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Alan McCrindle Lysenko
A great program.Time to take it to the next step and continue with the logic. Just as the Soviet model failed through bad science, so has the western model failed through bad science (reductionism). It is just that we haven't accepted it and made the equivalent program yet. The key point is that "reductionisnm" is a limited perspective of the world. It ignores things that it can't measure. And unfortunately it is the hidden, unmeasurable that "support" life. The temporary winners in our present value system are the visible agents that shine their own lights the strongest.Our western free market, capitalist model, has brought us the same short term "progress" that has delivered us climate change and ecological disaster. Yet we, in our present "moment of time", hold it up to be a big success.Paradoxically Lysenko was right in so much as he recognised the impact of the environment as an agent that objects adapted to (vs us as all powerful agents that adapt the environment). This is being demonstrated in epigenetics as one of your panel mentioned.Our future as a human species - if we have one - depends on us recognising that we aren't all powerful masters of the universe. Rather that we are part of the environment and that we assert our own arrogant superiority over nature at the peril of our offspring. Our future depends on us learning to adapt to the realities of the environment, of which we are a part, rather than look for further technological solutions that pretend our salvation lies on the failed premise that we have the power to transcend the limits of nature. I loom forward to your program that explores this.
Bill Geraci Huxley's weird genetic
I listened today to your soviet Agro-biologist show and finally figured out A. Huxley's Brave New World's training of fetuses (eg: turning them as they gestated if they were to be sent into space). That always seemed weird. But if he had Lysenko's ideas in mind.... Thanks! That and your guest's (in passing) explaining how Classical Science was done in by Columbus' discovery of The New World (among many others) have been invaluable understandings for me....
Jeffery Roberts, www.pomor.com on Lysenkoism
I thought your guests explored Lysenko very well, and one even pointed out how 'science' today can be 'sovietized' to get funding.How about exploring the role of mythologies in science? For example, climate change might be happening (it happened in the Vendian 650m years ago when carbon dioxide levels might have fallen by being trapped in limestones - an anti-greenhouse effect) and might have little to do with man made pollution. However, the ideas of global disaster embraced by so many 'scientists' mesh easily with those who want the world population reduced to 2bn, a 'sustainable' level. Nobody is allowed to question this dogma, which seems to resemble the Millenarian phantasies so beautifully described by Normah Cohn half a century ago. So everyone recycling their waste (rathern than not making it in the first place) could be adding to the mythology of those who want fewer people on the planet so that the rich can carry on as usual.
Gilbert Hall, Lysenko
I thought this programme wasn't up to the usual In Our Time level. Though I still enjoyed it. There was no attempt at a quantitative guess at how much damage Lysenko did. Soviet agriculture also suffered from collectivisation and central planning. In the capitalist West, farmers had the boon of being able to buy the equipment they needed, spares for that equipment, etc. The Soviets would never have had this regardless of Lysenko. Yet Soviet agriculture managed to grow something. Did Lysenko lead the Soviet Union to half the yield they would otherwise have got or worse than that or not so bad?I was also disappointed that there was no time left to discuss Lysenko's fall from dominance. How did it happen? How did Soviet agriculture start catching up with the West and how far did it get? Sakharov's dramatic denunciation of Lysenko merited a bit of time, not just the brief aside it got.
Robert Carnegie, Lysenko
I found the Lysenko programme quite disappointing. I thought that the fundamental ideas of "agrobiology", if there were any, were not clearly stated, and only one or two of Lysenko's actual projects were discussed - of the one involving Kruschev, a speaker said "Don't ask" - how is that an acceptable answer! I don't recall hearing the term "Michurinism", maybe I missed it. And of hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dissenting scientists (as opposed to bourgeois peasants) removed and executed, only Vavilov was named, and he seems to have died in prison -without- being executed - and it isn't clearly stated (except in Wikipedia) that disagreeing with Lysenko was what put him there. If he was not a Stalinist, that would be sufficient, one assumes. I suppose that a full proper biography would clear it up.
Michael Wolfe, TROFIM LYSENKO
Lysenko was accepted as a pioneer by many Western speculative fiction (science fiction) authors. Specifically, 'Day of the Triffids' and Simak's 'City' were based on the validity of Lysenko's research.My personal objection is that Triffids are now possible, thanks to modern genetic engineering, but the idea has already been pre-empted by an author who believed Lysenko, and so cannot be re-employed by a modern speculative fiction author..
Mike Donovan, Soviet agriculture
The Soviets have no monopoly on farming disasters. Look at the post war Ground Nut Scheme in E Africa which was the brainchild of British agriculturalists including the late Prof Bunting. Go further back to the Irish Potato famine (there's an impressive exhibition about it in the Agri Museum in Johnstown Co Wexford). Many development schemes which have involved the introduction of alien varieties and methods (mainly machanisation) in Africa have had equally disastrous results. There will be others. Will difficult to control weeds such as blackgrass mutate with Roundup ready cereals (GM crops) so as to become chemically uncontrollable? I enjoy most of your programmes and, as an agriculturalist, really benefitted from this one. Keep up the good work. You remain a bastion of excellence in the Corporation which appears content to take the dumbing down route in too much of its programming.
Tom - Swedish Research
Hi, enjoyed the program on Lysenko, does anyone know the reference about the effect on grandparents' diet during famine periods related to their grandchildren's genetics? Thanks.
