The debate on the relative influence of heredity and environment took a distinctive form in the Soviet Union in the turbulent years between the 1920s and the 1960s. There was among many committed communists a sense that the socialist revolution should transform everything, including the foundations of knowledge. There was intense debate about what constituted a Marxist approach to every discipline, including biology.

Lysenko's Practice and Theory

Into this context came Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976), a young agronomist from the Ukraine, who emerged into the limelight in 1927 in connection with an experiment in the winter planting of peas to precede the cotton crop in the Transcaucasus. The results he achieved in a remote station in Azerbaijan were sensationalized in the national Communist Party newspaper Pravda. The article projected an image of him as a sullen, barefoot scientist close to his peasant roots. Lysenko subsequently became famous for...