Was Lysenko (Partly) Right? Michurinist Biology in the View of Modern Plant Physiology and Genetics 1. Introduction 2. Vegetative Hybridisation 3. Wobbled Heritability 4. Heritability of Environmentally Induced Adaptive Changes in Plants 5. Intravarietal Crossing of Self-fertilizing Plants

Soviet Lysenkoism was the darkest period of modern science, and its main product — Michurinist biology — was a collection of absurd theories usually based on anecdotal observations or on a few badly designed experiments without proper controls and without any statistical evaluation of results. However, in the thirties and early forties, Lysenkoists also described (and misinterpreted) some interesting data and observations which could have been real and which might inspire modern biologists to construct testable hypotheses and suggest experiments that could extend our scientific knowledge. Here, I attempt to present an explanation in terms of modern biology of some of those phenomena, namely vegetative hybridization, wobbled heritability, heritability of environmentally induced adaptive modifications and effects of intravariety hybridization of self-fertilizing cultivars. The first two phenomena can be explained on the basis of visualization of hidden Rivista di Biologia I Biology Forum 95 (2002), pp. 259-272.