SELDOM BEFORE in the history of modern science has a crackpot achieved the eminence, adulation, and power achieved by Trofim D. Lysenko, the Soviet Union’s leading authority on evolution and heredity. Not only have his opinions been pronounced dogma by the Kremlin, but his Russian opponents (whose views are held everywhere but in the USSR) in recent years have been systematically eliminated from their posts. Some have died in prison camps. Some have simply vanished. A few remain at work—but it is work in other fields of biology.
What is behind this seeming insanity—this apparently planned destruction of one branch of science? Indefensible though it is, we can understand it better if we know something of the ideological issues involved, and the principal events which preceded Lysenko’s fantastic rise.
The story begins in the eighteenth century with a French scientist, Jean Lamarck. Lamarck has been truly called the Father of Evolution. Although his books were published a half-century before Darwin’s and lacked sufficient facts to convince his colleagues, he had a magnificent vision of the slow evolutionary development of plants and animals through the vast aeons of geologic time. The mechanism by which evolution operated, Lamarck believed, was through the inheritance of traits which organisms acquired in response to their surroundings.
The classic illustration of this “inheritance of acquired characters” is Lamarck’s description of how giraffes developed elongated necks. The giraffes found themselves in an area in which they could live only by eating leaves which grew high on trees. They stretched their necks to reach these leaves. Somehow, this stretching, and the desire to stretch, got passed on to later generations. Giraffes with longer and longer necks were born.
Darwin was actually a “Lamarckian” in the sense that he also accepted the inheritance of acquired characters, but he made the role which it played in evolution a small one. More important, he argued, was the fact that some giraffes would be born with shorter necks and some with longer. Those with the short necks would be more likely to die. Those with longer ones would survive. In this way, “natural selection,” or “survival of the fittest,” would eventually result in longer necked giraffes.
Modern evolutionary theory has discarded the Lamarckian approach entirely in favor of natural selection, though its explanation of how selection operates differs considerably from Darwin’s. It is now known that the units of heredity are submicroscopic bodies called “genes,” carried within the sperm and eggs. Each new animal has a combination of genes acquired from both parents. These genes determine the animal’s growth. Occasionally, however, a “mutation” occurs—a gene is changed. When this happens the animal carrying the new gene grows up with something in its structure altered, though the alteration is usually slight.
Mutations occur at random and are not connected in any way with an animal’s experience. When a mutation is harmful, the animal’s chances of survival are lessened. If helpful, the chances are increased. In individual cases this means little, but over long periods of time these tiny changes have an accumulated effect on the population of a group. Eventually, the helpful mutations establish themselves as part of the collective heredity of the species.
There are many reasons for thinking this the basic process by which evolution works. In ant, bee, and wasp colonies, for example, “worker” insects are sterile and do not leave descendants. Yet they are marvelously adapted to their tasks. A Lamarckian explanation of this is unthinkable, but the mutation theory explains it fairly well. Another strong argument is based on the complete lack of any conceivable means by which genes of the germ cells can be connected to other parts of the body. If Lamarck was correct, the stretching of a male giraffe’s neck would have to be transmitted somehow to that giraffe’s sperm. No such connection exists. In fact, many highly adapted structures are simply dead matter secreted from the body like fingernails—a butterfly’s wings for instance. There is no imaginable way the use of such non-living structures could influence the insect’s genes.
A host of experiments have been designed to test Lamarckianism. All that have been verified have proved negative. On the other hand, tens of thousands of experiments—reported in the journals and carefully checked and rechecked by geneticists throughout the world—have established the correctness of the gene-mutation theory beyond all reasonable doubt. The chromosomes, which carry the genes, have been studied in great detail. In recent years, the electron microscope has made visible what are probably the genes themselves.
In spite of the rapidly increasing evidence for natural selection, Lamarck has never ceased to have loyal followers. In Darwin’s day, the English satirist, Samuel Butler, devoted a half-dozen books to a defense of Lamarck and bitter attacks on Darwin. Later, George Bernard Shaw took up Butler’s cudgel. In France, where Lamarck’s views survived longer than in England or Germany, the philosopher Henri Bergson found that Lamarckianism fitted neatly into his concept of “creative evolution.” Both he and Shaw were “vitalists” who felt that back of evolution was a creative élan vital, or “life force,” which found expression in the constant striving of organisms to better themselves. In America, around the turn of the century, there were a number of neo-Lamarckians, of whom the most eminent was the psychologist William McDougall.
