There’s an old adage or curse that comes to mind nearly every day since Donald Trump won the 2024 Presidential election. Hard as it is to believe, it’s been less than four months since Trump was inaugurated, and nearly every day since then has greeted me with new assaults on the federal infrastructure overseeing biomedical science, medicine, and public health. It’s an assault that began before longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was nominated to be Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services but has only accelerated massively since then. Last week, the main themes with respect to medicine were the worsening damage done to the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and public health through the lens of a disastrous interview with the new NIH Director (and Great Barrington Declaration co-author) Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the appointment of hostile anti-mask antivax methodolatrist Dr. Vinay Prasad to replace Dr. Peter Marks as head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER), which oversees vaccines and blood products as well as gene and cell therapy products, and the appointment of RFK Jr. friend and “make America healthy again” (MAHA) booster Dr. Casey Means. That made it a difficult decision what to discuss. In the end, I thought that what’s going on at the is most emblematic of the damage MAHA is doing to federal medicine, public health, and biomedical research programs. It all hangs together, but the assault on the NIH, perhaps more than anything else, demonstrates the practical effect of what I called the “new Lysenkoism” inherent in MAHA will have on US science.
Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976).
I wrote about the new Lysenkoism of MAHA over a month ago. If you want to go into detail, you can read my previous post, but I’ll lay down the CliffsNotes version. Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist with a number of pseudoscientific views, most prominent of which was his embrace of a form of warmed-over Larmackism, or “soft inheritance,” a concept named after French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), who championed the hypothesis that notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism had acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime, instead of Mendelian genetics, in which inheritance is passed from parents to offspring by genes. Because Josef Stalin found Lysenko’s ideas attractive, Lysenko became more and more influential in Soviet agriculture, to the point where agricultural scientists who went against him could find themselves out of a job, sent to the gulags, or even killed. His views of agricultural science dominated the Soviet Union for more than three decades, from the late 1920s to the early 1960s, and even metastasized to China, contributing to or causing famine wherever they were applied to crop production. Basically, Lysenkoism destroyed Soviet agricultural science for more than a generation and stands as perhaps the most prominent historical example of what can happen when ideology infuses science to the point where ideology trumps science.
You can see where I’m going with this: I view MAHA as a new form of Lysenkoism applied to medical science, except with a Trumpian twist, that twist being the grift. Basically, what appears to be happening is that, from my perspective, it appears that Trump, with the enthusiastic assistance of RFK Jr., is changing the system used by the NIH to distribute grant money from the current system, which relies on rigorous peer review of grant applications by study sections to score them, with the best-scoring grants being funded, to one that is very much more based on ideological tests, patronage, and grift, combined with the massive shrinking of the NIH budget; that is, if the administration gets its way.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Enthusiastic MAHA supporter or useful idiot?
Observing what has been happening to the NIH since the Trump administration took over, in particular the sudden mass cancellations of grants based on an “anti-DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion) rationale, I had been thinking along these lines for a while. Then I saw a disastrous interview with the new NIH Director Dr. Bhattacharya published in Science last Monday, and by “disastrous,” I mean just that, at least for his reputation among actual scientists. I’m sure it played well with MAHA and MAGA, given that he was confrontational and full of excuses.
First, note that Dr. Bhattacharya didn’t appear alone. He appeared to require a handler:
But the day before that budget was released, Bhattacharya sat down for an interview with this Science reporter. He was joined by NIH Chief of Staff Seana Cranston, a former congressional staffer who replaced John Burklow, a 4-decade NIH communications veteran. The encounter was brief, sometimes confrontational, and even personal.
I note that the appointment of a nakedly political appointee like Cranston was a major change from the longtime practice at NIH of appointing a career professional as chief of staff to the NIH Director. Moreover, given how poorly Dr. Bhattacharya did during the interview, you’ll see why he needed a handler:
When I asked about low morale at NIH following two waves of firings, and about concerns at academic institutions about funding delays and grant cuts, Bhattacharya wanted to know whom I had talked to. After I mentioned past NIH Director Harold Varmus, he noted that the Nobel Prize winner had “attacked me pretty viciously” in an op-ed. He complained about my past coverage of a nonprofit group, the EcoHealth Alliance, that used NIH funding for virus studies in China that some scientists and Republican politicians claim caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
Very Trumpian, all grievance, all wanting to know who was complaining, the better to attack them. However, here’s what I found to be one very telling part of the interview:
On a Nature news article reporting that NIH planned to suspend subawards for foreign collaborations:
“No, that’s false. There’s going to be a policy on tracking subawards. The NIH and the government should be able to see where the money’s going.”
