Abstract

In 1948, at the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences conference held in Moscow, T. D. Lysenko announced that the Central Committee of the Communist Party had examined his theory and approved it. There followed a series of confessions of ideological error by many of the attending scientists (Lysenko, T. D., 1949. The Situation in Biological Science. Proc. Lenin Acad. Agric. Sci. U.S.S.R., July 31–Aug. 7, 1948, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow). Another aftermath was the adoption of Lysenko's theories by the Gamaleia Institute of Epidemiology & Microbiology whose workers set out “to find whether directed variations can in principle be made to occur, in order to obtain avirulent strains having immunizing ability.” Consideration of this intention should give some idea of the objectivity involved in these investigations but, nonetheless, directed variations were sure enough directed, unless, of course, the facts reported are simply red herrings drawn across the path of Western Science.