This is what happens when you put politicians in charge of science

By the 1930s, Soviet scientists knew what could happen if they went against the party line: denunciation, dismissal, and banishment from the scientific establishment, even imprisonment and death. Political retaliation against those who opposed the views of dictator Joseph Stalin and his supporters – and the dubious science they supported – led to the starvation of millions, as well as decades of lost progress in fields ranging from agriculture to molecular biology.

Now scientists are warning that history could repeat itself – but in the United States.

A new proposal from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget would put politicians in charge of funding decisions traditionally overseen by scientists. In recent years, the federal government has funded approximately 40 percent of basic scientific research in the United States.

The OMB document of more than 400 pages proposed rule change would let political appointees decide how to distribute federal research funds and who can get them. This would reduce funding for collaboration with scientists in other countries and restrict scientists’ ability to communicate their findings. Additionally, it could prevent research on topics that President Donald Trump’s administration has deemed “not in the national interest” — such as studies of health disparities, mRNA vaccines and research that does not recognize biological sex as a strict binary.

The new rules would also give OMB the authority to rescind previously approved research funds. The proposal “poses a major threat to federal grantmaking and the responsible management of American taxpayer dollars,” the science advocacy group Stand Up for Science Foundation said in a report. Furthermore, he would impact non-scientific grants support services for mental health, housing, education, veterans and tribal nations, affecting the health and well-being of millions of people.

So far, OMB has received more than 98,000 comments on the proposal. THE public comment period ends July 13. It will then be up to OMB to decide whether to keep the rule as is, revise it, or remove it.

A dark side of scientific history

These far-reaching measurements already draw parallels with dark moments in scientific history. Some researchers claim that the recent Mass layoffs, policy changes and subsidy cancellations in federal research institutions, including the National Institutes of Health and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accurately reflect what happened in the USSR under Stalin. “A similar threat now hangs over American science,” writes the editorial board of The New England Journal of Medicine wrote in June.

It is editorial invoked the example of Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist and astute political operator who came to power in the 1930s, under Stalin.

Until the 1930s, “the Soviet Union was a real powerhouse in genetics,” says Lee Dugatkin, an evolutionary biologist and historian of science at the University of Louisville, Kentucky.

Then Lysenko arrived. “This guy was your classic sort of charlatan,” Dugatkin says. “He had the equivalent of a correspondence degree in agriculture, but he was quite good with the press, and he began to spread the idea that he was capable of greatly increasing the yield of crops, particularly wheat. »

Lysenko’s supposed innovation was a process called vernalization and amounted to soaking seeds in ice water. The resulting plants – and all their offspring – should be resistant to the cold winters of the USSR, Lysenko explained.

His reasoning was based on a disproven idea in evolutionary biology called Lamarckian heritage. French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his followers believed that the experiences an organism had during its lifetime could be passed on to the next generation. THE the classic example is a giraffe which must stretch to reach the leaves producing long-necked offspring.

This idea went against Mendelian geneticswhich argues that genes – not environmental influences – control traits and are passed on to offspring. Mendelian geneticists believed it would take five years to produce more cold-tolerant crops. Lysenko said he could do it within two to three years.

Stalin had no time to wait. He was trying to make collective farms work and needed to increase crop yields to feed more than 150 million people. Large parts of the country had already suffered from famine in 1932 and 1933 and around 6 million people died. Some resorted to cannibalism.

Stalin adopted Lysenko’s quick-fix approach. That decision, says Michael Gordin, a historian of science at Princeton University, was “something that the majority of people at the time, and everyone since, see as the wrong side of the conflict.”

Lysenko was made head of a prestigious genetics institute and imposed his scientifically unsound agricultural practices on collective farms. His methods were disastrous.

Soaking seeds in ice water hindered germination, leading to crop losses. Millions of people died of starvation. During this time, Mendelian genetics was qualified a “whore of capitalism” and geneticists were forced to renounce their opinions or lose their jobs. Many were imprisoned and nearly a dozen were executed or died in prison.

Falling behind in science

The Soviet Union lost its role as a scientific leader and remained isolated from important scientific discoveries of the 1950s and beyond. One of them, Gordin said, was the development of a “massively” productive hybrid corn. The country also missed the discovery of DNA and the advent of molecular biology, putting Soviet genetics several decades behind the rest of the world.

Soviet genetics only recovered from Lysenko’s influence after the breakup of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gordin says. “I think it would be difficult to find anyone who thinks that … Russia today, or Ukraine, or any other post-Soviet state, is a leading country in molecular biology.”

