Filipchenko [Philiptschenko], Iurii Aleksandrovich

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FILIPCHENKO [PHILIPTSCHENKO], IURII ALEKSANDROVICH

(b. Zlyn’, Bolkhovskii district, Oriovskii Province, Russia, 13 February 1882; d. Leningrad, U. S. S. R., 19/20 May 1930)

genetics, eugenics, Zoology.

Filipchenko was of Moldavian, Ukrainian, Swedish, and Belorussian extraction. His unique family name (which he pronounced “fee-LEEP-chen-ko”) probably dates from an eighteenth-century conflation of Filipov and Pilipenko. His grandfather, Efim Iva novich (1805–1861), was a physician and naturalist. His father, Aleksandrovich Efimovich (1842–1940), was a landowner and agronomist. His younger brother, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1884–1940), became a parasitologist and physician.

Filipchenko’s active interest in zoology began at the age of eight, when he developed a fascination with natural history books, started an insect collection, and began keeping annual summer diaries of his entomological observations. He received his secondary education at the Second St. Petersburg Classical Gymnasium. In 1897 he read Darwin’s Origin of Species and Sexual Selection, and two years later he worked his way through Carl Naegeli’s Mechanisch-physiologische Theorie der Abstamungslehre (1884). These works had an important formative influence on his scientific thinking and on his choice of zoology as a career.

In 1900 Filipchenko graduated from the gymnasium with a silver medal. That same year his father died, and financial difficulties led Filipchenko to enter the Military Medical Academy, but the next year he transferred into the natural science division of the physicomathematical faculty of St. Petersburg University. As a student he spent his summers doing fieldwork, first on a scientific expedition to Kuban (1903), then at the Borodin biological station (1904–1906), and later at the Murmansk station (1908).

During his student years Filipehenko participated in various scientific, popular, and political organizations. In the summer of 1905 Filipchenko’s brother was arrested “for political crimes” and sentenced to six years of hard labor; he escaped in 1908 and fled to Italy, returning only in 1917. In early December 1905 Filipchenko himself was arrested while atttending a meeting of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, but was released in a few days. He helped to organize workers in the Aleksandr Nevskii region of the city, and at the end of December was again arrested and spent four months in prison, where he studied philosophy and prepared for his government examinations. Although he subsequently served as a member of the Schlisselburg Committee for aiding political prisoners and gave occasional help to the Social Revolutionary Party, he largely gave up political activity after 1906 and devoted himself to science.

Immediately after Filipchenko’s release from prison in the spring of 1906, he passed his government examinations and was accepted for specialized study in V. T. Sheviakov’s laboratory of invertebrate zoology at St. Petersburg University. Concurrently he assisted M. N. Rimskii-Korsakov in entomology (1907–1909) at the Stebut Agricultural Courses and taught at the Shaffe, Tagantsev, and Obolenskii women’s gymnasiums and at a commercial high school. In May 1907 he was elected a full member of the Russian Entomological Society.

In 1910 Filipchenko was accepted into the master’s degree program in zoology and comparative anatomy at St. Petersburg University and was sent abroad to Munich for a year (1911–1912) to work with Richard Hertwig, who was interested in the problem of sex determination. There Filipchenko met Richard Goldschmidt (1878–1958), then a privatdocent in Hertwig’s department. Goldschmidt had just recently taken up genetics, switching from the studies of the development of Ascaris to genetic research on moths and the problem of intersexuality. Because of their closeness in age, their common expertise in invertebrate development, and their mutual interest in insects, the two developed a close relationship. Principally under Goldschmidt’s influence, Filipchenko became converted to experimental zoology and especially to genetics.

In the spring of 1912 Filipchenko worked at the Naples Zoological Station, collecting material on crustacean embryology. Later that year he returned to Petersburg and defended his master’s thesis on the development of Apterygota and the genealogical relation between insects and the millipedes and centipedes. His discussion emphasized the nonhomologous particularities of embryonic layers in different groups. This research convinced Filipchenko that higher systematic taxa differ in their embryological development in ways that are qualitatively different from the kinds of variation occurring within species. The work was published as Razvitie izotomy (The development of isotomes) in 1912. That year he was awarded a master’s degree in zoology and comparative anatomy from St.Petersburg University, became preparator of its zootomical cabinet, and was appointed to its faculty as a privatdocent.

