Follow the Science, Part II: Lysenko’s Ghost

Trofim Lysenko “probably killed more humans than any scientist in history,” as director of Soviet agriculture under Stalin, according to Sam Kean in the Atlantic. Celebrated by the Soviet press as “the barefoot scientist” — he was illiterate until he was 13 — Lysenko was a devoted Communist who rejected modern genetics on ideological grounds, as reinforcing the status quo by denying the capacity for change. Instead he subscribed to a form of Lamarckianism, and sought to “reeducate” crops by soaking their seeds in freezing water. He was convinced that by such techniques he would soon grow orange trees in Siberia.

Placed in charge of Stalin’s “modernization” of Soviet agriculture, he oversaw a decline in food production, even as the cultivated land increased 163-fold. The famines produced by Stalin’s agricultural policies resulted in the death by starvation of seven million people, and when Lysenko’s methods were introduced by Communist China in the late 1950s, 30 million more died of starvation.

Nor was the subordination of Soviet biology to ideology  a singular example. In a letter to the Journal of Physical Chemistry, Anna Krylov, a professor of chemistry at USC, describes how in her native country “entire disciplines were declared ideologically impure, reactionary, and hostile to the cause of working class dominance.” Notable examples of “bourgeois pseudo-science” included genetics and cybernetics, quantum mechanics, and general relativity, which were criticized for their lack of alignment with dialectical materialism.

Krylov argues that something similar is taking place today in the United States, where the Left is politicizing even hard sciences such as chemistry, to pursue an ideological agenda. Unapologetic expressions of ideological commitments have infected STEM education, social science research, and, perhaps most alarmingly, medical school education.