Bhattacharya is the New Lysenko

Starving the NIH through ineptitude, bitterness, and thirst for revenge

(Note from Angie: I know this is REALLY long. I’ve been working on it for a couple months in my spare time, ever since I noticed Bhattacharya has accused his opponents of Lysenkoism multiple times over the years and decided to look into those allegations. These two really have a LOT in common. I hope that even though it’s a long read, you find it worthwhile.)

Credit: Left-NIH; Right-Union of Soviet Socialist Republics

An insecure and inept but ambitious scientist climbs out of obscurity up a ladder of political favor in a burgeoning totalitarian society. What he lacks in professional competence and talent, he makes up for in sycophancy and pseudoscientific imagination. He leverages his connections within the Party to get the ear of the dictator so he can tell him what he wants to hear. The dictator loves his ideas despite their scientific implausibility, because they serve his goals for consolidating power and neutralizing dissent. Other scientists protest and present evidence that the scientist is wrong. The scientist denounces his colleagues as ideological enemies of the state, so the dictator obligingly eliminates them. The scientist’s unsupported but authoritarian-serving policy ideas are implemented, leading to the deaths of millions.

It’s hard to tell whether I’m talking about NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya or the former Soviet Academy of Sciences President Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, until you get to the deaths of millions part of the biography. Lysenko’s pseudoscientific ideas led to policies in the Soviet Union that did kill millions in the past. Bhattacharya tried and failed to do that with the Great Barrington Declaration, but now, as the leader of the largest biomedical research organization in the world, he is on track to succeed.

Sowing the seeds of discontent

Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist who claimed to have developed a novel method of growing cereal grains called vernalization that produced wheat strains with increased crop yields and extended growing seasons. This was especially important, because Joseph “Big Brother” Stalin was enforcing agricultural collectivism across the Soviet Union. Rapidly forcing collective farms to begin crop production at national scale and relocating or purging the kulaks (prosperous, land-owning peasants who resisted collectivization) devastated food production. People were starving and Stalin was desperate for a solution that would not require him to admit that collectivization had failed.

Lysenko was a die-hard Lamarckist—he believed that heritable traits were not genetic as Gregor Mendel’s pea experiments indicated, but were acquired from the environment. So he hypothesized that soaking seeds in cold water or “vernalizing” them would increase crop production and solve the famine problem. Lysenko’s theories contrasted with most of his contemporaries in the rising field of Soviet genetics. In the early 1930s, Lysenko’s former mentor, renowned geneticist Nikolai Vavilov, offered a solution that involved a lot of complicated breeding and would take at least a decade. Stalin was impatient and did not want to wait that long. So Lysenko stepped in with vernalization and gave Stalin exactly what he needed: a speedy miracle solution to keep the collective laborers alive and picking potatoes over at the kolkhoz.

Come, comrade, and starve on our collective farm!

The only problem was that vernalization didn’t work. It turns out that heritable traits are genetic after all, as a growing chorus of geneticists including Vavilov pointed out. So Lysenko faked a bunch of data and lied about his findings. Besides vernalization, he claimed that plants select their mates, some plants self-sacrifice for the good of other plants, and fields could self-fertilize. He boasted that he could transform one species of grain into another without breeding. He denied that genes exist and asserted that the field of genetics was ideologically opposed to Soviet Communism. Although none of this was remotely true, Stalin ate it up.

Lysenko’s agricultural methods and policies were instituted throughout the Soviet Union. Most of the crops planted with Lysenko’s methods of planting seeds very close together didn’t grow or rotted in the fields. Catastrophic famine ensued and millions died. At least 7 million people died in the famines of the 1930s, which were prolonged by Lysenkoist agricultural practices. Mao Zedong implemented Lysenko’s methods in 1958, resulting in a famine that killed as many as 55 million people.

