Jun 02 2024 149 mins 7
A season finale is upon us. A lot remains to be said about Lysenko, epigenetics and that original cliffhanger regarding Darwins repressed theory of pangenesis.
Not all has been said about Kruschev and the nuclear-bomb-corn of American Big Ag during the creation of the first truly global market of grain speculation, all has not been said about x-ray Mullers letter to Stalin that kickstarted the purge of the natural sciences or how Huxley got him into the soviet union and how they helped exiling Serebrovsky’s deserter students to take part in radiation sterilisation experiments in Nazi Germany.
Not much has been said about Lysenko's teachers themselves, Michurin and Timiryazev who, though already seniors when the winter palace was stormed, nonetheless gladly supported the communist reorganisation of their scientific fields.
We have yet to explore the great around-the-world adventures of Vavilov which debunked the biblical idea of a single origin of civilization, have not yet in detail told the story of Himmler's SS-biopiracy operations. During which it was not Vavilovs international Rockefeller “colleague” who defended his seed banks in Leningrad, but Lysenkoites who starved to death on their post to protect the work and legacy of a man whom western historians are telling us they saw as an enemy to be eradicated.
There is a lot left to be talked about dear listener, but to really get there, we will begin today with something which our Marxist-Botanist Allan G. Morton has stated was and is “In fact, after all, the central problem of genetics, the explanation of Ontogeny.” This is a story of genetic fluidity and shaken heredity, the material dialectic critique of DNA-essentialism.
