Injurious to Mix Science and Ideology

Once upon a time, people weren’t sure how inheritance worked. At that time, the Lamarckian inheritance was a legitimate candidate – it said that organisms could pass on acquired traits to their descendants. In this view, a giraffe whose neck got longer by stretching in its lifetime would pass on the longer neck characteristic to its babies. Once Mendel’s findings were re-discovered, it was generally accepted that inheritance didn’t work that way.

 

Not Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet biologist. He still believed in Lamarckian inheritance. He merged that idea with his political support for communism, declaring that subjecting crops to the harsh "power of collectivism" and environmental conditioning, they would magically adapt and transform!

 

Well, it was a crazy view and that could have been the end of the story. Except Stalin supported Lysenko. Unsurprisingly, Lysenko’s career bloomed. Since this was communist USSR, those scientists who didn’t agree with the view espoused by Stalin got prosecuted. It got even worse. Lysenko’s mad belief was imposed as the way to practice agriculture across the USSR, leading to severe food shortages and starvation deaths.

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At this point, you might be tch tch’ing and saying only dictatorships or authoritarians behave like this, capitalist democracies don’t mix science with ideology. Not so fast, as Tim Harford points out.

 

In 1943, two German pathologists, Schairer and Schöniger, came to the conclusion that cigarette smoking increased the risk of cancer significantly. But:

“They were German, writing in German, and they published in a German scientific journal in 1943.”

All that (language, middle of World War II) meant the study barely got noticed.

 

Ok, but post the War, it could have been pursued, at least in West Germany, right? But by then, it was dangerous to espouse such a view. Why?! Because it aligned with the “anti-smoking policies of the Nazi government”:

“Nazi cartoons depicted grotesque caricatures of Jews and dark-skinned people drinking and smoking.”

 

The topic was thus taboo in West Germany. But what about the rest of the West?

“(Hitler was a non-smoker)… Nazi anti-tobacco activists were fond of pointing out that Mussolini and Franco also abstained, while Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin all smoked heavily.”

So the West dismissed the entire study and conclusion as just Nazi propaganda.

 

How much earlier could the causative relation between smoking and cancer have been found, how many lives saved, if only the study was not dismissed simply because it aligned with a Nazi practice…