Stalin's favourite agronomist declared the gene a bourgeois invention, and biology paid
Trofim Lysenko promised Stalin wheat yielding 15,000 kilograms per hectare, when the best variety under ideal conditions managed about 2,000. He called genes a bourgeois invention, scorned statistics and control groups, and with state backing drove more than 3,000 mainstream biologists out of their jobs or into prison.
The ground was prepared by ideology. By the early 20th century researchers such as Thomas Hunt Morgan had shown that traits pass down through genes on chromosomes, shuffled by chance mutation and recombination. Some Marxists disliked that picture: evolution driven by random individual variation looked like a liberal doctrine, at odds with collective struggle and inevitable history. The older Lamarckian idea that organisms pass on traits acquired during life, largely abandoned in the West by 1925, fitted better, and the party principle that science must serve the working class invited results judged by usefulness rather than truth.
Crisis supplied the opening. Forced collectivisation had wrecked Soviet farming, and the famine of 1932 to 1933 left officials hungry for a technical fix. From 1928 Lysenko touted vernalisation, chilling and moistening seed wheat, along with claims that one species could turn into another and that a grafted shoot permanently altered its rootstock's heredity. The biologist Isaak Prezent promoted him as a genius, and propaganda trumpeted faked results while burying failures.
Stalin's favour made him untouchable. In 1935, when Lysenko likened his critics to peasants resisting collectivisation, Stalin was first on his feet, calling out bravo, and he personally edited a Lysenko speech. Lysenko went on to head the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, denouncing geneticists as fly-lovers, people haters and wreckers.
The damage was enormous. Nikolai Vavilov, once Lysenko's mentor and later his critic, died in prison, numerous scientists were executed, and Soviet genetics was effectively destroyed, with harm spreading to cell biology, neurophysiology and other fields. Eastern Bloc countries such as Poland adopted the doctrine too.
Source: Lysenkoism
