Trofim Lysenko
Encyclopedia
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (November 20, 1976) was a Soviet agronomist
of Ukrainian
origin, who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin
. Lysenko rejected Mendelian
genetics
in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist
Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin
, and adopted them into a powerful political-scientific movement termed Lysenkoism
. Today much of Lysenko's agricultural experimentation and research is largely viewed as fraudulent.
His unorthodox experimental research in improved crop yields earned the support of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
, especially following the famine
and loss of productivity resulting from forced collectivization
in several regions of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. In 1940 he became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences
, and Lysenko's anti-Mendelian doctrines were further secured in Soviet science and education by the exercise of political influence and power. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance
was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from held positions, and many imprisoned. Lysenko's work was officially discredited in the Soviet Union in 1964, leading to a renewed emphasis there to re-institute Mendelian genetics and orthodox science.
Though Lysenko remained at his post in the Institute of Genetics until 1965, his influence on Soviet agricultural practice declined by the 1950s. The Soviet Union quietly abandoned Lysenko's agricultural practices in favor of modern agricultural practices after the crop yields he promised failed to materialize.
, Poltava Oblast
, Ukraine
and attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute. In 1927, at 29 years of age, working at an agricultural experiment station in Azerbaijan
, he embarked on the research that would lead to his 1928 paper on vernalization
, which drew wide attention due to its practical consequences for Soviet
agriculture. Severe cold and lack of winter snow had destroyed many early winter-wheat seedlings. By treating wheat seeds with moisture as well as cold, Lysenko induced them to bear a crop when planted in spring. Lysenko coined the term "Jarovization" to describe a chilling process he used to make the seeds of winter cereals behave like spring cereals ("Jarovoe"); this term was translated as "vernalization" from the Latin "vernum" for western texts.
Later, however, Lysenko falsely claimed that a vernalized state could be inherited - i.e., that the offspring of a vernalized plant would behave as if they themselves had also been vernalized and would not require vernalization in order to flower quickly.
Praise for Lysenko's work included such items as credit from the Soviet newspaper Pravda
for having discovered a method to fertilize fields without using fertilizers or minerals, and for having proven that a winter crop of pea
s could be grown in Azerbaijan, "turning the barren fields of the Transcaucasus green in winter, so that cattle will not perish from poor feeding, and the peasant Turk will live through the winter without trembling for tomorrow." In succeeding years, however, further attempts to grow the peas were unsuccessful. Similar Soviet media reports heralding Lysenko's further discoveries in agriculture continued from 1927 until 1964; reports of amazing (and seemingly impossible) successes, each one replaced with new success claims as earlier ones failed. Few of the successes attributed to Lysenko could be duplicated. Nevertheless, with the media's help, Lysenko enjoyed the popular image of the "barefoot scientist"—the embodiment of the mythic Soviet peasant genius.
By the late 1920s, the Soviet political bosses had given their support to Lysenko. This support was a consequence, in part, of policies put in place by Communist party personnel to rapidly promote members of the proletariat
into leadership positions in agriculture, science and industry. Party officials were looking for promising candidates with backgrounds similar to Lysenko's: born of a peasant family, without formal academic training or affiliations to the academic community.
Lysenko in particular impressed political officials further with his success in motivating peasants to return to farming. The Soviet's Collectivist reforms forced the confiscation of agricultural landholdings from the peasant farmers and heavily damaged the country's overall food production, and the dispossessed peasant farmers posed new problems for the regime. Many had abandoned the farms altogether; many more waged resistance to collectivization by poor work quality and pilfering. The dislocated and disenchanted peasant farmers were a major political concern to Soviet Leadership. Lysenko emerged during this period inaugurating radically new agricultural methods, and also promising that the new methods provided wider opportunities for year round work in agriculture. Lysenko proved himself very useful to Soviet leadership by reengaging peasants to return to work, helping to secure from them a personal stake in the overall success of the Soviet revolutionary experiment.