All these men were idealists. They objected to Darwin because they felt his theory left no room for free will and individual effort. Natural selection seemed a blind, purposeless struggle in which progress came about almost like an accidental afterthought. Just as orthodox Christians objected to evolution because it impressed them as a dreary, roundabout, wasteful method of creation compared to the story told in Genesis, so neo-Lamarckians felt that natural selection was a dreary, roundabout, and wasteful method compared to the transmission of acquired traits. There is indeed a strong emotional appeal in the thought that every little effort an animal puts forth is somehow transmitted to his progeny. It permits every individual to share directly in the process of evolution. The harder a rabbit tries to run, the faster will his offspring be able to run. The more a man uses his brain, the better brains will his children have.
Just as Lamarckianism combines easily with an idealism in which the entire creation is fulfilling God’s vast plan by constant upward striving, so also does it combine easily with political doctrines which emphasize the building of a better world. One of the most eloquent defenders of this aspect of Lamarckianism was a Viennese biologist and socialist, Paul Kammerer. His book The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics was translated into English in 1924, and from it, we can draw an extract which conveys vividly the strong appeal Lamarckianism has for the man with a social conscience.
“If acquired characteristics cannot be passed on,” Kammerer wrote, “as most of our contemporaneous naturalists contend, then no true organic progress is possible. Man lives and suffers in vain. Whatever he might have acquired in the course of a lifetime dies with him. His children and his children’s children must ever and again start from the bottom. . . . If acquired characteristics are occasionally inherited, then it becomes evident that we are not exclusively slaves of the past—slaves helplessly endeavoring to free ourselves of our shackles—but also captains of our future, who in the course of time will be able to rid ourselves, to a certain extent, of our heavy burdens and to ascend into higher and ever higher strata of development. Education and civilization, hygiene and social endeavors are achievements which are not alone benefiting the single individual, for every action, every word, aye, even every thought may possibly leave an imprint on the generation.”
Kammerer was responsible for a series of sensational laboratory experiments which seemed to prove the Lamarckian view. On the strength of them, he was offered in 1925 a chair at the University of Moscow, where the Lamarckian views of a Russian horticulturist named Michurin were popular. Shortly after he accepted the post, however, it was discovered that a number of his animal specimens had been deliberately faked. Kammerer denied everything, blaming one of his assistants. Few believed him. He willed his valuable library to the University of Moscow, his body to an anatomical school in Vienna, then shot himself with a revolver. He was the last Lamarckian whose writings and experiments carried, at least for a time, a tone of authority.
As Lamarckianism became more and more discredited throughout the world, it began to grow in popularity within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. A Russian film glorifying Kammerer was produced in which the faking of specimens was blamed on reactionary capitalist enemies. Nevertheless, many Russian biologists continued to do excellent work in the Mendelian gene-mutation theory (so called after the pioneer work of the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel), and it was not until the late thirties that Mendelianism began to be branded by the Party as “bourgeois idealism.” Henceforth events moved with grim rapidity.
H. J. Muller, Nobel Prize winner, who served as senior geneticist for four years (1933-37) at the Institute of Genetics in Moscow, wrote two authoritative articles on Lysenkoism for the Saturday Review of Literature, December 4, and 11, 1948. The following excerpts give a vivid picture of what took place.
“. . . In 1933 or thereabouts,” Muller wrote, “the geneticists Chet-verikoff, Ferry, and Ephroimson were all, on separate occasions, banished to Siberia, and Levitsky to a labor camp in the European Arctic . . . in 1936, the Communist geneticist Agol was done away with, following rumors that he had been convicted of ‘Menshevik idealism’ in genetics . . . it is impossible to learn the real causes of the deaths of such distinguished geneticists as Karpechenko, Koltzoff, Serebrovsky, and Levitsky. Certain it is, however, that from 1936 on Soviet geneticists of all ranks lived a life of terror. Most of them who were not imprisoned, banished, or executed were forced to enter other lines of work. The great majority of those who were allowed to remain in their laboratories were obliged to redirect their researches in such a way as to make it appear that they were trying to prove the correctness of the officially approved anti-scientific views. During the chaotic period toward the close of the war, some escaped to the West. Through it all, however, a few have remained at work, retained as show pieces to prove that the USSR still has some working geneticists.”
“Ironically,” Muller comments, “the great majority of the geneticists who have been purged were thoroughly loyal politically; many were even ardent crusaders for the Soviet system and leadership, as the writer well knows through personal contact with them.”
