Lysenkoism: The Danger of Politicized Science
It was the summer of 1940 and Nikolai Vavilov, along with biologists and geneticists from his staff, was on a botanical expedition to Ukraine to collect plant and seed samples. Considering the political turmoil and Communist Party scheming taking place at the time, it must have been liberating for Vavilov and his fellow scientists to escape the Moscow hothouse and be out in the great outdoors doing what they loved most. He probably didn’t see his arrest coming. The NKVD (predecessor of the Soviet KGB) swooped down on him and “disappeared” him into Stalin’s police-state labyrinth.
Vavilov had to know he was in serious trouble. But he likely had no idea just how serious. The terror of Joseph Stalin’s Moscow Purge Trials of 1936-1938 were not such a distant memory. Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Yagoda, Radek, and other former top Soviet leaders had been rounded up, tortured, forced to “confess” to crimes against the Soviet Union, and then executed. But they were all political apparatchiks who had run afoul of Stalin; Vavilov, on the other hand, was a scientist. Indeed, at the time, Vavilov was arguably Soviet Russia’s top scientist, and her most celebrated scientist worldwide at that. Nevertheless, he was destined to play a central role in a conflict with the deadliest scientist in history. Vavilov was sentenced to death in July 1941. For reasons unknown, his sentence was commuted to 20 years imprisonment. It was obviously not a gesture of mercy, for he was allowed to starve to death in prison. The tragic irony is that he had spent his life on research aimed at solving the world’s food problems and boosting Russia’s food production to avoid the cycle of famines the nation was experiencing. He died of starvation in 1943 at age 55, at the height of his career.
So, what was Nikolai Vavilov’s putative crime? He was falsely charged with sabotaging Soviet food production. His real “crime” was standing in the way of an ambitious, conniving, ruthless “scientist” by the name of Trofim Lysenko, who wheedled his way into Stalin’s favor with ludicrous promises of huge new crop yields — if his fraudulent methods of “science” were employed on a mass scale. Vavilov, a real scientist, was an obstacle who had to be removed. Not only that — his removal must strike terror into all scientists who might be tempted to criticize Lysenko and his crackpot theories. This was the epitome of science politicized and weaponized.
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