The Molecular Biologist Who Exposed the Soviet Union

The Lysenkoist line coming from Moscow posed a painful dilemma for the many French scientists who were members of the very large and popular French Communist Party: Should they adhere to their political allegiances and toe the party line? Or, instead, should they defend genetics and break from the party? For an entire week in September 1948, the major newspaper Combat provided a forum for French scientists to debate it, under the headline “Mendel … or Lysenko.” The biologist Marcel Prenant, Monod’s former chief in the Resistance, sought to reconcile the two camps. He asserted that Lysenko did not reject the existence of genes and chromosomes, and had achieved important results.

Monod’s turn came the following day, and he was having none of Prenant’s apologetics. He charged his former comrade with embarrassing himself with contradictory explanations. No, Monod alleged, “the system by which [Lysenko] proposes to replace genetics is a muddle of propositions which are mutually contradictory when they are not meaningless.”

But he also articulated what he viewed as the greater threat: the Soviet Union itself. “What begs to be understood is how Lysenko was able to obtain sufficient power and influence to subjugate his colleagues,” he wrote, “to win the support of the radio and the press, the approval of the Central Committee and of Stalin personally, to the extent that today Lysenko’s derisory ‘Truth’ is the official truth guaranteed by the state, that everything that deviates from it is ‘irrevocably outlawed’ from Soviet science.”

The power of the USSR was such, Monod explained, “that his opponents who defend science, progress, and the interest of the nation against him are expelled, pilloried as ‘slaves of bourgeois science,’ and practically accused of treason. All of this is senseless, monstrous, unbelievable. Yet it is true. What has happened?”

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It was a bold, devastating attack. Monod had many colleagues and even family members who belonged to the Communist Party. His essay was far more than a critique of some specialist branch of Soviet biology, it was a condemnation of the entire Soviet way of thinking. The more he looked into his own question about what had happened to Soviet science, the more he discovered that most of Lysenko’s key objections to genetics pivoted on, of all things, a misunderstanding of chance.

For decades, scientists had observed that mutations in genes arose spontaneously at a low, but measurable, rate. They could not predict whether any given individual plant, animal, or bacterium would bear a particular new mutation; it was a matter of probability, of random chance. Since no one could predict which chromosomes would be inherited by an individual animal or plant, geneticists understood fertilization to be a random process.