Graham has written a wonderful
book on Lysenko and the Russian School of Genetics during the Stalin era. Lysenko
viewed inheritance in the sense that certain characteristics could be handed
down in generations based upon environmental factors experienced by parents.
That is the change in a genetic makeup was not solely due to genetic changes
per se. He could turn summer wheat to winter wheat by getting it used to a
change in weather. Thus he did not need a genetic alteration but an
environmental alteration was sufficient. In a sense the concept did play into
the hands of the Marxist reasoning.
Graham blends the understanding
of epigenetic changes that are currently being understood with the ideas of
Lysenko and asks if this new understand then justifies Lysenko's ideas. On the other
hand, Graham details Lysenko's way of dealing with his academic adversaries
often resulting in their imprisonment and demise. The current understanding of
gene expression and thus phenotype is that genes can be turned on and off by
such epigenetic factors as methylation. Methyl groups bind to the nucleotides
and also suppress expression directly by blocking the gene or indirectly by
blocking transcription factors.
This is somatic epigenetics. Germ
line epigenetics, parent to child has also been observed. Namely effects on the
parent causing epigenetic changes can be handed down to the child, where it was
assumed that the methylation of certain bases was eliminate but somehow they
can be preserved. Thus, in a simplistic sense, an environmental change
imprinting the parent can imprint the offspring. This may or may not be
consistent in a broad sense with Lysenko but the author discusses it in some
detail. Graham's discussion is limited as one would expect in a short book of
this type but he does explain some of the issues well including the event of
the "Dutch Winter", an epigenetic benchmark.
Graham has a wonderful discussion
of his opportunistic meeting with Lysenko at a lunch table in the Russian
Academy, and the brief attempt to elicit some explanation from Lysenko. Lysenko
was as one would expect defensive since this occurred after he was taken down
from his perch yet retained his academic credentials. This discussion is
quintessential east meets west based upon my personal experiences in Russia
when first meeting some notable. It was clear from Graham's description that
Lysenko was still wary especially since Graham had been critical of him in
Graham's prior writings.
Graham also presents a clear and
coherent discussion of the players in this tragedy, the geneticists following
the true path and how Lysenko and his actions resulted in their fall.
The only point that would have
been useful to explore would be the need by the Marxist theorists to have a
Lysenko position versus a Darwinian one. I had seen this battle with the
probabilists. Marxist theory is deterministic and probability is its enemy. Yet
many probabilists managed to work and prosper. Individuals like Gnedenko,
Kolmogorov, Stratonovich, Markov and others developed the basis for stochastic
processes that we see used in fields as broad as finance with the Black-Scholes
theorem in options trading, a thought anathema to the Marxists. Graham does
provide some insight but it would be worthwhile to have a more in depth
discussion of this potential conflict.
Overall the book is an excellent
addition to understanding both the Russian Academy and its functioning, the
Stalinist management of the overall society, and a petri dish model of Academic
infighting. It is very worthwhile for those seeking to understand both Russia
as well as the politics of Science, albeit in a different vein.
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