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Podcast: New Discourses
Episode: The Dawn of Medical Lysenkoism
Description: The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 28
The agriculturalist Trofim Lysenko should be a household name throughout the world in roughly the same way that Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong are or should be. That is, Lysenko shouldn't be known for his successes, which are none of his legacy, but for his catastrophic failure. He was the agriculturalist of the Soviet Union, first under Stalin, and his ideological biology (Lysenkoism) led directly to the deaths of tens of millions, first in the Soviet Union and then in Maoist China. Lysenkoism implied famine and mass death, and disputing...