17-04-2025
RFK Jr., America's Lysenko
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Lysenko had developed a theory that high-yield winter wheat could be planted in the spring, thus avoiding the dreaded 'black frost' that could wipe out crops. Though Lysenko's experiments were rejected by the Soviet scientific establishment as insufficient and poorly executed, the Soviet regime adopted his view in vain hope of avoiding a looming food shortage.
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A 1938 portrait of Soviet pseudoscientist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.
Wikimedia Commons
Lysenko, thus hailed in the press as a hero and emboldened, used his 'discovery' as a way to refute scientists who had been trying to improve crops through genetics. In fact, he rejected genetics as an explanation for heredity. Soon, geneticists who questioned or challenged him were on the run — literally. Thousands lost their jobs or even
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As the science writer Carl Zimmer recounted in
Trofim Lysenko speaking at the Kremlin in 1935. Behind him, all the way to the right, is Joseph Stalin.
Wikimedia Commons
The pall Lysenko cast over Soviet science in general lasted beyond Stalin's death in reach of'Lysenkoism' extended from genetics and biology into
Which brings us to Kennedy and his oversight of 11 federal agencies, including the
Not only have Kennedy's wrongheaded scientific views not impeded his political gain, they may explain it. Just as Lysenko told Stalin what he wanted to hear, so Kennedy does with Trump and with those who espouse his unscientific beliefs Congress approved Kennedy's appointment to HHS despite his long record of lies and misinformation about vaccines and in defiance of broad opposition from the health and science communities. A
Indeed, once in his new job, after an outbreak of measles in Texas,
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Yet in
Now consider President Trump's purge of federal agencies across the board. There was the initial firing of
In response to the cuts at USAID, Johns Hopkins University, a leading research institution,
So Trump, who kick-started the development of COVID vaccines with Operation Warp
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How dangerous is this combination of funding cuts and Kennedy's role?
'It could take years for the system to recover,' Zimmer said recently. He was at the Harvard Science Center discussing his book '
It's not just that the cuts will be, Zimmer told me, 'incredibly disruptive to ongoing research.' They throw entire teams into disarray, upend years of planning, and could have effects that ripple on for a generation or more. 'A number of clinical trials have been halted. You have to remember these things take years to line up, and then all of a sudden if everything gets yanked and people are fired and so on, they're not going to just jump back into existence. So some of those [trials] could be lost.'
Other cuts to scientific grants will break the pipeline of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who help sustain the American research infrastructure and ensure its continuity.
That the cuts seem to have neither a basis in scientific goals nor a
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