Olga Borisovna Lepeshinskaya, née Protopopova, was a Russian revolutionary and Soviet pseudoscientist, who advanced her career as a biologist in the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences through fraudulent claims and personal ties with Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Trofim Lysenko and Alexander Oparin. She rejected genetics and was an advocate of spontaneous generation of life from inanimate matter.

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist and pseudoscientist. He was a strong proponent of Lamarckism, and rejected Mendelian genetics in favour of his own idiosyncratic, pseudoscientific ideas later termed Lysenkoism.