@wbtd A bit of stretch. Lysenko devastated Soviet biology, agriculture and genetics for 2 decades and decimated Soviet scientific community (Vavilov).
The current UK policy doesn't reject science, but science doesn't make risk analysis and policy decisions for you - it just provides you with facts to base them on. The UK government made a risk-based decision that is definitely driven by economy but is not unscientific in the way Lysenko did.
> does *not*, by the way, mean that scientific research is paralysed
That what I was just going to point out - various biases and flaws of scientific processes in different countries are well known.
I could talk for hours about how science if broken in Poland and Russia, but none of these actually prevents them from doing *some* good science.
These biases and flaws just prevent them from realizing their full potential but this is far away from how it worked in USSR.
The one between 19-20th century seems to be only discussed in Polish-language sources.
During WW2 - best source is probably Jan Karski "Story of a secret state" (widely available in paper and e-book)
And the one in communist Poland: "The flying university in Poland, 1978-1980", H Buczynska-Garewicz - Harvard Educational Review, 1985 and "The Flying University" C Pszenicki - Index on Censorship, 1979
Regarding competitive - ok, but where it isn't?
Competition is primarily about *individual* ambitions and these can be reinforced by the system but are not given exclusively by the system.
In Soviet science there was just as much competition as in the West and the greatest minds (like Sergey Korolyev) were quite a dicks in person. Same in open-source which is quite collaborative by nature but people like Linus Torvalds are both great and dicks at the same time...
So it seems like this competition and ambition thing seems to be an intrinsic feature of homo sapiens character and I don't think there's any culture in the world that successfully curbed this trait *and* at the same time delivered some great discoveries.
Happy to learn more about this - who should be learning from?
@wbtd One can grab pretty much everything easily from https://libgen.is/ these days :)
Read anything in the past 40 years of STS studies. Scientific research is not politically neutral, but to claim that it is neutral is a cornerstone of extractive capitalism. That does *not*, by the way, mean that scientific research is paralysed and unable to produce good research; see Sarah Harding's _Objectivity and Diversity_ for a good exposition of one model for how plural socially embedded scientifc research programmes that acknowledge differences of power, entitlement, culture, gender and so forth produce *better* science.