Lysenkoism
The Lysenkoism was one of the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko founded in the 1930's pseudo-scientific doctrine that, among other things to the Lamarckismus anknüpfte. The central postulate of Lysenkoism was that the properties of cultivated plants and other organisms were not determined by genes , but only by environmental conditions. Even then, this was in no way compatible with the state of science.
Lysenko won a leading position in the Stalinist Soviet Union , especially between 1940 and 1962, as he succeeded in winning the dictator Josef Stalin as a sponsor. Serious crop losses were attributed to alleged saboteurs. Associated with this was a campaign against so-called “ fascist ” or “ bourgeois ” genetics and against those biologists who dealt with this discipline.
Lyssenko's rise
In 1931 the Central Committee of the CPSU passed a resolution according to which, within a few years, all types of grain cultivated in the USSR should be improved in various ways and at the same time adapted to all cultivation areas. This plan was nonsensical from a scientific point of view and could not be fulfilled even in a much longer period of time. At the conference of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1936, however, the agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who was then working at the All Union Institute for Genetics and Breeding Techniques in Odessa , announced that he would be able to achieve the planned goals in a very short time using unconventional methods. Lysenko rejected the prevailing doctrine in genetics and claimed that there are no genes at all and that different types of grain can be converted into one another through suitable culture conditions. He enjoyed the personal support of the dictator Josef Stalin , who publicly praised and patronized him.
As early as 1938 Lysenko was appointed president of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and his theses soon gained general validity in the Soviet Union, while critical voices - as was generally the case in that phase of Stalinism - were massively suppressed and hardly ever came into play. One of the central themes of Lysenkoism was not only the change in cereal varieties due to special cultivation conditions, but also the “species conversion”, in which rye plants should also emerge from wheat grains through certain cultivation conditions. The technique was also important, especially planting tree seedlings in “nests” close together so that only the best survived and the others “sacrificed” themselves in the course of “self-thinning”. In addition, Lyssenko promoted special fertilizer mixtures such as the combination of superphosphate and lime , which is ineffective because these two substances combine to form insoluble calcium phosphate .
The Soviet mass media portrayed Lysenko as a genius who revolutionized agriculture. The propaganda loved to bring out stories of simple farmers large, solved the practical by their skill and experience problems. Lyssenko enjoyed this media attention and used it to blacken geneticists and to spread his own ideas. Wherever he was unable to assert himself in the specialist field, propaganda helped him: Lysenko's successes were exaggerated and failures were hushed up. He rarely conducted controlled experiments , because he mainly relied on questionnaires from farmers, with which he "proved", for example, that the vernalization he advocated would increase wheat yields by 15%.
Lyssenko's political success was largely based on his origins as a farmer's child. Most of the biologists came from the bourgeoisie, which had been ideologically suspect since the October Revolution : workers and peasants should constitute the ruling class. Lysenko was also an enthusiastic supporter of Stalin and his system.
Lyssenko quickly had “solutions” ready for current problems. Whenever the Communist Party had decided to use a new type of grain or develop new agricultural land, Lysenko would come up with practical advice. He developed his ideas - vernalization , cutting off the leaves of cotton plants , planting trees in groups and even strange fertilizer mixtures - at such a rapid pace that academic scientists hardly had time to investigate these sometimes useless and often dangerous teachings and, if necessary, to accept them refute.
Consequences for the Soviet Union and science
The state-run press applauded Lyssenko's "practical progress" and questioned the motives of his critics. Eventually he was appointed by Stalin as his personal agricultural advisor - a position Lyssenko used to denounce biologists as “fly lovers and people who hates people”. He also continued the agitation against "saboteurs" who allegedly intended to ruin the economy of the USSR. Sabotage was a criminal offense in the Soviet Union. Lysenko - like the party - denied any difference between theoretical and practical biology.
The poor harvests of Soviet agriculture in the 1930s were due in large part to the fact that many farmers opposed the policy of collectivization . Lyssenko's methods offered a way to let the farmers take an active part in the harvest success and in the "agricultural revolution". For the party functionaries, a farmer who sowed grain - for whatever purpose - was useful, in contrast to the previously widespread practice of destroying grain in order not to leave it to the state.
The academic scholars, on the other hand, could not propose any innovations that were simple or immediately implementable, and so the charlatanry Lyssenkos gained a good reputation with the CPSU. This reputation also spread beyond the borders of the Soviet Union to other communist parties , where Lysenko's theses temporarily became the dominant doctrine .
Lyssenko's own science never existed. He copied the ideas of Ivan Michurin and applied a kind of Lamarckism . The plants, according to Lyssenko, changed their shape through hybridization , grafting and other non-genetic techniques. One reason for Lyssenko's success in the Soviet Union is seen in the fact that, according to the Marxist view of the time, hereditary influences on human development were minimal. Lysenko rejected ideas such as heredity or eugenics as a bourgeois influence on science, which had to be fought under the dictatorship of the proletariat .
The Lysenkoism was - as the Japhetic theory Nikolai Jakowlewitsch Marrs in linguistics - an outgrowth of the fact that a pseudo-scientific approach of ideology reasons in a totalitarian was supported dictatorship by any means.
