Tommy Mischke (2:15)

Welcome ladies and gentlemen. On this episode, I have a guest named Matt Kaplan who has written a book called I Told you Scientists who were Ridiculed, Exiled and Imprisoned for Being Right. A fascinating book and I welcome the author. Now all the way from the uk, right, Matt, drizzly, cold and miserable over here.

Matt Kaplan (2:39)

Yes, Tommy, thank you for having me.

Tommy Mischke (2:41)

I greatly enjoyed your book, Matt, and it's one that tackles a topic that I've thought about often over the years. People who have been ridiculed in their time for being right about something. They simply were ahead of their time. And and of course, what happens when you daydream about something like this is you automatically think about who's being ridiculed today, who a generation from now will be thought of as heroic. And of course we don't know who those people are. But someone right now is being ridiculed, suffering greatly. And they're right.

Matt Kaplan (3:18)

Those are the dramatic examples. But what really keeps me up at night are the people who are ignored, dismissed because their ideas are just a little bit too far out there. And therefore they're not going to get the grant funding, they're not going to get the attention. This is where you have the real problem, where people who have those ideas that are just a little bit out there, they get dismissed in favor of those who have research that's a little more familiar. And as a result, we end up supporting research that isn't as brave. And right now we need brave ideas. So when we dismiss people for that, that's a real problem.

Tommy Mischke (3:58)

If you come along and you have an out there idea that's just a little wild for me and I gotta go into my pocket, if I've gotta fund something that seems a little out there, I'm gonna say, you know, I don't wanna sit here two years from now saying I wasted that money. Money is limited. I wanna fund something that of success.

Matt Kaplan (4:22)

If they've put out a methodology for testing the idea, and that is sound, they lay out how they're going to do it, why they're doing it, and why it matters. Clearly whether the idea is blue sky or not, as long as they've put the thought in and really considered how they're going to test it and run it and demonstrate that there's a reason for doing it, then that is something that should be considered. I'll give you an example. So Katikariko, who invented the MRNA vaccine that helped get us out of COVID Katikariko was messing with messenger RNA back in the late 90s, and every time you injected messenger RNA into people's bodies, it just fell apart in the lab. She was a goddess. She could create anything she wanted with mRNA, but as soon as it went into the body, it just broke apart. Nothing happened. And so for years, people ridiculed her and said, you're not going anywhere. MRNA is useless. It's a dead end. Ultimately. After being demoted, fired, and ultimately threatened with deportation by the U.S. department of State, she was picked up by a private company called Biontech, who partnered with Pfizer to create the COVID vaccine and she ended up winning the Nobel Prize. MRNA was considered really out there. Her methodology and all the statistics she wanted to run were perfectly sound. And she was just ridiculed because it was an out there idea.

Tommy Mischke (5:42)

What's your definition of out there?

Matt Kaplan (5:44)

MRNA? Everybody and Their dog said, MRNA is a useless technology to be exploring because every time you inject it into the body, it falls apart. It took Drew Weitzman, who won the Nobel Prize with Katikariko, to say the reason it's falling apart is because of immune reaction. The immune system is attacking the MRNA we're injecting in. We need to decorate the MRNA with some proteins to tell the immune system to back off. That was the key. We can go even further back in time. I mean, Ignaz Semmelweis is this Hungarian researcher who was trying to defeat a disease called properal fever, which killed one in 10 women when they gave birth back in the Victorian period. Semmelweis was devastated by the fact that he was losing all of these patients to the disease over and over again. Ultimately, he worked out that going to the morgue every morning, which is what all doctors did back in the day, to study the patients who had died previously, before going and putting their hands inside women to feel for the umbilical cord around the baby's neck. He worked out that this was a mechanism by which women were becoming infected with disease particles that were found on corpses. He didn't understand bacteria, but he totally figured out what was going on. And he said, all of us are responsible for this disease because we're not washing our hands with a powerful enough solution to get the smell of corpses off of our hands before we put them inside women. The rest of the medical community derided him as crazy. They said, sir, we are gentlemen. How dare you tell us that our hands are dirty? He was ultimately thrown in a lunatic asylum. He identified how people were becoming ill, but no one wanted to believe it. So the real issue in science is managing respectful debate as opposed to character assassination.

