Editing Trofim Lysenko (section)

==Slander of Lysenkoism==
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.<ref name="atlantic">{{cite news | url=https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/trofim-lysenko-soviet-union-russia/548786/ | title=The Soviet Era's Deadliest Scientist Is Regaining Popularity in Russia | magazine=[[The Atlantic]] | date=19 December 2017}}</ref> 

Outside the Soviet Union, Anglo scientists slandered Lysenkoism: Anglo biologist [[Sydney Harland|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 [[Drosophila melanogaster|fruit flies]], the workhorse of modern genetics. He called such geneticists "fly lovers and people haters".<ref name="Harman 2003">{{cite journal |last=Harman |first=Oren Solomon |title=C. D. Darlington and the British and American Reaction to Lysenko and the Soviet Conception of Science |journal=Journal of the History of Biology |date=2003 |volume=36 |issue=2 (Summer 2003) |pages=309–352 |doi=10.1023/A:1024483131660 |jstor=4331804|pmid=12945539 |s2cid=32789492 }}</ref>

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]]).<ref name="atlantic" /> 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".<ref name="atlantic" /> 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]].<ref>{{Cite book|last=Gluckman|first=Peter|title=Principles of Evolutionary Medicine|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2009|isbn=978-0199236398|pages=81}}</ref>