Stalin’s War on Genetics
· 38 min · S6 E20
Episode Stalin’s War on Genetics
October 11, 1955. Nearly three hundred of the Soviet Union’s top scientists sign a secret letter demanding the removal of one man: Trofim Lysenko. For decades, Lysenko had Joseph Stalin’s ear, ruling Soviet biology with an iron fist—banning genetics, rewriting textbooks, and sending dissenting scientists to prison or worse.
How did a peasant-turned-agronomist convince Stalin that wheat could turn into rye, and that ideology mattered more than evidence? And when politics replace science, what—and who—gets destroyed?
Special thanks to William deJong-Lambert, author of The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research: An Introduction to the Lysenko Affair; and Nikolai Krementsov, author of Stalinist Science.
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Links in the notes 4
- https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-cold-war-politics-of-genetic-research-an-introduction-to-the-lysenko-affair-william-dejong-lambert/505cdcc5ef3ec758?ean=9789400728394&next=t&next=t
- https://press.princeton.edu/books/ebook/9781400822140/stalinist-science-pdf?srsltid=AfmBOoq4gdcDiCuFOfq-sC9HhXPAe8u0_BM9JckN7w_iPVsVMm3M3lTb
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