Emil Paleček

“That was Olga Borisovna Lepešinská, a Soviet laboratory worker, who discovered that the life starts in nail dirt etc. I do not remember all that nonsense. Later there was Lysenko. It was the two of them; Lysenko and Lepešinska. That was obligatory (reading) back then. Another thing was Mendel. Until 1965 he was a bourgeois co called scientist, priest and so on. Then due to Russian physicists… Stalin was dead already… who very much tried to avoid all the messing about with science… so then Mendel was finally rehabilitated.“

„That was when I wrote for the Nature magazine, so I got an invitation from Harvard (from the professor Marmur). I went to the director to inform him… I was all shaking with excitement, as I actually had a paper from Harvard… And he told me: ‚Paleček, I will not let you go.‘ And that was the end of fun of course. And I replied: ‚Can I write him you will not let me go then?‘ And he responded: „No, no! Simply write them you cannot go now and they will forget about you soon.‘ So it was that all the letters I got had to go to the director first, and only when he signed a copy, they could be posted. And when he did not, they were not sent. So it would have happened so that I would never go, but what actually happened… In 1961 there was an international biochemistry conference in Moscow. And the professor Marmur, who went to Moscow, wrote me he would stop by in Brno. And he went to the director (Herčík) and talked. Then he left and there was another, who also invited me. That was Larry Grossman. They just kept asking, why I have not left yet. After that he (director) changed a bit. He stopped saying he would not let me go, but still it was unknown, whether I would or would not go. And that lasted… for two years. I actually believe that he (director) was much afraid of me staying there and him being made accountable for it.“