---
title: "Lysenkoism"
chunk: 4/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:30:18.060159+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Reappearance ===
In the 21st century, Lysenkoism is again being discussed in Russia, including in respectable newspapers like Kultura and by biologists. The geneticist Lev Zhivotovsky has made the unsupported claim that Lysenko helped found modern developmental biology. Discoveries in the field of epigenetics are sometimes raised as alleged late confirmation of Lysenko's theories, but in spite of the apparent high-level similarity (heritable traits passed on without DNA alteration), Lysenko believed that environment-induced changes are the primary mechanism of heritability. Heritable epigenetic effects have been found, but are minor and unstable compared to genetic inheritance.

== Scientific content ==
Heredity was reformulated as "the property of the living body to demand certain environmental conditions and to react in a certain way to them". Michurin attempted to explain Lamarckian heredity by theorizing that some sort of "heredity" is present all throughout an organism, which reacts to environmental influence. This is incompatible with the Weismann barrier, which leads Lysenkoists to denounce Weismann. Instead, they proposed a "physiological" theory, that the heredity diffused throughout the body is somehow collected in the germ cells, which are "built from molecules, granules, of various organs and parts of the organism", i.e. the pangenesis theory. When two germ cells form a zygote, the "weak" one is assimilated by the stronger one, like food digestion.
This theory also explains vegetative hybridization, as the heredity in the scion may diffuse into the stock, resulting in a change in the stock's offspring. The vegetative hybridization theory was further tested on animals by injecting blood, for example, by injecting blood from colored chicken into a white chicken. It was claimed that the white chicken's offspring showed partly and fully colors. However, such claims were rejected by Western scientists. The plant hybridization experiments did not replicate, and the chicken experiment did not control for recessive alleles.
Lysenko also proposed a form of Lamarckian heterochrony. An individual plant develops in stages, depending on its environment. A change in environment can speed up or slow down the stages, and result in downstream effects that are then inherited. This theory justified Lysenkoist plant-breeding practices.

== In other countries ==
Other countries of the Eastern Bloc accepted Lysenkoism as the official "new biology", to varying degrees. 

=== Poland ===
In Communist Poland, Lysenkoism was aggressively pushed by state propaganda, signalling the newly founded Polish state's loyalty to the Soviet Union. State newspapers attacked "damage caused by bourgeois Mendelism-Morganism" and "imperialist genetics", comparing it to Mein Kampf. For example, Trybuna Ludu published an article titled "French scientists recognize superiority of Soviet science" by Pierre Daix, repeating Soviet propaganda claims. According to Aleksandra Putrament, doctoral students in biology had to study Engels's Anti-Dühring and Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism and take examinations pertaining to Marxist philosophy. While some academics accepted Lysenkoism for political reasons, Polish scientists largely opposed it. A notable opponent was Wacław Gajewski: in retaliation, he was denied contact with students, though not dismissed from the Warsaw botanical garden. Lysenkoism was rejected from 1956, and in 1958 Gajewski founded Poland's first department of genetics, at the University of Warsaw.

=== Czechoslovakia ===
Communist Czechoslovakia adopted Lysenkoism in 1949. The prominent geneticist Jaroslav Kříženecký (1896–1964) criticized Lysenkoism in his lectures, and was dismissed from the Agricultural University in 1949 for "serving the established capitalistic system, considering himself superior to the working class, and being hostile to the democratic order of the people"; he was imprisoned in 1958.

=== East Germany ===
In East Germany, although Lysenkoism was taught at some universities, it had very little impact on science due to the actions of a few scientists, such as the geneticist Hans Stubbe, and scientific contact with West Berlin research institutions. Nonetheless, Lysenkoist theories were found in schoolbooks as late as the dismissal of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964.

=== China ===
Lysenkoism dominated Chinese science from 1949 until 1956, during which open discussion of alternative theories like classical Mendelian genetics was forbidden. Only in 1956 during a genetics symposium opponents of Lysenkoism were permitted to freely criticize it and argue for Mendelian genetics. In the proceedings from the symposium, Tan Jiazhen is quoted as saying "Since [the] USSR started to criticize Lysenko, we have dared to criticize him too". For a while, both schools were permitted to coexist, although the influence of the Lysenkoists remained strong for several years, contributing to the Great Famine through loss of yields.

=== North Vietnam ===
Lysenkoist theories and practices were attempted in North Vietnam, often in conjunction with the pedological theories of Vasili Williams as part of a broader diffusion of Soviet agronomy.

=== Non-communist countries ===
Almost alone among Western scientists, John Desmond Bernal, Professor of Physics at Birkbeck College, London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a communist, made an aggressive public defence of Lysenko. Australian biochemist and fellow communist Jack Legge tried to find a middle ground between Lysenkoism and conventional genetics by using Lysenkoist ideas to explain phenomena which conventional genetics at the time could not satisfactorily explain, while teaching other communists about conventional genetics.

== See also ==
Anti-intellectualism
Deutsche Physik
Junk science
Neo-Lamarckism
Solomon Levit – a notable victim
Pavlovian session
Politicization of science
Suppressed research in the Soviet Union
"Bourgeois pseudoscience"
Nature versus nurture controversy

== Notes ==

== References ==