When 'science' fails the truth test, it can cost millions of lives.
A cautionary tale of how tragically politics can pervert science. Meet Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.
Although it may be hard to prove,
Trofim Lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history. If you have never heard of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko it might be worth learning how he may have indirectly been responsible for the deaths of over 50 million people. Indirectly is generous because his ideas killed millions, but his ideas were abused by others and that magnified his crimes. His story is worth getting to know and understand why it had the impact it did. You may or may not see echoes of today in this story, but even if you don’t, it is a story worth knowing.
Who was Lysenko?
Lysenko was a Soviet biologist who condemned millions of people to starvation through bogus agricultural research. Lysenko so believed the communist revolution that he doctored his science to prove that all nature should reflect the lesson of the revolution. Basically, he believed that rather than planting seeds individually, he believed they should be planted in groups or communes. Moreover, when he saw that the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end.
As the Atlantic said in an article in 2017:
In particular, he loathed genetics. Although a young field, genetics advanced rapidly in the 1910s and 1920s; the first Nobel Prize for work in genetics was awarded in 1933. And especially in that era, genetics emphasized fixed traits: Plants and animals have stable characteristics, encoded as genes, which they pass down to their children. Although nominally a biologist, Lysenko considered such ideas reactionary and evil since he saw them as reinforcing the status quo and denying all capacity for change.
Despite this hatred for genetics and the science it was producing, Lysenko was made the director of the Institute of Genetics in 1940 within the USSR's Academy of Sciences. From there he used his influence and power to suppress dissenting opinions. Worse, he went out of his way to discredit, marginalize, and imprison his critics. The result was a famine that killed millions of Soviet people. Worse, the adoption of his methods from 1958 in China, created the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962.
After Lysenko's control on biology ended, it took many years for these sciences to recover in Russia. Lysenko died in Moscow in 1976.
Why Lysenko matters, even today
Lysenko was trained as a scientist, but his actions were as a bureaucrat (and maybe a politician).
Lysenko used the mask of science to achieve political and social power.
He was willing to do so at the cost of others’ careers and even lives. It is worth considering that Soviet scientists who refused to renounce genetics were dismissed from their posts and left destitute. He used his position to belittle and diminish others. The elite of society liked what he was saying and were willing to give him even more power, because he reinforced their power. The elite and Lysenko’s actions, cost millions of lives and probably were responsible for the imprisonment of thousands.
Whether you want to draw parallels today is up to you. But there are lessons that need to be remembered or we are doomed to forget them. A bureaucrat who is also a scientist can act more like a bureaucrat than a scientist. See this tweet which outlines how Fauci’s boss, Francis Collins, believed they should deal with people who disagree with them - one of which was a Nobel Prize winner (maybe not a ‘fringe’ scientist). He wanted a ‘quick and devastating take down published.’
Before you let your cogitative dissonances cut into protect the establishment, ask yourself if that sounds like a scientific approach.
That doesn’t feel like science to me, but it does start to look like Lysenkoism.