Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2021. Pp. 256. ISBN 978-0-2267-6138-1. $45.00 (hardback)

The shock of learning about Vavilov's 1943 death in a Saratov prison, and the incredible Moscow encounter between Huxley and Lysenko's anti-Mendelian pseudoscience in 1945 – nicely retold by Aronova – propelled Huxley into becoming a Cold War theorist of ‘two camps’ in science as the first...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The British journal for the history of science 2022, Vol.55 (1), p.124-126
Main Author: Langstaff, Alex
Format: Review
Language:English
Subjects:
Bibliometrics
Bolshevism
Camps
Cold War
Cybernetics
Efflorescence
Environmental movements
Fiction
Historians
Huxley, Julian (1887-1975)
Politics
Pseudoscience
Science fiction
Science fiction & fantasy
Science history
Sociobiology
War
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Summary:The shock of learning about Vavilov's 1943 death in a Saratov prison, and the incredible Moscow encounter between Huxley and Lysenko's anti-Mendelian pseudoscience in 1945 – nicely retold by Aronova – propelled Huxley into becoming a Cold War theorist of ‘two camps’ in science as the first director of UNESCO. Aronova cites the New Chronology movement of Anatolii Formenko, and Armenian cybernetician Akop Nazaretyan's Euro-Asian Center for Megahistory and Systems Forecasting in Moscow (and, one might add, the 1990s efflorescence of Russian science fiction) – in both cases examples of intellectuals already pursuing a Big History approach during perestroika. [...]one wonders what Aronova would make of the 1970s, when global debates about sociobiology raged, and environmental movements that scholars of the Soviet sphere are now investigating became avowedly political.
ISSN:0007-0874
1474-001X
DOI:10.1017/S0007087422000097