Lysenko, however, was unfortunately very much alive and riding the Soviet propaganda train to Stalinist superstardom. In doing so, he took the opportunity to prop up his theories and stick it to his geneticist haters. He started his own academic journals to publish scientific manuscripts describing made-up experiments in which he claimed to have turned cabbages into rutabagas and grew oranges in Siberia, as well as commentaries calling classical geneticists “enemies of the people.” Lysenko claimed that the Mendelian view of genetic heritability upheld the imperialist status quo. His most fundamental scientific beliefs were indistinguishable from the core principles of Stalinism.

Ladies, find a totalitarian dictator who gazes at you the way Stalin looks at Lysenko

In the mid-1930s, Lysenko was delivering regular polemics on Mendelian genetics, calling it “bourgeois pseudoscience,” and accusing his critics of being kulak-loving capitalist spies who were out to undermine Stalinist collectivism. Stalin promoted Lysenko to the head of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences and proceeded to purge Soviet science of anyone who ever uttered a critical word against him.

Vavilov’s mugshot after being tortured into confessing that his plant genetics research was actually a capitalist plot to ruin Soviet agriculture

Many of the geneticists opposing Lysenko were executed by Stalin for invented crimes against the state. Lysenko denounced his former mentor Vavilov along with his colleague plant geneticist Georgii Karpechenko, Izrail Agol, a Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist philosopher who also studied Drosophila (fruit fly) genetics, and Solomon Levit, a human geneticist who studied identical twins. Agol was shot to death in 1937 for being a Trotskyist saboteur. Levit was executed in 1938 for being an American spy. Karpechenko died by firing squad in 1941 for being a member of an “anti-Soviet group” (he was a member of the faculty in Vavilov’s department at the Institute of Applied Botany in Leningrad). Vavilov was captured by the secret police in 1940 after having it out with Lysenko at a genetics conference at the Lenin Academy in 1939. He was sentenced to death for being a British spy and destroying Soviet agriculture. Vavilov starved to death in prison in 1943. Thousands more scientists met a similar fate in Siberian gulags for the unforgiveable crime of correctly pointing out that Lysenko was scientifically wrong (and, in many cases, also for being Jewish). The entire field of genetics was banned in the Soviet Union in 1948, which lasted until Stalin’s death in 1953.

Remember when the New York Times used to accurately report on politically motivated crackpots hell-bent on destroying science?

Lysenko himself lasted a little longer by cozying up to Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, but by the 1960s, Soviet leadership could no longer deny the damage that his policies inflicted. The physics community, which hadn’t been targeted by Stalin, presented a case against Lysenko during a time of political upheaval, in which various Stalinist mechanisms of oppression were being dismantled in the government. They specifically denounced Lysenko’s political tactics to silence and eliminate opposition. In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov excoriated Lysenko at the General Assembly of the Soviet Academy of Science.

He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists.

Lysenko was removed from his position as Director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy. After Khruschev was forced out by Leonid Brezhnev in 1964, an expert commission investigated Lysenko and found proof of his extensive scientific misconduct. He died in disgrace 12 years later.

Genetics work slowly resumed, but never matched its dominance or vigor from the time before Lysenko. The millions who died because of Lysenko’s stranglehold on Soviet science obviously could not return. Russian biologists were never able to completely restore what Lysenko destroyed. The legacy of Lysenkoism was decades of scientific stagnation and a staggering death toll, as well as a cautionary tale about what happens when evidence-based scientific methods are exploited or suppressed by political ideologues to serve a tyrant.

Gold Standard Lysenkoism

OMG quit copying me, Jay! -Trofim

In the chronically underrated 90s erotic thriller Single White Female, a woman is stalked by her psychotically obsessed roommate, who emulates her to the point of duplication. Bhattacharya’s trajectory to the NIH Office of the Director follows Lysenko’s path to power so closely it’s almost like he is Single White Female-ing him. Both have capitalized on population-level disasters to climb out of academic obscurity into powerful positions. Both did so by advancing authoritarian political interests and telling a dictator what he wanted to hear. Both proposed and doubled down on policies that would kill millions of people, even resorting to manipulating or manufacturing data to justify them. Both were so emotionally fragile and unable to tolerate expert criticism that they pursued mortal vendettas against entire scientific fields of study. The only difference is that Lysenko hated genetics, while Bhattacharya hates public health, virology, and vaccines. Let’s go over some of their uncanny similarities.

