by Melvyn Bragg
MELVYN BRAGG: Okay, that’s a sort of a weird feeling here, a strange feeling went through the studio then. That’s the world, isn’t it?
The race to absolute zero, it turned out, was not one that can ever be won, in some sense. Stephen Blundell explained that any cooling process imaginable will essentially reduce the temperature by a certain fraction. That can be done in a series of stages, perhaps reducing the gap to absolute zero by half and then again by a quarter, one eighth, one sixteenth, but the gap to zero can never be closed in a finite number of steps. The limit is there but it can never be reached.
STEPHEN BLUNDELL: In practice, it’s even worse than that because, when you get down to very, very low temperatures, you find that, if you’re trying to cool something, there will always be some environment that is warmer and that will leak heat in. So the closer you get, you then start finding the thing slightly warms up a bit, and so it’s like travelling on an escalator that’s going against you, you can never get to the top.
With advanced cooling techniques, scientists have been able to get to a millionth of one Kelvin, that is a millionth of a degree above absolute zero. Recent techniques have been evolved to cool small collections of gas atoms in a trap to even lower temperatures, around a billionth of a Kelvin.
There is a silver lining to this sensitivity that allows these cold gases to reach such low temperatures but not quite absolute zero. Normally, that sensitivity to the environment is not something positive in an experiment.
NICOLA WILKIN: In fact, these gases, because they are so sensitive, are now becoming sensors. One thing that they’re sensitive to, for instance, is variation in gravity. People are investigating using it for searching for oil, underground water supplies, archaeology.
STEPHEN BLUNDELL: Really one of the most exciting areas of research is to try to get superconductivity, which is a purely low temperature phenomenon. We have to cool down all the magnetic resonance imaging magnets to get them to work. How can you get that to work at room temperature?
Just as the programme closed, Melvyn asked about recent research in Germany that suggested that a temperature below absolute zero had been created. ‘Is it below -273 or not? I mean the producer is crossing his arms saying I’ve got to get off the air. Is it below … ?’ It is lower, we were told, but had not gone through T = zero to get there, and that would have to be something for another day.
LYSENKOISM
In 1928, as America headed towards the Wall Street Crash, Joseph Stalin revealed his masterplan: nature is to be conquered by science, Russia is to be made supremely modern at any cost, and the world is to be transformed by communist example. Into the heart of this vision stepped Trofim Lysenko, a self-taught geneticist who promised to turn Russian wasteland into a grain-laden Garden of Eden. Today Lysenko is a by-word for scientific fraud but, in Stalin’s Russia, his ideas became law. They reveal a world of science distorted by ideology, where ideas were literally a matter of life and death. To disagree with Lysenko risked the Gulag and he damaged, perhaps irrevocably, the Soviet Union’s capacity to fight and win the Cold War.
With Melvyn to discuss Trofim Lysenko were: Robert Service, emeritus professor of Russian history at the University of Oxford and Hoover senior fellow; Catherine Merridale, senior research fellow at the Institute of Historical Research and fellow of the British Academy; and Steve Jones, senior research fellow in genetics at University College London.
Crop threshing in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.
In order to understand why Lysenko appeared to be the right man at the right time for Stalin, Melvyn asked Robert Service to explain the context of the first five-year plan in 1928. We heard that it was a stupendous ambition to modernise agriculture, banking, finance, industry, the military, foreign trade, transport, communications, and it was a contrast to everything that was happening elsewhere in the world, because there was just about to be the Wall Street Crash and a crisis in capitalism. Since the Bolsheviks had come to power in 1917, there had been a dictatorship run in the interests of the working class, taking hold of everything and mobilising the people in the interests of the revolutionary cause.
ROBERT SERVICE: For several years, it met all sorts of obstacles, it had a civil war, it then had to make compromises with its peasantry, and then came the great breakthrough, in 1928, when the first five-year plan was announced and this great transformation started to be attempted comprehensively.
