Lysenko and Genetics

Lysenko's contribution printed in the summer number of SCIENCE AND

SOCIETY will certainly "give occasion to the enemy to blaspheme." I have
little doubt that he has gone too far in some directions, but it is important to see
what there is of value in his criticism of orthodox genetics.
He begins by attacking the theory, which appears to be taught in the Soviet
Union, that once a pure line is established, selection is useless. This theory is
simply false, for the following reason. A pure line originally consists of
individuals all of which are homozygous and genetically alike. But in course of
time this ceases to be the case as a result of mutation, and also in the case of an
allopolyploid such as wheat, of crossing over between chromosomes which do
not normally cross over. Hence a pure line gradually breaks up into other
approximately pure lines.
Some of these will be worse from an economic point of view than the original
line. But some at any rate are better adapted to local conditions than their
ancestors. Hence Lysenko is quite right in stressing the importance of selecting
"elite strains of seed" from so-called pure lines. Any reader who supposes that I
am taking this line because Lysenko is a Communist might do worse than read a
paper which I published in the Journal of Genetics for 1936, entitled "The
Amount of Heterozygosis to Be Expected in an Approximately Pure Line."
His next point, the breadth of the zone of isolation needed for different crops,
has nothing to do with Mendelism as such. I have of course no means of
judging who is right in this controversy, but I should be prepared to bet on
Lysenko's being substantially correct.
Then we come to the question of the three-to-one ratio, which Lysenko says is a
statistical, not a biological regularity. I confess that I am not quite clear what he
means in this case, perhaps because his speech has been summarized. Where a
three-to-one ratio is expected according to the laws of formal genetics, it is very
rarely obtained with complete accuracy. The deviations from it are due to two
causes. First of all, we have deviations due to chance. Thus if we expect 30
hairy and ten smooth plants we are quite likely to get 33 and seven or 27 and
13. And this fact is of great biological importance. If plants or animals were
always produced in exactly Mendelian ratios there would be a perpetual
equilibrium in hybrid populations. These deviations, so far as they are random,
are partly due to sampling, partly to linkage of the gene studied with other
genes in the same chromosome affecting viability or fertility. Owing to these
chance deviations, one type or another will ultimately disappear from a small
population, and it will become homogeneous. Sewall Wright of Chicago has
studied this effect in great detail. Second, when large numbers are grown, a
deviation from the three-to-one ratio is usually found, because one type is fitter
than the other. One of the largest lists of such deviations in any plant was
published by de Winton and myself.[1] If there were no systematic deviations of
this kind there would be no natural selection based on survival of the fittest,
even if there were reproductive selection based on differences of fertility. Thus
systematic deviations from the three-to-one ratio are a fact of extreme
biological importance.
His next point, the importance of selection in the F1, or first hybrid generation,
is correct if the hybrids are not between pure lines. As we saw, pure lines are
ideals which are rarely quite realized, and agricultural varieties may be very far
from pure lines.
Next we have the question of food. I think that nine times out of ten Lysenko is
wrong, that is to say that you cannot improve a breed of animals by improving
its food. But there are cases where this is possible, and they may be common
enough to make Lysenko's principle of great practical value. The clearest of
such cases was discovered at Bar Harbor, Maine, by Little's group of workers
on mouse genetics and has been specially studied by Bittner. For many years
they had kept different pure lines of mice. Each line had a characteristic liability
to mammary cancer in females. In one line 90 per cent of all females who did
not die of some other cause before the age of two years would develop this
disease, in another line only 5 per cent. The members of the immune line were
no more likely to develop it if they were caged for months with the susceptible
line. The liability seemed to be hereditary. But it turned out that if the young of
the susceptible line were separated from their mothers at birth and suckled by
immune females they were much less likely to become cancerous. And this
partial immunity is handed on to their children.
Nothing of the kind has been discovered for other forms of cancer. And I
believe it to be a rarer phenomenon than Lysenko supposes. But it is futile to
deny its existence and to regard Lysenko's assertion of its possibility as in any
way unscientific.
Now follows the question of grafting. Lysenko personally vouches for four
cases where tomatoes have been altered by grafting. Tomatoes belong to the
Solanaceae, which have long been known to be particularly susceptible to virus
diseases. These diseases can be transmitted, among other methods, by grafting.
Later research has shown that besides disease-producing viruses, it is possible
to transmit viruses which have no obvious effect on the plant, but immunize it
to one or more of the disease producers. Some of these viruses are known to be
heavy proteins which reproduce (or are reproduced) within the plant cells.
Lysenko claims to have evidence of transmissible agents which alter the shape
of the fruit. It seems quite possible that the range of transmissible agents
stretches from those which produce obviously pathological effects such as
yellow patches on the leaves, to others which produce morphological effects
like those of genes. Daniel and Dangeard in France have reported similar results
in Compositae such as the Jerusalem artichoke.
On the other hand, I don't agree with Lysenko in believing that Michurin gave a
white-fruited cherry red fruit by grafting it. There is a vast amount of practical
experience in grafting cherries, apples, plums, loses, and other members of the
Rosacene, and no recorded case of a permanent color change. Michurin's claims
to have succeeded with hybridizations which otherwise failed, as a result of
grafting, are on quite a different footing. They may or may not be confirmed by
workers in other countries. But so little is known about the conditions for
