Commission on Pseudoscience

The Commission on Pseudoscience is a Russian scientific organisation under the , created on the initiative of Vitaly Ginzburg in 1998. Until 2018, the organisation was a member of the Commission on Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research, since 2018 it has been independent. The commission's task is to promote scientific knowledge and counter the discrediting of science and pseudoscientific activity. History The prerequisite for the emergence in the structure of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) of a separate body focused on countering the spread of pseudoscientific theories was their widespread distribution in Russia in the 1990s. Unproven theories were popular even in the highest echelons of power: in the book Scientists from the Highway, Academician of the RAS and future chairman of the Commission on Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research described the case when then Russia's president Boris Yeltsin's security guard Alexander Korzhakov introduced Yeltsin to the author of research on obtaining energy from stone, and Yeltsin approved the allocation of 120 million rubles to the "inventor", despite the protest of the scientific community. It is known from biographical materials that Yeltsin also believed in psychics, and Korzhakov's first deputy, Georgy Rogozin, provided the president's occult protection. Publications about the living dead, torsion fields and other pseudoscientific theories were published in major Russian media outlets, and even in the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta (RG). Kruglyakov wrote a response article, but due to criticism of the then head of the RG science department, Albert Valentinov, the response article was not published for a long time, despite complaints to the editor-in-chief. The article was published only after Kruglyakov's letter to the Deputy Minister of Science, but it was accompanied by a detailed commentary by Valentinov, in which he accused Kruglyakov of using administrative resources. The future Nobel laureate Vitaly Ginzburg in 1998 proposed to the President of the RAS Yury Osipov to create a special commission on pseudoscience. By pseudoscience, Ginzburg understood "all sorts of constructions and hypotheses that contradict firmly established scientific facts." The Commission on Pseudoscience and Falsification of Scientific Research was formed by the decree of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences No.