Lysenkoism

Trofim Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin 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. The president of the Soviet Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, who had once been Lysenko’s mentor but later spoke against him, was arrested, sent to prison, and died there. Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed. Teaching and research in other biological fields such as neurophysiology and cell biology were also damaged or banned.

The government of the Soviet Union supported Lysenko’s campaign. Joseph Stalin personally edited one of Lysenko’s speeches to show his support, even though Stalin was skeptical of Lysenko’s claim that all science was shaped by social class. Lysenko became director of the USSR’s Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Other countries in the Eastern Bloc, including the People's Republic of Poland, the Czechoslovak Republic, and the German Democratic Republic, accepted Lysenkoism as the official “new biology” to different degrees. The People’s Republic of China also followed Lysenkoism for some years.

Context

Further information: Lamarckism and Mendelian inheritance

August Weismann's germ plasm theory said that the hereditary material, called germ plasm, is passed on only by the reproductive organs. Somatic cells (the body cells) develop fresh in each generation from the germ plasm. This means that changes made to body cells cannot affect the next generation, which is against the idea of Lamarckism.

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.

Some Marxists thought there was a conflict between Marxism and Darwinism. In Marxism, the "struggle for survival" applies to a social class as a whole (the class struggle), while in Darwinism the struggle for survival is decided by individual random mutations. This was seen as a liberal idea, against the Marxist belief in "immutable laws of history" and the spirit of collectivism. In contrast, Lamarckism suggested that an organism could pass on traits it had gained during its lifetime to its offspring, meaning that changes to the body could affect the genetic material in the germ line. To these Marxists, a "neo-Lamarckism" seemed more compatible with Marxism.

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, it continued in Soviet doctrine. Besides the strong Darwinism of Marx and Engels, which included some Lamarckian ideas, two mistaken experimental results supported it in the USSR. First, Ivan Pavlov, who discovered conditioned reflex, announced in 1923 that it could be inherited in mice; his later withdrawal of this claim was ignored by Soviet ideologists. Second, Ivan Michurin interpreted his work on plant breeding as proof of the inheritance of acquired traits. 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

Lysenko in 1938

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 ignored this objection and claimed that the chromosome number itself could change.

Lysenko said that the concept of a gene was a "bourgeois invention". He denied the existence of any "immortal substance of heredity" or "clearly defined species", which he said belonged to Platonic metaphysics rather than materialist Marxist science. Instead, he proposed a "Marxist genetics" that allowed unlimited transformation of living organisms through environmental changes, in line with Marxist dialectical materialism and the Party’s program of creating the New Soviet man and controlling nature for human benefit. Lysenko refused to accept random mutations, saying that "science is the enemy of randomness".

Lysenkoist vegetative hybridisation showing the supposed effect of scion on stock when a fruit tree is grafted. Lysenko’s Lamarckian idea could only be possible through horizontal gene transfer, but there is no evidence for this.

Lysenko also claimed that Lamarckian inheritance of acquired traits happened in plants, such as in the "eyes" of potato tubers, even though the genetic differences in these plant parts were already known to be non-heritable somatic mutations. 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.

Rise

Isaak Izrailevich Prezent, a biologist who had fallen out of political favor, brought Lysenko to public attention. He described Lysenko as a genius who had created a revolutionary technique that could lead to the success of Soviet agriculture, which was an exciting idea for a society suffering from Stalin’s famines. Lysenko quickly became a favorite of the Soviet propaganda machine, which exaggerated his successes, promoted his falsified experimental results, and ignored his failures. 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".

Lysenko’s political success was mainly due to his appeal to the Communist Party and to Soviet ideology. His attack on the "bourgeois pseudoscience" of modern genetics and his claim that plants could quickly adapt to new environments fit well with the ideological struggle in both agriculture and Soviet society. After the disastrous collectivization of the late 1920s, Lysenko’s new methods were seen by Soviet officials as a way to achieve an "agricultural revolution." Lysenko himself came from a peasant family and was an enthusiastic supporter of Leninism. 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. Lysenko was admitted into the Communist Party hierarchy and was placed in charge of agricultural affairs.

He used his position to insult biologists as "fly-lovers and people haters", 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.

We biologists do not take the slightest interest in mathematical calculations, which confirm the useless statistical formulae of the Mendelists … We do not want to submit to blind chance … We maintain that biological regularities do not resemble mathematical laws.

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.

Support from Joseph Stalin further increased Lysenko’s popularity. In 1935, Lysenko compared his opponents in biology to peasants who resisted collectivization, saying that opponents of his theories were also opponents of Marxism. Stalin was in the audience for this speech and was the first to stand and applaud, shouting "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko. Bravo." 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.

