The myths of modernity have tossed up their share of heroic martyrs, battling for science against the entrenched bureaucracies of ignorance and superstition. From the Roman Church’s inquisition of Galileo in 1616 to the State of Tennessee’s indictment of John Thomas Scopes in 1925, the tale that the modern age wants to tell, the self-image it wants to hold, is science that stands against the idols of the world to pronounce the truth, though the heavens fall. And then there’s Lysenko.
Lysenko. Trofim Lysenko. What an amazing figure he was. Lysenko’s Ghost, a new book by the American historian Loren Graham, traces the long-lasting effect the Soviet scientist had on Russian biology, but, really, that’s only the beginning of what we need to know about the man. If Galileo Galilei is taken to represent all the horrors that can descend when government represses science, then Trofim Lysenko ought to be equally representative—the figure who shows, more than any other, what can happen when government endorses science and empowers it.
Lysenko rose to prominence in the 1930s and 1940s in part because of the Soviet version of political correctness: He came from good peasant stock. Born in 1898, a young man during the 1917 revolution, the impoverished Lysenko had scrabbled to obtain his science education, and his background meant that he was exempt from the suspicions directed against all college professors, researchers, and intellectuals trained before the founding of the communist state.
But the proper political credentials only gave Lysenko his chance—and what makes him interesting is the way he seized that chance. In 1928, after working at an experimental agricultural station in Azerbaijan, he published a paper on wheat that caught the attention of the new post-Lenin government that Stalin had forged in Moscow. Lysenko reported that winter wheat (which must be planted in the fall and live through the winter) could be transformed into spring wheat (planted after the spring warming) by a treatment combining refrigeration with high humidity.
The idea wasn’t crazy. It also wasn’t exactly new, and Lysenko’s claims of huge increases in crop yield were exaggerated. Still, the Soviets had to try something. A series of harsh winters had been destroying the winter wheat that the Russians traditionally planted, and the state-directed farm collectives needed a technique for transforming their seeds into spring plants.
Called to Moscow and then sent on a lecture tour of collective farms, Lysenko proved inspirational. Preaching about the gains of modern research, drawing in his listeners with the promise of a grand adventure in science, he somehow inspired a good number of farmers to return to the lands that had been taken from them by the Soviets. By the mid-1930s, the less-than-impressive effect of the spring plantings was fully apparent, but Lysenko had already moved on, as his success at rebuilding the collectivist farms led to his appointment as the chief agricultural and biological bureaucrat in the Soviet Union.
Ideas fell from the man like dandruff. He reported that he had found a way to plant the dry fields of Azerbaijan with peas that would grow though the winter. He announced that his innovative crop rotation and aeration techniques would renew fields without using fertilizers or minerals. He claimed that bacterial interaction showed that mutual competition among species is matched by a process of mutual assistance, and he declared that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck—not Gregor Mendel or Charles Darwin—had discovered the true path for biology.
It’s there, in the history of Lamarckism, that mention of Lysenko is usually found. Teach a rat to navigate a maze, Lamarckism claims, and its offspring will inherit the knowledge. Why wouldn’t an animal that has to stretch its neck to reach edible leaves produce descendants with long necks? The appearance of giraffes suggests the inheritability of behavioral traits urged by Lamarck, and by Lysenko in his wake.
This theory of inherited traits was as widely rejected in the early decades of the twentieth century as it is today: Cut off a thousand dogs’ tails, and the dogs will still produce puppies with tails. But the usual way to tell the story of Trofim Lysenko is to claim that something in his Lamarckism spoke to Russian sensibility. The Soviets wanted to be scientific. Marxism is a dialectical materialism, after all. But they also wanted science to confirm Marxism. The rise of what would come to be called Social Darwinism in the 1870s had left Darwin’s theories with a tinge of unconstrained capitalism about them, and the communists needed an untainted theory of biology. Even more, they needed a biology that suggested human nature could be transformed—with generations of New Socialist Men created in the future by the behavior of Soviet revolutionaries in the present. And Lysenko’s grand biological theories seemed to give them what they needed, just as his smaller ideas about agriculture had seemed the way to solve famine in the Soviet Union.
This is the version of the scientist’s life told in Lysenko’s Ghost, and Graham argues that Lamarckism hasn’t disappeared from Russia even after the fall of the Soviet Union. In science textbooks issued by the Russian Orthodox Church, in some intellectual journals, and in popular culture, there’s been a recent effort to rehabilitate Lysenko in order to promote a science that affirms mutual assistance and inheritable virtues—unlike the war of all against all affirmed by science in the decadent capitalistic societies of the West. The effort is more minor than Graham can admit without losing the excuse to write a book even as small as the 200-page Lysenko’s Ghost, but there’s surely something intriguing in the fact that, for anyone, Lysenko would seem a good scientist.
A better way to understand Lysenko is to realize that the success he found in the Soviet Union did not come from the compatibility of his biology with communism. He had the sense to use a Marxist vocabulary to express his theories in a Marxist country, but he proved best at manipulating government bureaucracy. In 1940, he became a director of the Academy of Sciences, and in 1948 the Soviets announced that Lysenko’s work would be taught as "the only correct theory" of biology in Russian schools. Genetics was disgraced as a science, denounced as a capitalist invention, and over 3,000 Russian scientists were reported to the secret police and punished—some by exile to the gulag and death—for having the temerity to argue with Lysenko.
Loren Graham argues that Lysenko remains today a banner for authoritarianism and Russian nationalism. It’s certainly an embarrassment that keeps Russian universities and science academies from funding modern research on genetics, leaving Russian biotechnology far behind the science in countries even as small as South Korea. Lysenko’s Ghost spends much of its energy dismissing any notion that recent theories of "epigenetic transgenerational inheritance" mean that Lysenko had been on the right track. Inherited behavioral traits are still bad science, and any rehabilitation of Lysenko, Graham suggests, proves nothing more than "the continuing strength of the belief in the superiority of collectivism over individualism" in modern Russia.
That may be true, but we need to remember that it is a derived effect, a result of the justifications offered by the Soviets for the power Lysenko wielded. Down through the years, the man’s name picked up that Russian odor, assumed that Russian valence: redolent of the self-declared war of the true science of Marxism against the false science of the capitalist West. But the influence of Lyskeno’s biology began not with its Marxism but with Lysenko’s power. A modern bureaucracy proved the perfect stage for a huckster with the right socio-economic background, a gift of gab, and a taste for authority. He wanted power over science, and he got it.
If, in the myths of modernity, Galileo stands as the figure, the archetype, who reminds us why we should be wary of subordinating science to the interests of an anti-science government, Trofim Lysenko stands as the figure, the archetype, who reminds us why we should be wary of subordinating science to the interests of a pro-science government. The problem isn’t the government’s attitude toward science. The problem is the power offered by government—and the power-hungry people anxious to seize it.