Background

Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin was born on October 27, 1855, in Dolgoye, Ryazan Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ryazan', Russian Federation) to the family of Vladimir Ivanovich Michurin. His grandfather Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Naumovich were also interested in botany and gathered a rich collection of fruit-bearing trees. The family was impoverished gentry who lost their hereditary orchard. Michurin's mother was called Maria Petrovna and died when he was four years old.

Education

His early education including the one connected with botany Michurin received from his father. He graduated from the Pronsk District School and entered the Ryazan Men's Gymnasium. But he was soon expelled from the gymnasium under the pretext of "disrespect" to his superiors, and in fact, because these superiors demanded a bribe and did not receive it. Michurin dreamed of higher education, but he could not even finish high school.

Career

After being expelled Michurin worked as a railway clerk, signal repairman, and watchmaker until he saved enough money to buy some land and concentrate on breeding varieties of fruit for the harsh climate of north-central Russia. When his nursery proved commercially unsuccessful, he tried, between 1905 and 1908, to have it transformed into a government experiment station. Specialists in the Ministry of Agriculture rejected Michurin’s proposal, offering him a couple of medals as consolation prizes, which he accepted, and suggesting grants to aid contract research, which he refused. Somehow he kept his nursery going, although it was in poor condition; published occasional articles in horticultural journals; and developed a deep resentment of the official world of science.

During the revolution of 1917-1918 Michurin almost lost his thirty acres to the neighboring peasants. Two local agronomists, however, persuaded the new central government to transform the modest nursery into a state institution. The story of Lenin's personal support is unsubstantiated, but Michurin’s plant breeding station did get successive increases in government support during the 1920s. Through skillful appeals to journalists and politicians, Michurin won a reputation as “the Russian Burbank,” glorified for performing miracles without the benefit of diplomas and in spite of the disdainful opposition of academic scientists.

Achievements

• 

  Great fame and power came to Michurin in the early 1930s, during Stalin's “revolution from above,” which drove peasants into collective farms and pushed agricultural scientists into a centralized system of research and extension work, subject to frantic demands for quick, cheap solutions to overwhelming problems. Michurin was put in charge of an Institute directing fruit breeding for almost the entire country. Criticism of him was sharply rebuked. Indeed, Volodymyr Lvovych Simirenko, a leading specialist in horticulture, was denounced as a “wrecker” and was arrested after he had presided over a 1931 conference that refused to endorse Michurin’s idiosyncratic methods of breeding.
  
  Michurin died in 1935 when Lysenko was beginning his campaign against genetics. Very quickly Michurin was transformed into the patron saint of that campaign, and “Michurinism” became the official name of Lysenko's doctrine. Some geneticists tried to prove that Michurin’s methods and beliefs could be squared with their science, but such efforts were unavailing during the long period of Lysenko's dominance. from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s. After 1965, when Lysenko lost all political support, official sanction was bestowed on the view that Michurin was a breeder of genius whose unusual methods can be explained by genetics.
  
  Michurin's genuine contributions to horticulture are difficult to determine, in view of the great diversity of claims and the paucity of hard evidence. In 1931, for example, when he was claiming over 300 commercially useful varieties, only one of his creations was officially certified for use in Soviet orchards. Even after political pressure increased that number, few of his hybrids seem to have achieved significant commercial success; but a considerable number may have provided useful breeding stock for further experimentation.
  
  Michurin received the Imperial Order of Saint Anna 3rd Class in 1912, the Order of Lenin in 1931, and the Order of the Red Banner of Labour. He was named Honored Worker of Science and Technology of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In 1934 he was also given an Honorary Doctor of Sciences in Biology and Agriculture degree.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin: Selected Works 1949
  • Vegetative Hybridization and Mentors 1957

Religion

Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin was an atheist.

Politics

On the day after the October Revolution of 1917, despite the ongoing shooting on the streets, Michurin appeared in the newly organized county land department, where he met with the former farm laborer Dedov, the commissioner of the land department, and told him: “I want to work for the new government”. Since then Michurin was supported by the Soviet government up to the end of his life.

Views

Michurin's methods of breeding were partly commonplace and partly controversial. He insisted on hybridization as the only way to combine such qualities as the hardiness of a northern variety and the lusciousness of a southern one. He favored wide crosses. “to shake up the heredity,” followed by an intuitive selection of promising seedlings from the resulting mass of wildings. To facilitate wide crosses he urged “vegetative blending” (sblizhenie) - that is, grafting different species or genera onto one another to predispose them for cross-pollination. To train hybrid seedlings in desired directions, he recommended the use of “mentors,” grafting a seedling onto the variety he wished it to resemble.

In Michurin’s writings, justification of these methods is hand to distinguish from the ancient belief in vegetative hybrids - that is, hybridization by grafting, without the mixture of germplasm. That was how the Lysenkoites read Michurin, and one of the main reasons why named their anti-Mendelian doctrine “Michurinism.” (The other main reason was Michurin’s reputation as an untutored genius who achieved great things against the opposition of academic scientists.) Soviet geneticists who have tried to separate Michurin from “Michurinism” have argued that physiologic changes resulting from grafting may indeed predispose widely separated plants for cross-pollination and that the use of “mentors” may in fact serve the breeder’s purpose by affecting the penetrance or dominance of genes in complex situations.

Michurin himself resented efforts to subject his methods and beliefs to rigorous tests in accordance with the basic assumptions of genetics. He was annoyed by the combination of learned criticism and condescending praise that characterized scientific comments on his work down to the 1930s before the Stalinist regime raised him above criticism. Michurin was separated from modern biological science not only by his confessed ignorance of it but also by his objections. He was convinced, for example, that heredity “does not yield and in essence cannot conform to any patterns worked out by theoretical science and determined in advance.” In-plant breeding, he declared, “Not only is it impossible to apply any calculation in accordance with Mendel's law, but it is quite impossible to do any strictly precise work in accordance with a plan worked out in advance”: practical intuition must be the principal guide of the breeder, according to Michurin. At times he revealed the primitive vitalism of many gardeners, ascribing to “every living organism a reasoning [razumnuy] power of adaptability in the struggle for existence;” In the 1970s Michurin was largely ignored by Soviet biologists, although he continued to be admired by the ideological establishment.

Membership

Michurin was a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.

• 

  Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union , Soviet Union

Personality

Michurin was a stubborn person who wasn't able to receive critics of his ideas.

Connections

In 1874, Michurin married Alexandra Vasilyevna Petrushina, the daughter of a distillery worker. She died of cholera in 1911. They had two children: son Nikolai and daughter Maria.

Father:

Vladimir Ivanovich Michurin

Mother:

Maria Petrovna Michurina

late wife:

Alexandra Vasilyevna Petrushina

Son:

Nikolai Ivanovich Michurin

Daughter:

Maria Ivanovna Michurina

Acquaintance:

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov

Acquaintance:

Frank Meyer

Meyer tried to invite Michurin to the United States but the latter refused due to poor health and lack of proficiency in English.

Acquaintance:

Mikhail Kalinin

On September 11, 1922, Mikhail Kalinin visited Michurin at Lenin's personal request.

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography: Volumes 9 & 10
  1981
• Michurin Ivan Vladimirovich 1855-1935
  1963
• The Great Transformer of Nature - Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin
  1949
• Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin
  1950