Foreign News: King of the Dunghill

Trofim Lysenko is an egregiously indestructible plant breeder from the Ukrainian black-earth belt who long ago won world notoriety, scientific contempt and Stalinist favor with his attempt to rewrite nature to suit Marx. A weird cross between sinister charlatan and seedy fanatic. Lysenko used his political influence, based on Stalin's favor, to wreak ruthless vengeance on his critics, the scholars who had made genetics—until his rise—the pride of Russian science.

Lysenko argued that newly acquired characteristics could be genetically passed on through succeeding generations, a provably quack notion that served the Communist notion of making over man by making over society. In 1939 he engineered the disgrace of the Soviet

Union's leading geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, the pioneer who showed by applying Mendelian principles of selective breeding that wheat could be developed sturdy enough to grow profitably in all of Russia's diverse climates and soils. So powerful was Lysenko that not even Nikolai's brother, a leading member of the mighty Academy of Sciences itself (and later its president), could save Nikolai Vavilov, who died in a Siberian concentration camp in 1943.

Seed-Time. In 1948 Lysenko got official Communist endorsement for his "theories," which meant that anyone who challenged them was setting himself up against the party. A new wave of dismissals and Siberian imprisonments engulfed rival biologists and geneticists. In 1956, in the period of destalinization, Lysenko suffered partial eclipse. Party chieftains criticized his theories, and official journals exposed reports by his supporters as fakes; many of his victims were rehabilitated and reinstated. Soviet biology began to recover as a science.

But Lysenko has the resistance and recuperative power of ragweed. A practical botanist of some skill, he concentrated on improving corn, and thereby worked his way into the graces of corn-loving Nikita Khrushchev, a practical man with a built-in contempt for academics. When he saw tall corn nurtured on a particularly thrifty mixture of manure and factory fertilizers, Khrushchev proclaimed: "Biological disputes should be settled in the fields. Comrade Lysenko has shown astonishing results." No sooner had Khrushchev called for a drive to overtake the U.S. in milk production than the practical Lysenko was out in his barns feeding calving cows extra-rich feeds and trying to prove that the calves produced would grow up to give milk containing 5% butterfat.