Why Does It Matter? 389of immune rejection, given the baboon’s great evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey
said, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.” If Bailey had
performed the same experiment in any other medical institution except Loma Linda (which
is run by the creationist Seventh-Day Adventist Church), his experiments would be labeled
dangerous and unethical, and he would have been sued for malpractice and his medical
license revoked. But under the cover of religion, his unscientific beliefs caused an innocent
baby to die of immune rejection, when other alternatives might have been available. Bailey
was never prosecuted for this unethical and shocking example of medical malpractice and
kept doing surgery at Loma Linda until he retired.
- Allowing ideologues of any type to suppress science through political means is deadly
for a society as well.
The classic illustration of this is the infamous case of Trofim Lysenko, who became Stalin’s
favorite scientist and wielded almost absolute power over Soviet science from 1927 until - By all accounts, he was a mediocre geneticist who held onto discredited notions of
how Lamarckian inheritance might improve Soviet crop yields and stave off famine. Most of
his results were inconclusive or outright fraudulent, yet he told Stalin that he could produce
incredible crop yields. Consequently, he rose to power in the Soviet scientific establishment
then used his clout with the brutal dictator to suppress the legitimate Mendelian geneticists,
who did understand how inheritance worked. Most of them were killed outright, sent to
concentration camps, or driven into exile, forever destroying the vitality and strength of
Soviet genetics and biology. Soviet biology fell decades behind that of the rest of the world
until the 1960s, when Lysenko was finally denounced, his work was discredited, and he fell
from power.
The point here is that science cannot be subservient to ideology and be forced to com-
promise the truth in order to please the political leadership. Lysenko and Stalin did not
want to believe in Mendelian genetics or Darwinian biology, and they murdered hundreds
of legitimate scientists who had the temerity to disagree with them. Other regimes (such
as the Nazis) have distorted science to support their ideas, but ultimately scientific reality
must win.
Some might argue that we’re not in the Soviet Union of Stalin, and that the United States
has safeguards against such oppression of scientific ideas. But the Bush administration was
well documented (see Mooney 2005, and Shulman 2007) as interfering with legitimate sci-
entists, rewriting reports by federal scientists that disagreed with their right-wing ideology,
encouraging fringe scientists to testify as legitimate equals with well-regarded scientists in
order to cancel out politically inconvenient messages, and generally ignoring the conclu-
sions of scientists who didn’t agree with them. Already the stem-cell research program in the
United States has been set back compared to that in other countries, as our best scientists go
to countries with less political oppression. Likewise, the foot-dragging and denials of global
warming by the Bush administration and the flunkies of the oil industry in Congress cost the
world valuable time in addressing this serious crisis.
And now we have a Trump Administration in power that is run by science deniers from
top to bottom, with a Congress controlled by climate deniers as well. Many are strident
creationists, such as Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, as
well as climate deniers like EPA head Mike Pruitt, Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke, and
of course Donald Trump himself. Who knows what will happen to science education when a