Background
The son of Denis and Oksana Lysenko, Trofim Lysenko was born into a peasant family in Karlivka, Poltava Governorate (in present-day Poltava Oblast, Ukraine) on 29 September 1898.
(CONTENTS Biology, the Basis of Agronomy The History of Bi...)
CONTENTS Biology, the Basis of Agronomy The History of Biology: A History of Ideological Battle Two Worlds---Two Ideologies in Biology The Scholasticism of Mendelism-Morganism The Idea of Unknowability in the Teaching on "Hereditary Substance" The Sterility of Morganism-Mendelism Michurin's Teaching, the Foundation of Scientific Biology Young Soviet Biologists Should Study the Michurin Teaching For a Creative Scientific Biology Concluding Remarks Appendix.---Resolution Adopted by the Session of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the USSR on the Address Delivered by T. D. Lysenko on the Situation in Biological Science
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(This is a collection of papers and addresses by Academici...)
This is a collection of papers and addresses by Academician Trofim Denisovich Lysenko on the nutrition of plants by the soil and the fertilization of fields
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The son of Denis and Oksana Lysenko, Trofim Lysenko was born into a peasant family in Karlivka, Poltava Governorate (in present-day Poltava Oblast, Ukraine) on 29 September 1898.
He studied at the Poltava Primary School for Horticulture and Gardening (1913 - 1917) and at the Uman School for Horticulture (1917 - 1921), after which he was assigned to the Belotserkovsky Experimental Station and went on to the Kiev Agricultural Institute, continuing his studies until 1925.
Lysenko accepted a position at the Kirovabad experimental station in Azerbaijan, where he worked out his theory on the stages of plant development. According to initial reports from Soviet collective farms, vernalization was something of a sensation, and Lysenko was appointed director of the Odessa Plant Breeding-Genetics Institute.
His school of "genetic" thought also received the personal endorsement of Joseph Stalin.
Reigning as the supreme authority in practical and theoretical agriculture, Lysenko advised the hierarchy of the Communist party on land reclamation and reforestation, the use of fertilizers, and methods of increasing crop and animal yields. Between 1954 and 1968 Lysenko's theories and contributions came under increasing scrutiny, but he managed to hold on to most of his positions mainly because of the intervention of Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
By 1963 the Central Committee of the Communist party and the U. S. S. R. Council of Ministers became alarmed that Soviet Russia was lagging dangerously behind the West in several critical branches of biology and medicine. Later Years When Khrushchev was replaced, the monopolistic position of Lysenko and his followers in biology ended. Lysenko was charged with being oblivious to the recent advances in contemporary biology and with employing "administrative methods" to gain support for his theories and programs. Scientists both inside and outside the then Soviet Union were never able to validate his theories.
In 1965 the new scientific journal Genetics appeared, sponsored by the Soviet Academy of Sciences; this marked the restoration of genetics to a respectable position in Soviet science. Lysenko was nevertheless permitted to head a laboratory at the Institute of Genetics, and his popularity with the Soviet Union's collective farmers hardly diminished-they understood his language, methods, and ideas.
Lysenko died in Moscow on November 20, 1976, at the age of 78.
(CONTENTS Biology, the Basis of Agronomy The History of Bi...)
(This is a collection of papers and addresses by Academici...)
Reigning as the supreme authority in practical and theoretical agriculture, Lysenko advised the hierarchy of the Communist party on land reclamation and reforestation, the use of fertilizers, and methods of increasing crop and animal yields.
Lysenko's theory to explain the process of vernalization was challenged in 1934 by Soviet scientists as a repudiation of the classical Mendelian theory of heredity and variation, which is based on the idea that genes are the carriers of hereditary characteristics.
Lysenko defended his theory, known as "Lysenkoism, " and launched a vicious attack on Soviet geneticists. It took him and his followers three contrived conferences and a dozen years (1936 - 1948) to topple Soviet geneticists from leading positions in research centers and educational institutions. Outstanding geneticists were vilified as "enemies of the people. "
Lysenko believed that in one generation of a hybridized crop, the desired individual could be selected, mated again, and continue to produce the same desired product, not worrying about separation/segregation in future breeds. For that to work, he had to assume that after a lifetime of developing (acquiring) the best set of traits to survive, those were passed down to the next generation. That assumption disregarded the potential for variation or mutation. Lysenko did not believe that genes or DNA existed, and only spoke about them to say that they did not exist. He instead believed that any body, once alive, obtained heredity. That meant that the entirety of the body was able to pass on the hereditary information of that organism, and was not dependent on a special element such as DNA or genes. That puzzled biologists at that time because it went against all established notions of heredity and inheritance. It also contradicted the Mendelian principles that most biologists had been using to base their ideas on.
Quotations: According to Lysenko: "The organism and the conditions required for its life are an inseparable unity. Different living bodies require different environmental conditions for their development. By studying these requirements we come to know the qualitative features of the nature of organisms, the qualitative features of heredity. Heredity is the property of a living body to require definite conditions for its life and development and to respond in a definite way to various conditions. "