Tommy Mischke (7:31)

As a scientist yourself, you've watched a phenomenon that's bothered you. It's the phenomenon of the gloves off treatment of people who present opposing views, that they're so threatening to the orthodoxy, to the dominant view, that the attack really goes over the top and that this is a phenomenon that goes way, way back, at least to the days of Galileo. You talk about Galileo and the abuse he took for simply coming up with the idea that maybe we're not the center of the universe here. It's an old story in science.

Matt Kaplan (8:08)

I talk about a conference that I attended in 2013, 2014, where a PhD student was questioning dinosaur feathers. So for years, people in paleontology had said, hey, I think I know what color T Rex was, because I have found impressions of T Rex feathers in the Mud. And I can see the color proteins in the feathers. And these proteins look green to me. So that tells me that this limb was green. And this PhD student said, well, hang on a second. Are we sure that what we're looking at are the color cells? Is this actually correct? Are we seeing something else? So she did a very good thing and ran an experiment in a garden where she put a bunch of feathers of colored birds into the soil and left them there for a year. And then she dug them up and said, you know what? I cannot tell the difference between the pigment molecules and bacteria. They look exactly the same. And these were feathers that were only a year old. So what chance do we have that when we look at feathers that are 70 million years old of knowing the difference between a T. Rex pigment molecule versus some bacteria that were on the T. Rex feather when it rotted away? And you would have thought that she was destroying people's careers by the way they responded on the conference room floor. 21 years old, and she had 8, 9, 10, 70 something old white men screaming at her, using language that was beyond the pale. I really found that shocking because what she was doing was exactly what she's supposed to do. She's supposed to ask, are we doing things right? Is our analysis of T. Rex feathers correct? And she was questioning whether or not what we were doing was right and finding, you know what? I'm not sure it's right. And that would be distressing because there were a lot of papers on the covers of very important journals that had colored dinosaurs on them. And these folks were losing their minds, not because they really disagreed with her so much as the stuff that they were underpinning their careers on was being criticized. And rather than having a respectful conversation, it very rapidly moved into character assassination. And I ended up sitting with the researcher in a restaurant shortly thereafter. She was in tears. And then I sat with the researchers who had made the attack, taking my name tag off and hearing them speak terribly of her. And that's not the way science is supposed to operate. It doesn't get us anywhere.

Tommy Mischke (10:41)

This woman, this PhD student, was this Mary Schweitzer?

Matt Kaplan (10:46)

No, this is Alison Moyer, her ph. So Allison Moyer was Mary Schweitzer's PhD student. And Allison got attacked on the conference room floor for questioning, something that everyone was doing. She said, are we sure these are really pigment molecules? And that's a very healthy thing to do. And for asking that question, doing that very scientific thing, she got vigorously attacked. And actually, she got attacked the following year At a conference in Europe. It was so bad that the people running the conference had to publish rules of engagement for behavior at the conference so that people would understand that there were certain behaviors and certain language that they could no longer use. Allison ended up leaving paleontology behind. She gave up on science entirely. And who knows what beautiful things she might have discovered if she had stuck with it. But because the rest of the community was so aggressive, she moved on. And just imagine what would have happened if Caitlyn Carico, halfway through her MRNA research, said, you know what? Screw this, I'm going to go become a florist.

Tommy Mischke (12:00)

Yeah, I'm really struggling trying to figure out the extreme quality of these attacks with scientists who themselves will have to do work, have it peer reviewed, have people comment on it. They know what they would want to hear. If they put out something that might be controversial but was backed by solid research and science, and yet they're not granting that to others. I want to take the case of this obstetrician in the 1850s, Ignaz Semmelweis. Yeah, let's go with the idea of an out there view. A lot of doctors think of his view as out there because what he's identifying is something invisible. He realizes that. That if you dissect a corpse in the morning and deliver a baby in the afternoon, even washing your hands with soap leaves something on there that could infect the mother delivering the child and kill her. One out of ten were dying. Now these doctors are saying, hey, we washed with soap. Okay, we're fine. He says, yeah, but smell your fingers. Death is still on there. You can smell it. And he actually, I believe. Do I have this right? He went to some sewage treatment plant. This doctor went to a sewage treatment plant to get what was necessary to get the odor of death off of his hands so that he could feel his hand was actually clean for entering the mother, and only then did he feel it was clean. And he experiments and he finds, yes, they live if I do this.

