Soviet Scientific Work on Potatoes

Abstract

A LONG cable has been sent by Prof. Lysenko, president of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, to Sir John Russell, chairman of the Anglo-Soviet Scientific Collaboration Committee, describing recent results of Soviet scientific work on the potato crop which in the U.S.S.R., as in Great Britain, is now of very great importance as human food. The message begins by stating that the Odessa Institute of Genetics and Selection, of which he was for a long time director and where much of this work was begun, had been evacuated before the Germans captured the city. The investigations now being made under Lysenko's general direction by various scientific bodies, like all other scientific investigations in the U.S.S.R., are exclusively directed to the war effort; in this case to help the Collective and State farms increase the output of food and raw materials. Genetics, he says, is the science dealing with the nature of the living organism and its reactions to various environmental influences at different stages of its development. The better the laws of inheritance are understood, the easier it is to govern the nature of the plant organism and modify it in any desirable direction, thereby creating new plants possessing characters useful to man.