Trofim Lysenko

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Trofim Lysenko, 1938. (credit: Sovfoto)

(born 1898, Karlovka, Ukraine, Russian Empire — died Nov. 20, 1976, Kiev, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.) Soviet biologist and agronomist. During the Soviet famines of the 1930s, he proposed techniques for the enhancement of crop yields, rejecting orthodox Mendelian genetics on the basis of unconfirmed experiments, and gained a large popular following. As director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute of Genetics (1940 – 65), he became the controversial "dictator" of Stalinist biology. Claiming, among other things, that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment would produce seeds of rye, he promised greater, more rapid, and less costly increases in crop yields than other biologists believed possible. Eventually his "grassland" system of crop rotation was abandoned in favour of cultivation with mineral fertilizers, and a hybrid-corn program based on the U.S. example was pursued. In 1964 Lysenko's doctrines were officially discredited, and intensive efforts were made toward reestablishing orthodox genetics in the Soviet Union.

For more information on Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, visit Britannica.com.

Ukrainian agriculturalist (1898–1976)

A peasant's son from Karlovka (now in Ukraine), Lysenko began work at the Kirovabad Experimental Station in 1925, after completing his studies at the Kiev Agricultural Institute. In 1929 he became a senior specialist in the physiology department at the Institute of Selection and Genetics in Odessa and in the same year he first claimed success using vernalized grain on his father's farm. Vernalization is the cold treatment of soaked grains and it promotes flowering in spring-sown plants that might otherwise take two years to flower. Lysenko was later credited with inventing the method, although it had long been an established agricultural practice.

Lysenko claimed that the effects of vernalization could be inherited and so the treatment need not be repeated each year. This reversion to a belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics was the hallmark of his career, and he is remembered for his single-minded application of this belief to Soviet biology. The validity of the chromosome theory of inheritance had been generally accepted in the West, especially since the publication of T. H. Morgan's results. Naturally, many Soviet scientists also followed the Mendel–Morgan theory of heredity, notably Nikolai Vavilov, who was president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences and head of the Institute of Plant Protection. Vavilov was publicly discredited by Lysenko and in 1940 exiled to Siberia, Lysenko taking over his scientific posts. Other dissenting scientists were brought into line at the genetics debate held at the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1948. At this meeting Lysenko announced that he had the backing of the central committee of the communist party, and a motion was passed directing all textbooks and courses to be changed in accordance with his views. This dictatorial state of affairs continued until 1964, and Lysenko was finally ousted from his powerful position in 1965.

Soviet science suffered immeasurably from Lysenko's refusal to acknowledge “alien foreign bourgeois biology” or the existence of the gene. His theories complemented Stalinist party dogma very conveniently and it is to this rather than any great scientific ability that his rise to prominence may be attributed.

The Soviet agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976) developed a number of theories dealing with heredity and variability, species formation, intraspecific and interspecific relationships, and plant nutrition.

Trofim Lysenko was born on Sept. 30, 1898, in the Ukrainian village of Karlovka in Poltava Province. He studied at the Poltava Primary School for Horticulture and Gardening (1913-1917) and at the Uman School for Horticulture (1917-1921), after which he was assigned to the Belotserkovsky Experimental Station and went on to the Kiev Agricultural Institute, continuing his studies until 1925.

Genetics vs. Environment

Lysenko accepted a position at the Kirovabad experimental station in Azerbaijan, where he worked out his theory on the stages of plant development. In 1929 he described a process known as vernalization which involved a pre-sowing treatment of seeds to induce plants to flower sooner than usual, and enable them to adapt to different climates. According to initial reports from Soviet collective farms, vernalization was something of a sensation, and Lysenko was appointed director of the Odessa Plant Breeding-Genetics Institute.

Lysenko's theory to explain the process of vernalization was challenged in 1934 by Soviet scientists as a repudiation of the classical Mendelian theory of heredity and variation, which is based on the idea that genes are the carriers of hereditary characteristics. Lysenko defended his theory, known as "Lysenkoism," and launched a vicious attack on Soviet geneticists. It took him and his followers three contrived conferences and a dozen years (1936-1948) to topple Soviet geneticists from leading positions in research centers and educational institutions. Outstanding geneticists were vilified as "enemies of the people." Lysenko's meteoric rise to power and prestige is evidenced by his becoming a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1935, full director of the All-Union Institute of Selection and Genetics in 1936, president of the Lenin's All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, an active member of the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1938, and director of the academy's institute of Genetics in 1940. His school of "genetic" thought also received the personal endorsement of Joseph Stalin. During his heyday, he received many awards and prizes, including three Stalin prizes and six orders of Lenin.

