Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday
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His technique relies on the fact that no more than prima facie plausibility is required. Close examination by the general reader is unlikely, but shows that the comparisons are hollow and devious. British scientists may be “compelled” to seek positions abroad, but not through fear of prison sentences or execution, which is what kept people like Timofeev-Ressovsky in Berlin at Vavilov’s suggestion, which had been relayed through Hermann Muller. The British geneticist who supposedly “lost” his “post” for “marrying a Chinese wife” was Sydney Cross Harland, well known to Haldane.13 He was perfectly aware that Harland had actually arranged his own dismissal from the firm that employed him by suing them for libel, after taking care to accept a job in South America beforehand, a story that Harland recounts in his autobiography; it had nothing to do with the fact that his wife was Chinese, even though that caused social difficulties in color-conscious Trinidad, where Harland was based at the time.14 But this would not be the last time that Haldane deployed the Harland story.
The comfort to be gained from the reassurance that Agol and Levit “had not done work of great originality” is obscure when it is remembered that Agol and Levit were shot, and that Haldane had met them both. Recall his casual description of the arbitrary execution of his fellow detainee during the Spanish Civil War, when Bethune’s entire Blood Transfusion Unit had been under arrest. However, there is another loose end here.
Hermann Muller had worked with Levit in Moscow shortly before Levit’s opportunity for originality had been foreclosed. Later he wrote a friend that he had forwarded a paper on mathematical genetics and heterosis, written by one of Levit’s students, to Haldane for possible publication.15 The paper vanished, and Muller suspected that Haldane had discreetly dropped it for fear of embarrassing the regime.16 The student in question, Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson (1908–1989), had been sent to the Gulag. In fact, he did two terms of hard labor: first from 1932 to 1935, after he was arrested when Levit’s institute was first purged; and again, after criticizing Lysenko, from 1948 to 1955. Somehow he survived both horrors. However, his vanished paper was not on heterosis per se but rather on the estimation of genetic mutation rates.17 It had been written just before Efroimson’s first spell in the Gulag, around 1932. Haldane published his own calculation of mutation rates in 1935.18
Did Haldane squash Efroimson’s paper, as Muller suspected, because of Efroimson’s embarrassing Gulag imprisonment? There are too many uncertainties to tell: exactly when he received it, if at all; what his personal politics were like at the time of receipt; whether there were other grounds for rejecting it; or whether Muller’s antipathy to Haldane at the time he wrote the letter clouded his judgment. However, Levit himself thought Efroimson’s paper was more general than Haldane’s and worth publishing.19 Efroimson went on to author several books, including The Genetics of Genius, which was published posthumously in 1998. It was possibly a work of some originality, as Efroimson was an early sociobiologist and could not publish material like that in the USSR.
Returning to Lysenko, Haldane volunteered himself for correction. “I have little doubt that when I taught genetics (owing to the war I no longer do so) I made a number of misleading statements. I should be a better teacher if these were pointed out in a public debate to which I could reply.” There was, Haldane averred, equivalent criticism of rival theories in journals in the West—equivalence through naming—but, incredibly, “such attacks are not hot news in New York or London, because the publics of those cities are much less interested in genetics than is that of Moscow.”20
This led Haldane to wonder if perhaps, as the result of Hermann Muller’s persuasion, Soviet geneticists really had spent too much time on “such questions as locating genes in chromosomes, rather than in finding out how they act in the development of an individual, or arise and spread during evolution of a species.” “It may be that under the stimulus of so brilliant a teacher as Muller, an unduly large fraction of the younger Soviet geneticists had occupied themselves with formal genetics.” The stuff was being taught the wrong way. “Some of Lysenko’s points are, I think, valid against genetics as often taught, rather than against the theories held by competent geneticists.”21 In truth that is not what Lysenko meant at all, since he had no time for the “Menshevizing idealism” of genes as a concept, nor did he have any desire to be taught about them. But it all looked a lot more reasonable when it was dressed up by Haldane.
The specific question of the Lysenkoist transformation of varieties proved a lot stickier for Haldane to handle, especially in more technical forums where hard questions might be asked. It was contrary to orthodox genetics, which had banished Lamarck’s inheritance through use, and required stochastic changes to the sex or germ cells in order to alter the nature of offspring. Lysenko, having no use for “Mendelist-Morganist” concepts, offered no coherent theory, apart from repeatedly invoking “development.” Here Haldane did his best over the years to hedge, holding out hope for an orthodox interpretation that would vindicate Lysenko if things were just formulated the right way.
Thus, one of Lysenko’s more offbeat claims was that he could actually produce new varieties by grafting, so that the results bred true. He had supposedly done this with potatoes, which are in the nightshade or Solanaceae family. In his 1940 lectures on genetics, Haldane hedged with a hopeful tautology. “If Lysenko is correct, there is no sharp line in the Solanaceae between viruses causing disease and graft-transmissible factors responsible for morphological characters.”22 This neatly ignores the question of whether Lysenko had offered any proof at all for viral-style transmission of heredity in potatoes, which would indeed be an extraordinary discovery. Good reasons for believing in an effect are advisable before speculating about its causes.
