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Fall 2020 News: Russian Studies

2020 Tepper Lecture Series: “How and Why to Make Oil into Food”

The Russian and Post-Soviet Studies Program held its annual Tepper Speaker Series: Global Russia virtually this semester.

On September 17th, Prof. Douglas Rogers (Yale) gave a talk titled “How and Why to Make Oil into Food: A Tale of Soviet biotechnology and Human – Microbe Relations.” In his talk, Prof. Rogers focused on an interesting period in the history of Soviet science: the massive effort, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, to transform oil into food through industrial scale fermentation, which was a part of a larger international science competition in a Cold War context.Screenshot 2020-09-17 173323