Lysenko's genetic theories were grounded in Lamarckism
. His work was primarily devoted to developing new techniques and practices in agriculture. But he also contributed a new theoretical framework which would become the foundation of all Soviet agriculture: a discipline called agrobiology that is a fusion of plant physiology, cytology
, genetics and evolutionary theory. Central to Lysenko's tenets was the concept of the inheritability of acquired characteristics
. In 1932 Lysenko was given his own journal, The Bulletin of Vernalization, and it became the main outlet for touting emerging developments of Lysenkoist research.
One of the most celebrated of the earliest agricultural applications developed by Lysenko was a process of increasing the success of wheat crops by soaking the grain and storing the wet seed in snow to refrigerate over the winter ("vernalization
"). Though his work was scientifically unsound on a number of levels, Lysenko's claims delighted Soviet journalists and agricultural officials, who were impressed by its promise to minimize the resources spent in theoretical scientific laboratory work. The Soviet political leadership had come to view orthodox science as offering empty promises, as unproductive in meeting the challenges and needs of the Communist state. Lysenko was viewed as someone who could deliver practical methods more rapidly, and with superior results.
Lysenko himself spent much time denouncing academic scientists and genetic
ists, claiming that their isolated laboratory work was not helping the Soviet people. By 1929 Lysenko's skeptics were politically censured, accused of offering only criticisms, and for failing to prescribe any new solutions themselves. In December 1929, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
gave a famous speech praising "practice" above "theory", elevating the political bosses above the scientists and technical specialists. Though for a period the Soviet government under Stalin continued its support of agricultural scientists, after 1935 the balance of power abruptly swung towards Lysenko and his followers.
Lysenko was put in charge of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union and made responsible for ending the propagation of "harmful" ideas among Soviet scientists. Lysenko served this purpose by causing the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and eliminating all study and research involving Mendelian genetics
throughout the Soviet Union. This period is known as Lysenkoism
. He bears particular responsibility for the persecution of his predecessor and rival, prominent Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov
, which ended in 1943 with the imprisoned Vavilov's death by starvation. In 1941 Lysenko was awarded the Stalin Prize
.
. However, mainstream scientists re-emerged, and found new willingness within Soviet government leadership to tolerate criticism of Lysenko, the first opportunity since the late 1920s. In 1962 three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich
, Vitaly Ginzburg
, and Pyotr Kapitsa, presented a case against Lysenko, proclaiming his work as false science. They also denounced Lysenko's application of political power to silence opposition and eliminate his opponents within the scientific community. These denunciations occurred during a period of structural upheaval in Soviet government, during which the major institutions were purged of the strictly ideological and political machinations which had controlled the work of the Soviet Union's scientific community for several decades under Stalin.
In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov
spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences:
The Soviet press was soon filled with anti-Lysenkoite articles and appeals for the restoration of scientific methods to all fields of biology and agricultural science. In 1965 Lysenko was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences and restricted to an experimental farm in Moscow
's Lenin Hills (the Institute itself was soon dissolved). After Khrushchev's dismissal in 1964, the president of the Academy of Sciences declared that Lysenko's immunity to criticism had officially ended. An expert commission was sent to investigate records kept at Lysenko's experimental farm. A few months later, a devastating critique of Lysenko was made public. As a result, Lysenko was immediately disgraced in the Soviet Union, although his work continued to have impact in China
for many years after.
Lysenko died in 1976.
Agronomy
Agronomy is the science and technology of producing and using plants for food, fuel, feed, fiber, and reclamation. Agronomy encompasses work in the areas of plant genetics, plant physiology, meteorology, and soil science. Agronomy is the application of a combination of sciences like biology,...
of Ukrainian
Ukrainians
Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...
origin, who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
. Lysenko rejected Mendelian
Mendelian inheritance
Mendelian inheritance is a scientific description of how hereditary characteristics are passed from parent organisms to their offspring; it underlies much of genetics...
genetics
Genetics
Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....
in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist
Horticulture
Horticulture is the industry and science of plant cultivation including the process of preparing soil for the planting of seeds, tubers, or cuttings. Horticulturists work and conduct research in the disciplines of plant propagation and cultivation, crop production, plant breeding and genetic...
Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin
Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin
Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin , was a Russian practitioner of selection, Honorable Member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and academician of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agriculture....
, and adopted them into a powerful political-scientific movement termed Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism, also denotes the biological inheritance principle which Trofim Lysenko subscribed to and which derive from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics, a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism and that Lysenko named...
. Today much of Lysenko's agricultural experimentation and research is largely viewed as fraudulent.
His unorthodox experimental research in improved crop yields earned the support of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, especially following the famine
Russian famine of 1921
The Russian famine of 1921, also known as Povolzhye famine, which began in the early spring of that year, and lasted through 1922, was a severe famine that occurred in Bolshevik Russia...
and loss of productivity resulting from forced collectivization
Collectivisation in the USSR
Collectivization in the Soviet Union was a policy pursued under Stalin between 1928 and 1940. The goal of this policy was to consolidate individual land and labour into collective farms...
in several regions of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. In 1940 he became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's Academy of Sciences
Russian Academy of Sciences
The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....
, and Lysenko's anti-Mendelian doctrines were further secured in Soviet science and education by the exercise of political influence and power. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance
Inheritance of acquired characters
The inheritance of acquired characteristics is a hypothesis that physiological changes acquired over the life of an organism may be transmitted to offspring...
was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from held positions, and many imprisoned. Lysenko's work was officially discredited in the Soviet Union in 1964, leading to a renewed emphasis there to re-institute Mendelian genetics and orthodox science.
Though Lysenko remained at his post in the Institute of Genetics until 1965, his influence on Soviet agricultural practice declined by the 1950s. The Soviet Union quietly abandoned Lysenko's agricultural practices in favor of modern agricultural practices after the crop yields he promised failed to materialize.
Early rise
Lysenko, the son of Denis and Oksana Lysenko, born to a peasant family in KarlivkaKarlivka
Karlivka is a city in Poltava Oblast, Ukraine. Population is 17,995 . Until the 1950s the city was known as Karlovka.-See Also:* Karlivka...
, Poltava Oblast
Poltava Oblast
Poltava Oblast is an oblast of central Ukraine. The administrative center of the oblast is the city of Poltava.Other important cities within the oblast include: Komsomolsk, Kremenchuk, Lubny and Myrhorod.-Geography:...
, Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...
and attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute. In 1927, at 29 years of age, working at an agricultural experiment station in Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan , officially the Republic of Azerbaijan is the largest country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia. Located at the crossroads of Western Asia and Eastern Europe, it is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia to the west, and Iran to...
, he embarked on the research that would lead to his 1928 paper on vernalization
Vernalization
Vernalization is the acquisition of a plant's ability to flower or germinate in the spring by exposure to the prolonged cold of winter...
, which drew wide attention due to its practical consequences for Soviet
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
agriculture. Severe cold and lack of winter snow had destroyed many early winter-wheat seedlings. By treating wheat seeds with moisture as well as cold, Lysenko induced them to bear a crop when planted in spring. Lysenko coined the term "Jarovization" to describe a chilling process he used to make the seeds of winter cereals behave like spring cereals ("Jarovoe"); this term was translated as "vernalization" from the Latin "vernum" for western texts.
Later, however, Lysenko falsely claimed that a vernalized state could be inherited - i.e., that the offspring of a vernalized plant would behave as if they themselves had also been vernalized and would not require vernalization in order to flower quickly.
Pravda
Pravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
for having discovered a method to fertilize fields without using fertilizers or minerals, and for having proven that a winter crop of pea
Pea
A pea is most commonly the small spherical seed or the seed-pod of the pod fruit Pisum sativum. Each pod contains several peas. Peapods are botanically a fruit, since they contain seeds developed from the ovary of a flower. However, peas are considered to be a vegetable in cooking...
s could be grown in Azerbaijan, "turning the barren fields of the Transcaucasus green in winter, so that cattle will not perish from poor feeding, and the peasant Turk will live through the winter without trembling for tomorrow." In succeeding years, however, further attempts to grow the peas were unsuccessful. Similar Soviet media reports heralding Lysenko's further discoveries in agriculture continued from 1927 until 1964; reports of amazing (and seemingly impossible) successes, each one replaced with new success claims as earlier ones failed. Few of the successes attributed to Lysenko could be duplicated. Nevertheless, with the media's help, Lysenko enjoyed the popular image of the "barefoot scientist"—the embodiment of the mythic Soviet peasant genius.
