Lysenkoism

Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935. Behind him are (left to right) Stanislav Kosior, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev and Joseph Stalin.

Lysenkoism (Russian: Лысе́нковщина, tr. Lysenkovshchina) was a political campaign conducted by Trofim Lysenko, his followers and Soviet authorities against genetics and science-based agriculture. Lysenko served as the director of the Soviet Union's Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Lysenkoism began in the late 1920s and formally ended in 1964.

The pseudo-scientific ideas of Lysenkoism assumed the heritability of acquired characteristics (Lamarckism).^[1] Lysenko's theory rejected Mendelian inheritance and the concept of the "gene"; it departed from Darwinian evolutionary theory by rejecting natural selection.^[2] Proponents falsely claimed to have discovered, among many other things, that rye could transform into wheat and wheat into barley, that weeds could spontaneously transmute into food grains, and that "natural cooperation" was observed in nature as opposed to "natural selection".^[2] Lysenkoism promised extraordinary advances in breeding and in agriculture that never came about.

Joseph Stalin supported the campaign. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were fired or even sent to prison,^[3] and numerous scientists were executed as part of a campaign instigated by Lysenko to suppress his scientific opponents.^[4][5][6][7] The president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was sent to prison and died there, while scientific research in the field of genetics was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953.^[2] Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines was also negatively affected or banned.^[8]

In agriculture

In 1928, Trofim Lysenko, a previously unknown agronomist, claimed to have developed an agricultural technique, termed vernalization, which tripled or quadrupled crop yield by exposing wheat seed to high humidity and low temperature. While cold and moisture exposure are a normal part of the life cycle of autumn-seeded winter cereals, the vernalization technique claimed to increase yields by increasing the intensity of exposure, in some cases planting soaked seeds directly into the snow cover of frozen fields. In reality, the technique was neither new (it had been known since 1854, and was extensively studied during the previous twenty years), nor did it produce the yields he promised, although some increase in production did occur.

When Lysenko began his fieldwork in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the agriculture of the Soviet Union was in a massive crisis due to the forced collectivisation of farms, and the extermination of the kulaks. The resulting famine provoked the people and the government alike to search for any possible solution to the critical lack of food. Lysenko's vernalization practices yielded marginally greater food production on the farms, and he was quickly accepted as the hero of Soviet agriculture.

Many agronomists were educated before the revolution, and even many of those educated afterwards did not agree with the forced collectivization policies. Furthermore, among biologists of the day, the most popular topic was not agriculture at all, but the new genetics that was emerging out of studies of Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as fruit flies. Drosophilid flies made experimental verification of genetics theories, such as Mendelian ratios and heritability, much easier.

Isaak Izrailevich Prezent, a main Lysenko theorist, presented Lysenko in Soviet mass-media as a genius who had developed a new, revolutionary agricultural technique. In this period, Soviet propaganda often focused on inspirational stories of peasants who, through their own canny ability and intelligence, came up with solutions to practical problems. Lysenko's widespread popularity provided him a platform to denounce theoretical genetics and to promote his own agricultural practices. He was, in turn, supported by the Soviet propaganda machine, which overstated his successes and omitted mention of his failures. This was accompanied by fake experimental data supporting Lysenkoism from scientists seeking favor and the destruction of counter-evidence to Lysenko's theories. Instead of performing controlled experiments, Lysenko claimed that vernalization increased wheat yields by 15%, solely based upon questionnaires taken of farmers.

Rise

Lysenko's political success was mostly due to his appeal to the Communist Party and Soviet ideology. Following the disastrous collectivization efforts of the late 1920s, Lysenko's "new" methods were seen by Soviet officials as paving the way to an "agricultural revolution." Lysenko himself was from a peasant family, and was an enthusiastic advocate of Leninism. During a period which saw a series of man-made agricultural disasters, he was also extremely fast in responding to problems, although not with real solutions. Whenever the Party announced plans to plant a new crop or cultivate a new area, Lysenko had immediate practical suggestions on how to proceed.

