At the height of the Cold War, Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, one of the most prolific American surgeons of the 20th century, made several trips to China and the USSR to survey the medical landscape on the other side of the Iron Curtain. He toured clinics and medical schools and met with barefoot doctors. DeBakey became a broker of valuable medical and scientific information, teaching new techniques and introducing new machines in the USSR and China, while reporting on the conditions of Chinese and Soviet medical institutions back home to the American public. His diplomatic success was possible in part because of his willingness to take other medical systems seriously—he praised the barefoot doctors and was “impressed” with Russian medical inventions that were showcased during his visits. This paper draws from archival and oral historical material in Dr. DeBakey’s personal papers to consider the ways in which he was able to gain mobility between the Cold War East and West through his expertise in medical technology. With rich diary entries describing his visits, DeBakey situated both the Western technology he helped transplant to the East as well as that which he encountered there within the topography of the Soviet and Chinese medical systems. In reflecting upon DeBakey’s Cold War travels, this paper seeks to interrogate how his influence and mobility shaped perceptions of both American and communist-sphere medical technology.

From the establishment of the World Health Organization in 1948, the question of technical assistance was hotly debated by Eastern European countries. Recuperating from the war and undergoing radical political change, countries of the Socialist Bloc were both recipients and donors of technical assistance in a newly forming system of international health. These countries had specific ideas about the obligations of states and the role of technical aid in health that did not necessarily map on the dominant, US-led interpretation. While there is a growing literature on technical assistance and development between Eastern Europe and the so-called Third World, the role of technology and expertise at the intersection of liberal and socialist international health has been little explored. Through the case of hospital building projects and expert networks from a Hungarian perspective, this paper asks how we can understand socialist engagement in international health, and how technical aid among the Second and Third worlds fitted into a broader system of technical aid and international health.

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.”