| I actually overall agree with your point, but to be fair the off topic remark probably was targeted at this bit of pseudoscience that unfortunately dominated Soviet politics for decades, and its influence in Soviet and Chinese agricultural policy ultimately contributed to the death of millions of people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko#Repression_of_b... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine#Agricultu... https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/trofim-l... Note that Nikolai Vavilov, a scientist that preserved the seedbank cited in the Guardian article, was actually purged due to Lysenko's crusade against genetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov > Vavilov's work was criticized by Trofim Lysenko, whose anti-Mendelian concepts of plant biology had won favor with Joseph Stalin. As a result, Vavilov was arrested and subsequently sentenced to death in July 1941. Although his sentence was commuted to twenty years' imprisonment, he died in prison in 1943. In 1955, his death sentence was retroactively pardoned under Nikita Khrushchev. By the late 1950s, his reputation was publicly rehabilitated, and he began to be hailed as a hero of Soviet science.[4] |