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Paper short abstract

The Lysenko affair, long a cautionary tale of political interference in science, is reframed as a Kuhnian "antiexemplar": a normative failure shaping scientific boundaries politically, ethically, and disciplinarily. This invites complex STS readings beyond caricatures to resilient epistemic futures.

Paper long abstract

The Lysenko affair stands as a canonical narrative in history, philosophy, and sociology of science—a recurring "morality tale" (Mouzo, 2025) warning against political interference, from Stalinist endorsement of Trofim Lysenko's failed genetic theories to Soviet agricultural collapse. Popular textbooks and high-impact journals (Nature Genetics) perpetuate it as fraud cautioning against state meddling in science.

This paper replaces that reductive framing with the analytic category of "anti-exemplar," inspired by Kuhn's exemplars—shared past achievements guiding normal science (Kuhn, 1962). We define anti-exemplars as "exemplary failures" blocking discarded research paths as normative obstacles.

Methodologically, we conduct a bibliographic review of classic historiographies (Medvedev 1969; Joravsky 1970; Lecourt 1978) plus recent works (Krementsov 1996; Graham 2016; Wolfe 2010), alongside textbook mentions and Scientific journal rhetoric.

Lysenko functions as an "anti-exemplar"on three axes: politically, assaulting scientific autonomy amid Cold War tensions between democratic (scientist-led) and totalitarian (state-controlled) models; ethically, as "infamous" violator of Merton's CUDOS norms (Merton 1942), contrasted with Vavilov's martyrdom; disciplinarily, reinforcing modern genetics' identity against "Lamarckian" inheritance of acquired characters, consolidating it as a discipline

This anti-exemplar reveals its emergence amid post-WWII state-science planning, expert role shifts, and ethical norm-building. Contemporary epigenetics reopens Lysenko affair-blocked paths, while STS (Haraway 2004; Latour 2008) moves beyond positivist/Popperian/Mertonian legacies that Lysenko readings helped entrench.

Far from rehabilitating Lysenko, this invites complex, non-naïve interpretations of historical episodes as disciplinary tools—fostering resilient epistemic futures attuned to science's co-production with politics and society