successful hybridization that they do not seem to be a priori improbable. And in
view of the great value of Lysenko's technique of vernalization, which has been
amply proved not only in the Soviet Union but all over the civilized world, I
should personally be surprised if his statements on results obtained by him were
not largely correct.
But scientific pioneers are not infallible. Pasteur did more for the theory and
practice of fermentation than any other man. Yet he made some big mistakes.
Having discovered that the usual agents of fermentation, such as yeasts and
bacteria, were alive, he denied the possibility of fermentation by nonliving
substances. Yet today thousands of different enzymes are known, about twenty
have even been crystallized by Sumner, Northrop, and others, mostly in the
U.S.A. In the same way Lysenko, who is right in pointing out that the majority
of characters showing Mendelian inheritance are of little economic importance,
is quite wrong in supposing that none of them are.
I take a simple example from British agricultural practice. Two dominant sex-
linked genes, for barred feathers and for silver as opposed to gold feathers,
show up in newly hatched chicks. Thus by a suitable cross, for example of a
Light Sussex hen and a Rhode Island Red rooster, we can get chickens whose
sexes can be separated at once and given different food. So long as ten years
ago a single British firm was raising 800,000 chicks a year from such crosses.
This was done with severely practical motives, and not to confute Lysenko. If
his authority prevents similar practice in the Soviet Union he will be doing a
disservice to socialism.
In the same way, I am sure that he goes much too far in his attack on the
chromosome theory. His statement that "any hereditary properties can be
transmitted from one breed to another even without the immediate transmission
of chromosomes" is, in my opinion, absolutely false, and I think that anyone
with practical experience of grafting roses or apples would agree with me. But
it is equally false to say that no hereditary properties can be so transmitted. The
correct statement is as above, but substituting "some" for "any."
In the same way Lysenko was wrong if he referred to the theories of current
genetics, such as the three-to-one ratio and the like, as "fantasies." They are not
fantasies, but approximations. Copernicus's theory that the planets went round
the sun in circles was an approximation. Kepler's theory that they moved in
ellipses was a better approximation. The Newton-Laplace theory was yet a
better approximation, but it was still undialectical, as it did not allow for any
real history of the solar system in the sense of irreversible change. Then Kant
and George Darwin showed that the solar system had undergone and would
undergo slow and irreversible changes through tidal friction, with not only the
moon but most of the planets moving in slowly widening orbits. Various
developments of the theory of relativity suggest other slow changes.
Although the Copernican and Newtonian systems were inadequate, they were
great advances on the systems of Ptolemy, Kidinnu, and other earlier
astronomers. And I think posterity will rank Mendel with Copernicus or Kepler,
though hardly with Newton.
It must not be supposed that Lysenko stands alone in his criticism of formal
genetics and his belief that breeds can be altered by feeding. Some of his views
are shared, for example, by .J. L. Hammond of Cambridge, England. I think that
he has gone too far, but he may well have done a service to Soviet genetics by
making his more traditionally minded colleagues examine not only the
theoretical foundations of their work, but its relation to agricultural practice.
In the same number of SCIENCE AND SOCIETY Polyakov criticizes my
mathematical work. Probably his criticism refers mainly to that summarized in
The Causes of Evolution in 1930. He says that it includes "no consideration of
real biological interrelations." This is largely true, because a mathematical
treatment of even the simplest evolutionary problems is difficult. One must
begin with problems as abstract as the motion of two perfectly elastic billiard
balls on a frictionless table. I had to begin, just as mathematical physicists had
to begin, by leaving out factors of great practical importance. Wright, Fisher,
and others have greatly improved my work by making it more concrete. But I
have also done so myself.
For example, fifteen years ago I calculated the equilibrium which should result
when the same gene was constantly being produced by mutation and destroyed
by natural selection. The idea of an equilibrium was undialectical, like
Copernicus's idea of planetary motion in perfect and invariable circles. But it
gave results of the right order of magnitude. Then Fisher pointed out that in this
case selection of modifying genes would cause slow evolutionary changes in
the apparent equilibrium. Later I dealt with "real biological interrelations" and
showed that in civilized human populations the relaxation of inbreeding in
recent centuries had probably caused a sharp decrease in the frequency of
recessive abnormalities such as amaurotic idiocy, albinism, and some types of
blindness. In fact the motor bus, by breaking up inbred village communities,
was a powerful eugenic agent. Here, if I am correct, I am getting down to "real
biological interrelations." If I were a Newton or a Maxwell, I might have got to
this point in one step. I might even have done so had I been a Marxist fifteen
years ago, in which case I should have been very suspicious of equilibriums,
knowing that the conflict between two tendencies such as mutation and
selection may lead to apparent equilibrium, but is very apt to cause real
changes, either slow evolutionary changes or qualitative leaps. I might also
have been on the lookout for biological effects of technical changes in transport
and communications.
I have also had to bring my theories up to date in the light of the new facts
discovered in the Soviet Union by Dubinin and his colleagues in their studies of
wild populations of Drosophila. I had predicted some of them, but by no means
all. The fact that I had predicted some of them shows that my mathematics had
a certain validity.
Any mathematical theory inevitably leaves out a good deal of relevant facts.
But it is more exact than a theory expressed in words. And I believe that my
own theories, inadequate as they doubtless are, were an essential step toward
exact thinking in genetics.

Footnotes
[1] D. de Winton and J. B. S. Haldane, Journal of Genetics, xxiv, p. 1.