Lysenkoism: The War Against Genetics
Abstract
In the 21st century, the foundations of the study of evolution are universally held to lie in the synthesis of Darwinian natural selection and Mendelian genetics, and the relevance of these theories in humanity’s understanding of the natural world is unquestioned. However, there was once a time when the pursuit of genetics was forbidden — on pain of death — in nations across the world. The story of this war against genetics, which was propagated by the apostles of the Soviet pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko, is a stark warning of what happens when the demands of politics and ideology overwhelm the search for scientific truth.
Introduction: The Foundations of Genetics
In broad terms, genetics can be defined as the science which studies the origins, transmission and expression of the physical characteristics of organisms. As we know it today, genetics is based on the combination of several major ideas about evolution into a common framework known as the modern synthesis. This synthesis is inspired largely by the ideas of three scientists, namely:
I) August Weismann, who is best known for his germ plasm theory. Weismann stated that in multicellular organisms there are two types of cells — the somatic cells, which perform the ordinary bodily functions, and the specialized germ cells or gametes, that contain and transit heritable information. Only the germ cells can act as agents of heredity, and genetic information cannot pass from the somatic cells to the germ cells. As such, any changes in the somatic cells of an organism cannot be passed onto its descendants.
II) Gregor Mendel, whose famous experiments on pea plants enabled him to formulate many of the underlying principles of heredity, which are now referred to as the Laws of Mendelian Inheritance. Published in 1866, his work demonstrated the importance of certain invisible factors — genes — in predictably determining the traits of an organism.
III) Thomas Hunt Morgan, who through his experiments on fruit flies proved that chromosomes are the basis of all genetic inheritance. Morgan’s work successfully explained the mechanics of Mendelian inheritance by successfully identifying the “factors” described by Mendel as chromosomes.
The essence of the modern synthesis is this — in organisms there are two kinds of variations, hereditary and non-hereditary. Out of these, hereditary variations are of evolutionary significance. They can be caused either by new combinations of old characteristics, or through changes in the chromosome, which can again be of two types: structural changes such as an increase or decrease in the number of chromosome pairs, or through qualitative changes in the chromatin material itself, which can by induced by radiation, extreme temperatures etc. Importantly, hereditary mutations largely cannot be predicted or controlled, except in the case of hybridisation through breeding between organisms of known genetic composition. Non-hereditary mutations, on the other hand, occur mostly in the somatic cells. These mutations are of great economic interest to agriculturalists for various reasons, but they can be created only through non-sexual methods of reproduction, such as grafting. As the name suggests, they cannot be transmitted to successive generations.
Thus, organic evolution can be defined as the process of descent accompanied by hereditary variations. To explain evolution, two competing theories were formulated. The first of these theories was Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characters. According to Lamarck, the environment in which an organism lived induced certain changes or “acquired characteristics” within its body, which were subsequently inherited by its descendants. The second theory was, of course, Charles Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. Darwin hypothesised that due to the great fertility of organisms and the limited amount of resources available, there was a competition for the available resources amongst organisms. In this struggle for existence, those organisms with variations that were suitable to their environment survived, and the others died off. Darwin himself accepted Lamarck’s theories about inheritance to explain how variations developed in organisms, but the later discoveries of Mendel, Morgan and their ilk satisfactorily explained both the origins of variations and the mechanism of their transmission, causing Lamarck’s theories to fall out of favour.
This, then, was the state of biological knowledge in the mid1920s, when Trofim Lysenko first began to push his wild theories upon the world of science. Over the course of the next two-and-a-half decades, he managed to establish himself as the undoubted Tsar of Russian science; a proletarian miracle worker whose each new discovery struck a death-blow at the “bourgeois science” of the West. With extraordinary fervour he waged a veritable war of extermination against genetics in Russia, condemning many better scientists than him to the Gulag or the gallows. The cult of Lysenkoism had many aspects — political, ideological and, to some extent, scientific. Therefore, it is perhaps best understood through the prism of the life and personality of its eponymous high priest.
The Barefoot Scientist
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was born into an impoverished family of Ukrainian peasants in 1898. For someone who eventually became as powerful as he, his formal education was undeniably lacking: he completed his secondary schooling at a school of gardening in Kiev, and his higher education as an extramural student at the Kiev Agricultural Institute. Without any postgraduate education or formal degree, he possessed no real claim to the title of “scientist”.