Genetics and Evolution. Upon his return to Russia, Filipchenko gave up his work on invertebrate embryology and devoted himself to experimental zoology and genetics. On 18 September 1913 he opened a course at St. Petersburg University entitled “The Study of Evolution and Heredity.” In 1914 he published anthologies of the latest Western literature on hybridization and sex determination that included his own translations of works by de Vries, Plate, Lotsy, Hertwig, Correns, and others, supplemented with his own essay reviews. During World War I he published a number of popular articles on the new biology in leading contemporary journals and two books based on his lectures. Izmenchivost’ i evoliutsii (Variation and evolution; 1915) and Nasledstvennost (Heredity; 1917).

Filipchenko’s views on evolution were influenced by those of von Baer, Naegeli, and Hertwig. Although he regarded himself as a Darwinian in the sense that he believed in evolution, Filipchenko denied that natural selection could play the evolutionary role that Darwin had assigned it. In the thesis for his master’s dissertation, written in late 1912, he emphasized that “the process of organic evolution will be explained neither by the so-called factors of Lamarck, nor by selection. but is one of the fundamental properties of living matter” (Aleksandrov, p. 5). For Filipchenko, as for Herbert Spencer and Naegeli, the evolution of animals and plants was a developmental process analogous to the development of a chick embryo or the solar system.

In his 1915 book Filipchenko criticized the evolutionary mechanisms proposed by de Vries, Lotsy, the English biometricians, and the Lamarckians as inadequate, incomplete, improbable, or unsubstantiated. Citing as a “general law” that “each whole develops primarily under the influence of its own internal causes and impulses that may be affected only secondarily by external ones” (a view referred to as “autogenesis” in Russian scientific literature), Filipchenko concluded with the assertion that “in general organic evolution originates primarily under the influence of causes lying within organisms, which the action of their surrounding environment can affect only in a purely secondary way” (pp. 78–80).

Filipchenko continued to hold this view throughout his career, although it gained sophistication in later presentations. In 1923 he published a 288-page history entitled Evoliutsionnaia ideia v biologii (The evolutionary idea in biology) that critically evaluated the theories of Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, Cope, Naegeli, Eimer, Weismann, Korzhinskii, de Vries, Severtsov, Berg, and others. The same year, in his textbook on biometrics and variability, he extended his notion of “group variability” (gruppovaia izmenchivost’). asserting that the traits varying within a species are different in kind from those characterizing genera and higher taxa, which exhibit “less variation” and “appear significantly earlier during individual development.” Granting that traits characterizing species are carried by genes localized in the chromosomes of the sex cells, he considered it likely that traits of a generic character depend on “entirely special carriers located not in the nucleus, but in the plasm of the sex cells” (p.213).

Because Filipchenko regarded intraspecific “individual variation” as qualitatively different from interspecific “group variation,” he held that evolution comprised two fundamentally different processes. In his 1927 German monograph Variabilitat und variation, he distinguished between microevolution (the evolution of biotypes. Jordanons, and Linnaean species), which could be elucidated by genetics, and macroevolution (the evolution of higher systematic taxa), which lay outside the scope of genetics. First formulated before World War I, Filipchenko’s interrelated concepts of autogenesis and group variability dominated his thinking for the rest of his career and underlay each successive stage of his evolving research program.

Genetics, Hybridization, and Craniometry. Filipchenko took up the study of heredity in mammals in 1913, when he was appointed assistant to I. I. Ivanov at the physiological division of the Veterinary Laboratory of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, where he worked through 1916. A student of Pavlov and a pioneering researcher in artificial insemination, Ivanov had been appointed to head the division when it was founded on 19 May 1908. In July 1910 it organized a zootechnical station at Askaniia-Nova, the large estate of F. E. Fal’ts-Fein on the southern Russian steppes that had been donated in 1904 as a wildlife park. There Ivanov conducted important hybridization work on various domesticated and wild varieties of bison, cattle, and other ungulates. At that time, Ivanov was interested in Richard Hertwig’s theories of sex determination and probably chose Filipchenko as his assistant for that reason.

Together with Ivanov, Filipchenko taught a course at the Veterinary Laboratory begining in 1913, lecturing on Mendelian genetics, biometrics, the mutation theory, cytogenetics, and sex determination. Under Ivanov’s direction he investigated the effects of mammalian sperm on the sex determination of offspring and studied hybrids of rats and mice produced by artificial insemination. He also mastered the various measures and indices for studying skull characteristics and sought to apply them to the study of cattle.

