A recent report in Nature describes how the Trump administration is weakening peer review in favor of ideology-based grant ...

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 ...

A strange thing is happening to the venerable magazine Scientific American. It has decided to kick its science-loving readers in the teeth and embrace a modern equivalent of Lysenkoism—the doctrine ...

Lysenkoism became one of the Soviet Union’s most disastrous scientific and political catastrophes after ideology replaced evidence inside the agricultural system. Backed by Stalin’s regime, ...

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 ...

A few years ago, one of us (Ian) was lucky enough to be invited to visit the N.I. Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry in St Petersburg, Russia. Every plant breeder or geneticist knows of Nikolai ...

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 ...