Combined with his working-class roots, this lack of formal achievement instilled in him a fierce disdain for more traditional academicians. Throughout his life, he and his followers emphasised the distinction between the “barefoot professor” who toiled for the people, and the practitioners of “bourgeois genetics” who knew nothing that was of any practical use. This anti-intellectual spirit would serve him well in Stalinist Russia, where official ideology elevated lowly peasants and workers above the educated elite; the state propaganda machine seized on this farmer’s son as the perfect example of the kind of working-class heroes that a Marxist society produced.
Even as he was shunted off to a remote research station in Azerbaijan and tasked with finding a suitable winter-habited crop (i.e. a plant which requires a period of cold weather after planting before it matures and produces seed) for the locality, Lysenko aspired to greater things. Believing (without any basis) that every plant needed a fixed amount of heat throughout its lifetime to pass through the various stages of development, he attempted to work out a formula to calculate the amount of heat a particular plant needed to go through its life cycle. This “formula” was riddled with errors of statistical reasoning, but upon being confronted Lysenko simply declared that mathematics had no place in biology.
After his theory of thermal development proved to be a wash, Lysenko turned to the effects of cold instead. In 1928, he published a paper describing a process which he termed vernalisation, in which the seeds of winter crops like rye or winter wheat were moistened and artificially chilled in refrigerators, before being normally planted. Vernalised winter crops would behave like spring cereals and flower in directly upon being planted in the spring season, as opposed to normal winter crops, which are planted in the autumn, remain in the vegetative phase throughout the winter and flower in spring.
In of itself, Lysenko’s theory was nothing astounding. The first experiments upon chilling winter seeds were carried out in 1857, but Western horticulturalists had long since dismissed the practice as being economically unviable, since improper techniques of moistening resulted in the loss of considerable numbers of seeds, and even successfully vernalised seeds often produced inferior crops due to seed damage incurred during the moistening process. Nevertheless, Lysenko was correct in claiming that vernalisation could induce winter crops to behave like spring crops. Where he did go wrong was in declaring that the vernalised transformation could be inherited, and that the offspring of a vernalised plant would possess the same resistance to low temperatures and harsh weather. This Lamarckian assertion flew in the face of the core tenets of heredity — since the mutation associated with vernalisation is somatic in nature, it cannot be passed onto the germ cells.
Fortunately for him, agriculture in the U.S.S.R was at that time passing through a period of severe upheaval: Stalin’s ill-conceived campaigns of mass collectivisation (the policy of forcibly integrating individual landholdings and labour into collectively controlled or state-controlled farms) had led to a wave of disastrous famines. Existing food shortages were exacerbated by the destruction of winter crops due to severe cold and lack of snow, as well as by the campaigns of passive resistance that saw many farmers putting down their tools in protest against collectivisation.
Hence, Lysenko’s grandiose claims about the benefits of vernalisation came as a boon to a Soviet regime desperate to mollify the peasantry and alleviate famine. In 1929, the government ordered that 200,000 hectares of grain should be vernalised (never mind that the initial experimental results indicating increased yields had been obtained from planting over only half a hectare, and were very likely fabricated) and Lysenko himself was appointed as the chair of the prestigious Institute of Genetics and Breeding in Odessa. From this lofty perch, he now began to churn out one scientific miracle after the other. Some of his “discoveries” during this period included:
• The transformation of one species of wheat (the spring wheat Triticum Durum) into another (the winter wheat Triticum Vulgare) in 2–4 years of planting. Since T. Durum’s genetic makeup is radically different from T. Vulgare, rational horticulturalists already knew this to be impossible.
• The Inheritance of Acquired Characters in plants, as exemplified by his claim that “altered sections of the body of parent organisms always possess an altered heredity”. He gave the example of a potato tuber, declaring that the artificially altered bud of a potato tuber, if cut away from the parent vegetable and grown separately (i.e. in an asexual fashion) will be able to transmit its altered characteristics to its offspring. Just like his claims about vernalisation, this claim is proven false by its violation of Weismann’s principle of the separation between the soma and the germ plasm. An especially bizarre consequence of Lysenko’s belief that it was the environment which decided a plant’s characteristics and not its genes, was his theory that if warm-weather plants were grown a little further north each year, they would eventually adapt to their climate, and that one day it would even be possible to “grow oranges in Siberia.”
