https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/trofim-lysenko-soviet-union-russia/548786/
The Soviet Era's Deadliest Scientist Is Regaining Popularity in Russia
Trofim Lysenko’s spurious research prolonged famines that killed millions. So why is a fringe movement praising his legacy?
Sam Kean
December 19, 2017
Although it’s impossible to say for sure, Trofim Lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history. Other dubious scientific achievements have cut thousands upon thousands of lives short: dynamite, poison gas, atomic bombs. But Lysenko, a Soviet biologist, condemned perhaps millions of people to starvation through bogus agricultural research—and did so without hesitation. Only guns and gunpowder, the collective product of many researchers over several centuries, can match such carnage.
Having grown up desperately poor at the turn of the 20th century, Lysenko believed wholeheartedly in the promise of the communist revolution. So when the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end. It never did. But in a twisted way, that commitment to ideology has helped salvage Lysenko’s reputation today. Because of his hostility toward the West, and his mistrust of Western science, he’s currently enjoying a revival in his homeland, where anti-American sentiment runs strong.
Lysenko vaulted to the top of the Soviet scientific heap with unusual speed. Born into a family of peasant farmers in 1898, he was illiterate until age 13, according to a recent article on his revival in Current Biology. He nevertheless took advantage of the Russian Revolution and won admission to several agricultural schools, where he began experimenting with new methods of growing peas during the long, hard Soviet winter, among other projects. Although he ran poorly designed experiments and probably faked some of his results, the research won him praise from a state-run newspaper in 1927. His hardscrabble background—people called him the “barefoot scientist”—also made him popular within the Communist party, which glorified peasants.
Officials eventually put Lysenko in charge of Soviet agriculture in the 1930s. The only problem was, he had batty scientific ideas. In particular, he loathed genetics. Although a young field, genetics advanced rapidly in the 1910s and 1920s; the first Nobel Prize for work in genetics was awarded in 1933. And especially in that era, genetics emphasized fixed traits: Plants and animals have stable characteristics, encoded as genes, which they pass down to their children. Although nominally a biologist, Lysenko considered such ideas reactionary and evil, since he saw them as reinforcing the status quo and denying all capacity for change. (He in fact denied that genes existed.)
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
Trofim Lysenko
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (Russian: Трофи́м Дени́сович Лысе́нко, Ukrainian: Трохи́м Дени́сович Лисе́нко, Trokhym Denysovych Lysenko; 29 September [O.S. 17 September] 1898 – 20 November 1976) was a Soviet agronomist and biologist. Lysenko was a strong proponent of soft inheritance and rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of pseudoscientific ideas termed Lysenkoism.[1][2]
In 1940, Lysenko became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR's 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.
Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were imprisoned. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state, including the botanist Nikolai Vavilov. Scientific dissent from Lysenko's theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in the Soviet Union in 1948. As a result of Lysenkoism and forced collectivization, 15-30 million Soviet and Chinese citizens starved to death in the Holodomor and the Great Chinese Famine.
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Lysenko forced farmers to plant seeds very close together since, according to his "law of the life of species", plants from the same "class" never compete with one another.[14] Lysenko played an active role in the famines that killed millions of Soviet people and his practices prolonged and exacerbated the food shortages.[14] The People's Republic of China under Mao Tse-Tung adopted his methods starting in 1958, with calamitous results, culminating in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962, in which some 15 million people died.[14] At least 30 million died of starvation.[14]
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). Criticism from foreigners did not sit well with Lysenko, who loathed Western "bourgeois" scientists and denounced them as tools of imperialist oppressors. He especially detested the American-born practice of studying fruit flies, the workhorse of modern genetics. He called such geneticists "fly lovers and people haters".
Unable to silence Western critics, Lysenko tried to eliminate all dissent within the Soviet Union. Scientists who refused to renounce genetics found themselves at the mercy of the secret police. The lucky ones simply got dismissed from their posts and were left destitute. Hundreds if not thousands of others were rounded up and dumped into prisons or psychiatric hospitals. Several were sentenced to death as enemies of the state or starved in their jail cells (most notably the botanist Nikolai Vavilov).[14] Before the 1930s, the Soviet Union had a strong genetics community. Lysenko gutted it, and by some accounts set Russian biology and agronomy back a half-century.[14]
= new reply since forum marked as read
So funny! 
