Lysenko's Ghosts

Will we ever be rid of him?

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The logo for this newsletter is a cartoon of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. In the early to mid-twentieth century, geneticists used D. melanogaster’s rapid life cycle and tendency to mutate to flesh out their theories of inheritance. The young biologists in T. H. Morgan’s Columbia University fly room spent years of their lives counting and categorizing the offspring of crosses between wildtypes and white-eyed flies, wildtypes and vermillion-eyed, sepia-eyed and vestigial winged, using their findings to build the first chromosomal map based on mutation frequency. The humble fruit fly was, and is, the foundation for classical genetics.  

For reasons that are difficult to explain in a <1,000-word newsletter, D. melanogaster became a flashpoint for Cold War politics. But here’s my best shot. In the 1930s, a Ukranian agronomist by the name of Trofim Lysenko began to accumulate power in the Soviet agricultural research system. Lysenko rejected classical genetics (and especially its fixation on fruit flies) as a form of “bourgeois science” that ignored the needs of the people. A tireless self-promoter, he managed to convince the powers-that-be that his unorthodox methods for improving wheat yields were both more efficient and more in keeping with Marxist philosophy than Mendelian genetics. In 1948, Lysenko announced that Stalin himself had endorsed his theories; the practice of classical genetics would no longer be tolerated in Soviet institutions. Most of the remaining fly stocks were destroyed.

Lysenko’s triumph came at precisely the same moment that the United States and the Soviet Union were ramping up their ideological campaigns against one another. Propagandists in the West began warning scientists around the world about “Lysenkoism,” by which they usually meant something like “a party line in science.” And they were not wrong about that. Lysenko’s control of Soviet genetics was exactly a party line for science. Anyone who did not subscribe to his theories—theories that had been endorsed by the Politburo—could not expect to find work, or at least could not expect to perform that work openly. The handful of researchers who held on learned to describe their work by other names, like “radiobiology.” Among other things, Lysenko’s grip on power meant that Soviet researchers were shut out of some of the most consequential biological research in the twentieth century, including the race to unlock the relationship between DNA, RNA, and protein.

So far, I’ve left out a key part of this story. In the late 1930s, several dozens of Soviet geneticists, including the world-renowned researcher Nikolai Vavilov, were arrested, imprisoned, or shot. As with so many others rounded up in Stalin’s purges, it’s still not entirely clear why. Bad luck? Prior political commitments? A false accusation? Rank paranoia? A deep and abiding love for Mendelian genetics? To many anti-Communists in the West, these possible explanations seemed like distinction without difference. Geneticists were dead, and a decade later, the Politburo banned genetics. Surely these things were related.

And so, in the most heated U.S. propaganda, a new storyline about science under Communism emerged: Communism would get scientists killed. The timeline got garbled and the charge of “Lysenkoism” came to mean something much, much worse than “a party line in science.” The claim, more or less, was:

Communism => State control of science => A party line in science => Murder for thought crimes

I want to be crystal clear about two things:

1)    This wasn’t how science actually worked under Communism
2)    Stalin’s purges were an atrocity, and that includes the murder of geneticists

Both/and, as the kids say.

As someone who writes about science and politics, I’m no stranger to Lysenko’s ghost. His name, or more specifically, “Lysenkoism,” regularly comes up in interviews and online discussions. Until recently, I brushed these off. Nine times out of a ten, a person who says, “But LYSENKO!” is not interested in real dialogue. It’s a response that I have heard, over and over again, when I say that scientists need to acknowledge and engage in politics as such if they hope to advance the cause of justice. These respondents—almost always white, politically conservative men affiliated with industry—warn me that scientists put their institutions and possibly even their own lives at risk whenever they engage in politics or acknowledge prior ideological commitments. They do not seem particularly interested in considering the ways that science-as-usual puts institutions and even lives at risk.

More recently, though, a more sincere version of Lysenko’s ghost has floated into the discourse. Over the past week, I have seen multiple references to Lysenko related to the White House’s coordinated attack on Anthony Fauci and its attempt to pressure the CDC into revising its school opening deadlines. Recall that this is the same administration that bullied National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials into rebuking weather forecasters who dared correct the president’s inaccurate claim that Hurricane Durian would strike Alabama. Here we have a situation in which the occupant of the most powerful political office in the country is attempting to punish his political “enemies,” who fell into that category because they stated scientific findings that contradict beliefs based on nothing but political convenience.

I’m still reluctant to call the administration’s attacks on science “Lysenkoist.” The term has so much baggage. But there doesn’t seem much doubt that it’s increasingly Lysenko-ish.

Freedom’s Laboratory officially comes out in paperback on August 4, but my big box of advance copies arrived yesterday. Hurrah!

If you like this post, check out the book: I have a lot more to say about Lysenko, Lysenkoism, and the long shadow Lysenkoism casts over American and Soviet science. (Note the fruit fly.) If you’re already planning on assigning it in a course, first, THANK YOU!, and second, schedule permitting, I’m happy to pop in to your virtual class discussion—just drop me a line.