Starts With A Bang!

The Worst Scientist in History

There are many great, elegant, and simple theories and ideas that attempt to make sense of this Universe. Above all, many of these ideas are beautiful, and often the people who come up with them are brilliant.

Almost all of these great, elegant, and simple theories are wrong. This is important to remember and difficult for many scientists to accept. Most theories, no matter how well-conceived or how brilliant they are, will eventually fail to an experimental test that does not yield what the theory predicts.

The key, and this is a really hard part for anyone with an ego (and I am just as guilty of this as any other scientist), is admitting when your brain-child, your theory, is wrong. There are plenty of examples of this: Halton Arp and Fred Hoyle refusing to let go of their incorrect theories when it was shown that their theories were invalid and the Big Bang was more correct, Howard Georgi going into a deep depression when the proton didn’t decay as predicted by his theory of Grand Unification, and even Einstein refusing to abandon his idea of a classical unification of E&M and Gravity, ignoring all of the evidence for quantum theory.

Normally, when this happens, you have no reason to care. One person cannot hold up the scientific endeavor, cannot stop the tide of research and evidence as we gather more and more data and refine our understandings of the Universe. Science, technology, health, and medicine march forward.

Right?

Umm… right?

That’s what you think. Meet Trofim Lysenko. Biologist, agronomist, with a specialized interest and knowledge set in the field of inherited traits. Also, in my opinion, he is the worst and most dangerous scientist of the 20^th Century. With his expert knowledge and status, he was able to promise increased crop yields following the famines and drop in food production in the USSR in the 1930s. In 1940, he was appointed director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR’s Academy of Sciences, a position he held for 25 years.

What makes him the worst scientist in history? He was a denier of science. Despite overwhelming evidence in support of Gregor Mendel’s theory of genetics and inherited traits, Lysenko stuck to his own theories of hybridization instead. Lysenko’s theories became widely accepted in the USSR, and in 1948, scientific dissent from his theory of hybridization was outlawed.

It was not until about 15 years had passed, and crop productivity had failed to improve, that people in power realized that Lysenko was not fairly considering all of the evidence. Modern agricultural techniques were eventually adopted and Lysenkoism fell out of favor. But science in that field, especially in the USSR, was set back a good 20 years by Lysenko’s denial of the evidence.

Well, I must say, it’s a good thing that there’s nobody with any political influence who can make huge mistakes on issues of science policy. It’s a good thing that, in the USA, the scientific community is always consulted for their expert opinion on matters of national and international importance. And it’s a good thing that the opinion of one politician or one rogue scientist can’t dictate policy.

Right?

Umm… right?

A-ha! Three more weeks, America, just three more weeks. I have hope that this time, we’re getting it right.