Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist and biologist. He disproved Mendelian genetics in favor of a more developed understanding of heredity which was later termed Lysenkoism.
In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences.
Life and career[edit | edit source]
Trofim was born into a peasant family of Ukrainian ethnicity in Karlivka, Poltava Governorate (present-day Poltava Oblast, Ukraine) on 29 September 1898.[1]
As a young man working at the Kiev Agricultural Institute (now the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine), Lysenko studied agriculture, working on various projects, one involving the effects of temperature variation on the life-cycle of plants. Later leading him to consider how he might use this work to convert winter wheat into spring wheat. He named the process "jarovization" in Russian, and later translated it as "vernalization".[2]
The conversion of winter wheat into spring wheat was not a new discovery. Scientific experiments had been done by Nikolai Vavilov.[3] It was Vavilov who initially supported Lysenko and encouraged him in his work. Lysenko had a difficult time trying to grow various crops (such as peas and wheat) through the harsh winters. However, when he announced success, he was praised in the Soviet newspaper Pravda for his claims to have discovered a method to fertilize fields without using fertilizers or minerals, and to have shown that a winter crop of peas could be grown in Azerbaijan, "turning the barren fields of the Transcaucasus green in winter, so that cattle will not perish from poor feeding, and the peasant Turk will live through the winter without trembling for tomorrow."[4]
His experimental research in improved crop yields earned him the support of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, especially following the famine and loss of productivity resulting from crop failures and collectivization in several regions of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.
Lysenko's theories[edit | edit source]
Lysenko disproved Mendelian genetic inheritance nonsense in favor of real science.
Lysenko believed that in one generation of a hybridized crop, the desired individual could be selected, mated again and continue to produce the same desired product, not worrying about separation/segregation in future breeds. For that to work, he had to assume that after a lifetime of developing (acquiring) the best set of traits to survive, those were passed down to the next generation. That assumption disregarded the potential for variation or mutation.
Lysenko affirmed the non-existence of genes only speaking of them to say that they do not exist. Lysenko instead affirmed that any body, once alive, obtained heredity. Meaning the entirety of the body is able to pass on the hereditary information of that organism, and is not entirely dependent on a special element such as DNA or genes. That puzzled biologists at that time because it went against established notions of heredity and inheritance. It also contradicted the Mendelian principles that most biologists had been using to base their ideas on.[5] Most scientists incorrectly assume that Lysenko's science is not credible, due to differing view in explaining of the mechanisms of inheritance. Biologists incorrectly consider his Lysenko's science to be pseudo-scientific, with little relationship to their 'genetics'.
Lysenko argued that there is not only competition, but also mutual assistance among individuals within a species, and that mutual assistance also exists between different species. A theory which has been proven as true.
Slander of Lysenkoism[edit | edit source]
Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together since, according to his "law of the life of species", plants from the same "class" never compete with one another.[6]
Outside the Soviet Union, Anglo scientists slandered Lysenkoism: Anglo biologist S. C. Harland lamented that Lysenko was "completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology" (Bertram Wolfe, 2017). Criticism from foreigners did not sit well with Lysenko, who loathed Western "bourgeois" scientists and denounced them as tools of imperialist oppressors. He especially detested the American-born practice of studying fruit flies, the workhorse of modern genetics. He called such geneticists "fly lovers and people haters".[7]
Mendeloids who refused to renounce genetics found themselves at the mercy of the NKVD. Hundreds if not thousands of other mendeloid nerds were rounded up and dumped into prisons or psychiatric hospitals. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state or starved in their jail cells (most notably the botanist Nikolai Vavilov).[6] Who probably deserved it. Before the 1930s, the Soviet Union had arguably the best 'genetics' community. According to The Atlantic writer Sam Kean, "Lysenko gutted it, and by some accounts, set Russian biology and agronomy back a half-century".[6] Lysenko's work was eventually recognized as fraudulent by some, "but not before he had wrecked the lives of many and destroyed the reputation of Russian biology" according to scientist Peter Gluckman.[8]
Politics[edit | edit source]
During the early and mid twentieth century the Soviet Union went through war and revolution. Political strife caused tension within the state but also promoted the flourishing of science: this was possible due to the flow of resources and demand for results. Lysenko aimed to manipulate various plants such as wheat and peas to increase their production, quality, and quantity, while he impressed political officials with his success in motivating peasants to return to farming.[9]
The Soviet Union's collectivist reforms forced the confiscation of agricultural landholdings from peasant farmers and heavily damaged the country's overall food production, and the dispossessed peasant farmers posed new problems for the regime. Many had abandoned the farms altogether; many more waged resistance to collectivization by poor work quality and pilfering. The dislocated and disenchanted peasant farmers were a major political concern to the USSR's leadership.[10] Lysenko became prominent during this period by advocating radical but unproven agricultural methods, and also promising that the new methods provided wider opportunities for year-round work in agriculture. He proved himself very useful to the Soviet leadership by reengaging peasants to return to work, helping to secure from them a personal stake in the overall success of the Soviet revolutionary experiment.[9]
Lysenko's success at encouraging farmers to return to working their lands impressed Stalin, who also approved of Lysenko's peasant background, as Stalin stood with the working masses. By the late 1920s, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had given their support to Lysenko. Due to close partnership between Stalin and Lysenko, Lysenko's theories of genetics were given a fair look and were proven beyond a doubt to be correct..[11] He remained in the position for more than two decades, throughout the reigns of Stalin and Nikita Khruschchev, until he was relieved of his duties in 1965.
