This story parallels that of Luther Burbank:

> In 1905, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., gave Burbank a grant of $10,000 for the purpose of furthering his experimental investigations in the evolution of plants. Another $10,000 was contemplated annually for as long a time as was mutually agreeable. A young botanist at the Carnegie Institution's Cold Spring Harbor Station for Experimental Evolution, named George H. Shull (later to become famous in large part for his work with hybrid corn genetics), was commissioned to go to Santa Rosa and find out everything he could in this regard.

> Aside from noting the wealth of new and improved varieties Burbank had produced, he found that there were scant records of ancestries and little of scientific value to report. Shull found that in many artificial hybridizations, no attempts were made to prevent a flower from self-fertilization or crossing with any other plant whose pollen might find its way thereto. In some cases, Burbank would apply pollen from several species to the same flower. Shull, in frustration, reported to his institute that such methods “lead to results that can not give any confirmation of Mendelism or any other theory of inheritance that rests upon statistical inquiry.” The grant was terminated in 1909.

> Russia's most famous plant geneticist, Nikolai I. Vavilov, visited Burbank in 1921 and wrote an obituary (Crow 2001) when Burbank died in 1926. In this document, Vavilov highly praised Burbank's practical achievements and minimized his mistakes and scientific naivete. T. D. Lysenko (1898–1976) emerged from obscurity in the early 1930s and soon became the champion in the application of the dialectical principle underlying Marxist communism in agricultural practice. 

> Lysenko admitted his admiration for Burbank. Western scientists rejected Lysenko as a quack long before he gained the political power to silence his detractors. In the end, Vavilov, who fought against Lysenko from the outset, was “silenced” by being sent to prison where he eventually died. These dictatorial acts enraged western scientists, and Burbank unfortunately became a kind of Lysenkoist by posthumous association.

Journal of Heredity, Volume 97, Issue 2, March/April 2006, Pages 95–99, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/esj015

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