Talking with the lower echelon employees of publishing reminds me of a description I once read about the mutual embarrassment of Western and Soviet biologists when they talked about genetics.

Trofim Lysenko became the Director of the Soviet Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in the 1930s under Josef Stalin. He was an advocate of the theory that characteristics acquired by ...

A strange thing is happening to the venerable magazine Scientific American. It has decided to kick its science-loving readers in the teeth and embrace a modern equivalent of Lysenkoism—the doctrine ...

CONSERVATIVE LYSENKOISM….THE DEFINITIVE REPORT….Chris Mooney emailed me yesterday to draw my attention to a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists about how deeply the ideological tentacles of ...

Trofim Lysenko rose to power by promising Stalin a miracle: crops that would grow faster, bigger, and stronger without modern genetics. He rejected real science and instead pushed untested theories ...

The patient, cumulative work of consensus science. The carbon cycle is one of the great wonders of life on our planet—among other things, it helps explain what David Archer calls our planet's ...

In “Change Is Coming to the Practice of Medicine” (Letters, Aug. 2), your letter writers show that history repeats itself. Biological research in the U.S.S.R. was crippled for decades because it ...

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was Joseph Stalin’s favorite scientist. He rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of a new pseudo-science of hybridization which had strong political appeal to Stalin and his ...