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 ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it. When you have a question about the physical world, there are a lot of ...

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 ...

John Rennie: Well, I think the major point we were trying to make was that Lysenkoism was a policy of letting ideology dictate your science for you. Lysenko was a complete fraud and yet there are ...