Portal:History of science/Article/Week 31, 2006
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Lysenkoism was a campaign against genetics and geneticists which happened in the Soviet Union from the middle of the 1930s to the middle of the 1960s, centered around the figure of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. In a broader context, Lysenkoism is often invoked to imply the overt subversion of science by political forces.
When Lysenko began his fieldwork in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the agriculture of the Soviet Union was in a massive crisis due to the forced collectivization movement. There were few agricultural specialists who were willing to work committedly towards the success of the new and troubled collective farms. Among biologists of the day, the most popular topic was not agriculture at all but the new genetics that was emerging out of studies of Drosophila melanogaster, fruit flies with very simplistic genetic structures which allowed for easy studying of Mendelian ratios and heritability. Only much later would this research have obvious application to the problem of agriculture, and during the 1920s and 1930s it was easy for a radical like Lysenko to castigate these theoretical biologists for spending their time bent over trays of fruit flies while famine raged on around them.
In 1928, a previously unknown agronomist, Trofim Lysenko "invented" a new agricultural technique, vernalization (using humidity and low temperatures to make wheat grow in spring). Soviet mass media presented him as a genius who had developed a new, revolutionary technique. He was supported by the Soviet propaganda machine, which overstated his successes and omitted mention of his failures. Instead of making controlled experiments, Lysenko relied upon questionnaires from farmers, using them to "prove" that vernalization increases wheat yields by 15%. Lysenko's influence continued to grow, and in 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience"; all geneticists were fired from work (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued.
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