Reigning as the supreme authority in practical and theoretical agriculture, Lysenko advised the hierarchy of the Communist party on land reclamation and reforestation, the use of fertilizers, and methods of increasing crop and animal yields. Between 1954 and 1968 Lysenko's theories and contributions came under increasing scrutiny, but he managed to hold on to most of his positions mainly because of the intervention of Premier Nikita Khrushchev. By 1963 the Central Committee of the Communist party and the U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers became alarmed that Soviet Russia was lagging dangerously behind the West in several critical branches of biology and medicine.

Later Years

When Khrushchev was replaced, the monopolistic position of Lysenko and his followers in biology ended. Lysenko was charged with being oblivious to the recent advances in contemporary biology and with employing "administrative methods" to gain support for his theories and programs. Scientists both inside and outside the then Soviet Union were never able to validate his theories. In 1965 the new scientific journal Genetics appeared, sponsored by the Soviet Academy of Sciences; this marked the restoration of genetics to a respectable position in Soviet science. Lysenko was nevertheless permitted to head a laboratory at the Institute of Genetics, and his popularity with the Soviet Union's collective farmers hardly diminished - they understood his language, methods, and ideas.

Lysenko died in Moscow on Nov. 20, 1976, at the age of 78.

Further Reading

For a brief biographical sketch and evaluation of Lysenko's theories see Maxim W. Mikulak, "Trofim Denisovich Lysenko," in George W. Simmonds, ed., Soviet Leaders (1967); Of special interest is Zhores A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (trans. 1969); Accounts of the Soviet biological controversies can be found in Julian Huxley, Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity (1949); Conway Zirkle, ed., Death of a Science in Russia: The Fate of Genetics as Described in Pravda and Elsewhere (1949); Theodosius Dobzhansky, "The Crisis of Soviet Biology," in Ernest J. Simmons, ed., Continuity and Change in Russian and Soviet Thought (1955); and David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (1970), the best study to date.

Additional Sources

"Lysenko, Science Overlord Under Stalin, Dead at 78," New York Times, Nov. 24, 1976, p 36.

Rossianov, Kirill, "Biology Under Lysenko and Stalin," Science, Nov. 11, 1994, p. 1085-1086.

Sakharov, Andrei D., "The Poisonous Legacy of Trofim Lysenko," Time, May 14, 1990, p. 61.

Soifer, Valerii, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, c1994.

(1898 - 1976), agronomist and biologist.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was born in Karlovka, Ukraine, to a peasant family. He attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute as an extramural student and graduated as doctor of agricultural science in 1925. A disciple of horticulturist Ivan Michurin's work, Lysenko worked at the Gyandzha Experimental Station between 1925 and 1929 and coined his theory of vernalization in the late 1920s. His vernalization theory described a process where winter habit was transformed into spring habit by moistening and chilling the seed.

During the agricultural crisis of the 1930s, Soviet authorities started supporting Lysenko's theories. By the mid-1930s Lysenko's dominance in agricultural sciences was clearly established as he founded agrobiology, a pseudoscience that promised to increase yields rapidly and cheaply. He became president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1938 and director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences in 1940. Lysenko and his followers, Lysenkoites, have long been thought to have had a direct line to the Stalinist terror apparatus as they targeted geneticists that they thought opposed Lysenkoism, most famously noted scientist Nikolai Vavilov.

As Lysenko's political influence increased, he expressed his views more forcefully. His view of genetics was irrational and based neither on reason nor scientific experimentation. His theory of heredity rejected established principles of genetics, and he believed that he could change the genetic constitution of strains of wheat by controlling the environment. For example, he claimed that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment produced seeds of rye.

By 1948 education and research in traditional genetics had been completely outlawed in the Soviet Union. The 1948 August Session of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences gave the Lysenkoites official endorsement for these views, which were said to correspond to Marxist theory. From that moment, and until Josef Stalin's death, Lysenko was the total autocrat of Soviet biology. His position as Stalin's henchman in Soviet science has been compared to Andrei Zhdanov's role in culture during this time of high Stalinism.

