Trofim Lysenko

October 5th, 2006

Soviet agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was catapulted to fame in the 1930s through his attempts to tackle the famine caused by the collectivisation of farms. Though mostly inneffectual, his peasant status, staunch support of Leninism and popularity amongst disenfranchised farmers gained the support of the Soviet propaganda machine, which exaggerated his successes and ignored his failures.Lysenko had no agronomic training - his ideas involved on Lamarckian evolution and applying communist ideology to crop growing. Thus, plants were grown closer together so that they could help eachother. He also claimed a “new” technique of vernalisation, a method of growing wheat that was in fact neither new nor useful. He supported his ideas not with controlled trials but the time-honoured quack method of customer feedback - using questionnaires filled out by farmers to “prove” yield increases.Once put in charge of Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union, Lysenko ruthlessly suppressed any criticism of his work and demonised the new field of genetics. Hundreds of biologists were expelled, imprisoned, or executed.

Only in the 1960s did the influence of Soviet ideology over science wane, and with it Lysenko’s campaign against geneticists. Disgraced and discredited, Lysenko was removed from power, though his ideas lived on in China. Lysenko died in 1976. To this day, his name lives on as a term describing the suppression of science for ideological purposes: see Lysenkoism.

Entry Filed under: Bad Scientists

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