Lysenko Quotes

Let us hope that Lysenko's success in Russia will serve for many generations to come as another reminder to the world of how quickly and easily a science can be corrupted when ignorant political leaders deem themselves competent to arbitrate scientific disputes.

The real purpose of studying heredity is to determine the relation of an organism of a given nature to its environmental conditions.

Honest dissent and unorthodox ideas often promote scientific knowledge. Even though more often wrong than right, unorthodox ideas are apt to stimulate some clear thinking among the orthodox. And from time to time, a doubter makes a basic discovery. But the lysenkoism is quite sterile of ideas and of suggestions for new experiments. It urges a retreat to archaic views, long abandoned with sufficient reason. In this, the lysenkoism is comparable only to the anti-evolutionism in the USA. New arguments and new facts mean just as little to the lysenkoists as they do to the anti-evolutionists.

During the war, Monod had joined the Communist Party as a matter of expediency, so that he could join the FTP. But he developed reservations about the Communists’ intolerance of other political views and quietly quit the Party after the war, at a time when many fellow citizens were joining. That might have been the end of Monod’s involvement with Communism, were it not for bizarre developments in the sphere of Soviet science. In the summer of 1948, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, Joseph Stalin’s anointed czar of Soviet agriculture, launched a broad attack on the science of genetics. Lysenko believed that virtually any modification could be made rapidly and permanently to any plant or animal and passed on to its offspring. His belief, while consistent with Soviet doctrine that nature and man could be shaped in any way and were unconstrained by history or heredity, flew in the face of the principles of genetics that had been established over the previous fifty years. Nevertheless, Lysenko demanded that classical genetics, and its supporters, be purged from Soviet biology. Lysenko’s outrageous statements were heralded in Communist-run newspapers in France. Monod responded with a devastating critique that ran on the front page of Combat. Monod exposed Lysenko’s stance on genetics as antiscientific dogma and decried Lysenko’s power as a demonstration of “ideological terrorism” in the Soviet Union. The public scrutiny damaged the credibility of Soviet socialism in France. The episode thrust Monod into the public eye and made him resolve to “make his life’s goal a crusade against antiscientific, religious metaphysics, whether it be from Church or State.

2.​Of course religion is not the sole source of dogma in the world. There’s political dogma, as well as cultural & ethnic dogma. There’s even, on occasion, scientific dogma. But science contains the methods and tools within itself to ferret it out, so dogma in science doesn’t last long when it arises. Consider also that scientists hardly ever wield power. So when science becomes dogma in a country, it’s usually because a political system that is itself dogma has adopted it. Nazi Germany and communist Lysenko Russia are, perhaps, the best example of this.

Lysenkoism may be useful only because it provides a lesson. Whether we like it or not, the days of the independent scientist and of independent science are about over. The more important science becomes in the lives of individuals and of nations, the more it will need popular support and will have to submit to social control. But the forms and techniques of this support and control have not yet been devised and tested. The problem is a new one. The Soviet rulers have tried a solution, but their solution has resulted in lysenkoism, and thus proved to be a dismal failure.

Now, quite apart from the fact that, from the point of view of the Earther, socialism suffers the devastating liability of only exhibiting internal contradictions when you are trying to use it as an adjunct to your own stupidity (unlike capitalism, which again, from the point of view of the Earther, happily has them built in from the start), it is the case that because Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules, it will always stay at least one kick ahead of its rivals. Thus, while it takes Soviet Russia a vast amount of time and hard work to produce one inspired lunatic like Lysenko, the West can so arrange things that even the dullest farmer can see it makes more sense to burn his grain, melt his butter and wash away the remains of his pulped vegetables with his tanks of unused wine than it does to actually sell the stuff to be consumed.

Nazism and Lysenkoism were based on dramatically opposed conceptions of heredity—but the parallels between the two movements are striking. Although Nazi doctrine was unsurpassed in its virulence, both Nazism and Lysenkoism shared a common thread: in both cases, a theory of heredity was used to construct a notion of human identity that, in turn, was contorted to serve a political agenda. The two theories of heredity may have been spectacularly opposite—the Nazis were as obsessed with the fixity of identity as the Soviets were with its complete pliability—but the language of genes and inheritance was central to statehood and progress: it is as difficult to imagine Nazism without a belief in the indelibility of inheritance as it is to conceive of a Soviet state without a belief in its perfect erasure. Unsurprisingly, in both cases, science was deliberately distorted to support state-sponsored mechanisms of “cleansing.” By appropriating the language of genes and inheritance, entire systems of power and statehood were justified and reinforced. By the mid-twentieth century, the gene—or the denial of its existence—had already emerged as a potent political and cultural tool. It had become one of the most dangerous ideas in history.

