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Stalin’s War on Genetics
Season 6 Episode 20
October 11, 1955. Nearly three hundred of the Soviet Union’s top scientists sign a secret letter demanding the removal of one man: Trofim Lysenko. For decades, Lysenko had Joseph Stalin’s ear, ruling Soviet biology with an iron fist—banning genetics, rewriting textbooks, and sending dissenting scientists to prison or worse.
How did a peasant-turned-agronomist convince Stalin that wheat could turn into rye, and that ideology mattered more than evidence? And when politics replace science, what—and who—gets destroyed?
Special thanks to William deJong-Lambert, author of The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research: An Introduction to the Lysenko Affair; and Nikolai Krementsov, author of Stalinist Science.
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Published on 4 weeks ago