America’s Lysenko

In 1940, Trofin Denisovich Lysenko was appointed to the position of director of genetics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In this position, he enforced his idiosyncratic and unscientific vision of biology and agriculture for a decade and a half - making decisions that would indirectly lead to the deaths of tens of millions. In the present day, Robert F. Kennedy Junior seeks to enact a national medical policy that ominously echoes many of Lysenko’s views on science.

Born into extreme poverty in modern-day Ukraine, Lysenko hardly had the upbringing one would expect of a national scholar. He did not learn to read until he was 13 and only attended two years of school. Despite his lack of a traditional education, he was able to propel himself to some of the highest positions in the Soviet scientific apparatus by way of politics. His upbringing in poverty and squalor gave him a mystique of the ideal communist - a hard-working member of the proletariat; comfortable without excess and skilled enough to surpass his peers in the west despite their material superiority. At the time, Soviet leadership, and Stalin in particular, sought to invigorate the government by installing proletariat visionaries - people who displayed ambition and a desire to improve the Union despite their poor upbringings. More specifically, people like Lysenko. Once a friendship with Stalin had blossomed, he was rapidly shuffled upwards along the administrative hierarchy of Soviet biology, with little vetting of his bizarre ideas occurring on his way to the top. As his influence grew on his path to political dominance, many of his intellectual rivals were jailed, slandered, or even sent to be worked to death in gulags. By 1940, there was nobody left to oppose him. 

Lysenko’s theories filled many books, but were centralized around a rejection of mendelian genetics - the idea that an organism’s traits are inherited from its parents. Instead, he pushed the obsolete idea of Lamarckism, which claimed that developed physical traits were passed down directly (for example, a weightlifter’s children would inherit large muscles.) Promising extreme improvements in crop yield, he applied these ideas to his favorite field: agriculture. His plans included planting seeds six times denser than they had been before (under the assumption that plants of the same species wouldn’t compete for resources,) plowing far deeper to access supposedly richer soil. He wove these ideas in a mythological plan that he promised would increase crop yield by as much as eight times. Far from a promised octupling of land yield, these policies dramatically decreased food production when they were tried.

Despite his agricultural experiments being a resounding failure, his scheme would be used to disastrous effect in neighboring Communist China, as part of a wider plan known as the Great Leap Forward. Seeking to pull China out of the agrarian squalor it had been mired in for the past century, Mao Zedong put into motion a radical plan aimed at completely transforming the country in just a few years, spearheaded by huge increases in the production of crops and industrial goods. Lysenko’s lofty claims caught the attention of sympathetic officials in China, who subsequently made his plan official policy, to be practiced by all farmers in the nation. Before long, China was wracked by crop failures and famines, exacerbated by a false perception of excess that prompted officials to push for huge exports of grain, even as millions starved. Lysenko’s unscientific ideas, and a dogged refusal to question them, had caused the worst famine in human history.

On July 31 of 1948, at the height of his political influence, Lysenko delivered an address to an audience of sympathetic researchers at the Soviet academy of agricultural sciences. Although merely a preface to a battery of other talks delivered in a series of assemblies over eight days, the speech is a stark display of the mindset that he – and by extension soviet biologists in general – had embraced at that point in time. In his speech, Lysenko makes little attempt to evidence his claims; in fact, what literature he does present is exclusively authored by “Mendelist-Morganist” thinkers opposed to his ideas. It becomes apparent that Lysenko is presenting them for comedic effect, as he denounces them and their creators as “idealist,” “worthless,” and “mythical.” The audience laughs in response, not at the validity or factuality of the opposing claims, but rather at the fact that they are being made at all. At this moment, the ideas of Lysenkoism had moved beyond the domain of science and into that of religion; Its tenets to be upheld as implacable, self-evident truth, not as fluid ideas to be challenged and adjusted. 

Many decades after Lysenko’s death, the spirit of the counter-intellectual ideology he created lives on. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s appointment to the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) (an appointment exchanged for his withdrawal from the 2024 election) heralds the breakout of a new form of Lysenkoism onto the stage of American politics. Kennedy – who has no prior medical education – is pushing a scientific agenda that is sometimes almost diametrically opposed to modern scientific understanding. His political advocacy organization, Children’s Health Defense, upholds a litany of long-debunked claims, from the myth that vaccines cause autism to conspiracies about adverse health effects from 5G cell towers.  His actions in office have been even more idiosyncratic and bizarre. He’s claimed, among other things, that fast food fried in beef tallow is a health food. His tenure so far has overseen massive workforce cuts and a rapid, often disorganized reorganization of HHS, seemingly to better align the agency with his personal beliefs. Most recently, he gutted a prominent vaccine panel, replacing several qualified members with a group of vaccine skeptics who share his ideas.

Kennedy’s claims are, of course, utterly false. Decades of studies have shown no connection between vaccination and autism, SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), or a number of other conditions pinned to them by vaccine skeptics. Beef tallow is extremely high in saturated fat, excessive consumption of which is closely linked to a number of cardiovascular problems. The rise in autism rates is almost entirely attributable to changes in diagnostic protocols. None of these facts matter to him. 

The actions of RFK have made one thing abundantly clear: science must not become a subservient arm of politics. The Trump administration has made a habit of politicising previously nonpartisan government entities, from HHS to the Federal Reserve and Bureau of Labour Statistics. While the damage done by tampering with the economic and regulatory sections of the government may be high, it pales in comparison to what could happen if medical agencies are subjected to the same treatment. Dangerous precedent-setting aside, millions of Americans rely on the government for health insurance, and doctors around the world work intimately with the CDC. If these agencies are reduced to mere political tools in an effort to scrape up votes, the damage would be almost impossible to ascertain. Diseases like Measles are already becoming re-established in North America (Canada lost its eradicated status earlier this month,) almost entirely through unvaccinated children. A widespread discarding of vaccines could massively increase the already above-average infant mortality rate in the USA, among other negative effects.

Nevertheless, some people do earnestly agree with RFK Jr’s beliefs, and may have voted for Trump in part because they knew he was likely to appoint Kennedy. Politics aside, all of this begs one question above all else: what are we to do in the face of anti-intellectual thinking? In my mind, the only way out is by holding respectful dialogue with adherents of RFK Jr’s conspiratorial thought. The vast majority of people who fall to belief in incorrect “alternative” science do so because they were plainly misled and misinformed. Out of either misplaced trust or misguided searching for truth in a world that is at times impossibly complex, they stumbled down the wrong path. It is a responsibility for all of us to lead them back out. I will again emphasize the respectful part of that goal – as Keshia Thomas said, “you can’t beat goodness into a person.” dangerous beliefs like vaccine skepticism must be condemned and contained at every step, but we cannot let that hostility spill over to its proponents. Compassion, not anger or hatred, is the only thing that can deliver us from greater conflict and animosity in an America that is growing more polarized by the day.