In the Soviet Era as in Canada: Science Suffers Under Authoritarian Rule

This is a guest post by Richard Kool, Associate Professor in the School of Environment and Sustainability at Royal Roads University in Victoria.

Back in the 1930s, the Soviet ruler Josef Stalin had a problem with genetics; as a result, geneticists were branded traitors ("Trotskyite agents of international fascism"), stripped of their positions at government laboratories and universities, sent to prison, or even executed. Soviet biological sciences were hindered for more than a generation. The story of the Soviet geneticists has a distant resonance to the story of what is happening to government-sponsored environmental science in Canada today.

Genetics, the science of inheritance, was developed in the late 19^th and early 20^th century by scientists such as Gregor Mendel and T.H. Morgan, who did careful experiments demonstrating, among other things, the presence of dominant and recessive genes, as well as examining how genes combine to produce a variety of traits in animals and plants. Unfortunately, in Stalin’s Soviet Union, there were a lot of things wrong with Mendelian genetics, including: Mendel was a Catholic priest (and thus stood against the atheistic Soviet regime), while Morgan was branded a capitalist (he was an American). Mendelian genetics didn’t fit the Soviet ideology.

In the 1930s, Soviet genetics fell under the sway of Trifim Lysenko, an agronomist who proposed a different grounding for genetics. Lysenko’s beliefs were that seed quality could be improved by challenging seeds with extremes of high humidity and low temperatures, and that these changes so produced would be inherited by the next generation of plants; indeed, he believed that new species of plants could be created through this process (much as the Soviet rulers believed that a new humanity could result from “challenge and struggle”). Instead of engaging in the necessarily long-term selection processes to produce the plant products that would be most valuable, Lysenko pushed Soviet plant science towards a method of crop improvement that led to crop failures and famine: genetic reality trumped Lysenkoist ideology.

The pursuit of scientific knowledge flourishes when scholars are free to pursue the best understandings they can come up with, knowing that others may come along afterwards and create more and better explanatory theories. Science can do what it does best when political systems encourage the freedom of exploration, and those systems are usually found in contexts of democratic governance.

Science, and scientists, do not always do well when states are run by rulers, especially rulers with strong authoritarian and ideological orientations that might be threatened by research findings. Rulers feel that they know what is right and what needs to be done in their domain, and see no need to compromise, to consult, to listen or to consider other opinions, all of which are essential elements of the toolkit of those who govern democratically. Rulers often see themselves as exceptional and exempt from the rules that they can impose on the ruled.

Mendelian genetics in Russia and those that practiced it were threats to the ruler’s ideology and they were removed from positions where they could do ‘harm’ to the State.

And now we have in Canada a situation where environmental scientists working for the government of Canada have been found to be doing research that is no longer in line with the ideology of our present rulers. Climate change scientists, eco-toxicologists, habitat specialists and more are not being lined up and shot as the geneticists were in Stalin’s time, but they are seeing their positions eliminated, their funding and other resources constrained, and their ability to communicate restricted.

The ghost of Trofim Lysenko stalks Canadian government science. Science that produces results that fit with the Harperian science doctrine of “utility to corporations and industry above all else” seem to get the resources. Those government scientists engaging in the exploration of the major global issues of our time but whose pursuits fall outside of Harperian ideology today are, either literally or metaphorically, being shown the door.

Image Credit: Zack Embree