Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist born on the 29th of September 1898 in the village of Karlovka, who became director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1940 and used political power to impose his pseudoscientific ideas on Soviet biology. He rejected Mendelian genetics in favour of his own theories, later called Lysenkoism, which contributed to lower agricultural yields across the Soviet Union from the late 1930s until his downfall in the mid-1960s.
What happened to Nikolai Vavilov because of Lysenko?
Nikolai Vavilov, the prominent Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, was arrested in August 1940 after Lysenko arranged for an NKVD employee to be placed in his institute over his categorical protest. Vavilov died in prison in 1943. Several of his colleagues, including Georgii Karpechenko and Grigory Levitsky, were also arrested and died in custody.
What was vernalization and did Lysenko invent it?
Vernalization is the technique of germinating seeds at low temperatures before sowing to accelerate plant development. Lysenko popularized and named the process, but the method had been known to farmers since the 1800s and was discussed in detail by Gustav Gassner in 1918. Lysenko's additional claim that vernalized traits could be inherited by offspring was not scientifically valid.
When was Lysenkoism declared the only correct theory in Soviet biology?
On the 7th of August 1948, at the end of a week-long session of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), the academy announced that Lysenkoism would be taught as the only correct theory. Soviet scientists were required to denounce any work contradicting it, and those who refused faced dismissal, imprisonment, or execution.
How did Lysenko's ideas affect China?
Lysenko's ideas held influence in China from the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949 through 1956, when a genetics conference in Qingdao spurred the resumption of genetics teaching and research. Atlantic writer Sam Kean argues that Chinese agricultural methods in the late 1950s, inspired by Lysenko, contributed to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962.
How and when was Lysenko removed from power?
In 1965, Lysenko was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences and restricted to an experimental farm at Moscow's Lenin Hills. His removal followed the 1964 speech by physicist Andrei Sakharov before the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences, and the formal declaration after Khrushchev's dismissal in 1964 that Lysenko's immunity to criticism had ended. He died in Moscow on the 20th of November 1976.