Thoughtcrime

While we're deciding whether to care about Barry Bonds' record-breaking home run, I thought I'd look forward with some anticipation of learning more about the role of fraud in science. I'm going to be taking a course this fall in the history of the Soviet Union and Central Europe, and I'm especially interested in using that opportunity to explore how science and ideology have interacted in that context.

One of the most notorious examples from the history of science is the practice of science in the Soviet Union. And perhaps the most infamous story of Soviet ideology perverting science is that of agronomist Trofim Lysenko(1898-1976), who synthesized Communism and biology in opposition to Mendel's genetic theory. Famines in the Soviet empire had created a desperate desire for science that would support socialist principles and promise increased crop yields. Techniques like the winter storage of wet wheat seed were promoted with the assurance of radically increased harvests, but experimental results were never able to confirm the claims of Lysenko's labs. Other scientists whose work did not conform to the dictates of Lysenkoism were imprisoned, and hundreds of them died in this purge, one of the most awful periods in the history of science.

Serving under both Stalin and Khrushchev, Lysenko enjoyed more than three decades of media attention and immunity from opposition. After prominent Soviet physicists in the early 1960s denounced his work as fraudulent science, he was removed from the directorship of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences, and was publicly disgraced, not only for the misrepresentation of experimental results, but also for the death of millions in the famines that followed, notably in China. Lysenko's name is remembered primarily as an egregious example of allowing politics to distort science.

Feels good to beat up on the former "Evil Empire," doesn't it? Guess where I'm headed next with this.

Science under the Bush administration is a disgrace. (And, no, the disgrace didn't start with this administration, but it has certainly reached a personal best.) While not a human rights disaster of the scale of Lysenkoism, I fully believe that history will look back on this time as a grim one for science and reason. The political perversion of science education, especially in the repression of evolution teachings; the muzzling of women's clinics and other health care providers in providing or even communicating about abortion or birth control; the culture of deceit and lack of accountability in agencies like NASA, the EPA and the FDA; the suppression of information about environmental degradation and pillage; the political pressure and even censorship of public health leaders like the Surgeon Generals; and the widespread deterioration of science literacy will leave a disastrous legacy. Above all, the sway of conservative Protestant ideology and politics over the work of science will haunt us just as Lysenko's story continues to haunt the remnants of the former Soviet empire.