I Told You So!: A Guest Post by Matt Kaplan

Matt Kaplan examines the long, complex history of scientists being dismissed for researching new, life-saving methods. Read on for an exclusive essay from Matt on writing I Told You So!.

I remember the moment vividly. “You can’t write what I just told you in your article.” I was baffled, “Why not?” A long sigh came from the other side of the phone as the researcher said with exhaustion, “because this is immunology Matt, and I’m a woman.”

It was the middle of the pandemic and the world was in lockdown (again). I was once more home schooling my five-year-old while trying to provide my weekly 500-word piece for the science section of The Economist. The infection rate for Covid-19 was going through the roof and here I was having yet another conversation with a researcher about why I could not publish something relevant to world health.

The reasons for self-censorship were not always related to gender. Far from it. I had heard, “my idea challenges those held by my PhD supervisor and he will kill me if you publish what I just said,” “there is no way I am ever going to get funding for what I just told you so best not to even mention it,” and “you can’t quote that, others in my field will laugh me out of a job.” Given that people were, you know, actually dying in the midst of all this, I found such comments astonishing. Had science always been this dysfunctional?

Curious, I delved into history to find out. Obviously, I knew about Galileo and his torture by the Inquisition for proposing that the earth orbited the sun and not vice versa.[*] Yet, there were so many others. Some, like the Hungarian Ignaz Semmelweis and the American Oliver Wendell Holmes, made major breakthroughs but were treated terribly simply because the world was not ready to hear what they were saying. Some, like Joseph Lister, fell victim to fierce attacks from rival scientists who could not tolerate the revelation in Lister’s work that their own ideas might be wrong. Others, like Louis Pasteur, are remembered as heroes but engaged in considerable villainy to get where they did. All of these historic researchers have modern counterparts and that is a problem.

From the energy crisis and feeding eight billion people to defeating cancer and coping with climate change, humanity is facing urgent challenges. We need science running like a well-oiled machine rather than a clunky old engine prone to breaking down at the worst possible moment. While I appreciate that it is tempting to blame recent funding cuts as the problem, focusing only on money rather misses the point. The biggest problems in science have been around for centuries. We no longer have time for researchers to be sidelined or attacked for having ideas that are too new or too inconvenient. We need more healthy debate and less character assassination.

Fortunately, longstanding problems are not the same as unsolvable ones. In I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled and Imprisoned…For Being Right, you will find a spirited and insightful exploration of the history behind these systemic issues and, more importantly, a discussion about what we can do to consign them to the scientific scrap heap.

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[*] Although the Galileo tale that we all know is actually an extraordinary lie created by the Vatican to protect its reputation.