"Put on More Manure"

A lanky fellow with a fanatic's fiery eyes, Geneticist Trofim Lysenko was Stalin's favorite scientist. Thirteen years ago, he blossomed before the world as the self-taught despot of Soviet biological science, proclaiming his fantastic dogma that Communists could change nature at will. Riding high, he terrorized his rivals, shipping to prison or disgrace all Soviet biologists who defended the orthodox axiom that basic traits are transmitted by genes that cannot be changed by training the parent organism. Lysenko's dictatorship died with Stalin. But now Lysenko is back in bloom, not as a declaimer of dogmas, since Nikita Khrushchev does not care much about that, but as a preacher of the kind of husbandry that Khrushchev hopes will whip up the country's badly lagging farm output.

Potato Chips. Lysenko's lank hair is now grey, but at 62, the old plant breeder still brings the buoyant spirit of religious revival to the Khrushchevian task of boosting yields. Sunburnt and dust-covered, he travels the vast land, bawls orders to the peasants in his hoarse, high-pitched voice: "Keep the weeds down." "Put on more manure." "Thin out in case of drought." Khrushchev, another peasant's son from the Ukraine, understands and appreciates that kind of talk. Lysenko tells virgin land pioneers not to plow their land in the fall but to plant their grain amidst the snow-catching stubble, advises Volga farmers to increase their crop by cutting their seed potatoes into three or four chips before sowing. However wildly willful his theories, he gets what the pragmatic Khrushchev considers good results --or has so far.

At his big laboratory in a cornfield outside Moscow, Lysenko gets every facility and encouragement. He goes right on trying to change nature in far-out ways by grafting pine branches on fir trees, injecting the blood of Plymouth Rock chickens into Buff Orpington hens, trying to turn wheat into rye. He complains righteously against Science Academy President Aleksandr Nesmeyanov (TIME cover, June 2, 1958) for criticizing his experiments. Says he pointedly: "I am infinitely happy that my modest work is highly prized by the party government and Nikita Khrushchev in person."

Slow Readers. Khrushchev has praised a thrifty mixture of manure and factory fertilizers devised by Lysenko as "proved in the field." Most recently, in a gamble to achieve higher production through shortcuts, Khrushchev has backed a plan to send out hybrid bulls bred at "Lysenko's farm" to boost Soviet butterfat production. At last month's Central Committee meeting on agriculture, Lysenko told how he tried to get the Agriculture Ministry to act on his plan. Khrushchev interrupted: "What did the Ministry reply to you?" Lysenko: "Recently, in January, they signed an order." "And when did you write?" Lysenko: "In July or August." Khrushchev: "And how many pages were there in your note?" Lysenko: "About 20." Khrushchev: "Then they read 20 pages in six months. They read slowly in the Agriculture Ministry." By then, the Agriculture Minister had already been shipped off to the Virgin Lands. His successor: Professor Mikhail Olshansky, who has been Lysenko's right-hand man ever since Lysenko established himself as the boss of Soviet genetics in 1948.

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