What does it mean to go public? The American response to Lysenkoism, reconsidered

Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences

Volumn 40, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 48-78

  Wolfe, Audra J ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Cold War; Commemoration; Genetics; Mendel; Science and politics; Science and the media; Scientific activism; Trofim Lysenko

Indexed keywords

ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; GENETICS; GOVERNMENT; HEALTH CARE ORGANIZATION; HISTORY; LABORATORY PERSONNEL; LEGAL ASPECT; MASS MEDIUM; ORGANIZATION; PERSONNEL; POLICY; POLITICS; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PUBLIC OPINION; PUBLIC RELATIONS; REVIEW; SCIENCE; UNITED STATES;

ANNIVERSARIES AND SPECIAL EVENTS; GENETICS; GOVERNMENT PROGRAMS; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; LABORATORY PERSONNEL; MASS MEDIA; ORGANIZATIONS; POLITICS; PUBLIC OPINION; PUBLIC POLICY; PUBLIC RELATIONS; RESEARCH PERSONNEL; SCIENCE; SOCIETIES, SCIENTIFIC; UNITED STATES;

EID: 77950745067     PISSN: 19391811     EISSN: 1939182X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/hsns.2010.40.1.48     Document Type: Review

References (70)

1. Most early histories of the Lysenko affair, some written by participants, proclaim the view that ideology had replaced rational science. The classic early accounts are Z. A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, trans. I. Michael Lerner (New York: Anchor Books, 1971)
2. and David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970)
3. Although written after the end of the Cold War, Valery N. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, trans. Leo Gruliow and Rebecca Gruliow (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994) takes a similar point of view
4. In addition, see Mark B. Adams, "Genetics and the Soviet Scientific Community, 1948-1965 (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1972)
5. Loren Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Knopf, 1972)
6. and Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997)
7. As to the question of whether there was room for genuine scientific disagreement with regard to Lysenko's theories, see Nils Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2005)
8. Specific discussions of the American geneticists' campaign can be found in Krementsov, "A 'Second Front' in Soviet Genetics: The International Dimension of the Lysenko Controversy, 1944-1947," JHB 29 (1996): 226-50
9. and Jan Sapp, Beyond the Gene: Cytoplasmic Inheritance and the Struggle for Authority in Genetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 168-80
10. For discussions of the British response, see Oren Solomon Harman, "C. D. Darlington and the British and American Reaction to Lysenko and the Soviet Conception of Science," JHB 36 (2003): 309-52
11. and Diane Paul, "A War on Two Fronts: J. B. S. Haldane and the Response to Lysenkoism in Britain," JHB 16 (1983): 1-37
12. Obviously, there were many individual exceptions to the collective scientific turn away from true public engagement during the postwar period. My analysis owes much to Jessica Wang's discussions of the actions of physical scientists in the immediate postwar years. See Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999)
13. and Jessica Wang, "Scientists and the Problem of the Public in Cold War America," Osiris, 2nd ser., 17 (2002): 323-47
14. Kelly Moore's Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008) offers counterexamples of scientists who chose to engage the public in ongoing discussions about science and militarism throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s
15. This basic point has become commonplace in analyses of Cold War science. See especially Paul Boyer, By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985)
16. Gregg Herken, Cardinal Choices: Presidential Science Advising from the Atomic Bomb to SDI, rev. ed. (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000)
17. Daniel J. Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (New York: Vintage, 1979)
18. Charles Thorpe, Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006)
19. and Wang, American Science (ref. 2)
20. Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990)
21. David A. Hollinger, "The Defense of Democracy and Robert K. Merton's Formulation of the Scientific Ethos," Knowledge and Society 4 (1983): 1-15
22. Thorpe, Oppenheimer (ref. 3)
23. and Charles Thorpe, "Disciplining Experts: Scientific Authority and Liberal Democracy in the Oppenheimer Case," Social Studies of Science 32 (2002): 525-62
24. Wang, "Problem of the Public" (ref. 2)
25. Moore, Disrupting Science (ref. 2)
26. The cultural authority of science and medicine is a concept that underlies most work by historians of American science and medicine today. For works that specifically address this issue, see Ronald G. Walters, ed., Scientific Authority and Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
27. Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
28. Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic Books, 1982)
29. Dobzhansky to Dunn, 4 Jul 1945, LCD. Historians now believe that Vavilov died on January 23, 1943; Karpechenko on July 28, 1941; and Levisky on May 20, 1942. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy (ref. 1), 357-58
