Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory–Sarajevo–Moscow: An Unlikely Network in the Fight against Lysenkoism in Yugoslavia

Never officially enforced or renounced, Lysenkoism in socialist Yugoslavia was propagated since 1945 and lingered on well into the 1950s, even after the Tito-Stalin Split precipitated an early and dramatic de-Stalinization. In 1954, Mirko Korić (1894-1977), biology professor at the University of Sarajevo who was forced to retire after students rebelled against his lectures in “formal genetics,” published a book, Istina o T. D. Lisenku i njegovom učenju (The truth about T. D. Lysenko and his teachings). By far the most sophisticated and comprehensive anti-Lysenkoist piece in Yugoslavia, the book illustrated the complexity of discussing Lysenkoism in post-Stalinist Yugoslavia. Instead of summarily dismissing it, Yugoslav biologists and agronomists carefully differentiated between “deviated” and “sound” elements in the Michurinist biology. If the Yugoslav scientific leadership failed to protect Korić from militant students, he found an unlikely ally – the director of the department of Genetics, Carnegie Institution of Washington (now Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), Milislav Demerec (1895-1966). Decades earlier, they had attended school in Croatia together. Acquainted with Korić’s situation, Demerec supplied and interpreted him with a variety of Western genetics and anti-Lysenkoist publications. The anti-Communist tone of many of these, however, made them problematic in the anti-Stalinist, yet still committedly socialist Yugoslavia. The paper will examine this and related examples of trans-Atlantic cooperation, focusing on the translation and usage of the Western anti-Lysenkoist efforts for specifically Yugoslav purposes in a time when Yugoslav scientific community drew ever more inspiration and resources from the West, but continued to build a “socialist science.”