How to Liquidate Heredity

The science of genetics is out of date and had better be revised or abandoned. Geneticists, fussing around for the last century with colored sweet peas and subnormal fruit flies, are out of touch with the real world.

These rude views are advanced in a new book called Heredity and Its Variability, by the U.S.S.R.'s T. D. Lysenko (King's Crown Press; 50-c-). In the ancient heredity v. environment feud, Comrade Lysenko is definitely an environment man.

The characteristics of a plant or animal variety, according to old-fashioned geneticists, are passed down from generation to generation. Hybrids get their qualities from their parents, mixing them together according to a complicated and rigid set of rules. Any sudden change in a species, the geneticists call a "mutation." They do not account for it naturally, but consider it a genetic act of God.

All of which, says Lysenko, is nonsense. Heredity, he believes, changes spontaneously--and can be changed artificially. His key chapter has the thundering Marxian title "The Liquidation of the Conservatism of the Nature of Organisms." He explains that a plant variety often gets into a rut. Thus, it tries to produce descendants exactly like itself. But buried in its germ plasm are characteristics which have been suppressed because they did not benefit the plant in its accustomed environment. All that is needed to bring these buried characteristics to light is to "liquidate the plant's conservatism."

The plant can be jarred out of its bourgeois rut: 1) by a special sort of grafting, 2) by modifying the external environment at the proper stage of the plant's development, or 3) by crossing sharply differing varieties. If done properly, the plant's heredity is "disestablished." It becomes plastic, enterprising, willing to try new methods of getting along in the world. Then, if moved to a new environment, it can change itself to fit the new conditions.

Lysenko and his followers at the Soviet's All-Union Institute of Selection & Genetics claim to have disestablished tomatoes, potatoes, wheat and barley. Their conservatism vanquished, the plants could be grown in almost any part of the mighty Soviet Union: e.g., a tomato was deeply shaken by a grafted liaison with a nightshade. It became so enterprising that, sown outdoors in May, it ripened its fruits before the early frost of Moscow.

If Lysenko's "disestablishment" methods really work, the world has a powerful method of adapting plants and animals to the needs of man.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.