So quickly did he develop his prescriptions—from the cold treatment of grain, to the plucking of leaves from cotton plants, to the cluster planting of trees, to unusual fertilizer mixes—that academic biologists did not have time to demonstrate that one technique was valueless or harmful before a new one was adopted. The Party-controlled newspapers applauded Lysenko's "practical" efforts and questioned the motives of his critics. Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" had a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics, who urged the patience and observation required for science.

Lysenko was admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party, and was put in charge of agricultural affairs. He used his position to denounce biologists as "fly-lovers and people haters",^[9] and to decry the "wreckers" in biology, who he claimed were trying to purposely disable the Soviet economy and cause it to fail. Furthermore, he denied the distinction between theoretical and applied biology.

Lysenko presented himself as a follower of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, a well-known and well-liked Soviet horticulturist. However, unlike Michurin, he advocated a form of Lamarckism, insisting on using only hybridization and grafting, as non-genetic techniques. With this came, most importantly, the implication that acquired characteristics of an organism—for example, the state of being leafless as a result of having been plucked—could be inherited by that organism's descendants. This is why Lysenko claimed vernalization would give greater productivity than it did; he believed the ability of his vernalized seeds to flower faster and produce more wheat would be passed on to the next generation of wheat seeds, thus causing vernalization to further amplify the process.

Support from Joseph Stalin gave Lysenko even more momentum and popularity. In 1935, Lysenko compared his opponents in biology to the peasants who still resisted the Soviet government's collectivization strategy, saying that by opposing his theories the traditional geneticists were setting themselves against Marxism. Stalin was in the audience when this speech was made, and he was the first one to stand and applaud, calling out "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko. Bravo." This event emboldened Lysenko and gave him and his ally Prezent free rein to slander the geneticists who still spoke out against him. Many of Lysenkoism's opponents, such as his former mentor Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, were imprisoned or even executed because of Lysenko's and Prezent's denunciations.

On August 7, 1948, the V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced that from that point on Lysenkoism would be taught as "the only correct theory". Soviet scientists were forced to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenko.^[10] Criticism of Lysenko was denounced as "bourgeois" or "fascist", and analogous "non-bourgeois" theories also flourished in other fields in the Soviet academy at this time (see Japhetic theory; socialist realism). Perhaps the only opponents of Lysenkoism during Stalin's lifetime to escape liquidation were from the small community of Soviet nuclear physicists: as Tony Judt has observed, "It is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess their calculations. Stalin may well have been mad but he was not stupid."^[11]

In other countries

Many other countries of the Eastern Bloc accepted Lysenkoism as the official "new biology" as well; however the acceptance of Lysenkoism was not uniform in communist countries. In Poland, all geneticists except for Wacław Gajewski^[12] followed Lysenkoism. Even though Gajewski was not allowed contact with students, he was allowed to continue his scientific work at the Warsaw botanical garden. Lysenkoism was then rapidly rejected starting from 1956^[12] and modern genetics research departments were formed, including the first department of genetics headed by Wacław Gajewski, which was started at the Warsaw University in 1958.

Czechoslovakia adopted Lysenkoism in 1949. Jaroslav Kříženecký (1896–1964) was one of the prominent Czechoslovak geneticists opposing Lysenkoism, and when he criticized Lysenkoism in his lectures, he was dismissed from the Agricultural University in 1949 for "serving the established capitalistic system, considering himself superior to the working class, and being hostile to the democratic order of the people", and imprisoned in 1958.^[13] In 1963, he was appointed head of the newly established Gregor Mendel department in the Moravian Museum in Brno, the city in which Gregor Mendel pursued his early experiments on inheritance and formulated the laws of Mendelian inheritance.

In the German Democratic Republic, although Lysenkoism was taught at some of the universities, it had very little impact on science due to the actions of a few scientists (for example, the geneticist and fierce critic of Lysenkoism, Hans Stubbe) and an open border to West Berlin research institutions. Nonetheless, Lysenkoist theories were found in schoolbooks until the dismissal of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964.^[14]

Lysenkoism dominated Chinese science from 1949 until 1956, particularly during the Great Leap Forward, when, during a genetics symposium opponents of Lysenkoism were permitted to freely criticize it and argue for Mendelian genetics.^[15] In the proceedings from the symposium, Tan Jiazhen is quoted as saying "Since [the] USSR started to criticize Lysenko, we have dared to criticize him too".^[15] For a while, both schools were permitted to coexist, although the influence of the Lysenkoists remained large for several years.^[15]

Repercussions

From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's approval, many geneticists were executed (including Isaak Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943.^[16] Hermann Joseph Muller (and his teachings about genetics) was criticized as a bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and promoting fascism so he left the USSR, to return to the US via Republican Spain. In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience";^[17] all geneticists were fired from their jobs (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued.

