30 years ago, I took a college class on the history of Russian and Soviet science. One of the more infamous figures in an otherwise accomplished pantheon of scientists was a man named Trofim Lysenko, who rejected Mendelian genetics and espoused a form of agricultural pseudoscience. In a naturally self-correcting scientific system, he should have been an historical footnote, but by cleverly aligning his theories with Marxist ideology and ingratiating himself with Joseph Stalin, he managed to hold on to power for decades, at the expense of thousands of legitimate scientists and the Soviet people who depended on successful crop yields to feed their families.
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| Trofim Lysenko |
Studying Lysenko, I would have been shocked if I had known that history would repeat itself in the United States, where a similar figure would promote thoroughly debunked theories about childhood vaccines and elevate his ideology above science at every turn. Thanks to elections and Presidential term limits, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s reign as the head of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is likely to be much shorter than Lysenko's in the Soviet Union. However, the damage he has done to our scientific institutions and the scourge of preventable infectious diseases he has unleashed may take many more years to be repaired.
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| Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. |
I am not the first person to compare the HHS Secretary's actions to those of Lysenko, but I don't believe there is a more definitive treatment of this analogy than my perspective article in the Fall 2026 issue of the Journal of Lancaster General Hospital.
