Brave Genius Page 30

  For Monod, another part of his putting the war behind him was also putting certain politics aside. He had joined the French Communist Party, albeit with reservations, in order to have some voice in the affairs of the FTP. But during the war, Monod had observed that the Communists had “absolute contempt and hatred” of anything and anyone not with the Party. Because of the Communists’ prominent role in the Resistance and the USSR’s contribution to the Allied victory over Germany, the Party enjoyed a surge in popularity after the war. Monod, however, had hesitated to become a full-fledged, card-carrying member. By the end of 1945, he had quietly quit the Party and disengaged from Communism for good.

  Or so he thought.

  On August 26, 1948, the banner across the top of the front page of the Communist newspaper Les Lettres Françaises announced “A Great Scientific Event,” and heralded an article entitled “Heredity Is Not Commanded by Mysterious Factors: The Soviet Scientist Lysenko Delivers a Major Blow to Anti-Darwinian Theories.”

  Had there been some breakthrough in Soviet genetics about which Monod and Western science did not yet know?

  From the Soviet and French Communist Party points of view, the answer was a resounding yes. But as Monod read the article, he was stunned and horrified to realize that quite the opposite was true, that the USSR and PCF were throwing overboard the very foundation of modern genetics, from the work of Gregor Mendel to that of the Nobel laureate and Monod’s former Caltech host, T. H. Morgan.

  The newspaper’s Moscow correspondent reported that a great debate had recently taken place at the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences on “the situation of biological science in the USSR.” During the lengthy proceedings, Russian adherents of Mendel and Morgan were accused by the academician Trofim D. Lysenko of having “turned their backs on science, on materialism,” and on the very foundations of Marxist and Soviet principles, and of having embraced metaphysics and idealism.

  The fundamental flaw in Mendel’s, Morgan’s, and other Western scientists’ theories, the article explained, was the insistence that inheritance was independent of the conditions experienced by animals and plants, such that no characteristics acquired during their lives were passed on to the next generation. The critics at the Lenin Academy objected to the idea that the hereditary substance of animals and plants was not influenced by the conditions experienced by the organism, and that it acted alone in determining inheritance in a “mysterious and unforeseeable fashion.” It was claimed that the prevailing theory had been disproven by Lysenko, who had reportedly achieved transmission of acquired characters from generation to generation.

  Moreover, the article reported that the teachings of the late Soviet biologist Ivan Michurin were that there was no limit to the effects of the direct action of external conditions on living organisms: “Human intervention makes it possible to coerce each animal or plant form to be modified more rapidly and in whatever way desirable to man.” The difference between Western and Soviet theories had profound implications for the urgent, practical needs of Soviet agriculture: adherents of “Mendelist-Morganist” genetics had long maintained that in order to improve crops, one had to patiently wait for fortuitous, random mutations to arise in strains, and then to select among resulting crop varieties for those with desirable characteristics. It was therefore of limited power to change plant or animal forms. In contrast, the “Michurinist-Lysenkoist” view asserted that any changes imposed on plants by humans could be passed immediately from generation to generation. Clearly, the latter was more beneficial to the goals of Soviet agriculture and the progress of the revolution. Mendelist-Morganist genetics was labeled “reactionary,” “bourgeois,” and “erroneous.”

  The article further explained that this debate over genetics had much broader implications, as it reflected the ongoing conflict between two opposing political and ideological views:

  As in our world all fits together, the two hostile and irreconcilable concepts that collided on the seemingly specialized terrain of biology, of genetics more precisely, are the same that are opposed and still oppose each other in all of the modern world—in science, philosophy, economics, politics: that which causes people to exterminate one another on battlefields and sterilize the resources of the earth and human intelligence, and that which wants to unite all citizens of the world … In large part, very much in large part, the debates in Moscow saw the defeat of those ideas that, in the matters of heredity … constitute before and after Hitler, the basis of all racist doctrines.

  In sum, “Mendelist” and “Morganist” views of heredity were not only opposed to Soviet biology but also responsible for Hitler’s racist doctrines. They thus needed to be replaced by “Michurinism” and “Lysenkoism.” Indeed, two days later in Le Monde, Monod read that the Soviet Academy of Sciences had addressed a letter to Marshal Stalin in which it recognized its past errors, promised to correct them, and pledged to coordinate the efforts of scientists in the interest of the country and of Communism. They also admitted that some scientists had applied reactionary and antinationalist theories and were thus incapable of assisting the government in the development of Socialist science. There was no mistaking the meaning: scientists would either repent or lose their jobs, or worse.

  Monod was utterly dumbfounded.

  For him and other Western observers, the news from Moscow raised many questions: What could possibly have led the Soviet Union, once home to many well-known and respected geneticists, to jettison a cornerstone of modern biology? And to do so at this very moment, when molecular biology was on the verge of great new discoveries about genetics! What was “Soviet biology” and how was it any different from the science they practiced? And who in the hell was this Lysenko?