In 1916 Filipchenko published a popular volume on the origin of domesticated animals. His doctoral dissertation of 1917, “Izmenchivost’ i nasledstvennost” cherepa u mlekopitaiushchikh” (Skull inheritance and variation in mammals), led to joint publications with Ivanov in German and Russian and was awarded the Von Baer Prize of the Russian Academy of Sciences for 1919. Filipchenko’s expertise in the new biology and his study of mammalian crania led to contacts with V. M. Berkhterev’s Psychoneurological Institute, where Filipchenko taught a course on vertebrate zoology (1914–1917). He was elected professor of vertebrate zoology at the institute on 11 November 1915 and served as its academic secretary through 1920.

Because of the effects of world war, revolution, and civil war, the period 1917–1922 was a time of both hardship and opportunity for young Russian scientists. Filipchenko was awarded a doctoral degree in zoology and comparative anatomy from Petrograd University in 1917. On 18 December he was appointed a salaried docent in zoology at the city’s women’s college, the Advanced Courses for Women; following its merger with the university in 1919, he became a full professor at Petrograd University. In 1918 he organized and directed the university’s Laboratory of Genetics and Experimental Zoology; in 1919 the laboratory became a university department and Filipchenko became its chairman.

At this time most academics had to supplement their incomes with extra jobs and popular writing. Filipchenko worked as senior zoologist at the Zoological Laboratory of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1918–1921) and as professor at the Chemical Pharmaceutical Institute (1919–1922), where he lectured on zoology. During this period he also wrote drafts of many of his books. By 1923 he had published a technical book on biometrics and a historical book on evolutionary theory, and had reworked his lectures on general biology for the women’s courses into Obshchedostupnaia biologiia (Biology for the general reader; 1923), which went through fifteen editions in his lifetime. During the famine, Filipchenko also worked closely with Maxim Gorky on the Commission to Improve the Living Conditions of Scientists (KUBU).

Eugenics and Genetics. Filipchenko’s readings on genetics, craniometry, the inheritance of quantitative characters, and neurology brought him into contact with the eugenics work being developed in the United States and Europe. He began giving popular lectures on eugenics in 1917 and published his first popular article on the subject in 1918. In 1919 he became aware of the chromosomal theory of heredity developed by the Morgan school and published an influential popular article that was the first generally available summary of the theory in Russian.

Filipchenko helped to organize the Russian Eugenics Society, founded in Moscow on 19 November 1920. Earlier that month he had decided to develop an independent eugenics research institution in Petrograd, and his Bureau of Eugenics was established on 14 February 1921 under the auspices of the Commission on the Study of Natural Productive Forces of Russia (KEPS) of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He appointed to the bureau’s staff Dmitrii M. D’iakonov (1893–1923), Denis Karl Lepin (1895–1964), and Jan Arnold (Janovich) Lusis (1897–1969), three of his senior students at the time. The group undertook vast genealogical studies of Petrograd students, artists, writers, musicians, scientists, and academicians, based not only on archival research but also on widely distributed questionnaires. The studies were published in the bureau’s research volumes, edited by Filipchenko, and were the basis of a number of his articles, notably “Intelligentsiia i talanty” (Talent and the intelligentsia; 1925).

In addition to his more technical articles on eugenics, Filipchenko published several pamphlets and books in Russian for the general reader, including Chto takoe evgenika? (What is eusenics?; 1921), Kak nasleduetsia razlichnye osobennosti cheloveka (How various human traits are inherited; 1921), Putiuluchsheniia chelovecheskogo roda (Ways of improving the human race; 1924), and Gal’ton i Mendel’ (Galton and Mendel; 1925). Although Filipchenko felt that human heredity was a vital area for further research, he believed that humans should never be used as experimental subjects and opposed sterilization and all other immediate social applications, arguing that eugenic progress should be brought about by education rather than legislation.

Beginning in 1924, Marxist ideological discussions began to focus on inheritance, evolution, and eugenics. At the time many Marxists favored Lamarckian inheritance because it appeared more consistent with a materialist philosophy that emphasized the social transformation of nature, society, and man. Genetics, on the other hand, seemed to embody an idealist concept of heredity based on genes impervious to human control and incompatible with rapid human betterment. As a leading geneticist and eugenicist, Filipchenko was drawn into these discussions. In 1925 he forcefully argued against the plausibility of Lamarckism in a booklet entitled Nasledstvenny li priobretennye priznaki? (Are acquired characteristics inherited?). Its most controversial passage argued that Lamarckism was actually incompatible with socialism: if acquired characteristics were inherited, the oppression of the lower classes over thousands of years would have made them hereditarily inferior to the privileged classes.