Matt Kaplan (13:41)

Yes.

Tommy Mischke (13:42)

And he does real rigorous research testing. It's not just an idea. He tests it repeatedly and then goes to these guys, and they're scientists, too, and they're outraged to the point of ride him out of town on a rail. And I'm just wondering, why not say to him, here's why I think you're wrong. It must be difficult to hear that you have perhaps killed quite a few women inadvertently, not washing your hands with. What was the chemical ultimately? Chlorine.

Matt Kaplan (14:21)

Chlorine, yeah. It was chloride of lime. They were dumping in sewage systems to try to get rid of the odor.

Tommy Mischke (14:26)

He's recommending this level of cleaning. You have to find a way to get a guy who's been doing it the wrong way to say, interesting. Let me look into this. Interesting. Let me try this. The next baby I deliver, I'm going to try this. Because I do smell that on my hand after I do these dissections in the morning that is somehow killing these women. Crazy. How would that happen? I don't get it. But say, you're right. I would like to experiment with that. They don't say that. They don't say that. And I think across the board, you're arguing in your book, I told you so. The thing that is not said time and time again is interesting. I don't think you're right. But I'm gonna mull that over and maybe do some experiments of my own.

Matt Kaplan (15:15)

I think there's a psychological element to a lot of this. There's a guy named Michalis in Germany who read Semmelweis paper and went, I'm trying this. And he used it, and it worked. And he became so aware of his part that he had played in killing women because he was the doctor delivering the babies and inserting the bacteria into the birth canal that he threw himself under a train on his way to Hamburg because he couldn't cope with just the number of deaths that he had directly caused. Think about that for a moment. It's not just about sharing the idea that the medical method must change, but it's also instilling the notion in all these doctors. You killed these people. You were the mechanism. And I think a lot of people who didn't kill themselves like Mikalis just decided to stick their fingers in the ears and go la, la, la, la, la. Because they couldn't cope with the notion that this was true.

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Matt Kaplan (17:49)

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Tommy Mischke (17:52)

What? Free Brewery. Why are you doing that? Because Minneapolis St. Paul plumbing, heating and Air is giving away a furnace in February and thus it's Free Brewery. I don't want you to keep saying that. Spend a lousy 49 bucks for a tune up on your furnace, something your furnace has needed and you haven't done. Spend a silly 49 bucks getting a tune up you need anyway, and you enter to win a free furnace. This is only in February and February's almost over. Last chance, camper Dan. Get this scheduled now and possibly have an entire free furnace dropped on top of your house from a helicopter. What did you think think was going to happen? MSP. For the last 20 years, Matt Kaplan has covered science for the Economist. He has seen breakthroughs often occur in spite of, rather than because of the behavior of the research community. Support can be withheld for those who don't conform. His book I told you scientists who were ridiculed, exiled, even imprisoned for just being right. The PhD student who with her own research determined that it was unlikely we could know the colors of feathers on prehistoric animals, which she came up with, is now the prevailing wisdom.

Matt Kaplan (19:36)

It's still very much debated. But what is unquestionable is that she walked out of the science community permanently. That was the end of it. After the second battle in Europe where people were screaming at her, she just said, you know what? I'm not doing this anymore. Her mentor, Mary Schweitzer. Mary is a big deal in paleontology. I mean, she's amazing. She was the person who said, I think bits of blood are still inside dinosaur bones. That means that this kind of stuff that we thought rotted away millions of years ago is still intact and can be analyzed. She had to fight for over two decades after repeating experiments and being super cautious with everything. And she has ultimately been vindicated and really created an entirely new area of paleontology but she'll be the first to say it nearly killed her. And what's really important with Mary is Mary had Jack Horner. Jack Horner is a paleontologist of legend. He was the advisor on the Jurassic park films. He's the paleontologist who demonstrated that dinosaurs engaged in maternal care. He's a really big deal. And if you know Jack, you know Jack can be really scary. He's a big personality. And Jack is incredibly defensive of his academic offspring. And when people came for Mary to tear her down, Jack made it absolutely clear that you mess with Mary, you mess with me. And it's the power of the wingman. And poor Allison did not have the powerful wingman to back her up the way Mary did.

