Soviet spring of Trofim
Lysenko
Lysenko was an agricultural researcher who in 1929 claimed to
have invented "vernalisation". He chilled and soaked
winter wheat, planted it alongside spring wheat, and reported that
he got a better harvest. In fact, vernalisation was an old peasant
technique, and Lysenko’s experiment was based on one field
of wheat, in one season, on his father’s farm.
He also claimed that acquired characteristics could be inherited
by the next generation — as if parents who go in for weightlifting
could be sure of children with big biceps and six-pack abs. This
evolutionary heresy is still known as Lysenkoism.
Joseph Stalin liked practical peasants who promised success, and
the state bureaucracy wanted immediate improvement in Soviet agriculture — why
wait for a five-year plan? — so Lysenko came to dominate
Soviet biology. His theories were preposterous but he remained
director of the Institute of Agricultural Genetics until February
1965, when an expert committee finally exposed a long career of
false data and distorted science. |