For various reasons, including the hostile reaction of Marxists to his booklet, Filipchenko lost interest in eugenics in the mid 1920’s, although he continued to contribute occasional popular articles and book reviews on the subject. beginning in 1925, he instead focused his considerable energies on experimental work with animals and plants and on the cultivation of genetics as a Soviet discipline. In late 1925 his Bureau of Eugenics was renamed the Bureau of Genetics and Eugenics; in 1927 it became simply the Bureau of Genetics; in April 1930, shortly before his death, it became the Laboratory of Genetics of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences.

Genetics and Agriculture. In the spring of 1920, together with six colleagues from the Advanced Courses for Women, Filipchenko founded the Peterhof Natural Science Institute in Old Peterhof (now Petrodvorets) at “Sergievka,” the former estate of the duke of Leichtenberg. There he created the institute’s Laboratory of Genetics and Experimental Zoology and became its director, and the Institute’s scientific secretary, for the next decade. Working principally at Peterhof, Filipchenko conducted research on the genetics of agriculturally important plants and animals.

Filipchenko’s chief assistant, D. M. D’iakonov, died of complications from tuberculosis on 30 September 1923. To replace him Filipchenko recruited, from Kiev. Theodosius G. Dobzhansky, who had come to his attention through a piece of research on the genetics of Drosophila, the principal research object of the Morgan school. Dobzhansky accepted and became a docent in Filipchenko’s department at the university, arriving in Petrograd in January 1924, within hours of the announcement of Lenin’s death; the city was renamed Leningrad the next day. Eight months later Filipchenko’s assistant at the Peterhof laboratory, V. M. Isaev (an outspoken Communist), was killed by a White guerrilla band in September 1924 while mountain climbing in the northwest Caucasus. In 1925, then Dobzhansky became assistant director of both the Peterhof laboratory and the KEPS bureau.

Over the next three years Filipchenko and Dobzhansky became very close. As head of the KEPS bureau, Filipchenko organized a series of summer expeditions to survey local breeds of hoofed animals in remote regions; the Semirechie (1926) and Semipalatinsk (1927) regions of Kazakhstan, Kirghizia (1928), and Turkmenistan (1929, 1930). As Filipchenko’s chief assistant, Dobzhansky led the first two such expeditions, which also included Lusis and two new students in the department, Nikolai Nikolaevich Medvedev and Iulii lakovlevich Kerkis. In 1926 Filipchenko nominated Dobzhansky for an International Education Board fellowship to work in T. H. Morgan’s laboratory; he was accepted and left for New York in the fall of 1927.

In the mid 1920’s Filipchenko conducted a systematic survey of the genetics literature that was published as a two-volume text dealing with plants (1927) and animals (1928). For practical and theoretical reasons he became especially interested in the inheritance of quantitative characters in soft wheats, focusing on the size of the ears and seed kernels in grains and grasses. Working with Lepin on experimental plots at Peterhof, he conducted regular studies of seeds and samples collected by Vavilov’s worldwide expeditions. Although these investigations on soft wheats did not entirely confirm his expectations on group variability, they proved useful to other researchers and were posthumously published as a book in 1934.

By 1929 Filipchenko had become convinced that genetics had to be reconstituted as a discipline. He believed that its traditional, strictly morphological character had to be replaced by a physiological approach that emphasized the development of traits. Drawaing on the recent work of Spemann and other embryologists to support his idea of group variability, Filipchenko called for the integration of developmental mechanics and genetics. In 1929 he began teaching a new course embodying these ideas and systematically set forth its subject matter in a textbook (published posthumously in 1932 as Eksperimental’naia zoologiia (Experimental zoology). In May 1930 he laid out the argument and agenda for physiological genetics in his paper “Morfologiia i fiziologiia nasledstvennosti” (The morphology and the physiology of heredity), presented to the VIth All-Union Congress of Zoologists in Kiev.

During the period of the first Five-Year Plan, ideological disputes and institutional reorganizations disrupted academic and scientific life. Beginning in 1929, Filipchenko was publicly castigated for his autogenetic view of evolution and his earlier work in eugenics. He was relieved of all university teaching duties in early 1930, but he was never arrested. Forced out of the university, Filipchenko devoted himself to the organization of applied research in animal genetics.

