StemCell Therapy

Science is social, but when political ideology takes precedence over experimental evidence the results can be fatal.

"Eduard Kolchinsky" by Nathaniel Gold

The United States is in the midst of a partisan political battle over science. Whether the issue is evolution, global warming, stem cell research, or HPV vaccines, conservative politicians either disregard the evidence that would undermine their position or remain proudly ignorant of scientific reality. For example, in the lead up to the mid-term elections, Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA-7) singled out the National Science Foundation as part of his YouCut Citizen Review that asked conservative voters to sift through a list of already approved federal science grants and contact their Congressperson about wasteful spending that should be cut. This, in addition to the ongoing battles to stop the teaching of evolution, and prevent the evidence of global warming from informing energy policy, has made science the subject of political attacks today more than during any other period in U.S. history.

The goal, as Republican strategist Frank Luntz famously wrote in a leaked memo, is entirely ideological. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science, he wrote, referring to global warming. A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth. This is the backdrop to the so-called Climategate scandal in which hacked e-mails written by climate scientists became the justification for right-wing attacks upon, not only the science they rejected, but also the integrity of the scientists themselves.

History offers compelling examples of what can go wrong when science is sidelined in favor of political ambition. Perhaps the most extreme case would be that of the Soviet Union where biologists, in particular, were censored, arrested, or even executed because their evidence contradicted the official Party line. Under the influence of the charismatic agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who claimed that genetics was a fraud and that environment alone influenced heredity, Russian biology became stunted for a generation. His promise of unprecedented agricultural yields coincided with a Soviet ideology that believed human nature could be moulded to support the interests of the state. Those scientists who challenged the results of his highly flawed experiments, particularly after the August, 1948 session of VASKhNIL (the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences), were singled out as critics not only of Lysenkoism but of Soviet ideology itself.

Eduard Izrailevich Kolchinsky grew up in the generation after Lysenkos downfall and has worked for more than forty years to bring the previously censored history of evolutionary biology to light in his native Russia. Born on September 16, 1944, at the same time that Allied forces were entering Germany in World War II, Kolchinsky has been fascinated with the intersection between biology and politics throughout his career. Receiving his PhDs in Philosophy of Biology and the History of Science, his first book, The Evolution of Evolution (1977) co-written with Kirill Zavadsky, became highly influential and continues to be cited to this day. Among Kolchinskys many international honors he was recently invited to be a Fellow in the Linnaean Society of London. He is currently the director of the St. Petersburg branch of the Institute for the History of Science and Technology (IHST) in the Russian Academy of Sciences as well as a professor of Philsophy at St. Petersburg State University.

I recently arrived in Russia to begin my fellowship with the Institute and to present my research at an international conference being held later this week. I had the opportunity earlier to sit down with Professor Kolchinskyalong with Marina Loskutova, IHST senior researcher, who assisted with translationto ask him about the dangers of mixing science with politics and what lessons can be learned by exploring this previously unknown history of the Soviet Union.

Eduard Izrailevich Kolchinsky, January 2012. Image courtesy of the Institute for the History of Science and Technology, RAS.

Eric Michael Johnson: Readers of Scientific American are certain to have an idea of what it was like to live in the Soviet Union. Some of these ideas may be accurate, others not. But few will have any idea about what it was like to be an evolutionary scientist during the Soviet period. What were the major issues that scientists had to deal with then and what, in your opinion, are the greatest misconceptions about this time?

The rest is here:
The Failed Synthesis: Eduard Kolchinsky on the Dangers of Mixing Science and Politics

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