Lysenko, Trofim (Denisovich)

Trofim Lysenko, 1938.

(credit: Sovfoto)

(born 1898, Karlovka, Ukraine, Russian Empire—died Nov. 20, 1976, Kiev, Ukraine, U.S.S.R.) Soviet biologist and agronomist. During the Soviet famines of the 1930s, he proposed techniques for the enhancement of crop yields, rejecting orthodox Mendelian genetics on the basis of unconfirmed experiments, and gained a large popular following. As director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences' Institute of Genetics (1940–65), he became the controversial “dictator” of Stalinist biology. Claiming, among other things, that wheat plants raised in the appropriate environment would produce seeds of rye, he promised greater, more rapid, and less costly increases in crop yields than other biologists believed possible. Eventually his “grassland” system of crop rotation was abandoned in favour of cultivation with mineral fertilizers, and a hybrid-corn program based on the U.S. example was pursued. In 1964 Lysenko's doctrines were officially discredited, and intensive efforts were made toward reestablishing orthodox genetics in the Soviet Union.