The regime under Lenin had been much tighter than anything that had existed in Russia before the revolution, and it was about to get tighter or, as Robert Service put it, ‘absolutely cataclysmically worse’. This very, very authoritarian one-party state planned the biggest undertaking ever by a world power.
ROBERT SERVICE: It was absolutely staggering at the time to people who were living in foreign states. And many people who were not communists in Europe and North America were positively impressed because this was a state, the USSR, that was offering something totally different from what all the other advanced economies were offering to the rest of the world.
Lysenko’s contribution was to be to agriculture, the occupation of most of the population. The peasantry were using old-fashioned methods of cultivation based on household units that were now to be combined into large farms, essentially owned by collective farm chairmen who would control the methods of production, deal with the state and trade with the produce. Steve Jones then identified some of the flaws in this. Firstly, large numbers of the better-off peasants, the kulaks, were shot, which removed many people with expertise and an overview. Secondly, Soviet agriculture followed a centralised, scientific model, and the science of Lysenko was ‘complete nonsense’. In the USA, too, small farms were being merged to make large farms and there was an increasing role for science, but the main difference in the USA was that their model of science was correct and was being used to increase the yields. Soviet agricultural scientists had their views suppressed and some suffered the same fate as the kulaks.
The central problem with Lysenko and Soviet agriculture was that it was a ‘lethal mixture of science and ideology’, something that Steve Jones said has happened in his field of genetics and still can, to a degree.
STEVE JONES: The difficulty was that the model the Soviets had was partly a scientific model. You could observe certain things – that if you gave a cold shock, for example, to maize then they would burst into flower, and that’s true. But added on to that was the belief that somehow there was what they called the ‘law of necessary progress’, that biology had an end in view, that things were bound to get better.
That fitted with the Soviet view, he said, that one generation of suffering would possibly generate a new kind of human being, for the better. This was in some ways a mirror image of the 1920s view in the west, which was that human nature was set, a flawed approach that was soon exposed. The Soviets echoed Lamarck (1744–1829), the French naturalist.
STEVE JONES: Lamarck was the ‘inheritance of acquired characters’ [which] meant, famously, that giraffes would stretch up to get the leaves at the top and then their offspring would have longer necks as a result. And that was believed for a long time.
Stalin lionised Lysenko. He was, Catherine Merridale told us, the son of peasants and always dressed as a peasant rather than as the agricultural scientists often did, in their high collars and starched shirts. He was Ukrainian and trained briefly in Kiev, but did not have much formal education. He first came to prominence in Azerbaijan in 1927.
CATHERINE MERRIDALE: His first great breakthrough, which he was very good at publicising, was to get peas to grow in the winter in the Caucasus, and he said that he could actually produce a desert that was green through the winter so that the camels would have something to eat.
Lyskenko’s next major step was to go into the science of vernalisation that Steve Jones had mentioned, the idea that, if grains were chilled before they were sown, then crops such as winter wheat could grow within one season, avoiding the freezing winter that cou
ld kill them off. Lysenko did his first experiment by getting his father to bury forty-eight sacks of pre-soaked grain in a snowdrift and, without waiting for the results, he declared in spring that the experiment had been a success. This was another of Lysenko’s traits, Catherine Merridale said: he was very good at producing results before finishing experiments, and declaring them a success. He was brilliant at self-publicity and even better at it once he had been adopted by people who wanted to promote him for political reasons. He was also intolerant of criticism.
CATHERINE MERRIDALE: Anybody who said, ‘Comrade Lysenko, this isn’t right,’ they might very well find themselves being attacked verbally by him and then attacked in other ways by the state later on, when he became more powerful. He was very intolerant. He was also very good at getting the establishment to adopt him. And he was always moving on to the next thing before the previous thing had been shown to be a total failure.
