Cut to Pattern

For months a torrent of science propaganda has sluiced from Moscow's presses. Murky with Marxist doubletalk, it praises Soviet science, denounces Western science as the tool of capitalism and the slave of doctrinal errors, such as "idealism" and "formalism." Along with the orchids for Russia and brickbats for the West go long polemic discourses on such subjects as genetics and quantum mechanics. Most of it is far above the heads of the Russian (or any other) general public.

Last week mighty Pravda (which claims 2,000,000 copies daily) gave three of its 24 columns to a claim that the principle of conservation of matter,* attributed by Westerners to Lavoisier (1775), was really discovered by an 18th Century Russian poet-scientist-philosopher named Mikhail Lomonosov. This week the Russians claimed again that a Russian flew the first power-driven heavier-than-air machine 21 years before the Wright brothers got around to their 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C. In recent years, official Communist publications have claimed that the incandescent lamp, the radio, the steam engine, penicillin, and many basic discoveries in theoretical sciences were Russian products. A few of these claims have shreds of truth to them; most are the wildest fantasy.

Light from Russia. Foreigners who keep track of the claims, and the prodigal expenditure of newspaper space on them, are inclined to doubt that they are signs of nationalism. These days Communism is in an internationalist mood and the claims of the Russian propagandists are widely pushed abroad. The purpose may be to convince prospective foreign proselytes that Russia, through the years, has been a source of scientific light and not (as was generally the case) a dismal swamp of scientific darkness. From this premise it is easy to argue that the U.S.S.R. is still a source of scientific light, and thus a sort of shrine of wisdom for the world.

Latterly, the heaviest propaganda fire has been concentrated on one science--genetics. Russians, both before & after the revolution, excelled in genetics. But under Stalin the great school of Soviet geneticists led by Nikolai Vavilov has been utterly destroyed. Its members, who agreed in general with Western geneticists, have been disgraced and removed from their university posts. Some have died in forced labor camps. An obscure plant-breeder named Trofim Lysenko has been raised by the Soviet state to a sort of genetic dictator. Any Russian scientist who wants to work in genetics must bow low to Lysenko, though his doctrines are scientifically naive (TIME, Feb. 11, 1946).

Hope for the Backward. Genetics probably offers the Soviet authorities one of their trickiest methods of posing as a source of scientific light and hope. Western genetics, following Mendel and Morgan, teaches that the inherited characteristics of living organisms are largely controlled by genes passed down from parents to offspring. During sexual reproduction the genes are shuffled, but except in the case of accidental mutations they are not changed. Lysenko teaches that the form of an organism is determined by the environment in which it develops. He claims to have modified plant species merely by moving them around Russia. (Western geneticists have tried & tried, with no success, to repeat his experiments.)

As propaganda, Lysenkoism is promising. The so-called backward peoples of the world, to whom Communists are making an intense appeal, may like the suggestion that a better environment (provided, of course, by Communism) can turn their children, in one generation's time, into superiors of the strutting white men who have ruled them for centuries past.

Western genetics does not maintain that "backward" races are backward because of hereditary deficiencies. All humans, say the geneticists, have about the same genetic potentialities. Individual deficiencies come from defects of culture, early nutrition, etc. But such details of accepted science are not likely to be expounded by Soviet propagandists. Western genetics (primacy of heredity) can be made to sound like a "master race" doctrine, and Lysenkoism (primacy of environment) can be made to sound like light and hope--out of Soviet Russia.

*That matter is neither destroyed nor created during a chemical reaction, such as combustion.

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