by Greg Mayer

[Addendum— I’ve only just realized (1005 h) that Jerry posted on this same piece by Carl Zimmer back in 2017. Great minds think alike! But the relevance to today is, I think, even more striking.]

A few days ago I happened to run across an old blog post by the eminent science writer Carl Zimmer, in which he recounts the Lysenko affair and the lessons to be learned from it. Posted in 2017, the lessons he identifies are eerily prescient in light of the U.S. government’s (i.e., Trump’s) response to the coronavirus pandemic:

— 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.

— It ignored its own best scientists and its scientific academies.

— It glamorized someone who opposed that mainstream research based on weak research, turning his meager track record into a virtue.

— It forced scientists to either be political allies or opponents.

— 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.

— 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.

— And by turning away from the best science, the Trump administration did harm to its country.

It all seems very relevant, and his third item practically screams, “Scott Atlas!” He wrote the piece in 2017 in the context of climate change policy, but the relevance to today must have been evident to Carl, too; the reason I came across the 4-year old post is because he had moved it to near the top of his blog, where I came across it while looking for other things on his website.

The blog post is based on a talk Zimmer gave at a conference on “Science, Journalism, and Democracy: Grappling With A New Reality” at Rockefeller University on how science journalism can deal with the “confusing swirl of reality, misinformation, and so-called fake news” that is “[t]he current media landscape”. Carl’s talk can be seen on YouTube (below).