the United States and Great Britain to provide an overview of one of the most important controversies in Twentieth Century biology, the “Lysenko Affair.” The book is written for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of history/history of science. It covers a number of topics which are relevant to understanding the sources and dimensions of the Lysenko controversy, including the interwar eugenics movement, the Scopes Trial, the popularity of Lamarckism as a theory of heredity prior to the synthesis of genetics and Natural Selection, and the Cold War. The book focuses particularly on portrayals—both positive and negative—of Lysenko in the popular press in the U.S. and Europe, and thus by extension the relationship between scientists and society. Because the Lysenko controversy attracted a high level of interest among the lay community, it constitutes a useful historical example to consider in context with current topics that have received a similar level of attention, such as Intelligent Design or Climate Change.
Book Synopsis The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov by : Peter Pringle
Download or read book The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov written by Peter Pringle and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-05-13 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, acclaimed journalist and author Peter Pringle recreates the extraordinary life and tragic end of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century. In a drama of love, revolution, and war that rivals Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Pringle tells the story of a young Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who had a dream of ending hunger and famine in the world. Vavilov's plan would use the emerging science of genetics to breed super plants that could grow anywhere, in any climate, in sandy deserts and freezing tundra, in drought and flood. He would launch botanical expeditions to find these vanishing genes, overlooked by early farmers ignorant of Mendel's laws of heredity. He called it a "mission for all humanity." To the leaders of the young Soviet state, Vavilov's dream fitted perfectly into their larger scheme for a socialist utopia. Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, a handsome and seductive young professor, as he became an Indiana Jones, hunting lost botanical treasures on five continents. In a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, Vavilov built the world's first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that was the envy of scientists everywhere and remains so today. But when Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov's dream turned into a nightmare. This son of science was from a bourgeois background, the class of society most despised and distrusted by the Bolsheviks. The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin's dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage. Stalin's collectivization of farmland caused chaos in Soviet food production, and millions died in widespread famine. Vavilov's master plan for improving Soviet crops was designed to work over decades, not a few years, and he could not meet Stalin's impossible demands for immediate results. In Stalin's Terror of the 1930s, Russian geneticists were systematically repressed in favor of the peasant horticulturalist Trofim Lysenko, with his fraudulent claims and speculative theories. Vavilov was the most famous victim of this purge, which set back Russian biology by a generation and caused the country untold harm. He was sentenced to death, but unlike Galileo, he refused to recant his beliefs and, in the most cruel twist, this humanitarian pioneer scientist was starved to death in the gulag. Pringle uses newly opened Soviet archives, including Vavilov's secret police file, official correspondence, vivid expedition reports, previously unpublished family letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to bring us this intensely human story of a brilliant life cut short by anti-science demagogues, ideology, censorship, and political expedience.
Book Synopsis Science in Russia and the Soviet Union by : Loren R. Graham
Download or read book Science in Russia and the Soviet Union written by Loren R. Graham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the 1980s the Soviet scientific establishment had become the largest in the world, but very little of its history was known in the West. What has been needed for many years in order to fill that gap in our knowledge is a history of Russian and Soviet science written for the educated person who would like to read one book on the subject. This book has been written for that reader. The history of Russian and Soviet science is a story of remarkable achievements and frustrating failures. That history is presented here in a comprehensive form, and explained in terms of its social and political context. Major sections include the tsarist period, the impact of the Russian Revolution, the relationship between science and Soviet society, and the strengths and weaknesses of individual scientific disciplines. The book also discusses the changes brought to science in Russia and other republics by the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Book Synopsis The Vavilov Affair by : Mark Aleksandrovich Popovskiĭ
Download or read book The Vavilov Affair written by Mark Aleksandrovich Popovskiĭ and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Stalin and the Scientists by : Simon Ings
