TD Lysenko (1898 - 1976)
NI Vavilov (1887 - 1943)
Science &
Politics in the Soviet Union: The Fate of Genetics, 1930 -
1964
Following the collapse of the Russian Empire and the ensuing Civil
War, agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1920s remained in a
state of massive crisis during the forced changeover from a
small-farm, agrarian-based economy towards an industrial economy
based on collective farms. Whole-sale elimination of the Kulak
peasant class, and bureaucratic mismanagement, led to
widespread famines that provoked the Soviet government to search
for any possible solution to the critical lack of food.
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898 – 1976) was a Russian
peasant agriculturist, who achieved notoriety in the late 1920s by
his advocacy of vernalization, a method by which seeds
from winter-strains of wheat were treated to freezing temperature
prior to planting. This allowed them to be planted in the spring.
The method was well-known, but scientific data had shown that it
produced only marginal increases in yield. Lysenko, instead of
performing controlled experiments, made extravagant claims that
vernalization increased wheat yields by as much as 15%, and also
that the modified growth was inherited between generations. Soviet
propaganda favored inspirational stories of peasants who, through
their native ability and intelligence, came up with solutions to
practical problems. Lysenko was widely presented as such a genius
who had developed a new, revolutionary technique. Lysenko also built on the ideas of
Michurin, another peasant horticulturist who
advocated Lamarckism, and claimed to have effected
permanent changes in plant species through hybridization,
grafting, and other non-genetic techniques. [Michurin’s methods
have parallels in the work of the American plant breeder
Luther Burbank]. The notion that acquired characteristics
could be transmitted to an organism's descendants was seen as
consistent with the social theories of Marx and Engels, who
argued that nature and human society were infinitely plastic. Lysenko's
methods were also seen as a way to engage peasants directly in an
"agricultural revolution," instead of opposing government
'reforms'. He went on to advocate other dubious methods, such as
cluster-planting of trees, scattering seed on stubble fields, and
even inter-species transformations (the sort of things that might
be expected with contaminated seed)
Soviet geneticists at the time were well-established among
the world leaders in the field, including Theodosius
Dobzhansky (1900 - 1975), whose "Genetics and the
Origin of Species" was a seminal contribution to the
New Evolutionary Synthesis, and Sergei Chetverikov
(1880 - 1959) whose work on population genetics anticipated
Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright. In
particular, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (1887 - 1943)
amassed a huge seed bank collection for breeding. He
pioneered efforts to develop new strains of crops that
were specific for the many growing regions in the USSR,
by use of controlled crosses and heritability studies.
Left-leaning Western geneticists including Nobelist HJ
Muller visited Vavilov to promote East-West cooperation.
However, such methods are require several generations to show
results, academic geneticists were constrained by their
actual data and could not hope to match Lysenko's extravagant
claims. They were also no match for Lysenko's political tactics,
which presented genetics as 'western bourgeois science'.
Support from Joseph Stalin (1879 - 1953) enhanced
Lysenko’s status. In 1935, during the height of the Yezhov Terror,
Lysenko gave an address to the Politburo in which he accused "Mendelist
- Morganist" geneticists who opposed his theories as setting
themselves against Marxist-Leninism. Stalin was in the audience,
and called out "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, Bravo." Lysenko
thereafter began an campaign of extreme demagoguery to slander
geneticists who still spoke out against him, and to replace the
staff of genetics research units in Soviet laboratories with his
own followers. Many of Lysenko’s scientific opponents, including
Vavilov, were imprisoned and died in the Gulag after
denunciation by Lysenko. (At the time of his arrest, Vavilov had
just been elected President of the International Congress of
Genetics, but was refused permission to travel abroad. Vavilov
died of starvation in a prison cell.).
Following World War II, Stalin instituted a new "anti-Cosmopolitan"
campaign intended to suppress any influence from the West. In
1948, a carefully stage-managed scientific debate between the two
schools at the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences was
terminated by the announcement that the Central Committee had
approved Lysenko's position paper, and Lysenkoism would henceforth
be taught as "the only correct theory". In the subsequent
scramble for survival, Soviet geneticists and biologists were
forced to denounce each other and any work that contradicted
Lysenko's theories. The anti-Cosmopolitan campaign extended to
many spheres of Soviet science and culture. Notably, the "anti-Formalist"
campaign in music targeted the most prominent Soviet composers
including Shostakovitch, Prokofiev, and Khachaturian.
Lysenko’s domination of Soviet agriculture was essentially
complete from 1948 – 1964. Following the death of Stalin in 1953
and eventual consolidation of power under Nikita
Khrushchev in 1958, realistic assessment of serious
shortfalls in Soviet agriculture as compared with successes
achieved by genetic means in the West came to question, and
criticism of Lysenko was again permitted. Scathing reviews of
Lysenko's results and methods contributed to Khrushchev's fall in
1964, and he was removed from all positions of authority by 1966.
Soviet biology had lost an entire generation to the political
ambitions of an ignorant demagogue.
Lysenko died in isolation in
1976. His western obituary noted, “Even the fruit flies were
killed.”