i mean i guess i knew that because there was a girl in middle school who said that genes didn’t really exist, and DNA was like dinosaur bones (a false flag to make us doubt god’s will). i’m pretty sure she grew out of it.
Good old Trofim Lysenko. He did in fact deny the existence of genes (not quite DNA, whose role in heredity wasn’t known at the time), and despite this he was director of the Institute of Genetics in the Academy of Sciences of USSR for a quarter of a century.
He had impressed Stalin with his claim that he could turn a species of wheat into a different species by changing its planting season, which flattered the Party because it sounded like the idea of remaking people into the New Soviet Man through education, while any talk of heredity or natural selection was tainted by association with “social darwinism” and dismissed as fascist or capitalist propaganda; and he kept up the flattering until he was promoted to the highest position in “his” field.
The attempt to change a species of wheat into another failed, obviously, which greatly damaged grain production in the USSR and later in China, dooming additional thousands and possibly millions to starvation (in addition to, well, all the other reasons for starvation that were already around). Since he was personally promoted by Stalin, Lysenko had the power to get rid of anyone who questioned him, so thousands of actual biologists were fired, imprisoned, interned in mental hospitals, or outright executed. (Most famously Nikolai Vavilov, known for his research in the origin of agriculture, who starved to death in a prison cell.) Eventually the whole field of genetics was declared a “pseudoscience”.
After Stalin’s death, Lysenko lost most of its power, and his influence waned until he finally lost his position in 1965. It was actually physicists who made the most important case against him, as biologists were more or less extinct in the USSR; Soviet biology stagnated while physics and engineering progressed, largely because Lysenko had personally gutted the whole field to protect his own position.