The history of another country, one Americans don’t much like comparing themselves with, illustrates the grave dangers of yoking political ideology to dubious science. In the 1930s under Joseph Stalin, the quack “scientist” Trofim Lysenko, who promoted himself through party newspapers rather than rigorous experiments, rose to prominence and took control of Soviet biological, medical, and agricultural research for several decades. Lysenko used his power to prosecute an ideologically driven crusade against the theory of genetics, which he denounced as a bourgeois affront to socialism. In short, his political presuppositions led him to embrace bogus scientific claims. In the purges that followed, many of Lysenko’s scientist critics lost their jobs and suffered imprisonment and even execution. By 1948 Lysenko had convinced Stalin to ban the study of genetics. Soviet science suffered immeasurable damage from the machinations of Lysenko and his henchmen, and the term “Lysenkoism” has since come to signify the suppression of, or refusal to acknowledge, science for ideological reasons. In a democracy like our own, Lysenkoism is unlikely to take such a menacing, totalitarian form. Nevertheless, the threat we face from conservative abuse of science—to informed policymaking, to democratic discourse, and to knowledge itself—is palpably real. And as the modern Right and the Bush administration flex their muscles and continue to battle against reliable, mainstream conclusions and sources of information, this threat is growing.

This extreme situation in which all data is processed and all decisions are made by a single central processor is called communism. In a communist economy, people allegedly work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs. In other words, the government takes 100 per cent of your profits, decides what you need and then supplies these needs. Though no country ever realised this scheme in its extreme form, the Soviet Union and its satellites came as close as they could. They abandoned the principle of distributed data processing, and switched to a model of centralised data processing. All information from throughout the Soviet Union flowed to a single location in Moscow, where all the important decisions were made. Producers and consumers could not communicate directly, and had to obey government orders. For instance, the Soviet economics ministry might decide that the price of bread in all shops should be exactly two roubles and four kopeks, that a particular kolkhoz in the Odessa oblast should switch from growing wheat to raising chickens, and that the Red October bakery in Moscow should produce 3.5 million loaves of bread per day, and not a single loaf more. Meanwhile the Soviet science ministry forced all Soviet biotech laboratories to adopt the theories of Trofim Lysenko – the infamous head of the Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rejected the dominant genetic theories of his day. He insisted that if an organism acquired some new trait during its lifetime, this quality could pass directly to its descendants. This idea flew in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy, but it dovetailed nicely with communist educational principles. It implied that if you could train wheat plants to withstand cold weather, their progenies will also be cold-resistant. Lysenko accordingly sent billions of counter-revolutionary wheat plants to be re-educated in Siberia – and the Soviet Union was soon forced to import more and more flour from the United States.

A note of caution: epigenetics is also on the verge of transforming into a dangerous idea. Epigenetic modifications of genes can potentially superpose historical and environmental information on cells and genomes—but this capacity is speculative, limited, idiosyncratic, and unpredictable: a parent with an experience of starvation produces children with obesity and overnourishment, while a father with the experience of tuberculosis, say, does not produce a child with an altered response to tuberculosis. Most epigenetic “memories” are the consequence of ancient evolutionary pathways, and cannot be confused with our longing to affix desirable legacies on our children. As with genetics in the early twentieth century, epigenetics is now being used to justify junk science and enforce stifling definitions of normalcy. Diets, exposures, memories, and therapies that purport to alter heredity are eerily reminiscent of Lysenko’s attempt to “reeducate” wheat using shock therapy. Mothers are being asked to minimize anxiety during their pregnancy—lest they taint all their children, and their children, with traumatized mitochondria. Lamarck is being rehabilitated into the new Mendel. These glib notions about epigenetics should invite skepticism. Environmental information can certainly be etched on the genome. But most of these imprints are recorded as “genetic memories” in the cells and genomes of individual organisms—not carried forward across generations. A man who loses a leg in an accident bears the imprint of that accident in his cells, wounds, and scars—but does not bear children with shortened legs. Nor has the uprooted life of my family seem to have burdened me, or my children, with any wrenching sense of estrangement. Despite Menelaus’s admonitions, the blood of our fathers is lost in us—and so, fortunately, are their foibles and sins. It is an arrangement that we should celebrate more than rue. Genomes and epigenomes exist to record and transmit likeness, legacy, memory, and history across cells and generations. Mutations, the reassortment of genes, and the erasure of memories counterbalance these forces, enabling unlikeness, variation, monstrosity, genius, and reinvention—and the refulgent possibility of new beginnings, generation upon generation.

