Anomaly UK takes an unorthodox look at Lysenkoism:
Lysenko was not a politician, he was not a fraud, he was not an ideologue. Lysenko was a scientist. Lysenko, like the majority of scientists today, worked for the government. In the scientific controversy that involved Lysenko, he reported to his superiors (the government). That was his job as a senior member of the scientific establishment.
The scientific controversy was politically sensitive. Lysenko claimed that his scientific opponents were politically motivated: their science was based on bourgeois ideas of inherited superiority. That claim was not implausible, and Lysenko had no reasonable alternative but to draw the attention of his superiors to the possibility. The politicians did their job — they reached a conclusion about how to run a government department based on the advice they received and their judgement of that advice.
When we tell the story of Lysenkoism, we tell it in the knowledge that Lysenko was wrong. What we look for are the indications that the process was bad — that the wrong conclusion was being reached. My opinion is that there are no such indications. Yes, it was “politicized science”, but the main political force on the science was the belief that orthodox genetics was itself the product of the political assumptions of the Western scientists that developed it. That perception was probably exaggerated, if not totally erroneous, but it was a genuine belief honestly held.
The point is that for politics to mess up science, it is not necessary for anyone to let the political implications of a theory take precedence over the evidence. All that is necessary is for some participants to believe that other scientists are doing that. That is enough to cause theories to be suppressed, and thereby for the science to be systematically skewed.