The Science of Food

One day, years ago, when I was a cocksure university undergraduate, I was chatting to some Jehovah’s Witnesses who had come to the door of the share house I lived in. I’d ditched lectures for the day so, as a man of leisure, I had some time to discuss philosophical issues with these poor people who probably just wanted to sell me a copy of the Watchtower. We discussed a few things but at one point the guy I was talking to said that when it came to evolution he didn’t understand how if you threw someone in a pool they would grow gills. I was more than happy to explain to him that this wasn’t how evolution worked. That evolutionary change happened over long periods of time as random mutations made individuals better or more poorly adapted to their local environment¹. That if you threw two people of the opposite sex in a very large pool and came back in a million years you might have dolphins. I don’t think he really got it; I certainly didn’t explain it very well.

The incident has always stuck in my mind though. Mainly it’s the embarrassing memory of what a little prig I was but also because it reflects one of the early, and most serious, of the criticisms of Darwin’s theory. Darwin’s proposition was that new species arose gradually over time. Darwin’s problem was that he had no mechanism of inheritance that could support his claims, he had absolutely no idea about genes or genetics, and the existence of intermediate species was not well supported in the fossil record. Something like the Cambrian explosion² actually seemed to show the opposite with the sudden appearance of many new species over a, relatively, short period of time.

When Darwin, and Alfred Russel Wallace, announced their theory of evolution by natural selection in 1858 they sparked a controversy that would last for decades. Many parts of society were implacably opposed to evolution and, far from being an esoteric academic fight, the truth of Darwin’s theory engaged almost all levels of Victorian society. Debate raged over evolution and the lack of a mechanism for heredity provided plenty of ambiguity for opponents to attack evolution. One of the main criticisms was the lack of “missing links” in the fossil record. Darwin badly needed a mechanism and some fossils to really establish his theory and it wasn’t really until the 1930s and 1940s, when evolution got it’s mechanism in the form of modern genetics that Darwinism was fully accepted.

Given the importance of a mechanism for inheritance of biological traits it is amazing that the whole the time that Darwin was fighting to defend his theory a mechanism was just sitting there in an obscure journal, waiting to be discovered. An Austrian monk called Gregor Mendel had published what was going to become the basis of modern genetics in 1866 but no one saw or realised the importance of his work. Mendel, working with pea plants in a monastery in the Moravian town of Brunn (now Brno in the Czech Republic), had worked out that heritable traits were passed down in discrete units, one from each parent, as well as the principles of dominance and independent assortment (see the post on bananas for a genetics refresher if you need it). But it wasn’t until the early 1900s (long after Darwin’s death in 1882) that Mendel’s work was discovered and he became the “father of genetics”.

In the meantime, with Mendel’s work languishing in obscurity, there were plenty of other theories competing with Darwin’s version of evolution. One of the biggest rivals was something called Lamarckism, named after a French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck³. One of the key aspects of Lamarckism is that attributes that organisms acquire during their lifetime can be passed on to their offspring. So a blacksmith, for example, would pass down a predisposition for strength to his offspring because of the muscular development he or she acquired from working as a blacksmith. In Lamarckism the emphasis is on individuals developing traits that made them better adapted to their environment. Traits that could then be passed onto their offspring. The Lamarckist view of evolution was a progression of continual improvements as organisms adapted to their environment.

As an alternative to Darwinism, Lamarckism was popular in Victorian society for this reason; it didn’t dethrone us as the pinnacle of creation. Darwinism, driven as it was by random mutations that were filtered by natural selection, implied that evolution could end up anywhere and that, gasp, humans were not the inevitable perfect endpoint of evolution. Lamarckism with its continual improvement gave a direction and an endpoint to evolution, that endpoint being us. To many Victorians we were meant to be created in the image of God, we weren’t just the descendent of some monkey who got a couple of lucky mutations. Lamarckism also gave some agency to our own evolution, if we changed ourselves we could change our offspring and we could do the same to other species. More prosaically, it also gave a scientific explanation for nepo babies and the maintenance of the class system; aristocratic families are aristocratic because they pass on their acquired virtues to their offspring⁴.