“I’m really uncomfortable with this conversation, because you’re like, actually spreading rumors that you don’t know anything about. … Nature also is spreading rumors. Halt foreign collaborations, that’s not true.”
“We’re working on the policy, Jocelyn. You shouldn’t be reporting rumors. I know there’s leaks all over here, but the leaks don’t actually reflect what’s happening. Don’t write about rumors. It actually makes the things that you and I care about worse. Like it spreads panic.”
Later that day, NIH released a policy that halted future subawards to foreign scientists and said they will need to apply directly for money under a system still in development.
I saw two likely possibilities, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Either Dr. Bhattacharya was lying (or deluding himself), or he genuinely didn’t know, implying that political operatives like RFK Jr. and DOGE were the ones making major decisions about how NIH grants will be disbursed without consulting him. In other words, Dr. Bhattacharya is not driving the clown car that the NIH is fast becoming; he’s in way over his head, a useful idiot for MAHA.
I’m thinking the latter possibility is closer to the truth, if only because Dr. Bhattacharya is clearly utterly unqualified even strictly based on his utter lack of experience running an organization even a thousand times smaller than the NIH. Much of his interview consisted of excuse-making and responses that boiled down to, in essence, “It wasn’t me” or “I had nothing to do with that,” asserting, for instance, that he “arrived the day that the RIF [reduction in force] happened” and “had nothing to do with it.” Basically, he comes across as a figurehead with no real power. After all, you’d think that a responsible administration would have consulted with its nominee to head an agency regarding planned reductions in force in that agency. Here’s another example:
“They’re canceled because they’re DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion]-based science … [which does] not actually have anything to do with promoting the health of the American people. I’m not sure why you’re switching to HIV.”
“I think the scientific priorities of the NIH ought to focus on improving the health of the American people. Politicized science doesn’t do much to advance the health status of anybody.”
“I don’t personally review grant lines and say, ‘I cancel this grant. Don’t cancel that grant.’ That’s not what I do. … There’s a process. It’s not me personally, but I mean, the best I can tell, most of those were canceled before I even got into office.”
In fairness, it is true that the NIH Director doesn’t personally review every grant. It’s also true that a lot of the grants that were canceled were canceled before he was confirmed as NIH Director. Even so, here Dr. Bhattacharya is dodging responsibility. If he objected to what is going on with his agency, he could advocate against it. If he had any major problem with it, he could resign and go back to Stanford, refusing to be part of it. He didn’t and won’t. When he complained about the “politicization” of science, like everyone else in the Trump administration, what he really means is that he doesn’t like “politicization” that doesn’t align with his beliefs, and, when he complained about “censorship,” what he meant was criticism of views and science that he didn’t like. He’s more than happy to “censor” science based on nakedly political reasons, such as hostility to “DEI.” Again, he saw what DOGE and the Trump administration were doing before he was confirmed. If he objected and didn’t want to be part of it, he could easily have asked to have his nomination withdrawn.
Instead, when asked about the withholding of grant funds from universities like Columbia solely based on alleged antisemitism, Bhattacharya was more than happy to justify it:
“Those decisions are not up to me, but I do notice these institutions ought to obey the civil rights laws, and I think eventually they will. … There’s a lot of excellent science that goes on in these places. It’s very difficult to do excellent science, though, in a place that doesn’t have basic civil rights laws.”
“Free speech, for instance, [was] really important during the pandemic. Many, many of the academic institutions in this country, including some of the places you’ve mentioned, make it very difficult for free speech, for scientists to dissent.”
