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June 23, 2015 - Skeptoid
19:05
Skeptoid #472: Lysenko and Lesser Science Grifters

Trofim Lysenko mixed pseudoscience and ideology to set back Soviet biology. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Lysenko's Disastrous Soviet Crops 00:07:13
Crackpots are not always harmless, especially when given power.
Such was the case with Trofim Lysenko, who literally believed that food crops could be taught to be good communists.
In the early 20th century, when the young Soviet Union was struggling, he was put in charge of revitalizing the food supply, and results were, predictably, both disastrous and deadly.
That's up next on Skeptoid.
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You're listening to Skeptoid.
For Brian Dunning, this is Kevin Hoover from Skeptoid.com with advice for today's up-and-coming scientific charlatan.
If you have an abundance of goofy but superficially science-y ideas, a nice smile, and a crazy dream of fame, riches, and influence, your next step is to pick a path to success.
One role model might be Soviet agronomist and pseudobiologist Trofim Denisevich Lysenko.
Lysenko is a super-achieving standout among history's ignoble invaglers.
He didn't just win friends and influence people.
He took control of an entire branch of the Soviet Union's government, misdirecting resources, setting back that country's agriculture and genetic science for decades, denouncing, and through his sponsor Joseph Stalin, even disappearing those who questioned his ideologically driven pseudoscience.
While Lysenko later turned into a monster, he didn't start out that way, nor was he entirely bereft of scientific cred.
Trofim Lysenko began life among the peasants of Ukraine, gaining an education at the Kiev Agricultural Institute.
He hit the ground at an Azerbaijan research farm just as communist doctrine in the form of forced collectivization was taking its toll on Soviet agriculture.
The state-controlled newspaper Pravda cast him as a rough-hewn miracle worker, well in keeping with the emerging mythology about proletarian heroes.
Lysenko was skinny with prominent cheekbones and close-cropped hair, a man of doleful appearance.
Pravda said that the young ag scientist had solved the problem of fertilizing the fields without fertilizers and minerals.
While that stunt, even if true, apparently wasn't repeatable in successive years, Lysenko had gotten a taste of fame and learned the ways of story-hungry journalists, how to feed them lines, and how to get his own work published.
Then Lysenko got his big break.
Over the winter of 1927-28, Ukraine suffered the loss of 5 million hectares of winter wheat crops.
No one, including a large gathering of scientists convened to address the crisis, knew why or what to do about it.
The next winter was even worse, with the loss of 7 million hectares of winter wheat.
Enter peasant hero Trofim Lysenko with a new process he called geravization, today known as vernalization, literally making spring happen.
Some plants respond to a period of cold, followed by a temperature upturn, with flowering and fruit production.
Vernalization involves the soaking and chilling of seed to induce flowering, and it's a real thing.
German plant physiologist J. Gustav Gastner had already vernalized rye years earlier, but Lysenko rode the technique to glory.
He had his father soak 48 kilograms of wheat seed, then bury the moist bag in a snowbank to chill it out.
When a half hectare of the treated winter wheat seed was sown alongside a crop of spring wheat, it yielded an even better harvest with abundant earring.
This spurred a visit by a commission from the Ukrainian Commissariat of Agriculture, which ordered large-scale tests.
In typical commie propaganda fashion, the commissariat didn't even wait until the tests were done to tell the press that the winter wheat die-offs had been solved.
In October 1929, Lysenko was transferred to the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding in Odessa, the center of Ukrainian ag research.
As his star rose, establishment scientists who prescribed caution fell.
The same press that elevated Lysenko called dissenting scientists wreckers and fly lovers who'd rather fuss with theories than practical solutions.
Thus began a long, runaway spiral of self-reinforcing propaganda which would eventually collapse, but not for decades.
By 1931, Lysenko was emerging as a darling of the commissars whose bacon, that is, wheat, he was saving.
Lysenko didn't really know what he was doing, at least scientifically.
His concept of vernalization was vague, and his experiments sloppy.
