The early years of the Cold War were marked by vicious propaganda and counter-propaganda campaigns that thundered on both sides of the Iron Curtain, further dividing the newly formed ''Western'' and ''Eastern'' blocs. These campaigns aimed at the consolidation and mobilization of each camp's politics, economy, ideology, and culture, and at the vilification and demonization of the opposite camp. One of the most notorious among these campaigns -''For Michurinist biology'' and ''Against Lysenkoism,'' as it became known in Eastern and Western blocs respectively -clearly demonstrated that the Cold War drew the dividing line not only on political maps, but also on science.
The centerpiece of the campaign was a session on ''the situation in biological science'' held in the summer of 1948 by the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) in Moscow. In his opening address on July 31, the academy's president Trofim D. Lysenko stated that modern biology had diverged into two opposing trends. Lysenko and his disciples represented one trend, which he named ''agrobiology'' or ''Michurinist biology,'' after Ivan Michurin, an amateur plant breeder, who had gained notoriety in the Soviet Union