He’s so on board, that he makes a hilarious contortion to justify what’s happening, even though his past research involved what the administration might term “DEI”:
“I want to distinguish studies that make appropriate distinctions between people based on their age, race, sex, all that, that have biological consequences that are important. Scientists should be able to look at that, and we’re not canceling any grants around that, as far as I know.”
“[On the other hand] politicized, DEI kinds of ideology, essentially race essentialism, that has nothing to do with science, as far as I’m concerned, and has no capacity to improve the health of the American people.”
Imagine my relief. (Hint: I have co-authored a few papers on health disparities in breast cancer.) Of course, health disparities are a very important area of research, but MAHA tends to be very hostile to such research because health disparities imply that there are systemic, environmental, and racial influences that individuals can’t control that have huge impacts on their health. I’ve argued that MAHA is an unholy combination of social Darwinism and soft eugenics, in which nature is allowed to cull the “unfit” (e.g., no vaccines) and the individual is viewed as entirely responsible for their own health, with health being due solely to virtue. If, however, science shows and describes influences on health that individuals can’t control, that rather undermines the entire idea in MAHA that health is a result of personal virtue with respect to “healthy living” in terms of diet, exercise, and lifestyle.
Basically, this interview with Bhattacharya made it clear that he’s all-in on punishing ideological opponents of the Trump administration, punishing universities that don’t sufficiently toe the line with respect to the administration’s preferred ideology, and refusing to support scientists whose science doesn’t align sufficiently with the prevailing ideology of the administration—just as the Soviet Union with anyone who opposed Lysenko. Will the gulags be next? Probably not, but certainly the NIH is being—shall we say?—repurposed to serve the ideological goals of the administration in a way that no administration has ever done before.
The mass defunding of grants
Although the carnage started almost immediately, the most prominent implementation of a Lysenko-like regime at the NIH has been the mass defunding of already awarded grants, preceded by an attempt to slash indirect funds. Remember, as I’ve described many times, the NIH distributes most of its grant funding through a system in which scientists submit detailed grant applications to the NIH, where they are reviewed by groups of scientists in committees called study sections, scored, and then ranked. Final funding decisions are made by scientific councils, the best-scored grants first and working their way down the list until the money runs out. It’s certainly not a perfect system. No system designed and run by humans is. The NIH is, however, about as close to a meritocracy as one can imagine in the government, and funding decisions tend to be, by and large, pretty closely aligned with scientific merit.
Generally, the system has functioned pretty well for many decades and contributed to the US becoming the leader in biomedical research. Administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have generally not meddled much with how the NIH functions. Certainly, never before has an administration done anything like what the Trump administration has done, namely the mass defunding of grants based on ideology, eliminating science that its ideology rejects or that is being done at universities that do not sufficiently toe the line with respect to the administration’s ideology.
It’s very clear that the mass defunding of grants is based primarily on ideology, too. Indeed, the second thing I read last week that made me lament what’s happening at NIH was in LinkedIn. It was written by Brittany Charlton, Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School & Harvard Chan School of Public Health; Founding Director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence. Harvard University, as you might recall, has resisted the administration’s blackmail in the form of withdrawing federal grants and thus has been the target of particular opprobrium from Trump and his allies. The Trump administration is targeting anything it can represent or misrepresent as “DEI” (diversity, equity, and inclusion), as well as anything related to mRNA technology (which its supporters hate and fear because of the fearmongering about COVID-19 vaccines during the pandemic), to LGBTQ health research (especially anything related to gender-affirming care or transgender healthcare), vaccine hesitancy, and combatting misinformation. Charlton is not silent about it on LinkedIn:
Here’s what I’ve built in the last few years: I’ve mentored 75+ faculty, postdocs, & leaders. Published 100+ papers in top journals like JAMA, Journal of the American Medical Association & BMJ. Been cited 2,600+ times — because facts matter. Launched the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence <1 year ago. Our mission is to advance health equity by training future leaders, driving innovative research & informing public policy. I had secured continuous NIH funding for almost 2 decades — 15+ grants, including a rare early-career R01. With a proven track record of winning & managing NIH grants, I had built what should have been a lasting academic center. To put it in perspective: I rank as the 51st most highly funded NIH investigator compared to the nearly 500 faculty across Harvard University’s 13 schools — including Harvard Med School, Harvard Chan School of Public Health, & Harvard College.
