Peter Hotez

and say he was toughening it up.

There was a term at that time called vernalization.

He was toughening it up, and it would make the wheat hardy for subsequent winters.

It was all BS.

And he and Lysenko himself

was untrained in science, whereas Lysenko had trained at the best universities and was a world-renowned geneticist.

But Stalin, it fit with Stalin's confirmation bias.

And the fact that he was, Lysenko came from modest means, being a peasant, he liked that as well.

And even though it was a theory that didn't work and ultimately failed,

helped precipitate the collapse of the wheat crop in Ukraine and Russia and led to famine, it was still practiced for purposes of authoritarian control.

And Stalin did the same thing with Russian physics, Soviet physics.

You know, you weren't allowed to talk about Einstein's theory of relativity because he figured...

for seemingly arbitrary reasons, decided that that didn't fit with his communist worldviews either.

So you saw this complete collapse of Soviet science to the detriment of the society for purposes of authoritarian control.

And in a different way, this is what happened in Weimar Germany during the 20s and 30s, where Einstein's theory of relativity, again, in this case, it was called the Jewish fraud theory.

because it was laced with anti-Semitism, as was the theory of psychoanalysis.

And ultimately, by attacking modern physics at the time, it probably helped lead to Hitler's defeat.

So even though these are such self-defeating enterprises to attack science,

We found a quote from Maxim Gorky who said, without science, democracy is impossible, or you can't have democracy without science.

And we believe that as well.