Page 105 - Communism in Ambush

Adnan Oktar (Harun Yahya)
103

under the proper conditions, wheat would produce rye seeds—and he
made preparations to achieve this. (This is like saying that dogs living in
the wild will eventually bear litters of foxes—a claim that's totally con-
trary to science, of which no instance has ever been observed.) In 1940,
Stalin put Lysenko at the head of the Institute of Genetics of the
Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and he held this chair for twenty-five
years. Lysenko also headed the Lenin All-Union Academy of
Agricultural Sciences, one of the Soviet Union's most important institu-
tions.
In 1948, it was forbidden to be educated or do research in the area
of classical genetics. T Those geneticists who rejected Lysenko's evolution-
ist thesis, and continued to support Mendel's genetic discovery, were se-
cretly arrested and executed.
Meanwhile, Lysenko's agricultural policy created wide-
spread lack of productivity. For example, he claimed that
putting seeds in cold water for a while be-
fore being sown, would make them gain
resistance to cold weather conditions. To
test this hypothesis, he had tons of seeds
immersed in cold water and then sown on
the Siberian steppes. Of course, none of
the seeds sprouted. Similar experiments
all ended in disaster, but these failures
were never spoken of until the 1960s.
Finally, in 1964, it was officially acknowl-
edged that Lysenko's theory was wrong.
Great efforts were expended to have
Mendel's genetic discoveries taught and
applied again. Russia moved to the
American type of mixed hybridization
Because Lysenko
management, using dung to fertilize the rejected the
fields. Even though their nonsensical the- laws of genetics
sis had dealt such a great blow to Soviet for the theory of
evolution,
science and agriculture, Lysenko and his
Soviet agricul-
ture remained
backward for
decades.