30. For additional biographical information on Dunn, see Melinda Gormley, "Scientific Discrimination and the Activist Scientist: L. C. Dunn and the Professionalization of Genetics and Human Genetics in the United States," JHB 42 (2009): 33-72. Gormley skirts the question of whether Dunn was a member of the American Communist Party
31. In the late 1930s, Dunn was a member of the Executive Committee of the American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom, an organization accused of being a Communist front by the prominent liberal anti-Communist Sidney Hook in his memoir, Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the 20th Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 249. Gormley describes Dunn (using Dunn's own language) as a Fabian Socialist. His American contemporaries would have characterized him as a Popular Front liberal or liberal anti-Fascist
32. Dobzhansky to Dunn, 31 Jul 1945, LCD. The work was published as T. D. Lysenko, Heredity and Its Variability, trans. Th. Dobzhansky (New York: King's Crown Press, 1946)
33. Muller et al. to J. B. S. Haldane, 7 Apr 1946, HJM. For an insightful discussion of Haldane's position on Lysenkoism vis-à-vis his role in the Communist Party, see Paul, "War on Two Fronts" (ref. 1)
34. L. C. Dunn, "Review of Heredity and Its Variability," Science 103 (1946): 180-81
35. Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Review of Heredity and Its Variability," Journal of Heredity 37 (1946): 5-9. Oddly, no one seems to have objected to the obvious conflict of interest of having the translator and sponsor of the book write its reviews
36. Stadler to Dunn, 28 Nov 1945, LCD, Folder Lysenko Controversy in the U.S. #2. The State Department refused to grant Stadler a passport to attend the International Congress of Genetics in Stockholm in 1947 on the basis of his involvement with the American Committee to Save Refugees. If Stadler really was a Communist, he may not have felt free to criticize Lysenko's views in a public forum. For more on the Stadler controversy, see the Stadler folder in the Correspondence Series, HJM. For Haldane's terse refusal, see Haldane to H. J. Muller et al., 15 May 1946, HJM
37. L. C. Dunn to the Editor of Science, 15 Jan 1946, LCD, Folder Lysenko Controversy in the U.S. #2
38. Robert Simpson, "Science, Totalitarian Model," SRL, 9 Mar 1946, 28-32
39. L. C. Dunn to the Editor of the SRL, 11 Mar 1946, LCD, Folder Lysenko Controversy in the U.S. #2. Dunn's letter was published in the March 30, 1946 issue
40. Robert Simpson, "Response to L. C. Dunn's letter to the Editor," SRL, 30 Mar 1946, 29-30
41. Krementsov has examined the American geneticists' 1946 campaign in light of Soviet Westernization. He suggests that Lysenko's triumph in 1948 had more to do with Soviet isolationism and nationalism than any true belief in Lysenko's theories. Krementsov, "Second Front" (ref. 1)
42. For good documentary histories of these events, see "The History of the Genetics Conflict," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 5, no. 5 (1949): 131-40
43. and Conway Zirkle, ed., Death of a Science in Russia: The Fate of Genetics as Described in Pravda and Elsewhere (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949)
44. The standard biography of Muller is Elof Alex Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society: The Life and Work of H. J. Muller (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)
45. A concise discussion of his changing political views can be found in Diane B. Paul, "H. J. Muller, Communism, and the Cold War," Genetics 119 (1988): 223-25. Muller's involvement with liberal anti-Communist New York intellectuals is rarely commented upon but is evident in his correspondence and professional memberships
46. E. G. Butler, T. C. Byerly, F. P. Cullinan, W. O. Fenn, and R. E. Cleland, "A Statement of the Governing Board of the AIBS," Science 110 (1949): 124-25
47. Sapp, Beyond the Gene (ref. 1), 168-80, discusses American geneticists' fears that any action or statement that could be interpreted as establishing a scientific dogma might be used by Lysenko's allies as evidence that Western science was based on ideological principles rather than the scientific method
48. H. J. Muller, "The Destruction of Science in the USSR," SRL, 4 Dec 1948, 13-15, 63-65, quotes on 13, 13, 13, 14, and 65
49. H. J. Muller, "Back to Barbarism - Scientifically," SRL, 11 Dec 1948, 8-10, quotes on 8 and 9
50. H. J. Muller, "It Still Isn't a Science," SRL, 16 Apr 1949, 11-12, 61
51. and George Bernard Shaw, "Behind the Lysenko Controversy," SRL, 16 Apr 1949, 10-11
52. For the origins and development of Science Service and its role as a public relations agency for the scientific community, see Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, Science on the Air: Popularizers and Personalities on Radio and Early Television (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), particularly chap. 3, "Syndicating Science."