• “The Law of Life of the Species”, which was Lysenko’s patented take on the Marxist theory of class consciousness. According to this law, plants of the same species do not compete with each other for resources, but help each other to survive, akin to members of the same social class cooperating with each other. The practical outcome of this was that farmers were forced to plant seeds in extremely dense concentrations, to facilitate their cooperation. This practice, known as “close planting”, produced spectacular results in the initial phase, when the seeds derived nutrition from the material stored within the seed itself. But when the plants turned to extracting nutrients and water from the soil, excessive competition meant that the crops invariably withered and died.
Despite the fact that every single one of his claims was either verifiably false or a rehash of existing scientific knowledge, Lysenko’s rise through the ranks of Soviet intelligentsia in the 1930s was meteoric. His crackpot theories now became official dogma, and a nationwide convention of farmers held in 1935 that was attended by no less a personage than Stalin himself held up Lysenko as a “model scientist”. Admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party and put in charge of agricultural affairs, he used his influence to denounce biologists as “fly lovers” (a reference to genetics’ enduring fascination with Drosophila, the humble fruit fly that had become the workhorse of experiments in heredity ever since the days of T.H. Morgan) determined to sabotage the Soviet economy. As a result of his vitriol, scores of respected geneticists were either imprisoned or executed, most prominently Nikolai Vavilov, the President of the Agricultural Academy, and Lysenko’s one-time mentor, who had encouraged the young man to persevere with his research into vernalisation back in 1928.
At this juncture, a question might arise: why did the high and mighty of the U.S.S.R extend their support to this con-man in the guise of a scientist? After all, the worst victims of Lysenkoism weren’t the intellectuals whom Lysenko loathed, but the peasantry whom he claimed to work for: far from alleviating famine, his madcap ideas only worsened the situation. To understand Stalin’s seemingly paradoxical faith in Lysenko even in the faith of disaster, one must understand Lysenkoism for what it truly was: a political ideology, rather than a scientific school of thought.
A New Soviet Biology
To grasp the roots of the Lysenkoists’ crusade against genetics, a cursory discussion of Marxist philosophy is necessary. Simply speaking, the Marxist approach to history, science, nature and sociology — termed Dialectical Materialism by Marx — postulates the existence of certain “universal and immutable laws of history”, which lead to unavoidable large-scale change at the level of societies. According to Marx, one can apply the principles of Dialectical Materialism to unerringly predict the course of history, hence his famous assertion that the rise of Communism is an inevitability. The premises of the disagreement between this kind of thinking, and the science of Darwin and Mendel, which declares unpredictable and uncontrollable mutations in individual organisms to be the engine of change, are obvious. A sample of Marxist attitudes towards Darwin can be obtained from the writings of the Czech Marxist Karl Kautsky, who sought to apply Dialectic principles to biology:
“For Marx, the mass is the carrier of the development, for Darwin it is the individual… the main thing for Darwin was not the same effect of the environment on all individuals of the same species, that is, a mass phenomenon, but the occasional and accidental peculiarities of particular individuals… A quite individualist conception which corresponded very well to the thought of liberalism!
Nor was genetics the only field where science found itself in disagreement with Communism. Cybernetics, quantum physics, language theory: all were outlawed at one point or the other. In any case, the Soviet obsession with reconstructing science to conform with ideology proved a blessing for Lysenko. Himself a fanatical Marxist who firmly believed that all science was class- oriented in nature and stringently denied the very existence of genes, he found his teachings, such as they were, to be in perfect alignment with official doctrine.
Beyond ideological conformity, Lysenkoism had a practical side as well: as mentioned earlier, its promises of bountiful harvests proved useful in restoring public morale and encouraging peasants to return to work in the aftermath of the disasters of collectivization. Similarly, the promised miracles of Soviet science formed an essential part of the U.S.S. R’s propaganda campaigns in Eastern Europe after the Second World War — for example, Trybuna Ludu, the official newspaper of the Polish Communist Party, carried at least 125 articles on Lysenkoism between 1948 and 1956. This was only one part of a larger coordinated propaganda effort executed by the government on Lysenko’s behalf: the state-controlled media crowed loudly about his successes with sensational headlines like “SIBERIA IS TRANSFORMED INTO A LAND OF ORCHARDS AND GARDENS” or “SOVIET PEOPLE CHANGE NATURE” and faked glowing tributes to him from foreign scientists to create an impression that his theories were gaining credence in the Western world, while quietly omitting all mention of his failures. The government even created journals where he could publish his work without submitting to the usual peer-review process. In this way, the humble agronomist was from Kiev converted into, to quote a particularly effusive piece published on the happy occasion of his 50th birthday, “the pride of the Soviet Union, the pride of mankind… the great magician transforming nature!”