He failed with winter wheat but did not admit it, then went on to spring wheat and tried making the grain warm and wet to shorten the growing time once cold and wet had not worked, though warm and wet only led to rotting grain, so he moved on to potatoes and then to maize, announcing his ‘success’ as he went.
The Soviet Union was one of the world leaders in plant biology in the 1920s, and yet the agricultural scientists encouraged Lysenko. Perhaps, Catherine Merridale suggested, some were socialists and believed it was important to encourage the coming generation. Some were intrigued. Some were frightened to speak out against him as that would make them look bad. For the health of agricultural science, that tolerance and accommodation of Lysenko’s culture was a mistake. In the eyes of Stalin, though, Lysenko was just what he was looking for.
CATHERINE MERRIDALE: He was called a barefoot scientist. He was credited, in fact, with restoring the confidence of a lot of peasants because collectivisation was such a blow and there was such demoralisation and famine in the countryside. Here’s a man who actually works with peasants in their villages.
Lysenko said there was no need for expensive laboratories, and that he did his science in five pots in the corner of his greenhouse. He could also move more quickly than classical scientists who wanted perhaps ten years to develop a new strain of wheat, promising Stalin he could achieve this in two or three years, thanks to vernalisation and cutting down on multiple experiments.
As Robert Service emphasised, professional people were being arrested in the early 1930s when there was a deep suspicion in Stalin’s USSR of anybody who had a toehold in the old pre-revolutionary society.
ROBERT SERVICE: Eventually, in 1937, in the Great Terror, they’re named as groups that are to be eliminated and either thrown into the Gulag camps or shot …
MELVYN BRAGG: We’re talking about hundreds of thousands, even millions.
ROBERT SERVICE: We’re talking millions of people. And the Gulag is kept topped up with new victims as the slave labourers die off. And that’s going on right through to the death of Stalin in 1953. So it’s a period of enormous utopian feeling and aspiration, combined with enormous, huge, intense trepidation.
Lysenko was the right fit for Stalin, who was a great believer in the effectiveness of science. Not only science, Robert Service said, but Soviet science and modernity, which would be superior to American modernity. He picked out young men from the peasantry and the working class, and they were usually men rather than women, who might enhance the possibility of transforming society rapidly.
ROBERT SERVICE: The thing for Stalin was not to proceed by gradualist science but to set the goals in advance and then cajole, encourage and intimidate people into finding ways to meet the goals.
MELVYN BRAGG: And, if they couldn’t find them, to fake them?
Trofim Lysenko measuring the growth of wheat on one of the kolkhoz (collective farm) fields near Odessa, Ukraine.
ROBERT SERVICE: And, if they couldn’t find them, you arrested them and that induced scientists like Lysenko to say that they could do things that they really couldn’t do. The thing about Lysenko that was different from the other scientists was that he came to Stalin with apparent solutions.
Lysenko was not the only one suggesting quick fixes for significant problems. Catherine Merridale mentioned the idea of breeding rabbits as a solution to meat shortages in the first five-year plan. All factories and offices, even the secret police, were given a number of breeding pairs of rabbits and a target for the number of rabbits that they were supposed to produce at the end of the period, along with the amount of fur and meat. There was some merit in the idea, with rabbits being such fast breeders, but there was nothing green for them to eat in the winter, so they starved and it was a failure on the quiet. Later in his reign as king of Soviet biology, Lysenko came to Stalin to offer to change the climate of Siberia by planting trees in clumps where the best tree in the clump would survive.
CATHERINE MERRIDALE: Peasants were supposed to put hundreds and thousands and millions of bunches of acorns into the Siberian soil, which they did in 1948. And, by 1952, the great Siberian forest was supposed to have happened. Shostakovich actually wrote some music, The Song of the Forests, to celebrate the future Stalin forest. And of course, by 1952, 4 per cent of the trees were still alive, so it came to nothing.
