To: Land Shark who wrote (894389 ) 10/16/2015 9:28:08 PM From: bentway Read Replies (1) | Respond to Your mention of Stalin reminded me of another politically-driven scientific direction ordered by him, Lysenkoism. It put the Soviets WAY behind us and the free world in genetics.en.wikipedia.org Lysenkoism (Russian: ????´????????) was a political campaign against genetics and science-based agriculture conducted by Trofim Lysenko , his followers and Soviet authorities. Lysenko was the director of the Soviet Union 's Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences . Lysenkoism began in the late 1920s and formally ended in 1964.Lamarckan heritability of acquired characteristics . [1] Lysenko's theory rejected Mendelian inheritance , the concept of the "gene" and departed from Darwinian evolutionary theory by rejecting natural selection . [2] Proponents falsely claimed to have discovered, among many other things, that rye could transform into wheat and wheat into barley, that weeds are spontaneously transmuting into food grains, and that 'natural cooperation' was observed in nature as opposed to 'natural selection'. [2] Lysenkism promised extraordinary advances in breeding and agriculture that never came about.The campaign was supported by Joseph Stalin. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were sent to prison or fired or executed as a part of this campaign instigated by Lysenko to suppress his scientific opponents. The president of the Agriculture Academy was sent to prison and died there, while the scientific research in the field of genetics was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953.[2] Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines was also negatively affected or banned.[3] Term "Lysenkoism" is also used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.[4]