By the late 1920s, the Soviet political bosses had given their support to Lysenko. This support was a consequence, in part, of policies put in place by Communist party personnel to rapidly promote members of the proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
into leadership positions in agriculture, science and industry. Party officials were looking for promising candidates with backgrounds similar to Lysenko's: born of a peasant family, without formal academic training or affiliations to the academic community.
Lysenko in particular impressed political officials further with his success in motivating peasants to return to farming. The Soviet's Collectivist reforms forced the confiscation of agricultural landholdings from the peasant farmers and heavily damaged the country's overall food production, and the dispossessed peasant farmers posed new problems for the regime. Many had abandoned the farms altogether; many more waged resistance to collectivization by poor work quality and pilfering. The dislocated and disenchanted peasant farmers were a major political concern to Soviet Leadership. Lysenko emerged during this period inaugurating radically new agricultural methods, and also promising that the new methods provided wider opportunities for year round work in agriculture. Lysenko proved himself very useful to Soviet leadership by reengaging peasants to return to work, helping to secure from them a personal stake in the overall success of the Soviet revolutionary experiment.
Lysenko's genetic theories were grounded in Lamarckism
Lamarckism
Lamarckism is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring . It is named after the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck , who incorporated the action of soft inheritance into his evolutionary theories...
. His work was primarily devoted to developing new techniques and practices in agriculture. But he also contributed a new theoretical framework which would become the foundation of all Soviet agriculture: a discipline called agrobiology that is a fusion of plant physiology, cytology
Cell biology
Cell biology is a scientific discipline that studies cells – their physiological properties, their structure, the organelles they contain, interactions with their environment, their life cycle, division and death. This is done both on a microscopic and molecular level...
, genetics and evolutionary theory. Central to Lysenko's tenets was the concept of the inheritability of acquired characteristics
Inheritance of acquired characters
The inheritance of acquired characteristics is a hypothesis that physiological changes acquired over the life of an organism may be transmitted to offspring...
. In 1932 Lysenko was given his own journal, The Bulletin of Vernalization, and it became the main outlet for touting emerging developments of Lysenkoist research.
One of the most celebrated of the earliest agricultural applications developed by Lysenko was a process of increasing the success of wheat crops by soaking the grain and storing the wet seed in snow to refrigerate over the winter ("vernalization
Vernalization
Vernalization is the acquisition of a plant's ability to flower or germinate in the spring by exposure to the prolonged cold of winter...
"). Though his work was scientifically unsound on a number of levels, Lysenko's claims delighted Soviet journalists and agricultural officials, who were impressed by its promise to minimize the resources spent in theoretical scientific laboratory work. The Soviet political leadership had come to view orthodox science as offering empty promises, as unproductive in meeting the challenges and needs of the Communist state. Lysenko was viewed as someone who could deliver practical methods more rapidly, and with superior results.
Lysenko himself spent much time denouncing academic scientists and genetic
Genetics
Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....
ists, claiming that their isolated laboratory work was not helping the Soviet people. By 1929 Lysenko's skeptics were politically censured, accused of offering only criticisms, and for failing to prescribe any new solutions themselves. In December 1929, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
gave a famous speech praising "practice" above "theory", elevating the political bosses above the scientists and technical specialists. Though for a period the Soviet government under Stalin continued its support of agricultural scientists, after 1935 the balance of power abruptly swung towards Lysenko and his followers.
