| Abstrakt: |
ONE of the oddities occasionally encountered in science or medicine is the emergence, and for a time the spread, of an idea in spite of a great preponderance of evidence to the contrary. Usually when this occurs it can be accounted for by the prestige or reputation of one or more of its sponsors and the inherent desirability of the goal toward which the idea is directed, quite apart from its practicability.A classic example of this phenomenon in recent history was the socalled Lysenko Affair1-3 in which the Russian antimendelian agronomistbiologist T. D. Lysenko claimed to have discovered a method of preconditioning wheat grain whereby it could be planted in the summer and harvested in the winter, and planted in the winter and harvested in the summer. He declared that all plant and human life could be controlled by environment. Jovarsky1 says,Between 1933 and 1935 he |