In April 1952 the Ministry of Agriculture withdrew its support of Lysenko's cluster method of planting trees, but Lysenko was not publicly rebuked until after Stalin's death in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev tolerated criticism of Lysenkoism, but it took eleven years to completely confirm the uselessness of agrobiology. It was only with Khrushchev's ousting from power in 1964 that Lysenko was fully discredited and research in traditional genetics accepted. He resigned as president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1956, and his removal from the position of director of the Institute of Genetics in 1965 signified the full return of scientific professionalism in Soviet science. Lysenko kept the title of academician and held the position of chairman for science at the Academy of Science's Agricultural Experimental Station, located not far from Moscow, until he died in November 20, 1976.

Bibliography

Joravsky, David. (1970). The Lysenko Affair. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Medvedev, Zhores A. (1969). The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko. New York: Columbia University Press.

Medvedev, Zhores A. (1978). Soviet Science. New York: Norton.

—RÓSA MAGNÚSDÓTTIR

Trofim Lysenko
Lysenko studying wheat
Born	September 29, 1898 (1898-09-29) Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
Died	November 20, 1976 (1976-11-21) Moscow, Soviet Union
Nationality	Ukrainian
Fields	biologist agronomist
Institutions	Soviet biology
Known for	Lysenkoism hybridization rejecting Mendelian inheritance
Influences	Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (Russian: Трофи́м Дени́сович Лысе́нко, Ukrainian: Трофим Денисович Лисенко, Trofym Denysovych Lysenko) (September 29, 1898–November 20, 1976) was a Ukrainian agronomist who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them into a powerful political scientific movement termed Lysenkoism. His unorthodox experimental research in improved crop yields earned the support of Soviet leadership, especially following the famine and loss of productivity resulting from forced collectivization in several regions of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. In 1940 he became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences, and Lysenko's anti-Mendelian doctrines were further secured in Soviet science and education by the exercise of political influence and power. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from held positions, and many imprisoned. Lysenko's work was officially discredited in the Soviet Union in 1964, leading to a renewed emphasis there to re-institute Mendelian genetics and orthodox science.

Though Lysenko remained at his post in the Institute of Genetics until 1965,^[1] his influence on Soviet agricultural practice declined by the 1950s. The Soviet Union quietly abandoned Lysenko's agricultural practices in favor of modern agricultural practices after the crop yields he promised failed to materialize. Today much of Lysenko's agricultural experimentation and research is largely viewed as fraudulent.

Contents 1 Early rise 2 After Stalin 3 See also 4 Notes 5 References 6 External links

Early rise

Lysenko, the son of Denis and Oksana Lysenko, came from a peasant family in Ukraine and attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute. In 1927, at 29 years of age and working at an agricultural experiment station in Azerbaijan, he was credited by the Soviet newspaper Pravda with having discovered a method to fertilize fields without using fertilizers or minerals, and with having proved 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."^[2] In succeeding years, however, further attempts to grow the peas were unsuccessful.

Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935. At the back (left to right) are Stanislav Kosior, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreyev and the Soviet leader, Joseph Stalin

Similar Soviet media reports heralding Lysenko's further discoveries in agriculture continued from 1927 until 1964; reports of amazing (and seemingly impossible) successes, each one replaced with new success claims as earlier ones failed. Few of the successes attributed to Lysenko could be duplicated. Nevertheless, with the media's help, Lysenko enjoyed the popular image of the "barefoot scientist"—the embodiment of the mythic Soviet peasant genius.

By the late 1920s, the Soviet political bosses had given their support to Lysenko. This support was a consequence, in part, of policies put in place by Communist party personnel to rapidly promote members of the proletariat into leadership positions in agriculture, science and industry. Party officials were looking for promising candidates with backgrounds similar to Lysenko's: born of a peasant family, without formal academic training or affiliations to the academic community.^[3]

Lysenko in particular impressed political officials further with his success in motivating peasants to return to farming.^[4] The Soviet's Collectivist reforms forced the confiscation of agricultural landholdings from the 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 Soviet Leadership.^[5] Lysenko emerged during this period inaugurating radically new agricultural methods, and also promising that the new methods provided wider opportunities for year round work in agriculture. Lysenko proved himself very useful to 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.^[4]