Over 3,000 biologists were imprisoned, fired, or executed for attempting to oppose Lysenkoism at one time and overall, scientific research in genetics was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953.^[2] Due to Lysenkoism, crop yields in the USSR actually declined as well.^[2][8]

At the end of 1952, the situation started changing, possibly due to Stalin taking offense to Lysenko's growing influence. Articles criticizing Lysenkoism were published in newspapers. However, the process of return to regular genetics slowed down in Nikita Khrushchev's times, due to Lysenko showing him the supposed successes of an experimental agricultural complex. It once again became forbidden to criticize Lysenkoism, though it was now possible to express different views, and all geneticists were released or rehabilitated posthumously. The ban was only waived in the mid-1960s.^[18]

Almost alone among Western scientists, John Desmond Bernal, Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Fellow of the Royal Society, made an aggressive public defense of Lysenko and some years later gave an obituary of "Stalin as a Scientist". However, despite Bernal's endorsement, other members of Britain's scientific community retreated from open support of the Soviet Union.

Neo-Lysenkoism

The word "Neo-Lysenkoism" has occasionally been used by hereditarian researchers as a pejorative term in the debates over race and intelligence and sociobiology to describe scientists supposedly minimizing the role of genes in shaping human behavior, such as Leon Kamin, Richard Lewontin, Stephen Jay Gould and Barry Mehler.^[19][20]

See also

• Anti-intellectualism
• Great Leap Forward
• Japhetic theory
• Lamarckism
• Pavlovian session
• Politicization of science
• Roy Medvedev
• Suppressed research in the Soviet Union
• Deutsche Physik
• Tobacco science
• List of topics characterized as pseudoscience

References

• Denis Buican, L'éternel retour de Lyssenko, Paris, Copernic, 1978.
• Ronald Fisher, "What Sort of Man is Lysenko?" Listener, 40 (1948): 874–875. Contemporary commentary by a British evolutionary biologist (pdf format)
• Loren Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). ISBN 0-231-06442-X.
• Loren Graham, "Stalinist Ideology and the Lysenko Affair", in Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
• Loren Graham, What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1998).
• Loren Graham, Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). ISBN 0-674-79420-6.
• Oren Solomon Harman, "C. D. Darlington and the British and American Reaction to Lysenko and the Soviet Conception of Science." Journal of the History of Biology, Vol. 36 No. 2 (New York: Springer, 2003)
• Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Union from 1917 to the Present. (New York: Summit Books, 1986)
• Julian Huxley, Soviet Genetics and World Science (Chatto & Windus, 1949).
• David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
• Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, "Lysenkoism", in The Dialectical Biologist (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1985).
• Anton Lang, "Michurin, Vavilov, and Lysenko". Science, Vol. 124 No. 3215 (Washington: American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, 1956)
• Richard Lewontin, "The apportionment of human diversity". Evolutionary Biology, 6 (1972): 381-398
• Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)
• Roger Pearson, "Activist Lysenkoism: The Case of Barry Mehler". In Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe (Washington: Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1997).
• Valery N. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
• Gary Werskey, The Visible College: The Collective Biography of British Scientific Socialists During the 1930s (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978). ISBN 0-7139-0826-2.
• "The Disastrous Effects of Lysenkoism on Soviet Agriculture". Science and Its Times, ed. Neil Schlager and Josh Lauer, Vol. 6. (Detroit: Gale, 2001)

External links

• SkepDic.com - 'Lysenkoism', The Skeptic's Dictionary
• Lysenkoism, BBC Radio 4 discussion with Robert Service, Steve Jones & Catherine Merridale (In Our Time, June 5, 2008)