When you think of the most deadly people in history the names that pop into your mind are typically your power hungry sociopaths... you know... Hitler, Stalin, Mao... Pol Pot.  If you turn back the clock or know your history you might toss up names like Gengis Kahn, Tamerlane, Julius Caesar or Ashurbanipal II. You might also consider Leopold II , Charles V, or Ivan The Terrible. Whatever you come up with, its typically a head of state or at least someone who with military power. You don't think of a poor softspoken peasant with little education that has some interesting ideas about plants. Nonetheless... one man... Trofim Lycenko may have been responsible for more deaths than at least half the people on your top ten list... and chances are you probably haven't heard of him. If you have, then you might not know the whole story. This is a cautionary tale of what happens when politics and science become one and the same.  Millions of people died directly because of his false ideas. But it's deeper than that. What happens when the idea of "truth" itself is called into question? What happens when a state adopts a view of reality that is contrary to reason itself?  What happens when contradicting an "official" narrative guarantees losing your job, your freedom or even your life?  Could you stand up to that or would you just look the other way? In the Gospel of John, Pilate famously asks: "What is Truth?" To live in the Soviet Union was to ask yourself that question on a daily basis.  The vast majority of people quietly went along with it. Why?  After spending nearly a decade in Stalin's Gulag and another twenty years as a "free"  Soviet citizen,  Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:

"The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence, in the same way as betrayal. Every wag of the tongue can be overheard by someone, every facial expression observed by someone. Therefore every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common lie."