Proletarian science? : the case of Lysenko / Dominique Lecourt ; introduction by Louis Althusser ; translated by Ben Brewster.
- Lecourt, Dominique. Lyssenko. English
- Date:
- 1977
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Proletarian science? : the case of Lysenko / Dominique Lecourt ; introduction by Louis Althusser ; translated by Ben Brewster. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![The Peasant Question 6g recommendations of a leading scientist fail under actual conditions of practice, but scientific workers lack the courage to admit it . . . practice has proved that recommendations [for Lysenko's method] are completely inapplicable under the conditions of Omsk and other Western Siberian regions. Nevertheless, members of the Siberian Agricultural Research Institute in Omsk, in order to please Lysenko, and ignoring obvious facts, proved the unprovable on the plots of the institute, under hot-house conditions. ... As a result, in the Omsk region alone, in the course of several years, tens of thousands of hectares of winter wheat were sown according to this method and failed to retum even the amount of seed origin¬ ally expended' (cit. Medvedev, op. cit., p. 165). Another delirious and catastrophic example; the planting in 'clusters' of forest trees according to the rriethod deduced from the conjuncture of Lysenko's doctrines and those of Vil'yams. This was by unanimous admission one of the reasons for the failure of the 'Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature' worked out by Stalin in 1949. To deceptive statistics manipulated by over zealous officials, cooked balance-sheets only revealing the successes and omitting the failures, 'questionnaires' drafted so that results obtained under the impact of other factors could be attributed to the application of the given technique and uneven comparisons between the yields in some highly equipped experimental station and those of an average kolkhoz of the region, it is necessary to add the imaginary facts announced by Lysenko himself. In fact, Lysenko invented a whole system of chimeras, the results of'orientated' metamorphoses of species; he flattered him¬ self as able to transform wheat into rye, barley into oats, cabbages into swedes, pines into firs, hazelnuts into hornbeams ... A whole mythology to which each number of the magazine Agrobiologiya was soon adding its contribution. A fantastic poem in which nature, infinitely malleable, bends to the whims of the Michurinist demiurge. Undisceming applications of techniques the precise conditions of whose effectiveness were unknown, the invention of procedures whose failures were camouflaged for years, the celebration of invented 'facts' with more to do with hterary fiction than with agricultural practice - this is the side of Lysenkoism that is most willingly remembered today, in order to condemn it. This is what](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b1803441x_0074.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