Tommy Mischke (21:12)

But it's so bizarre because we are talking about a wingman here. Really, really needed in a powerful sense. These aren't disagreements. These people are borderline out of control. Did you say Allison was her name?

Matt Kaplan (21:32)

Allison?

Tommy Mischke (21:33)

Yeah. This Allison was called all sorts of vulgarities. In the case of Mary Schweitzer, another researcher or scientist actually uttered the words to her. My goal in life is to destroy you.

Matt Kaplan (21:49)

Yes, and this is paleontology. We're not talking about medicine here where you're saving lives. This is, oh, I wonder what we know about something that lived 50 million years ago. And okay, fine, I get it. Sometimes that can be very relevant to modern biology. Trust me, I'm a paleontologist by training. I know, but people get so territorial about the ideas that they believe they know that they cease to ask questions or consider the possibility that they might be wrong. Or worse. They get territorial because they want to be first to, to defeat a problem. I write a lot about Joseph Lister in the book Joseph Lister, you want to talk about surgeons. Surgeons were not the top tier doctors that they are today. Back during the Victorian period, if you were a top notch surgeon, first of all, you were part of the Barbers Guild because that's what surgeons were. You would go and get your hair cut in the same place, you'd have your arm chopped off if it needed to be amputated. Same group of people, Joseph Lester, lived at a time when if you were going to have an amputation, you wanted to go to the surgeon with the knife that was most encrusted with dried blood, because that indicated that that was a surgeon who was really, really experienced. You wanted the surgeon with the apron encrusted with blood. And back in those days, if you had a surgery, you were very likely to die from post operative Infection. I mean, you can understand why, right? Bacterial over this stuff. So Joseph Lister, he did the same kind of thing that Semmelweis at about the same time in history and said, I wonder if I put carbolic acid all over the knife and pour it all over the wound when I'm cutting into people, if I can reduce post operative infection so people don't die after I cut them open. And he made huge strides forward and worked out, yes, it solved the problem. He was vigorously attacked by a separate surgeon named James Simpson. James Simpson led the charge against Joseph Lister for no reason other than the fact that James Simpson believed that to defeat postoperative infection, you needed to insert teeny little needles around the surgical site to spread the inflammation. And he wanted to be first to defeat postoperative infection and could not stomach the notion that Joseph Lister would beat him to it, rather than both of them being on Team Science and wanting to defeat the problem, saying, hey, look, you know what, I was wrong, you're right. James Simpson attacked so vigorously and Lister was quite a quiet man, that Lister went into retreat for almost two decades. Lister ultimately won because he was an excellent teacher in the classroom. And student after student came out of the University of Glasgow in Scotland learning Lister's technique. And they spread like wildfire across the uk, showing hospitals what Lister had done. And ultimately his technique just became adopted everywhere because it worked and James Simpson ultimately gave up. But it was a 20 year process for Lister to win and it didn't need to be that way. And it was only that way because Simpson wanted to be first. We see it all the time in science today. People get their knickers in a twist because they're going to lose, rather than saying, hey, look, I'm so glad you solved this problem I've been working on for 20 years.

Tommy Mischke (25:08)

Let's look at incentives. The way the system is set up, there is an incentive not to be part of a team. There's an incentive to stand alone, as the great one recognized. Correct?

Matt Kaplan (25:23)

Yeah. You see a lot of splintering and a lot of fiefdoms that get created, different labs rivaling one another. And look, a little bit of rivalry is actually a really good thing because if you have one lab trying to solve a problem, let's call it COVID 19, and you have another lab, two groups of 20 people in each lab, then you've now got two groups that are hopefully thinking a little bit differently and coming at the problem from different angles. Where we run into problems, Tommy, is when one group tries to sabotage the

Tommy Mischke (25:54)

other, sabotage and savage. The other?