Lysenko was put in charge of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union and made responsible for ending the propagation of "harmful" ideas among Soviet scientists. Lysenko served this purpose by causing the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and eliminating all study and research involving Mendelian genetics
Genetics
Genetics , a discipline of biology, is the science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms....
throughout the Soviet Union. This period is known as Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism
Lysenkoism, or Lysenko-Michurinism, also denotes the biological inheritance principle which Trofim Lysenko subscribed to and which derive from theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics, a body of biological inheritance theory which departs from Mendelism and that Lysenko named...
. He bears particular responsibility for the persecution of his predecessor and rival, prominent Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov
Nikolai Vavilov
Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a prominent Russian and Soviet botanist and geneticist best known for having identified the centres of origin of cultivated plants...
, which ended in 1943 with the imprisoned Vavilov's death by starvation. In 1941 Lysenko was awarded the Stalin Prize
USSR State Prize
The USSR State Prize was the Soviet Union's state honour. It was established on September 9, 1966. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the prize was followed up by the State Prize of the Russian Federation....
.
After Stalin
Following Stalin's death in 1953, Lysenko retained his position, with the support of the new leader Nikita KhrushchevNikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
. However, mainstream scientists re-emerged, and found new willingness within Soviet government leadership to tolerate criticism of Lysenko, the first opportunity since the late 1920s. In 1962 three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich
Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich
Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich was a prolific Soviet physicist born in Belarus. He played an important role in the development of Soviet nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, and made important contributions to the fields of adsorption and catalysis, shock waves, nuclear physics, particle physics,...
, Vitaly Ginzburg
Vitaly Ginzburg
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg ForMemRS was a Soviet theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of the fathers of Soviet hydrogen bomb...
, and Pyotr Kapitsa, presented a case against Lysenko, proclaiming his work as false science. They also denounced Lysenko's application of political power to silence opposition and eliminate his opponents within the scientific community. These denunciations occurred during a period of structural upheaval in Soviet government, during which the major institutions were purged of the strictly ideological and political machinations which had controlled the work of the Soviet Union's scientific community for several decades under Stalin.
In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He earned renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the...
spoke out against Lysenko in the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences:
- "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."
The Soviet press was soon filled with anti-Lysenkoite articles and appeals for the restoration of scientific methods to all fields of biology and agricultural science. In 1965 Lysenko was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences and restricted to an experimental farm in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
's Lenin Hills (the Institute itself was soon dissolved). After Khrushchev's dismissal in 1964, the president of the Academy of Sciences declared that Lysenko's immunity to criticism had officially ended. An expert commission was sent to investigate records kept at Lysenko's experimental farm. A few months later, a devastating critique of Lysenko was made public. As a result, Lysenko was immediately disgraced in the Soviet Union, although his work continued to have impact in China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
for many years after.
Lysenko died in 1976.
See also
- Jean-Baptiste LamarckJean-Baptiste LamarckJean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck , often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist...
- Gregor MendelGregor MendelGregor Johann Mendel was an Austrian scientist and Augustinian friar who gained posthumous fame as the founder of the new science of genetics. Mendel demonstrated that the inheritance of certain traits in pea plants follows particular patterns, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance...
- VASKhNILVASKhNILVASKhNIL was the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union...
- John Desmond Bernal
External links
- Ronald FisherRonald FisherSir Ronald Aylmer Fisher FRS was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, eugenicist and geneticist. Among other things, Fisher is well known for his contributions to statistics by creating Fisher's exact test and Fisher's equation...
(1948) What Sort of Man is Lysenko? Listener, 40: 874-875 — contemporary commentary by a British evolutionary biologist (pdf format) - Letter from Lysenko's parents to Stalin, PravdaPravdaPravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
, January 3, 1936. - Report by Lysenko to the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, 1948
- New Developments in the Science of Biological Species by Lysenko, 1950
- Heredity and Its Variability by Lysenko, 1951
- Lecourt, Dominique, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko (1977), Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, London, this digital edition first published 2003 (A Marxist, though anti-Stalinist, history of Lysenkoism)
- BBC program (In Our Time) on Lysenko