"I Was Delighted and Aghast at the Treasure Trove of Materials on Russian Genetics". Mark Adams’s letters to Th. Dobzhansky
The publication includes Mark B. Adams’s letters to Theodosius Dobzhansky regarding the history of Russian genetics and evolutionary biology. Mark B. Adams is a historian of biology, and Emeritus Associ- ate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. Th. Dobzhansky (January 25, 1900 - December 18, 1975) was a prominent Russian-American geneticist, evolutionary biologist, thinker, and evolutionary humanist. He was one of the central figures in the field of evolutionary biology in the first half of the XXth century, and played a key role in the “evolutionary synthesis” of the 1930s-1940s and in shaping the “synthetic” or modern theory of evolution. Dobzhansky was born in a small town Nemirov in the South-West of the Russian Empire, went to Thomas Hunt Morgans’s lab in the United States in Decem- ber, 1927, and in 1931 he decided not to return to the USSR. The main theme of the letters written in 1970-1975 is Adams’s meetings with Th. Dobzhansky, including several recorded interviews. The key goal of these interviews was to illuminate various aspects of the development of Russian genetics, mainly during the 1920s, including contributions and personalities of the most important Russian biologists, notably Yu.A. Filipchenko, N.K. Koltsov, S.S. Chetverikov, N.I. Vavilov and A.S. Serebrovsky, as well as Dobzhansky’s library and his relations with Russian colleagues during the time of Dobzhansky’s life and research in the Soviet Union. A letter, dated November 11, 1975, also includes Adams’s Research Proposal “Studies in the History of Russian Biology 1870-1930”, Specific Research Information, Addendum, and Curriculum Vitae for his application for an IREX grant.