lilietsblog reblogged
reading about the development of hybrid rice in china just makes lysenkoism more depressing
ok some dates
- 1943: Vavilov, the scientist that started the Leningrad seed bank, dies in prison
- 1948: Genetics is officially condemned. I don't understand Soviet political structure enough to understand exactly what this involved. It wasn't a new law, it was a statement involving the Minister of Agriculture. But I get the impression that writing and teaching about genetics had to stop.
- Around 1960 is the beginning of planting of semi-dwarf wheat in the United States.
- 1965: A report on Lysenko's failure to achieve real improvements is published in the USSR. Lysenko loses his job as director of something or other, I can't follow this Soviet political stuff. Of course the real event here was the removal of Kruschev in 1964. Things may have gotten better for genetics when Stalin lost power, but Kruschev was also a Lysenko supporter.
- I don't know how to date Borlaug's work on wheat, but I'll throw in an event of 1968, the introduction of "Chaparral" and "Red River 68", semidwarf wheat varieties. Look, I don't know much about this, but it was ongoing work at this time.
- 1972: Publication of the discovery of "wild abortive", a male-sterile strain of rice still used today. That is, it doesn't produce male parts, so it doesn't self-pollinate, so you can easily hybridize it. Yuan Longping's first publication on male-sterile rice plants was 1966, so wild abortive was not the first candidate found by his group, but rather that culmination of a years-long search. My understanding is it's easier to find male-sterile rice plants than to find a robustly inherited male-sterile trait. If you eat rice it's probably a hybrid between a descendant of this discovery and some other line. A first-generation hybrid, they redo the hybridiziation for every year's seeds to get hybrid vigor.
My point is that the Soviet persecution of agricultural scientists and silencing of genetics was going on at around the same time that agricultural science was most important and urgent. I don't know if the timelines in China and the Soviet Union were really so different, lysenkosim was popular in China until the mid 50s. But the point is that agricultural science was not, you know, expendable, this wasn't just some dispute among experts in an esoteric subject. It was a matter of whether it was allowed to do some of the most important scientific work possible at that moment in history.