Word: lysenko
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During Stalin's iron rule, he commanded virtually unlimited support for his outlandish agricultural schemes, controlled the direction of research in areas far beyond his competence-and set back Soviet genetics nearly a generation. Indeed, when Izvestia last week belatedly revealed the death of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko at age 78 in a brief back-page announcement, his bitter legacy was still all too apparent. Only now are the biological sciences in the U.S.S.R. finally recovering from what the American geneticist I. Michael Lerner calls "the most bizarre chapter in the history of modern science...
That chapter began in the bloody 1930s when Lysenko, a young plant breeder from the Ukraine, burst onto the Soviet scientific scene with a beguiling claim: that the inheritance of physical characteristics could be manipulated in plants by their environment. It was an idea totally at odds with modern genetics, which holds that an organism's basic color or shape, say, is passed from one generation to the next by the genes with inflexible regularity (except when they are mutated). But the theory was highly compelling to Stalin; he had become increasingly annoyed at the failure of conventional agricultural...
Miraculous Change. In his most famous experiment, Lysenko presoaked winter wheat seeds in chilly water just before they germinated, and claimed a miraculous conversion: the seedlings were turned into spring wheat, which matures more rapidly and thus can produce greater yields. By such tactics, he insisted, more crops could be planted under harsh Russian climatic conditions. But while such "vernalization" worked under test conditions, it failed on a large scale. Despite Lysenko's insistence, there was no evidence of any innate genetic changes; he had merely induced a single generation of wheat to mature a little more rapidly...
...Lysenko moved with Rasputin-like skill. Inviting critics to come forth at an "open" scientific meeting in 1948. he trapped them into confessing their adherence to the old "Mendel-Morgan" genetic heresies and, with Stalin's approval, replaced them with his cronies. As Director of the Genetics Institute of the Academy of Sciences, Lysenko banned all experiments in traditional genetics; even the fruit flies used in this work were destroyed by boiling...
...Theodosius Dobzhansky, 75, Russian-born geneticist whose work at U.S. universities and research institutes earned world acclaim; of a heart attack; in Davis, Calif. Dobzhansky, who came to the U.S. as a student and chose to remain when the spurious environmental doctrines of Stalin's pet geneticist, T.D. Lysenko, became Communist dogma, was best known for works such as Genetic Diversity and Human Equality and Heredity and the Nature...