1948: The Stalin Plan and the Rout of Genetics
The Lysenkoist fervor would reach its peak after the Second World War, for a variety of reasons — the advent of the Cold War made Stalin suspicious of all those in the U.S.S.R who demonstrated sympathy towards the West and Western science, while the devastation caused by the World War resulted in the worst grain harvest in over a century. Lysenko again stepped in, promising to develop a new brand of “miracle wheat” from a batch of seeds personally gifted to him by Stalin. At a time when the average yield for wheat fields in the U.S.S.R was 700–800 kg/hectare, he declared that he could achieve a yield of 15,000 kg/hectare — in only 2 or 3 years! His compatriots in the field of genetics could not, of course, keep up with this titan, and were forced to yield further ground.
The consequence of all this was the infamous 1948 Session of VASKhNIL, or the V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the institution which acted as the final arbiter of agricultural policy in Russia, and over which Lysenko had presided since 1938. Lysenko’s address to VASKhNIL at this session, published under the title “The State of Soviet Biology”, marked the final humiliation and utter rout of genetics, and indeed of all reasonable and rational thought, in the world of Russian biology. In his speech, he violently rejected the Darwinian concept of intra-specific competition (the process of competition for resources between members of the same species) and “Mendelism-Morganism-Weissmanism”, even as he held up his own science as the true successor of Darwin.
In the days that followed, all but 8 of the 56 other speakers delivered similar rants against Mendelian genetics, and decried the teaching of such concepts in schools and colleges. Any and all murmurs of dissent were silenced on the final day, when Lysenko declared that his report had been “examined and approved” by the Central Committee of the Party, making it clear beyond a shred a doubt that Lysenkoism was now the Party line and immune to criticism. Immediately after this, the Ministry of Education passed a decree to dismiss everyone who had “actively fought against Lysenkoists and Lysenkoist doctrine and failed to educate the Soviet youth in a spirit of progressive Lysenkoist biology”. All scientific institutions dealing with genetics were dissolved, books on genetics were removed from bookstores and libraries, and even at institutes in fields indirectly related to genetics, such as microbiology or animal husbandry, suspected ideological deviants were forced out and replaced with adherents of Lysenko.
Around this time, the U.S.S.R embarked on one of its grandest politico-economic-scientific projects: The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature, or simply the Stalin Plan. Announced in October 1948 without the benefit of any preliminary findings or trials, the plan dreamed of the planting of eight vast shelterbelts of trees that would obstruct the passage of dry winds from Central Asia into Southern Russia, leaving the barren steppes cool, moist and conducive to agriculture. Together, these shelterbelts would encompass an area of 5.7 million hectares — equal to the area of France, Britain, Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands combined. To generate support for this project, the government turned out newsreels and booklets with images of children eating fruits grown in the tree belts and playing in green fields that were once desert.
Before 1948, Lysenko had shown no public interest in forestry or tree biology, but the sudden interest of the state prompted him to turn his prodigious talents to this field as well. In no time at all, he came up with yet another fantastic theory — that plants could become collectivists. Applying his “Law of Life”, he declared, again without going through the bother of experimental verification, that oak seedlings if planted properly would band together to combat the growth of weeds and, if necessary, sacrifice their own growth for the benefit of other seedlings. He even posited that plants from different species could help the shelterbelt trees in their struggle for existence, and thus recommended that agricultural crops be grown alongside the oak seeds. In fact, his theory rested on harnessing a hypothetical “internal drive” of domesticated crops to cooperate with each other in the conquest of the wild steppes — a notion as absurd as it sounds.
Unsurprisingly, the result of his decrees was once again shambolic: the trees and crops did compete with each other for food and water, and, smothered by wheat and barley, the oak seedlings died. By 1954, fully half of the seedlings sown in the shelterbelts had perished. As a whole, the Stalin Plan managed to complete only about 20% of the original quota of afforestation, at incalculable cost.
A Fall From Grace
His political master’s demise marked the beginning of Lysenko’s fall from grace as well. By the end of 1948, Lysenko’s mastery of Soviet science was complete. But even for him, time was running out. Now that he had successfully eliminated all opposition to him among Russia’s scientists, there was no longer any possibility for passing the blame for the inevitable failure of his projects to the “wreckers” and “fly-lovers.” The beginning of the end for Lysenkoism came in March 1953, when, at the end of a 29- year-long reign of terror, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin fell victim to a cerebral haemorrhage. After his death, his successors embarked on a comprehensive program of Destalinization, to undo the worst excesses of the Stalinist era. The grand economic projects were scaled back, taxes on the peasantry lowered and the apparatus of state security and prison camps reformed.
