“Soviet Genetics: the Real Issue”

Abstract

No one disputes the recent rise in agricultural production in the Soviet Union. Prof. E. Ashby, in a recent broadcast (Listener, March 30, 1950), has directed attention to it, and to the fact that productivity “has even approached the yields reported for similar climates in Western countries”. While, however, Dr. Marchlewski asserts that this is due to the application of “new biological theory” (presumably including new genetic theory), Ashby concludes that it was the result of the application of common sense and some very elementary practical measures, none of them involving genetics, to an extremely backward condition of agricultural practice. And he stresses that, to achieve this result, Lysenko was indispensable.