After Trump’s election, when we began to wonder what an authoritarian regime could do to science, my first thought was the story of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko—a tale known to all geneticists. Born to a peasant family in 1898, Lysenko eventually became an agronomist and, in 1928, reported a series of experiments in which he claimed that an environmental modification of winter wheat, allowing it to germinate in spring after cold treatment, could be inherited over subsequent generations. The higher yield of this crop, he said, would revolutionize Soviet agriculture, minimizing the effect of the severe famines that had killed millions.

The problem was that these results were bogus: one could not genetically modify a crop through pure environmental modification. (This claim that has revived with the recent epigenetics juggernaut, which has shown a very limited ability of environmental modifications to be be inherited, but none are adaptive and the heritable changes last only one or a few generations). But despite the theoretical weaknesses of Lysenko’s hypothesis, and the plain fact that his “vernalization” ideas didn’t work, Lysenko became Stalin’s Pet Scientist and rose to become director of the country’s Institute of Genetics, a position of great power. Denigrating real (i.e., Mendelian) genetics as a plot by decadent Western science, Lynsenko and the Soviets put into wide effect his theories of inheritance of acquired traits (now called “Lysenkoism”), while at the meantime real geneticists were being persecuted, fired, and even killed. Nikolia Vavilov, a great Russian agronomist who did real work in identifying the origin of domesticated plant cultivars and creating seed banks, was arrested and sentenced to the gulag, where he starved to death.

Eventually Lysenko fell from grace under Khrushchev, but the damage to Russian agriculture had been done, and genetics was set back several decades. The lesson is to let scientists dictate how science is done and what science is accepted, and to keep alive science’s vital, self-correctives of criticism and doubt. None of this was possible under Stalin.

And so, in a keynote lecture given yesterday to a conference “Science, Journalism, and Democracy: Grappling With A New Reality” at Rockefeller University in New York, Carl Zimmer began with the story of Lysenko story. His talk, called “Let’s not lose our minds“, was published at Medium, and underlines the dangers of science in an authoritarian regime as well as giving advice about what journalists can do about it. (Thanks to several readers who send me the link.)

While American agriculture may not be in danger of governmental interference with science, one area clearly is: climate change. And that’s what Zimmer writes about.

It’s frightening to read Zimmer’s account of how the President, the EPA, Congress, and other members of the administration are downplaying and censoring the very clear evidence for anthropogenic climate change. We are, says Zimmer, starting to repeat the pattern that developed in the USSR during the Lysenko years (his words are indented):

— A government decided that an important area of research, one that the worldwide scientific community had been working on for decades, was wrong. Instead, they embraced weak evidence to the contrary. [JAC: True!]

— It ignored its own best scientists and its scientific academies. [JAC: Also true!]

— It glamorized someone who opposed that mainstream research based on weak research, turning his meager track record into a virtue. [JAC: we don’t yet have a climate-change Lysenko]

— It forced scientists to either be political allies or opponents. [JAC: This hasn’t happened widely.]

— It personally condemned scientists who supported the worldwide consensus and spoke out against the government’s agenda, casting them as bad people hell-bent on harming the nation. [JAC: Not so much true as making sure their voices aren’t heard in government policy]

— The damage to the scientific community rippled far, and lasted for years. It showed hostility to scientists from other countries, isolating them from international partnerships. It also created an atmosphere of fear that led to self-censorship. [JAC: Not so true; the community itself isn’t being damaged: American science remains vital, although climate scientists may be disheartened.]

— And by turning away from the best science, a government did harm to its country. [JAC: True, but the harm is wider: to the Earth as a whole.]

The parallel isn’t perfect—the government, for instance, is not jailing climate-science dissenters or refusing to give NSF or money to studies of climate, but it’s close enough to be worrying. The authorities are denying scientific truth—not in the service of a political ideology so much as to capitalistic business interests aligned with the Republican party. And unless that truth is heeded, we’re screwed.

What can scientists do? Here’s Carl’s take on what has been done:

And how is the scientific community responding? Many participated in the March on Science. Many others have spoken out about their research. But there are other responses that have a different echo. On August 25, Nature reported things in the Department of Energy are a lot like they are in the EPA: scientists supported by the department have been asked to remove references to climate change and global warming from the descriptions of their projects.

One scientist who does this research was chillingly realistic about this situation. “If that’s what it takes to keep science going for a couple of years, we will I guess play along.” Just a couple years, and somehow, magically, this will all be over.

Well, the March on Science was, as I predicted, pretty useless. The government hasn’t magically started paying attention to scientists, and if you claim the March did anything other than make people feel good about themselves, show me some real changes produced by the March on the government’s attitude toward science (that was, after all, the aim). But I am still heartened that many scientists are doubling down on the data, even as the government tries to steamroller them.

The main point of Zimmer’s talk was to tell young journalists what they could do to keep journalism free, always pointed toward scientific truth, and unpolluted by corruption. He offers seven pieces of advice, including things like “be aware of history”, “hold on to your journalistic principles”, “write for the public, not for the powers that be”, and so on. Those are good things to hear, but I don’t sense science journalists themselves being corrupted by the government.

But neither journalism nor public awareness, I think, will save the world from anthropogenic climate change. Journalists have been telling the story for years; you can hardly be literate and be unaware that the overwhelming scientific consensus is that humans are warming the Earth and the consequences will be dreadful. Politicians and business interests don’t care, nor does the public want to make this a major issue, all for two reasons: business has too much to gain by unrestricted emission of greenhouse gas, and the consequences global warming are so far in the future that our cohort can ignore them, passing the buck to future generations. By then, of course, it will be too late.

Perhaps we can help things by changing the administration and legislature, but even a Democratic President couldn’t do much in the face of a recalcitrant Congress. And if you think we can change our leadership from Republican to Democrat over the issue of climate change itself, you’re wrong. Perhaps Trump and the GOP will effect that change through stupidity alone, and that would be good. But I still see little happening to stem global warming. Doing that will take a meaningful effort on the part of all industrial countries, and that seems highly unlikely.

Global warming is not like Paul Ehrlich’s dire predictions about the destruction of the planet by overpopulation—predictions that didn’t come true. In the case of global warming, the causes will continue and the will to curb them is missing. Can we do anything? Not so long, I think, as the effects remain in the distant future. Maybe when Miami gets inundated we’ll start to see some change, but by then it will be too late.

Finally, the greatest danger to science journalism is not its corruption or muzzling by the Trump administration, which I see as crying wolf, but its death by a thousand cuts, as the media eliminates science journalism bit by bit. And while there is good journalism produced by writers without science degrees (Zimmer is one example), more journalism, and more popular articles, should be produced by scientists themselves (are you listening, Scientific American?). That, too, is unlikely given that newspapers and magazines seem to be getting less and less interested in science.