Biochemist and Nobel laureate Katalin Karikó grew up in Hungary, an Eastern Bloc country with close ties to the Soviet Union. “We lived in a system that we knew we couldn’t protest openly,” she says. She learned that there was a difference between the truth and the official government position. “If you stood against [it]you were crushed, so you had to constantly compromise.

At his university, Karikó had two genetics professors, one who taught Lysenko’s view and the other who taught molecular biology. She and other students saw molecular biology as the key to the future, but they still had to take exams for the other professor and espouse Lysenko’s views. “We said the stupid thing[s]because that’s what was needed.

Karikó, back at the University of Szeged in Hungary, won the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2023 for fundamental research on messenger RNA, or mRNA, which ultimately led to mRNA vaccines against COVID-19.

This is an area of ​​American science that has already been affected by changing administrative priorities. Despite championing the technology during its first term, the Trump administration withdrew funding during the second term. research into mRNA therapies For cancer And genetic disorders and on vaccines against many infectious diseases.

If the United States doesn’t pursue mRNA technology, other countries will, Karikó says. China, which has already surpassed the United States in the number of registered clinical trials for mRNA therapies, is a prime example. And patients don’t care where their medications come from, she adds.

Casting a veil over American science

Meanwhile, at the CDC, layoffs have gutted much of the public health staff and budget cuts have hampered responses to problems. measles outbreaks and other diseases. The agency’s leadership has changed several times, with some career scientists fired or resigning because they refused to sign politically motivated directives.

In one case, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer by training, personally asked the CDC to stop spending on its flu vaccination campaign. “There are people who are not trained, nor experts, who are placed in positions in the scientific world where they make decisions in which they “They have absolutely no credibility,” Dugatkin says.

Lysenko’s example also shows that when an administration has an agenda it wants to enforce, Dugatkin says, “how easy it is, if you say what they want to hear, to get them to pay attention to you, regardless of what the data says.”

Elizabeth Ginexi, a former NIH program manager, sees this process playing out at her former institution. In a notice from June room for Page Med todayshe wrote: “Lysenko replaced legitimate science with a politically acceptable, state-imposed alternative and destroyed the careers of scientists who practiced disfavored methods. » At the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, she writes, leadership has been restructured either through firing, reassignment or resignation.

“It’s not like you can turn off the tap on politics, but you can certainly think very carefully about the kinds of politics that are going to shape your science.”

Michel Gordin

Institute staff were also instructed to remove references to “biodefense” and “pandemic preparedness” from their materials. And, she writes in another articlethe NIH canceled at least 110 funding announcements between January 2025 and May 2026. Many focused on infectious diseases, vaccines or health disparities. Under Kennedy, the Trump administration also disfavored research into antidepressants and encouraged work on psychedelics. “This is a system operating under political instructions,” Ginexi wrote.

There have even been calls for the imprisonment of prominent US scientists, including former NIAID chief Anthony Fauci, for actions he committed while in office.

Gordin worries that American scientists deal with uncertainty Regarding funding and academic freedom, training courses will be disrupted. “So smart undergraduates don’t go on to graduate school, smart grad students don’t finish their degrees, they don’t stay in postdocs, they don’t stay in the research community. Science functions as a transmission of knowledge, skills and theories that develop and evolve over time. “You can’t just take away a five-year period and then hope to restart it.”

The role of democracy

The analogy with Lysenko is not perfect, some historians warn. In the USSR, “there existed a specific type of society in which a person [Stalin] “We believed or disbelieved in certain scientific theories, which influenced the direction of science,” says Georgy Levit, a historian of science at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena in Germany. He adds that Soviet society was based on an ideology that permeated all of society – and that scientists and opponents were powerless to fight back. On the other hand, “the United States is a democratic state and there are certainly powers fighting against these trends.”

History has not favored efforts to restrict science, Gordin says. Measures “that involve trying to prevent people from doing science or imposing purely political criteria, such as partisan criteria, have been seen in retrospect as detrimental to scientific development and progress.”

But there is also plenty of precedent showing that politics plays a role in science. “It’s inevitable,” Gordin says. Partisanship and pet projects or pet peeves of presidents can — and do — influence how much money is spent or not spent on certain types of science. Gordin quotes the Manhattan Project and the development of radar, two examples “where the federal government funded science for a very specific purpose.”

There is no such thing as non-political science, says Gordin. But political commitment and buy-in need not disrupt funding, alienate scientists, and put politicians in a position to make scientific judgments. “It’s not like you can turn off the tap on politics, but you can certainly think very carefully about the kinds of politics that are going to shape your science.”