Nonetheless, despite it’s attractions, by the 1920’s Lamarckism was well and truly on it’s way out of fashion. Mendel’s work had finally been discovered and modern genetics was on the rise. The accepted position was that only DNA from our germ cells, the cells that develop into sperm and eggs, is transmitted to the next generation and that anything that happens to the other cells in our body, our somatic cells, cannot be passed on to our offspring. You could lift all the weights in the world but nothing you do to your pecs is going to be reflected in your offspring. There is just no mechanism for the transference of genetic information that would enable this kind of inheritance in Mendelian genetics.

So another victory for the scientific method was marked down and Lamarckism was consigned to the dustbin of history never to be heard of again? Well, not quite. As we’ll find out later Lamarckism has made something of a comeback recently but even before this it found a place in the USSR under the influence an Ukranian scientist called Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenko was born into a Ukrainian peasant family in 1898 and after attending school and university he graduated with a degree in agronomy⁵ and was sent to Azerbaijan in 1925. There he worked on ways to improve crop yields, especially in cold conditions. After some disastrous experiments in collectivist reforms the food production of the USSR had dipped precipitately and by 1930 Soviet agriculture was in crisis. There was an urgent need to increase food production and Lysenko’s work started getting the attention of his political bosses. One of them being the biggest possible boss: Josef Stalin. Russia is a cold, cold place and the promise of being able to increase agricultural production in areas not traditionally contributing to the agricultural output of the union was an attractive proposition. One of the things that really interested his bosses was Lysenko’s insistence that he could quickly turn winter wheat varieties into spring wheat varieties using a process he called “vernalization”.

Wheat can be differentiated into two varieties that differ by when they are planted and when they are harvested. Spring wheat varieties are planted in spring and harvested in late summer or early fall. Winter wheat is planted in fall, it experiences some cold conditions that cause germination but then it enters a period of dormancy before it flowers in the following spring and is harvested in the summer. Winter wheat takes a lot longer to grow but it has some resistance to the cold. In fact the cold is necessary, without it the winter wheat wont flower in spring.

In the extremely cold parts of the USSR the problem is that even winter wheat couldn’t last through the winter but the window between spring and summer was too short to allow spring wheat to grow either. Lysenko promised to correct this by transforming winter wheat into spring wheat using a version of vernalization that used moisture as well as cold. This way he would have a cold resistant wheat that could grow quickly like a spring wheat. The combination of faster growth and cold resistance meant that winter wheat could be grown in very cold areas because it could be planted in spring and harvested in late summer. Importantly, Lysenko claimed that plants that he “vernalized” could pass their acquired abilities to their offspring, that he could transform winter wheat to spring wheat and vice versa. We’ve heard this before of course, it’s Lamarckism.

Lysenko’s promise of increased agricultural yield, his endorsement of Lamarckism, which was favoured by communist theory, and his enthusiastic Leninism made him a successful man. He was given his own laboratory at the Breeding and Genetics Institute in Odessa in 1929, in 1938 he became president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences and in 1940 he became the director of Genetics for the Academy of Sciences, a position he held until 1965. Lysenko’s primacy was associated with an extreme politicisation of science, he denied the existence of genes, calling them a “bourgeois invention”, and condemned the developing field of genetics as “fascist science”. He deemed scientific opponents became opponents of Marxism and reactionary saboteurs.

Lysenko couldn’t have done any of this without the endorsement of Soviet officials and political influence in the sciences was occurring in all fields. But Lysenko by serving up a political acceptable but faulty version of genetics, by making exaggerated promises on the basis of his questionable science and by using political rhetoric to face down his scientific opponents destroyed the fields of genetics, biology and agronomy in the USSR. Although not on his direct order, scientists who didn’t conform to his body of theories, that came to be called Lysenkoism, were arrested, often imprisoned and sometimes shot. In 1948 Lysenkoism was proclaimed as the only acceptable theory of genetics in the USSR.

One of the problems with the public perception of science is that it can be hard to draw a straight line between basic research and the benefits that this research brings to society. With Lysenkoism we can draw a direct line between his theories and some calamitous consequences. Lysenko’s promises of increased agricultural production never came into reality and millions of Russians died in the famines of 1930-1933 and 1946-1947. Some of his practices were adopted by Communist China, including vernalization and some other theories on tree planting, that contributed to famines between 1959 and 1962 that killed somewhere in between 15 and 55 million people. All this occurred while agriculture in the West was undergoing a revolution, thanks to Mendelian genetics, that bought about increased crop yields and the development of new varieties resistant to pests and diseases.