Replacing science with ideological dogma framed as a class struggle

Bhattacharya first came to prominence with the Santa Clara serology study in April 2020, a widely pilloried preprint that claimed the mortality rate of COVID-19 was much lower than most other estimates. It was later revealed that this study was partly funded by the CEO of JetBlue Airlines, who was looking for data to support lifting pandemic-related restrictions on air travel. A few months later, Bhattacharya dropped the Great Barrington Declaration, a pandemic policy proposal calling for “vulnerable” people to isolate forever, while encouraging a COVID free-for-all everywhere else. That would have resulted in mass infection and another million deaths in the US if it had been implemented. Viruses spread easily, and there is no way to effectively isolate a small subpopulation of sick or elderly people when the entire rest of the population is infected with COVID and straining the health care system past its breaking point. While a competent scientist would revise his hypothesis when presented with this evidence, Bhattacharya was as resolute as Lysenko was facing the Soviet geneticists. To this day, he refuses to admit that his Let It Rip pandemic plan had any shortcomings at all, even as it continues to be weaponized against public health.

Just as Lysenko described genetic heritability as an instrument of capitalist oppression, Bhattacharya defended his position in socioeconomic terms, deriding an elite “laptop class” for implementing supposedly destructive pandemic response policies like mask and vaccine mandates and school closures. According to Bhattacharya, privileged academic and government scientists and public health officials wielded interventions meant to keep people from dying from COVID like a weapon against the proletariat. While the essential workers were forcibly masked and vaccinated to toil thanklessly in the salt mines of the pandemic gig economy, the professional intelligentsia indulged in a lavish lifestyle of Zoom meetings, delivery apps, and subjugation of the working class. The courageous proles were deprived of their freedoms and unjustly indentured by morally compromised, financially conflicted public health hegemony, as Bhattacharya frequently told the press through the webcam of his laptop over Zoom.

Propaganda and media manipulation

Despite his repeated complaints of censorship, Bhattacharya has been working the right wing media circuit since 2020. He continues to appear regularly on Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN, as well as working the MAGA disinformation podcast circuit with Charlie Kirk, Lex Fridman, Andrew Huberman, Bari Weiss, and Steve Bannon. He wrote countless op-eds promoting his ideas, including for crackpot outlets like the anti-vax libertarian think tank founded to preach the Great Barrington Declaration gospel, as well as mainstream outlets, such as the anti-vax trash fire he set last week in the Washington Post. He has starred in multiple documentaries, including one funded by the Falun Gong cult in which he promoted ivermectin (which does not work to treat COVID) as an alternative to vaccination. His entire public persona has been based on using the media to launder his abhorrent, deadly ideas and manipulate the public into believing they are beneficial and based on sound science.

In his time, Lysenko railed against the “fly-lovers and people haters” of genetics extensively in the state newspaper Pravda. Lysenkoist policies and their supposed success were the subject of massive state-sponsored propaganda campaigns intended to cement Stalin’s power, suppress dissent, and rewrite history about collectivism. He branded his ideas as “Michurinism,” after a respected Russian horticulturist named Ivan Michurin, who shared some similar scientific theories. A 1948 movie called Michurin idealized him as an archetypal Soviet scientist and contemporaneous song lyrics described Lysenko as following in his footsteps. Bhattacharya’s contemporary equivalents are AI-generated MAHA content, social media influencer campaigns, and taxpayer-funded propaganda videos on YouTube to make us believe that the pandemic was entirely the fault of scientists who oppose Trump. The Great Barrington Declaration was billed as “focused protection” rather than “mass infection,” just as Lysenkoism was Michurinism. With propaganda, both scientists made wildly, obviously harmful policy prescriptions more palatable to the public.

