Soviet folly with pseudoscience offers a warning about U.S. science deniers

Ignoring science (or making things up and pretending they are science) can have dire consequences for a society, as the history of Soviet science demonstrates.

The Soviet Union under Stalin was not a good place to be a scientist. In 1935, world-renowned plant geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was demoted from his position on the Soviet Central Executive Committee largely because he promoted science-based policies to improve agriculture productivity slowly but steadily by the application of the principles of Mendelian genetics to plant breeding.

In contrast, his eventual successor, Trofim Lysenko, proposed bold new ideas that would deliver instant improvements in crop yields. Lysenko’s ideas were in line with Communist Party ideology, which assured his upward mobility in the Soviet hierarchy and his favor with Stalin. Unfortunately for the Soviet Union, Lysenko’s ideas were pseudoscience, and the promotion of his various asinine (but greatly hyped) schemes contributed to the Soviet Union’s poor agriculture productivity, and set back biology in the Soviet Union for decades.

The sadly ironic ending of this tale was Vavilov’s death of starvation in a Siberian prison camp almost 75 years ago while Lysenko controlled Soviet agricultural science.

The United States today, of course, is generally a great place to be a scientist. However, there are ominous signs that a new Lysenkoism is taking hold at the highest positions of political power in our country.

The new prospective Secretary of Energy (Rick Perry) previously supported the elimination of the department he now leads and referred to the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is real and largely due to human activity as a “contrived, phony mess.”

The nominee for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (Scott Pruitt), another climate change denier, made his name as an aggressive opponent of science-based environmental regulations.

A prominent member of the pseudoscientific anti-vaccine movement has indicated that the president may put him in charge of a commission to study the scientific integrity of vaccine research.

Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley tycoon and science adviser to President Trump, said recently that “science is technology’s older brother who has fallen on hard times.”

Welcome to the brave new world of business and technology that will rocket to new heights of grandiosity unfettered by stodgy old science’s reliance on experimentation, analysis and consideration of actual facts!

This all has parallels with the ascendance of Lysenko’s ideas in the Soviet Union on the wings of hyperbole into the bosom of the prevailing political ideology, where they were shielded from the overwhelming scientific evidence of their fatuity.

U.S. government scientists have not been banished to the gulag. The new administration is only a few weeks old, however, and just getting started.

In that short time, several federal science agencies were banned from communicating scientific information to the public and climate change scientists were specifically singled out for investigation into their research work and presentations.

The echo chamber of Cabinet members and advisers who oversee science policy despite lacking any education in science suggests a new Lysenkoism is taking hold that may promise economic miracles but will do long-term damage to our environment, the health of our people and the economic competitiveness of the USA.

This story was originally published February 11, 2017 at 6:03 PM with the headline "Soviet folly with pseudoscience offers a warning about U.S. science deniers."