Since 1928 Filipchenko had been involved in plant and animal breeding work at the State Institute of Applied Agronomy (GIOA). In 1929, at the invitation of Nikolai Vavilov, he agreed to organize the Genetics Division of its Institute of Animal Breeding, which was slated to become the core of the new Institute of Animal Breeding of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. In the spring of 1930, now free from university duties, Filipchenko devoted himself to planning the division and started work on the genetics of swine breeding. On 4 April 1930 Filipchenko’s Bureau of Genetics became the Laboratory of Genetics of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, and he looked forward to expanding his academy research base.

Filipchenko’s death was natural but sudden. A few days after returning from the Kiev meeting, while sowing experimental wheat at Peterhof, he developed a severe headache and returned to Leningrad to be attended by his physician brother. After a three-day illness he died of streptococcal meningitis during the night of 19/20 May 1930, around midnight. His head was donated to Bekhterev’s Brain Institute for research and his remains were buried in Smolensk Cemetery in Leningrad following a large public funeral procession. His wife, Nadezhda Pavlovna, and his only son, Gleb, a physicist, died during World War II in the blockade of Leningrad.

Impact. Filipchenko was a founder of Soviet genetics and experimental biology, Fluent in German, French, English, and Latin, and a member of the American Genetic Association, the Société de Morphologie (Paris), the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Vererbungswissenschaft, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Zuchtungskunde, he played a central role in introducing the latest Western biological developments into Russia. His energetic personality, precise mind, and broad encyclopedic knowledge in a wide range of biological fields exercised a profound influence on Theodosius Dobzhansky and other members of the Leningrad school. His review articles, textbooks, and popular tracts educated a generation of Soviet biologists.

Despite his early death Filipchenko had a lasting impact on the institutionalization of Soviet genetics. Founded in 1919, Filipchenko’s department at Petrograd University was the first university genetics department in Russia and one of the first in Europe; despite subsequent organizational, ideological, and political disruptions, it remains one of the leading Soviet centers of genetics. The Laboratory of Genetics and Experimental Zoology of the Peterhof Natural Science Institute, which he founded in 1920, was one of Russia’s earliest research centers for the new experimental biology; renamed the Peterhof Biological Institute in 1930, the complex remains the university’s principal base for biological research and field work. The KEPS bureau that Filipchenko founded in 1921 became the central genetics institution of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences under the leadership of N. I. Vavilov, who took over the Laboratory of Genetics upon Filipchenko’s death.In 1933 it became the academy’s Institute of Genetics (IGEN). Although IGEN moved to Moscow in 1934, Filipchenko’s students continued to form the coreof its research staff and that of its mutation laboratory, directed by H.J. Muller (1933–1937), until Lysenko forced them out in the early 1940’s.

In the Soviet Union the recognition of Filipchenko’s historical importance was eclipsed by the rise of Lysenkoism. Ironically, his principal detractor was the Leningrader Isaak Izrailovich Prezent. In 1932 Prezent edited Filipchenko’s Eksperimental naia zoologiia for posthumous publication, and his extensive annotations indicated only minor quibbleswith Filipchenko’s views. Five years later Prezent had become Lysenko’s chief ideologist and was leading the attack on Filipchenko for his “reactionary”support of evolutionary autogenesis, his “idealist” concept of the gene, and his “bourgeois” eugenic views. Filipchenko’s importance began to be recognized in the Soviet Union only after the repudiation of Lysenkoism and the rebirth of Soviet genetics (1964–1967). In the succeeding years two of Filipchenko’s articles were reprinted (1968), his book on the history of evolutionary theory was reissued (1977), and a brief biography by his student N.N. Medvedev was published (1978).

In the West, however, Filipchenko’s distinction between microevolution and macroevolution had an impact on the development of evolutionary theory in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The distinction was employed by Filipchenko’s protege Theodosius Dobzhansky in Genetics and the Origin of Species (1937), a key work in the development of the synthetic theory of evolution. The same distinction became the organizing principle of the most outspoken attack on that theory, The Material Basis of Evolution (1940), by Filipchenko’s friend Richard Goldschmidt. By the 1940’s the relationship between microevolution and macroevolution had become a central issue in evolutionary theory. In challenging the relevance of population genetics to macroevolution and highlighting the importance of morphological, embryological, physiological, and developmental factors, Filipchenko helped to shape the problematics and discourse of modern evolutionary biology.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I Original Works. Filipchenko’s archives are Fund 813 of the Manuscript Division of the Saltykov-Shchedrin Public Library in Leningrad. He published more than 100 works in Russian, several of which include summaries in Western languages. Spelling his name “J.A Philiptschenko,” he also published approximately 20 works in German and 4 in French.

