Francesco Cassata

When Italian economics "Was Second to None". Luigi Einaudi and the Turin School of Economics

Abstract The article is dedicated to the work of a group of economists that was an important expression of a fertile season of Italian economics, in the period from the mid-1890s to the end of 1930s, which developed around the figure of Luigi Einaudi, and earlier, around that of his master Cognetti de Martiis. This School expressed a range of thought of high value in the political and economic sphere. In the economic field, the School established a fertile relation between historical–empirical work and economic theory; in the political field it investigated the relation between freedom and economic order.

The Italian Communist Party and the “Lysenko Affair” (1948–1955)

This article explores the impact of the VASKhNIL conference upon the cultural policy of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and Italian communist biology, with particular attention to the period between 1948 and 1951. News of the Moscow session did not appear in the Italian news media until October, 1948, and for the next three years party biologists struggled over whether to translate the official transcript of the proceedings, The Situation in Biological Science, into Italian. This struggle reveals the complex efforts of the PCI to confirm the ideological and political connection with the Soviet Union, without completely alienating significant milieus of the democratic and antifascist culture in Italy. The apparent impossibility of doing both is indicated by the fact that the project was finally abandoned in March–April, 1951. The article is divided into three sections, each focused on different actors and their response to Lysenkoism. The first section outlines the features of the PCI’s pro-Lysenko campaign, with particular regard to the intellectual militancy and organizational commitment of Emilio Sereni, head of PCI’s Cultural Commission between 1948 and 1951. The second section analyzes the reaction of the three most important figures in Italian communist biology during this period, Massimiliano Aloisi, Franco Graziosi and Emanuele Padoa. The third section interprets the decision not to publish a translation of The Situation in Biological Science as a consequence of the conflicts between PCI cultural program and the editorial policy of the left-wing publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore.

“A Cold Spring Harbor in Europe.” EURATOM, UNESCO and the Foundation of EMBO

This article explores the problem of the foundation of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), by reconstructing a broader institutional framework, which includes other international actors – EURATOM, UNESCO and the International Laboratory of Genetics and Biophysics (ILGB) in Naples – and a relevant, but still neglected figure, the Italian geneticist Adriano Buzzati-Traverso (1913–1983). The article considers the tension between centralized and federal models of organization in the field of life sciences not just as an EMBO internal controversy, but rather as a structural issue of European scientific cooperation in fundamental biology in the early 1960s. Along with EMBO, the article analyzes in particular the EURATOM Biology Division Program and the constitution of UNESCO International Cell Research Organization (ICRO). Adriano Buzzati-Traverso, as founder of ILGB and scientific consultant of EURATOM and UNESCO, played a crucial role in the complex negotiation which ultimately led to the foundation of EMBO. A synchronic treatment of ILGB, EURATOM, UNESCO-ICRO and EMBO opens a window on the early 1960s institutional configuration of molecular biology in Europe, showing how it basically incorporated the “Cold Spring Harbor” decentralized model rather than reproducing the “CERN” centralized model.

Lysenko in Bellagio: The Lysenko Controversy and the Struggle for Authority Over Italian Genetics (1948–1956)

The Ninth International Genetics Congress (Bellagio, August 1953) was a fundamental moment in the response to the Lysenko controversy in Italy. On the national scene, the Italian geneticists in charge of the organization of the Congress consolidated the disciplinary autonomy of their discipline by constructing intellectual, institutional and political boundaries that marginalized their competitors: eugenicists, plant breeders and “human”/“medical” geneticists. In this context, the implicit or explicit use of “Lysenko” by the Italian academic geneticists for stigmatizing their rivals has to be understood as a boundary tool in the struggle for disciplinary control.