Mendelian genetics<\/a>, which holds that genes \u2014 not environmental influences \u2014 control traits and are passed to offspring. Mendelian geneticists thought it would take five years to breed more cold-tolerant crops. Lysenko said he could do it in two to three years.<\/p>\nStalin didn\u2019t have time to wait. He was trying to get collective farms going and needed to increase crop yields to feed more than 150 million people. Large parts of the country had already suffered from famine in 1932 and 1933 and about 6 million people died. Some resorted to cannibalism.<\/p>\n
Stalin embraced Lysenko\u2019s quick-fix approach. That decision, says Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton University, was \u201csomething that the majority of people at the time, and everyone since, considers the wrong side of the dispute.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lysenko was put in charge of a prestigious genetics institute and forced his scientifically unsound farming practices on the collective farms. His methods were disastrous.<\/p>\n
Soaking seeds in freezing water hampered germination, leading to crop losses. Millions starved. Meanwhile, Mendelian genetics was branded a \u201cwhore of capitalism,\u201d and geneticists were forced to renounce their views or lose their jobs. Many were jailed, and almost a dozen were executed or died in prison.<\/p>\n
Falling behind in science<\/h2>\n The Soviet Union lost its scientific leadership role and sat on the sidelines for important scientific discoveries of the 1950s and beyond. One, Gordin says, was the development of \u201cmassively\u201d productive hybrid corn. The country also missed out on the discovery of DNA and the advent of molecular biology, putting Soviet genetics decades behind the rest of the world.<\/p>\n
Soviet genetics did not recover from Lysenko\u2019s influence until after the break-up of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gordin says. \u201cI think you\u2019d be hard pressed to find anybody who thinks that \u2026 Russia is today, or Ukraine, or any post-Soviet successor state, is a leading molecular biology country.\u201d<\/p>\n
Biochemist and Nobel Prize Laureate Katalin Karik\u00f3 grew up in Hungary, an Eastern Bloc country with strong ties to the Soviet Union. \u201cWe lived in a system that we knew that we cannot openly protest,\u201d she says. She learned that there was a difference between the truth and the official government position. \u201cIf you stood up against [it], you were crushed, so you had to compromise constantly.\u201d<\/p>\n
At her university, Karik\u00f3 had two genetics professors, one who taught Lysenko\u2019s view and one who taught molecular biology. She and other students saw molecular biology as the key to the future, but they still had to take exams for the other professor and espouse Lysenko\u2019s views. \u201cWe said the stupid thing[s], because that\u2019s what was required.\u201d<\/p>\nMessenger RNA, or mRNA, therapies have shown early promise in treating cancer, infectious diseases and autoimmune disorders. But the Trump administration pulled federal funding for research on mRNA. Such political interference with science funding could erode the United States\u2019 leadership position in science, critics say. Shown here is an illustration of nanoparticles containing mRNA (seen in triangle cutaway) inside a lipid sphere.<\/span>THOM LEACH\/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY\/GETTY IMAGES<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\nKarik\u00f3, who has returned to the University of Szeged in Hungary, won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2023 for basic research on messenger RNA, or mRNA, which ultimately led to the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s one area of U.S. science that\u2019s already been swept up in the shift in administrative priorities. Despite championing the technology during his first term, in the second term, the Trump administration pulled funds for research on mRNA therapies for cancer and genetic disorders and on vaccines against many infectious diseases.<\/p>\n
If the United States doesn\u2019t pursue mRNA technology, other countries will, Karik\u00f3 says. China, which has already surpassed the United States in the number of clinical trials registered for mRNA therapies, is a prime example. And patients don\u2019t care where their medicine comes from, she adds.<\/p>\n
Casting a pall over U.S. science<\/h2>\n Meanwhile, at the CDC, firings gutted much of the public health workforce and funding cuts hampered responses to measles outbreaks and other illnesses. The agency\u2019s directorship has changed multiple times, with some career scientists being fired or resigning because they refused to sign off on politically motivated directives.<\/p>\n
In one case, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer by training, personally asked CDC to halt spending on its flu vaccine campaign. \u201cYou have people who are not trained, not experts, being put in positions within the scientific world where they\u2019re making decisions in which they have absolutely no credibility,\u201d Dugatkin says.<\/p>\n
Lysenko\u2019s example also shows that when an administration has an agenda it wants to enforce, Dugatkin says, \u201chow easy it is, if you say what they want to hear, to get them to pay attention to you, regardless of what the data says.\u201d<\/p>\n
