Lysenkoism

in 1935; behind him are (left to right) Stanislav Kosior, Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreev and Joseph Stalin]]

**Lysenkoism** was a political campaign in the Soviet Union led by the biologist Trofim Lysenko. It was called pseudoscience because it rejected genetics and modern, science-based agriculture. Lysenko denied natural selection and instead promoted a form of Lamarckism, the idea that traits gained during life could be passed on to offspring. He also expanded farming methods such as vernalization (cold treatment of seeds before planting) and grafting.

More than 3,000 biologists working in mainstream science were dismissed from their jobs or imprisoned, and many scientists were executed during the Soviet campaign to suppress opponents of Lysenko.]]

Mendelian genetics, the science of heredity, became an experimental field of biology at the start of the 20th century through the work of August Weismann, Thomas Hunt Morgan, and others, building on the rediscovered work of Gregor Mendel. They showed that the traits of an organism are carried by inherited genes, which are located on chromosomes in each cell's nucleus. Genes can be changed by random mutations, and can be mixed and recombined during sexual reproduction, but are otherwise passed on unchanged from parent to offspring. Helpful changes can spread through a population by natural selection or, in farming, by plant breeding.

Marxism–Leninism, which became the official ideology in Stalin's USSR, included Darwinian evolution as a basic doctrine, giving a scientific basis for its state atheism. At first, the Lamarckian idea of inheritance of acquired traits was considered a valid part of evolutionary theory, and even Darwin himself supported it. Although the Mendelian view had mostly replaced Lamarckism in western biology by 1925, his later withdrawal of this claim was ignored by Soviet ideologists. Michurin promoted directed plant breeding by controlling the environment, saying: "We cannot wait for favors from nature: we must wrest them from her".

Kliment Timiryazev, a popularizer of science in Russia, supported communism and worked with the new Soviet republic. This made his views more accepted and widely known. When gene theory developed in the early 1900s, some scientists promoted saltative mutationism as an alternative to gradual Darwinism, and Timiryazev strongly argued against it. His views influenced many people, including Ivan Michurin.

Soviet agriculture in the 1930s was in crisis because of Stalin’s forced collectivisation of farms and the killing of kulak farmers. The Soviet famine of 1932–1933 pushed the government to look for a technical solution that would also keep strong political control.

## In the Soviet Union
### Lysenko's claims
In 1928, rejecting natural selection and Mendelian genetics, Trofim Lysenko said he had developed farming techniques that could greatly increase crop yields. These included vernalization, species transformation (changing one species into another), inheritance of acquired characteristics, and vegetative hybridization. He claimed that vernalization, exposing wheat seeds to humidity and cold, could greatly increase crop yield. He also claimed he could transform one species, *Triticum durum* (durum spring wheat), into *Triticum vulgare* (common autumn wheat), through 2 to 4 years of autumn planting, without any intermediate form. This was already known to be impossible, since *T. durum* is a tetraploid with 28 chromosomes (4 sets of 7), while *T. vulgare* is a hexaploid with 42 chromosomes (6 sets).

. Lysenko’s Lamarckian idea could only be possible through horizontal gene transfer, but there is no evidence for this. He further claimed that when a tree is grafted, the scion permanently changes the heritable traits of the stock. In modern biology, such a change could only happen through horizontal gene transfer, but there is no evidence that this occurs, and Lysenko rejected the idea of genes entirely. State media published enthusiastic articles such as "Siberia is transformed into a land of orchards and gardens" and "Soviet people change nature". Anyone who opposed Lysenko was presented as a defender of "mysticism, obscurantism, and backwardness". Party-controlled newspapers praised Lysenko’s supposed successes and questioned the motives of his critics, mocking academics who called for patient and impartial scientific observation. and to accuse traditional biologists of being "wreckers" who were trying to sabotage the Soviet economy. He denied the difference between theoretical and applied biology, and rejected basic scientific methods such as control groups and statistics.

Lysenko presented himself as a follower of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, a respected Soviet horticulturist, but unlike Michurin, Lysenko insisted on using only non-genetic techniques such as hybridization and grafting. Stalin personally edited one of Lysenko’s speeches, even though he doubted Lysenko’s claim that all science was shaped by social class. Stalin’s official support gave Lysenko and Prezent freedom to attack and slander geneticists who spoke against him. After Lysenko became head of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences, classical genetics was labeled "fascist science". Many of Lysenkoism’s opponents, including his former mentor Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, were imprisoned or executed, although not directly on Lysenko’s orders. organized by Lysenko and approved by Stalin. At the end of this session, Lysenkoism was declared to be "the only correct theory." As Lysenko spoke at the conclusion, he said, "the Central Committee of the Communist Party has examined my report and approved it." Those present understood this as the creation of a new official orthodoxy. Of the eight scientists who defended genetics during the session, three immediately announced their repentance. and criticism was condemned as "bourgeois" or "fascist." The Ministry of Higher Education ordered all biological institutes to immediately follow the Lysenko orthodoxy:
The Central University Administration and the Administration of Cadres are directed to review within two months all departments of biological faculties to free them from all opposed to Michurinist biology and to strengthen them by appointing Michurinists to them.

