Le due scienze. Il "caso Lysenko" in Italia

In the summer of 1948, between 31 July and 7 August, during a session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), the theories of Ukrainian agronomist Trofim D. Lysenko, based on the rebuttal of the underlying principles of genetics (for example, the existence of genes and random mutation) and on the assertion of the infinite possibilities etched on the hereditary structure of living organisms through the modification of the environment, became the official doctrine of the CPSU. The head-on battle between the \u201ctwo blocks\u201d defined at the beginning of the Cold War thus extended to the scientific front. The \u201cproletarian\u201d science of Lysenko, faithful to the ideas of Engels and to dialectical materialism, and involved in the broad work of optimising Soviet agriculture, was set against \u201cbourgeois\u201d science \u2013 genetics \u2013 denouncing and criminalising it as a \u201creactionary\u201d, \u201cidealistic\u201d and \u201cmechanistic\u201d discipline. For the Soviet Union, the VASKhNIL session in the summer of 1948 was the end of a long controversy begun at the end of the 1920s. For the communist parties of occidental Europe, it was instead the start of a season of intense and painful cultural lacerations that touched the political world as much as the scientific. Particularly dramatic was the choice imposed upon communist oriented biology, compelled to decide if it would remain faithful to the party in the face of this ultimate error. Though Lysenkoism has long been a popular topic in numerous academic disciplines, this book is the first which explores the subject from the perspective of the West Europe, and particularly of the country \u2013 Italy - with the most important Communist Party in the West. In this sense, the book focuses on a paradigmatic case of the relationship between science, politics and culture in post-World War II Italy