Trofim Lysenko: Chilled Wheat, Banned Genetics and Vavilov's Prison Death

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Trofim Lysenko was born into a peasant family in the Poltava region of present-day Ukraine in 1898 and could not read until he was 13. He studied horticulture through the First World War and the Russian Civil War and graduated from the Kiev Agricultural Institute in 1925. At a breeding station in Ganja, Azerbaijan, he got winter crops to grow to feed starving cattle, drawing praise in Pravda, whose reporter described his gloomy, unsmiling manner, and the support of geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. Lysenko rebranded vernalization, an old trick of chilling soaked winter wheat seeds so they could be sown in spring, and claimed the plants learned to survive cold and passed that trait to their offspring. He rejected Mendelian genetics and championed Michurinist biology rooted in Lamarckism.

Amid collectivization and famine, Stalin embraced him. Lysenko led the Academy of Agricultural Sciences from 1938 and the Institute of Genetics from 1940, branded opponents Weismannist-Mendelist-Morganists, and in August 1948 his doctrine became the only approved theory. Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and starved to death in prison in 1943. Lysenko kept his post under Khrushchev, but physicists, protected by their role in the atomic bomb, challenged him, and in 1964 Andrei Sakharov denounced him before the Academy of Sciences. Khrushchev fell that year, Lysenko lost the Institute of Genetics in 1965, and an audit exposed his farm near Moscow. He died in 1976.

• He declared that mathematics had no place in biology when critics demanded statistics.
• He claimed cuckoos arose when birds fed their chicks the wrong hairy caterpillars, and that cows gave more milk when treated kindly.
• Summer potato planting and trench storage spread the plant viruses he refused to recognize.
• Oak seedlings planted in dense nests, on his theory that plants of one kind do not compete, mostly died, and China's close planting during the Great Leap Forward fed the 1959 to 1962 famine.
• The Strugatsky brothers modeled the demagogue Professor Vybegallo in Monday Begins on Saturday on him.