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Lysenkoism (''Russian:'' Лысе́нковщина) was a political campaign against genetics and science-based agriculture conducted by Trofim Lysenko, his followers and Soviet authorities. Lysenko was the director of the Soviet Union's Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Lysenkoism began in the late 1920s and formally ended in 1964. The pseudo-scientific ideas of Lysenkoism were built on Lamarckan heritability of acquired characteristics.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Lysenkoism )〕 Lysenko's theory rejected Mendelian inheritance, the concept of the "gene" and departed from Darwinian evolutionary theory by rejecting natural selection .〔 Proponents falsely claimed to have discovered, among many other things, that rye could transform into wheat and wheat into barley, that weeds are spontaneously transmuting into food grains, and that 'natural cooperation' was observed in nature as opposed to 'natural selection'. Lysenkism promised extraordinary advances in breeding and agriculture that never came about. The campaign was supported by Joseph Stalin. More than 3,000 mainstream biologists were sent to prison or fired or executed as a part of this campaign instigated by Lysenko to suppress his scientific opponents. The president of the Agriculture Academy was sent to prison and died there, while the scientific research in the field of genetics was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953.〔 Research and teaching in the fields of neurophysiology, cell biology, and many other biological disciplines was also negatively affected or banned. Term "Lysenkoism" is also used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.〔(), ().〕 ==In agriculture== In 1928, Trofim Lysenko, a previously unknown agronomist, claimed to have developed an agricultural technique, termed vernalization, which tripled or quadrupled crop yield by exposing wheat seed to high humidity and low temperature. While cold and moisture exposure are a normal part of the life cycle of autumn-seeded winter cereals, the vernalization technique claimed to increase yields by increasing the intensity of exposure, in some cases planting soaked seeds directly into the snow cover of frozen fields. In reality, the technique was neither new (it had been known since 1854, and was extensively studied during the previous twenty years), nor did it produce the yields he promised, although some increase in production did occur. When Lysenko began his fieldwork in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the agriculture of the Soviet Union was in a massive crisis due to rapid changes in switching from an agrarian-based economy towards an industrial economy and the liquidation of the kulaks, leading to mismanagement of collective farms. The resulting famine provoked the people and the government alike to search for any possible solution to the critical lack of food. Lysenko's vernalization practices yielded marginally greater food production on the farms, and he was quickly accepted as the hero of Soviet agriculture. Many agronomists were educated before the revolution, and even many of those educated afterwards did not agree with the forced collectivization policies. Furthermore, among biologists of the day, the most popular topic was not agriculture at all, but the new genetics that was emerging out of studies of ''Drosophila melanogaster'', commonly known as fruit flies. Drosophilid flies made experimental verification of genetics theories, such as Mendelian ratios and heritability, much easier. Isaak Izrailevich Prezent, a main Lysenko theorist, presented Lysenko in Soviet mass-media as a genius who had developed a new, revolutionary agricultural technique. In this period, Soviet propaganda often focused on inspirational stories of peasants who, through their own canny ability and intelligence, came up with solutions to practical problems. Lysenko's widespread popularity provided him a platform to denounce theoretical genetics and to promote his own agricultural practices. He was, in turn, supported by the Soviet propaganda machine, which overstated his successes and omitted mention of his failures. This was accompanied by fake experimental data supporting Lysenkoism from scientists seeking favor and the destruction of counter-evidence to Lysenko's theories. Instead of performing controlled experiments, Lysenko claimed that vernalization increased wheat yields by 15%, solely based upon questionnaires taken of farmers. ==Rise== Lysenko's political success was mostly due to his appeal to the Communist Party and Soviet ideology. Following the disastrous collectivization efforts of the late 1920s, Lysenko's "new" methods were seen by Soviet officials as paving the way to an "agricultural revolution". Lysenko himself was from a peasant family, and an enthusiastic advocate of Leninism. During a period which saw a series of man-made agricultural disasters, he was also extremely fast in responding to problems, although not with real solutions. Whenever the Party announced plans to plant a new crop or cultivate a new area, Lysenko had immediate practical suggestions on how to proceed. So quickly did he develop his prescriptions — from the cold treatment of grain, to the plucking of leaves from cotton plants, to the cluster planting of trees, to unusual fertilizer mixes — that academic biologists did not have time to demonstrate that one technique was valueless or harmful before a new one was adopted. The Party-controlled newspapers applauded Lysenko's "practical" efforts and questioned the motives of his critics. Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" had a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics, who urged the patience and observation required for science. Lysenko was admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and was put in charge of agricultural affairs. He used his position to denounce biologists as "fly-lovers and people haters," 〔''Epistemology and the Social'', Evandro Agazzi, Javier Echeverría, Amparo Gómez Rodríguez, Rodopi, Jan 1, 2008 - Philosophy - 231 pages, (Google books scanned reference ), p 149〕 and to decry the "wreckers" in biology, who he claimed were trying to purposely disable the Soviet economy and cause it to fail. Furthermore, he denied the distinction between theoretical and applied biology. Lysenko presented himself as a follower of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, a well-known and well-liked Soviet horticulturist. However, unlike Michurin, he advocated a form of Lamarckism, insisting on using only hybridization and grafting, as non-genetic techniques. With this came, most importantly, the implication that ''acquired'' characteristics of an organism — for example, the state of being leafless as a result of having been plucked — could be inherited by that organism's descendants. This is why Lysenko claimed vernalization would give greater productivity than it did; he believed the ability of his vernalized seeds to flower faster and produce more wheat would be passed on to the next generation of wheat seeds, thus causing vernalization to further amplify the process. Support from Joseph Stalin gave Lysenko even more momentum and popularity. In 1935, Lysenko compared his opponents in biology to the peasants who still resisted the Soviet government's collectivization strategy, saying that by opposing his theories the traditional geneticists were setting themselves against Marxism. Stalin was in the audience when this speech was made, and he was the first one to stand and applaud, calling out "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko. Bravo." This event emboldened Lysenko and gave him and his ally Prezent free rein to slander the geneticists who still spoke out against him. Many of Lysenkoism's opponents, such as his former mentor Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, were imprisoned or even executed because of Lysenko's and Prezent's denunciations. On August 7, 1948, the V.I. Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences announced that from that point on Lysenkoism would be taught as "the only correct theory". Soviet scientists were forced to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenko's research.〔Pamela N. Wrinch. "(Science and Politics in the U.S.S.R.: The Genetics Debate )". ''World Politics'', Vol. 3, No. 4 (Jul., 1951), pp. 486-519〕 Criticism of Lysenko was denounced as "bourgeois" or "fascist", and analogous "non-bourgeois" theories also flourished in other fields in the Soviet academy at this time (see Japhetic theory; socialist realism). Interestingly, perhaps the only opponents of Lysenkoism during Stalin's lifetime to escape liquidation came from the small community of Soviet nuclear physicists: as Tony Judt has observed, "It is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess ''their'' calculations. Stalin may well have been mad but he was not stupid."〔Judt, Tony. ''Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945'', (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), p. 174n.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lysenkoism」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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