Re: Cuban cows

["Justin Schwartz" <jkschw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fidel Castro is pushing his scientists
> to clone milking-cows, with the goal being to replicate a famously
> productive, and now deceased, Cuban bovine beast. . . . The idea, according
> to the paper, was "to provide families with
> miniature milk-cows that they could keep in their apartments. The
> pint-sized
> beasts would graze on grass grown in drawers under fluorescent lights."<
>
> I'm sorry, but it sounds as if Fidel -- or one of his advisors -- has
> partaken of some grass grown in drawers under fluorescent lights. The
> intent
> is good, but Lysenko's ghost is hovering near-by.
>
> Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

Well, Fidel may have been smoking some of the other stuff that grows on his
lovely isle, and no one would accuse him of excesses of liberal democracy,
but I doubt that whatever his program involves, it involves denouncing the
cow-skeptics as enemies of the people and sending them and their families to
die in the Cuban gulag, as Lysenkoism did, at terrible cost to Soviet
agriculture and science--maybe that is what Carrol has in mind by saying
that that involved more tha mere quackery. The best studies of Lysenkosim in
English are by my neughbor David Joravsky, NWU emeritus (and One Of Us), and
Zhores Medvedev (in translation). There's some excellent stuff in German,
but not in translation as far as I know. jks


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