All science is a dialogue between competing theories and in Lysenko’s case, at the beginning of his career anyway, Lamarckism was still a part of the debate, even if the writing was on the wall. Scientists hanging on to their pet theories is not an unusual phenomenon, Einstein never accepted quantum theory for example. The problem with Lysenko was that instead of building a body of evidence for his theories by doing experiments, publishing papers and debating rivals, he used politics to establish his position. Dissenting opinions were not dispatched by evidence they were squashed by state sanctioned violence.

Now I’m not naive enough to believe that politics doesn’t have it’s place in science, some of the time honoured ways of dealing with scientific rivals include calling them names in the press, backstabbing them at international conferences, publicly mocking them in academic addresses and convincing others not to publish their papers or approve their funding. No system is perfect but when state politics and science start mingling the imperfect system breaks down entirely. Science is replete with examples of people who weren’t listened to at first but turned out to be right⁶, Mendel is a good example of this. But when state backed sanctions are made against scientists who are proposing unpopular theories or who are questioning officially sanctioned theories science stops working.

It’s not hard to draw some parallels with Lysenkoism and some of the things going on in the world today. Clearly science is being politicised in the USA under the Trump administration. The spectacle of Robert Kennedy, as Health Secretary, declaring in April that autism would be solved by September only to announce, in September, that Tylenol caused autism⁷ calls to mind some of Lysenko’s over-promising on the basis of dodgy, politically mandated science. These are disturbing developments in a country with such a proud scientific tradition. Our incredibly complex modern societies were made possible by the advances that science brought to our species and if science stops working bad things will happen to our food systems, the infrastructure that makes our cities work, our communications networks and our health. Lysenkoism had some grave consequences for the USSR, what will be the consequences if we go down the same path now?

In an example of how science never stops evolving Lamarckism has undergone something of a resurgence in recent years. Epigenetics, the field of genetics that looks at the way that changes in gene expression, rather than changes in genes themselves, can alter an organism, has uncovered ways that parental experience can be passed to their offspring. Things such as DNA methylation, histone modification, and noncoding RNA, for example, can all influence gene expression in offspring giving rise to a form of what could be termed Lamarckism, if you squint a bit. Epigenetics needs its own post, but it doesn’t stand in opposition to classical genetics, as Lysenko claimed, rather it complements it and the majority of the time inheritance proceeds along Mendelian lines.

These recent advancements has led some to try and reform Lysenko and even make him out to be the forefather of epigenetics. But the fact remains that he denied the existence of genes, they clearly exist, and he never established any real mechanism for the passing of genetic information apart from some vague notion of a heredity that was “inherent not only in the chromosomes but in any particle of the living body.”⁸ This is a long, long way from the precise and experimentally supported mechanisms that have been described by epigenetics researchers. Lysenko was also not some lone voice preaching in the wilderness, he held absolute control over Soviet genetics for close to 20 years and he still could not experimentally validate his theories or put them into practical use in the agriculture of the USSR. One could say he had his chance and the pseudo-science that is Lysenkoism should definitely be consigned to the historical dustbin.

Footnotes

1. A massive simplification of the field of genetics and evolutionary biology but I was an undergraduate. ↩︎
2. The Cambrian Explosion was the sudden massive increase in the number of complex animal life that occurred in the Cambrian period, some 540 million years ago. During this time almost all the animal groups (or phyla) that we see today made their first appearance. It should be noted that when a palaeontologist says ‘sudden’ they mean something different from the rest of us. The Cambrian explosion went on for somewhere in between 13 and 25 million years, so it wasn’t quite overnight. ↩︎
3. Given that Lamarckism is often held up for ridicule these days it is a a bit of a shame the Lamarck got lumbered with the dubious honour of naming the theory. He didn’t really propose it, he just referred to it as it was a common way of thinking about heredity at the time. See here if you’re interested in his story. ↩︎
4. Something that even a cursory reading of history soon disproves. ↩︎
5. The science of soil management and crop production. ↩︎
6. Or at least mostly right. Or not entirely wrong. ↩︎
7. Something completely unsupported by any evidence. ↩︎
8. T. D. Lysenko. 1948. The Situation in Biological Science. Proceed Lenin Acad Agricult Sci USSR, Session July 31–August 7. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House. ↩︎