  Monod started immediately to read all he could find about Lysenko and Soviet genetics.

  GENETICS AND THE COLD WAR

  The scientific coup in Moscow was at the very least another symptom of the deliberate movement of the USSR away from all things Western. In the three years since the end of the war, the Soviet and Western governments had been drawing increasingly sharp geopolitical and ideological boundaries between their spheres of influence. Mutual suspicion was obvious at the Moscow Conference in December 1945, when the Soviet, British, and American foreign ministers met to discuss problems concerning the occupation of European countries. As early as March 1946, Winston Churchill publicly voiced his concerns over the expanding scope of Soviet influence in coining the metaphor of the Iron Curtain:

  A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organization intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytizing tendencies … From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an “Iron Curtain” has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in some cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow … The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case.

  In March 1947, US president Harry Truman announced a new doctrine of aiding people who were resisting “subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures.” He provided economic and military aid to Turkey and Greece to prevent them from falling into the Soviet camp. On June 5, 1947, the Marshall Plan was made public. Secretary of State George Marshall declared: “Our policy is directed neither against a country nor against a doctrine, but against hunger, misery, desperation, and chaos.” The Soviet government was invited to participate, but ultimately rejected the plan as a US pl
ot to exert undue influence over Europe, and the Kremlin persuaded all Soviet satellites not to apply for or to accept US funds.

  In turn, the USSR convened a meeting of Communist Party leaders from both eastern and western Europe in September 1947. Stalin wanted to strengthen his hold on eastern Europe and to pressure the Western parties to adhere more closely to Moscow and to break away from coalitions with non-Communist parties in their respective countries. The Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) was established by Stalin’s representative Andrei Zhdanov to coordinate the activities of international Communist parties with Soviet policy. At the meeting, Zhdanov proclaimed a new posture toward the West, what would become known as the “Zhdanov line”—namely, that the world was now divided into two camps: a democratic and anti-imperialist camp led by the USSR, and the imperialist-capitalist camp led by the United States. Communist parties outside the Soviet bloc, such as the French Communist Party (PCF), were thus to observe strict discipline and to subordinate themselves to Moscow’s central control.

  The sealing off of the Soviet sphere was not merely political but also cultural. Both before and again after the war, Stalin and Zhdanov sought to regiment Soviet culture by purging Western influences and promoting distinct forms of Soviet literature, music, art, and science that were aligned with Soviet ideology. There was pressure upon artists to depict so-called Socialist realism, which emphasized appropriate heroes and party spirit. In science, theories were classified as “materialistic” (based on reality and consistent with Marxism) or “idealistic” (a spiritual and mental construct). Under Zhdanov, propaganda campaigns began to claim that certain important achievements in science (such as the invention of the lightbulb and the radio) were actually made by Russians and not the Western scientists who had been credited. The sealing off of the Soviet Union from the West was enabled by the imposition of a “cult of secrecy” on all Soviet affairs. In the realm of science, the translation of Russian journals into English was halted, and Soviet scientists were denied access to most foreign journals and strictly forbidden from publishing their results in the West.

  Stalin took a keen personal interest in elevating Soviet scientific heroes, one of whom was Lysenko. As a result of the collectivization of agriculture, the Soviet Union suffered disastrous declines in crop yields in the late 1920s and early 1930s. There was great urgency for innovations to reverse the decline. Working at a plant-breeding station in Azerbaijan, Lysenko experimented with a process dubbed “vernalization” in which wheat seeds were chilled before planting in the spring in order to promote earlier flowering. His claims of great increases in yield and his roots as a Ukrainian peasant’s son were widely touted in Party publications. After being promoted and given numerous honors, Lysenko advanced the idea that vernalization caused permanent heritable changes in the plants. He started making claims of transforming other plants simply by altering their growing conditions. With Stalin and the Party’s advocacy of “practice” over “theory,” Lysenko’s purported successes in transforming nature were just what Soviet leaders wanted to hear.

  Well before the war, Russian geneticists openly challenged Lysenko’s claims concerning the inheritance of any acquired traits, but they were stifled, demoted, and even jailed. The internationally known botanist Nikolai Vavilov died in prison during the war. When Lysenko came under criticism again in 1947–48, he appealed directly to Stalin, who then intervened personally by orchestrating the pivotal meeting at the Lenin Academy and even editing Lysenko’s speech. Stalin had previously told Lysenko, “The Michurin position is the only correct scientific approach … The future belongs to Michurin.” Before the meeting at the Lenin Academy, he told Lysenko to make clear to the assembled body that he was speaking with the explicit approval of Marshal Stalin.

  For the many French scientists who were members of the Communist Party, the Lysenkoist policy coming from Moscow would present a difficult dilemma: whether to adhere to their political faith and toe the Party line, or to defend a half century of genetics and break from the Party.

