Trofim Lysenko

Born Sept. 17 (29), 1898, in the village of Karlovka (the present-day city of Karlovka), Poltava Oblast, Ukrainian SSR; died Nov. 20, 1976. Soviet biologist and agronomist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (AN SSSR; 1939), the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1934), and the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1935). Hero of Socialist Labor (1945).

Lysenko graduated from the Kiev Agricultural Institute in 1925. From 1922 to 1925 he was a senior specialist at the Belaia Tserkov’ Breeding Station, and from 1925 to 1929, head of the legumes breeding division of the Giandzha Breeding Station. He was a senior specialist in the physiology division of the All-Union Research Institute of Selection and Genetics in Odessa from 1929 to 1934 and scientific director and director of the institute from 1934 to 1938. From 1940 to 1965 he was director of the Institute of Genetics of the AN SSSR. In 1938 he became scientific director and, in 1966, director of the laboratory of the Gorky Leninskie Experimental Research Station of the AN SSSR (near Moscow). He was president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences from 1938 to 1956 and from 1961 to 1962.

Lysenko developed a theory of the phasic development of plants and a method of directing a change from hereditarily fixed winter grain varieties into hereditarily fixed spring varieties, and vice versa. He proposed a number of farming techniques (vernalization, cotton chopping, summer planting of potatoes). A number of Lysenko’s theories and proposals failed to be experimentally confirmed or extensively applied. Lysenko was a deputy to the first through sixth convocations of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR. He was awarded the State Prize of the USSR, several Orders of Lenin, and various medals.