From: Washington's Blog
by Kevin Ryan
Science has been misused for political purposes many times in
history. However, the most glaring example of politically motivated
pseudoscience—that employed by U.S. government scientists to explain the
destruction of the World Trade Center (WTC)—continues to be ignored by
many scientists. As we pass the 10th anniversary of the
introduction of that account, it is useful to review historic examples
of fake science used for political purposes and the pattern that defines
that abuse.
An early example of pseudoscience used to promote a political agenda
was the concerted Soviet effort to contradict evolutionary theory and
Mendelian inheritance. For nearly 45 years, the Soviet government used
propaganda to foster unproven theories of agriculture promoted by its
minister of agriculture, Trofim Lysenko. Scientists seeking favor with
the Soviet hierarchy produced fake experimental data in support of
Lysenko’s false claims. Scientific evidence from the fields of biology
and genetics was banned in favor of educational programs that taught only Lysenkoism
and many biologists and geneticists were executed or sent to labor
camps. This propaganda-fueled program of anti-science continued for over
forty years, until 1964, and spread to other countries including China.
In the 2010 book Merchants of Doubt,
authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway describe several other examples
of the misuse of science, spanning from the 1950s to the present. They
show how widely respected scientists participated in clearly
non-scientific efforts to promote the agendas of big business and big
government. Examples include the tobacco industry’s misuse of science to
obfuscate the links between smoking and cancer, the military industrial
complex’s use of scientists to support the scientifically indefensible
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), and several abuses of environmental
science. MORE
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