Haldane pursued much the same type of hopeful interpretation, but now with transfer to other anomalous cases, in an article devoted to Lysenko in the Marxist journal Science and Society. The article was provoked by reports printed in the previous number of that journal from the 1939 Moscow Conference on Genetics and Selection, including large chunks of Lysenko’s speech. Haldane submits that Lysenko often “goes too far” in his criticisms of genetics but works hard to hold out for “some” cases where Lysenko’s non-genetic transmission might work, arguing that they were not impossible. This fudges the obvious fact that Lysenko’s claims were overwhelmingly unlikely given extant knowledge, and that peculiar instances of heritability in extremely rare instances would actually make no material difference to the probability of the instances Lysenko really was claiming, like the creation of new varieties by grafting fruit trees. We will consider one of Haldane’s attention transfers in detail because it cropped up several times in his writings on the subject.
I think that nine times out of ten Lysenko is wrong, that is to say that you cannot improve a breed of animals by improving its food. But there are cases where this is possible, and they may be common enough to make Lysenko’s principle of great practical value. The clearest of such cases was discovered at Bar Harbor, Maine, by Little’s group of workers on mouse genetics and has been specially studied by Bittner. For many years they had kept different pure lines of mice. Each line had a characteristic liability to mammary cancer in females. In one line 90 per cent of all females who did not die of some other cause before the age of two years would develop this disease, in another line only 5 per cent. The members of the immune line were no more likely to develop it if they were caged for months with the susceptible line. The liability seemed to be hereditary. But it turned out that if the young of the susceptible line were separated from their mothers at birth and suckled by immune females they were much less likely to become cancerous. And this partial immunity is handed on to their children.
Nothing of the kind has been discovered for other forms of cancer. And I believe it to be a rarer phenomenon than Lysenko supposes. But it is futile to deny its existence and to regard Lysenko’s assertion of its possibility as in any way unscientific.23
This is
a transfer of attention to an experimental anomaly never referenced by Lysenko, abstracting “Lysenko’s principle” away from his own putative examples and neatly sidestepping the question of whether he had conducted an experiment at all, or whether, say, spring wheat really can be transformed into true-breeding winter wheat by vernalization—but look over there! Haldane knew that the most probable explanation of the Little-Bittner anomaly was that there was transmission of a carcinogenic virus through suckling. This was strongly suspected at the time, as the cancer switched tendencies in both groups; the previously susceptible also benefited from being suckled by the non-susceptible. Bittner himself attributed this to a “milk factor” that we now know to be the MMTV virus.24 Haldane makes no mention of the viral explanation here, as it would ruin the effect of introducing the anomaly. But elsewhere he does mention exactly this possibility: in his 1940 lectures on genetics mentioned above! “The epoch making work of the Bar Harbor group has shown that ‘spontaneous’ cancer not only has a genetical basis, but at least in one case depends on an agent, perhaps a virus, which can be transmitted by the milk.”25
In 1944, criticizing an article by Cyril Darlington in Nature, Haldane shifted the burden onto the doubters by splicing in an imputed fallacy, complaining that “Lysenko and his colleagues in the U.S.S.R. have reported a large number of cases in which characters have been transmitted from one plant variety to another by grafting” but that Darlington had ignored his work. “It may be that Lysenko, with the enthusiasm of a pioneer, has criticized Mendelian conceptions unjustifiably, as the biometric school did in Great Britain. But this is scarcely a sufficient reason for ignoring his work, particularly as some of his publications antedate that cited by Dr. Darlington.”26 But rather than making the dubious inference imputed by Haldane, might Darlington not have ignored that “work” because it provided no substantial data in the form of controlled experiments beyond the claimed results?
At other times, Haldane enlisted what might be called the argument from overcorrection. “There can be little doubt that some Soviet plant breeders had underestimated the importance of environment. Lyssenko,27 who has produced most conspicuous results by changing the environments of plants, has probably swung the pendulum too far in the other direction, but I do not doubt that it will settle down.”28
By now this ongoing defense of Lysenko by shifts and contrivances was exasperating many of Haldane’s colleagues at home. A Daily Worker reader, Professor F. G. Gregory from the Research Institute of Plant Physiology at Imperial College, was moved to write to him in August 1947 to complain. “Lysenko has spoken a great deal of nonsense on vernalisation, just as he has about genetics, and I really cannot see why you should give all his utterances your official blessing. I have never had the opportunity of talking with you about vernalisation . . . but should you care to hear from me what the position with regard to vernalisation really is I would only be too pleased to discuss the matter with you.”29 What Gregory meant was that experience, including his own, had shown that vernalization was not worth the trouble in practice.
