a081  0704  22 Aug 80
PM-Soviet-Genetics, Adv 26,790
$adv 26
For Release PMs Tues Aug. 26
Soviet Geneticist Says Experiments Endanger Marxist Ideology
By BARTON REPPERT
Associated Press Writer
    MOSCOW (AP) - A top-ranking Soviet geneticist claims that attempts
to breed a ''new man'' through human genetic engineering could lead to
dangerous social consequences and pose a direct threat to Marxist
ideology.
    Academician Nikolai P. Dubinin, director of the Soviet Institute of
General Genetics, launched the sharply worded attack on
''neo-eugenics'' in a recent issue of the authoritative journal
Kommunist.
    Citing Western proponents of ''sperm banks'' and other eugenic
schemes, Dubinin charged that ''bourgeois ideologues'' are striving to
find scientific justification for social inequality, race laws and
genocide.
    However, he aimed his heaviest criticism at Soviet scientists and
writers whom he accused of undermining Marxist faith in the crucial
role of social factors rather than heredity in forming an individual's
personality and abilities.
    ''Sociobiologists are trying to eliminate Marxist teaching about the
unified social essence of man, offering instead the thesis that
genetic programming supposedly rules over the social conduct of
people,'' the academician said.
    Sociobiology is the new science that tries to find the genetic
basis, if any, for behavior. Eugenics is the attempt to improve the
human race by selective breeding.
    The potentially broad ideological implications of Dubinin's stance
were underscored by publication of his 6,500-word article in
Kommunist, the leading theoretical journal of the Soviet Communist
Party.
    Genetics has long been a sensitive field in Soviet science, where
scientists are expected to interpret results of their research within
the framework of the doctrine of Karl Marx.
    Dubinin, 74, was himself a victim of ideological strife in Soviet
genetics. In the late 1940s he was demoted and obliged to work in
Siberia after running afoul of Trofim D. Lysenko, who emerged under
Stalin as the virtual czar of Soviet biology.
    Lysenko and his disciples believed that characteristics acquired by
living things during their lifetimes could be passed along
genetically to their children. This view had long been discredited by
Western genetics research, but was attractive to Russian leaders who
hoped to create a new race of men by re-education and social
conditioning.
    In his article, Dubinin expressed concern over calls for developing
''highly humane, socialist eugenics.''
    He noted that from the eugenic viewpoint, ''biological differences
between people demand a selective, elitist approach to education as
well as favoring reproduction by individuals and groups with
'valuable' genes.''
    ''These neo-eugenicists consider that supposedly with the help of
such an approach - on a voluntary basis, through gradual changes in
the gene pool of mankind and biological reconstruction of populations
- one can achieve the breeding of a new man,'' Dubinin wrote.
    ''Experimental manipulation with genetic codes at the molecular and
cell levels and modification of the processes of animal development
in experiments has provided food for fantastic schemes on altering
man's natural foundations.''
    However, Dubinin said biological heredity must be distinguished from
what he called ''social heredity'' - the cultural repertoire that is
transmitted from generation to generation by ''the whole aggregate of
social relations and all forms of social consciousness.''
    ''Marxism has convincingly shown that labor and social necessities
formed man,'' the geneticist said, arguing that regardless of any new
biological discoveries ''the significance of the laws of historical
materialism cannot be shattered.''
    Among Soviet authors criticized by Dubinin was D.I. Dubrovsky, a
philosophy professor who has said the key to human psychology should
be sought in biologically deciphering man's ''neurodynamic code.''
Dubinin called his views ''idle nonsense.''
    He also denounced as ''anti-science'' eugenic concepts set forth in
a recently published Soviet genetics textbook.
    Dubinin said such ''neo-eugenic propaganda'' can only be useful to
''those who want to eternalize social differentiation of people ... in
the shape of race laws, genocide and other forms of national, class,
property and spiritual inequality.''
    Attempts at eugenics have also met with criticism in the United
States, as when California industrialist Robert Graham revealed in May
that he had set up a sperm bank for Nobel prize winners.
    Many scientists believe the attempt is useless since intellectual
brilliance, while it may be partially hereditary, is not handed down
in a simple manner like characteristics such as eye color.
    Nevertheless, sociobiologists like Edward O. Wilson of Harvard argue
that genes may do more to shape culture than is suspected.
    In an article in the current U.S. publication Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, Wilson and Charles Lumsden say that
slight biases that are probably inherited - a taste for sweets, for
example, or a preference for the human face - are amplified to become
normal social behavior when large numbers of people with that bias
live together.
    They say that other genetically determined biases of which humans
are not even aware may govern their cultural norms even though these
biases are too small to be measured in any individual person.
End Adv PMs Tues Aug. 26
    
ap-ny-08-22 1006EDT
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