Legitimize ideology and discredit science

Bhattacharya started lying about vaccines in 2021. That was when he appeared on a panel hosted by “vaccine safety” fanatic Steve Kirsch and his Great Barrington Declaration co-author Martin Kulldorff, the anti-vax barrow-wight who is currently chairing ACIP, purging it of expertise, and trying to cancel the MMRV vaccine. At this panel, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff sat silent, nodding in tacit approval as Kirsch claimed falsely that COVID vaccines killed more than half a million people.

Left to right: NIH Director Bhattacharya, ACIP Chair Kulldorff, Anti-Vaxxer Kirsch, Unnamed Anti-Vax Extra. Credit: @observingangel.bsky.social

Bhattacharya has continued to spread disinformation about vaccines and extended this to his own scientific work. As NIH Director, he has launched multiple initiatives to cast doubt on vaccine safety and further undermine public confidence in vaccination. He has published papers and reports that encourage “natural” immunity (from infection rather than vaccination) and misrepresent vaccine safety and effectiveness, including this banger disputing the trustworthiness of COVID vaccine trials that he co-authored with Kulldorff and published in the fake academic journal backed by a conservative media company for which they are founding editors. Bhattacharya has echoed his boss HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s call for alternatives to peer-reviewed scientific journals that will not publish low quality anti-vax propaganda. He plans to cap publication fees—which is something I generally support, as do most other scientists, due to the shameless profiteering by scientific publishers—although I’m very uncertain that his motives are actually responsible stewardship of taxpayer funds, considering the myriad ways he has mismanaged those during his tenure thus far. He is attacking conventional journals in the name of open science and has floated the idea of replacing conventional academic publishing with NIH-sponsored blogs. I am a co-Editor-in-Chief of the peer-reviewed journal Vaccine, so I have a very good understanding of what a bad idea this would be based on the volume of anti-vax propaganda that is submitted to us. Objective, expert editorial and peer review are essential to maintaining Vaccine’s scientific integrity in the current climate of disinformation.

Lysenko also started his own journals to attack Mendelian genetics and legitimize his own theories. He published an entire special collection of essays called Agrobiology devoted to his made-up experiments to transform wheat into rye and to tearing apart his enemies’ counterarguments. He also skillfully used Pravda to circumvent standard scientific review and enshrine his beliefs as Party-approved science. By creating alternatives to standard mechanisms for communicating scientific results, he was better able to establish parity between his manufactured, manipulated findings and legitimate research. Bhattacharya is doing the same thing.

Bigoted persecution of dissidents

The process of peer review is not only under attack in scientific publishing, but it is being reconsidered at NIH. Not only are grants going to be reviewed by political censors, but Bhattacharya himself has admitted that he is cancelling grants that were funded after peer review for their scientific merit because they were related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Bhattacharya has said that studying any kind of health equity is discriminatory and ideological, despite the cuts disproportionately affecting minority and LGBTQ+ health. A Reagan-appointed federal judge said he’d never seen such egregious government-imposed discrimination. Although Bhattacharya claims to stand firmly against discrimination, he continues to practice it.

Lysenko also gleefully participated in discriminatory political purges. He earned Stalin’s favor by persecuting the kulaks to ensure the dominance of forced collectivization. Andrei Zhdanov was Stalin’s analog to OMB Director Russell Vought, the architect of the plan to eliminate all things DEI in his quest to turn America into a white supremacist theocratic dictatorship. Zhdanov came up with a plan called the Zhdanovshchina (Zhdanov Doctrine), which was a campaign to eliminate decadent Western capitalist cultural influences in favor of Russian achievements to further decrease resistance to Stalin. As a result, numerous composers, writers, artists, and intellectuals were targeted for being too “formalist” (creating art for the sake of art instead of Stalinism) and “cosmopolitan” (emulating foreign imperialists). However, Zhdanov’s definition of cosmopolitan also evidently meant “Jews,” partly because Stalin’s chief rival and mortal enemy Leon Trotsky, who was exiled to Mexico, was Jewish. The Zhdanov Doctine resulted in thousands of Jewish intellectuals being exiled, arrested, or killed. In a jarring parallel with our times, anti-cosmopolitanism was justified as a necessary measure to root out “Zionist” agitators (they didn’t use “antisemitism” because, while prejudice against Jews had been common in Russia even before the Bolshevik revolution, it reminded people of the Nazis). Stalin had persecuted Jews since the Great Purge of the 1930s, in which the NKVD, his secret police, rounded up people who were insufficiently Stalinist, condemned them in extrajudicial show trials, and sent them to Siberia or executed them. A NKVD agent managed to assassinate Trotsky in 1940. At Lysenko’s request, Stalin installed NKVD agents in leadership positions at the Lenin Academy when he became its president in 1938, providing him with his own division of secret police to root out his enemies.

