Accountability for Politicization of Science? Lysenkoism in the U.S.

by Natalka Poltavka*

"Working hard will give you a good farm," USSR collective farming, 1947

It took 97 days from the outbreak of the first Covid-19 case in the U.S. to get to 1 million cases and 44 days to hit 2 million cases. Since summer we have experienced exponential growth in the number of Covid-19 cases, as more and more people seem to ignore simple public health warnings.  In November alone the U.S. added 4 million new cases, going from 10 million on November 9th, to 13 million 18 days later.  And this is before the fallout from Thanksgiving travel is felt.

This is distressing in the extreme, especially in a society where we conduct complex global stock trades, multilateral business meetings, and exchange of technical equipment with the international space station, all using complicated technology. And yet millions are unwilling to engage in life-saving behavior using the simplest techniques -- wearing masks, washing hands and social distancing. And half the population mocks those who do. How did we get here?

I keep returning to something that has been troubling me for a long while and is now disturbingly evident -- the rise of Lysenkoism in American science.  One could argue that there were disturbing signs of this in April as President Trump mocked epidemiologists and public health specialists and started to brush their recommendations aside. Then with the elevation of Dr. Scott Atlas to the WH Coronavirus task force, and kangaroo panels of doctors peddling unproven and even crackpot theories antithetical to proven and established public health practices, the rise of Lysenkoism in public health and to some degree, medical science, became more evident. Yet again I find myself asking, how could this happen here?  Most of the world's public health specialists are enacting proven methodology that many of them learned in the U.S. and U.K to combat Covid-19 and even in the face of global surges, they are having more success than in the US. These experts are bewildered by the undermining of proven public health practices and frightened when the most renowned infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists are mocked, denounced and threatened!

Nikolai Vavilov, 1933

I often think that some of the cruelest tragedies are found in Russian history, and certainly one of the bitterest ironies in recent Russian science history is the fate of Nikolai Vavilov, noted agronomist, and genetic biologist, who died of starvation in a freezing Saratov prison in January 1943.  A scientist who pioneered plant breeding to help Soviet agriculture and created a bank of seeds from around the world to foster research to produce better crop yield to feed more people in the world, starved to death, a martyr to the political takeover of science that denied Mendelian genetics and elevated a peasant "agronomist," T.D. Lysenko, who embraced long-disproven Lamarckism.  Stalin, looking for someone to blame when collectivization failed spectacularly, found Vavilov a convenient scapegoat.  Many experts like Vavilov, along with his students were persecuted, arrested or shot.  Yet they refused to yield to what was politically mandated, some of them undertaking heroic efforts to save the seed bank in Leningrad during the Siege, when starvation was rampant and rats and people were vying for food -- the cats having long ago been eaten. Vavilov's seed bank by that time had grown to over 250,000 samples.  During this purge of expertise and actual science, T.D. Lysenko rose in the institutes and academies and his pseudo-scientific theories prevailed.  This set back Soviet genetics, agronomy and biology for a generation. And yet, Lysenko's popularity in Russia is "currently enjoying a revival in his homeland, where anti-American sentiment runs strong."

And so now here we are with Trump, blaming public health and infectious disease specialists for the damaged economy, yet offering no coherent plan to bring the numbers down and give us a fighting chance. By opening too soon, he ironically prevented the economy from rebounding.  Instead he and his Atlas acolytes undertook and expanded an insidious campaign of disinformation that is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans.  While millions eventually died from Stalin's repression of agriculture, biology and science, death took its toll over time, except for the immediate repercussions that Vavilov himself suffered.

Scott Atlas resigns from Trump Coronavirus Taskforce, Dec 1, 2020

The current pandemic and its unfettered surge in the U.S. due to willful denial of science, is having a more immediate effect -- hundreds of thousands have died and thousands more will die of Covid-19 by January 2021.  More despicable is that several of those preaching an anti-Public Health message -- much like Dr. Atlas himself -- are trained doctors, among them Rand Paul (a "self-certified" ophathalmologist).  This is even more damning than the misguided self-aggrandizement of a peasant Ukrainian pseudo-scientist. People are continuing to die needlessly.  And, just like the destructive impact on Soviet Science, the U.S. Public Health field and possibly nursing and medicine itself, will also suffer in the long term.  Already state public health specialists are resigning from their posts, fighting a losing battle against disinformation and increasing death threats to themselves and their families. Doctors and nurses are working around the clock to save lives of Covid victims -- many of whom deny the existence of the disease from which they are dying.

Where is the accountability for this?  For the lives that are being lost, for the grave damage dealt to what was once a crown jewel of U.S. medical expertise -- public health?  When experts like Vavilov paid with the loss of their careers or their lives, where was accountability in the USSR?  Yes, Vavilov was "rehabilitated" by the Soviets, and an institute named after him, but long after he was dead. And after Soviet biology/genetics had to make a long climb back.

When millions fall ill weekly and the death toll approaches half a million by February, and the Public Health field is decimated, will Trump, Atlas or Paul be held accountable? Or will they, like Lysenko, be admonished by scientific publications (Stanford and the Hoover Institute have distanced themselves from Atlas's positions), but serve out their days at their Institute or office or on Fox & Friends?

I thought the rise of Lysenkoism and the tragic fate of Vavilov was something unique to authoritarian regimes ruled by ideology and could not happen here.  Yet it has, with equally tragic consequences. We cannot overlook this.  This isn't a matter of disagreement over two scientific approaches.  One approach is unscientific; it has been disproven, it is wrong. Those responsible for promoting pseudo-science, conspiracy theories, or simply ignoring the worst pandemic in more than 100 years, must be held accountable.  

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'Natalka Poltavka' is a pseudonym for a long-time friend working as a foreign affairs specialist in the U.S. government. She has studied Soviet and then Russian affairs for over 4 decades.