LONDON—secrecy and the deliberate exclusion of information from the West are hadly damaging Soviet science, according to Academician Vitali Goldanski.
In a strongly worded article in the general circulation monthly magazine Ogonyok (Little Flame), Goldanski recalled the harm caused by the misguided biological theories of Lysenko and drew attention to the problems faced by his colleagues in keeping abreast of outside developments.
“In higher technical colleges everywhere,” Goldanski writes in the October issue, “there is a most powerful hunger for foreign science journals.” Goldanski said that copies of Nature and Science, among others, show evidence of having been censored, even at major institutes. A list of recent articles expunged from major foreign journals, he said, would include such titles as “Nuclear Energy after Chernobyl,” “Glasnost in Soviet Physics,” and “Hungarians Want to Make Up Their Own Minds.”
Goldanski’s criticism is one of the strongest to appear since Mikhail Gorbachev came ...
