MedPage Today
The trouble with hyperbole is that it crowds out the argument worth having. By invoking Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet agronomist whose state-imposed theories devastated Soviet biology, NEJM avoided the reform case it was especially well positioned to make: that American science already has real problems of hierarchy, risk aversion, incumbent advantage, and opaque decision-making. The choice is not between pristine science and Soviet pseudoscience. It is between repairing a flawed but indispensable system and replacing it with one that is more openly vulnerable to political direction by this administration and the next.