Tracking Scientists and Subsequent Development
The initially still open arguments between the geneticists and the supporters of Lyssenko were decided when the geneticists lost all advocates in politics as a result of the " Great Terror " in 1937. As a result, many scientists (including Solomon Levit , Grigori Levizki , Isaak Agol , Georgi Nadson ) were arrested and liquidated on the pretext of cooperating with “enemies of the people”. Other geneticists were ousted from their posts due to reputational damage. The few geneticists' research centers that could last a little longer included that of Nikolai Kolzow , who was poisoned in 1940, and the Institute of Nikolai Wawilow . Wawilow was arrested in 1940 and died in prison three years later.
Genetics has been called a "fascist and bourgeois science". In 1948 genetics was officially declared a "bourgeois pseudoscience" - as a result, all remaining geneticists were released or imprisoned. Evolutionary biologists like Iwan Schmalhausen were also removed from their offices.
Stalin's successor Nikita Khrushchev was more critical of Lyssenko, but continued to support him. In 1962 his scientific misinterpretations and falsifications were criticized by prominent scientists, whereupon he was deposed as president of the Lenin Agricultural Academy in 1962. But it was only after Khrushchev's fall in October 1964 that Lyssenko's heresies could be labeled as such and rejected. In 1965/66, biology classes in the Soviet Union were suspended in order to develop new curricula and retrain teachers.
Today, the term “Lysenkoism” in a broader sense also generally refers to the political promotion of pseudo or unscientific theses and the hindering of the free development of science by politics.
Attempts at Rehabilitation in the 21st Century
Lysenkoism has been experiencing a renaissance in Russia since the second half of the 2000s. Initially non-specialist authors, now also biologists, publish texts in which the pseudo-scientific teaching is defended and z. T. is brought close to epigenetics . This is not correct, however, since in epigenetics the genes as such are not changed.
The renaissance of Lysenkoism stands in the context of a longing for past greatness and increasing sympathy for Stalin and a glorification of the time of his rule. Lysenko is portrayed as a patriot who, as a scientist, was ahead of his time, and his opponents, in particular Vavilov, as henchmen of the West and traitors . The topic has recently received attention in well-known newspapers such as the Literaturnaja Gazeta , although scientific facts are rarely discussed . Above all, however, according to a study by Uwe Hoßfeld, it is also a problem of social media, where facts and serious science do not play a role anyway. One of the relevant books with the title Dva mira, dve ideologii (Two Worlds, Two Ideologies) was even funded by the federal agency for press and public relations .
literature
- The situation in biological science. Meeting of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the USSR (July 31 - August 7, 1948). Stenographic report. Publishing house for foreign language literature, Moscow 1949 (in it Lyssenkos' report of the same name: pp. 9–59).
- Uwe Hossfeld , Lennart Olsson : From the Modern Synthesis to Lysenkoism, and Back? In: Science . Volume 297, No. 5578, 2002, pp. 55-56, doi: 10.1126 / science.1068355 .
- Shores Medvedev : The Lyssenko case. Science surrenders. Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg 1971, ISBN 3-455-05090-5 .
- Johann-Peter Regelmann: The history of Lyssenkoism. Rita G. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-88323-154-1 (also: Marburg, University, dissertation, 1978).
- Valery N. Soyfer: Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ 1994, ISBN 978-0-8135-2087-2 .
- Loren Graham : Lysenko's Ghost. Epigenetics and Russia . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA 2016, ISBN 978-0-674089051 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter von Sengbusch: Introduction to General Biology , 2nd ed. Springer 1977, p. 148
- ^ A b Peter von Sengbusch: Introduction to General Biology , 2nd ed. Springer 1977, p. 149.
- ↑ See Wrecking (Soviet Union) (Eng. WP).
- ^ Nikolai Krementsov: Stalinist Science . Princeton University Press, 1997.
- ^ A b Valery N. Soyfer: The consequences of political dictatorship for Russian science Nat Rev Genet 2, 2001, pp. 723-729.
- ^ Nikolai Krementsov: A "second front" in Soviet genetics: The international dimension of the Lysenko controversy, 1944-1947 . Journal of the History of Biology 29 (1996).
- ↑ Bruce Sterling, article Suicide by Pseudoscience , in: Wired 06/12 (June 2004), accessed October 6, 2013.
- ↑ What the Stalin nostalgia in Russia for curious flowers. In: Philippines: Freedom of the press under pressure. SRF , Kultur Kompakt, January 22, 2018
- ^ University of Jena: Lyssenkoism in Russia: A zombie returns. Retrieved October 11, 2017 . (German-language summary)
- ↑ Edouard I. Kolchinsky, Ulrich Kutschera , Uwe Hossfeld , Georgy S. Levit: Russia's new Lysenkoism . In: Current Biology . tape 27 , no. 19 , October 9, 2017, ISSN 0960-9822 , p. R1042 – R1047 , doi : 10.1016 / j.cub.2017.07.045 , PMID 29017033 . ( Full text online )