252 



GENETICS AND PLANT BREEDING 



M. B. Crane 



Lysenko's Experiments 



Reprinted with the pubHsher's permission 

 from Discovery, February 1949. 



Are Lysenko's claims to success in breeding and grafting 

 unaccountable in terms of scientific genetics? The 

 author of the following review examines Lysenko's evi- 

 dence and weighs it against his own experience in this 

 field. Mr. Crane is a Fellow of the Royal Society of 

 London and geneticist in the John Innes Horticultural 

 Institution. 



The address by Academician T. D. 

 L) senko to the Lenin Academy of Agri- 

 cultural Sciences reports results so re- 

 markable that they raise questions be- 

 yond the scope of an ordinary review. 

 Most writers on biology, especially 

 when dealing with their own work, 

 freely and clearly give all relevant de- 

 tails of their experiments so that the 

 reader can decide whether or not the 

 results and conclusions the author ar- 

 rives at are justified. It is regrettable 

 that so often in this book and in earlier 

 publications by the author and his as- 

 sociates, such details are not adequately 

 given. We have, however, heard so 

 much about the work of Lysenko and 

 Michurin that all biologists— and es- 

 pecially those engaged in growing, 

 grafting, and breeding plants— will, I 

 feel, be impelled to read this latest ac- 

 count of biolog}' in the Soviet Union. 



There are five points which will doubt- 

 less attract attention and at the same 

 time puzzle the critical reader: 

 I. breeding grafted plants; 

 II. vegetative hybridization; 



III. improving plants bv grafting — 

 Michurin's so-called 'Mentors'; 



IV. the inheritance of acquired 

 characters; 



V. the rapid conversion of "hard" 



wheat Triticum durum into 



winter wheat T. vulgare. 



These five points, and especialh' the 



first three, I shall attempt to analyze 



in detail. 



The first experiment involved the 

 grafting of a tomato shoot with "pin- 

 nate leaves" and yellow fruits on to a 

 plant with potato-like, non-pinnate 



