9 July 26
Hunting For Apples
I just read the travelogue Apples Are From Kazakhstan: The Land That Disappeared by British journalist Christopher Robbins. The title statement about apples is true, but there is a tragedy around its discovery which has ripples that unfortunately are of great concern today.
The origin of apples was tracked in the 1920s to the Tien Shan mountains which run through northeastern Kazakhstan by a brilliant Russian botanist, geneticist, and geographer named Nikolai Vavilov. Vavilov was highly lauded by the Soviet state for his research on agronomy and the geographical origins of many crops, becoming the youngest member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
Vavilov ran afoul of his onetime protegé, the scheming and ambitious agronomist Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko adapted his research so as to align with the Soviet policy of forced agricultural collectivization. To support his claims of making agronomic innovations that radically increased crop yields, he rejected both natural selection and genetics in favor of a modified sort of Lamarkianism. Lysenko became a favorite of Josef Stalin, and genetics research in the Soviet Union was destroyed. Over 3,000 biologists were dismissed from employment, and some were imprisoned and executed. Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. Rather than improving crop yields, Lysenko’s ideas did the opposite, and when implemented in China they would contribute to the famine there between 1959 and 1961.
Lysenkoism is much on my mind because of changes to federal funding administration that are being proposed by the US Office of Management and Budget. These changes are quite lengthy; former National of Institutes of Health program officer Elizabeth Ginexi provides a good summary of them. Her article is subtitled “Russell Vought [the director of OMB] is going to destroy American Science”. Probably the most significant change is that senior political appointees would be mandated to conduct a review of every grant before it is issued. Moreover, these appointees would be under no obligation to defer to the recommendations from peer review.
This proposal is open for public comment through July 13, and there has been a massive campaign to elicit comments opposing the new rules. I am presently working on my own comment. As of this writing 98,973 comments have been received. OMB may well ignore all the comments but such an outpouring provides a strong basis for legal action against any finalized rules.
Searching through the already-submitted comments, Lysenko has been mentioned in several hundred of them. Amusingly, someone has in jest submitted a comment as Trofim Lysenko. It concludes with the following:
I therefore urge OMB to finalize the rule and give America what every great centrally managed scientific system requires: political officers empowered to decide which science may live, which science must wait, and which science must be uprooted before it bears unauthorized fruit.
With ideological warmth and agronomic confidence,
Trofim Lysenko
Dictator Emeritus of Politically Convenient Biology
Former Specialist in the Suppression of Bourgeois Genetics
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