- Person
- Vitaly Ginzburg
- Lived
- 1916–2009
- Field
- Theoretical physics
- From
- Russian
The story
For decades Soviet biology was crippled by Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist who rejected Mendelian genetics and enjoyed the backing of Stalin and later Khrushchev. From 1937 he and his allies accused geneticists of sabotage. The great plant geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943, and at a session of the Agricultural Academy in August 1948 Lysenko's doctrine was declared the only correct theory. Geneticists who would not recant lost their posts, and some were imprisoned or executed.
Vitaly Ginzburg knew this atmosphere at first hand. His wife Nina's father, a prominent engineer, had died of starvation in a Saratov prison in 1942, apparently in the same cell and at almost the same time as Vavilov. On 4 October 1947 the Literaturnaya Gazeta attacked Ginzburg in an article headed Against Servility, which also targeted the biologist Anton Zhebrak, an opponent of Lysenko. Ginzburg later wrote with contempt of the ignorant officials who had tried to dictate how the laws of physics or genetics should be understood.
Even after Stalin's death in 1953, Lysenko kept powerful protection. In 1955 more than 300 scientists signed a letter to Khrushchev seeking to curb his influence; he stepped back only briefly. In 1962 three leading physicists, Yakov Zeldovich, Pyotr Kapitsa and Ginzburg, publicly denounced Lysenko's work as pseudoscience and condemned his silencing of opponents. In 1964 the physicist Andrei Sakharov blamed Lysenko in the Academy of Sciences for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology.
After Khrushchev was removed in 1964, the president of the Academy declared that Lysenko's immunity from criticism was over. In 1965 he was removed as director of the Institute of Genetics, which was soon dissolved. Wikipedia records that Ginzburg is known to biologists as part of the group of scientists who helped bring down Lysenko's reign, allowing modern genetic science to return to the USSR.
It was an example of scientists in one field using their standing to defend the integrity of another, at a time when doing so carried real personal risk. Genetics had been set back by decades, but its revival opened the way for Soviet scientists to rejoin the international work that transformed biology, medicine and plant breeding.
Why it matters
The fall of Lysenkoism, which Ginzburg and fellow physicists helped bring about, allowed Soviet scientists to rejoin modern genetics, to the benefit of agriculture, medicine and biology.
About Vitaly Ginzburg
Soviet-Jewish physicist whose Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity won the 2003 Nobel Prize, and who survived Stalin’s antisemitic purges to become a fearless public voice.
More about Vitaly Ginzburg
- Vitaly Ginzburg founded a department to train physicistsIn 1968 Vitaly Ginzburg founded the Department of Problems of Physics and Astrophysics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, which he headed for decades.
- Vitaly Ginzburg co-created the theory of superconductorsIn 1950 Vitaly Ginzburg and Lev Landau published the Ginzburg–Landau theory of superconductivity, which became fundamental to all later work on superconductors and won Ginzburg the 2003 Nobel Prize.
- Vitaly Ginzburg kept a famous list of physics' big questionsFor three decades Vitaly Ginzburg compiled and updated a list of the most important unsolved problems in physics, publishing 30 problems for the 21st century in 1999.
- Vitaly Ginzburg developed a theory of cosmic ray originsVitaly Ginzburg developed a theory of the origin of cosmic rays, the high-energy particles that rain on Earth from space, work honoured by the cosmic ray physicists' Ó Ceallaigh Medal.
- Vitaly Ginzburg explained how radio waves cross the skyDuring the Second World War and after, Vitaly Ginzburg developed the theory of how electromagnetic waves travel through plasmas such as the ionosphere, vital for long-distance radio.
- Vitaly Ginzburg's theory underpins MRI magnetsSuperconducting magnets in hospital MRI scanners and particle accelerators rely on type-II superconductors, whose behaviour is described by the theory Vitaly Ginzburg helped create.
- Vitaly Ginzburg ran a physics seminar for 1,700 sessionsFrom the mid-1950s Vitaly Ginzburg ran a weekly Wednesday physics seminar in Moscow that drew scientists from across the city and beyond, closing it at its 1,700th session in November 2001.
Sources
- Vitaly Ginzburg Wikipedia
- Vitaly L. Ginzburg, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Trofim Lysenko Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.