“The good thing about science,” writes astronomy popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson, “is that it’s true whether you believe in it or not.” One could also state that the opposite can be the case — merely wishful thinking will not alter the rules of the material world. Or the biological one. But this is not what the infamous Soviet scientist Trofim Lysenko thought, and his influence was one of the main contributors to famines that killed millions of people.
Born in 1898, Lysenko came from a family of peasants and was illiterate until he was 13. As Russia moved into communism, he benefited from the system which eventually provided him an education. His ideals aligned with Marxism: unification of the working social classes and a faith in the role of the external environment to produce the best society. And Lysenko took these ideals to heart but applied them to science. And specifically, agriculture.
To us today, his notions seem silly: he did not believe in genes, but rather that “training” plants through exposure he called “shock therapy” would result in crops adaptable to all sorts of soils and weather. He could grow wheat and rice in the coldest winters and driest summers, he boasted. Furthermore, he taught that seeds should be planted hyper close together, because “plants from the same ‘class’ never compete with each other”. Whelp.
Obviously, these ideas were groundless, but Lysenko was given Stalin’s full support in implementing them into his agricultural program. The famines that Stalin generated killed millions of people. Furthermore, anyone opposing the agricultural minister wound up imprisoned, fired, or even executed.
Source(s): _The Atlantic_, “The Soviet Era’s Deadliest Scientist Is Regaining Popularity in Ruasia,” Sam Mean, Dec 19, 2017. _The Gene_ Siddartha Mukherjee, 2017, Scribner, 125-128.