Charlton is Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Chan School of Public Health, as well as the Founding Director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence. At almost any university other than Harvard, she would be a full professor. In this case, she lost her grants due to Trump’s feud with Harvard, which has refused to buckle under his demands, which has led to grant terminations, a threat to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and a statement last week that Harvard will receive no new federal research grants.
Meanwhile, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) published a brief describing how many grants have been defunded since Trump took office, and include grants supporting research involving HIV/AIDS, vaccine hesitancy, mental or behavioral health, COVID-19, vaccines, substance abuse, and, shockingly, cancer. Many of the grants are supporting clinical trials:
Canceling grants supporting clinical trials is particularly wasteful, because not only does it prevent funded trials from accruing new patients, but it makes it impossible to follow and collect data on the patients already in the trial. Basically, much, if not all, of the data already collected is wasted because the trial, unless near the end of accrual, will not have enough patients to produce a statistically significant result.
Meanwhile, as reported in Nature, the FY2026 budget proposal sent to Congress by the administration contains massive budget cuts:
US President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2026 calls for unprecedented cuts to scientific agencies that, if enacted, would deal a devastating blow to US science, policy specialists say. On 2 May, the White House released a budget document for the upcoming fiscal year, which starts on 1 October. The proposal is a ‘skinny budget’ that is light on details, but calls for disproportionately large cuts to federal science funding. According to the White House document, the proposal would cut all non-defence spending by 23%, but it targets the US National Science Foundation (NSF) for a 56% funding reduction, and would slash the budget of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) by roughly 40%. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would be hit by a 55% cut as the administration seeks to eliminate what it calls “radical” and “woke” climate programmes. On the day the budget was released, the EPA announced plans to dismantle its primary research division. Later this month, the presidential administration is expected to release a more detailed budget. Observers warn that Trump might still seek cuts to money already allocated by Congress for fiscal year 2025.
One notes that, as part of the CDC budget, the Trump administration proposes to eliminate programs aimed at preventing chronic diseases. So much for “make America healthy again.” The same is true of the proposed 55% cut to the Environmental Protection Agency.
Again, remember. The grants being defunded were all awarded after a rigorous peer review process. They are not being defunded based on lack of scientific rigor, no matter how much the administration, Dr. Bhattacharya, and RFK Jr. claim otherwise. They are being defunded based on ideology. Unfortunately, there are a number of scientists who are willing to go along with this. For example, on LinkedIn, I found a bit of a rant by someone named P. Greg Czyryca, PhD, CSO at a company called Allosterix, who is happy about the grants being terminated because he thinks that “soft” science and DEI are keeping funding away from where he thinks it all belongs, “hard” science:
The list of recently canceled NIH grants is a must read for people who were unable to secure funds for legitimate scientific research or after-postdoc academic positions. You were not able to get $500,000 for your cancer research? That was the “proper grantsmanship”, silly: “Testing the effect of anti-tobacco message framing on polytobacco use in lesbian gay bisexual and transgender young adults”, and here comes $858,221. You were unable to get $300,000 for HIV drug discovery? Refocus your work, silly, on “Intersectional Approaches to Population-Level Health Research: Role of HIV Risk and Mental Health in Alcohol Use Disparities among Diverse Sexual Minority Youth”, and here comes $2,017,111.68 of taxpayers’ money. Not enough? Try “Harnessing the power of text messaging to reduce HIV incidence in adolescent males across the United States” – $4,180,423.00 And so on. You have sent 100 applications, with innovative science proposed in your research plans, and got no interview invitations? Guess who has been sitting on the selection committees.
Later, in the comments, he adds:
Note that all this recent noise about cutting NIH spending is padded with examples of authentic societal benefits of cancer research, vaccine research etc. The authors of such posts know PERFECTLY WELL what they owe to the taxpayers. NOBODY quotes actual examples of huge grants awarded for DEI social engineering, or for ideological aspects tangential to healthcare (such as “fighting disinformation”). Oh, they know what they owe. Yet they hide the quackery, the fraud and their “right” to distribute academic welfare as they please behind examples of legitimate research.
