ABSTRACT
At the close of a conference held at the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Moscow in the summer of 1948, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko condemned genetics as Western, capitalist, imperialist science and declared his own “Michurinist” approach to the study of evolutionary biology as the only one acceptable for Soviet scientists.1 Lysenko’s speech was edited by Joseph Stalin himself, and afterward genetic researchers in the Soviet Union were forced to renounce their views and engage in self-criticism. The events which followed, including the imprisonment and murder of several genetic researchers in the Eastern Bloc, and the fact that the first courses in genetics weren’t offered at universities in the region until the early 1960s (Gajewski, 1990; Kojevnikov, 2000), have caused the “Lysenko affair” to be considered one of the primary examples of the negative effects of communist totalitarianism upon academic research.
