quote source: https://archive.org/details/safonov-land-in-bloom/page/318/mode/2up?view=theater
Concerning his own future as a Soviet scientist, [Lysenko] speaks in the following terms:
“In our Soviet Union men and women are not born: organisms are born, but men and women are made—tractor drivers, motor drivers, mechanics, academicians, scientists. I was not born a man, I was made a man. And to feel that you are living in such an environment is more than being happy.”
What’s the deal with Trofim Lysenko, anyways? He seems like one of those figures where there are so many different ideas about him from the relentlessly positive to the relentlessly negative.
My understanding is that he correctly identified that contemporary science had been influenced by racist ideology/eugenics but then he threw the baby out with the bathwater and just sorta made up pseudo-scientific nonsense to try to replace genetics and the next thing you know there’s a major famine in China.
He was a living meme that rejected Mendel and the concept of genetics, sadly he got actual scientists purged
You will never live in the world where Vavilov become the top soviet agricultural scientist
