Dear President Trump: Stalin’s Science Didn’t Work for Russia - and It Won’t Work For America.

In 2017, neuroscientist Ali Cohen and I started a group we called From Science With Love, where we had planned document anti-scientific policymaking and support evidence-based approaches. After a few months our responsibilities as scientists drew our attention away from FSWL and it eventually died out. However, given the Trump administration’s current distaste for scientist-led, evidence-based responses to the COVID-19 outbreak, I wanted to republish the letter I published through FSWL back in 2017, without edit.

Dear President Trump,

You have recently called yourself an environmentalist. Unaware of context of your claim, one might have thought you were about to talk about the urgency of dealing with global climate change, about protecting public water sources from contamination, or about preserving our national parks.

Sadly, this was not the context of your claim. Instead, you claimed that environmentalism was out of control, that regulations must be cut, and that environmental protection was an unnecessary burden on our economy.

These claims don’t come as a surprise to those who have been listening. Early in your presidential campaign, you called climate change a Chinese hoax. Your nominee to direct the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has multiple pending lawsuits against the agency, and no intention of recusing himself. Three days into your presidency, you called for a freeze on new EPA contracts and grants, as well as communications between the EPA and the public.

Political interference in the scientific process is not new, and it does not have a history of success. Stalin and the Soviet Union learned this lesson the hard way, and you’ve recently begun to garner the comparison from our closest allies. I urge you to consider your policies in light of their failure.

In the 1930s, Trofin Lysenko was appointed the Director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. As the leader of Russian agriculture and a member of Stalin’s Communist party, Lysenko advocated an “alternate” theory of heredity, known as Lamarckian inheritance, in which adaptations were passed down through non-genetic means. This alternate theory, based on what we may now call “alternative facts”, was at odds with the worldwide scientific consensus regarding heredity, in which traits were passed down genetically through DNA according to a theory known as Mendelian inheritance. In the face of opposition from scientists both within Russia and across the globe, the Communist Party made this alternative theory, now known as Lysenkoism, the official science of the State in 1948. The Communist Party declared genetics to be pseudoscience, similar to how GOP leaders such as Ted Cruz have declared climate science to be pseudoscience. All Soviet genetics research was discontinued, a step that Republican Representative Matt Gaetz has recently proposed to take against the EPA. Most disturbingly, many geneticists that opposed Lysenkoism were imprisoned and executed - luckily we can’t draw any comparisons at the moment.

Did Lysenkoism work? No. Theories with little scientific basis will eventually crumble to the indifference of reality. The Soviet Union was faced with famine, and while Lysenko promised increased crop yields, they only declined further. Despite this grand failure, Lysenkoism was ingrained in the State, and the ban on genetics was not lifted until the 1960s. Lysenkoism is now no more than a bad memory, a warning of the dangers of political interference in science. What might be most tragic is that there was a kernel of truth in Lysenko’s ideas - we now know that there are non-traditional means of passing down adaptations without changes in our DNA sequence, termed epigentics - but Lysenko’s dogmatic belief in Lamarckian inheritance prevented him from making the discovery himself. Scientific skepticism is healthy and necessary for the process to succeed, and many scientists make their careers thanks to skeptical hunches that lead to new breakthroughs. However, political interference masquerading as skepticism is dangerous, disruptive, and divisive.

Will Scott Pruitt be the Lysenko to your Stalin? The scientific community is in consensus: man-made climate change is real, and we must act according to that state of understanding. Your attempts to delegitimize environmental science and dismantle the functionality of the EPA are no different that the Communist party’s attempts to deny genetics and silence scientific opposition. Like Stalin, your alternative science will inevitably fail, as with time, reality always allies with truth. But unlike Stalin, your failure may not be apparent until the damage is done, until it is too late, and our planet may never recover.

Historian Tony Judt noted that it was “significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess their calculations. Stalin may well have been mad but he was not stupid." Coincidentally, it has been reported that you plan to cut funding for nuclear physics through the Energy Department.

In light of history, and the collective wisdom of our scientific community, I urge you to be smart. I urge you to at the very least be sane. I urge you to accept man-made climate change. I urge you to free the EPA from political interference.

Please do not wage war against reality. Please do not endanger our future and the future of our children.

From Science With Love,

Michael V. LeVine, Ph.D.