Throughout history there have been dark moments where science has been manipulated for political ends, and few are as starkly cautionary as Lysenkoism. This was a period where Soviet science was gripped by an ideologically motivated rejection of Mendelian genetics in favour of a sort of Lamarckism, at the direction of the biologist and agronomist Trofim Lysenko. It was believed, for example, that wheat grown under stressful conditions could pass physically improved resilience onto its direct offspring - that Autumn wheat could be turned into Winter wheat by exposing the seeds to cold. Lysenko decried evolutionary theory as bourgeois doctrine and rejected the notion of a clear definition of species, believing one variety of grain could be transformed into another by exposing it to a different set of environmental factors.
This pseudoscience held sway for decades under the Communist regime, with Lysenko as head of agriculture granted political favour by Stalin, while contrary scientific opinions were dismissed as bourgeois fascism and dissenting scientists arrested and condemned to death. Meanwhile, the attempts to put these ideas into practice did untold damage to Soviet and Maoist agriculture, leading to crop failures on a huge scale and the deaths of millions.
The unhappy legacy of Lysenkoism in contemporary disputes however seems to be as an easy analogy to be exploited for political ends. Lysenkoism provides an example of illegitimate suppression of science that is invoked to compare any disfavoured scientific position to those evolutionary biologists repressed by the Soviets, reputations shredded, papers unpublished, sent to the gulag for daring to speak the truth by an intolerant ideologically-driven regime.
In 2005, journalist George Monbiot compared the Bush administration’s efforts to undermine and stall progress on climate change to “Lysenkoism”, while in 2009 Emeritus Professor Cliff Ollier compared the orthodox mainstream view on climate change to “Lysenkoism”. More recently, the Trump administration’s attitude to vaccination is regularly compared to “Lysenkoism”, while others dismiss social justice activism as “woke Lysenkoism”. These are just a few contrasting examples of many to illustrate that, over the decades that political arguments have raged over the reality of climate change, vaccination, and many other politically contentious topics, comparisons to Lysenkoism have been drawn over and over again by opposing sides.
The problem with using analogies in this way is that they do not truly help us understand which side to believe. Taking an example of a historic injustice and applying it as an analogy to an existing situation can simply feed our own preexisting belief in a contemporary injustice. Arguably for political activists this is the point of the analogy, exploiting past wrongs to win public sympathy and popular support. However, simply being attacked for holding a minority position does not mean that position is correct or that it will ultimately be vindicated. As Carl Sagan said:
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
It is seductive to lend credence to claims that “the truth” is being suppressed by ideologues, but science rarely deals in such absolutes. Science is - especially at the bleeding edge - messy and couched in uncertainty, in probability, in what we can plausibly say with some degree of confidence given the state of available evidence.
One possible lesson of Lysenkoism is to avoid the black-and-white thinking that led to its dominance and propped it up for so long. To eschew rigid ideas and the arrogance of having access to the whole truth, and to accept some room for uncertainty. But then this is complicated by other, contrary historic situations such as that with Big Tobacco, where doubt and uncertainty were exploited in bad faith to forestall action (as detailed in Merchants of Doubt), tactics that were later employed by the fossil fuel industry to delay action on climate change. We can find ourselves caught between two warring analogies - one where junk science was propped up by ideologues, and one where manufactured doubt was cast on good science to stall progress. When advocates are demanding urgent political action, attempts to inject nuance and complexity are treated with suspicion, and we cannot know for sure which is right without actually assessing for ourselves the quality of the arguments and the evidence on display.
The boring reality is that such situations cannot really be understood without actually assessing whether legitimate science is indeed being attacked or suppressed for political reasons, or whether in actual fact junk science is being rightly ignored by a sensible mainstream. Teasing that out is difficult, slow, complicated, and does not sit well with the slogans and thought-terminating cliches that dominate political discourse.
Perhaps all we can do to chart a path between opposing analogies is to make our best effort to assess that the uncertainty is genuine, and then see how that uncertainty is treated - as part of scientific discourse, or with censure, silencing and smear.
A recent and shameful episode has been the capitulation of McMaster University to a campaign of bullying and invective. After publishing the first three of a planned series of systematic reviews in the field of youth gender medicine - all of which had so far concluded that the evidence was low quality - the authors were subjected to a sustained campaign of bullying with the intention of discrediting their work. As co-author Gordon Guyatt stated in an interview with Jesse Singal:
The young people and my colleague who got us into this in the first place are now so traumatized by the whole scene that they want nothing to do with it. That is, they all pulled their names off. They’re all terrified. They’re all traumatized.
Eventually McMaster published a statement disowning their partners in the research (SEGM) and promising to do better, with some of the authors putting their names to this statement and distancing themselves from the remaining, unpublished reviews which may now never see the light of day. This is disturbing behaviour from such an institution, failing to protect open enquiry, self-censoring to appease partisan critics and hanging the remaining authors out to dry. To see McMaster baited into giving this statement of apology - lending credence to a long-running ideological smear campaign - is pretty disgraceful. As one co-author put it in an interview with Benjamin Ryan:
If I’m a funding body, I would think twice about engaging with McMaster.
Witnessing this sort of thing, it is easy to reach for the parallels to the ideological attacks on evolutionary biologists under Lysenko - not because the silencing is necessarily being enacted in the same way or for the same reasons, but because of the consequences such an obvious chilling effect will have on open inquiry and scientific discourse. Having researchers “terrified” to investigate a subject while institutions bow down to angry mobs and agree to comply with preconceived conclusions can only be a disaster for science.
But summoning the ghost of Lysenko cannot tell us who is right in a given debate, all it can do is act as a stark warning of what happens when the very conditions for uncovering truth are destroyed. This is what science must be ever vigilant towards, and this is what appears to be under threat now, when institutions lack the courage and integrity to protect researchers and their work from campaigns of abuse. Standing up for open, good-faith debate is still the only safeguard we have against repeating our greatest errors.