engleski

Behind and Across the Curtains: How and What Yugoslavia Learned About American Big Science in the Early Cold War

The Soviet–Yugoslav split of 1948–49 and Yugoslavia’s subsequent “opening to the West” have received much scholarly attention, though almost exclusively through the lens of high politics and diplomacy, with little regard for how the process unraveled “on the ground.” By focusing on a seemingly low-key science diplomacy episode from the early 1950s, I will elaborate on the process form a bottom-up perspective and on what it meant for biology and genetics. Parallel to the official diplomacy that was taking first steps aiming at bringing Yugoslavia and the U.S. closer, the Croatian-born American geneticist, Milislav Demerec (1895–1966), director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, played a discrete but important role in “un-doing” Soviet influences among Yugoslav scientists. At a time when the global Cold War science diplomacy was becoming increasingly ambitious, this was a small but effective enterprise. Demerec got involved in a controversy about Lysenkoism at the University of Sarajevo, setting in motion a chain of events that in facilitated the later, state-sponsored diplomatic efforts. While the official scientific diplomacy was slow to yield results, here the effects were seen quickly, and the episode raised politically sensitive issues that high diplomacy often worked hard to suppress.

socialist Yugoslavia ; history of science ; science diplomacy ; Lysenkism ; Milislav Demerec

nije evidentirano