As RFK Jr. purges the CDC and cancels billions in research grants, Americans need a refresher course on what happened to Soviet biological research during the Stalin years.
In many ways, Trofim Lysenko was just the man Stalin had been looking for. He grew up in the peasantry rather than the elitist intelligentsia. He promised new techniques for growing crops that might solve the Soviet Union's difficulty producing food in the same quantities the Czars had. And he represented a rebellion against Mendelian genetics, whose vision of evolution relied more on the individual's struggle for survival than on the collective class struggle more in line with Marxist ideology.
From our 21st century point of view, as well as from the perspective of 20th-century geneticists, Lysenko was a crank. He espoused "vernalization", a process by which winter wheat could be converted to spring wheat and then pass its new abilities on to its descendants. Following LeMarck rather than Mendel, he believed that acquired characteristics could be inherited -- a possibility that appealed to a regime dedicated to producing the "new Soviet man".
Wikipedia explains:
Lysenko's political success was mostly due to his appeal to the Communist Party and Soviet ideology. His attack on the "bourgeois pseudoscience" of modern genetics and the proposal that plants can rapidly adjust to a changed environment suited the ideological battle in both agriculture and Soviet society. Following the disastrous collectivization efforts of the late 1920s, Lysenko's new methods were seen by Soviet officials as paving the way to an "agricultural revolution." Lysenko himself was from a peasant family and was an enthusiastic advocate of Leninism. The Party-controlled newspapers applauded Lysenko's practical "success" and questioned the motives of his critics, ridiculing the timidity of academics who urged the patient, impartial observation required for science. Lysenko was admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party, and was put in charge of agricultural affairs.
He used his position to denounce biologists as "fly-lovers and people haters", and to decry traditional biologists as "wreckers" working to sabotage the Soviet economy. He denied the distinction between theoretical and applied biology, and rejected general methods such as control groups and statistics:
"We biologists do not take the slightest interest in mathematical calculations, which confirm the useless statistical formulae of the Mendelists … We do not want to submit to blind chance … We maintain that biological regularities do not resemble mathematical laws."
By 1940, Lysenko had become the director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Those who opposed him or criticized his theories did not fare well.
From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's approval, many geneticists were executed (including Izrail Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. In 1936, the American geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller, who had moved to the Leningrad Institute of Genetics with his Drosophila fruit flies, was criticized as bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and a promoter of fascism, and he returned to America via Republican Spain. Iosif Rapoport, who worked on mutagens, refused to publicly repudiate chromosome theory of heredity, and suffered several years as a geological lab assistant. Dmitry Sabinin's book on plant physiology was abruptly withdrawn from publication in 1948. He died by suicide in 1951.
His hold on power began to waver after Stalin's death in 1953, but he remained influential far into the Krushchev years. The results were predictable:
Lysenko's ideas and practices contributed to the famines that killed millions of Soviet people; the adoption of his methods from 1958 in the People's Republic of China had similarly calamitous results, contributing to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1961.
Historians regard the Lysenko Era as a prime example of what can happen when ideology triumphs over science. During the same period, Soviet rocket scientists led the world in space exploration, and Soviet nuclear physicists nearly caught up with the far-better-funded Americans. But Soviet biology and agronomy could not free themselves from the ideological mud.
RFK Jr. Today, we are seeing history beginning repeat itself, with RFK Jr. as the new Lysenko. Like Lysenko, he has gained the backing of an autocratic regime; criticizing RFK Jr. or his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement marks someone as anti-MAGA, exposing them to the retribution of the US government. At the moment, that just means firing from government jobs or the cancellation of research grants; it doesn't yet send you to a labor camp. But the regime is young.
Unlike Lysenko, RFK Jr. is a child of wealth and privilege; he undoubtedly would not be where he is if his name were Smith. But he has tapped into a similar anger against elites and a distrust of expertise. He favors explanations that are sweeping and easily explained, while distrusting results that depend on careful procedures and statistical analysis.
Research. Also like Lysenko, Kennedy is a crank. His anti-vaccine ideas (which are his most prominent, but not his only departure from scientific orthodoxy) are fixed, baseless, and impervious to data. Control groups and statistics may "confirm the useless statistical formulae" of MRNA vaccines, or refute Kennedy's hobby-horse belief that vaccines cause autism, but no matter. Henceforth, the US government will not fund MRNA research, and a report claiming that autism is caused by vaccines or other environmental factors should be out this month:
We will have announcements as promised in September, finding interventions, certain interventions, now that are clearly almost certainly causing autism. And we're going to be able to address those in September.