At home, Lysenko was coming under steadily increasing pressure. The chaos of the war and the deep layers of deceit that the Soviets called tufta could disguise the variance between his theories and the way things worked in the real world, but only for so long. His promised novel varieties, to be delivered in as little as two or three years, did not materialize, and vernalized spring wheat (he was vernalizing almost everything by now) simply didn’t work in Siberia. The dire state of agriculture was worsening, not improving, after the war. The technical specialists and the regions of the research establishment not under his direct control began to notice, and by 1947 open challenges to his theories were emerging. This sort of tension—an internal contradiction, in Marxese—would periodically recur throughout Lysenko’s career until his final eclipse, and could only be contained by political action. If Lysenkoism didn’t work as a scientific theory, it would be made to work as a political theory. Those who had the bad manners to notice that the promised results never materialized simply had to stop noticing. Crucially, Lysenko still had the backing of the politicians, and of Stalin in particular.
An article in a “bourgeois” journal in the West provided the impetus. The geneticist L. C. Dunn had written a glowing recollection of Soviet science, based mainly on his visit to the USSR back in 1927, to inform the readers of Science about its state there in 1944.30 Dunn was enthusiastic about “the control and organization of science by and for the whole community,” and the “vigorous science” that could “survive in a socialist state” despite naysayers. This provoked a rejoinder by Karl Sax, who pointed out the widely reported persecution of Vavilov and orthodox genetics, which Dunn had passed over in silence.31 News of this exchange filtered through to the USSR, and in 1945 a reply to Sax appeared in Science, written by Anton R. Zhebrak (1901–1965), who was at the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy of Moscow. Zhebrak assured the world that “the science of genetics is making progress in the USSR,” pointing out that there were a “number of important genetics laboratories” that were “doing good work.” This despite Lysenko’s “naïve and purely speculative” criticism, which he implied was not taken seriously. The pill was sugared with the observation that Lysenko had nevertheless made “a number of practical suggestions which have been of great value.”32
Back home in the USSR, this response was not taken kindly by Lysenko’s allies. Two years later Zhebrak was unceremoniously slapped down for “unpatriotic acts” in the state organ Pravda: first by Prezent,33 and then by the agronomist Professor Ivan Laptev and others.34 For a while Zhebrak went into hiding. He was dismissed from the presidency of the Byelorussian Academy, but otherwise escaped harm. This encouraged the latent opposition.
The controversy was followed with interest in the West. During the war, the British geneticist Kenneth Mather had kept up scrutiny of Lysenko in Nature.35 Lysenko’s book Heredity and Its Variability (1943) had also been translated into English by the exiled Russian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky and circulated in manuscript by late 1945 for critical review, to increase interest in the West—this translation was eventually published the following year. Lysenko had sent the Russian edition of the book to Haldane in 1944, with a cheerful cover letter.36
Dear Professor Haldane!
I have read with highest interest your book ‘New Paths in Genetics’, which according to my request has been translated in Russian and is now available in manuscript.
I am sending to you my book on Heredity and its variation, which in many points differs essentially from the orthodox Mendel-Morganistic genetics.
Sincerely Yours,
President of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences acad. T. D. Lysenko
Haldane replied that he could not read the language, adding somewhat obscurely that he would “perhaps” agree with some of Lysenko’s views, and tactfully asking for experimental evidence.37
Dear Professor Lysenko,
Many thanks for your book. Unfortunately my knowledge of Russian is very poor, and at the present time it is difficult to find translators who also know enough biology for the purpose. I should like to add that the book of mine to which you refer so kindly was written in 1941, and that as a result, if I wrote it again today, I should modify my views in several respects, perhaps bringing them nearer your own. Unfortunately it is extremely difficult in this country to obtain accounts of the actual experimental results on which your views are based, and I should be very grateful if I could obtain some reprints giving accounts of the facts in question (on genetics), as well as the general conclusions based on these facts.
During the war I have done little genetics, as I have been engaged on problems of human physiology arising in connection with the war. However, I hope shortly to begin full-time work on genetics again, and it would be of great value to me to have access to your reprints.
Yours sincerely,
J. B. S. Haldane
Now Haldane was offered D
obzhansky’s English translation of Heredity and Its Variation to review, by a group of geneticists based in America: Kurt Stern, Salvador Luria, Hermann Muller, L. C. Dunn, Milislav Demerec, and Dobzhansky himself.38 Haldane refused outright, causing Muller to break off relations with him.39
A well-informed article in the Nineteenth Century by Haldane’s former colleague Cyril Darlington, “The Retreat from Science in Soviet Russia,” proved the most provoking. Darlington, unlike Haldane, had taken the trouble to read the English translation of Heredity and Its Variation. He summarized the controversy in detail, and Lysenko’s role since its inception, along with an account of what was then known about Vavilov’s arrest, trial, and disappearance into the Gulag, as well as the general persecution of geneticists that accompanied and preceded Vavilov’s demise. After an accurate précis of Lysenko’s blossoming inspirations, Darlington concluded that “It may be difficult in such a man to distinguish between the enthusiasm of the charlatan and the frenzy of the fanatic.”40
Laptev made sure to single out Darlington for especial opprobrium as a foreign troublemaker, but Darlington had provoked even stronger reactions in the UK from the small group of geneticists in the fold of the British Communist Party. One of these, Angus Bateman (1919–1996), wrote a hurried letter to Haldane, asking him if something could not be done about Darlington.41