Filipchenko was the author of twenty pamphlets. books, and texts: Razvitie izotomy (The development of isotomes; St. Petersburg, 1912); Izmenchivost’ i evoliutsiia (Variation and evolution; Petrograd and Moscow, 1915; 2nd ed., Petersburg, 1921); Proiskhozhdenie domashnykh zhivotnykh (The origin of domesticated animals; Petrograd, 1916; 2nd ed., Leningrad, 1924);Nasledstvennost’ (Heredity; Moscow, 1917; 2nd ed., 1924; 3rd ed., 1926);Chto takoe evgenika? (what is eugenics?; Petrograd. 1921);Kak nasleduetsia razlichnye osobennosti cheloveka (How various human traits are inherited; Petrograd, 1921); Izmenchivost” i metody ee izucheniia (Variation and methods for its study: Petrograd, 1923;2nd ed. Leningrad 1926; 3rd ed., 1927; 4th ed., Moscow and Leningrad 1929); Obshchedostupnaia biologiia (Biology for the general reader; Petrograd, 1923; 15th ed., 1930); Evoliutsionnaia ideia v biologii (The evolutionary idea in biology; moscow, 1923; 2nd ed., 1926; 3rd ed., 1977); Puti uluchsheniia chelovecheskogo roda (evgenika) (Ways of improving the human race [eugenics];Leningrad, 1924); Frensis Gal’ton i Gregor Mendel” (Francis Galton and Gregor Mendel; Moscow, 1925); Besedy o zhivykh sushchestvakh (Conversations about living substances; Leningrad, 1925); Nasledstvenny li priobretennye priznaki? (Are acquired characteristics inherited?: Leningrad. 1925). translation of T.H. Morgan’s essay of that title, translated by Filipchenko’s plus an essay of his own; Variabilitat and variation (Berlin, 1927); Chastnaia genetika (Systematic genetics). I, Rasteniia (Plants; Leningrad, 1927), II, Zhivotnye (Animals; Leningrad, 1928); Genetika (Genetics: Leningrad, 1929); Genetika i ee znachenie dlia zhivotnovodstva (Genetics and its significance for animal breeding; Moscow and Leningrad, 1931); Eksperimental naia zoologiia (Experimental zoology; Leningrad and Moscow, 1932); and Genetika Miagkikh pshenits (The genetics of soft wheats; Moscow and Leningrad, 1934), with T.K. Lepin.