Download or read book Stalin and the Scientists written by Simon Ings and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One of the finest, most gripping surveys of the history of Russian science in the twentieth century.” —Douglas Smith, author of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Stalin and the Scientists tells the story of the many gifted scientists who worked in Russia from the years leading up to the revolution through the death of the “Great Scientist” himself, Joseph Stalin. It weaves together the stories of scientists, politicians, and ideologues into an intimate and sometimes horrifying portrait of a state determined to remake the world. They often wreaked great harm. Stalin was himself an amateur botanist, and by falling under the sway of dangerous charlatans like Trofim Lysenko (who denied the existence of genes), and by relying on antiquated ideas of biology, he not only destroyed the lives of hundreds of brilliant scientists, he caused the death of millions through famine. But from atomic physics to management theory, and from radiation biology to neuroscience and psychology, these Soviet experts also made breakthroughs that forever changed agriculture, education, and medicine. A masterful book that deepens our understanding of Russian history, Stalin and the Scientists is a great achievement of research and storytelling, and a gripping look at what happens when science falls prey to politics. Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction in 2016 A New York Times Book Review “Paperback Row” selection “Ings’s research is impressive and his exposition of the science is lucid . . . Filled with priceless nuggets and a cast of frauds, crackpots and tyrants, this is a lively and interesting book, and utterly relevant today.” —The New York Times Book Review “A must read for understanding how the ideas of scientific knowledge and technology were distorted and subverted for decades across the Soviet Union.” —The Washington Post
Book Synopsis The Pseudoscience Wars by : Michael D. Gordin
Download or read book The Pseudoscience Wars written by Michael D. Gordin and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Properly analyzed, the collective mythological and religious writings of humanity reveal that around 1500 BC, a comet swept perilously close to Earth, triggering widespread natural disasters and threatening the destruction of all life before settling into solar orbit as Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor. Sound implausible? Well, from 1950 until the late 1970s, a huge number of people begged to differ, as they devoured Immanuel Velikovsky’s major best-seller, Worlds in Collision, insisting that perhaps this polymathic thinker held the key to a new science and a new history. Scientists, on the other hand, assaulted Velikovsky’s book, his followers, and his press mercilessly from the get-go. In The Pseudoscience Wars, Michael D. Gordin resurrects the largely forgotten figure of Velikovsky and uses his strange career and surprisingly influential writings to explore the changing definitions of the line that separates legitimate scientific inquiry from what is deemed bunk, and to show how vital this question remains to us today. Drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material from Velikovsky’s personal archives, Gordin presents a behind-the-scenes history of the writer’s career, from his initial burst of success through his growing influence on the counterculture, heated public battles with such luminaries as Carl Sagan, and eventual eclipse. Along the way, he offers fascinating glimpses into the histories and effects of other fringe doctrines, including creationism, Lysenkoism, parapsychology, and more—all of which have surprising connections to Velikovsky’s theories. Science today is hardly universally secure, and scientists seem themselves beset by critics, denialists, and those they label “pseudoscientists”—as seen all too clearly in battles over evolution and climate change. The Pseudoscience Wars simultaneously reveals the surprising Cold War roots of our contemporary dilemma and points readers to a different approach to drawing the line between knowledge and nonsense.
Book Synopsis Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science by : Valerii Soifer
Download or read book Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science written by Valerii Soifer and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Dr. Soyfer, a former Soviet scientist who had met Lysenko, documents the destruction of science and scientists under the influence of Lysenko. Contrary to numerous opinions, Lysenko was an poorly educated agronomist who happened to have been in the right place at the right time: In the '30s, "Pravda" wrote him up as a pioneering scientist. Recognizing that newspapers and popular support could fuel his rise to the top of Soviet society, he set about making a name for himself as a scientist in non-academic journals and periodicals. His peasant upbringing and miraculous findings--never empirically proven or duplicated--made him a star proletarian scientist, the kind needed to bring about true Communism. Along his way to the top, he was assisted by many people who thought him a sincere, but ill preparted, scientist; he later had many of these people purged after gaining the almost total support of Stalin and Khrushchev. His grand claims of producing superior cattle and wheat, among other things, consistently failed, yet no one dared oppose or even question his policies. Whether to propel himself upward, bring down the academics he apparently detested, or protect himself and his "science", Lysenko nearly eliminated all serious work in genetics, agriculture, and biology from the '30s into the '60s. Numerous scientists were exiled, fired, or executed during his reign as the people's scientist; according to the author, the effects still linger in Russia. An amazing story of how, when politics decrees what science is acceptable and how it is going to work in the political paradigm, the results can be tragic.
Book Synopsis Of Flies, Mice, and Men by : François Jacob
Download or read book Of Flies, Mice, and Men written by François Jacob and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Tells the story of how the marvelous discoveries of molecular and developmental biology are transforming our understanding of who we are and where we came from. Jacob scrutinizes the place of the scientist in society". -- Jacket.
Book Synopsis Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars by : Ethan Pollock
Download or read book Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars written by Ethan Pollock and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: Stalin, science, and politics after the Second World War -- "A Marxist should not write like that": the crisis on the "philosophical front" -- "The future belongs to Michurin": the agricultural academy session of 1948 -- "We can always shoot them later": physics, politics, and the atomic bomb -- "Battles of opinions and open criticism": Stalin intervenes in linguistics -- "Attack the detractors with certainty of total success": the Pavlov session of 1950 -- "Everyone is waiting": Stalin and the economic problems of communism -- Conclusion: science and the fate of the Stalinist system.