53. and Carlson, Genes, Radiation, and Society (ref. 33), 330-32, discuss the Spitzer case as one of the major obstacles to the committee's success, I found very little mention of this issue in the GSA's papers. Muller mentioned his displeasure at an American Federation of Scientists editorial in a letter to Leo Szilard, and Glass alluded to it in the committee's first report, but its main importance seems to have been in distracting the committee members from overcoming opposition within the GSA. See Muller to Szilard, 21 Jul 1949, HJM
54. and Robert C. Cook, Theodosius Dobzhansky, H. J. Muller, and Bentley Glass, "Report of the Committee to Counteract Anti-Genetics Propaganda," 30 Nov 1949, GSA, Box 6, Folder Committee to Counteract Anti-Genetics Propaganda 1949
55. Singleton's correspondence reveals an obsession with a positive group image. See, for example, W. R. Singleton to Bentley Glass, 21 Feb and 18 Jul 1950; Singleton to H. J. Muller, 28 Feb 1950; all in GSA, Box 7, Folder Committee to Counteract Anti-Genetics Propaganda; Singleton to Congressman W. Kingsland Macy, 9 Mar 1950, GSA, Box 7, Folder Golden Jubilee of Genetics, #1; and Singleton to M. R. Irwin, 2 Mar 1950, GSA, Box 7, Folder Golden Jubilee of Genetics, #7. Unlike their colleagues, Irwin and Singleton refrained from discussing their political views in their professional correspondence. Irwin, a well-respected scientist who pioneered the field of immunogenetics, regarded his work on domestic animals as eminently practical, and seems to have had little patience for what he considered political grandstanding. For information on Irwin's scientific career, see Ray D. Owen, Malcolm Robert Irwin, 1897-1897: A Biographical Memoir (Washington, DC: National Academy of Science, 2007); available online at: http://books.nap .edu/html/biomems/mirwin.pdf (last accessed 2 Sep 2009)
56. L. C. Dunn, ed., Genetics in the 20th Century: Essays on the Progress of Genetics During Its First 50 Years (New York: Macmillan, 1951)
57. Although the GSA's members seem not to have been aware of this, G. Edward Pendray, one of the firm's principals, had coordinated an Ad Council campaign on behalf of the Federation of Atomic Scientists in 1946 and 1957. For an excellent analysis of this campaign, see Megan Barnhart, "Selling the International Control of Atomic Energy: The Scientists' Movement, the Advertising Council, and the Problem of the Public," in The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives, ed. Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), 103-19
58. Dunn to Robert McDevitt, 12 May 1950, sums up a meeting about Pendray and Leibert's services. Dunn explained, "It was our opinion that the fund at our disposal was given for publication and that we are not at liberty to expend it for public relations as such. We understood, however, that a certain amount of public relations work would be involved in the publication and marketing of such a book and we thought that you might be able to suggest ways of giving such service as we can afford to pay for under the general head of publications." Located in GSA, Box 7, Folder Golden Jubilee Publications #1. For background on the Rockefeller Foundation's support of American genetics, see Robert E. Kohler, Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists, 1900-1945 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)
59. "Public Relations Report to the Genetics Society of America on Golden Jubilee Activities and the Public Affairs Pamphlet,"
60. New York Times, 13 Sep 1950. For additional news coverage
61. "Publicity Material for Golden Jubilee of Genetics Meetings," packet containing all of Pendray and Company's press releases [n.d., Nov 1950], GSA, Box 7, Folder Golden Jubilee
62. Dunn to G. Edward Pendray, 21 Nov 1950, GSA, Box 7, Folder Golden Jubilee, Publications #2. Although scientific organizations occasionally hired public relations firms to publicize specific events or expeditions, this appears to be one of the earliest attempts of a scientific organization to use a PR firm to influence public opinion. For an exception, see Barnhart, "Selling the International Control" (ref. 71). LaFollette, Science on the Air (ref. 51), mentions a few earlier incidents in passing (for example, see p. 60)
63. Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America, 1945-1947 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965)
64. Boyer, Bomb's Early Light (ref. 3)
65. Barnhart, "Selling the International Control" (ref. 71)
66. The literature on postwar scientists as political advisors is rich and voluminous. For good starting points, see Kevles, The Physicists (ref. 3)
67. Herken, Cardinal Choices (ref. 3)
68. and Ronald E. Doel, "Scientists as Policymakers, Advisors, and Intelligence Agents: Linking Contemporary Diplomatic History with the History of Contemporary Science," in The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, ed. Thomas Söderqvist (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 1997), 215-44
69. Not coincidentally, many of the same geneticists involved with the Lysenkoism debate were involved with other public issues, including the space race, the biological effects of radiation, and educational reform. See Audra J. Wolfe, "Germs in Space: Joshua Lederberg, Exobiology, and the Public Imagination, 1958-1964," Isis 93 (2002): 183-205
70. and Audra Wolfe, "Speaking for Nature and Nation: Biologists as Public Intellectuals in Cold War Culture" (PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2002)