MOSCOW (AP) — Russia’s science and better schooling ministry has dismissed the pinnacle of a prestigious genetics institute who sparked controversy by contending that people as soon as lived for hundreds of years and that the shorter lives of recent people are as a consequence of their ancestors’ sins, state information company RIA-Novosti mentioned Thursday.
Although the report didn’t give a motive for the firing of Alexander Kudryavtsev, the influential Russian Orthodox Church known as it non secular discrimination.
Kudryavtsev, who headed the Russian Academy of Science’s Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, made a presentation at a convention in 2023 during which he mentioned folks had lived for some 900 years previous to the period of the Biblical Flood and that “original, ancestral and personal sins” induced genetic illnesses that shortened lifespans.
He additionally claimed that kids “up to the seventh generation are responsible for the sins of their fathers,” in keeping with the Russian information web site Meduza.
The head of the Russian church’s fee on household points, Fyodor Lukyanov, mentioned Kudryavtsev’s dismissal “for religious beliefs and statements in accordance with these beliefs violates the ethics of the scientific community,” RIA-Novosti mentioned.
“We have already gone through Soviet times, when genetics was long considered a pseudoscience,” Lukyanov mentioned. The Soviet Union underneath Josef Stalin suppressed standard genetics in favor of the theories of Trofim Lysenko, who contended that acquired traits might be inherited by offspring.
