Lysenkoism

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Lysenkoism
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Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976)

• Came from a peasant family in Ukraine
• Attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute
• A follower of Michurin

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Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin(1855-1935)

• In 1875 began collecting plants, and started
• his research in pomology and selection
• In 1920 Lenin ordered an analytic research
• on Michurin's works
• His garden was recognized as an institution
• of state importance
• He claimed that predominance depends on
• heredity, ontogenesis, the initial cell
• structure, individual features of hybrids and
  conditions of cultivation
  
• He assumed a possibility of changing genotype
  under external influence

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• He worked on hybridization of plants of similar
  and different origins and artificial selection
  with the help of physical and chemical factors
  
• He crossed geographically distant plants

• Michurin also proposed means for overcoming the
  genetic barrier of incompatibility during the
  process of hybridization, by pollinating young
  hybrids during their first florescence with the
  mix of different kinds of pollen

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• The Soviets began to cultivate Michurins hybrids
  of appel, pear, cherry, rowan, etc.
  
• Michurin was the one to start cultivation of his
  hybrids of grape, apricot, sweet cherry and other
  southern plants in the northern climates
  
• During the Lysenkoism campaign, Michurin was
  promoted as a Soviet evolutionary leader in an
  opposition to Mendelian genetics, pejoratively
  called Weismanism-Morganism-Mendelism by Soviet
  propaganda

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• Michurin's theory of influence of the environment
  on the heredity was a variant of Lamarckism
  
• He maintained that the task of a selectioner is
  to assist and enhance natural selection
  
• "We cannot wait for favors from the Nature. To
  take them from it -- that is our task."
  
• For this reason, in the Soviet Union he was
  considered as the only true follower of
  Darwinism
  
• Throughout all his life Michurin worked to create
  new sorts of fruit plants. He introduced over
  300 new species
  

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Lysenkos Path

• In 1927 while working at an experiment station he
  was credited by the Soviet media with having
  discovered a method to fertilize fields without
  using fertilizers, and that he had proved that a
  winter crop of peas could be grown "turning the
  barren fields green in winter, so that cattle
  will not perish from poor feeding, and the
  peasant will live through the winter without
  trembling for tomorrow

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• The winter crop of peas, however, failed in
  succeeding years.
  
• The Soviet media reported Lysenkos successes
  from 1927 until 1964 with reports of amazing (and
  impossible) feats

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• They would be replaced with claims of new
  successes once the old ones became failures
  
• What mattered more to the press was that Lysenko
  was a "barefoot scientist"an embodiment of the
  mythical Soviet peasant genius
  

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• Lysenko's "science" was practically nonexistent
• His theories were variations of Lamarckism and
  various confused forms of Darwinism
  
• Lysenko's work consisted of "practical
  directions" for agriculture, such as cooling
  grain before it was planted
  
• Lysenko's primary procedure was a mixture of
  so-called "vernalization" (by which Lysenko
  generally meant anything he
  
• did to plant seeds and tubers)
• as well as Hybridization

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• He picked a spring wheat with a short "stage of
  vernalization" but a long "light stage," which he
  crossed with another variety of wheat with a long
  "stage of vernalization" and a short "light
  stage"
• He did not explain what was meant by these
  stages.
  
• Lysenko concluded on the basis of his stage
  theory that he knew in advance that the cross
  would produce offspring that would ripen sooner
  and as such yield more than their parents and
  thus did not have to test many plants through
  their generations

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• Though scientifically unsound on a number of
  levels, Soviet journalists and agricultural
  officials were delighted with Lysenko's claims
  
• Lysenko was given his own journal, Vernalization,
  in which he bragged about forthcoming successes

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• The Soviet press reported great
• successes from Lysenko's early
• initiatives, though in the end they would
• almost all result in failure
• What most caught the Soviet government's
• eye with Lysenko was his success at
• motivating peasants
• Soviet agriculture was deeply damaged by
• the mandatory collectivization movement in the
  early 1930s, and many peasants were at best
  unenthusiastic and at worst prone to destroy
  their grain to keep it away from the Soviet
  government
• Lysenko energized the enthusiasm of the peasants,
  making them feel truly in control and
  participants in the great Soviet revolutionary
  experiment

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• By the late 1920s, the Soviet political bosses
  had given their support to Lysenko. Lysenko
  himself spent much time decrying academic
  scientists and geneticists, claiming that their
  isolated laboratory work was not helping the
  Soviet people
• He was quick to anger and could tolerate no
  criticism
  
• By 1929 the skeptics of Lysenko were politically
  censured for only being able to criticize rather
  than prescribe new solutions

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• In 1929 Stalin gave a famous speech elevating
  "practice" above "theory", i.e., elevating the
  judgment of the political bosses above that of
  the scientists and technical specialists
• The Soviet government under Stalin gave much more
  support to genuine agricultural scientists in its
  early days but after 1935 the balance of power
  abruptly swung towards Lysenko and his followers

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• 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 faithfully, causing
  the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of
  hundreds of scientists and the demise of genetics
  throughout the Soviet Union

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• This period is known as Lysenkoism
• He was responsibility for the death of the
  greatest Soviet biologist Kikolai Vavilov at the
  hands of the NKVD

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• After Stalin's death in 1953, Lysenko retained
  his position, enjoying a relative degree of trust
  from Nikita Khrushchev
  
• However, mainstream scientists were now given the
  ability to criticize Lysenko for the first time
  since the late 1920s

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• In 1962 prominent Soviet scientists set out the
  case against Lysenko, his false science and his
  policy of political extermination of opponents
  
• 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 pseudoscientific views,
  for adventurism, for the degradation of learning,
  and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even
  death, of many genuine scientists

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• 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

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• After the dismissal of Khrushchev in 1965, the
  president of the Academy of Sciences declared
  that Lysenko's immunity to criticism had
  officially ended, and an expert commission was
  sent to Lysenko's experimental farm
• A few months later, a devastating critique became
  public and Lysenko's reputation was completely
  destroyed in the Soviet Union, though it would
  continue to have effect in China for many years