Duančić, Vedran. Lysenko in Yugoslavia, 1945–1950s: How to De-Stalinize Stalinist Science.

Duančić, Vedran. Lysenko in Yugoslavia, 1945–1950s: How to De-Stalinize Stalinist  Science. Journal of the History of Biology (2020), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09598-2

Abstract:
By the summer of 1948, socialist Yugoslavia seemed determined to follow in the footsteps of its closest ally, the Soviet Union, and strike a decisive blow to “reactionary genetics.” But barely a month before the infamous VASKhNIL session, the Soviet–Yugoslav split began to unravel, influencing the reception of Lysenko’s doctrine in Yugoslavia. Instead of simply dismissing it as yet another example of Stalinist deviationism, Yugoslav mičurinci carefully weighed its political and ideological implications, trying to negotiate the Stalinist origins of Michurinist biology with political and ideological reconfigurations in post-Stalinist Yugoslavia. The essay examines the strategies employed by supporters and opponents of Lysenko’s doctrine, as well as those sympathetic to it but yet unconvinced of its scientific validity and political appropriateness. It emphasizes globally unique attempts to de-Stalinize Michurinist biology and use it in the political-ideological struggle against the Stalinist Soviet Union, pointing to local agency and the bottom-up nature of attempts both in support of and against the doctrine.

Keywords:
Lysenkoism, Michurinist biology, Genetics, Marxism, Yugoslavia, Tito–Stalin Split

Alexei Yurchak: "Communist Proteins: Lenin's Skin, Astrobiology, and the Origin of Life," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 20, no. 4 (2019): 683-715.

DOI: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/739469

Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen: Wie man Mikroben auf Reisen schickt Zirkulierendes bakteriologisches Wissen und die polnische Medizin 1885–1939, Tübingen 2018.

[Published in German.]

Knowledge does not travel on its own. Bacteriology's laboratory practice depended on comprehensive logistics to be mobilized. Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen follows Polish physicians in their efforts to make microbes travel. Inscriptions of laboratory techniques and the mobilization of laboratory devices were important tools in this process. The history of circulating bacteriological knowledge connects Polish doctors with research institutions from Berlin to Tunis, integrates them into a global history of knowledge and leads us to rethink the categories of center and periphery. At the same time, the study tells us the story of how bacteriological knowledge was introduced to medical practice, first in the Kingdom of Poland and then in the Polish state founded in 1918 – a story which can only be encompassed by taking the practices and materialities of bacteriological laboratory practices into account

The study was awarded the 2016 dissertation prize of the German Society for the History of Medicine, Natural Sciences and Technology.

Katharina Kreuder-Sonnen Geboren 1983; Studium der Neueren und Neuesten Geschichte, VWL und des Öffentlichen Rechts; 2013–15 Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Medizinhistorischen Institut der Universität Bonn; 2016 Promotion an der Universität Gießen; seit April 2016 Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Professur für Europäische Zeitgeschichte nach 1945 an der Universität Siegen.

https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/buch/wie-man-mikroben-auf-reisen-schickt-9783161550645?no_cache=1