Lysenkoism
Let me begin by reminding you that the topics of genetics and politics have, on occasion, been mixed. Particularly, political leaders attempt to use science to further their political agenda.
Since this is a course in Biology and Society, it is useful to look at what can happen when things go wrong with this relationship.
Lysenkoism
There are many situations where science is brought into the public arena with a seemingly good purpose such as increasing the agricultural productivity of a country.
There are, unfortunately, cases where politicians have had a goal of "racial purity" or some other genetic concept that involves controlling the lives of a country's inhabitants.
I want to describe what happened in the Soviet Union. As a general title, it is referred to as Lysenkoism, after its founder, Lysenko.
T.D. Lysenko
Lysenko began his scientific career in the 1920s. He worked on agricultural problems.
One of his early studies, reported in 1926, was that under mild winter conditions, planting peas before cotton helps the cotton survive winter conditions.
This isn’t a particularly important scientific contribution, but Lysenko was very ambitious. He did something that is very rare for a scientist. He tried to sensationalize his results.
Soon he started advertising another of his “discoveries.” This is now called vernalization and it is the process of giving a seed a cold treatment to enhance its later germination. Lysenko showed that you could soak a variety of wheat seeds in ice water and that would speed their germination. Unfortunately, while Lysenko claimed credit for this discovery, it had actually been known for at least a century.
One thing was clear: Lysenko’s research was not very exciting or original.
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But Lysenko kept up his publicity machine.
His next declaration was that this cold treatment would permanently change the wheat variety into another one. You could convert winter wheat to spring wheat.
The other scientists could not ignore this claim.
Some scientists pointed out that some of Lysenko’s claims were not original, that this was just well known vernalization results.
Other critics got closer to the heart of the matter by pointing out that he couldn’t have gotten this result. They said that what Lysenko was doing was applying Lamarckian reasoning to interpret his results. Lamarckian interpretations of genetics had been shown to be wrong more than 100 years before. Organisms don’t pass on characteristics that they acquire through environmental change.
Moreover, the critics pointed out that Lysenko is claiming to be very important. He’s not important.
Support for "New Biology"
While other scientists might have said that Lysenko wasn’t important, that isn’t what the politicians thought.
Lysenko was fully supported by Stalin, the leader of the Communist Party.
Lysenko was soon to become the acknowledged leader of the "New Biology" movement.
Stalin declared that "New Biology" provided the only true scientific theory of heredity. This was as you might suspect, based on the doctrine of dialectical materialism, the philosophical basis of communism.
The result is that we have a case of a political leader trying to show the correctness of political beliefs by invoking the objectivity of science.
Although this movement started in the Soviet Union, it was soon spread to the other countries of the Soviet sphere of influence. Many speakers came out to the institutes that were rebuilding in the countries of Eastern Europe. There, they presented dogmatic lectures on Lysenkoist theories and the results that had been obtained in plant breeding experiments.
These speakers had all sorts of words that they used to describe Western genetics: "enemies," "backward," "reactionary," and "lackeys of Wall Street."
Marxist Dogma
Lysenko’s results were just what the communist politicians wanted.
They wanted to show that man is a creation of his environment.
If this is true, then Stalin’s goal of creating “the new Soviet man,” would simply be one of changing the environment. Politics would make the environment that would produce a new superior race.
Lysenko said that his studies showed genetics wasn’t important. He was their guy!
Soviet Union After WW II
World War II was a time of great destruction in Eastern Europe. Not only were entire university campuses destroyed, but also most of the faculty and staff were deported or executed. After the war was a period of rebuilding. Essentially, most research and academic institutions had to begin all over again.
It was during this rebuilding phase, in 1948, three years after war had ended, that a large conference was held in Moscow as part of the Academy of Agronomic Sciences. At the end of the session, the participants "unanimously" declared that Western genetics was unscientific, idealistic, and metaphysical (whatever these terms mean).
They readily embraced Lysenko’s ideas.
Lysenko's Ideas
Here is an example of the sort of information that would be presented in a lecture: Viruses arise spontaneously from unorganized organic matter. Viruses, in turn, can give rise to bacteria. And bacteria can also revert to becoming viruses. Other similar (absurd) things were presented, complete with photographs or experimental results that "proved" these were correct assertions.
Lysenko had many ideas. Some of the more basic ones include his ideas that species arise spontaneously and can be transformed into other species. For example, assume that you have sterilized the soil and water of a pond, and then sealed it. Nothing can come in from the outside. Lysenko maintained that after a while, you would find plants, and even frogs and other animals, growing in the sealed pond.
Here is another example.
If you grow a plant in a different type of soil, it will develop into a different species. This works for grasses and trees. For example, if you transplant a pine tree to a colder place, it will become a birch tree.
Support for these theories was generally crude and incomplete, to say the least.
Another basic idea behind the Lysenko movement was the notion of the inheritance of acquired characters. This has considerable intuitive appeal. When you see how plants adapt to their environment, it gives a kind of intuitive support for such an idea.
Also, Lysenko's followers believed that "sex cells originate and are built from particles that are formed from substances coming from different tissues and parts of organisms and undergo numerous (but regular) changes." This is just the theory of pangenesis again.
Even the existence of chromosomes was challenged. Genes did not exist in the theories of the Lysenkoists.
Impact
The older biologists were horrified with these lectures. But there were many people in the audiences who were pleased, for it demonstrated the great achievements of Soviet Science. Even if you knew better, you had to keep quiet for the political discipline being imposed on the people required complete acceptance of official Communist Party statements. The concept of the gene, for example, was considered an unscientific myth and so it could not even be discussed.
The penalty for disagreeing was severe. During the Stalin era, hundreds of thousands -- perhaps millions -- of people were imprisoned or killed.
As a result, Lysenko's teachings became official and the teaching of any other ideas about genetics was forbidden.
I'll remind you that this was happening at the time that Watson and Crick were elucidating the structure of DNA.
You should get the idea that there was a big difference between the state of knowledge in the two halves of the world.
Why Did This Happen?
To advance in your job under the Soviet system, you had to be politically correct. Essentially, your job as a scientist was to produce the results that your supervisor wanted. Most research institutes by this time were controlled not by scientists, but by politicians. Because of the power that Lysenko controlled, most "researchers" simply manipulated experiments to get acceptable results. Creating false evidence is, of course, even worse than believing a bad theory.
During the period from 1949 to 1954, there was a great push to get Lysenko's views into academic institutions. It presented a double problem. There was little the opposition could do. And there was no information coming from the West that would give students alternative ideas.
Because this happened during the period of rebuilding science, and an entire generation was completely influenced, Lysenko retarded the development of biology in the Soviet Union by some 40 years. His official influence ended by 1956. But so much damage had already been done -- he had devastated the ranks of the teachers and students--that it has taken a long time to get things back on track.
Scientists have to learn the ethics of how you do science. Administrators have had to learn that you don't promote people based on their political beliefs.
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I’ve painted a very negative picture of the Soviet Union. This is certainly not the only country that has misused science for political reasons.
There was a very unfortunate period in American history between 1915 and 1930 where we had laws that attempted to eliminate people who were “genetically undesirable.” Some of this screening took place during the process of immigration on Ellis Island in New York harbor.
The Nazi period in Germany took this to an extreme with its massive eugenic programs.
These should all be grim reminders of what can happen when you improperly mix science and politics.
Could it happen here? Could it happen again?
Just listen to the news.