Abstract
IN his presidential address to the Royal Society, delivered on November 30 (see p. 872), Sir Robert Robinson refers to the restrictions which have been placed on biological teaching and research in the U.S.S.R. Also simultaneously, his predecessor in the presidential chair of the Royal Society, Sir Henry Dale, has resigned his honorary membership of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., because, as he says in a letter to the president of that Academy, "I believe that I should do a dis-service even to my scientific colleagues in the U.S.S.R. if I were to retain an association in which I might appear to condone the actions by which your Academy, under whatever compulsion, is now responsible for such a terrible injury to the freedom and the integrity of Science". In his announcement of his resignation, Sir Henry recalls that his election took place while he was president of the Royal Society, and that it was widely welcomed among British scientific men "as the symbol of a community of purpose between the scientists of our two nations ... in defending, as we believed, the freedom of Science, as of all man's proper activities, from the threat of an aggressive tyranny". He points out that in the same year, 1942, N. I- Vavilov was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in recognition of his contribution, by research in the U.S.S.R., to advances in genetics. But Vavilov had fallen into disfavour, and even now the Royal Society does not know whether he was alive at the time of his election to foreign membership. "More recent events, of which full reports have come to hand, have made it clear what has happened. The late N. I. Vavilov had been replaced by T. D. Lysenko, the advocate of a doctrine of evolution which, in effect, denies all the progress made by research in that field since Lamarck's speculations appeared early in the nineteenth century. Though Darwin's work is still formally acknowledged in the U.S.S.R., his essential discovery is now to be rejected there. The whole great fabric of exact knowledge, still growing at the hands of those who have followed Mendel, Bateson and Morgan, is to be repudiated and denounced; and the last few, who were still contributing to it in the U.S.S.R., have now been deprived of position and opportunity. This is not the result of an honest and open conflict of scientific opinions; Lysenko's own claim and statements make it clear that his dogma has been established and enforced by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, as conforming to the political philosophy of Marx and Lenin. ... It remains to be seen whether such compliance with dogma is to be exacted in other departments of Science. So far as we know only that of the genetics encouraged by Lenin is now prohibited as alien to his political philosophy."
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Science in the U.S.S.R. Nature 162, 882 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/162882a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/162882a0