“Peace and Freedom in Sovdepila”: White Army (Tsarist) propaganda depicting Leon Trotsky as a Jewish devil using Chinese Red Army troops to murder people against the Kremlin wall. Trotsky was targeted throughout his life by antisemites. “Sovdepila” was a derogatory nickname for the USSR used by anti-Bolsheviks.

Lysenko adapted Zhdanov’s rhetoric and positioned himself as the arbiter of the scientific arm of the Zhdanov Doctrine. He accused his geneticist opponents of being racist eugenicists who supported Hitler, omitting the disproportionate number of Jewish scientists that he had arrested and sent to die in a forced labor camp. Bhattacharya’s dutiful adherence to the Trump directive to eliminate “politicized science” (which is justified by the administration as an attempt to end a supposed epidemic of antisemitism at universities) is reminiscent of Lysenko’s participation in the Great Purge and the Zhdanov Doctrine. The only difference is that instead of being anti-cosmopolitan and specifically going after Jews, he is anti-DEI and targeting Black people, immigrants, women, and transgender people. While both Lysenko and Bhattacharya did not use explicitly racist terminology, their interpretation and application of authoritarian priorities makes them no different from any other bigot abusing their power to exterminate people on the basis of their race, religion, or gender identity.

Personal attacks to discredit critics and punish expertise

Lysenko loved famines like Bhattacharya loves pandemics, so it’s on brand that both doubled down on their bad ideas and accused their critics of crimes they had committed themselves. Vavilov was blamed for the agricultural failures that Lysenko prolonged. Former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci is now being blamed for the fractured political climate and loss of trust in public health and science that Bhattacharya himself caused with his prolific lies about pandemic control measures, virology research, and vaccines. Bhattacharya has repeatedly accused virologists of cooking up new and deadly viruses and starting the pandemic, just as Lysenko alleged that “the Mendelists” were guilty as a field of sowing distrust in Stalinist collectivism and the glories of the Soviet state. Bhattacharya has used the specter of “risky” virology research and lab leaks as a pretext for stripping grant funding from essential virus and vaccine research and redirecting it to his cronies who are doing this type of research themselves. Lysenko did much of the same thing in 1948 when he declared that to oppose his scientific theories was to oppose the Party. Genetics became treason.

The personal nature of Lysenko’s attacks on his opponents was a function of his exceptionally low tolerance for criticism of any kind, his exquisitely fragile ego, and his nearly superhuman capacity for being bitterly aggrieved, qualities that Bhattacharya shares. He has already assembled a list of enemies to denounce and unfortunately it does include me, along with many of my colleagues in the US and around the world. He’s mad that we criticized his claims or his papers, especially if it’s about his mass infection plans, lockdowns, mandates, school closures, the lab leak, regulating virology research, vaccines, censorship, public trust, or his financial conflicts of interest. Our sins are reckless virology, silencing, slander, bullying, harassment, denigration, lying, lack of expertise, propagandizing, cover ups, ignorance, shutting down debate and not agreeing to debate him, Orwellian suppression of academic freedom, exclusion, propagandizing, unwarranted hubris, misconduct, conspiring against him, ad hominem attacks, and calling him a “fringe epidemiologist.” Many of his charges are things that he himself is doing now that he’s running NIH. I particularly enjoyed this example of Lysenkoist gaslighting, when he accused my colleague Kristian Andersen of yearning for the power to banish chronically abusive “rival” Richard Ebright, a reptilian troll who has repeatedly called for Andersen’s prosecution and accused him of fraud, to a gulag for politely objecting to Ebright’s constant harassment via false criminal allegations.

