memes

Very Socratic last remark there.

Lysenko was a soviet agronomist whose contributions include formally describing vernalization (and utilising vernalization deliberately on cereal plants).

Vernalization is effect of cold on a plants flowering. Lysenko had through cold treatment managed to effect when and how a plant would grow. You can see how that is a cool thing that people in the soviet union would care a lot about.

However lysenko came to use this and various other observations to build a framework of biology that was not true. He rejected mendelian inheritance and came to believe plants possessed a kind of primitive class consciousness and wouldn't compete for resources if they were of "the same class". This idea directly led soviet farmers to overplant crops too close and producing measurably lower yields for decades.

Still, he was appointed to be a head of genetics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in the year 1940. A post he held until 1965. Which meant his reign lasted 25 years from Stalin to Khruschchev.

At his role he oversaw the systemic suppression of soviet biological research involving actual genetics and the imprisonment of scientists who did not agree with Lysenko. Which set back biological research.