Abstract
The seventh part of a series on the history of biological sciences over the past 100 hundred years focuses on developments after the Second World War. It describes changes experienced by scientific institutions over the four decades of state socialism under the rule of the Communist Party.
It describes the Stalinist ideological deformation of biological sciences in the form of Lysenkoism and so-called Michurinian biology. This contribution also summarises the main reforms of agricultural research and education and changes which took place at faculties of natural sciences in Prague, Brno, and Olomouc.
Special attention is paid to the establishment of new biological institutes in the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, whose foundation led to far-reaching changes in the structure of research activities. The period of normalisation after 1968 was then characterised by stagnation as well as by the foundation of a South Bohemian Centre for Biology and ecological movements, which contributed to a renaissance of civic society.