Filipchenko also published numerous articles on invertebrate embryology, vertebrate hybridization, genetics and eugenics. notably:” Anatomische Studien uber Collembola.” in Zeitschrift fur wissenschaftliche Zoologie, 85 (1906), 270–304;’Beitrage zur Kenntnis der Apterygoten, ’3 parts.ibid., 88 (1907).99–116. 91 (1908). 93III, and 103 (1912), 519–660; “O vidovykh gibridakh” (On species hybrids). in Novye idei v biologii. no 6 (1913), 122–149; “Opisanie gibridov mezhdu bizonom. zubrom i rogatym skotom v zooparke “Askaniia Nova” F.E. Fal’ts-Feina” (Description of hybrids between bison, aurochs and percora in the “Askaniia Nova” Zoological Park).in Arkhiv veterinarnykh nauk, no.2 (1915), 1–33, written with I.I Ivanov. published the next year in German as “Beschreibung von Hybriden zwischen Bison, Wisent und Hausrind,” in Zeitschrift fur induktiv Abstammungsund Vererbungslehre16 (1916). 1–48; “Izmenchivost’ i nasledstvennost’ cherepa u mlekopitaiushchikh” (Variation”(Variation and heredity of mammalian skulls), 2 parts, in Russkii arkhiv anatomii, gistologii i embriologii, 1 , no 2 (1916). 311–304, and no 3 (1917). 747–818; “Evgenika” (Eugenics). in Russkaia mysl’, 1918, no 3–4 69–95; “Khromozomy i nasledstvennost’” (Chromosomes and heredity), in Priroda, 1919, no. 7–9, 327–350; “Zakon Mendelia i zakon Morgana “(Mendel’s law and Morgan’s law), ibid., 1922, no 10–12, 51–66; “Nashi vydaiushchiesia uchenye” (Our leading seientists), in Izvestiia Biuro po evgenike Akademii nauk SSSR, no. I (1922) 21–38; “Rezul’taty obsledovaniia leningradskikh predstavitelei iskusstva” (Results of a survey of Leningrad artists), ibid., no.2 (1924), 5–28; “Deistvitel nye chleny b imperatorskoi, nyne Rossiiskoi, akademii za poslednie 80 let” (Members of the former imperial, now Russian. Academy for the past eighty years), ibid., no 3 (1925) 3–82, with T.K Lepin and la. la.Lus; “Intelligentsiia i talanty” (Talent and the intelligentsia), ibid., 83–101; “Izmenchivost’ Kolichestvennykh priznakov u miagkikh pshenits” (Variation of quantitative characters in soft wheats), Izvestiia Biuro po genetike i evgenike, no. 4 (1926), 5–58; “O parallelizme v zhivoi prirode” (On paralleilsm in living nature), in Uspekhi eksperimental’noi biologii, 3 (1925), no 3–4, 242–258; “Uspekhi genetiki za poslednie 10 let (1918–1927) v SSSR” (Achievements of genetics in the U.S.S.R. over the past ten years, 1918–1927), in Trudy Leningradskogo obshchestva estestvois pytatelei, 57, no. 1 (1927), 3–11; and “Morfologiia ifiziologiia nasledstvennosti’(The morphology and physiology of heredity), in Trudy VI Vsesoiuznogo s“ezda zoologov (Proceedings of the Sixth All-Union Congress of Zoologists; Kiev, 1930), 15–30.

II Secondary Literature. In Russian, see the obituaries by T. K.Lepin, in Priroda, 1930, no 7–8, 683–698; by A Zavarzin, in Trudy Leningradskogo obshchestva estestvoispytatelei, 60, no. 2 (1930), 3–16; and by his brother, A.A. Filipchenko, in Trudy Laboratorii genetiki, no.9 (1932), I-II. See also the works by his student N.N. Medvedev, Iurii Aleksandrovich Filipchenko 1882–1930 (Moscow, 1978), and “Iurii Aleksandrovich Filipchenko 1882–1930,” in Vydaiushchiesia sovetskie genetiki (Outstanding Soviet geneticists; Moscow, 1980), 88–100 On his role in the development of Soviet genetics, see A.E. Gaisinovich, Zarozhdenie i razvitie genetiki (The birth and development of genetics; Moscow, 1988).

On Filipchenko’s evolutionary views, see Mark B. Adams, “La génétique des populations était-elle une génétique évoltive?” in Histoire de la génétique, Jean-Louis Fischer, ed. (Paris, 1989); and D.A. Aleksandrov, “Iurii Aleksandrovich Filipchenko kak genetik-evoliutsionist: Formirovanie nauchnykh interesov i vzgliadov” (Iurii Aleksandrovich Filipchenko as a geneticist and evolutionist: The formation of his scientific interests and views), in Evoliutsionnaia genetika (k 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia) lu. A. Filipchenko) (Evolutionary genetics [in honor of the 100th anniversary of lu. A. Filipchenko’s birthday]; Leningrad, 1982), 3–21.

In English, see Mark B.Adams. “Eugenics in Russia 1900–1940,” in The Wellborn Science, Mark B. Adams, ed. (New York, 1988), 153–216. See also the following essays in The Evolutionary Synthesis, Ernst Mayr and William B. Provine, eds.(Cambridge. mass., 1980): Mark B.Adams, “Severtsov and Schmalhausen: Russian Morphology and the Evolutionary Synthesis,” 193–225, and “Sergei Chetverikov, the Kol’tsov Institute. and the Evolutionary Synthesis, 242–278; and Theodosius Dobzhansky, “The Birth of the Genetic Theory of Evolution in the Soviet Union in the 1920s,” 229–242. see also A.E. Gaissinovitch, “The Origins of Soviet Genetics and the Struggle with Lamarckism, 1922–1929,” Mark B.Adams. trans., in Journal of the History of Biology, 13, no. 1 (1980), 1–51.

Mark B. Adams

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