More evidence that every accusation is actually a confession

Bhattacharya has been attacking his opponents as Lysenkoists hell-bent on exiling lockdown-hating dissidents to scientific Siberia for years. In 2021, he wrote that objections to his unsupported epidemiological ideas on the grounds that they would cause mass death were tantamount to Lysenko obliterating Soviet genetics. Since he has evidently long been a student of Lysenko’s tactics, it’s only natural that he would eventually employ them.

A legacy of destruction

My husband AK spent the first 29 years of his life in the Soviet Union, during which time he got a PhD in protein biochemistry in the late 1980s. He was born a few years before Lysenko’s public disgrace and was educated and trained at elite institutions in Moscow that did everything possible to remove the stain of Lysenkoism, with the backing of the state. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev instituted the reforms of glasnost and perestroika in an attempt to lift the Soviet Union out of its economic, political, and scientific torpor by increasing transparency, streamlining the government, and opening up the country to more Western people, products, and ideas. McDonald’s opened in Red Square. It became even easier to score previously forbidden black market goods from America or Europe (in his case, Pink Floyd albums and Levi’s jeans). This applied to science, as well. AK’s undergraduate genetics course was taught using a translated American textbook. His PhD institute was so resolutely on board with genetics that the building was designed in the shape of a double helix. He used modern equipment, including mass spectrometers and chromatographs, from Western manufacturers. He attended conferences and collaborated with scientists in western Europe and America. He was allowed to leave the Soviet Union (permanently, as it turned out) for his postdoctoral training in the US.

But even though Lysenko was reviled in AK’s time in Soviet science, his legacy persisted. Although a modern, evidence-based understanding of genetics and molecular biology was now the standard, komissars continued to monitor scientists for evidence of ideological impurity or anti-Communist dissent. Collective agriculture remained integral to science and daily life. Collectivist propaganda was still so mainstream that on Vremya, the national evening news, the first 5-7 minutes were reports on sowing and crop yields. AK routinely took the Moscow subway to a kolkhoz just outside the city so he could get cow amniotic fluid for protein purification (which he described as toting large metal buckets of blood-streaked Jello, so I assume he was very popular with other subway riders). When he worked with radioactive isotopes (very common in 1980s biochemistry), he would get an extra ration of milk from a collective dairy because of an unsupported belief that milk was protective against radiation exposure. Reagents that were produced with agricultural products, like lab alcohol, were rationed and still impacted by grain yields. Certain scientific terms were renamed under Lysenkoism to be less Western and more Stalinist, so in Russian articles or textbooks, terms like “dorsal fin” were replaced with “back spine fin.” Many of AK’s contemporaries left like he did, because no matter how much effort was put into restoring biology in the Soviet Union, they just couldn’t keep pace with their competitors in the West. Four decades after Lysenko banned genetics, the entire field was still hobbled by stagnation, despite more than two decades of attempts to recover.

People frequently talk about what will happen to American science “after.” Though I am not sure there will be an “after,” I think AK’s experience is informative if there is. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide much to be optimistic about. Lysenko inflicted destruction on Soviet biology that could not be rebuilt and killed millions in the process. Bhattacharya is on track to annihilate the research that has made America the scientific envy of the world. The impact this will have on scientific progress globally will be severe. Fewer drugs will be developed. Fewer vaccines will be made. Lives will be shorter, harder, and sicker.

Bhattacharya is going to replace NIH’s exceptional research portfolio with pseudoscientific pursuits designed to affirm the harmful and discriminatory policies he wants to implement. He will try to eliminate peer review, thus making it more difficult for the public to distinguish legitimate science from quackery. He will support research that serves political objectives rather than scientific ones. He will dismiss criticism as an attempt to censor or politicize science, despite being the arbiter of political censorship at NIH. He is going to retaliate against critics with the expertise to point out his many scientific shortcomings by defunding their labs and banning their research; he has already done this to many of my colleagues and friends. If he has the opportunity, Bhattacharya will have his enemies prosecuted and purged, just as Lysenko did. This will silence any meaningful opposition. All of these changes will cause people to die: from lack of access to medication, from cancer and diabetes and HIV, from vaccine-preventable diseases, from any epidemic or pandemic that might occur.

