Discoveries Transcend Science

Theodosius Grygorovych Dobzhansky (1900-1975)

Note: a native from Ukraine and a prodigy who became an expert biologist by the age of 15 years - his teacher was Victor Luchnik, a refugee in Kyiv escaping the ravages of the Bolshevik terror in whose honor he named a species of "ladybug" (coccinellidae beetle). Theo, as he was known in the U.S., was granted a Rockefeller scholarship and emigrated to the United States in 1927 to join the pioneer genetics investigative team of Thomas Hunt Morgan. For not returning to the USSR, Theo was declared a "non person" by the Bolsheviks. In 1937, Theo was recognized as a distinguished geneticists and was able to bridge the gap separating Darwinian Evolution and quantitative genetics from Mendelian Genetics as given in his classic book "Genetics and the Origin of Species". On the other hand, in Ukraine and the USSR, Stalin and the Communist Party autocrats negated genetics and upheld the unscientific theories of T. Lysenko (1898-1976) who also was an active accomplice in the "liquidation" of geneticists. Regrettably, although Ukraine is now an independent country, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences continues to honors T. Lysenko but has not seen fit to restitute and honor the global scientific impact of Dobzansky, a recipient of the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award granted by the U.S.