Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Trofim Lysenko and Lysenkoism

Starting point is 00:00:00 In the early 20th century, a Soviet agronomist by the name of Trofim Lysenko developed some unique theories of biology and genetics. He rose to the top of the Soviet hierarchy in his field and Stalin himself endorsed his theories. And the result of the implementation of his ideas was nothing short of disastrous. Learn more about Trofim Lysenko and Lysenkoism on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time. to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

Starting point is 00:00:50 And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thulein podcast from NPR. The Soviet Union did excel in several areas of science and technology. They put the first satellite in orbit and the first human into space. They had very good mathematicians, theoretical physicists, chess players, and while not science-related, some of the greatest, ballet dancers in the world. However, there were some areas in science and technology where they fell flat, and one area in particular where they were downright backward. This backwardness had

Starting point is 00:01:26 devastating consequences for the Soviet people. The key player in this story is Trofim Lysenko. Trofim Denisovic Lysenko was born in 1898 in what was then the Russian Empire and what is today the city of Karlifka, Ukraine. He studied at the Kiev Agricultural Institute where he took an interest in agronomy. Lisenko grew up poor. He didn't actually learn how to read until he was 13, and he often dressed like a peasant when he attended university. When the communist revolution came around, he was totally on board. His poor background and his manner of dress made him very popular in communist circles.

Starting point is 00:02:01 He was dubbed the Barefoot Scientist. In fact, he was so on board with communism, his political views began to influence his scientific research. His early research focused on trying to grow peas in colder climates, which would have been a pretty handy thing to be able to do in Russia. One of the things he discovered is that peas could sprout faster when the seeds were kept at lower temperatures. Today, people who have investigated Lysenko's research have concluded that he probably fabricated his results. Fabrication of results aside, even if his conclusions were correct, it would just be something that was a property of the peas he was studying. Those peas sprout at lower temperatures.

Starting point is 00:02:37 Enough said. However, Lysenko took the conclusion of his research to a whole other level. He thought he was actually converting one species into another by exposing it to cold temperatures. He also thought he could take winter wheat and turn it into spring wheat, which were two totally different species, by exposing winter wheat seeds to cold temperatures. This actually can't allow winter wheat to sprout in the spring, but this had been known for centuries, and it doesn't make it a whole different species. The Soviet newspapers praised him in the late 1920s for his revolutionary work, which was the product of new Soviet thinking and would pave the way, for an agricultural revolution. What Lysenko had actually done was rediscovered Lamarckism.

Starting point is 00:03:19 What is Lamarckism, you might be asking? In the early 19th century, the theory of how biological traits were passed from generation to generation was developed by a French zoologist by the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck's theory held that acquired characteristics from the parent would be passed along to its offspring. For example, if a blacksmith worked with a hammer for years and developed muscles in his arm, then Lamarckism posited that muscular arms would be passed down to the blacksmith's children. The Lamarckian explanation for why giraffes had long necks is that they would stretch their necks to reach food,

Starting point is 00:03:53 which would actually make their necks longer. Once they acquired long necks, their offspring would now have long necks as well. Anyone who's taken even a semester of high school biology knows that this isn't how it works. Lamarckism was discredited by the later work of Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and other geneticists, who showed that genes were hereditary traits, passed along from one generation to another using probability. Lysenko, however, totally denied the existence of genes. And he went well beyond that. He believed that you could plant crops extremely close together because plants of the same species,

Starting point is 00:04:29 or class, as he described it, can't compete with each other. He thought that the amount of milk a cow could provide had nothing to do with genetics, but with how well the cow was treated. He claimed that cuckoo birds, which lay their eggs in the nests of other birds, were actually created when birds were fed hairy caterpillars. With his techniques, he said he could grow orange trees in Siberia. When he was presented with mathematical and statistical evidence that his theories were wrong, he countered that mathematics had no place in biology. Moreover, all of his theories were couched in the language and terminology of communist ideology.

Starting point is 00:05:04 Plants growing together were compared to class solidarity. cow is producing more milk because they were treated well was compared to the better treatment of workers. His collection of beliefs that biology was class-orientated in nature became known as Lysenkoism. The Communist Party ate this up. Not only did they think that his theories provided scientific confirmation of their political beliefs, but they also wanted to promote people from lower economic classes to higher levels of power. So, the proletarian Lysenko was put in charge of Soviet agriculture in the late 1920s, after the collectivization of Soviet farms caused a massive famine.

