(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . When the state controls science [1] ['Dr. G', 'View Profile', 'Chitown Kev', 'Bill In Portland Maine', 'Belinda Ridgewood', 'Sabrina Haake'] Date: 2026-05-07 Let me tell you a story that you may not be familiar with. I say this because I did not learn the details of this particular story until I was a first year graduate student at a land grant university with a USDA Agricultural Research Station, where I got started in my research rotations. This story sits at an odd intersection of bad science and bad ideology and mass human suffering that we don’t often revisit, mostly because at the time it was happening. there were other more pressing and more obviously, deliberately evil causes of mass human suffering to worry about. Josef Stalin had spent the late 1920s and early 1930s in the USSR seizing grain from the peasant laborers who produced it, and then forcing collectivization of agriculture. This was in part a reaction to a severe famine in 1921-22, which killed an estimated 5 million people during Lenin’s rule. Collectivization was sold to the public by Stalin as a way to increase agricultural production, but it was also a useful political tool, destroying competing centers of power and even targeting any peasant who was lucky enough to own a few more cows than his neighbors for persecution. Into the famine-ridden landscape of the 1920s USSR came Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko was a graduate of the well-regarded Kiev Agricultural Institute. He was born into a peasant family in what is now Ukraine, learned to read and write only when he was 13, and then rose quickly through the ranks of agronomy in the USSR, ultimately gaining Stalin’s favor and a director position in the All-Union Breeding and Genetics Institute (VSGI) in Odessa. As a young horticulturalist, he had had some successes with increasing crop yields in millet and introducing legumes as local crops while stationed in Azerbaijan, which brought him to Stalin’s attention. During this same period, what we now call the “modern synthesis” in evolutionary biology and genetics was beginning to emerge, driven by scientists both within and outside the USSR. The theories of Gregor Mendel had been revived from obscurity, and his theories were beginning to be integrated with Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Hardy and Weinberg had developed a model of equilibrium that described how multiple gene alleles are maintained in populations, suggesting a mechanism by which selection would operate. Thomas Hunt Morgan was developing theories of genetic linkage that contributed to understanding of the organization of genes within chromosomes. Lysenko, who would maintain iron control over Soviet genetics research until the end of Stalin’s life in 1953, is referenced simply as a cautionary tale in introductory biology classes, for his stubborn rejection of “the Morganists” and dedication to alternative and erroneous biological theories. He is lumped in with Lamarck, whose theory of heritability of acquired traits was the predecessor to Lysenko’s theories. But Lysenko’s impacts were far more dire and direct than those of other discredited evolutionary theorists. Because of his close political association with Stalin, his erroneous ideas became national agricultural policy. Lysenko had committed himself early and stubbornly to a concept called “vernalization”. This has its roots in an agricultural practice that involves exposing stored seeds to cold to stimulate germination so that they can be planted in spring rather than in the previous autumn. The challenges of agriculture in Russia were extreme cold temperatures and short growing seasons. Lysenko began to put forward claims that the growth of seeds after vernalization amounted to an inheritable cold tolerance that would persist in subsequent generations grown from the descendants of that seed, and he was successful in getting farmers to adopt his practices, his peasant background perhaps making him more relatable. He was reportedly thin-skinned and resistant to critique, but he gained and held onto Stalin’s backing. While the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 that killed millions, was largely engineered by Stalin as a tool of political repression, Lysenko’s ideas — including the use of vernalization, the introduction of unproductive planting approaches, and the rejection of fertilizers — may have contributed to the deadly extent of that famine, even if they did not cause it. By 1940, what is now Ukraine was subsumed in Stalin’s Soviet Union, and much of the rest of western Europe was subsumed in Hitler’s Germany to some degree. How can one man spell the downfall of an entire nation’s biology research enterprise? In the late 1930s, Lysenko began to use his platform at VSGI to instigate “debate” with proponents of modern genetics, making adherence to his erroneous theories a test of loyalty to the USSR and to the principles of Soviet communism. By 1938, the Stalinist purges had destroyed the careers of many leading Russian geneticists, including Lysenko’s colleagues and mentors. More scientists were killed, exiled, or imprisoned in that period in the USSR than during the entirety of Hitler’s rule in Europe. By the 1940s, Lysenko’s iron hand was so firmly upon the reins of the discipline that what scientists remained began to capitulate and offer support to his theories as a matter of survival. During World War II and the famine that followed, agricultural production did not significantly increase under Lysenko’s theories, and Western scientists who attempted the task were often unable to reproduce his results. But until Stalin died, and to some extent beyond, theories other than Lysenkoism were thoroughly suppressed. The impact of Lysenko’s ideological rejection of modern genetics and persecution of his fellow scientists on the scientific enterprise in Russia and Soviet controlled regions of Europe was stunning and long-lasting. Prior to Lysenko, Russian research in agronomy and genetics was arguably world-leading, with many important early contributions to the