In October 1947, Lysenko and Stalin exchanged several letters. Lysenko promised Stalin that he could breed branching wheat that would yield 15,000 kg/ha, even though the most productive wheat under the best conditions could only reach 2,000 kg/ha. In one letter to Stalin dated October 27, 1947, Lysenko wrote:

Mendelism-Morganism, Weissmanist neo-Darwinism ... are not developed in Western capitalist countries for the purposes of agriculture, but rather serve reactionary purposes of eugenics, racism, etc. There is no relationship between agricultural practices and the theory of bourgeois genetics.

Peak

From July 31 to August 7, 1948, the Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) held a week-long session, 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.

Soviet scientists were required to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenko, 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. Leading geneticists were monitored by secret agents from the State Security Service.

The same wave of propaganda supported other pseudo-scientific "new Marxist sciences" in the Soviet academy, in fields such as linguistics and art. Pravda reported the invention of a perpetual motion engine, claiming it confirmed Engels’ idea that energy dissipated in one place must concentrate somewhere else. Lysenko’s journal Agrobiology published reports of wheat turning into rye, cabbages into rutabaga, and similar claims.

In 1948, the film Michurin portrayed Michurin as an ideal Soviet scientist, spreading propaganda to the public. Songbooks were published with songs praising Lysenko, such as "He walks the Michurin path/With firm tread;/He protects us from being duped/by Mendelist-Morganists."

In Lysenko and his followers’ political claims, the "Weismannist-Mendelist-Morganist" theory was described as reactionary and idealistic, a tool of the bourgeois, while the "Michurinist" theory was presented as progressive and materialistic. The victory of Michurinism was framed as a victory of socialism over capitalism. Some even linked Hitler’s racial policies to genetic theory.

A prominent supporter of Lysenkoism was the biologist Olga Lepeshinskaya, who tried to show abiogenesis of cells and tissues from "vital substance." In 1950 she gave a speech in which she equated all of the "bourgeois" heresies:

In our country there are no longer classes hostile to each other, and the struggle of idealists against dialectical materialists still, depending on whose interests it defends, has the character of a class struggle. Indeed, the followers of Virchow, Weismann, Mendel and Morgan, who speak of the invariability of the gene and deny the influence of the external environment, are the preachers of the pseudo-scientific teachings of the bourgeois eugenicists and of all perversions in genetics, on the soil of which grew the racial theory of fascism in the capitalist countries. The Second World War was unleashed by the forces of imperialism, which also had racism in its arsenal.

— Olga Lepeshinskaya

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. More than 3,000 biologists were dismissed from their jobs, and many scientists were imprisoned or executed. 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.

Lysenkoism was never dominant in the West, and during the 1960s it was increasingly seen as pseudoscience. 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.

Reappearance

In the 21st century, Lysenkoism began to be discussed again in Russia, including in respected newspapers such as Kultura and by professional biologists. The geneticist Lev Zhivotovsky made the unsupported claim that Lysenko helped to establish modern developmental biology. 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. When two germ cells form a zygote, they claimed that the "weak" one is absorbed by the stronger one, similar to food digestion.

This theory was also used to explain vegetative hybridization, where the heredity in the scion could diffuse into the stock, changing the traits of the stock’s offspring. Lysenkoists even tested this idea on animals by injecting blood, for example by injecting blood from colored chickens into white chickens. They claimed that the offspring of the white chickens showed partial or full coloring. Western scientists rejected these claims. The plant hybridization experiments could not be repeated, and the chicken experiments did not control for recessive alleles.

Lysenko also proposed a Lamarckian form of heterochrony. He argued that a plant develops in stages depending on its environment, and that changes in the environment could speed up or slow down these stages, producing effects that would then be inherited. This theory was used to justify Lysenkoist plant-breeding practices.

In other countries

Other countries in the Eastern Bloc accepted Lysenkoism as the official "new biology", to different degrees. In Communist Poland, Lysenkoism was strongly promoted by state propaganda. Newspapers attacked "damage caused by bourgeois Mendelism-Morganism" and "imperialist genetics", comparing them to Mein Kampf. For example, Trybuna Ludu published an article titled "French scientists recognize superiority of Soviet science" by Pierre Daix, a French communist and editor of Les Lettres Françaises. The article repeated Soviet propaganda claims and was meant to create the impression that Lysenkoism was accepted worldwide. 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.

Communist Czechoslovakia adopted Lysenkoism in 1949. The geneticist Jaroslav Kříženecký (1896–1964) criticized Lysenkoism in his lectures, and in 1949 he was dismissed from the Agricultural University for "serving the capitalist system, considering himself superior to the working class, and being hostile to the democratic order of the people". He was later imprisoned in 1958.

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". For a time, both schools were allowed to coexist, but Lysenkoists still had strong influence for several years, contributing to the Great Famine through reduced crop yields.

Almost alone among Western scientists, John Desmond Bernal, Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a communist, made a strong public defense of Lysenko.

Related pages

• Anti-intellectualism

Further reading

• Denis Buican, L'éternel retour de Lyssenko, Paris, Copernic, 1978. ISBN 2859840192
• 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) doi:10.1126/science.124.3215.277b
• Valery N. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994). ISBN 0813520878
• "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)