Exiled Knowledge: When experts are inconvenient.

 
As anyone can see, even in this day and age, it is not uncommon for a group of a scientists or academicians to be discounted in order for an agenda to be advanced.  On this show, we talk about two examples of the subjugation of those with real expertise by those with a goal that justified any means.  The examples come from the most dominant forms of the communist ideology in the last century, China and the Soviet Union.  In China, when Mao was confronted with a declining political situation, he initiated the “Cultural Revolution”, of which one piece was to reject those with traditional knowledge in order to advance an ideologically pure Maoism.  In the second example, a marginally trained agronomist, Trofim Lysenko, set the study of genetics in the Soviet union back by a couple of decades in order to promote a specious set of concepts which happened to conform with the ideological aims of Stalin and his supporters.  
 
Seemingly disconnected from anything which could happen here, we still sometimes see people with little experience set aside the findings and consensus of a large group of experts who, even after years of dedicated study, find their insight to be deemed unacceptable to those who have the power.