King of the Dunghill

Trofim Lysenko is an egregiously indestructible plant breeder from the Ukrainian black-earth belt who long ago won world notoriety, scientific contempt and Stalinist favor with his attempt to rewrite nature to suit Marx. A weird cross between sinister charlatan and seedy fanatic. Lysenko used his political influence, based on Stalin's favor, to wreak ruthless vengeance on his critics, the scholars who had made genetics--until his rise--the pride of Russian science.

Lysenko argued that newly acquired characteristics could be genetically passed on through succeeding generations, a provably quack notion that served the Communist notion of making over man by making over society. In 1939 he engineered the disgrace of the Soviet

Union's leading geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, the pioneer who showed by applying Mendelian principles of selective breeding that wheat could be developed sturdy enough to grow profitably in all of Russia's diverse climates and soils. So powerful was Lysenko that not even Nikolai's brother, a leading member of the mighty Academy of Sciences itself (and later its president), could save Nikolai Vavilov, who died in a Siberian concentration camp in 1943.

Seed-Time. In 1948 Lysenko got official Communist endorsement for his "theories," which meant that anyone who challenged them was setting himself up against the party. A new wave of dismissals and Siberian imprisonments engulfed rival biologists and geneticists. In 1956, in the period of destalinization, Lysenko suffered partial eclipse. Party chieftains criticized his theories, and official journals exposed reports by his supporters as fakes; many of his victims were rehabilitated and reinstated. Soviet biology began to recover as a science.

But Lysenko has the resistance and recuperative power of ragweed. A practical botanist of some skill, he concentrated on improving corn, and thereby worked his way into the graces of corn-loving Nikita Khrushchev, a practical man with a built-in contempt for academics. When he saw tall corn nurtured on a particularly thrifty mixture of manure and factory fertilizers, Khrushchev proclaimed: "Biological disputes should be settled in the fields. Comrade Lysenko has shown astonishing results." No sooner had Khrushchev called for a drive to overtake the U.S. in milk production than the practical Lysenko was out in his barns feeding calving cows extra-rich feeds and trying to prove that the calves produced would grow up to give milk containing 5% butterfat.

Harvest. By the time Khrushchev announced his new agricultural program last month, Lysenko was reaping a sweet political harvest. On his 60th birthday he won his seventh Order of Lenin. When someone complained to the Central Committee that the official Botanical Journal had disparaged the old tree grafter's views, Khrushchev interrupted: "The editorial staff should be replaced." When the speaker then added that some Soviet scientists last year had said Lysenko was "through both in theory and in practice." Khrushchev cut in: "Tsitsin [a distinguished botanist in the Academy of Sciences] said it. He should have been asked at a party meeting why he spoke that way." Lysenko himself was invited to speak. He attacked Alexander Nesmeyanov, president of the Academy of Sciences (TIME Cover, June 2) and V. A. Engelhardt, head of its biology section, in the same truculent language as in the '40s and with the identical arguments that "middleclass" and "foreign reactionary" ideas animated their opposition to his "Marxist" theories.

It may be no accident that all this coincided with fairly strong criticism of Khrushchev's educational reform plan by Nesmeyanov and other academicians, who do not like its provision for putting all students to work. At a recent Moscow meeting, Nesmeyanov reportedly toed the line: the time has come to glorify Soviet scientific achievements as the unique outgrowth of Marxist philosophy. Lysenko is not the type to accept political without professional vindication. In the field of Soviet genetics. Khrushchev's announcement that academic and research projects will henceforth get funds in proportion to their showing in the cowshed rather than in the laboratory amounts to a victory for the "practical" Lysenko approach.

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