LYSENKO -- THE CASE AGAINST ABSTRACTIONS

Russia of the 1920s and the 1930s desperately needed better strains of wheat and other grains to survive poor soils and severe weather. Nikolai Vavilov grasped the new genetics being unraveled by Morgan and other Western scientists. Vavilov realized the importance of securing a diversity of seeds from countries where major crops originated, and was the "father of seed banks."

At the same time, Trofim Lysenko rose to prominence with his work on converting winter wheat to spring wheat with temperature treatments. Although this inheritance of acquired charac-teristics was not clearly demonstrated by experimental evidence, it did appeal to a Communist desire that traits gained by hard work could be inherited by off-spring. Because of his strong personality and Lamarckian ideas that gave support to Marxist ideology, Lysenko became Stalin's favorite and was promoted to President of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1938 and Director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences in 1950.

While Western geneticists were making exciting strides in genetics, any Russian geneticist who argued against the inheritance of acquired traits was labelled an anti-Michurin Morganist neo-Darwinist, and was harassed, intimidated, and eventually banned from research. Vavilov, who championed the reality-based Western genetics, died in Saratov prison in 1943. Russian lost 3000 good scientists and 30 years of benefits from valid genetics work due to dogma (see Nature 339: 415-420 June 8, 1989 and The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko by Z.A. Medvedev, Columbia Univ. press 1971).

The falsehood of Lysenko’s “science” is not apparent in the textbooks, pictures, and lectures of his time. Today, Lysenko would love hypertext and simulations–“You, too, can convert wheat into rye with ‘Lysenko-Lab.’” His arguments, logical and internally consistent, spread through Russian and also Chinese universities of the time. But it failed when it came to producing the increased yields predicted. Valid lab and fieldwork just didn't support it.

Today we still face the same pressure to make our “science” match with popular or expedient social and political views. In investigating the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, physicist Dick Feynman refused to compromise genuinely-researched conclusions with expected platitudes. He summarized this in the last sentence of his appendix to the Challenger disaster report: “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.” (What Do You Care What Other People Think by R. Feynman, W.W. Norton & Co. 1988)