But the method did produce results.
With this kind of fodder, the ever-hungry Soviet propaganda machine went full-tilt boogie with Lysenko mania.
In 1935, he addressed Comrade Stalin himself at a gathering of leading industrial achievers, and when he humbly apologized for being a better vernalizer than orator, Stalin interrupted him with Bravo, Comrade Lysenko.
With that, Lysenko was off and running.
He made fantastic projections of massive gains in agricultural productivity through adoption of his techniques and pushed for expanding vernalization to other crops.
His critics were either on the ropes or expressing tepid support for survival reasons.
But not all.
Many still questioned his overreaching, underverified claims of revolutionary agrobiology.
At a 1936 scientific conference, genetic scientists and ideologically driven Lysenkoists wrangled with ferocity that presaged similar vitriolic debates today between GMO opponents and those who stick to the science.
Lysenko knew little about genetics and wasn't very curious.
He even questioned the existence of genes, claiming temperature-guided heritable traits.
Said Lysenko, We deny corpuscles, molecules of some special substance of heredity, and at the same time we not only recognize, but in our view, incomparably better than you geneticists, we understand the hereditary nature, the hereditary basis of plant forms.
Lysenko preached that plants impart lasting traits to their offspring based on what they experience during their lifespan, an extra genetic concept of transgenerational inheritance previously championed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Ivan Vladimirovich Micherin.
In other words, people are perfectible.
It just takes practice by their parents.
Sailing Into Skeptical Adventures 00:02:49
That's right.
Lysenko was so full of himself that he summarily threw natural selection overboard.
For all this, he was likened by one geneticist to those who championed perpetual motion machines.
But it was too late.
Reputable scientists began to disappear from top posts, only to be replaced by Lysenkoists or Trofim himself.
He became president of the Institute of Genetics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1940 when its previous head, botanist and longtime Lysenko critic Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested and sentenced to death.
Vavilov, a courageous pioneer of what we now know as permaculture, later starved to death in prison.
Many others met similar fates.
From there on out, terror ruled Soviet genetics, with dozens of bourgeois genetic scientists arrested and hundreds of others driven from the profession.
Meanwhile, Lysenko kept coming up with various gimmicks, stunts, and wild claims to stay in the spotlight, all dutifully documented by state media.
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Epigenetics and the Stalin Plan 00:03:30
In 1948, Lysenko was granted complete control over Soviet biological science as part of the great Stalin plan for the transformation of nature.
He delivered a grandiloquent, self-ennobling address to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, one which interwove science, as he understood it, with ideology.
It denounced Darwinism and its adherents, extolled the practical methods he had pioneered over decadent Western theories, and declared complete triumph over traditional genetics.
That was to be his high watermark.
When Stalin died in 1953, Lysenko carried on with business as usual under Nikita Khrushchev, but his years were numbered.
Khrushchev was no Stalin, and Soviet agriculture still lagged.
Scientists came out of the woodwork to raise questions about Lysenko, but there was too much legacy ideological investment in his work for Soviet science to turn on a dime.
By 1962, prominent scientists could openly criticize Lysenko, call B.S. on his pseudoscience, and decry his chronic political bullying.
In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov condemned Lysenko in a speech to the Academy of Science, said Sakharov.
He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudoscientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death of many genuine scientists.
State media took the cue, and anti-Lysenko stories sprouted like vernalized wheat after a long winter.
When Khrushchev was deposed in 1964, Lysenko's experiments were investigated and found massively fraudulent.
In 1965, he was stripped of authority.
His journal, Agrobiology, disappeared.
Lysenko was muzzled and fell into disgrace.
One of his earliest casualties, poor old Nikolai Vavilov, was later publicly rehabilitated as a hero of Soviet science.
The story of Lysenko and his notions of transgenerational heritability might have ended there but for the advent of epigenetics.
It turns out that environmental conditions experienced by one generation can influence the characteristics of their offspring.
