Abstract
Recent moves by the US government to increase political control over federal research funding include having political appointees make decisions on what gets funded and withdrawn, and severe constraints on ability to fund international collaborations. They have rightly incurred condemnation and protest from across the medical community. The Editors of the 'New England Journal of Medicine' have likened the scale of the threat to the Soviet-era political promotion of Trofim Lysenko’s anti-Mendelian genetics, which had decades-long devastating consequences for agriculture and the development of biological sciences in the Soviet Union. Science, they argued, should not be politicized. Yet public health, as a research discipline as well as a practice, is inherently and inevitably political. The challenge is one of combining a political sensibility with a commitment to methodologically sound, open and critical science