Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

One day a short man with a square figure, curly half-gray hair, and mustache appeared at one of the tables. I had the impression that the mustache gave this person a resemblance to Charlie Chaplin. He tried hard to escape meeting my father or coming close to him even accidentally. My father told me that this man was Prezent. Prezent was afraid not only that a Michurinist-Mendelist would not give him his hand, but that this Mendelist-Morganist would slap his face. Sometimes such things happened to Prezent.

In 1969, a few days before he died of cancer, Prezent was expelled from the Agricultural Academy. 347Shortly before his death, he visited one of his enemies, Professor Roskin. Later Dr. Kalinnikova, one of Roskin’s coworkers, recalled:

One day, when the whole [Roskin’s] laboratory staff gathered [at Roskin’s office], somebody knocked at the door and a little bit strange head of a short man appeared. The expression on Grigorii Iosifovich [Roskin’s] face changed immediately and he asked us to leave the office for a while. We understood that something unusual had happened. After we returned to his office, there was anger on Professor’s face: “Do you know who had just come to me? Bloody Prezent! He asked me to provide him with cruzin . I did not give it to him…” 348

Academician Aleksandr Oparin (1894–1980) was another who gained significantly from the August 1948 Session. In 1949, he became secretary academician of the Biology Division instead of Academician Orbeli. In contrast to Prezent, he was a serious scientist and the author of a theory on the origin of life. The first version of his book Origin of Life was published in Russian in 1924, and the English edition that appeared in 1938 was widely read by Western scientists. 349He became corresponding member of the academy in 1939, academician in 1946, and director of the Bach Institute of Biochemistry in 1946. But from the 1940s–1960s, Oparin was more a Soviet official than a scientist. Besides his positions at the academy, in 1950 he was appointed a member of the International Council for Peace, and in 1952 and 1962, he was elected vice president of the International Federation of Scientists. 350

During his years of power, Academician Oparin was an open pro-Lysenkoist. I have already mentioned his role in the tragic fate of Sabinin. He became even more famous as a supporter of Olga Lepeshinskaya and her pseudotheory on “the origin of cells from noncellular matter.”

Lepeshinskaya (1871–1963), an old Bolshevik, a personal friend of Lenin, and an active Party functionary, started her biological studies in the 1920s, when she was over fifty years old. 351In the 1930s, she published a few papers on “the origin of the cells from non-cellular matter,” which were seriously criticized by many scientists, including Professor Koltsov. 352It was evident that all Lepeshinskaya’s “discoveries” were simply based on artifacts (i.e., artificial substances or structures formed during the preparation of microscopic slides) obtained because of poorly and nonprofessionally made histology preparations (she worked at home with her daughter, granddaughter, and daughter’s husband, who assisted her). It is funny that Lepeshinskaya’s husband, Panteleimon, also an old Bolshevik, was the only person who understood very well what was going on. He told their mutual acquaintance, Yakov Rapoport: “Do not listen to her: She does not know anything about science and says complete nonsense.” 353

Finally, with the help of another old Bolshevik, F. Petrov, in 1945 Lepeshinskaya managed to publish a monograph under the same title as her theory. It had a foreword written by Lysenko and one of his closest coworkers, the VASKhNIL academician Ivan Glushchenko. The book described Lepeshinskaya’s experiments in which, for instance, red blood cells “were developed” from yolk.

After Lysenko’s victory in 1948 and using her Party connections in the Central Committee, Lepeshinskaya initiated a joint meeting of the Academy Biology Division, the Medical Academy, and representatives of the Agricultural Academy. This meeting took place on May 22–24, 1950. Academician Oparin presided over the commission that organized it. He formulated the goal of the meeting:

The attempts to create living systems are possible… only in the Soviet Union. Such attempts are not possible anywhere in capitalist countries because of the ideological position…. I think that the goal of the meeting should be the criticism and destruction of… the last basics of the Mendelism in our country, the Virchowian description of the cell theory [i.e., that a cell can be originated only from another cell]. 354

Twenty-seven speakers praised Lepeshinskaya’s alleged discovery, including one of Mairanovsky’s supporters, Academician Speransky. Some of them were forced to speak by personal order from the Central Committee. 355

The same year (1950), Lepeshinskaya received the highest Soviet award, the Stalin Prize. Two years later, in 1952, with the involvement of Oparin, a second joint conference of the Medical Academy and the Academy Biology Division on the problem of cell origin was organized. As Lepeshinskaya declared, “[U]sing experimental methods… a new dialectical-materialistic theory on the origin of all cells from non-living matter has been developed.” 356

All this nonsense was stopped only after Stalin’s death. However, Oparin continued to be an admirer of Lysenko. In 1954, he wrote:

The August 1948 Session of the VASKhNIL and the joint session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences [i.e., the session of 1950 on physiology] had a profound influence on the development of Soviet biological science. They were turning points after which all branches of biology in our country started to be developed on the basis of materialistic principles of the Michurinist biology and Pavlov physiology…. Our duty is to continue to guard biological science from the influence of foreign reactionary concepts of Morganism and vitalism. 357

Finally, in 1956 Oparin was dismissed from his secretary academician position after three Leningrad anti-Lysenkoists, Vladimir Aleksandrov, Dmitrii Lebedev, and Yurii Olenov, wrote a letter addressed to the Presidium (former Politburo) of the Communist Party. 358The letter was signed by 297 biologists, including academicians, corresponding members of the academy, and professors. Some were Party members and even pro-Lysenkoists. The letter consisted of five points, including “change the leadership of the Biology Division of the Academy,” that is, dismiss Oparin. Academician Engelhardt, the anti-Lysenkoist, replaced Oparin as the new secretary academician.

Besides his duties at the academy, Oparin was a professor at Moscow University. For us students, he seemed a “model” academician: Large and tall, with a mustache and a small beard, Oparin dressed smartly and always wore a bow tie. When I was a fourth-year student, he taught a course on technical biochemistry. Despite his impressive and pretentious appearance, the lectures were quite dull. It is very difficult to say why, but after the second lecture, students refused to attend them. There was something false in Oparin’s manner that students did not like. This refusal created a serious scandal: Such a famous and highly positioned scientist found an hour per week to come to the university, but ungrateful students did not want to listen to his lectures!

In the late 1940s, the Lysenkoist style of argument was introduced in all spheres of biology. In 1948, Nikolai Lebedev, a professor at the Lysenkoist Department of Darwinism at Moscow University, started to destroy the work of invertebrate zoologists of that faculty.

Fifteen years before that, in 1934, my father and his professor at the time, Lev Zenkevich (later secretary academician of the Academy Division of Oceanology, Atmosphere Physics, and Geography), 359published a paper in which they proposed to introduce a worm, Nereis succinea, from the Azov into the Caspian Sea. 360For an unknown reason, the benthic invertebrates that lived on the bottom of the Caspian Sea began to die out in the 1930s, and the peak of their death was in 1937. The sharp depletion in these organisms, which were the food of many fish, especially caviar-producing sturgeons, strongly affected the number of all fish in the Caspian Sea. Urgent measures were needed. After several years of experiments, it was shown that the Sea of Azov worm Nereis could be a candidate for survival in the Caspian Sea. From 1939–1941, on the order of the Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan, special expeditions transported the worm from the Sea of Azov to three locations in the Caspian Sea.