Lois Parshley writes:

In the fall of 1925, agronomist Trofim Lysenko arrived on the dusty plains of what is now Azerbaijan, hoping to keep cows from starving to death over the winter. The young scientist, who learned to read as a teenager during the Russian Revolution, dismissed the rapidly advancing field of genetics. He believed nature could be bent to human will.

Lysenko denounced the idea that genes pass traits down as a “degradation of bourgeois culture,” and couldn’t understand why cows bred to produce more milk did so simply because they had “advantaged ancestors.” He attempted to “educate” crops by soaking them in freezing water, thinking that could force them to sprout in winter, and insisted that orange trees would grow in Siberia if exposed to the right stimuli.

Such ideas catapulted Lysenko to the head of Soviet agriculture under Stalin. In the midst of the famine his catastrophic policies helped create, Lysenko banned fertilizers and demanded farmers sow seeds close together, believing that plants of the same species wouldn’t compete.

Lysenko’s pseudoscientific ideas outraged his peers. Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian botanist who founded the world’s first seed bank, openly challenged his rejection of genetics. Lysenko denounced him, and the secret police arrested him in 1940. Vavilov, who had worked to prevent famines, starved to death in jail three years later.

This kind of scientific misinformation and the consequences it can bring now sound eerily familiar to U.S. climate experts like Shaina Sadai. She has been stunned by how quickly politics have overshadowed science since President Trump took office. The most recent government climate report, which the Department of Energy released last month, for instance, so drastically misrepresented the studies it cited that the researchers whose work it drew from publicly decried it. “I’m just really having a hard time with the barrage of apocalypses every day,” she said. [Continue reading…]