Book Synopsis Stalinist Science by : Nikolai Krementsov
Download or read book Stalinist Science written by Nikolai Krementsov and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1996-11-25 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some scholars have viewed the Soviet state and science as two monolithic entities--with bureaucrats as oppressors, and scientists as defenders of intellectual autonomy. Based on previously unknown documents from the archives of state and Communist Party agencies and of numerous scientific institutions, Stalinist Science shows that this picture is oversimplified. Even the reinstated Science Department within the Central Committee was staffed by a leading geneticist and others sympathetic to conventional science. In fact, a symbiosis of state bureaucrats and scientists established a much more terrifying system of control over the scientific community than any critic of Soviet totalitarianism had feared. Some scientists, on the other hand, developed more elaborate devices to avoid and exploit this control system than any advocate of academic freedom could have reasonably hoped. Nikolai Krementsov argues that the model of Stalinist science, already taking hold during the thirties, was reversed by the need for inter-Allied cooperation during World War II. Science, as a tool for winning the war and as a diplomatic and propaganda instrument, began to enjoy higher status, better funding, and relative autonomy. Even the reinstated Science Department within the Central Committee was staffed by a leading geneticist and others sympathetic to conventional science. However, the onset of the Cold War led to a campaign for eliminating such servility to the West. Then the Western links that had benefited genetics and other sciences during the war and through 1946 became a liability, and were used by Lysenko and others to turn back to the repressive past and to delegitimate whole research directions.
Download or read book Agrobiology written by Trofim Lysenko and published by . This book was released on 1954 with total page 658 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theoretical principles of vernalization; Plant breeding and the theory of phasic development of plants; The reorganization of seed growing; The intravarietal crossing of self-pollinating plants; Two trends in genetics; Collective-farm laboratories and agronomic science; Intravarietal crossing and mendel's so-called "law" of segregation; The creator of soviet agrobiology (On the occasion of the fourth anniversary of the death of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin); Michurin's theory at the all-union agricultural exhibition; Ways of controlling plant organisms; New achievements in controlling the nature of plants; Organism and environment; Engels and certain problems of darwinism; What is michurin genetics?; K. A. Timiryazev and the tasks of our agrobiology; Hered ity and its variability; Natural selection and intraspecific competition; Genetics; The tasks of the lenin academy of agricultural sciences of the U.S.S.R.; Why bourgeois science is up in arms against the works of soviet scientists; The situation in biological science; Experimental hill sowing of forest belts; New developments in the science of biological species; Vitality of plant and animal organisms; The conversion of nonwintering spring varieties into winterhardy winter varieties.
Book Synopsis The Unique U.S.-Russian Relationship in Biological Science and Biotechnology by : Russian Academy of Sciences
Download or read book The Unique U.S.-Russian Relationship in Biological Science and Biotechnology written by Russian Academy of Sciences and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2013-04-14 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fall of 2010, the U.S. National Academies (consisting of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine) and the Russian Academy of Sciences (in cooperation with the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences and the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences) initiated a joint study of U.S.-Russian bilateral engagement in the biological sciences and biotechnology (hereinafter collectively referred to as bioengagement). The U.S. Department of State and the Russian Academy of Sciences provided support for the study. The academies established a joint committee of 12 leading scientists from the two countries to assess bioengagement activities since 1996 and to provide recommendations as to collaborative efforts in the near future. The Unique U.S.-Russian Relationship in Biological Science and Biotechnology: Recent Experience and Future Directions summarizes the principal conclusions and recommendations of the study.
Book Synopsis A Dominant Character by : Samanth Subramanian
Download or read book A Dominant Character written by Samanth Subramanian and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J.B.S. Haldane, scientist extraordinaire—born in Britain yet spiritually bound to India—remains one of the most enigmatic geniuses of the modern era. Here is a man who saw action in two world wars, engaged in the most radical politics of his day, conducted groundbreaking scientific research, and wrote with flair and conviction—yet Haldane’s universe remains shrouded in mystery. Award-winning author Samanth Subramanian’s latest offering undoes this travesty. Besides shedding light on Haldane’s contributions to genetics and evolutionary biology—he was the first to calculate the rate at which mutations occur and accumulate in genes—the book illuminates Haldane’s inner world—his towering intellect, his radical vision of society, his provocative philosophy, and his attempts a wrestling with the essential moral questions that scientific progress must raise. Equally, the book dwells on Haldane’s years in India—his journey to the nation; his affiliation with the Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta; his attachment to the Genetics and Biometry Laboratory in Bhubaneshwar (where he died). Dronamraju’s description of Haldane as ‘the last man who knew everything’ was, at its simplest, an acknowledgement of his command over multiple subjects. But it was also an astute observation that Haldane’s era was the last time when the realms of scientific knowledge were limited enough for a single person to apprehend in near-entirety. To know everything was to see the forces of the world unified and to conceive of life in its full complexity. A Dominant Character will give readers a taste of that heady sensation.
Book Synopsis Science and Ideology by : Mark Walker
Download or read book Science and Ideology written by Mark Walker and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does science work best in a democracy? Were 'Soviet' or 'Nazi' science fundamentally different from science in the USA? These questions have been passionately debated in the recent past. Particular developments in science took place under particular political regimes, but they may or may not have been directly determined by them. Science and Ideology brings together a number of comparative case studies to examine the relationship between science and the dominant ideology of a state. Cybernetics in the USA is compared to France and the Soviet Union. Postwar Allied science policy in occupied Germany is juxtaposed to that in Japan. The essays are narrowly focussed, yet cover a wide range of countries and ideologies. The collection provides a unique comparative history of scientific policies and practices in the 20th century.
