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Offers a contemporaneous account of the most important advances in the study of heredity during the beginning of the twentieth century.
The classic of Stalinist aberrant genetic theory, horticulturist Lysenko rejected orthodox genetics in favor of the theories of those of the Russian horticulturist I. V. Michurin (d. 1935). Among his theories were that wheat raised under certain conditions produce seeds of rye and that theoretical biology must be fused with Soviet agricultural practice. He was the total autocrat of Soviet biology from 1948 through 1953, and believed that through inherited characteristics Stalinism would create a 'new man'. Lysenko held that heredity can be changed by husbandry, a theory that had disastrous impact on Soviet agriculture. He was dismissed from his post as director of the Soviet Institute of Genetics.
Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.
The cultural history of heredity: scholars from a range of disciplines discuss the evolution of the concept of heredity, from the Early Modern understanding of the act of "generation" to its later nineteenth-century definition as the transmission of characteristics across generations. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the biological makeup of an organism was ascribed to an individual instance of "generation"--involving conception, pregnancy, embryonic development, parturition, lactation, and even astral influences and maternal mood--rather than the biological transmission of traits and characteristics. Discussions of heredity and inheritance took place largely in the legal and poli...
When the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics opened its doors in 1927, it could rely on wide political approval. In 1933 the institute and its founding director Eugen Fischer came under pressure to adjust, which they were able to ward off through Selbstgleichschaltung (auto-coordination). The Third Reich brought about a mutual beneficial servicing of science and politics. With their research into hereditary health and racial policies the institute’s employees provided the Brownshirt rulers with legitimating grounds. This volume traces the history of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics between democracy and dictatorship. Attention is turned to the haunting transformation of the research program, the institute’s integration into the national and international science panorama, and its relationship to the ruling power. The volume also confronts the institute’s interconnection to the political crimes of Nazi Germany terminating in bestial medical crimes.
Genetics - Eugenics and euthanasia - Genetic disease - Patterns of heredity - DNA - Genes_