When we went off to university to study science, we had lofty goals to become doctors or discover a new life-saving drug or, at the very least, brag about making some really pure meth once or twice. The thing about being a scientist is that it feels inoculating from having a career that can be summed up as “that asshole was wrong about fucking everything.”
In Soviet Russia, wrong asshole fuck you!
Today’s Moment of Science… The pseudoscientific follies of Trofim Lysenko.
In the 1860s, Gregor Mendel’s pea plants were getting frisky… er, cross pollinating. In a series of experiments that I’ll talk about much more another day, he figured out that genetics were a thing. More specifically, he figured out that by cross breeding, you could methodically coax desirable traits out of plants. Scientists previously thought traits from parents were just blended together. Through Mendel’s experiments, the concepts of recessive and dominant traits came to light. In the 1880s, chromosomes were first identified, and the term ‘gene’ started being used after the turn of the century.
Russia has entered the chat.
You know that friend who’s sure they know more than the scientists, they don’t need no fancy book learning because they just feel the truth in their gut? Most of the time that person is like a friend from your hometown who you haven’t seen since high school, right?
Trofim Lysenko was that fucking guy, and he was put in charge of increasing crop production in Russia a century ago. Despite knowing shit about crops or the scientific method, he was going to outdo the evil westerners and our crapitalism with a heaping dose of sticktoitiveness and making shit up as he went along.
The results were bad.
Make the seeds stronger by exposing them to heat and humidity, he said. Plant them close together because the same type of seeds won’t compete for resources. Pesticides and fertilizer? Nah, those aren’t allowed. Want rye but you only have wheat seeds? Just plant wheat in the right environment and it’ll turn into rye. Hybridizing species to get a desired trait? Out the window, because hybridizing was for those weirdos who believed in genetics. Lysenko proclaimed genes weren’t a thing as official Soviet policy. Instead of plants getting new traits by selective breeding, he had a more brutish idea. If you want your crop to survive in cold weather, just grow it in cold weather. Duh. It’ll adapt.
He borrowed this largely from the ideas of 18th century French anatomist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. He’d suggested centuries before Mendel’s experiments that giraffes spontaneously grew their necks longer by stretching to reach leaves, and they passed that adaptation down.
Somewhere in Lysenko’s turdpile of ideas, there were occasional shit covered nuggets of truth. But his theory of plant breeding was akin to saying that you’ll sprout wings if you fall from a high enough tree, and… nyet, comrades. Hard nyet.
As much as this may all sound merely daffy, Lysenko’s research was aimed at staving off famines. His incompetence was compounded by his absolute political power over the proletariat, and the results were deadly.
Nikolai Vavilov was a Russian geneticist researching plant origins and evolution. By the time he’d made huge leaps forward in our understanding of plant genetics, Lysenko was the spokesperson for biological sciences in Russia. He publicly denounced Vavilov as an apologist for “Mendelist–Morganist genetics.”
Vavilov’s reputation was destroyed and he became a wanted man for going against Stalin’s personal plant guy. He was abducted while gathering specimens in 1940 and went through eleven months of torturous interrogation, eventually dying of starvation in captivity.
Untold numbers of genetics researchers were arrested and killed, and I’m sure a few “accidentally fell.” Genetics were all but removed from the science textbooks for decades, verboten from being taught. And unfortunately, Lysenko’s unscientific assertions didn’t fortuitously breed a windfall of crops.
Millions starved to death because nobody would entertain criticism of Stalin’s man.
After Stalin’s death in 1953, it wasn’t long until Lysenko’s ideas were dismissed, his reign was over. I hear there were still issues with scientific accuracy in the Soviet Union though.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, reminding you that it’s always political, and there’s nothing inoculating you from being wrong.
Nothing specific, just loving your little gems of science.
I’m not in the habit of commenting frequently, but your articles are ‘just the bee’s knees’ (!) I live in a small mill town. The public library is the school (K-7). There is a very nice little library about 60 km. from here. Beautiful drive when the roads are good; deadly if not. Just about all my friends are functionally illiterate. These are good, kind people, but I am so glad to have re-discovered Margaret Atwood (for the well-crafted writing, like chatting with a friend (2 degrees of separation between us) and your work – wide-ranging and intelligently written. Have you read “The Case of the Midwife Toad (by Arthur Koestler)? Story of Lyskenkism outside the Soviet Union. Very highly recommended to some with the capacity to read & compresension.