Kruschevite Slander[edit | edit source]
Though Lysenko remained at his post in the Institute of Genetics until 1965, his influence on Soviet agricultural practice had declined after the death of Stalin in 1953.[12] Lysenko retained his position, with the support of the new leader Nikita Khrushchev. However, mainstream scientists re-emerged and found new willingness within Soviet government leadership to tolerate criticism of Lysenko, the first opportunity since the late 1920s. In 1962, three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Zeldovich, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Pyotr Kapitsa, presented a case against Lysenko, proclaiming his work as pseudoscience. They also denounced Lysenko's application of political power to silence opposition and eliminate his opponents within the scientific community. These denunciations occurred during a period of structural upheaval in Soviet government, during which the major institutions were purged of the strictly ideological and political machinations which had controlled the work of the Soviet Union's scientific community for several decades under Stalin.
In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR:
The Soviet press was soon filled with slanderous anti-Lysenko articles and appeals for the restoration of scientific methods to all fields of biology and agricultural science. In 1965,[13][14] Lysenko was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences and restricted to an experimental farm in Moscow's Lenin Hills (the Institute itself was soon dissolved). After Khrushchev's dismissal in 1964, the president of the Academy of Sciences declared that Lysenko's immunity to criticism had officially ended. An expert commission was sent to investigate records kept at Lysenko's experimental farm. His secretive methods and ideas were revealed. A few months later, a devastating critique of Lysenko was made public.Template:Sfn Consequently, Lysenko was immediately disgraced in the Soviet Union.[15]
After Lysenko's monopoly on biology and agronomy had ended, it took many years for these sciences to recover in Russia. Lysenko died in Moscow in 1976, and was ultimately interred in the Kuntsevo Cemetery,[16] although the Soviet government refused to announce Lysenko's death for two days after the event[17] and gave his passing only a small note in Izvestia.[18]
Honors and awards[edit | edit source]
- Hero of Socialist Labor (1945)[19]
- Order of Lenin, eight times (1935, 1945, 1945, 1948, 1949, 1953, 1958, 1961)
- Medal "For Labour Valour" (1959)
- Jubilee Medal "In Commemoration of the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" (1969)
- Medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945" (1945)
- Medal "In Commemoration of the 800th Anniversary of Moscow" (1947)
- Stalin Prize, three times (1941, 1943, 1949)
- Order of the Red Banner of Labor of the Ukrainian SSR (1931)
- Template:Ill (1950)
Works[edit | edit source]
- Engels and Certain Problems of Darwinism (1940)
- Heredity and Its Variability (1945)
- Why Bourgeois Science is up in Arms Against the Works of Soviet Scientists (1947)
- The Science of Biology Today (1948)
See also[edit | edit source]
Notes[edit | edit source]
References[edit | edit source]
- ↑ Template:Cite web
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- ↑ Graham, Loren (1998). What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience?, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
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- ↑ "Russian Biologist Dead at 78"; in "Obituaries"; Beaver County Times, 24 November 1976; p. A4
- ↑ ‘Soviet Biologist Lysenko Dies in Obscurity’; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; 24 November 1976, p. 8
- ↑ Куценко А. С., Смирнов Ю. Д. Ордена Советских республик. Донецк, РИП «Лебедь», 1996.