Women who become pregnant during times of famine give birth to undersized children, who, in turn, may do the same, even when adequate nutrition is restored.
Even behavioral influences can be passed on.
Mice, conditioned to associate a chemical odor with electric shocks, produce offspring who also respond fearfully to the same smell.
Epigenetic influence works by temporarily silencing certain genes, not modifying them.
Carbon hydrogen compounds called methyl groups can bind to genes and suppress their expression.
Histones constrict and loosen DNA, altering their availability.
Unhelpful phenotypes or physical characteristics are temporarily suppressed, but not as Lysenko had imagined by being modified in any lasting way.
These epigenetic tags are again updated in the next generation.
If genes are genetic hardware, then epigenetics are the software.
They act almost like a self-aware autoexec.bat file, setting up an organism and its successors to succeed in life.
Superficially, it might seem that epigenetics, literally above genetics, exonerates Lysenko.
How Fraudsters Cash In 00:05:28
Sadly, no.
The epigenetic effect doesn't fundamentally alter genes, only their expression.
Evolution and natural selection are unfazed by the ephemeral adaptations.
Epigenetics is a fast-evolving and very promising branch of biology with vast potential for the creation of new drugs and therapies.
I can't help but note that scientific research, not intuition, ideology, stirring slogans, protest signs, Facebook memes, or government propaganda, but science is what brought us our understanding of epigenetics.
Now, if you're still set on scamming, but don't have a friendly dictator handy to hand over a branch of government, don't lose hope.
There are multiple proven ways to cash in on the public's lack of scientific sophistication and lots of fabulous fraudsters in whose footsteps you can follow.
You could create a miracle product like the energy channeling pyramids of the 1970s.
These days, you might toss some sawdust and crumbled drywall into a jar and call it a dietary supplement.
If making something is too much trouble, just make stuff up.
Alternative medicine requires little more than an office with a framed diploma, some incense and ferns, and an exotically named therapy to cash in on distrust of real doctors.
Multi-level marketing lets you make more money selling the rights to sell your useless thing, whatever it is, than you do on the thing itself.
But why struggle in obscurity?
For the really big bucks, you need to hitch your woo wagon to a star or even a superstar.
Scientology has a whole host of top-flight celebs to extol its sci-fi spirituality.
Deepak Chopra routinely enjoys the attentions of Oprah Winfrey, purveying New Age baffle gab to millions of avid viewers.
Then there's Dr. Oz.
While he's no Lysenko, this medical wizard has uncovered and helped market more miracle diets and paranormal phenomena than the rest of medical science combined.
If you lack a knack for commerce, you still have options.
There's always what's been called Hollywood for the Homely, Washington, D.C. Dietary supplement manufacturers who made generous political donations there later benefited from bipartisan legislation exempting them from regulation.
History is bursting with bamboozlers buddying up to big shots.
And while they didn't give very good advice, at least they wasted everyone's time and resources.
Russian spiritual healer Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin gained the trust of Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra and wielded considerable influence among the aristocracy.
Though as Allison Hudson documented in Skeptoid number 432, things did not end well for him.
A few decades later, Adolf Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Theodore Morel, had Derfuhrer gobbling various pills and taking vitamin injections every day, all of which made the big guy feel downright hitlerific.
The shots are now thought to have included methamphetamine, and that may explain a lot.
In the swing in the 60s, Magic Alex Martis, a nutty inventor, dazzled John Lennon with fanciful devices and crackpot ideas, such as invisibility paint and soundproofing the Beatles studio with a force field.
While physicists are closing in on limited forms of invisibility, that doesn't legitimize Magic Alex any more than epigenetics rehabilitates Trofim Lysenko.
If there's a lesson here, it might be that science scammers are eventually exposed and discredited, their ephemeral glory turned to ashes.
So if you're really smart and want to make a name for yourself in the annals of science, why not put all that potential to good use and go legit?
Let Trofim Lysenko and the lesser science grifters serve as your anti-role models.
While reality reigned on their parade, science's steady march continues, and you can be part of it.
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