Even before Stalin’s death, government bureaucrats were already quietly abandoning Lysenkoist techniques like vernalisation or close planting in favour of more conventional wisdom; the losses sustained in agricultural production were simply too much to bear. And once the umbrella of Stalin’s protection had been lifted once and for all, Lysenko’s critics slowly came out in the open, accusing — and in some cases proving — him guilty of deliberate fraud. One-by-one, his acolytes were replaced from their offices in academia and replaced by genuine scientists. In the mid 50’s, Lysenkoism enjoyed a brief swan song, when Nikita Khrushchev launched a new campaign of cultivating the semiarid plains of Siberia and Kazakhstan as a stop-gap measure against famine, and looked to Lysenko to provide theoretical justification for this policy.
The palace coup that forced Khrushchev out of power in 1964 signaled the culmination of Lysenko’s rule. He was removed from the presidency of VASKhNIL and confined to an experimental farm near Moscow. An expert commission carried out a thorough investigation of his records and methods, and published a highly critical report. When this report was made public, Lysenko’s reputation was shattered beyond repair. He died in obscurity in 1976, unmourned beyond a passing mention in the government daily Izvestia. Before his death, he had the honour of witnessing the rehabilitation of a much finer scientist than him — his former boss Nikolai Vavilov, who in 1968 was officially hailed as a Hero of Soviet science.
Conclusion: Junk Science
It is estimated that more than 3,000 biologists were fired, imprisoned or even executed during the Stalinist era, simply because they had the temerity to oppose Lysenko. The science of genetics was irreversibly damaged in the U.S.S.R: by the time the Party permitted the resumption of study in genetics, there were no more trained geneticists to teach students, no more laboratories to carry out research. But the most vicious effects of the dead hand of Lysenkoism were felt, like such catastrophes usually are, amongst the masses: his brainless dogma incalculably exacerbated the Soviet Union’s deadly famines. The statistics which he hated reveal a harsh truth: between 1933 and 1937, the area of land cultivated using Lysenkoist techniques increased by 16,300%, but net food production declined steeply. The U.S.S. R’s allies suffered even worse: China, which adopted his methods of cultivation in 1958, was consumed by the worst famine in human history between 1959 and 1962. A definitive calculation of the human toll of Lysenkoism can never be made, but it is assuredly in the millions.
Stunningly, Lysenko’s reputation has undergone something of a resurrection in recent years. Developments in the field of epigenetics, which studies heritable variations that are induced not by alterations in the underlying DNA sequence, but through environmentally-driven mechanisms like modification in the histone proteins found in chromosomes, have led some to claim that Lysenko’s theories of environmentally induced heritable variations were correct all along.
The briefest study of epigenetics reveals that it is in no way related to Lysenkoism: epigenetics axiomatically accepts the existence of genes, which Lysenko completely denied, and all epigenetic transformations disappear within a few generations, unlike Lysenko’s claims of permanent alteration. The real reason behind Lysenko’s newfound popularity once again lies not in science, but in politics: in Russia’s current political climate, his ferocious denunciations of the West are very fashionable.
But the core lesson of the Lysenkoist saga is relevant not only in Russia, but worldwide. All around us, matters of science have been hijacked by political considerations; the prevailing scientific wisdom on everything from climate change to Covid-19 is analyzed on the basis of its ideological usefulness, not intellectual merits. In times like these, it is necessary to remember that beyond any abstract considerations of academia, politicizing science costs lives. As such, the importance attached to the duty of those in positions of knowledge and influence to speak truth to power can never be underestimated.
F.N.1: Lysenko and his disciples never referred to his teachings as “Lysenkoism”; this was a label applied only by his opponents. Rather, they used the term “Michurinism” or “Michurinist biology”, in honour of I.V. Michurin, a distinguished fruit breeder whose ideas bore a superficial similarity to Lamarckian thought. After Michurin’s demise, Lysenko conveniently hijacked his legacy and passed himself off as Michurin’s spiritual successor, even though Michurin never concerned himself with genetics. For reasons of clarity, the term “Lysenkoism” is used throughout this article, including in quotes which originally used the word “Michurinist”.
