The Lysenko Affair
In The Eighth Day of Creation: The Makers of the Revolution in Biology, Horace Freeland Judson describes the Lysenko affair, when a crackpot scientist loyal to Stalin took over Russian biology. It is worth reading his description of the entire episode (pages 370–372). Judson tells the story in his chapter about Jacques Monod, the great French biochemist and communist sympathizer, who finally abandoned his support of Stalin over Lysenko. I’ll quote excerpts.
Early in September 1948, the Lysenko affair blew up — the most grotesque scandal in the history of science, and all the more bizarre for entailing, among some intellectuals in the West, a self-willed intellectual delusion. Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was a Russian botanist, poorly educated, who turned the faking of scientific results and a debased skill at Marxist polemic into a claim on Josef Stalin’s patronage that made him the all-but-absolute ruler of Soviet biology….
Stalin made Lysenko boss of Soviet agricultural research. Opposing scientists were put down, argued down, shouted down, at meetings… [Lysenko] delivered a diatribe against Mendelian and Morganist genetics, calling them abstract and idealistic, fascist, racist… Its full text was published the next day by all the main Soviet newspapers. The Soviet Academy of Sciences met and announced support of Lysenko. Classical genetics was suppressed.
Western Communist intellectuals faced the gravest test of their faith since the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. In England, J. B. S. Haldane, for many years a member of the Communist Party, wrote “Genetics is my profession. If it is attacked, I will defend it.” He broke with the Party over Lysenko.
Then Jacques Monod contributed to an article denouncing Lysenko, in which he said “The victory of Lysenko has no scientific character whatever…” Later he said “there were absolutely no roots to it. I mean, no material roots, no experiments, absolutely nothing. Nothing but ideology.”
Why do I bring up the Lysenko affair, that occurred over 80 years ago? Because I see disturbing parallels between it and the situation of science in the United States today. Lysenko is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Stalin is Trump. Lysenko attacked genetics, whereas Kennedy attacks vaccines and the very foundations of immunology, and Trump attacks the concept of climate change. Granted, we are at the early stages of the our version of the Lysenko affair, and perhaps it will not grow into the debacle that beset Russia. But I fear we are heading in that direction. I wonder where are the Haldanes and Monods who will save us? Where are the Republican supporters of Trump who will finally break with his views because of their belief in science? I don’t see them. A few weeks ago I thought Louisiana Republican Senator Bill Cassidy might stand up for science and medicine, but he did not. Currently vaccine science and climate change research are being suppressed. Let us hope that American scientists rise to the occasion and defend science. History will not be kind to us if we do not.