• DOI:10.1038/embor.2009.198
• Corpus ID: 40073749

Science and politics

@article{Liu2009ScienceAP,
  title={Science and politics},
  author={Yongsheng Liu and Bao Qin Li and Qinglian Wang},
  journal={EMBO reports},
  year={2009},
  volume={10}
}

• Yongsheng Liu, B. Li, Qinglian Wang
• Published 1 September 2009
• Biology
• EMBO reports

In his 1977 obituary of Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976), the British biologist Cyril Darlington (1903–1981) commented that Lysenko was “obviously ill‐educated, quite shallow, very cunning and a little deranged” (Darlington, 1977). Lysenko's rejection of Mendelian genetics in favour of Lamarckism, his embrace of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Michurin (1855–1935), and his claims that plants can be heritably altered by graft hybridization or environmental conditions certainly ran counter to mainstream biological research. His influence and thirst for power had an impact on many areas of Soviet science and politics. The Soviet government imposed a complete ban on the practice and teaching of Mendelian genetics. Russian biological science, which had previously flourished, rapidly declined (Soyfer, 2001).

Lysenko was born into a peasant family in the Ukraine and achieved acclaim working as a plant biologist in the late 1920s. His pioneering work on vernalization and his claim that pre‐treating seeds in such a way that the treatment's effects were …