I’ve mentioned Trofin Lysenko a time or two on this blog, most recently here, but now Skeptical Inquirer’s David Robert Grimes has published a lovely article on this walking disaster of a scientist that I really enjoyed:
Lysenko’s 1928 announcement of a new way to hugely increase crop yield, dubbed “vernalization,” was music to the Party’s ears. Inspiring stories of ingenious workers solving practical problems by wits alone were a trope of Soviet propaganda, so this agronomist from peasant origins without any formal scientific training outsmarting a bourgeois scientific establishment was widely embraced. Bestowed with political and scientific awards, he was elevated up the Party hierarchy. Such praise was premature; Lysenko’s lack of scientific training translated into poorly controlled, subpar experiments. Nor was he above bolstering his heroic image with fabricated data.
Still, Lysenko was an unimpeachable Party darling, and the audacity of his claims increased steadily. He insisted that the offspring of seeds treated with his process would inherit wondrous properties, allowing wheat to transmute into barley. This caused consternation to biologists, as it pivoted on Lamarckian evolution. This obsolete theory suggested acquired characteristics of an organism could be passed down to descendants, so a plant plucked of leaves might have leafless offspring. Biologist Julian Huxley pithily observed that “if this theory is correct, it would follow that all Jewish boys would be born without foreskins.”
Bold mine.
And where did it all lead? Not well for his critics:
As World War II consumed Europe, Lysenko began purging scientists who contradicted his grandiose claims. Arrested on overblown charges, his mentor and early champion Vavilov ultimately died in prison from malnutrition. In 1941, Germany attacked Russia, putting Lysenko’s crusade temporarily on ice. At the war’s end in 1945, Lysenko still held dictatorial sway with the Party—but closer evaluations of his work by others began to reveal unjustified and blatantly falsified claims. Apprehensive of his position, Lysenko implored Stalin for support, promising to increase the country’s wheat yield tenfold. Despite ample evidence this was impossible and Lysenko incompetent, Stalin bowed to this much-vaunted genius of the proletariat, bestowing the entire political machinery of the Soviet Union on Lysenko.
But after Sakharov unloaded on him, as I mentioned previously, the Soviet Union dismissed him to dishonor and obscurity, and began clawing its way out of the feverish swamplands of quackery and ideological allegiances into which his ideology had led them:
The state press, which had once heralded his genius, now damned him absolutely. Lysenko retreated into obscurity, dying quietly in 1974. His cult of personality had stifled advances in genetics, biology, and medicine across the Soviet Union. His peaceful end was a stark contrast to that of the scientists whose destruction he had authored in his violent purges. The Lysenko affair was, in the words of scientist Geoffrey Beale, “The most extraordinary, tragic and in some ways absurd, scientific battle that there has ever been.”
And I fear this is what we’re seeing again, only a lot closer to my porch, as the folks who are characterized as anti-vax, or anti-science, might be better considered as alt-world people. They’ve had a taste of cultural power and, if only imagined, social superiority, and damned if they’re going to let a pandemic knock them out of their seats of power. It’s a hoax, medicines pushed by their leaders are effective, the vaccines don’t work or are morally flawed or will kill them. We’ve seen people die of Covid, whispering with their last breath that it is all a hoax, that if only the doctors gave them the real medicine, they’d get better instantly.
It’s all of a piece with the rejection of experts, as advocated by former Speaker Ryan (R-WI), isn’t it? He told the conservative base they could figure out anything, they didn’t need experts, and when an overwhelming problem descended upon them, they sought a magic cure, because that’s what they wanted and Ryan told them they could find it. And then out come the vultures who prey on such people, the latest appearing to be, in an imperfect analogy to Lysenko, the highly credentialed Dr. Robert Malone:
Timothy Caulfield, the Canada research chair in health law and policy at the University of Alberta, said Malone injecting himself into a conversation with the kind of credentials he has, and “cherry-picking rotten data,” was “a worst-case scenario.”
“You have this individual who has all these credentials and this history in the biomedical world, so that looks impressive. And he’s referencing a study that, on the face of it, may look impressive. But you don’t know that the study is fraudulent,” Caulfield said, adding that Malone has “weaponized bad research.”
In November, Malone shared a deceptive video to his Twitter followers that falsely linked athlete deaths to coronavirus shots. The video suggested that coronavirus vaccination killed Jake West, a 17-year-old Indiana high school football player who died of sudden cardiac arrest. But the vaccine played no role in West’s death. The teen died of an undiagnosed heart condition in 2013. [WaPo]
But when Malone says
“Regarding the genetic covid vaccines, the science is settled,” he said in a 15-minute speech that referenced the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy. “They are not working.”
It’s red meat for a base hungry for victory over those annoying liberals, and finding Covid doesn’t obey their wishes, their prayers, their earnest demands, not of themselves, not from the movement leaders, such as Trump or Copeland, they’re looking for confirmation of their alt-world fantasy.
The Soviet Union died, in part, from motivated reasoning: where the tires met the road, their technology and social management miserably came up as third-rate. Will the far-right conservatives, such as Trump and Speaker Ryan, who put their narcissism and ideological priorities, respectively, over the opinions of the best trained people available, suffer a similar fate?
And how much damage will their fatally flawed machine do before it’s finally abandoned?