All the time that Soviet agricultural science was supporting the ideas of Lysenko, it was falling behind with the understanding of genetics, which might have led to better crops. There was a reluctance to study chromosomes and this apparently was partly due to the fact that they could be seen through a microscope. Their physical structure, Steve Jones said, suggested that they were not changeable and this ran counter to the point of Lysenkoism, which was that there was a vague nexus of goodness and badness that could be altered so that the bad would become good.
STEVE JONES: They hated the notion that things could not be changed by the environment. And, at the time, they seemed to be entirely wrong, the Soviets, and later the Russians. However, nowadays I have to say some of that view is beginning to have some truth emerge. I’m not saying Lysenko was right but he wasn’t entirely wrong, which is pretty embarrassing for us geneticists.
According to the genetics of Gregor Mendel, the appearance of the peas he studied was controlled by something hidden inside the DNA and, whatever farmers did to the peas, growing them in good or bad soil, that made no difference to the genes. There have been some findings in Sweden in the past decade, Steve Jones noted, that suggested otherwise, where grandfathers who had experienced famine had grandsons and granddaughters who are better at dealing with food shortages than the intervening generation. Somehow the DNA has been marked by this environmental experience, which sounds Lysenkoist. In case it appeared that Steve Jones was supporting Lysenko here, he emphasised that Lysenko was wrong and a fraud.
It seems that Stalin had a particular weakness when it came to agriculture. By and large, Robert Service said, he took the correct decisions about such matters as what the best tanks were, what the best military aeroplanes were, whether the Kalashnikov rifle was any good. He read popular science textbooks and even forced his children to read them, but that did not lead to the right outcome.
ROBERT SERVICE: In science, he got things wrong. And yet, when that type of thing happened in military technology, the scientists were shot, but they weren’t shot in agriculture. And I think this indicates that much as he took agriculture seriously, he didn’t take it as seriously as he took waging war.
In 1940, Lysenko was made director of the Soviet Academy of Science Institute of Genetics, and that made him unassailable. He opposed Vavilov, a very serious geneticist, described by Catherine Merridale as the great plant biologist of the 1920s. He was a collector of plants and did something Stalin did not like, which was to travel abroad and contact foreign scientists. He looked at plants in their natural environments and tried to find ways in which they could be made adaptable to inhospitable conditions.
CATHERINE MERRIDALE: He and Lysenko clashed on a series of occasions and, fina
lly, he was arrested in 1940. He was sentenced to death in 1942 and he starved to death in a prison in the middle of the war in Saratov in 1943. It was a great tragedy. And all his supporters also disappeared; some committed suicide. And it’s at that point that several hundred thousand scientists lose their jobs for ever. Genetics became almost impossible to carry out in the Soviet Union until the early ’50s.
MELVYN BRAGG: It does seem extraordinary. Agriculture’s lumbering away, a total failure, they’re now in the late ’40s, having to take grain from America, and nobody’s saying, ‘Have you got this wrong?’ Or, if they do, they’re sent to prison.
STEVE JONES: It’s the power of terror. It’s ironic that the plant hybridisation institute in Russia now is called the Vavilov Institute, so he’s actually back and absolutely in favour. When I was learning genetics, there were a number of Soviet émigrés who’d been through that and fled to the States and to Britain and they still were terrified to talk about it, it was an appalling business.
In Steve Jones’s view, the further irony is that, while people talk of the arms race as the main contest between America and the Soviets, or oil, it was actually agriculture. The Soviets had to import grain from the USA. The Americans could do that because Donald F. Jones and E. M. East had discovered that, if you crossed lines of maize together, there was a fantastic improvement in yield and, suddenly, the United States was the breadbasket of the world. What made Lysenko’s rise all the more shocking to Catherine Merridale was that, in 1948, three years after the Great Patriotic War, Russia and America were allies and Russian scientists had access to American science. They could see the results of this and of selective weed killers, but turned away from it, preferring instead the mistaken methods from before the war. It was not a time to step out of line.
