LYSENKO STALIN’S SCIENTIST

“If you want a particular result you obtain it... I need only people who will obtain what I require” – Trofim Lysenko

Anyone reading the above quote, with no prior knowledge of the speaker, and assuming them to be some malevolent dictator, would be forgiven. Ostensibly, Trofim Lysenko was an agricultural scientist, though when examining his actions one discovers an individual who was perhaps more suited to the former role than the latter. At his death on 20th November 1976, there was no hint of sorrow among the scientific community, no suggestion that the world had lost a great scientific mind – only condemnation.

This is hardly surprising, as Lysenko was responsible for not only (to quote an issue of Current Biology) “the effective destruction of genetics in the USSR and the arrest of outstanding geneticists such as Nikolai Vavilov”, but also for prolonging famines that killed millions. Yet who was this deadly scientist who is now the subject of a revival of interest?

Trofim Lysenko was born on 19 September 1898 to a peasant family in Karlivka, Poltava Oblast in Ukraine. The oldest of the family’s four children, Lysenko would busy himself about the farm in his youth, giving him a taste for agriculture at an early age. It would be 20 years, however, until the young man would turn this passion into an academic career. Learning to read and write only during his late teens, he obtained a place at the Uman School, Loren Graham, explained in a 2017 interview on WBUR radio station: “There was an agricultural crisis and they needed more crops, higher yields. Part of the reason why they were in crisis, and part of the reason why there was famine in some areas, was because of the recent [communist] collectivisation program in agriculture.”