The history of the party had been revised several times, when Trotsky or others fell into disfavor and thus some pages or chapters had to be rewritten as heroes became thugs; as heroic revolutionaries became bourgeois lackeys. We had a teacher of linguistics who talked about language, meaning Russian or Ukrainian. Poor guy, young comrade Lysenko knew so little and felt so out of place when asked about romance or germanic languages. He looked like a bantam fighter, small and chunky. When he got drunk at the New Year's party, he, the comrade, kissed every girl's hand like a little comic figure.

began to make fun of sociology in the college paper in my column and got into more trouble. Some of the columns were 'killed' before seeing the light. I was still too ignorant to know that I was fighting Lysenko and Marx and the whole Soviet theory of environmentalism -- which has captured and hypnotized or terrorized all our intellectuals -- and I imagined I was battling just one foolish college course! During

Dimka kept his face expressionless. Trofim Lysenko was a scientific charlatan, a clever self-promoter who had won Khrushchev’s favor even though his research was worthless. He promised improved yields that never materialized, but he managed to persuade political leaders that his opponents were “anti-progress,” an accusation that was as fatal in the USSR as “Communist” was in the USA

Organisms which cannot change in accordance with the changed conditions of life do not survive, leave no progeny.

Heredity is the effect of the concentration of the action of environmental conditions assimilated by the organism in a series of preceding generations.

Every living body builds itself out of nonliving material, in other words, out of food, out of the environmental conditions.

parallel with similarity between species there always exists specific distinctness, which divides organic nature into qualitatively distinguishable yet interlocking links, or species.

Michurin's teaching, creative Darwinism, does not regard development as continuous evolution but as the genesis of a new quality within the old, of a quality that contradicts the old, which undergoes a gradual quantitative accumulation of its peculiar features and in the process of its struggle against the old quality constitutes itself into a new, fundamentally different totality of properties with its own distinct law of existence.

The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century give us the starkest examples of such insanity. Stalin persecuted genetics researchers in the 1930s and ostentatiously praised the scientist Trofim Lysenko when he claimed that genetics was a “bourgeois perversion” and geneticists were “saboteurs”. The resulting crop failures killed millions. For an encore, Stalin ordered the killing of the statistician in charge of the 1937 census, Olimpiy Kvitkin. Kvitkin’s crime was that his census revealed a fall in population as a result of that famine. Telling that truth could not be forgiven. In May, the great crop scientist Yuan Longping died at the age of 90. He led the research effort to develop the hybrid rice crops that now feed billions of people. Yet in 1966, he too came very close to being killed as a counter-revolutionary during China’s cultural revolution. In western democracies we do things differently. Governments do not execute scientists; they sideline them. Late last year, Undark magazine interviewed eight former US government scientists who had left their posts in frustration or protest at the obstacles placed in their way under the presidency of Donald Trump. Then there are the random acts of hostility on the street and the death threats on social media. I have seen Twitter posts demanding that certain statisticians be silenced or hunted down and destroyed, sometimes for doing no more than publishing graphs of Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations. Even when this remains at the level of ugly intimidation, it is horrible to hear about and must be far worse to experience. It is not something we should expect a civil servant, a vaccine researcher or a journalist to have to endure. And it would be complacent to believe that the threats are always empty.

bourgeois scientists found it necessary to invent the intraspecific struggle. They say that a fierce struggle for food, of which there is an insufficiency, goes on in nature, within the species, among its individual members – a struggle for the conditions of life. The stronger, fitter individuals win. The same thing, they aver, goes on among human beings: the capitalists, you see, are brainier, are more capable by nature and heredity. We Soviet people know full well that the oppression of the working people, the domination of the capitalist class and imperialist war have nothing in common with the laws of biology. These phenomena are all governed by the laws of decaying bourgeois, capitalist society, which has outlived its day. Nor is there any intraspecific competition in nature itself.

Humans can engineer Architecture. Architecture cannot engineer humans.

hypothetical genes are endowed with miraculous properties. The main property of a gene is to act as an ‘unmoved mover’ ...

genes are an image of the ruling class as it sees itself.

There is a very close parallel between the idea of genes in biology and the political idea of an élite, a ‘chosen’ ruling class.

In the 1920s, Anglo-American medicine was praised for its political independence...especially in comparison to the USSR and Lysenkoism. In the 2020s, Anglo-American science is mocked around the world for exchanging empirical observation for the cheap thrill of political relevance.

Lysenko had publicly come out in favor of a technique of close planting of crop seeds in order to increase output. The theory was that plants of the same species would not compete with each other for nutrients. This fitted in with Marxist and Maoist ideas about organisms from the same class living in harmony rather than in competition. “With company, they grow easy,” Mao told colleagues. “When they grow together, they will be comfortable.” The Chinese leader drew up an eight-point Lysenko-inspired blueprint for the Great Leap Forward, and persecuted Western-trained scientists and geneticists with the same kind of ferocity as in the Soviet Union.

In experimental science, to say that one understands a process, or can explain it, means that one can control it.