Afterthought /Re: Hoskins on CM/

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Thu Aug 12 10:53:25 PDT 1999


In message <00e201bee4e3$d5add140$0f4fefd1 at default>, elena <spectra at rousse.bg400.bg> writes
>Reminds me of Lysenko in the USSR (and Michourin and Co). It now seems
>absurd that they wanted to make hybrids between a pig and a mushroom (or
>almost), should I say anecdotal (like Michourin dying after a fall from a
>poplar tree where he had climbed to pick some dill). But Lysenko's theory
>was used to justify the assumption that conditions are more important than
>genetics; power of man over nature, of society's ennobling effect on the
>individual. And the promise of supercrops and superpeople

I'm over-limit, but in fact it is the opponents to GM food that are closer to Lysenkoism, especially Mae-Wan Ho and Steven Rose in the Open University Biophysics department in England. Rose is a one-time Maoist who holds to Engels' discredited Dialectics of Nature. Both have a mystified conception of the unity of the organism that Ho uses to dismiss 'reductionist' Genetic Engineering.

-- Jim heartfield



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list