Scientists' Choice

One of the biggest scientific fish in Communism's net, outside Russia, is British Biologist J.B.S. Haldane. Last week Haldane's scientific colleagues were watching closely to see if he would cling to the party line, recently clamped around some very dubious genetics (TIME, Sept. 6). Most scientists suspected that Haldane would have to go back on either his Communism or his science.

Science, like Communism, requires a kind of religious fervor of its practitioners. Scientists assume that they have the right to judge the truth on the basis of experiment, observation and reasoning. They regard any dogmatic authority as a deadly enemy.

The Communist high command, acting through the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, has declared that the genetics of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (briefly, that environment controls the heredity of organisms) is the only genetics that may be taught in Soviet institutions. The Morgan-Mendelian theory (that heredity is controlled by genes in the cells), generally accepted outside the U.S.S.R., has been forbidden and its adherents disciplined.

Back to Galileo. Western scientists are outraged by this Soviet attack upon scientific principle. It reminds them of Galileo, who was "disciplined" for asserting that the earth moves around the sun. They do not see how Haldane, who has enjoyed wide respect as a biologist and geneticist, can continue to toe the party line and remain a scientist.

Interviewed last week in Budapest by a TIME correspondent, Haldane took temporary refuge in his lack of exact information. (The genetics controversy, which has become a cause celebre in Soviet Russia, has not been fully reported in Budapest.) Until he could be sure, said Haldane, that Lysenko's current theories are unscientific and that opponents had been punished for disagreeing, he would make no decision. "I don't think a political body," he said, "should decide scientific, theories. I want evidence that those who disagreed were punished." He would not decide where he stood until "shown that the decision to outlaw Mendelian genetics has made teaching it illegal . . ."

Nazi Genetics? This winter Haldane plans to lecture on genetics in Communist-dominated Prague. "I shall say just what I think in Prague," he declared stoutly, "and if what I say does not agree with Lysenko, it's just too bad."

Western scientists, approving this declaration, will follow Haldane carefully. If he goes to Prague, they will note what happens to him if he deviates from the party's scientific line. The line itself is none too clear, and devout Communist geneticists may eventually get into trouble if they stick to it. Last week Nobel Prizewinning Dr. H. J. Muller, a leading U.S. geneticist, pointed out a doctrinal time bomb that threatens Lysenko's followers. The Lysenko doctrine, said Muller, teaches that the heredity of organisms is shaped by their environments. When applied to the evolution of man, said Muller, this doctrine means that "you would have to believe that colonial peoples, peoples who have not reached the development of the rest of the world, were doomed indefinitely to an inferior position." In short, said Muller, it is almost "Nazi genetics."

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