Former NIH program official Elizabeth Ginexi sees that process playing out at her former institution. In a June opinion piece for MedPage Today<\/em>, she wrote: \u201cLysenko replaced legitimate science with a politically acceptable alternative, enforced by the state, and destroyed the careers of scientists who practiced disfavored methods.\u201d At the NIH\u2019s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, she wrote, leadership was restructured either by firing, reassignment or resignation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\u201cIt\u2019s not like you can turn off the spigot on politics, but you can definitely think very carefully about what kinds of politics are going to be shaping your science.\u201d <\/p>\n
Michael Gordin<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n<\/blockquote>\nThe institute\u2019s staff were also instructed to remove references to \u201cbiodefense\u201d and \u201cpandemic preparedness\u201d from its materials. And, she writes in another piece, NIH canceled at least 110 funding announcements from January 2025 to May 2026. Many focused on infectious diseases, vaccines or health disparities. Under Kennedy, the Trump administration has also disfavored research on antidepressants and promoted work on psychedelics. \u201cThat is a system operating on political instructions,\u201d Ginexi wrote.<\/p>\n
There have even been calls to jail prominent U.S. scientists, including former head of NIAID Anthony Fauci for actions he took while in office.<\/p>\n
Gordin worries that as scientists in the United States face uncertainty about funding and academic freedom, training pipelines will be disrupted. \u201cSo smart undergrads don\u2019t go on to grad school, smart graduate students don\u2019t complete their degrees, they don\u2019t stay as postdocs, they don\u2019t stay in the research environment.\u201d\u00a0Science operates as a transmission of knowledge, skills and theories that develop and evolve over time. \u201cYou can\u2019t just remove a five-year period and then hope to restart it again.\u201d<\/p>\n
The role of democracy<\/h2>\n The Lysenko analogy isn\u2019t perfect, some historians warn. In the U.S.S.R., \u201cthere was a specific kind of society where one person [Stalin] believed or disbelieved in certain scientific theories, and this influenced the direction of the science,\u201d says Georgy Levit, a historian of science at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena in Germany. He adds that Soviet society was based on an ideology that penetrated the whole of society \u2014 and that scientists and others in opposition were powerless to fight back. In contrast, he says, \u201cthe United States is a democratic state, and certainly there are powers fighting against these tendencies.\u201d<\/p>\n
History has not favored efforts to restrict science, Gordin says. Measures \u201cthat involve trying to bar people from doing science or imposing nakedly political criteria, like partisan criteria, have been viewed in retrospect as deleterious to scientific development and advancement.\u201d<\/p>\n
But there\u2019s also plenty of precedent for politics to play a role in science. \u201cIt\u2019s inevitable,\u201d Gordin says. Partisanship and presidents\u2019 pet projects or peeves can \u2014 and do \u2014influence how much money is spent, or not spent, on certain types of science. Gordin cites the Manhattan Project and the development of radar as two examples \u201cwhere the federal government has funded science with a very specific end in mind.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is no such thing as nonpolitical science, Gordin says. But political engagement and buy-in doesn\u2019t have to disrupt funding, alienate scientists and put politicians in positions to make scientific judgments. \u201cIt\u2019s not like you can turn off the spigot on politics, but you can definitely think very carefully about what kinds of politics are going to be shaping your science.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Soviet scientists in the 1930s knew what could happen if they bucked the party line: denunciation, firing and banishment from the scientific establishment, even imprisonment and death. Political reprisals against those who opposed the views of dictator Joseph Stalin and his followers \u2014 and the dubious science they endorsed \u2014 led to the starvation of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adviews.info\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105363"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adviews.info\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adviews.info\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adviews.info\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adviews.info\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=105363"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adviews.info\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105363\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adviews.info\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=105363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adviews.info\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=105363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adviews.info\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=105363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}