Mendel Memorial Symposium 1965 - The event of genetics between the past, ideology and its modern development
Abstract
International "Mendel Memorial Symposium" was held in Czechoslovakia in August 1965 to mark the 100th anniversary of the public presentation of Mendel's experiments on heredity and was visited by 925 scientists from both sides of the Iron Curtain. All the Soviet block countries suppressed classical genetics and promoted Lysenkoism during the early 1950s, this situation was gradually changing with the destalinization, and it was finally suggested to the International Union of Biological Sciences by the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1958, that the anniversary of Mendel's work should be celebrated in Brno.
The four-day-long programme included fifteen invited lectures dealing with the origin, the development, and the application of genetics, opening the Mendel Memorial, excursion to Mendel native village Hynčice, etc. This celebration event meant among other things a satisfaction for many scientists from the East and the symbolic final evidence of the end of the Lysenkoism era.
The follow-up programme continued in Prague by "Symposium on the Mutational Process". Four working parallel sessions organised by the recently established biological institutes of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences and the Slovak Academy of Sciences completed the several-year strategy of cooperation between biologists from the West and the East and reflected completely current issues in connection with the development of molecular biology and genetics.
Therefore, it is opportune to describe the preparation, the agenda, and the course of the most significant conferences to date commemorating Mendel's legacy and discoveries.