A lanky fellow with a fanatic's fiery eyes, Geneticist Trofim Lysenko was Stalin's favorite scientist. Thirteen years ago, he blossomed before the world as the self-taught despot of Soviet biological science, proclaiming his fantastic dogma that Communists could change nature at will. Riding high, he terrorized his rivals, shipping to prison or disgrace all Soviet biologists who defended the orthodox axiom that basic traits are transmitted by genes that cannot be changed by training the parent organism. Lysenko's dictatorship died with Stalin. But now Lysenko is back in bloom, not as...
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