Matt Kaplan (25:58)

Well, both, yes. The place where we most commonly see this is with hoarding of information. One lab simply not revealing all their sources because they don't want the rival lab to have it.

Tommy Mischke (26:10)

Is the reason behind that? Simple capitalism. The idea that no one's doing this altruistically, this is a money making venture.

Matt Kaplan (26:18)

I think capitalism doesn't help the fact that we've got labs that are each pushing to be first. I think the fact that the system rewards first so heavily creates real issues.

Tommy Mischke (26:30)

Yeah, you say rewards first rather than rewards best first doesn't imply best.

Matt Kaplan (26:34)

That's absolutely, absolutely true. And also, if you're a real team player and you share what you've got in your lab widely, you don't get any kind of reward for that. Just as he was taking off, I can't remember where he was flying, but it was on the eve of COVID 19. The researcher in China, at the last minute, before China said, don't you dare share anything with anyone outside of China. The researcher, whose name escapes me at the moment, sent the details of COVID 19 to Eddie Holmes in Australia. The virologist and Eddie put it online and every virology lab on the planet could suddenly download COVID 19 and see what the hell this thing was that we were up against. Because he got the genome for COVID 19. At that moment, it suddenly became a team effort. And it did become an extraordinary. I'm getting goosebumps saying this because it became a team effort. It really was all of us versus the disease and we need to be operating like that all the time.

Tommy Mischke (27:36)

That's fascinating to me. So if I just look at this from a vantage point of human psychology, the suffering globally became enough to touch the heart, where somebody said, okay, all right, we'll play this game differently. I'll put it out there for everybody. In this one case. This is a big enough deal, but it's fascinating what it takes to do that. It has to get really, really bad.

Matt Kaplan (28:03)

Perhaps because I've been at the Economist so long. So I think about it financially, but I look at it and think, oh, wow. People made the decision to really collaborate because the economy was crumbling. There was money to be lost here, so let's work together to save the economy. I mean, is that too morbid? I hope not.

Tommy Mischke (28:20)

Reading your book, I found myself wondering what is realistically, realistically the way out of this? You talked about that woman, Alison, who was not only ridiculed that first year, but then the second year, passing along her findings in Germany, the abuse she took was so great that they actually had to make rules, teach people manners. And I think, are we at that point where there has to be an approach like this across the board in science to call out people?

Matt Kaplan (28:52)

It actually goes further than that, because I talk about Louis Pasteur and his engagement to fraud and terrible behavior where he erased his competitors. I mean, he really destroyed them.

Tommy Mischke (29:01)

Tell people about Pasteur.

Matt Kaplan (29:03)

So Louis Pasteur is known for creating the rabies vaccine. He's known for creating the vaccine against chicken cholera, which is very much like human cholera, not related, but it causes the chickens to have such bad diarrhea that they die just like people. And chicken cholera was devastating the European poultry industry. It was a huge financial threat. Rabies, not so much. But rabies was a stuff of nightmares. If you got bit by a dog or a wolf, your wound would heal, and then four months later, you would become the beast, go crazy trying to bite other people, and then die. So Louis Pasteur is known for developing both these vaccines, but that's actually a lie. Jean Henry Toussaint was a country veterinarian in Toulouse who identified that he could destroy the cholera bacterium with heat and then inject that into animals, and then if the animals became infected with real cholera, they were resistant to it. Pasteur argued vociferously that Toussaint was wrong. So under pressure, he stole Toussaint's idea, lied about it, and then demonstrated that he created a better vaccine, when, in fact he did exactly what Henry Toussaint did and then denigrated Toussaint until he died a popper. He did exactly the same thing with Pierre Gaultier. Galtier was a big deal because he had worked out that if he took saliva from a dog that was rabid and injected it into a sheep and then injected it into a rabbit and then injected it back into a dog again. The dog would get rabies, but it would overcome the rabies and then become permanently resistant. It was a way of creating a vaccine. And Pasteur stole that technique, modified it, and then erased Gaultier from existence and effectively said, I developed this all on my own. Gaultier was nothing. This is terrible behavior. And this kind of behavior still happens very much today. Fraud is a very serious issue, and we're just talking about there's no penalty for treating a scientist terribly on the conference room floor. There's also no penalty if you engage in fraud. The worst you're going to get by engaging in fraud in science today is a wrap on the knuckles and put on administrative Leave. You don't do jail time. Let's be honest here. If you lie about your results from your research so that the National Science foundation gives you another million dollars to do more work, not only was the first funding a waste, but the next million dollars they give you to do follow up work is also fraudulent because you're lying about what your initial results were. If you or I, Tommy, were to go to a bank and steal $2 million, you and I would both do time. If you're a scientist and you're lying about the results to get money from the government, that's really serious and there should be hefty punishments for that. Similarly, if you behave badly on the conference room floor until you leave someone in tears because you use such foul language, at minimum you should be banned from the damn conference. You shouldn't be coming back to behave that way again. There should be repercussions and currently there are not.

