Farshid Jalalvand: The scientific freedom is under acute threat in the United States
When 18-year-old Yang Jisheng was in the process of preparing a number of the school newspaper for his boarding school, he was abruptly interrupted by a friend who stormed in: Your father is dying of starvation. In his award -winning book « Tombstone », Yang describes how he hurried to his hometown but found the place desolate: neither dogs, chickens nor other animals were seen. Even the bark on the trees had been torn off and eaten. His father died three days after Yang had arrived, unable to swallow the small amount of rice that the student had arranged.
The year was 1959 and China was at the beginning of what would become the greatest famine disaster in the history of humanity. According to various calculations, 15-55 million people died in Chinese starvation 1959-1961 (Yang estimates it at an incredible 36 million). The reasons for the disaster were several: poor policy decisions, order of several million farmers for iron and steel production, ecological collapse due to the extinction of sparrows and so on. But an important aspect was also new agricultural methods imported from the Soviet Union – especially those developed by agronomist Trofim Lysenko, head of the Soviet Union’s Genetic Institute.
Lysenko was an eager And ideologically convinced fanatics. He was early cherished by Stalin – partly for his background as a simple farmer from Ukraine and partly for his scientific theories that were consistent with Marxist dogma. According to Lysenko, there was no single substance coded for heredity – all talk about genes was bourgeois determinism. Instead, each organism could be « trained » to acquire the requested properties – like the Soviet man, an idealized archetype that was independent, all -competent and would make the Soviet Union the world’s best country. He stated, among other things, that if you cultivated orange trees more north for each year, they would eventually bear fruit at the Arctic Circle (spoiler: they do not).
Another arranged theory that Lysenko presented was that plants within the same species never competed with each other for resources – if space became too crowded between planted seeds would « sacrifice for public utility ». It was, above all, this theory used by the Chinese state and contributed to mass roller; When the farmers planted six times as many seeds on the same surface, the return became catastrophically low.
Lysencoism is today synonymous with the worst kind of pseudoscience: one where difficult research is swept under the rug so as not to disturb state sanctioned statements. The security service made sure that the Soviet geneticists who dared to protest against Lysenko got rid of the job, freedom and at worst life. An authoritarian rule cannot be undermined by upset scientists.
I think of Lysenko As I read about the dramatically, the politicization of research in the United States increased. Trump government has already withdrawn grants for research that mentions the word climate. There are sources which states that grants where MRNA vaccine is mentioned will also be withdrawn. At the same time, Politico reports on a planned State Report from the United States who will show that climate change benefits man. Washington Post’s sources states that a new investigation should be appointed to study the link between vaccines and autism, it is led by a vaccine skeptic data analyst who has previously been punished for working as a doctor without a identification. That vaccines cause autism is a myth that has been disproved by at least 16 comprehensive Scientific studies.
It would be naive to believe that research in free societies, unlike in totalitarian states, is completely decoupled from politics. Scientific institutions depend on state grants. Also with us, the political tools partly control which research is being carried out, not least through priorities for appropriations. But there are degrees in hell: there is a significant difference between democratically making a certain priority of common means and actively suppressing or distorting the entire scientific field. And above all, it should be remembered that there are always eager researchers, careerists and charlatans who, like Lysenko, do not hesitate to go for the affairs. The price is paid by future generations. Neither mis -growth, viruses nor rising sea levels care about whose pseudoscientific theories that are state -sanctioned.
