Mixing Politics and Science: Lessons Learned

Modern science played an integral part in the rise to global dominance of both the Soviet Union and the United States in the twentieth century. Simon Ings’ Stalin and the Scientists explores, through the figures of Trofim Lysenko and Nikolai Vavilov, how communist ideology and tyranny at once exploited, degraded, and censored scientific knowledge, while destroying individual scientists. Audra Wolfe’s Freedom’s Laboratory, recounts how the United States negotiated a new relationship between government and science in the postwar decades. Interestingly, while reading the two books reviewer J. Scott Turner observes, “I was struck by how familiar the Soviet science ecosystem seemed to be, how similar to our own.”