History: Science and politics

"Perhaps the most egregious ghost is Trofim Lysenko, the man who ruled the life sciences of Soviet Russia from the late 1920s until the early 1960s. He had a theory which fit Marxism perfectly: acquired characteristics can be inherited. This is not true, of course, but Lysenko had the Politburo and Stalin behind him. It was science that fit the political needs of the Bolsheviks, and so it was science backed by the awful power of the party and the state.
Lysenko's experiments were heralded, although the experiments were never replicated. The Soviet Union was full of botanists, biologists, geneticists, and other life scientists, and it was obvious to anyone with a free mind that Lysenko was propounding nonsense. But it was not until 1962 that the Soviet government allowed a real critique of his cartoon science. Why?
Because in the Soviet Union, as in Nazi Germany, truth was never "objective." Science could literally be "Aryan," or "proletariat," or otherwise fit into some sort of sociopolitical mindset. God was dead in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, so no one was there to acknowledge the lies or account for the intellectual mischief. Honest scientists were imprisoned, tortured, and killed because they rested on the thin reed of the scientific method, which ill withstood the hurricane of politically correct science"

Read the whole piece here: The Ghost of Lysenko