Notice the hostility towards the social sciences, which Czyryca views as insufficiently “hard” science and thus unworthy of funding. (One wonders if Czyryca has some sour grapes over grants that he’s applied that weren’t funded because its science wasn’t as rigorous as he thought.) Truth be told, there was a time many years ago when I was sympathetic to that sort of viewpoint, but if age and experience combatting misinformation have taught me anything, it’s that social sciences are just as important as all that “hard” science and that the “hard” sciences aren’t always as rigorous as people like Czyryca seem to think. In any event, solution is not to defund social science, but to assure enough funding for both social sciences and the “hard” sciences. Both are needed. Certainly dealing with antivax propaganda and misinformation as well as combatting health misinformation has taught me that. Also, dude. Most NIH grants don’t involve “interview invitations,” just an application, evaluation and scoring by study section, and secondary review at council meeting if the score is in the fundable range.
In any event, what Czyryca is saying is little different than what RFK Jr. and the Trump administration are doing. Like Lysenko, they are punishing scientists whose science doesn’t fit within the government’s prevailing ideology. Lysenko 2.0 roles on, but it’s more than that. There is a Trumpian twist on an old theme. First, there is the thirst for punishment and revenge.
Gregg Gonsalves reports in The Nation that the mood at the NIH is…not good. In fact, he reports that there’s a “climate of fear as the Trump administration takes a hatchet to its core functions,” calling the whole situation a “bloodbath. >Worse, the man most responsible for the bloodbath appears to be Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Worse, he is someone whose family benefited directly from the results of NIH research, specifically Trifakta, a drug to treat cystic fibrosis, leading his wife Mary to post on social media, “Today our little one starts #trikafta. Beyond grateful for this miracle drug.… We’re extremely grateful to live in a nation that leads the way on medical innovation.”
Now:
But if the Voughts could once be described as symbols of the good that government can do for public health, Russell Vought has now become a symbol of just the opposite.
Metraux told the story about the Voughts because Russell had just been appointed as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and one of his first priorities was to attempt to gut indirect funding for research institutions from the NIH—the same kind of funding that produced the drug helping Vought’s own child. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation responded with criticism, stating that discoveries like that of Trikafta depend on this critical infrastructure support, support that Mr. Vought was now putting in jeopardy.
Just a little over 100 days later, it is clear that Russell Vought was just getting started on dismantling biomedical research in the United States. The NIH, when Vought gets through with it, will be a shell of its former self. It’s clear that for the Voughts, gratitude or even any sense of Christian charity is trumped by political sadism. “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in private talks, recorded on video in 2023 and 2024, and uncovered by ProPublica and Documented, “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down.… We want to put them in trauma.”
Enter Matthew Memoli, Jeffery Taubenberger, and the last Trumpian twist on Lysenkoism 2.0.
“It’s all cronyism going forward”
When it comes to MAHA, antivax, and the like, I often say something along the lines of: Yes, it’s the ideology, which comes first, but it’s always also about the grift, which inevitably follows. Enter Matthew Memoli, who has been guiding Vought through the inner workings of the NIH, the better to dismantle it, as reported by Gonsalves:
If DOGE needed a guide to the inner workings of the agency, Memoli would have the knowledge to provide. And it is Memoli who pulled the trigger on the cuts to indirect costs, the pausing of grants, their terminations, the decision to slow-walk study sections and council meetings, and the purging of senior staff at the agency, from second-in-command Larry Tabak to numerous institute directors. Memoli is now the principal deputy director at the NIH (fellow Covid skeptic Jay Bhattacharya has taken the top job), but he seems to still be leading the MAGA charge.
It wouldn’t surprise me if, given how hapless Bhattacharya has been, Memoli is the one who is really running the NIH at the moment. He is also being rewarded. This is where I bring in Generation Gold Standard, a new $500 million initiative to develop vaccines against influenza and potential “pandemic-prone” viruses. At this point, you might think, “Great! Maybe RFK Jr. isn’t as antivax as he seems.” Maybe. Or maybe this is both a way to give the appearance of not being antivaccine and to reward RFK Jr.’s hatchet man and mole at the NIH.
