The exchange of views on epigenetics (Letters, passim) must be causing some turning in graves: Lamarck hearing that maybe he was on the right track, Darwin thinking that maybe he was too exclusive and Trofim Lysenko with maybe a wry smile. Lysenko, by using Lamarckian ideas, destroyed Soviet genetics research between 1937-64. Stalin praised him and Khrushchev supported him, but Andrei Sakharov, with Zhores Medvedev, finally had him removed. The communist party aim at the time was to create the “New Soviet Man”. Lysenko’s philosophy involving the use of environmental influences on heredity fitted their dogma. As a result, hundreds of Soviet geneticists were dismissed, including Nikolai Vavilov, then one of the world’s leading plant breeders, who died in prison. The period was one of the most bizarre, and saddest, chapters in the history of science. Possibly now, epigenetics or neo-Lamarckism may be actually extending Darwinism, in a totally unexpected direction.
Dr Bruce Vivash Jones
Cirencester, Gloucestershire
