Reinventing Lysenko

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agrobiologist during the Stalin years, whose interest in trying to improve crop yields led him into some seriously sketchy pseudoscience.  He believed in a warped version of Lamarckism -- that plants exposed to certain environmental conditions during their lives would alter what they do to adjust to those conditions, and (furthermore) those alterations would be passed down to subsequent generations.

He not only threw away everything Mendel and Darwin had uncovered, he disbelieved in DNA as the hereditary material.  Lysenko wrote:

An immortal hereditary substance, independent of the qualitative features attending the development of the living body, directing the mortal body, but not produced by the latter -- that is Weismann’s frankly idealist, essentially mystical conception, which he disguised as “Neo-Darwinism.”  Weismann’s conception has been fully accepted and, we might say, carried further by Mendelism-Morganism.

So basically, since there were no genes there to constrain the possibilities, humans could mold organisms in whatever way they chose.  "It is possible, with man’s intervention," Lysenko wrote, "to force any form of animal or plant to change more quickly and in a direction desirable to man.  There opens before man a broad field of activity of the greatest value to him."

Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Soviet agricultural industry was ordered to use Lysenko's theories (if I can dignify them by that name) to inform their practices.  Deeper plowing of fields, for example, was said by Lysenko to induce plants' roots to delve deeper for minerals, creating deeper-rooted plants in following years and increased crop yields.  Farmers dutifully began to plow fields to a depth of five feet, requiring enormous expenditure of time and labor.

Crop yields didn't change.  But that didn't matter; Lysenko's ideas were beloved by Stalin, as they seemed to give a scientific basis to the concept of striving by the sturdy peasant stock, thus improving their own lot.  Evidence and data took a back seat to ideology.  Lysenko was given award after award and rose to the post of Director of the Institute of Genetics in the USSR's Academy of Sciences.  Scientists who followed Lysenko's lead in making up data out of whole cloth to support the state-approved model of heredity got advancements, grants, and gifts from Stalin himself.  Scientists who pointed out that Lysenko's experiments were flawed and his data doctored or fabricated outright were purged -- by some estimates three thousand of them were fired, exiled, jailed, or executed for choosing "bourgeois science" (i.e. actual evidence-based research) over Lysenko.  His stranglehold on Soviet biological research and agricultural practice didn't cease until his retirement in 1965, by which time an entire generation of Soviet scientists had been hindered from making any progress at all.

He is directly responsible for policies that led to widespread famines during which millions starved.

Lately, George Santayana's famous comment about being doomed to repeat history we haven't learned from has been graphically illustrated over and over.  Donald Trump, and the fascist, anti-science ideologues he hired to run the place while he's out golfing, have in the last three months:

• done a systematic search-and-destroy against government-sponsored research about climate change
• eliminated funding for the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control, especially targeting anything that mentions mRNA (presumably because of the COVID-19 vaccine, which is still widely hated by the far right)
• issued a decree declaring that there are only two biological sexes; the CDC was instructed to delete any papers, articles, and online resources that even mentioned the word "gender"
• virtually shut down USAID, which funds global disease prevention, treatment, and care
• once again doubled down on the idiotic claim that vaccination causes autism; as an indication of the level to which he understands science, his pronouncement about this was, "If you look at things that are happening, something's causing it."
• fired staff at NOAA and the National Weather Service just in time for tornado and hurricane season

So just like in Stalin's day, we are moving toward a state-endorsed scientific party line, which non-scientists (and scientists in the pay of corporate interests or the politicians themselves) are enforcing using such sticks as censorship, funding cuts, and layoffs.  They're even calling the firings "purges;" how they don't cringe at using a word associated with the horrors of people like Stalin and Mao Tse Tung is beyond me.

Or maybe, given how proud people like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Marco Rubio seem to be of their own cruelty, they have no problem with their viciousness being out on display for all to see.

Lysenko died forty years ago, but his propaganda-based, anti-science spirit lives on.  My hope is that because of the greater transparency and freedom of information afforded by the internet, this sort of behavior will at least not be shrouded in secrecy the way that Stalin's and Lysenko's actions were.  But even if people know what's happening, they have to speak up, and demand action from the spineless members of Congress who are standing idly by while one man and his neo-fascist cronies destroy decades of vital scientific research.  

It's only been three months, and the damage is already horrific.  And keep in mind Trump is, astonishingly, only one-sixteenth of the way through his term.

You do the math.

We are following the same devastating path that annihilated the USSR's position in the scientific community for a generation.  Like the Stalin regime, our nation is at the mercy of the whims of one catastrophically vain, immoral, and stupid man who has elevated a cadre of anti-science zealots to control our science policy based not only what is right or true, but what lines up with party propaganda.  And I fear that over the next three years the claws of partisan politics will sink so deeply into scientific research that it will, as it did in the USSR, take decades to repair the destruction.

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