Popularizing Science by Dronamraju Krishna;

Author:Dronamraju, Krishna;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART 1940S

|| 11 ||

Lysenko Controversy

Disappointing Role of Haldane

Now I am not going for one moment to suggest that there is not a very grave danger for science in so close an association with the State.

—J. B. S. Haldane in The Inequality of Man and Other Essays (1932), 136

This chapter outlines the series of events that led to the response of the scientific left in Great Britain, especially Haldane, to the so-called Lysenko controversy, which resulted in the suppression of the science of genetics in the Soviet Union during the 1940s and later. But Haldane had already predicted that possibility in 1932. First, we must examine Haldane’s political evolution, starting from his youth, when he was deeply under the influence of his mother’s conservative beliefs, to his ultimate role as a leading Marxist of the scientific left in Great Britain in the 1940s. Haldane’s silence, even when his friend, the eminent scientist N. I. Vavilov, was persecuted and killed, is inexplicable. I describe here the events that led to his controversial role in the so-called Lysenko controversy. These events were also indirectly responsible, among other factors, for his decision to spend his last years in India.

During the 1930s, largely influenced by his first wife, Charlotte, Haldane’s mild interest in socialism bloomed into an active interest in full-fledged Marxism. It was also one of the two major crises of his life, the other being the divorce scandal that involved his wife Charlotte, in which he was cited as a co-respondent and which resulted in his dismissal from Cambridge University.

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