First of all, the choice of platform is curious, namely using chemically inactivated whole virus as the antigen, leading scientists to be puzzled at the choice. This platform is, quite literally, just a variation on last century technology, having been in use since the 1940s to produce influenza vaccines. Yet, the press release sells it as cutting edge:
“Generation Gold Standard is a paradigm shift,” said NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. “It extends vaccine protection beyond strain-specific limits and prepares for flu viral threats – not just today’s, but tomorrow’s as well – using traditional vaccine technology brought into the 21st century.”
It’s basically just using chemical used since the the 1950s to inactivate the influenza virus. As one scientist said:
“This is not a next-generation vaccine,” said Rick Bright, who led HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, in the first Trump administration. “It’s so last-generation, or first-generation, it’s mind-blowing.”
And:
If the mRNA-based covid shots produced by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech represented the cutting edge of vaccine technology, applying ultra-sophisticated approaches never before seen in an inoculation, the approach by Taubenberger and Memoli represents a blast from the past.
So why? Why would RFK Jr.—and you just know he’s behind it—funnel this money to a project using 70 year old technology and an idea that’s at least 80 years old and then sell it as “cutting edge technology.” It’s not. Moreover, contrary to the way it’s being sold, it’s not any sort of lock to develop a universal flu vaccine. (After all, did scientists manage to develop such a vaccine last century? They did not.) I rather suspect that the main reasons this technology was chosen are two-fold. First, its’ a reaction to the opposition to what is really cutting edge technology, mRNA vaccines, stirred up by all the fearmongering during the pandemic leading to Trump’s base being suspicious and fearful. I also suspect that it’s easy for RFK Jr. to view inactivated whole virus vaccines as somehow “more natural” because they are the entire virus, rather than selected peptides used as antigens, produced either by recombinant DNA technology or by mRNA technology.
Never mind that the technology is associated with more, not less, adverse events.
The second reason is to reward Memoli and his collaborator Jeffery Taubenberger. As reported in The Atlantic by Sarah Wu:
Memoli and Taubenberger’s vaccine technology could end up yielding an effective product. It relies on a type of vaccine composed of whole viruses that have been chemically inactivated; at least one of the vaccines under development has undergone safety testing, and has some encouraging preliminary data behind it. But flu viruses mutate often, hop frequently across species, and are tricky to durably vaccinate against; although scientists have been trying to concoct a universal-flu-vaccine recipe for decades, none have succeeded. When the goal is this lofty, and the path there this difficult, the smartest and most efficient way to succeed is to “fund as broadly as you can,” Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona (who is unrelated to Jay Bhattacharya), told me. That strategy has long been core to the mission of the NIH, which spends the majority of its budget powering research outside the agency itself.
So, yes, the technology could result in a new vaccine or new vaccines. After all, it was the mainstay of vaccine technology for decades. It’s just that there is nothing new here. Come to think about it, it is very Trumpian, selling old technology as though it were something new and shiny.
As Wu concludes:
Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, does not appear to have sought out vaccine research to fund, though. Memoli “is really the one who has pushed this ahead,” one NIH official told me: A few weeks ago, he dispatched Taubenberger to brief Kennedy on the pair’s work. (Memoli did not respond to questions about this briefing or about how he had solicited so much of Kennedy’s support.) No matter the instigator, though, the outcome sends an unsettling message to the rest of the American research community—“the only way to overcome HHS priorities is to be part of the inner circle,” the University of Arizona’s Bhattacharya told me. One NIH official put it more bluntly: “It’s very clear it’s all cronyism going forward.”
Trofim Lysenko examines grain with Soviet farmers.
Lysenkoism 2.0. It’s all there: ideology trumping science, scientists not buying into the new scientific dogma losing favor, being fired, or even otherwise punished, while scientists who do are rewarded, sometimes richly. I predict that MAHA will end up changing the way that research grants are disbursed to scientists to emphasize rigorous scientific review by expert study sections less and emphasize ideology, loyalty, patronage and cronyism. The Trumpian innovation to Lysenko’s legacy is the cronyism and, I expect in the future, grift.