Kennedy has long claimed that environmental factors like vaccines, toxins, or food additives are likely culprits behind the rising rate of autism diagnoses, arguing research to back this up has been blocked by federal authorities. In fact, research on the environmental factors related to autism had been proceeding for years at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Kennedy cancelled its funding, along with more than 50 other autism-related studies.
What is wrong with that research? It keeps coming to inconvenient conclusions. Autism, it seems, is a more complicated problem than Kennedy wants to acknowledge.
Genetic factors account for a significant portion of autism cases. Research like the kind McCanlies and other government-funded scientists have conducted over the past two decades has established that environmental factors have a role, too, and can combine with genetics. Multiple factors can even converge within the same individual. Some of those environmental risks could be reduced by the very measures the Trump administration is rolling back.
But "genetic factors" are anti-MAHA, just as they were anti-Soviet. All our ills must be traceable to human deeds in the food industry, Big Pharma, or our own lifestyle choices.
Ideology over science. This week, the Center for Disease Control was decapitated: RFK fired Director Susan Monarez, a Senate-confirmed Trump appointment who had only served for three weeks. Her attorneys said that she had "refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts."
Presumably, this referred to new recommendations on who should get Covid vaccines, and possibly other pending announcements from the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. Kennedy dismissed all 17 members of the ACIP in June, and replaced them largely with unqualified people more in line with his views. (The resignation letter of Immunization and Respiratory Diseases head Demetre Daskalakis described them as "people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor".) Similarly, Monarez' interim replacement is Jim O'Neill, who is neither a doctor nor a scientist, but
was an early supporter of Kennedy's Make America Healthy Again movement and a vocal critic on social media of the CDC's role during the pandemic.
The double-tap of firing Monarez and backing new vaccine recommendations motivated more by ideology than science led to the resignations of three other top CDC officials: Chief Medical Officer Deb Houry, Daskalakis, and Dan Jernigan, who led the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease.
A key issue for Houry, Daskalakis and Jernigan are the actions Kennedy has taken that align with the views of anti-science activists. Houry told NPR that ethically they couldn't abide the direction the agency is taking, and she said they wanted to time their departures for impact after the news broke that Monarez was being fired.
Daskalakis' resignation letter went into detail:
I am unable to serve in an environment that treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public's health. ... The data analyses that supported this decision have never been shared with CDC despite my respectful requests to HHS and other leadership. This lack of meaningful engagement was further compounded by a "frequently asked questions" document written to support the Secretary's directive that was circulated by HHS without input from CDC subject matter experts and that cited studies that did not support the conclusions that were attributed to these authors. ... We are seven months into the new administration, and no CDC subject matter expert from my Center has ever briefed the Secretary. I am not sure who the Secretary is listening to, but it is quite certainly not to us. Unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC and other reputable sources.
Thursday, CDC employees staged a brief walkout to protest the agency's turn away from science, and to support Monarez and the resigning officials.
The medical community is beginning to adjust to a CDC that can no longer be trusted. For example, numerous non-government medical groups are preparing their own vaccine advice.
Political Pandering. Kennedy owes his position to Donald Trump, so MAHA will always serve MAGA. Trump's EPA has been working entirely counter to Kennedy's long-espoused views, but he has had nothing to say about that.
The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, is rolling back rules and regulations that will result in an increase in air pollution, which multiple studies have linked to autism. The agency is in the process of reversing bans on several chemicals, including TCE, one of the solvents associated with the disorder, and has told a federal court it won't legally defend certain aspects of a ban on methylene chloride, another of the solvents linked to autism. It also began dismantling its Office of Research and Development, which has funded research into the environmental conditions contributing to autism.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that RFK Jr. does not actually care about the things he says he cares about, but simply wants the spotlight and a position of power.
He has also gone along with the Trump administration's anti-DEI mandates, which have been interpreted to blackball research into the ways that women's health is different from men's, or racial factors that affect illness. Both are legitimate areas of research, but can't be discussed in the current political environment.
This is where we find ourselves: with current public health practices and future medical research controlled by one man who is as opinionated as he is ignorant: the American Lysenko.
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