Lysenko's theories were grounded in Lamarckism. His work was primarily devoted to developing new techniques and practices in agriculture. But he also contributed a new theoretical framework which would become the foundation to all Soviet agriculture: a discipline called agrobiology that is a fusion of plant physiology, cytology, genetics and evolutionary theory. Central to Lysenko's tenets was the concept of the inheritability of acquired characteristics. In 1932 Lysenko was given his own journal, The Bulletin of Vernalization, and it became the main outlet for touting emerging developments of Lysenkoist research.^[3]

One of the most celebrated of the earliest agricultural applications developed by Lysenko was a process of increasing the success of wheat crops by soaking the grain and storing the wet seed in snow to refrigerate over the winter ("vernalization"). Though his work was scientifically unsound on a number of levels, Lysenko's claims delighted Soviet journalists and agricultural officials, who were impressed by its promise to minimize the resources spent in theoretical scientific laboratory work. The Soviet political leadership had come to view orthodox science as offering empty promises, as unproductive in meeting the challenges and needs of the Communist state. Lysenko was viewed as someone who could deliver practical methods more rapidly, and with superior results.^[2]

Lysenko himself spent much time denouncing academic scientists and geneticists, claiming that their isolated laboratory work was not helping the Soviet people. By 1929 Lysenko's skeptics were politically censured, accused of offering only criticisms, and for failing to prescribe any new solutions themselves. In December 1929, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin gave a famous speech praising "practice" above "theory", elevating the political bosses above the scientists and technical specialists. Though for a period the Soviet government under Stalin continued its support of agricultural scientists, after 1935 the balance of power abruptly swung towards Lysenko and his followers.

Lysenko (right) with Khrushchev in an experimental field

Lysenko was put in charge of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union and made responsible for ending the propagation of "harmful" ideas among Soviet scientists. Lysenko served this purpose by causing the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and eliminating all study and research involving Mendelian genetics throughout the Soviet Union. This period is known as Lysenkoism. He bears particular responsibility for the persecution of his predecessor and rival, prominent Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov, which ended in 1943 with the imprisoned Vavilov's death by starvation. In 1941 he was awarded the USSR State Prize.

After Stalin

Following Stalin's death in 1953, 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 Borisovich Zel'dovich, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Pyotr Kapitsa, presented a case against Lysenko, proclaiming his work as false science. 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 to be 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:

He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists. [2]

The Soviet press was soon filled with anti-Lysenkoite articles and appeals for the restoration of scientific methods to all fields of biology and agricultural science. 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. A few months later, a devastating critique of Lysenko was made public. As a result, Lysenko was immediately disgraced in the Soviet Union, although his work continued to have impact in China for many years after.

Lysenko died in 1976.

See also

• Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
• Gregor Mendel
• VASKhNIL
• John Desmond Bernal

Notes

1. ^ "Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Retrieved 4 July 2007 [1]
2. ^ ^{a b} David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, University Of Chicago Press 1986.
3. ^ ^{a b} Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science, Princeton University Press 1997
4. ^ ^{a b} Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, Knopf 1972. p 208
5. ^ Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization, Oxford University Press, 1996. pp4-5

References

• Graham, Loren, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
• Graham, Loren, What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience?, (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998).
• Joravsky, David, The Lysenko Affair, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
• Lecourt, Dominique, Proletarian Science ? : The Case of Lysenko, (London: NLB ; Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press, 1977). (A Marxist, though anti-Stalinist, history of Lysenkoism)
• Lysenko, Trofim, The Science of Biology Today, (New York: International Publishers, 1948). Text of an address "evoked by the international discussion of the subject of inheritance of acquired characteristics," according to an introductory note. Delivered before a session of a meeting of the V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences on July 31, 1948, when Lysenko, its president, was at the apex of his power. [For an online version of the text see the Lysenko "Report" provided in the External Links section, below.]
• Medvedev, Zhores, The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969)
• Soyfer, Valery N., Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Trofim Lysenko

• Ronald Fisher (1948) What Sort of Man is Lysenko? Listener, 40: 874-875 — contemporary commentary by a British evolutionary biologist (pdf format)
• Letter from Lysenko's parents to Stalin, Pravda, January 3, 1936.
• Report by Lysenko to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 1948
• New Developments in the Science of Biological Species by Lysenko, 1950
• Lecourt, Dominique, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko (1977), Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, London, this digital edition first published 2003 (A Marxist, though anti-Stalinist, history of Lysenkoism)
• BBC program (In Our Time) on Lysenko

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