Trofim Lysenko Is A Perfect Cautionary Tale For 2018Forbes
K.N. Smith, Contributor Dec 31, 2017 @ 05:33 PM
Trofim Lysenko, 1938 Anon. via Wikimedia Commons In October 1992, in the waning days of the Cold War, one of the architects of the Soviet bioweapons program defected to the United States.
Colonel Kanatzhan "Kanat" Alibekov, who has since changed his name to Ken Alibek, wrote a detailed history of the Soviet biowarfare agency Biopreparat. His book, Biohazard, is a fascinating and deeply unnerving read, but the most frightening story Alibek tells, however, isn't about anthrax or smallpox. It's an account of how one man stifled the study of biology in the Soviet Union for over twenty years.
"We had gone from being one of the world's powerhouses of immunological and epidemiological research to a backwater of demoralized and discredited scientists," wrote Alibek. "The cause was one man - a Russian agronomist named Trofim Lysenko."
It all started innocently enough, as such things do. At a remote farm station in Azerbaijan, Lysenko spent the late 1920s experimenting with new ways to breed cold-resistant winter peas. He had some success in his work, but he attributed his results to the cold Azerbaijani winters, not natural selection acting on the gene pool of the parent pea plants. Environment, not genetics, determined which traits organisms would evolve. At the time, that was an oddly appealing idea to Soviet political thinkers; if Lysenko was right, then people's stations in life weren't determined by genetics, but by how and where they lived. Lysenko branded genetics "a bourgeois discipline that insulted that proletariat." (His ideas have seen a baffling resurgence in recent years.)
By the 1940s, Lysenko had gained the ear, and the support, of Joseph Stalin. Lysenko's powerful connections propelled him to the top of the Soviet scientific community, where he imposed what Alibek describes as "an iron brand of political correctness" on Soviet biologists. Genetics or evolution were not to be studied, discussed, or published. It sounds crazy, but it worked terrifyingly well. Scientists who so much as dabbled in the "bourgeois discipline" found themselves facing public ridicule, and some even ended up in Stalin's infamous prison camps. Journals bold enough to publish research that mentioned genetics or evolution got shut down, one way or another.
And Alibek wasn't talking about some ultra-specific line of research -- altering human pathogens to make them more dangerous, for instance. It's almost impossible to do biological research of any kind without starting with at least the basics of genetics and evolution. Lysenko and his political patrons had blocked access to the fundamental science needed to make advances in agriculture, ecology, medicine, and other vital areas. By the 1950s, the whole broad field of Soviet biology was in the tank, and it remained decades behind the rest of the world until the early 1970s. That's roughly 20 years of lost time when Soviet scientists could have been developing new vaccines or treatments for diseases, or breeding more resilient and productive crops.
Stifling scientific research, or the vocabulary we use to talk about it, stifles progress. Ultimately, it stifles the economy and even costs lives. And the fall of Soviet biology underscores how easily one powerful politician's influence can have a long-term impact on science and the industries it supports. In fact, the story sounds eerily familiar. It's easy to read Alibek's cautionary tale as just a caricature of Soviet political life, but U.S. science has faced heavy backlash, and in some cases outright suppression, from the [Sleezebag] administration over the past year. The old cliche about those who don't study history seems sharply relevant as 2017 draws to a close.
Meanwhile, the denouement of the Lysenko saga is an even grimmer commentary on the political realities that face the scientific community: Soviet biology finally managed to shrug off Lysenko and Stalin's restrictions in the early 1970s largely because the leaders of Soviet Army found a use for the taboo, discredited field of genetics: building deadlier biological weapons.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kionasmith/2017/12/31/trofim-lysenko-is-a-perfect-cautionary-tale-for-2018/#15005f5a787f
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