Word: lysenko
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...great disease of the 20th century was the politicization of life. The totalitarians, left and right, showed the way, politicizing everything: economics, education, art, religion, family life. Not even genetics could escape politics. One remembers with disbelief not just Hitler's eugenic lunacies but also Stalin's designation of Lysenko's crackpot genetics as official truth, enforced by secret police...
Earlier in this century, Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko severely damaged Soviet agriculture by forcing on his colleagues a pseudoscientific theory of heredity that was ideologically pleasing to the ruling Stalinists. Dissenters were dismissed, disgraced and even sent to the Gulags...
Right-wingers may be correct in claiming "a very significant victory." In a pale but disturbing analogue of the Lysenko affair, scientific judgments have been alloyed, if only slightly, with politico-religious dogma, creating / an unwelcome precedent for a nation that needs to stay even -- in some cases to catch up -- with its competitors. The camel's nose is now in the tent...
...arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for talks on Cambodia with Chinese Foreign Ministry officials. The governments are discussing an Australian proposal calling for the Vietnam-backed government in Phnom Penh to be replaced by an interim U.N. administration until free elections can be held, said Soviet Embassy spokesperson Yuri Lysenko...