In 1936, the Medico-genetical Institute, one of the finest in the world, was attacked by Pravda, then closed. Solomon Levit, the founder, made a confession of his Mendelian errors, and has not been heard from since. N. I. Vavilov, the most distinguished geneticist in Russia—internationally famous and respected—was relieved of his many posts and accused of being a British spy. He died in 1942 in a Siberian labor camp, although it was not until several years later that biologists outside of Russia were able to learn what had happened to him. “Thus,” writes Muller, “ended the career of a man who had . . . undoubtedly done more for the genetic development of Soviet agriculture than has ever been done by any individual for any country in the world.”
Several conferences were held in Russia, supposedly to debate the issues involved in the dispute. At these meetings, the chief defender of the Michurin (Lamarckian) point of view was Trofim Lysenko, a former peasant and plant-breeder who had been rising steadily in party favor. The conference of 1948 marked Lysenko’s decisive victory. A nervous, shy man in conversation, with unruly dark hair and the tanned face of a farmer, Lysenko becomes a Russian William Jennings Bryan when he lectures. His eyes blaze with hidden fire. At the 1948 conference, he delivered a passionate address of 12,000 words. Defenders of Mendelian thought were savagely attacked as reactionary and decadent, groveling before western capitalism. They were the enemies of the Soviet people. At the close of the conference, he mentioned casually that his address had been approved by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. According to Pravda this is how the audience reacted:
This announcement by the President evoked the general enthusiasm of the members of the session. With one impulse all those present rose from their seats and engaged in a stormy and prolonged ovation in honor of the Central Committee of the Party of Lenin and Stalin, in honor of the wise leader and teacher of the Soviet people, the greatest scholar of our epoch, Comrade Stalin. . . .
Party approval of Lysenko’s speech meant, of course, the final and complete victory of Michurinism. It had been established as the Party line in biology. From now on it would be impossible to present evidence against it, or even to express covert sympathy for Mendelian views. One by one, the few courageous scientists who had raised objections to Lysenko’s views wrote their pathetic public letters of confession, praising the Party for its wise guidance and promising to correct their errors. Professor Muller writes that the Academy of Sciences, headed by the late Vavilov’s brother, “toed the Party line by removing from their posts in utter disgrace the greatest Soviet physiologist, Orbeli, the greatest Soviet student of morphogenesis, Schmalhausen, and the best remaining Soviet geneticist, Dubinin. Dubinin’s laboratory, long known for the admirable work done there by numerous careful investigators, was closed down.”
The Academy unanimously approved a long letter to Stalin which was published in Pravda, August 10, 1948, thanking him for his great assistance. “Carrying on the work of V. I. Lenin, you have saved for progressive materialistic biology the teachings of the great remolder of nature, I. V. Michurin, and, in the presence of the entire world of science, you have raised the Michurinist tendency in biology to the position of the only correct and progressive tendency in all. the branches of biological science. . . . Long live the forward-looking biological Michurinist science! Glory to the great Stalin, leader of the people and coryphaeus of forward-looking science!”
Honor upon honor has been heaped upon Lysenko. He replaced his enemy, the great Vavilov, in all of his important posts. On two occasions he received the Stalin Prize. He was given the Order of Lenin and made a Hero of the Soviet Union. At one time he was vice-president of the Supreme Soviet.
Almost all the chief characteristics of the paranoid crank are exhibited by Lysenko. He is egotistical, fanatical, filled with hate for his enemies, and profoundly ignorant of scientific method. “Lysenko can only be described as illiterate,” writes Julian Huxley, in his excellent book, Heredity East and West, 1949. “I use the word as meaning that it is impossible to discuss matters with him on a scientific basis. . . . Sometimes he appears ignorant of the scientific facts and principles involved, sometimes he misunderstands them, sometimes he distorts them, sometimes he counters them with bare assertions of his own beliefs.”
In the opinion of Professor Muller, “Lysenko’s writings along theoretical lines are the merest drivel. He obviously fails to comprehend either what a controlled experiment is or the established principles of genetics taught in any elementary course in the subject.”
Here is the similar view, quoted by Huxley, of another leading geneticist, Professor S. C. Harland. “In 1933 . . . I saw Lysenko in Odessa, catechized him for several hours and inspected his practical work. It was quite clear that Lysenko was blazingly ignorant of the elementary principles of both plant physiology and genetics. . . . You simply couldn’t talk to Lysenko—it was like discussing the differential calculus with a man who did not know his 12-times tables. When I say that some of his assistants were using plant pots without drainage holes, you amateur gardening readers will understand.”
