Tylenol Falls Victim to the New Stalinism

The most striking feature of this week’s big Tylenol smackdown hasn’t yet had the attention it should be getting.

Let’s step back, all of us, men and women. The issue comes down, it seems, to whether women in pregnancy should seek relief from pain and fevers with Tylenol.  Two grumpy old men, neither of whom knows even the first thing about the experience of being pregnant, have raised their trumpets. He with the loudest trumpet, Donald Trump by name, said “Don’t take Tylenol. Don’t take it. Fight like hell not to take it . . . tough it out.”

His science whisperer, Kennedy, Jr., the national health commissar, suggested a largely unstudied vitamin B drug instead.

What can be said of this sorry political theater dripping with sexism? These two are giving medical advice to our nation’s women?  Men should, I know, be aghast. I can’t even imagine all the words women would attach, although I’ve heard a few that I won’t repeat.

As for what will now be called the debate about the science of autism causation and treatment: Expect our being dragged through the same contrived confusion thrown into the question of human contribution to climate warming. There will be no end of it.  Only one thing is certain: No male denialist will have to tough out any pain from science denialism about treatment for pregnancy pain relief.  But maybe this time the doubters will be right. Maybe. Not likely. We will have more than every opportunity to listen to their say, and an inquiring mind must be an open mind.

I do, however, characterize Kennedy, Jr. as health commissar for a reason. It helps to recall one of history’s most disastrous and best-known episodes when very bad science, even pseudo-science, gained the ear of a very powerful, very authoritarian politician.

In the episode I have in mind, the politician was the Soviet Russian dictator, Josef Stalin. The pseudo-science was delivered by a Russian agronomist, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898-1976). Trofim Denisovitch rejected the understandings of plant evolution pioneered by the Austrian Gregor Mendel (1822 – 1884), the father of modern genetics. His discoveries we now celebrate as Mendelian inheritance.

Not Lysenko. A plant breeder who discarded Mendel and a comet trail of supporting science, he convinced himself, incorrectly, that plant traits, rather than altered through hereditary evolution, could develop as direct adaptation to the needs of their environmental circumstances. In other words, rapid transformation of plant characteristics could be achieved independently of the patient workings of evolution

Lysenko urged that his theories could yield rapid transformation of Soviet agricultural yields. This was welcome music to Stalin’s ears. In 1940 Lysenko was named Director of the Soviet Academy of Sciences Institute of Genetics. A supposed link was forged from Lysenko’s theories to Marxist models of Communist societal transformation. Political ideology joined wishful thinking to smother empirical science. Critics were purged. One prominent Soviet geneticist was arrested and died in prison camp. During and after World War II, desperate grain shortages pitched the Soviet Union into agricultural adventurism based on Lysenko’s theories–for example, planting wheat in the wrong places at the wrong times, expecting plants to adapt and thrive. Results were disastrous, exacerbating famine. Lysenkoism triumphed. People starved.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, Lysenko’s grip finally weakened. Nikita Khrushchev conceded the failure of Soviet agriculture, eventually stating that “Soviet agricultural research spent over 30 years in darkness.” In 1964 Lysenko’s theories were officially discredited and the Soviet Union attempted to pivot its plant botany research and agricultural practice back to scientific understandings accepted in the rest of the world.

It is, at least as yet, a bit of a reach to call Kennedy, Jr., the Trofim Lysenko of Trump 2.0. He certainly seems to match up well in the arrogance attribute. His theories seem to incorporate a foundation of rage stirred with hubris. As Kennedy’s dominion unfolds, Lysenko, now pilloried as one of history’s great exponents of crackpot science, should certainly be considered as a historical specter against which Kennedy should continually be evaluated.

As for Trump. Clearly, he is one of a kind and therefore, even as an unvarnished authoritarian, not simply to be labeled as Josef Stalin incarnate. Bad enough, on his own terms. On Monday, according to the Washington Post, Kennedy seemed to concede that he was going further than medical advisers and scientists would support and that the research wasn’t robust enough to back up what he was saying. Yet he had no reluctance in directing pregnant women what to do, and what not do to.

As if to close the circle of surreal, the one academic reed on which Trump’s anti-Tylenol tantrum hinges, as reported in the New York Times, is a study led at the Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health, an institution facing calamitous collapse of its science and public health research from Trump administration funding cuts. With Trump, the problem isn’t politics intruding on science. The problem is that in Trump’s head, there is no such thing as science to intrude upon. Therefore, because nature abhors a vacuum, the void is filled the sexism.

An extended discussion of Trofim Lysenko, on which the above draws, has been written by K. Lee Lerner: “Science, Philosophy and Proactive: A Study in the Dangers of Political Intrusion into Science, accessed at Encyclopedia.com. The article includes an extensive bibliography for anyone wanting to dig more deeply into this topic.