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Tommy Mischke (35:00)

I sometimes think about the way people speak of politicians and how what often goes hand in hand with great ambition to be a great leader is big ego. And that you may get this leader, but it comes with crippling ego that has its own dark side. Whatever drives one to be a great scientist, a great researcher, to do something wonderful for humankind maybe comes with this Achilles heel. I cannot abide another's success. Any other man's success diminishes me. There is a feeling that these brilliantly talented scientists, researchers, they're doing this only partially for the good of humankind. Part of it is for them to feel like there's somebody. And I don't know how you ever take that out of the equation. I really don't.

Matt Kaplan (35:55)

Yeah, well, I mean, look, science is based upon humans. I think the gloves have come off more often in recent years, and I do wonder as to the reason for that. I think as funding has got scarcer, we've all ended up in a pressure cooker, and scientists become more desperate when the resources are limited. I think that's true for all people. People. But I do believe that the vast majority of scientists really don't want to be behaving the way that I report in the book. I don't think they want this to be the way things work. I think they really want to be working together for the sake of humanity. But they're in this ecosystem where you have a minority that do behave badly, and there need to be repercussions for that. I mean, look at the conference room floor when Allison was being vigorously attacked. There were like 300 people in there, and there were eight who decided to lose their shit and behave bad.

Tommy Mischke (36:48)

And how many were silent while those eight did that?

Matt Kaplan (36:51)

Yeah, but I think many were just aghast.

Tommy Mischke (36:56)

And I want to be clear. I'm aware that we have advanced. We have advanced as a civilization, thanks to the great work of a lot of scientists. Obviously, we owe a lot to science. What we're trying to identify here are problems that if they didn't exist, who knows how much better things could be or would be. I want to pass along something to get your reaction after reading your book. And I want to remind people the author is Matt Kaplan, my guest. The book is I told you scientists who were ridiculed, exiled and Imprisoned for being right. After I read your book, I just wanted to just keep exploring this whole topic. I became fascinated by it and I was looking at the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States and I want to get your reaction to this. This is just something I found when I was doing some leisure reading. One problem is an incentive structure that rewards quantity of publications over quality, hasty rather than thoughtful publication and research bias toward current areas of funding. Other problems include withholding of relevant data, selective reporting of positive rather than negative results, toleration of two week statistical criteria, error prone statistical analysis, inadequate reporting of design analysis data and computer programs and codes, unconscious biases that distort empirical design. I mean, it was really, it spoke to problems that had me thinking, is this being addressed out there? Are people looking into this? It is.