David Edwards - Lysenko
I am not a biologist so I can't comment on the the supposed demerits of Lysenko's theories, although they were not properly addressed on the programme. Whilst we are all in a mad rush to saturate the planet with genetically modified crops, complete with terminator genes, maybe Lysenko afterall wasn't as bad as he's portrayed.
Jane - Lysenko
I hadn't realized what an iron curtain I'd created in my own brain until this morning and odd as it seems, I feel a relief for the demystifying your programme has brought - thank you. Once again, the intellectual persepective spares us the real and complex impact of the subject . A couple of points - Steve Jones said "in the end the truth will out" but what a tortuous path it tends to be and quasi or partial truth seems to hold such appeal. The research of Dr. Bruce Lipton - a cell biologist - is well worth a look as he says that half of the story of dna is contained in its environment and that the work of Crick and Watson, which threw the protein housing into the bin, was science which set out to prove preformed concepts rather than the facts leading them to a truer and, in fact, less rigid functioning of dna. Whilst on the subject I don't understand the accolade sustaining for Crick and Watson if they really did use Rosalind Franklin's maths illicitly to finalize the work which led to their Nobel prize - they never even mentioned her. I suppose that partial and quasi truth holds another position here in terms of human nature. People who capture the imagination of the masses tend to fall into this category - the combination of the false and the true. This seems to be the hallmark of many dictators in the early years soon, obviously leading to overt and extreme bullying and oppression. If forewarned is forearmed - is anybody doing research into the schematic of both personal and demographic tendencies which cause this phenomenon of dictatorship? It's one of the most important issues of our planet - and its covert presence is in evidence everywhere .......need I say more? ps I know the programme is not political but I nodded hard when Steve Jones mentioned the "sovietization of today's science" and I'm glad he said it. Best wishes and thanks for another excellent and enlightening programme.
Christopher Draper, Lysenko
Another great programme but I wish the discussion had opened out a little to consider if Lysenko was a solely Soviet phenomenon. Steve Jones's cryptic reference to, "The Sovietisation of Science" passed unexplained but warrants exploration. It certainly applies to maths education in Britain's Schools where experimentation, innovation and independent research are alien concepts. The curriculum, the career structure, the examination and inspection systems are now all under state control. Minister Jim Knight's standard response to criticism is to cite supporting "evidence" supplied by one or other arms of the state's education bureaucracy (Ofsted etc). Lysenko for the modern age?
James Baring - Lysenko
This was terrific. I have waited years to hear a public admission that Lysenko was not entirely wrong in his idea, just wrong in practice and in science.The same applies to Lamarck. Steve Jones said the evidence is only there in the last 5 years. While this may be true in the case of Dutch humans, the evidence of anticipatory breeding trends in Turtles was around in the 1980s.The confusion arises from the failure to understand that the watch and the watchmaker are one. The question of blindness does not have simple answer. Like all other questions we ask of dynamic existence the answers is no but...yes but..
George Rumens on Lysenko
Lysenko Had a Case? The discussion upon Lysenko opens a wonderful can of worms; in a small and unexpected way, Lysenko was right! The proof is contained in my book Principia Humanitas, 635 pages, which is freely available at no cost. I am trying to put it on the internet where everybody can get access to my revolutionary new ideas. In this book I discuss at length the many examples of the natural world that indicate that the traumatic experiences of parents can pass down the germline. Lysenko probably observed this in his own extended family. And he may have been influenced by the Russian 'ice-bathing' tradition, which is popularly, but wrongly, said to improve health. Lysenko's theories were nonsense, but his core belief was right in some respects. I argue that genetic inheritance affects the different Brain Operating Systems (BOS) of the various Classes in human societies in different ways. The new theory of 'Memes' does not adequately explain the way whereby different societies absorb new beliefs; beliefs are genetically inherited. For example, people of a religious persuasion do not learn their religion by reading holy books; their genetic inheritance means that they share the same Brain Operating System of those who wrote those old texts. The Bible seems compellingly true to those who have inherited that same genetic propensities. And so, too, with sociology, psychology, anthropology and so forth. The implications of genetic research are startling. The truth is that genetics is upon a tremulous threshold of starling and counter-intuitive new understandings of human society. Classical sociology and psychology is probably all wrong. And 'class' as an explanation of social differences is completely wrong. Class is to do with competing Brain Operating Systems. Social mobility is a myth. You cannot change your class, you can only withdraw from its more corrosive beliefs. The confusion comes when people of different classes procreate, a and the children follow genetically, one parent or another. And so some children of such a relationship, unexpectedly show Middle class characteristics (and some show Working Class)The metaphor for 'class' as stratification is misleading. Class is more like different animals drinking at the same waterhole; different but equal.The more I hear the excellent Steve Jones on radio, the more tentative he sounds. The Swedish experiment he alluded to, is a spanner in the works. How come geneticists have clung to the idea of the Weismann Barrier for so long, when common observation upon human behaviour contradicts that rule? George Rumens, Burgundy, France
Tony Wright, Genetics and Lysenko
One interesting fact that was omitted during today's fascinating debate on the divergence of Soviet and Western plant improvement was that there were plant breeders working on Lamarkian principles in the USA. Including, I believe, the famous potato breeder, Luther Burbank.
Duncan Couchman. Soviet Science.
I'm not disagreeing, but does anyone know what Prof. Jones means by "the sovietisation of today's science"? (I paraphrase)Is it something to do with targets?
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