Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

The phenomenon of Lysenko should be considered not in scientific but in political and sociological terms, with an understanding of Soviet reality in the late 1920s to early 1930s, when Stalin’s ideological goal was to create a community of scientists that could be easily manipulated by Soviet leaders. Of the Western biologists, the Russian-born American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky (who emigrated to the United States in 1927) understood this better than others. 172Young Lysenko became known not as an author of scientific publications but as the hero in a long article published in 1927 in the main Communist newspaper Pravda . 173

For ideological reasons, the author of the article, Vitalii Fyodorovich, highlighted Lysenko’s peasant background as the basis of his success in science. By the time of Lysenko’s first “discovery” in the late 1920s, the process of the vernalization of plants, which refers to the influence of temperature on the transition from one physiological phase to another, was already a well-established fact. Apparently, Lysenko was not aware of this because he simply did not read scientific literature. The success of vernalization, or, in Lysenko’s terminology, “yarovization,” was also announced in Pravda and other Communist Party newspapers. 174Standard scientific methods were not followed in any of Lysenko’s “experiments,” and he considered the statistical analysis of data to be “harmful” for biology. No doubt Lysenko’s refusal to use standard scientific methods had a more practical purpose—it made the disproving of his results impossible since he never clearly explained his methods. Step by step, Lysenko’s “Marxist-Michurinist genetics” replaced the “bourgeois Weismannist-Morganist-Mendelist theory” of inheritance in the Soviet Union.

Ivan Michurin (1855–1935) was a breeder of apple trees and, in fact, had nothing to do with Lysenko’s “Michurinist genetics.” 175However, Lysenko applied the terms “Michurinist genetics” or “Michurinist doctrine” to his own pseudotheories. This term had positive meaning in the Soviet ideological language. Lysenko and his followers applied negative labels to the real geneticists who were their enemies: “the Weismannists, Morganists, and/or Mendelists.” By the end of the 1940s, these terms had become almost synonymous with the ideological slur “enemies of the people.” The labels stressed the “bourgeois” roots of the real genetics: The German biologist August Weismann (1834–1914) was one of the founders of genetics; the American geneticist and Nobel Prize winner (1933) Thomas H. Morgan (1866–1945) established the chromosome theory of heredity; and the Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel (1843–1884) described the basic laws of inheritance in mathematical terms. The discoveries of these scientists were exactly what the Lysenkoists desperately tried to deny.

In 1945, the famous British evolutionist Julian Huxley and Professor Eric Ashby attended a Lysenko lecture in Moscow and were shocked by what they heard. Lysenko presented his “theory” of fertilization: The best oocyte chooses the best spermatozoon, and everything occurs as a “love-based marriage” during which one cell “eats” another. The inheritance in the first generation depends on the cell that “ate” the other one. When somebody asked Lysenko how to describe the segregation of characters in the second generation (which is the basic law in Mendelian genetics), Lysenko answered: “This is belching.” Eleonora Manevich, who translated Lysenko’s speech to Huxley and Ashby, recalled that both of them shuddered at the description of sex cells “eating” each other. Huxley hid his discomfort by fussing with his glasses. 176Later, he paraphrased Lysenko’s answer in his book on Soviet genetics: “Segregation is Nature’s belching; unassimilated hereditary material is belched out.” 177

Lysenko’s understanding of speciation and evolution was more confusing nonsense. His “creative Darwinism” included the following statements:

Nobody knows what a species is, and everything written in books is not true.

Environmental conditions are the leading factor of life, and the living form of substances is a result and a derivative [of them], but this does not mean that the living form is the same as the non-living. The mutton meat is formed of hay and grass. The living form is a result of the non-living form… the living form appears from non-living form through the living form. The body of a live sheep (i.e. the sheep which is still running) is formed from the mutton meat, but not from grass. 178

A species is a species, a qualitatively distinct state of living form of substance. 179

Please note that these are not poor translations from Russian. In Russian, these statements sound as absurd as they do in English.

Also, according to Lysenko, there is no intraspecies competition, that is, there is no class struggle between members of the same species. On the contrary, all members of the same species “help” each other: “There is not, and cannot be, a class society in any plant or animal species. Therefore, there is not, and cannot be, here class struggle, though it might be called, in biology, intraspecies competition.” 180“In nature the life of any individual is subjected to the interests of its species.” 181“All intraspecies relationships among individuals… are directed toward the securing of the existence and thriving of a species and this means, towards the increasing of the number of individuals in a species.” 182

Even more disturbing was his belief that one species could somehow transform itself into another. “The transformation of one species into another occurs at a single leap… By means of ‘retraining’… after two, three, or four years of autumn planting [ Triticus ] durum [i.e., hard wheat] turns into [ T .] vulgare [soft wheat], i.e., hard, 28-chromosome wheat turns into various forms of soft, 42-chromosome wheat.” 183Lysenko also believed that wheat can be transformed into rye. According to him, sometimes in wheat plants “small grains of rye plant emerge,” and these “small grains” grow into rye grains. Lysenko also explained how a species of bird can turn into another. The molecular biologist and geneticist Valery Soyfer recalled:

In several lectures and speeches, he [Lysenko] announced that warblers had given birth to cuckoos! I heard him say this myself in a lecture at Moscow State University in the spring of 1955. He described how the lazy cuckoo placed its eggs in the nest of a warbler, and the warbler is then compelled by the “law of life of a biological species” to pay for letting the cuckoo take advantage of it by feeding on caterpillars, and as a result of the change in diet, it hatches cuckoos instead of warblers. 184

The geneticist Dobzhansky, mentioned earlier, compared Lysenko’s transformation of Triticus durum into T. vulgare with the birth of a lion by a domestic cat, and the transformation of wheat into rye with the transformation of a dog into a fox, or vice versa. 185

In 1934, at the Seventeenth Bolshevik (Communist) Party Congress, Lysenko received the highest recognition of the Party. The commissar of agriculture, Yakov Yakovlev, praised Lysenko in his speech:

Such people as agronomist Lysenko, a practical worker whose vernalization of plants has opened a new chapter in agricultural science, who is now heeded by the entire agricultural world, not only here [in the Soviet Union], but abroad as well… These are the people… who will be the backbone of the real Bolshevik apparatus, the creation of which is demanded by the Party, by Comrade Stalin. 186

That same year, Lysenko was elected to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and became research supervisor of the Ukrainian Institute of Plant Breeding and Genetics. He was appointed director of this institute two years later. Stalin was so moved by Lysenko’s speech at the Second All-Union Congress of Kolkhoz Shockworkers in the Kremlin in February 1935 that he jumped up, clapping, and shouted: “Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo!” 187Of course, after this the whole hall broke out in applause. Lysenko knew what to say. He proclaimed that only the kolkhoz system of agriculture introduced by Stalin in 1929 was “the one and only scientific guiding principle, which Comrade Stalin teaches us daily.” 188