Lysenko's Legacy

During Stalin's iron rule, he commanded virtually unlimited support for his outlandish agricultural schemes, controlled the direction of research in areas far beyond his competence--and set back Soviet genetics nearly a generation. Indeed, when Izvestia last week belatedly revealed the death of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko at age 78 in a brief back-page announcement, his bitter legacy was still all too apparent. Only now are the biological sciences in the U.S.S.R. finally recovering from what the American geneticist I. Michael Lerner calls "the most bizarre chapter in the history of modern science."

That chapter began in the bloody 1930s when Lysenko, a young plant breeder from the Ukraine, burst onto the Soviet scientific scene with a beguiling claim: that the inheritance of physical characteristics could be manipulated in plants by their environment. It was an idea totally at odds with modern genetics, which holds that an organism's basic color or shape, say, is passed from one generation to the next by the genes with inflexible regularity (except when they are mutated). But the theory was highly compelling to Stalin; he had become increasingly annoyed at the failure of conventional agricultural scientists to boost the output of the inefficient collectivized farms. Lysenko's assertion also had ideological appeal: if the inherited traits of plants could be manipulated by the right environment, so presumably could those of Soviet man.

Miraculous Change. In his most famous experiment, Lysenko presoaked winter wheat seeds in chilly water just before they germinated, and claimed a miraculous conversion: the seedlings were turned into spring wheat, which matures more rapidly and thus can produce greater yields. By such tactics, he insisted, more crops could be planted under harsh Russian climatic conditions. But while such "vernalization" worked under test conditions, it failed on a large scale. Despite Lysenko's insistence, there was no evidence of any innate genetic changes; he had merely induced a single generation of wheat to mature a little more rapidly.

Lysenko moved with Rasputin-like skill. Inviting critics to come forth at an "open" scientific meeting in 1948. he trapped them into confessing their adherence to the old "Mendel-Morgan" genetic heresies and, with Stalin's approval, replaced them with his cronies. As Director of the Genetics Institute of the Academy of Sciences, Lysenko banned all experiments in traditional genetics; even the fruit flies used in this work were destroyed by boiling.

In the early 1960s, Lysenko found a new patron in Nikita Khrushchev, who was desperately eager to overtake American agriculture. But Lysenko's star was already dimming. From the West came word of spectacular new advances in genetics. Lysenko's reputation was also undermined by Soviet geneticist Zhores Medvedev's samizdat (underground book) The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, which documented Lysenko's falsification of data and character assassination. Finally, when Khrushchev fell --in part because of his disastrous farm policies--so did Lysenko. The onetime czar of Soviet agriculture spent his declining years at a research station near Moscow, seldom doing anything more important than preaching to farmers the value of animal fertilizer.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.