  SENSELESS AND MONSTROUS

  The first notable French reaction to the reports from Moscow appeared in the September 5 issue of the Socialist daily Le Populaire, in which its foreign political editor, Charles Dumas, declared that the ascent of Lysenkoism “is a return to the Middle Ages: science must again be subservient to the doctrine of political ideology.”

  Soon afterward, Combat entered the fray. Camus and most of its editorial leadership had stepped down more than a year earlier when the paper had run into financial problems; the newspaper was now led by Claude Bourdet and others. The paper announced that it would publish a series of guest articles on the question “Mendel or Lysenko?” Its stated aim was to discover how Lysenko’s work differed from his predecessors and to what degree it had suffered from partisan distortion. In one of the first articles, a science historian alleged, “The recent Moscow debates take us back to Galileo’s time. With them come the same procedures, the same arguments in order to smear ideas and individuals.”

  Several issues later, the single Communist biologist who was in the greatest position of authority and who might be able to quell the controversy—Monod’s former Sorbonne colleague and FTP chief Marcel Prenant—weighed in. Prenant was both a member of the Central Committee of the PCF and a professor of comparative anatomy and histology at the Sorbonne, so he spoke for the Party as well as for academic science. He sought to accommodate simultaneously both the Lysenko and Mendel-Morgan theories. The headline over his article stated: “According to Professor Marcel Prenant, Lysenko respects the basis of classical genetics, but Prenant considers Lysenko to have obtained the genetic fixation of acquired characters.” Prenant explained that, contrary to what others had written, Lysenko did not challenge the existence of genes and chromosomes, but he was merely fighting “with vigor” the exaggerations of classical genetics concerning the role of mutations and the independence of germ cells from the conditions experienced by the rest of the body.

  Prenant emphasized the novelty and practicality of Lysenko’s results: “The really new point seems to be as follows. Whereas up until now the experimental interventions made by geneticists … have enabled them to increase the percentage of mutations, but not to obtain transformations of characters, Michurin and Lysenko say that they have … obtained in certain cases the hereditary fixation of characters acquired under environmental influences, and therefore knowable in advance. There is nothing absurd in this.” Prenant wrote that whatever Lysenko’s faults, they do not negate “the fact that a whole people is profiting today from the work of Michurin and Lysenko.” He closed: “Which of our vehement critics has obtained comparable results?”

  Monod’s turn in Combat came the very next day, on September 15. He opened by explaining his approach: “The important thing, the difficult thing in this affair is not to decide whether Lysenko is wrong, or if he is right from the scientific point of view. The cause is quickly understood.” Monod wrote that he was going to restrict himself to several citations that he had obtained from an article that appeared a year earlier in the Modern Quarterly, a British Communist periodical that could “hardly be suspected of malevolence with respect to the USSR.”

  Monod offered three brief excerpts:

  Lysenko’s claim that Mendelism must be incorrect because it contradicts Darwin … is, of course, completely absurd and is on the same level as the fundamentalist position in religious disputes.

  To every scientist the truth of a theory lies in the deductive methods used to establish it and the experimental demonstration of its fundamental premises and its consequences … Unfortunately, deprived of adequate experimental support, the adherents of the “new genetics” [Lysenko and his school] have chosen to uphold their claims and attack the Mendelists by appeals to authority and by dubious interpretations of dialectical materialism.

  The system by which he [Lysenko] proposes to replace genetics is a muddle of propositions which are mutually contradictory where
ver they are not meaningless.

  Monod then commented: “These judgments (formulated before the Central Committee took their position) are categorical. They can only be shared by every biologist who takes the trouble to study several of Lysenko’s texts. (And one does not understand, or too well, why Marcel Prenant, who is ordinarily so clear, embarrassed himself yesterday, in his ‘nuanced’ and contradictory explanations).”

  Monod continued:

  That such scientific aberrations can be born in the brain of a USSR academician is without a doubt surprising … What begs to be understood is how Lysenko was able to obtain sufficient power and influence to subjugate his colleagues, to win the support of the radio and the press, the approval of the Central Committee and of Stalin personally, to the extent that today Lysenko’s derisory “Truth” is the official truth guaranteed by the state, that everything that deviates from it is “irrevocably outlawed” from Soviet science … and that his opponents who defend science, progress, and the interest of the nation against him are expelled, pilloried as “slaves of bourgeois science,” and practically accused of treason.

  All of this is senseless, monstrous, unbelievable. Yet it is true. What has happened?

  Monod could learn only part of the answer from Modern Quarterly, as its authors were not privy to all of the intrigues inside the Party. What Monod could discern was that Lysenko had won over the highest-ranking members of the regime by political maneuvering. Lysenko’s victory was not scientific, but a matter of “doctrinal fanaticism” that was embraced by the authorities because it aligned with their own mode of reasoning and satisfied their way of thinking, which placed ideology over scientific evidence.