Word: lysenko
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Whatever Stalin's reasons, he permitted Lysenko to establish his naive and bungling doctrines as an officially supported cult. Critics were punished or silenced...
Spreading Blight. The effect of Lysenkoism on Soviet agriculture was disastrous. While other countries were using genetics to improve their crop yields mightily, the Soviet Union fell behind. None of Lysenko's alleged achievements ever proved practical. Most of his startling, experimental "results," never described in full detail, appear to have been caused by sloppy procedure. Western experts could never repeat his experiments and make them come out the way he said they...
...Lysenko's malign influence extended beyond genetics into other phases of Soviet agriculture. He was largely responsible for a costly and disastrous experiment with forest-belt planting. His notions about crop rotation cost the country in one season as much grain as would have been produced by 6,000,000 acres. He refused to introduce hybrid corn, the most spectacular practical achievement of Western plant genetics. The blight of Lysenkoism even touched far-distant sciences, including chemistry and physics, where Marxist dogmatists denounced useful and well-proved principles as tainted with Western error...
...Soviet Union's famed Geneticist Trofim D. Lysenko, currently out of favor with his bosses, has tried hard-perhaps too hard-for a comeback. At a conference on farm problems, he backed a "new Russian agricultural discovery": plowless farming. Despite Booster Lysenko's proprietary enthusiasm, the technique (loosening soil with a disk harrow instead of plow-turning it over) is old hat to Western experts, has been tried experimentally in various parts of the U.S. for more than a decade...
...first the institute refused to grant the degree, but Lysenko is the institute's head. When his favorite was turned down, said Professor Stankov, Lysenko intervened "with his customary sharpness," condemning Dmitriev's critics as "Weismannists."* On Feb. 20 the institute reconsidered. The degree was granted, and Professor Stankov' denounced the action as "a mockery of Soviet science...