[3][4][5][6] In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and he used his political influence and power to suppress dissenting opinions and discredit, marginalize, and imprison his critics, elevating his anti-Mendelian theories to state-sanctioned doctrine.

And he is stingy with his words, and insignificant in face - all I remember is his gloomy eye, crawling along the ground with such an air as if, at least, he was going to kill someone.Lysenko had a difficult time trying to grow various crops (such as peas and wheat) through the harsh winters.

In 1927, Lysenko embarked on the research that would lead to his 1928 paper on vernalization, which drew wide attention because of its potential practical implications for Soviet agriculture.

[10] In September 1931, the All-Ukrainian Breeding Conference adopted a resolution on a report by Lysenko, in which he noted the theoretical and practical significance of his work on vernalization.

[10] In August 1936, at a visiting session of the grain section of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Omsk, Lysenko made a report "On intravarietal crossing of self-pollinating plants," in which he entered into a discussion with Vavilov and other geneticists.

[10] In the spring of 1937, the journal Yarovizatsiya, founded and edited by Lysenko, published a speech by the head of the agricultural department of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, Yakov Yakovlev (No.

He claimed that when trees were planted at high densities their survival improved because they fought together against weeds and pooled their energy to benefit one shoot while sacrificing others in the nest.

[30] On 22 March 1943, Lysenko received the Stalin Prize of the first degree "for the scientific development and introduction into agriculture of a method of planting potatoes with the tops of food tubers.

"[10] On 10 September 1945, Lysenko was awarded the Order of Lenin "for the successful completion of the government's task in difficult war conditions to provide the front and the country’s population with food, and industry with agricultural raw materials.

[32] On 10 April 1948, Yuri Zhdanov, who considered the complaints of scientists against Lysenko, made a report at the Polytechnic Museum at a seminar of regional party committee lecturers on the topic "Controversial issues of modern Darwinism."

[33] From 31 July to 7 August 1948, a Session of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) took place, at which most of the speakers supported Lysenko’s biological views and pointed to the "practical successes" of specialists of the "Michurinist movement.

Lysenko aimed to manipulate various plants such as wheat and peas to increase their production, quality, and quantity, while impressing political officials with his success in motivating peasants to return to farming.

This support was a consequence, in part, of policies put in place by the Communist Party to rapidly promote members of the proletariat into leadership positions in agriculture, science and industry.

Outside the Soviet Union, scientists spoke critically: British biologist S. C. Harland lamented that Lysenko was "completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology" (Bertram Wolfe, 2017).

In 1962, three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Zeldovich, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Pyotr Kapitsa, presented a case against Lysenko, proclaiming his work as pseudoscience.

In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR: He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.

After World War II ended, Lysenko took an interest in the works of Olga Lepeshinskaya, an older feldsher and biologist, who claimed to be able to create cells from egg yolk and non-cellular matter.

"[2] In 1927, the main provisions of this work were reported by Lysenko at the "congress convened by the People's Commissariat for Agriculture of the Azerbaijan SSR at the Ganja station," and then, in December 1928, at the All-Union Meeting of Sugar Trust in Kiev.

For example, Gassner, based on his experiments, established that if sprouted seeds of winter crops are exposed to low temperatures, then the plants grown from them during spring sowing will split.

For example, Nikolai Vavilov saw the main advantage of vernalization in the possible simplification of breeding work, as well as in the ability to control the length of the growing season of plants.

Vavilov wrote:[68] It can definitely be argued that vernalization is the greatest achievement in breeding, because it has made available for use the entire world variety of varieties, which were still inaccessible for practical use due to the usual inconsistency of the growing season and the low winter hardiness of southern winter forms.The main reason Vavilov initially supported Lysenko's work on vernalization was his interest in the potential use of vernalization as a means of synchronizing the flowering of various plant species in the Institute of Plant Industry collection, since Vavilov's team had encountered problems in cross-species experiments that required such synchronization.

Pravda, in an editorial dated 14 December 1958, argued that after the massive introduction of technology on Soviet farms, which made it possible to sow in a shorter time, vernalization of seeds "was not always necessary."

In 1935, Lysenko wrote:[69] This theory proceeds from the fact that everything in a plant, each of its properties, characteristics, etc., is the result of the development of a hereditary basis in specific environmental conditions.

These requirements are the reverse side of the adaptations developed in the historical process.Based on this theory, Lysenko proposed vernalization of winter and spring grains, potatoes and other crops.

[68] In the southern regions of the Soviet Union, vegetatively propagated potatoes gradually produced increasingly smaller tubers, which, in addition, were subject to severe rotting.

[2] Soviet literature of the 1940s-50s and Lysenko's supporters credit him with a number of achievements, including the idea of sowing over stover to protect winter crops from frost.

Therefore, on stover crops, large ice crystals are not observed in the soil, which have a detrimental effect, damaging the roots and tillering nodes of winter plants.Sowing over stover, despite the advantages of the method (snow retention and better temperature conditions for wintering plant seeds in Siberian conditions), was criticized for clogging fields with weeds, since this excludes conventional agricultural technology - surface plowing, which provokes the germination of weeds, and subsequent spring plowing.

[75] Fundamental disagreements between Mendelian geneticists and Lysenko concerned the possibility of inheritance of traits that arise during the individual development of organisms, for example, under the influence of environmental factors or during grafting (vegetative hybridization).

[76] Lysenko himself, at the August 1948 VASKhNIL session, argued the following regarding the inheritance of acquired characteristics:[34] Thus, the position about the possibility of inheritance of acquired deviations - this is the largest acquisition in the history of biological science, the foundation of which was laid by Lamarck and organically mastered later in the teachings of Darwin - was thrown overboard by the Mendelian-Morganists.In the Soviet Union, streets named after Lysenko existed in several cities, such as Krasnoturyinsk.

[78] Arkady and Boris Strugatsky cited Lysenko as the inspiration for the character of Professor Ambrosy Ambruazovich Vybegallo [ru] from their 1965 satirical science fantasy novel Monday Begins on Saturday:[79] Professor Vibegallo is based on the once-famous academician Lysenko, who put all of Russian biology on all fours, spent more than thirty years doing nonsense and at the same time not only destroyed our entire biological science, but also trampled everything around, destroying (physically, with the help of the NKVD) all the best geneticists of the USSR, starting with Vavilov.