By applying grant funding priorities as his white Christian nationalist masters demand and imposing public health and pandemic preparedness policies based on his own unsupported anti-vax, Let It Rip beliefs, Bhattacharya has a shot at toppling Lysenko’s record-setting body count. I don’t see how American biomedical science could ever be fully restored after a self-inflicted catastrophe so devastating that the deaths are measured in millions. American scientists in the aftermath might flee for China, just as AK and his colleagues fled the Soviet Union for America, back when America was still committed to leading the world in public health and biomedical research.

Bhattacharya is calling plays directly out of Lysenko’s book. We know what happened when Lysenko took control of Soviet biology, weaponized his mass death-inducing crank beliefs for Stalin, and avenged himself on his haters by political purges. We know that Bhattacharya currently has control of American biomedical research, is eagerly gutting research that does not comport with his own mass death-inducing crank beliefs for Trump, and really wants revenge against anyone who ever pointed out that the Great Barrington Declaration would kill millions, the evidence does not show that the pandemic began with a lab leak, or that mRNA vaccine technology is safe, effective, and essential for pandemic preparedness. We know how this story will end. We must have the courage as a scientific community to stand united against it. Bhattacharya is the American Lysenko and must be removed as NIH Director.

Learn About Lysenko:

“Lysenko Crushes Geneticists in Russia; Gets Party Backing for His Theories” New York Times. August 19, 1948.

S.A. Borinskaya, A.I. Ermolaev, and E.I. Kolchinsky. “Lysenkoism Against Genetics: The Meeting of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences of August 1948, Its Background, Causes, and Aftermath” Genetics 212(1): 1-12. April 1, 2019.

C.D. Darlington. “Obituary: T.D. Lysenko” Nature 266: 287-288. March 17, 1977.

S.M. Gershenson. “Difficult Years in Soviet Genetics” Quarterly Review of Biology 65(4): 447-456. December 1990.

I. Godwin and Y. Trusov. “The tragic story of Soviet genetics shows the folly of political meddling in science” The Conversation. February 8, 2017.

J. Huxley. Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity. Chatto and Windus, London. 1949.

S. Kean. “The Soviet Era's Deadliest Scientist Is Regaining Popularity in Russia” The Atlantic. December 19, 2017.

E.I. Kolchinsky, U. Kutschera, U. Hossfeld, G.S. Levit. “Russia’s new Lysenkoism” Current Biology 27(19): 1042-1047.

T.D. Lysenko. The Situation in Biological Science: Proceedings of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the USSR. Session: July 31-August 7, 1948. Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. 1949.

T.D. Lysenko. Agrobiology: Essays on Problems of Genetics, Plant Breeding, and Seed Growing. Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow. 1954.

K. Mather. “Genetics and the Russian Controversy” Nature 149: 427-430. April 18, 1942.

Z.A. Medvedev. The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko. I.M. Lerner, translator. Columbia University Press, New York and London. 1969.

S. Reznik and V. Fet. “The destructive role of Trofim Lysenko in Russian Science” European Journal of Human Genetics 27: 1324–1325. May 14, 2019.

H.E. Salisbury. “Symbol of Stalinist Science” New York Times. November 24, 1976.

T. Shabad. “Pravda Appears to Condemn Lysenko Genetics” New York Times. November 3, 1964.

N.I. Vavilov, T.D. Lysenko, and I.M. Polyakov. “Genetics in the Soviet Union: Three Speeches From the 1939 Conference on Genetics and Selection” marxists.org. May 2002.

White, D. “Moron or Madman? Trofim Denisovich Lysenko” The Ancient and Esoteric Order of the Jackalope. April 26, 2021.

P.I. Wrinch. “Science and Politics in the U.S.S.R.: The Genetics Debate” World Politics 3(4): 486-519. July 1951.