In the fall of 1925, agronomist Trofim Lysenko arrived on the dusty plains of what is now Azerbaijan, hoping to keep cows from starving to death over the winter. The young scientist, who learned to read as a teenager during the Russian Revolution, dismissed the rapidly advancing field of genetics. He believed nature could be bent to human will.

Lysenko denounced the idea that genes pass traits down as a “degradation of bourgeois culture,” and couldn’t understand why cows bred to produce more milk did so simply because they had “advantaged ancestors.” He attempted to “educate” crops by soaking them in freezing water, thinking that could force them to sprout in winter, and insisted that orange trees would grow in Siberia if exposed to the right stimuli.

Such ideas catapulted Lysenko

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