Trofim Denisovich Lysenko

1898-1976

Russian Horticulturist

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was born in Karlovka near Poltav, Russia. Despite good grades in school, Lysenko, a peasant's son, struggled to receive an education in pre-Revolutionary Czarist Russia. He became a gardener and, after the 1917 Revolution, undertook studies at the Uman School of Horticulture. After graduating in 1921, Lysenko received an appointment to work at the Belaya Tserkov Agricultural Selection Station. In 1925, Lysenko received his doctorate from the Kiev Agricultural Institute. Following his graduation, Lysenko worked at the Gyandzha Experimental Station and, subsequently, at the Ukrainian All-Union Institute of Selection and Genetics in Odessa. Eventually, with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's (1879-1953) patronage, Lysenko became the director of the Odessa All-Union Selection and Genetics Institute.

Late in the 1920s, Lysenko began to advocate an outmoded Lamarckian view of genetics to harden Soviet crops against the brutal Russian winters. Lysenko's conclusions were based upon, and profoundly influenced by, the teachings of Russian horticulturist I.V. Michurin (1855-1935), and the discredited Lamarckian theory of evolution by acquired characteristics (i.e., that organisms evolved through the acquisition of traits that they needed and used) put forth by nineteenth-century French anatomist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829).

Based on his misunderstanding of genetics, Lysenko developed methods that falsely predicted greater crop yields through a hardening of seeds and a new system of crop rotation. Lysenko's theories drew the attention of the Soviet Central Committee desperate to avoid elongation of a string of politically disastrous famines. Moreover, Lysenko's Lamarckian-based teachings were thought by Stalin to be harmonious with the goals of a worldwide revolution of workers.

Championed by Stalin, Lysenko steadily ascended the rungs of power within Soviet science. In 1938 Lysenko took the reins as president of the powerful and influential Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences. As president of the Academy, Lysenko began to persecute scientists who did not agree with his theories. Backed by the Soviet Central Committee Lysenko was responsible for the exile, torture, and death of many talented Soviet scientists. Under Lysenko, Mendelian genetics was branded "decadent," and scientists who rejected Lamarckism in favor of natural selection were denounced as "enemies of the Soviet people." Lysenko's supporters even denied the existence of chromosomes, and genes were denounced as "bourgeois constructs."

During his career, Lysenko published articles in which he stressed the role of, what he termed, "sudden revolutionary leaps" in the origin of new species. He asserted that many species of cultivated plants could spontaneously transform, even under natural conditions, into other, quite different species (e.g., wheat into rye). The very spirit of Marxist theory, Lysenko claimed, called for a theory of species formation that would entail "revolutionary leaps." Lysenko attacked Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution as "a theory of all round gradualism." In 1940, Stalin appointed Lysenko Director of the Soviet Academy of Science's Institute of Genetics. Although Stalin died in 1953, Lysenko continued to act as director of the academy until 1964.

For a generation of scientists trained under Lysenkoism, Michurin "science," an exploration of man's power over nature, became the focus of theoretical development. Lysenko constructed an elaborate hypothesis that came to be known as the theory of phasic development. One of Lysenko's failed programs involved the treatment of seeds with heat and high humidity in an attempt to increase germination under harsh conditions. Although crop yields declined, Lysenko's programs were considered politically correct, and Lysenko was awarded the Order of Lenin and two Stalin prizes, and was nominated Vice Chairman of the Supreme Soviet.

Lysenko ruled virtually supreme in Soviet science, and his influence extended beyond agriculture to basic science and medicine. In 1948 the Praesidium of the USSR Academy of Science passed a resolution virtually outlawing any biological work that was not based on the teachings of Michurin and Lysenko. It was not until Nikita Khrushchev's (1894-1971) premiership following the death of Stalin in 1953 that opposition to Lysenko was tolerated. Under Khrushchev, Lysenko lost control of the Lenin Agricultural Academy and, following Khrushchev's political demise in 1964, Lysenko's doctrines were discredited, and intensive efforts were made toward the reestablishment of orthodox genetics and science in the U.S.S.R.

K. LEE LERNER