Socio-Political Phenomenon of Lysenkoism in Biological Science: Past and Present

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the phenomenon of lysenkoism as a practice of administrative reprisals against scientific opponents, which devel­oped in the natural sciences in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and developing in accordance with the emergence and transformation of the totalitarian political regime in the USSR. The scientific and ideological reasons for the emergence of lysenkoism as a system of theoretical views and philosophical and method­ological attitudes of T.D. Lysenko and his followers, summarizing under them the elements of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine. The position on the “inheri­tance of acquired traits” and the denial of the role of genes in the transmission of hereditary information were put forward by T.D. Lysenko as the basis for
administratively promoted recommendations for obtaining forms with “altered heredity” in a short time, which caused the destruction of the foundations of breeding work, seed production and animal husbandry in the country. The es­calation of lysenkoism as a method of ideological struggle against scientific op­ponents in biological and agricultural science, which took place against the back­drop of a tightening of the political regime, led to the denial of classical genetics, the ban on genetic research, defamation and reprisals against scientists who did not share the views of T.D. Lysenko. Modern approaches to attempts to reassess the personality of T.D. Lysenko and the revival of his ideas from the point of view of new data in genetic science. Populist and propagandistic publications about T.D. Lysenko is criticized. The inconsistency of the identification of the para­digms of neolysenkoism and epigenetics is substantiated in view of the interpre­tation of epigenetic mechanisms of inheritance. The controversy around lysenko­ism and modern pseudogenetic theories, taking place on an international scale, allows us to state that the complexity and drama of the development of soviet ge­netics were directly related to the priority of state ideology and philosophy over the scientific process, and to draw conclusions about the inadmissibility of such an approach in the future.