Wolfe’s new book, Freedom’s Laboratory, frontally addresses questions of what science is, how it is best done, and how it (and scientists themselves) might be strategically deployed to advance national interests. As suggested by its subtitle — “The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science” — after World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a global free-for-all to win hearts, minds, and markets. This extended to “science.” Americans exerted their minds and money to distinguish a “good” American science from its communist — and, therefore, by definition compromised — counterpart.
As Wolfe convincingly argues, these efforts were based from the outset in a questionable assumption: that American science, perhaps like America itself, was exceptional in being inherently apolitical. Or, put slightly differently: It was neutral, unlike its Soviet counterpart. And from this fallacy, as she demonstrates, much trouble has ensued.
For the next two decades, American scientists and government officials assiduously “attempted to convince audiences both at home and abroad that American science had uniquely transcended politics.” Strategically deploying an ideology of “scientific freedom,” American scientists were, the story went, committed to empiricism, objectivity, pure research (as opposed to research for specific applications like making weapons of mass destruction and sending people into space), and internationalism. By the end of her book, Wolfe builds a convincing case for “freedom” being just another word for expediency, realpolitik, opportunism, and perhaps even hypocrisy.
In order for US scientists to frame their science as free, pure, and better, they needed a foil. Wolfe describes how they found their boogeyman in Trofim Lysenko. An agronomist keen to improve Soviet agricultural output, he began experimenting with “vernalization” in the 1920s. This is a well-known agricultural technique that involves rubbing seeds with ice or soaking them in cold water so that they can function as winter crops. Although the technique can produce some positive results — it was actually discovered by an American in the 19th century — Lysenko used his research to promote a version of heredity that was more compatible with Marxist teaching. He correspondingly denounced classical genetics of the type pioneered by Gregor Mendel in the mid-19th century and advanced by geneticists like Thomas Hunt Morgan a half century later. According to Lynsenko, “genes” were immaterial entities dreamed up by ideologically compromised Western biologists. He won Stalin’s favor and so his opponents were arrested, imprisoned, and sometimes killed. In 1948, at the outset of the Cold War, Lysenko proclaimed that his version of biology was endorsed by the Soviet state. All other approaches to studying genetics were forthwith banned. His reign devastated Soviet biology, enduring for over a decade after Stalin’s demise in 1953.