"Chase Formal Genetics!"

In present-day Soviet Russia, young mouths have a lot to say. Recently 24 students of the Timiryazeff Agriculture Academy in Moscow got hot under their proletarian collars, wrote a steaming letter to the Commissariat of Agriculture's official journal, which published the letter last week, under the headline: "Chase Formal Genetics from the Universities!" Charles Darwin was okay, the students said in effect, but Mendel and Morgan were way off the party line, if not downright counterrevolutionary. To capitalist hell with the Mendelian Law!

Johann Gregor Mendel (1822-84) was a quiet Moravian monk, who discovered the laws of inheritance by puttering with peas. He showed, for example, that if a "dominant" yellow pea is bred to a "recessive" green pea, all the first generation peas will be yellow, and three out of four of the second (if bred together) will be yellow and one green. This ratio always holds in breeding a dominant to a recessive. At the dawn of the 20th Century, Mendel's laws were dug up and made the basis of the science of genetics, which was also boosted through experiments on fruit flies by Thomas Hunt Morgan, now a venerable Nobel Prizeman at California Institute of Technology.

In a fruit fly's germ cells are eight narrow little blobs called chromosomes. On these Morgan tracked down the positions of hundreds of invisible genes (heredity transmitters) each of which seemed to control a single body characteristic--such as eye color, chest bristles, wing shape--in the offspring. When a segment of a chromosome broke off during reproduction, all the features controlled by the genes on that segment were affected.

Some geneticists feel that Morgan overemphasized the independent action ot single genes. But they do not deny that genes exist. The Moscow students denied it flatly, on the ground that "the concept of the gene contradicts dialectical materialism." They asserted that in good Russian eyes "formal genetics" or "Mendelianism-Morganism" should be as outmoded as the myth that the world is supported on the backs of whales and tortoises.

To outside observers ft seemed that somebody had the wrong bull by the tail. For in the U. S. S. R., according to the New York Times'?, Harold Denny, "any theory that implies hereditary superiority is anathema." Yet no Soviet anathema has fallen on Darwinism, whose theories (of natural selection and survival of the fittest) are premised on hereditary superiority. The basic researches of Mendel and Morgan, which the students explicitly to-helled, have less to do with superiority than with the actual mechanisms of heredity.

"Formal genetics" has also been attacked in Russia by Professor T. D. Lysenko, a practical trial-&-error plant breeder of the school of Luther Burbank. It has been defended by Professor N. I. Vaviloff, an academic geneticist of international repute. The letter-writing students admired practical Lysenko, scorned academic Vaviloff. That the Kremlin Government does not know just what to make of this howdydo is evident from the fact that both Lysenko and Vaviloff have been permitted to air their views in the Soviet press.

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