Point 6 of the *Order No. 1208* (August 23, 1948)
For several months, similar central directives dismissed scientists, withdrew textbooks, and required the removal of any references to heredity in higher education. There was also an order to destroy all stocks of *Drosophila,* a common model organism for genetics research.

Perhaps the only opponents of Lysenkoism during Stalin’s lifetime to escape liquidation were the small group of Soviet nuclear physicists. According to Tony Judt, "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."

### Effects on scientists
Genetics was eventually banned in the Soviet Union. These punishments were directed at those who tried to oppose Lysenkoism, and as a result genetics research was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953. Many scientists ended up imprisoned in secret research facilities known as sharashka.

From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko’s influence and with Stalin’s approval, many geneticists were executed (including Izrail 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. In 1936, the American geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller, who had moved to the Leningrad Institute of Genetics with his *Drosophila* fruit flies, was attacked as bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and a promoter of fascism, and he returned to America via Republican Spain. Iosif Rapoport, who worked on mutagens, refused to publicly reject chromosome theory of heredity, and spent several years working only as a geological lab assistant. Dmitry Sabinin’s book on plant physiology was suddenly withdrawn from publication in 1948, and he died by suicide in 1951.

Those who supported Lysenkoism were favored. Alexander Oparin strongly defended Lysenkoism and was politically rewarded, and he continued to defend it even in 1955, after its decline.

Inspired by the success of Lysenkoism and the 1948 VASKhNIL session, other fields of Soviet science experienced short-lived revolutions, although with less success. These included campaigns against "Pavlovians" in medicine, against "reactionary Einsteinism" in physics and quantum mechanics, and against Pauling resonance theory in chemistry.

In addition to biology, Lysenkoism influenced geological sciences, especially paleontology and biostratigraphy in the USSR.

### Fall
By the end of 1952, the situation began to change, and newspapers started publishing articles that criticized Lysenkoism. However, the return to normal genetics was slow during Nikita Khrushchev’s leadership, because Lysenko showed him supposed successes at an experimental agricultural complex. It again became forbidden to criticize Lysenkoism, although it was possible to express different views, and the geneticists who had been imprisoned under Stalin were released or rehabilitated posthumously. The ban on genetics was finally lifted in the mid-1960s. Soviet scientists noticed the great progress in molecular biology, such as the discovery of DNA, and even remaining Lysenkoists began to accept DNA as the material basis of heredity, although they continued to reject gene theory. Discoveries in the field of epigenetics are sometimes presented as late confirmation of Lysenko’s theories. However, although epigenetics shows that some traits can be passed on without changes to DNA, Lysenko believed that environment-induced changes were the main mechanism of heredity. Heritable epigenetic effects have been found, but they are minor and unstable compared to genetic inheritance.

## Scientific content
Lysenko and his followers reformulated heredity as "the property of the living body to demand certain environmental conditions and to react in a certain way to them". Michurin tried to explain Lamarckian heredity by suggesting that some form of "heredity" exists throughout the whole organism and reacts to environmental influence. This idea was incompatible with the Weismann barrier, which led Lysenkoists to denounce Weismann. Instead, they proposed a "physiological" theory, claiming that heredity spread throughout the body is collected in the germ cells, which are "built from molecules, granules, of various organs and parts of the organism". This was essentially a revival of the old pangenesis theory. While some academics accepted Lysenkoism for political reasons, most Polish scientists opposed it. One notable opponent was Wacław Gajewski, who was punished by being denied contact with students, although he was allowed to continue his work at the Warsaw botanical garden. Lysenkoism was quickly rejected starting in 1956, and in 1958 Gajewski founded the first genetics department at the University of Warsaw.

In East Germany, Lysenkoism was taught at some universities but had little impact on science, thanks to scientists such as Hans Stubbe and continued contact with West Berlin institutions. However, Lysenkoist theories were still found in schoolbooks until the dismissal of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964.

Lysenkoism dominated Chinese science from 1949 until 1956, during which open discussion of alternative theories such as Mendelian genetics was forbidden. In 1956, during a genetics symposium, opponents of Lysenkoism were finally allowed to criticize it and argue for Mendelian genetics. In the proceedings, Tan Jiazhen said: "Since [the] USSR started to criticize Lysenko, we have dared to criticize him too". made a strong public defense of Lysenko.

## Related pages
* Anti-intellectualism

## Notes
## References
## Further reading
* 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, Chapter 6. "Stalinist Ideology and the Lysenko Affair", in *Science in Russia and the Soviet Union* (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
* 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)
* 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, 1956) 
* Valery N. Soyfer, *Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science* (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 
* "The Disastrous Effects of Lysenkoism on Soviet Agriculture". *Science and Its Times'', ed. Neil Schlager and Josh Lauer, Vol. 6. (Detroit: Gale, 2001)

## Other websites
* 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)