A celebration of Soviet agricultural science, using literary techniques to bring the main characters to life. A propagandized history of plant breeding. This entertaining work won the 1949 Stalin prize. Mendelian genetics, developed in the U.S., are attacked in favour of the inheritance of acquired characteristics as espoused by Michurin, Lysenko, and others.The book was translated from Russian by J. Fineberg was published in1951 by Foreign Languages Publishing House.