Trofim Lysenko

Trofim Lysenko is born into a Ukrainian peasant family in Karlivka, Poltava Governorate.

De Vries, Correns and Tschermak independently rediscover Gregor Mendel's 1866 laws of inheritance, launching modern genetics, the science Lysenko will later outlaw in the USSR.

Lysenko publicizes 'vernalization', chilling seeds to crop in spring, and claims, against Mendel, that such acquired traits are heritable.

The protégé turns on the patron: Vavilov and Lysenko clash openly over genetics, and Vavilov begins to be branded a 'saboteur'.

With Stalin sympathetic to his ideas, Lysenko becomes president of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, tightening his grip on Soviet biology.

At the 1948 VASKhNIL session Lysenko has genetics condemned as bourgeois perversion; his rivals are purged.

Stalin's death loosens Lysenko's grip and dooms Beria, arrested in June and shot in December. The poison laboratory's patrons begin to fall.

Khrushchev's fall removes Lysenko's last protector; within a year a commission exposes his fraud and Soviet genetics is rehabilitated.

After Khrushchev's fall a commission reviews the work on Lysenko's experimental estate and he is removed as director of the Institute of Genetics; his doctrines are abandoned. He had given up the VASKhNIL presidency already in 1956.

Lysenko dies in Moscow; his death is barely reported, a disgraced figure whose reign set Soviet biology back decades.