field. After Lysenko, leaders in the field who adhered to non-Lysenkoist theories of genetics were dead, fled, or completely demoralized. I’m a scientist, and Lysenko is often on my mind lately, as we enter what is likely to be another deadly era of scientific suppression, this time in the United States. The anti-science cabal destroying the future of US science You may know that over 100,000 Ph.D. level scientists have been dismissed from the US Government, intramural research programs have been shuttered, and priceless scientific infrastructure is being closed down or sold off. You may know that university research has been hard hit, both by retaliatory recissions of existing grants and contracts, and by the more subtle failure of new institute leaders to announce funding opportunties or to make grants using money that Congress has allocated. And you surely know that HHS Secretary RFK Jr. is an addle-headed joke of a man that should be nowhere near a major nation’s expensive, painstakingly cultivated research infrastructure. What you may not realize though is how deeply burrowed in Kennedy’s henchmen already are in the US research agencies, and how damaging their short tenures have been. Just on the issue of vaccination alone, NIH Director (and also erstwhile interim CDC Director) Jay Bhattacharya has done incalculable damage. Bhattacharya didn’t come out of nowhere. His qualifications to run the nation’s crucial health research infrastructure include an M.D. and a Ph.D., but here’s the thing. He’s neither a practicing doctor nor a medical researcher. He’s a “Health Economist”, which means he has little practical or technical understanding of biological systems, but lots of big feelings about how health care and “the market” interact. He got his launch into national prominence during the pandemic emergency, when he and a bunch of similarly credentialed experts put themselves forward as contrarian pundits, scaring and riling up the public in opposition to any public health measures that impinged on people’s ability to go to work. Lockdowns, social distancing, work-from-home, remote education, you name it, if it kept the peasants from getting sick getting to work, Bhattacharya opposed it. And with his elevation to leadership, we begin to see that this also extends to vaccines. Just in recent weeks, Bhattacharya and Kennedy have restricted the ability of US scientists to research and develop mRNA vaccines, putting the whole vaccine supply chain in danger by forbidding access to this world-changing and Nobel prize winning biotechnology advance, notably led by American researchers. In his CDC role, we learned this week that Bhattacharya suppressed research findings from FDA groups that rigorously investigated benefits and risks of the COVID-19 vaccine and other common vaccines as well as halting publication of positive vaccine outcomes in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. His policies and public statements have cast doubt on the lifesaving infant hepatitis B vaccine, and even on routine health practices like the newborn Vitamin K injection that saves babies from death or disability due to internal bleeding in their early weeks of life. Last month, a Wharton B-school professor and podcaster (under the aegis of the National Academy of Science, sadly) became the main character (derogatory) of Science Bluesky for hosting a panel that elevated Jay Bhattacharya and his fellow traveler Emily Oster in a discussion of how to “fix” the social and behavioral sciences. While researchers may object, universities’ newfound, zealous and opportunistic interest in “viewpoint diversity” and “institutional neutrality” makes them ripe for more ideologically-driven “debates” like these, and for continued spiraling away from evidence-based policy, and potentially into professional and personal danger for dissenting scientists. https://bsky.app/profile/katymilkman.bsky.social/post/3mj5mtevcek2s Lysenko’s purging of scientists may have begun as “debates” at conferences and events, but those debates quickly spiraled into firings, spurious legal persecution, and even executions. American scientists like Scripps institute virologist Kristian Andersen, who was called before Congress in late 2025 due to his publications that contradict the conspiratorial “COVID-19 lab leak theory”, and Dr. Fauci’s associate David Morens, who was indicted this week by the DOJ, are already being targeted. This has gotten rather long, so I’ll end for the time being by saying that NIH is not the only US science agency that is actively on fire. Bhattacharya’s acolytes have infiltrated the FDA, the decisionmaking boards at CDC, and many other functions. And in the agencies that deal with climate, like NOAA, EPA and USDA, the situation is equally grim. Should we regain control of the US as a democracy, Democratic Party leaders will need to understand just how deeply infiltrated our precious, carefully cultivated public science agencies are. Fixing the damage will not be merely a matter of throwing more money at them at this point — because the Republican Congress actually threw money at science this year, but that has done nothing to ensure that funding was used as intended internally, or distributed to researchers on the basis of merit, without fear or favor. Note (since this is a first diary) Why do I pay such close attention to this stuff? It’s my job — one that I’ve dedicated more than half a lifetime to. I’m a professor in a life science department in a state university system. We are subject to a heavily gerrymandered state legislature’s idea of academic freedom. Anticipatory obedience and ideological capitulation is already all around me. My lab contributed to local and regional pandemic response for four years during the COVID-19 pandemic so I’ve had a lot of exposure to the rise of the ideological contrarians destroying American science. I’m currently developing a course about the history of science-informed policy in the US, and I’ll be doing a lot of reading and writing this summer to get my thoughts in order. If you’re interested follow along. 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