Thursday, April 26, 2007

¡Ora, UTEP BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT !

¡Ora. MEChA !

¡Adelante, DESTINO !

Carl Sagan's

"Protocols of the Elders of Ozone."

a.k.a.


Contact: A Novel ...


Adapted from page 418 of the large print edition on the Soviet Union's views of genetics as a science.

Number one, Joseph Stalin hated, loathed and above all feared, the Roman Catholic Church.

Number two, this included Catholic monks like Mendel who was an early pioneer in the modern study of genetics.

As Sagan tells us:

"A nearly fatal blow had been dealt Soviet genetics when in the 1930s Stalin decided that modern Mendelian genetics was ideologically unsuitable, and decreed as scientifically orthodox the crackpot genetics of a politically sophisticated agriculturist named Trofim Lysenko.

"Two generations of bright Soviet students were taught essentially nothing of the fundamentals of heredity.

"Now, sixty years later, Soviet molecular biology and genetic engineering were comparatively backward, and few major disocveries in the subject had been made by Soviet scientists.

"Fortunately for American molecular biology, the [Christian] fundamentalists were not as influential in the United States as Stalin had been in the Soviet Union."



1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Mendel inspired me to study genetics.

9:13 PM  

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