American Lysenkoism

This is like Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union where we had a situation in which the government decided that Lysenko knew what was going on and everybody else didn't. And the only way that that got undone, if I recall the story correctly, is that Stalin had to keep around his theoretical physicists because his power derived from nuclear weapons.... So somebody asked, why didn't Stalin get rid of his dissident physicists? And the answer was, well, Stalin was always crazy, but he was never stupid. Which is a great line. The issue is that it then fell to the physicists to go save biology from the Soviet biologists who had been trained in Lysenkoism. So in part, we have to purge ourselves of our American Lysenkoism. And this is coming in large part from Public Health, from large pharmaceutical corporations that have the ability to pay for things when other people can't. Roughly speaking, we're in a terrible spot where we're being incentivized in science to destroy our own credibility.

- Eric Weinstein on Renewing our Belief in the Future of Humanity with Eric Weinstein (YouTube Content)