62 Facts About Trofim Lysenko

Trofim Lysenko was a proponent of Lamarckism, and rejected Mendelian genetics in favour of his own idiosyncratic, pseudoscientific ideas later termed Lysenkoism.

In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and he used his political influence and power to suppress dissenting opinions and discredit, marginalize, and imprison his critics, elevating his anti-Mendelian theories to state-sanctioned doctrine.

The son of Denis Nikanorovich and Oksana Fominichna Lysenko, Trofim Lysenko was born into a peasant family of Ukrainian ethnicity in the village of Karlovka, Poltava Governorate on 29 September 1898.

Trofim Lysenko learned to read and write only at the age of 13.

In 1922, Trofim Lysenko entered the Kiev Agricultural Institute.

In October 1925, Trofim Lysenko was sent to Azerbaijan, to a breeding station in the city of Ganja.

Trofim Lysenko had a difficult time trying to grow various crops through the harsh winters.

Soon, Trofim Lysenko married one of the interns who trained under him, Alexandra Baskova.

Trofim Lysenko worked with different wheat crops to try to convert them to grow in different seasons.

Trofim Lysenko believed that every plant needed a determinate amount of heat throughout its lifetime.

Trofim Lysenko attempted to correlate the time and the amount of heat required by a particular plant to go through various phases of development.

Trofim Lysenko was confronted by Nikolai Maximov, who was an expert on thermal plant development.

Trofim Lysenko did not take well to this or any criticism.

Trofim Lysenko considered how he might use his work to convert winter wheat into spring wheat.

In 1927, Trofim Lysenko embarked on the research that would lead to his 1928 paper on vernalization, which drew wide attention because of its potential practical implications for Soviet agriculture.

Trofim Lysenko coined the term "Jarovization" to describe this chilling process, which he used to make the seeds of winter cereals behave like spring cereals.

Trofim Lysenko himself translated Jarovization as "vernalization".

In October 1929, Trofim Lysenko was invited by the People's Commissariat of Ukraine to Odessa, to the newly formed Breeding and Genetics Institute where he headed the laboratory for vernalization of plants.

On 30 December 1935, Trofim Lysenko was awarded the Order of Lenin and elected a full member of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

In particular, Trofim Lysenko denied the method of inbreeding field crops.

The discussion continued on 23 December 1936 at the 4th session of the All-Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences, where Trofim Lysenko made a report "On two directions in genetics".

In 1938, Trofim Lysenko became president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

Trofim Lysenko suggested that planting of trees need to be done in "nests".

Trofim Lysenko claimed that when trees were planted at high densities their survival improved because they fought together against weeds and pooled their energy to benefit one shoot while sacrificing others in the nest.

From 1942, Trofim Lysenko was a member of the Extraordinary State Commission for the Establishment and Investigation of the Atrocities of the German Fascist Invaders.

In 1946, Trofim Lysenko wrote an article titled "Genetics" for the 3rd edition of the Agricultural Encyclopedia.

At the session, Trofim Lysenko presented erroneous views on genetics, as well as politicized statements addressed to opponents.

Trofim Lysenko aimed to manipulate various plants such as wheat and peas to increase their production, quality, and quantity, while impressing political officials with his success in motivating peasants to return to farming.

Trofim Lysenko became prominent during this period by advocating radical but unproven agricultural methods, and promising that the new methods provided wider opportunities for year-round work in agriculture.

Trofim Lysenko proved himself very useful to the Soviet leadership by reengaging peasants to return to work, helping to secure from them a personal stake in the overall success of the Soviet revolutionary experiment.

Party officials were looking for promising candidates with backgrounds similar to Trofim Lysenko's: born of a peasant family, lacking formal academic training or affiliations to the academic community.

Trofim Lysenko eventually became the director of Genetics for the Academy of Sciences in 1940, which gave him even more control over genetics.

Trofim Lysenko remained in the position for more than two decades, throughout the reigns of Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, until he was relieved of his duties in 1965.

Outside the Soviet Union, scientists spoke critically: British biologist S C Harland lamented that Lysenko was "completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology".

Criticism from foreigners did not sit well with Trofim Lysenko, who loathed Western "bourgeois" scientists and denounced them as tools of imperialist oppressors.

Trofim Lysenko especially detested the American-born practice of studying fruit flies, the workhorse of modern genetics.

Trofim Lysenko called such geneticists "fly lovers and people haters".

Trofim Lysenko's work was eventually recognized as fraudulent by some, "but not before he had wrecked the lives of many and destroyed the reputation of Russian biology" according to scientist Peter Gluckman.

Trofim Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together since, according to his "law of the life of species", plants from the same "class" never compete with one another.

Trofim Lysenko played an active role in the famines that killed millions of Soviet people and his practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages.

Trofim Lysenko retained his position, with the support of the new leader Nikita Khrushchev.

In 1962, three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Zeldovich, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Pyotr Kapitsa, presented a case against Trofim Lysenko, proclaiming his work as pseudoscience.

Trofim Lysenko is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.

In 1965, Trofim Lysenko was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences and restricted to an experimental farm in Moscow's Lenin Hills.

Trofim Lysenko died in Moscow in 1976, and was ultimately interred in the Kuntsevo Cemetery, although the Soviet government refused to announce Trofim Lysenko's death for two days after the event and gave his passing only a small note in Izvestia.

Trofim Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetic inheritance theory in favour of his own logic, which he termed "Michurinist genetics".

Trofim Lysenko believed Gregor Mendel's theory to be too reactionary or idealist.

Trofim Lysenko's ideas were a mixture of his own, those of Russian agronomist Ivan Michurin, and of other Soviet scientists.

The core ideas are that body cells determine the quality of an organism's offspring; every part of the body contributes to the germ cells, in the manner of Darwin's theory of pangenesis, though Trofim Lysenko denied any such connection.

Trofim Lysenko shaped his genetic concepts to support the simple practical purpose of breeding and improving crops.

Trofim Lysenko's ideas were shaped to disprove other claims made by his fellow geneticists.

Trofim Lysenko claimed that his ideas were not associated with Lamarckism, but there are similarities between the two ideas, such as a belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Trofim Lysenko did not believe in genes and only spoke about them to say that they did not exist.

Trofim Lysenko instead believed that any body, once alive, obtained heredity.

Trofim Lysenko argued that there is not only competition, but mutual assistance among individuals within a species, and that mutual assistance exists between different species.

Trofim Lysenko claimed that the cuckoo was born when young birds such as warblers were fed hairy caterpillars by the parent birds; this claim failed to recognise that the cuckoos he described were brood parasites.

In Ganja, Trofim Lysenko began work on studying the growing season of agricultural plants.

For two years, Trofim Lysenko experimented with the timing of sowing grain, cotton and other plants, sowing plants at intervals of 10 days.

When summer planting did not produce any positive results, Trofim Lysenko suggested burying the harvested potatoes in trenches, spreading a layer of soil over a layer of potatoes, arguing that this would reduce losses from rotting tubers.

Trofim Lysenko ignored the real reason for the degeneration of potato plantings - potato viruses, replacing it with abstract ideas about the "deterioration of the potato breed".

Finally, last year, 1946, at the same Siberian Research Institute, headed by Academician Trofim Lysenko, out of 150 [ha] of stover crops, 112 hectares were plowed, since only one weed was born on them.

Professor Vibegallo is based on the once-famous academician Trofim Lysenko, who put all of Russian biology on all fours, spent more than thirty years doing nonsense and at the same time not only destroyed our entire biological science, but trampled everything around, destroying all the best geneticists of the USSR, starting with Vavilov.