quote:
Amid revolution and civil war, Vavilov became a professor of agronomy in Saratov, a Volga port on the edge of Russia's fertile black-earth farmland, where he pursued research into breeding more productive crops, which the Bolsheviks would need to offset future famine. At first, Vavilov struck up a rapport with Vladimir Lenin, who understood the ultimate economic promise of his botanical expeditions. As head of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Vavilov established 400 research institutes throughout the Soviet Union and collected samples of 50,000 varieties of wild plants and 31,000 wheat specimens. With the death of Lenin, in 1924, the Kremlin's enthusiasm began to wane.

Stalin hated genetics — and chromosomes in particular, not least because the idea of genes as physical structures passed down through the generations suggested that nature wasn't changeable. His five-year plan for agriculture was a lethal mixture of science and ideology. It borrowed from the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck a belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics (e.g. that giraffes grew long necks because they stretched their heads higher and higher to reach the fruit on trees). Such a belief has never been experimentally verified, in spite of many attempts, but it fit perfectly with the Bolshevik view that people could be re-educated to think and act differently from their bourgeois predecessors, that one generation's suffering and torment could produce a new kind of being, Homo Sovieticus.

Using a wide variety of memoirs and archival documents, Pringle shows how the internationally acclaimed Vavilov was outmaneuvered by the "barefoot scientist" Lysenko, an uneducated peasant whom Stalin no doubt preferred to the unreliably bourgeois professor. Lysenko promised the Soviet leader that he would turn the Russian wasteland into a grain-laden Garden of Eden, using the bogus science of "vernalization" to eliminate the normal two-year growth cycle of winter wheat.

more review at: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/arts/2008/09/05/370710.htm