Suicide by Pseudoscience

The Union of Concerned Scientists in a February report pointed out something the science press has known for years: The Bush administration has no respect for science. Ideologues prefer to make up the laws of nature as they go.

Presidential science adviser John Marburger complained that the UCS's account sounded like a "conspiracy theory report." That's because it is one. As the report amply documents, the Bush administration has systematically manipulated scientific inquiry into climate change, forest management, lead and mercury contamination, and a host of other issues. Even as Marburger addressed his critics, the administration purged two advocates of stem-cell research from the President's Council on Bioethics.

When politicians dictate science, government becomes entangled in its own deceptions, and eventually the social order decays in a compost of lies. Society, having abandoned the scientific method, loses its empirical referent, and truth becomes relative. This is a serious affliction known as Lysenkoism.

Trofim Lysenko was Joseph Stalin's top stooge in Soviet agricultural science, a field that was mercilessly politicized by fanatics. His specialty was inventing nutty schemes - things like stimulating the evolution of trees by overcrowding them to get them to cooperate, as though they were communist minions. This totalitarian huckster spent his whole career promising exciting results and bringing about only disaster. But the party never judged itself on results, so he always got a free pass.

Politics without objective, honest measurement of results is a deadly short circuit. It means living a life of sterile claptrap, lacquering over failure after intellectual failure with thickening layers of partisan abuse. Charlatans like Lysenko can't clarify serious, grown-up problems that they themselves don't understand.

State-sponsored pseudoscience always fails, but slowly, like a wheat field choked with weeds. (This is a particularly apt comparison, because Lysenko claimed that the weeds infesting Soviet wheat fields had evolved from the wheat itself.) It fails in predictable ways, and these are the very ways in which the Bush science policy is going to fail.

The rot begins to set in when honest local institutions, appalled by high-level misdeeds, denounce federal policy as corrupt and corrupting, just as the UCS has done. There will be much more of this: congressional investigations, high-minded committees. Government officials will temporize by getting scientists to "compromise" and "split the difference" between actual science and partisan jiggery-pokery. This will fail because science just isn't politics. You can't legislate that E=mc21¼2.

Before long, the damage will spread beyond our borders. International scientific bodies will treat American scientists as pariahs. This process has already begun in bioethics, meteorology, agriculture, nuclear science, and medicine, but doubts will spread to "American science" generally. (In Lysenko's heyday, when scientists abroad came across a halfway-decent Soviet scientist, they would charitably offer to publish his books offshore, then maybe help him defect to someplace where he could get serious work done.)

Meanwhile, gaps will open between research establishments in the US and other countries, much like the one that now yawns between American and Korean stem-cell producers. US science will come to have a stodgy, old-fashioned, commissar-style inability to think and act freely. Yankee initiative and ingenuity will bow to bulging pie-in-the-sky superprojects like unproven antimissile systems, hot-air broadband initiatives, and swashbuckling moon shots.

Eventually the whole vast bubble will burst of its own fairy-tale unreality. Few will be held accountable. The quackeries will be purged, forgotten, hushed up. Except, that is, for the lasting effect on the health, morale, and self-esteem of the American people.

Trofim Lysenko was a funny case. He had the authority to reduce a major scientific-research power to a dismal Burkina Faso with rockets; he left behind practically no scientific achievement or discovery. As a scientist, he was a nonentity, but his menace is universal. Wherever moral panic, hasty judgment, arrogance, fear, brutal partisan ignorance, slovenly standards of research, overcentralization of authority, conspiratorial policymaking, jingoism and xenophobia, and spin-centric travesties of disinformation can flourish, Lysenko's spirit will never die.