Matt Kaplan (38:31)

I mean, so I talk about the Howard Hughes foundation and the AHRQ Institute in California, which I think are models of research funding organizations that we should be striving to follow. So the AHRQ Institute and the Howard Hughes foundation, when they give you a grant, they're not expecting a turnaround in two or three years like the NSF or the National Institutes of Health. They expect you to turn around results very, very quickly. Howard Hughes and the AHRQ Institute, they're giving you for funding seven to nine years and they expect you to try stuff that is not going to work. They want you to push the boundaries and be wrong. Now, when you look at the kinds of results you get out of Howard Hughes and ark, yes, they have more experiments that result in, we tried it and it didn't work. But when they have a breakthrough, their breakthroughs are not little tippy toes forward. Their breakthroughs are big and this is statistically significant. We look at the number of results that come out of Howard Hughes and ARC versus the National Science Foundation. And when they have something that yields results, oh boy, does it. And it's often really interesting stuff. The reason why that happens is because those two groups, the AHRQ and Howard Hughes, are very comfortable with funding something that might fail. We need to get comfortable with that. We've been living for far too long believing that the only Good funding that goes into science is funding that goes to research that yields results we can do something with. It's really, really important that we try stuff that doesn't work and then report it.

Tommy Mischke (40:18)

If that is in fact shown to be the case, that when you give people more freedom to fail, the results that end up being positive are dramatically positive. If that were something we could just accept, absolutely, we should be encouraging the freedom and the creativity to have some wild ideas, some big failures on your way to some wondrous discoveries. I would love to know more about that in everything. I'd love to know about it in the space program. I'd love to know about it in all areas of science. When you free someone with your money to completely fail, you are more likely when they do succeed, to have it be in a dramatic way. I hope that's the story out there because it speaks to something fundamental about the human experience. When we don't tighten the parameters, that's when the magic happens.

Matt Kaplan (41:16)

Actually, I'm going to be moderating a session at a conference just in two days in Florida, where the researchers who I'm talking to, they've done amazing stuff. And the reason they've been able to do the amazing things they've done is largely because the funding has not been tightly restricted. When they said, hey, you know, we want to explore this, we know it's not directly related to what you're funding us to do, but we think it might be important. The funder, in this case the US military said, yeah, go for it. You had people in engineering and computer science and psychology all collaborating with the freedom to go where they wanted. And the results were absolutely outstanding. So allowing people to be wrong, allowing people to have the time to consider what they're doing and really get creative is so important. And because we're so obsessed with results, we bind ourselves so tightly that we can't even breathe. I think the key to unlocking really high octane science is taking a step back and saying, look, folks, here's funding. Go and ask some interesting questions. That's what it's all about.

Tommy Mischke (42:29)

I want to pass along something else for your reaction. En route to publication, scientists work hard to correct their own findings and conclusions, knowing the high costs of losing reputation when presenting false results. However, once having reached the point of publication, the extensive investment of their own human capital can make scientists quite defensive. They tend to resist charges of error. Francis Bacon noted in 1620, way back in 1620, men become attached to certain speculations, either because they fancy themselves the authors and inventors thereof, or because they have become most habituated to them. Once again, we have this human nature problem. When you've worked your ass off for years for some discovery that you think is solid, and for a while it's thought to be solid, and someone comes along to knock it down, that's your life they're knocking down. You wrote in your book that we take great comfort in our paradigms. Once we attach to a paradigm, once we glom onto something that we think, this is how it works, this is how things are right here. We've figured it out. And here I can cite a couple things I read online that back that up. Once you settle into that and you kind of know how it is, how it works, how things are, you do not want to surrender that it is too difficult to live a life where the ground under you is constantly being shaken.

Matt Kaplan (44:02)

Yeah, and the shaking is happening more and more often now too. Our scientific community has got so large. It used to be you would go 30, 40 years before a researcher had to really question something that underpinned all their work. Now it could be every three or four years or less. The changes are very rapid and it's hard for us as humans to adapt so quickly, especially as we get older. But we have to do it. We have to be willing to accept that we might be wrong. I'm going to be giving a lecture at Harvard next week about function of science and dealing with errors. And I had a scientist who was contacted because another researcher looked at the data sets and said, I think you've got errors in there. And to his credit, the one who had written the paper said, oh gosh, can you show me which errors you spotted? And they identified an error where a number was corrupting a bunch of the data sets. Then they reworked the experiment together and published a new paper together correcting things. I wish we could all sit in a circle and sing Kumbaya like that more often. It was amazing. One researcher identified an error made by another and that first one was able to be gracious enough to say, please show me what I did that was wrong. And then not only did a follow up paper get published showing what had gone wrong, but. But they worked together on it and now they regularly collaborate. That's what's supposed to be happening. But because we get so invested and so scared and I think this is where the gloves come off and this is a real issue. If we were nice to each other and didn't beat the ever loving shit out of one another when challenging one Another in the conferences, I think the fear would be mitigated somewhat. It's the aggression that I think a lot of people are very worried about.