In Huxley’s opinion, Lysenko’s views are so vague they cannot even be called a theory. Throughout, they have strong analogies with Marxist political dogma. The existence of genes is simply denied. Mendelians are obviously “idealists” since they study something that doesn’t exist. Heredity is transmitted by every particle of the body (just as every worker in Russia contributes toward the future of the state). When a plant is suddenly given new environmental conditions there is a “shattering” of its heredity (like a political revolution). This shattering is a kind of shock treatment. It makes the plant peculiarly plastic to change. The new environment then produces desirable changes in the plant which are transmitted permanently to all later generations.
Unfortunately, few of Lysenkos’ experiments have worked out properly when scientists outside the Soviet Union try to repeat them. In many cases, he does not publish enough data to permit evaluation or repetition. Some of his experiments are undoubtedly successful, but in all such cases, there are simple Mendelian explanations. Lysenko probably does not understand the theory of heredity well enough to realize this. Almost no precautions are taken to insure a controlled experiment. For example, he will grow specimens of a plant under new conditions. But not having made sure that the plant strain is “pure” (i.e., free of a wide variety of recessive genes buried in the strain) the new plants naturally show a wide variety of differences. Lysenko imagines these differences to be the direct effect of the new environment. By picking out individual plants which seem to have made the best “adaptations,” he automatically and without realizing it, carries out an elementary process of selection of Mendelian characters in which genes present in the originally impure strain are bred into prominence.
The only way to prevent this Mendelian effect is to use strains genetically pure, but to get such strains requires a laborious process of inbreeding. Naturally Lysenko is not going to bother with such a time-consuming procedure since he doesn’t believe in the mechanism by which it operates. And of course no other Soviet biologist is going to attempt experiments which might cast doubt on what the Party has declared true. He remembers too well what happened to Vavilov and other Mendelians.
One of the most important phases of modern genetics is the application of statistical methods to the different types resulting from breeding experiments. It is, in fact, indispensable. But Lysenko does not believe in “chance” and is therefore opposed to the use of statistical methods. Michurin did not need statistics, he shouts, so why should he? This refusal to use a powerful scientific tool is another reason why it is extremely difficult for geneticists outside of Russia to judge the results Lysenko claims to have achieved.
Many of Lysenko’s promised results never materialize. On one occasion, Vavilov made the mistake of saying it would take at least five years to develop a certain improved type of wheat. He was immediately accused of national sabotage while Lysenko loudly proclaimed that his methods would produce the wheat in less than two years. “Needless to say,” writes Muller, “Lysenko has not been able to make good his promises.”
The question naturally arises—why has the Soviet Union been willing to turn its back on all the positive achievements of modern genetics? Why has it returned to a discarded Lamarckian point of view which, in Huxley’s words, is “little more than a survival of sympathetic magic,” and in the opinion of Muller, “as much a superstition as belief that the earth is flat”?
One can only guess at the reasons. The fact that Mendel was a Catholic, or that the Nazis made incorrect use of his ideas to support theories of Aryan superiority, are probably negligible factors. More important is the fact that Lysenkoism offers a convenient means of glorifying a purely Russian “science” at the expense of the “foreign” science of capitalist enemies. It may also be true that Stalin and his lieutenants are suspicious of Mendelian theory because it is too abstruse for them to understand. Perhaps also they feel that a simpler theory should be taught Soviet farmers as long as practical results in increasing crop yields can be obtained. Actually, the backwardness of Russian agriculture is such that many quick improvements can be made by means of simple cross-breeding, accompanied by elementary selection, and also by means of improved agricultural methods. As long as Lysenko keeps busy making crosses, he is likely to keep turning out useful variations. Back of his successes, of course, will be Mendelian laws, though they will be explained in Michurin terms.
Perhaps the most important reason of all is ideological. We have already seen how neatly Lamarckianism fits into the emotion of constructing a new society. Evolution, in Mendelian theory, is a slow process which operates by means of random, purposeless mutations. The over-all result is progress, but a progress in which an individual cannot feel that his own improvements are directly passed on to children. Lysenkoism offers a more immediately attractive vision. Humanity becomes plastic—capable of being molded quickly by new conditions and individual efforts. Russian children can be taught that the Revolution has “shattered” the hereditary structure of the Soviet people—that each new generation growing up in the new environment will be a finer stock than the last. Thus, a foundation is being prepared for a new type of racialism. Every Soviet citizen, regardless of his genetic background, will soon be able to feel himself superior in heredity to citizens of decadent, bourgeois environments.
