H.J. Muller and J.B.S. Haldane: Eugenics and Lysenkoism

Abstract

On December 30, 1948 J.B.S. Haldane participated in a radio program broadcast by the BBC on what had become a cause célèbre of Cold War science—the Lysenko controversy. The other three participants— S.C. Harland, C.D. Darlington and R.A. Fisher—were also all respected geneticists. The difference between Harland, Darlington, Fisher and Haldane was that while the first three were eager to weigh in by denounc-ing T.D. Lysenko as a fraud, Haldane was not. By this time two things were clear. One, the anti-genetics campaign launched by Lysenko had replaced eugenics—especially its German variant, Rassenhygiene, imple-mented in Nazi Germany during the 1930s—as a focus of concern among activist biologists in the USA and Great Britain. 1 Two, Haldane was appar-ently the only geneticist unwilling to outright condemn Lysenko as a char-latan who had nothing to offer to contemporary studies in evolution and heredity. 2 Lysenko's power, so the story went, was purely the product of state interference in science, an outcome portrayed as inevitable in a coun-try where the official doctrine—Marxism—presumed science as a central 104 component of state ideology, and thus necessarily subject to the dictates of the central governing authority, the Communist Party. Yet behind this story lies a far more nuanced chronology, showing how Haldane was inadvertently led into the role of Lysenko martyr by Hermann J. Muller, perhaps his generation of geneticists' most fervent advocate of the notion that a better world could be bred to order through human selective breeding. Muller's fantasies for this project were mapped out along the lines of other would-be technocrats of his generation, such as Julian Huxley: a society composed of genetically superior individuals who, in reproducing their kind, would raise civilization to a whole new level. 3