The same year that the show trials began, the geneticists attempted to debate the Lysenkoists in a public conference. It was a proxy war for empiricism and the freedom to pursue knowledge. The consequence of this dissent for a dozen of Vavilov’s colleagues was arrest and execution. Vavilov had been denounced by Lysenko, but he was unbowed. In March 1939, he stood up at a meeting of scientists at Leningrad’s All-Union Institute of Plant Industry and declared, “We will go into the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.”