This view offers something of a problem in connection with territories “liberated” by the Soviets. From the Michurin point of view, the masses of China—who for thousands of years have lived in poverty and misery—would have acquired far too degenerate a heredity for it to be removed by merely a few generations of new Soviet environment. On the other hand, as Huxley has pointed out, Mendelian theory “makes it clear that even after long-continued bad conditions, an enormous reserve of good genetic potentiality can still be ready to blossom into actuality as soon as improved conditions provide an opportunity.” But all this is far too complex for the Soviet politicians to understand. Perhaps they will be able to convince their “liberated” peoples that the new environment will so “shatter” their heredity that their children, or at least their grandchildren, will take a sudden leap upward to the Soviet level. In fact, this has already been alleged in some of the new “Peoples’ Democracies.”
The charge that Mendelian genetics is a form of idealism could not be further from the truth. The mutation theory bases evolution squarely on a material basis—namely genes—and its laws are the outcome of careful experimental research for the past fifty years. It is the Soviet view which is riddled with metaphysics. As Professor Muller writes, it “implies a mystical Aristotelian ‘perfecting principle,’ a kind of foresight, in the basic make-up of living things, despite the fact that it claims in the same breath not to be ‘idealistic’ at all.” One is reminded of the equally metaphysical botanical views of Goethe. The great German poet spent many weary months wandering over Sicily trying to find the Urpflanze—an “ideal” plant from which he believed all other plants had degenerated as a result of environmental influences.
Actually, the controversy over Mendel has nothing whatever to do with religious, philosophical, or political beliefs. Just as a theist can regard evolution as God’s method of creation, so can a theist regard random mutations as one of the means by which God’s evolutionary program is realized. The results are the same regardless of the mechanism by which evolution occurs. Why cannot God make use of any device He wishes? Random mutations, upon which environment has a molding effect, can be as adequate an instrument for divine will, or the manifestation of an élan vital, as any other instrument. Substitute “nature” or “Dialectical Materialism” for God in the above sentences and the arguments remain unchanged.
Likewise, the emotion of building a new society can be combined with Mendelian thinking just as successfully—in fact more so—than with the outimoded Lamarckian view. While Muller was in Moscow, he wrote a book called Out of the Night. In it he pointed out that once a culture achieves an equality of environment for all its citizens, it is possible to use modern Mendelian methods for increasing rapidly the general health and intelligence. The book was not acceptable to the Soviets. Muller is now a professor at Indiana University, and in Huxley’s opinion, “probably the ablest and certainly the most all-around geneticist that the world has yet seen.” To the Soviet biologists he is one of the world’s most misled scientists, having sold his services to the imperialist war-mongers.
The really frightening thing about Lysenkoism is, of course, the fact that a great culture has unequivocally made scientific truth subordinate to political control. The Nazis provided an earlier instance of this sort of policy when they raised the theories of crackpot anthropologists to official state doctrines. There is no difference in principle between either of these examples and the similar rejection of Galileo’s discoveries because they conflicted with a state orthodoxy. In fact Galileo’s well-known confession, extracted from a beaten, exhausted man who was trying desperately to save his life, parallels in every sad sentence the similar “confessions” of Soviet Mendelians.
There remain, however, two hopeful aspects of these shocking events. It may be that the steady deterioration of Soviet biology will be followed by a similar deterioration in other sciences. We know now how greatly the Nazi efforts to make an atom bomb were bungled by the control of political Neanderthals.1 There is reasonable ground for hope that a similar state of affairs may, to some degree, hamper Soviet war research.2
Secondly—the rise of Lysenkoism provides a dramatic object lesson for the free world. Fortunately, our own sins in this respect have not been very grave. True, the Scopes trial in Tennessee was a victory for the views of George McCready Price. True, there is control of research by the demands of government agencies and large corporations which alone can finance the necessary giant laboratories. True, the excessive zeal of poorly informed politicians for keeping security risks out of government research projects, and for “classifying” certain basic lines of work, has weakened both our war efforts and our fundamental scientific research.
But on the whole, in contrast with other countries and other ages, our science is enjoying a relative freedom that (until very recently, at least) is perhaps its greatest in history. Fundamentalists in the Bible Belt continue to read their dismal literature denouncing Darwin, but you are not likely to find a fundamentalist in any position of scientific authority or eminence. Only a few southern states have laws against the teaching of evolution, and even in those states the laws are constantly evaded in schools of higher learning. Scientists in hundreds of universities and institutes are working with unrestricted vigor on projects of their own choosing. Even in top-secret war research it is unthinkable that the President or Congress would make a decision about a scientific theory, then proceed to purge from their posts all who disagreed.
Let us hope that Lysenko’s success in Russia will serve for many generations to come as another reminder to the world of how quickly and easily a science can be corrupted when ignorant political leaders deem themselves competent to arbitrate scientific disputes.