Starting point is 00:05:40 The one person in the Soviet hierarchy who really loved Lysenko's work was none other than Joseph Stalin. Stalin personally edited many of his speeches, and when Lysako gave a speech praising the collectivization of farms, Stalin was the first person to stand up and applaud shouting, quote, Bravo, Kamrad Lysenko, Bravo. Lysenko's standing kept increasing within the Soviet scientific system. His photo would hang on the wall alongside Stalin's at research centers and laboratories. Beginning in 1934, purges began of Soviet geneticists who disagreed with Lysenkoism. Some scientists were sent to Gulags in Siberia, some created fake research data to show their support of Lysenkoism, and others issued public retractions and apologies.

Starting point is 00:06:21 Some prominent geneticists were executed, including such names as Israel Agol, Grigori Kapichenko, and Grigori Nodzson. In 1940, Lisenko was appointed the head of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences. It was in 1940 when the man who was perhaps the greatest Soviet geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, was imprisoned. Vivalov was a fierce critic of Lysenko and feared that his pseudoscience would hurt Soviet agriculture. Vivalov was the namesake of the Vivalov Institute in Leningrad, which held one of the world's greatest seed banks. Researchers at the Vavlov Institute protected the seed collection with their lives during the siege of Leningrad, despite the famine which raged in the city. Some of them literally died of starvation rather than eating the seed.

Starting point is 00:07:06 Vavlov died in 1943 in a Soviet work camp in Siberia of starvation. The Soviet Union, who probably had the world's greatest geneticist prior to the rise of Lysenko, had their entire community gutted. Over 3,000 genetic scientists were purged in one fashion or another. During this entire time, the science of genetics was advancing in the rest of the world. Lysenko's theories were known in the West, and he was dismissed as a crank and a crackpot. The British biologist Sidney Harlan said Lysenko was, quote, completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology, end quote.

Starting point is 00:07:42 Lysenko brushed aside this criticism as simply politics. He denounced Western genetics as bourgeoisie, and that Western science was imperialist and fascist. He called the geneticists that studied genetics and fruit flies, quote, fly lovers and people haters. In 1948, genetics was officially declared a bourgeoisie pseudoscience, and Lysenkoism became the official scientific policy of the Soviet Union. Lysenko's influence didn't start to wane until 1953, when two momentous things happened. Stalin died, and the DNA molecule was discovered. With Stalin gone, many of the Soviet geneticists that were purged were rehabilitated. It became possible once again to present theories that were countered to Lysenkoism.

Starting point is 00:08:24 However, Lysenkoism still lingered on in the Soviet system, and it had some limited support under Khrushchev. It wasn't until the mid-1960s that it was finally removed as an official policy. In 1964, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sokharov denounced Lysenko at the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He said, quote, Lysenko is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudoscientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation firing arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists. end quote. After this and the removal of Khrushchev from power in 1964, the floodgates opened and the tables turned on Lysenko.

Starting point is 00:09:10 The president of the Academy of Sciences declared that the prohibition of criticizing Lysenko was over. He was removed from all of his positions and became a pariah in Soviet scientific circles. Surprisingly, though, his photo was still reportedly hanging in some research facilities in the Soviet Union as late as the 1980s. However, by the time he was removed, the damage had already been done. Soviet agricultural output had actually gone down in the decades that Lysenko had influence, despite it going up dramatically, almost everywhere else on Earth. Programs to create hybrid strains of wheat and corn, as was being done in the West, were closed. Lysenko also banned the use of fertilizers or pesticides.

Starting point is 00:09:51 Forced implementation of Lysenko's ideas worsened the Holodomor famine in Ukraine in the 1930s. Lysenkoism is. became the prominent theory in communist China from 1949 to 1956, and the implementation of its theories contributed to the famine which occurred during the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1961. Believe it or not, there has been a minor revival of Lysenkoism in Russia in the last several years, but this has mostly come from political commentators, not from scientists. As much as the Soviet Union managed to make advances in discipline,

Starting point is 00:10:22 such as rocketry and nuclear science, they literally went backwards in the life sciences. By the end of the Cold War, they were decades behind the West. And this was entirely due to a single man who was able to impose his theories on a country, not through the scientific method, but via force. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett.

Starting point is 00:10:52 Today's view comes from listener Dylan 001 over at Podchaser. He writes, I've listened to every episode since I first heard Gary mention this podcast on this week and travel. It's been part of my daily commute, and I always learn something new, whether it's a new subject completely, or something new on a topic I already know. I've recommended your podcast to family and friends, and we often chat about recent episodes. Hi, Teresa. Thanks, Dylan. Thanks for sharing the show with your friends and family. And the completionist club is starting to get rather crowded, but thankfully, the clubhouse has room for an infinite number of people. Remember, if you leave a review

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Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Trofim Lysenko and Lysenkoism

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