Derek Lowe thinks that this year's Nobel Prize in medicine was well deserved by its recipients who did important work in understand stomach ulcers. In our earlier entry about healthcare, we said the world needed more Jonas Salks, rogues who will take to prove their vision. It sounds like Barry Marshall and Robin Warren are of that strain as well:
Marshall and Warren pursued their line of research despite raised eyebrows and dismissive head-shaking, even to the point of ingesting a culture of bacteria to show that it could infect the stomach lining. (emphasis added) And they were absolutely correct, as the scientific world came to realize. An important (and encouraging) part of the story is how they were able to prove their case and completely change medical opinion within just a few years. It's good to think about that when people start going on about Dogmatic Intolerant Scientists and Science As A New Religion and so on.
Crazy ideas won't necessarily get you tossed out of the club. Crazy ideas with nothing to back them up will. But just come back with the evidence, and they won't be crazy any more. Show me the religion that takes its heretics and makes them bishops, won't you?
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