Papers on the Soviet genetics controversy.

Date:
1949
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Papers on the Soviet genetics controversy. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    3/16 (page 3)
    Resignation from the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. by SIR HENRY H. DALE, o.m., g.b.e., f.r.s. Formerly President of the Royal Society, and of the British Association for the Advancement of Science London, November 22nd, 1948. To The President of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., Moscow. Mr. President, I have come to the conclusion that I ought to resign the Honorary Membership of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., to which I was elected in May, 1942. When your distinguished predecessor, Academician V. L. Komarov, wrote to inform me of the honour thus conferred upon me, his letter made reference to the fact that I was then President of the Royal Society of London. I believe that many British scientists, indeed, recognised and welcomed my election at that time as the symbol of a community of purpose between the scientists of our two nations, which had then been engaged together for nearly a year in the war against Hitler’s Germany in defending, as we believed, the freedom of Science, as of all man’s proper activities, from the threat of an aggressive tyranny. In that same year, 1942, the Royal Society of London elected Nicholas Ivanovitch Vavilov to be one of its fifty Foreign Members. With Lenin’s support and encouragement he had been able, as first Director of the Lenin Academy of Genetics, to initiate and promote a rapidly-growing contribution, by research in the U.S.S.R., to that world-wide advance in the science of Genetics which had followed the recognition of Mendel’s discoveries. His use of these opportunities was reputed to have been of great benefit to Agriculture in the Soviet Union ; we desired to honour it as a great contribution to Science for the whole world.