Tommy Mischke (45:55)

You cite modern cases where people left their passion, they left the world that they wanted to spend their life working in because of the abuse. Just left it behind. The saddest thing in the world to see someone run out of the world of science because they dared question something. I'm gonna do something else for a living. This is a blood sport. This science world is a blood sport.

Matt Kaplan (46:19)

It's not just bad for them, is really bad for you and I. Because when you have someone who's doing early work in cancer and they come up with a new mechanism for how to defeat the cancer cell, if that person gets run out of the field because everyone disagrees with them, and not only are we not doing a favor to that person by hearing them out, but we are doing a tremendous act of self harm because it damages the potential for that person's idea to make its way into medicine and really help us, all of us.

Tommy Mischke (46:53)

I used to do a lot of shows, radio shows, years ago, on cancer, because I was fascinated by the fact that there had been a war declared on cancer in the early 70s, and my shows would have been in the late 90s, early 2000s. And I just didn't see with the major organ cancers that there was a great deal of progress. The advances we made in aids, for instance, were so much more impressive. And I started to do shows on it. And this was a very competitive field where people had a lot at stake in hanging on to old paradigms. The idea being for everyone out there dealing with cancer, there were quite a number of people making a living off the treatment of cancer. And that money picture muddied things often. And it's a tough world to operate in if you're altruistic.

Matt Kaplan (47:50)

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I talk to cancer researchers all the time who really genuinely want to do the right thing, and they get shafted constantly. There's so much money to be made. There's real pushback and a lot of really bad behavior.

Tommy Mischke (48:11)

There is a very specific car dealer voice. I'm not doing that one. It's too loud, it's too urgent. And it sounds like someone trying to get me in their basement where they're gonna do weird things to me. At fury Motors, it's different. They've done everything differently since 1963. You see, when you've been around for over six decades, you realize that people in South St. Paul and Stillwater and Waconee and Forest Lake where Fury Motors is found. They don't actually want the deal of a lifetime. Time, time, time. They just want a car that they can love from someone. They don't have to watch their wallet around. Whether you need a brand new Jeep, a heavy duty gmc, a Ford, a Buick, a Chrysler, or any make or model of used car, Fury has it. They have all of it. But the what isn't the point here, it's the where. People come to Fury because they've been the steady hand in Minnesota since 1963. Fury Motors, four locations. One way of doing things. Stop by, they're waiting for you. I want to ask you about one other thing. Peer review. I have heard you say that, contrary to the pitch that has been out there, that sausage and laws are both things. You don't want to watch being made. Best that you don't observe how sausage and how law come to be. The idea being that it's so messy it would be disgusting to you. You say in science it is critical that people understand how we advance scientifically, how it works, what actually is involved in good science.

Matt Kaplan (50:10)

I think a lot of people don't understand what's involved with science and I think that's part of the problem. If we talk about who's doing what, how they did it and why they did it, we start to educate the populace. I mean, the newspaper I've worked for throughout my entire adult's life has argued laws and sausages. You never want to see them made is wrong. You do want to know how laws are made. Because if you're going to be a voting member of the public, you need to understand what's really going on there so that you can vote in people who can do good things for you. I agree with the same sentiment with regards to science. If you want to see the world get better, better, you need to understand how science is operating. And more importantly, you need to understand the pressures that are being brought to bear that lead science to behave in not the best of ways. Because ultimately legislation is a way to try to shift it in a better direction. Of course more funding helps, but as I've mentioned already, there are a lot of ways to get science to behave better by both carrot and stick. Certainly rewarding people for working together is a viable option and definitely punishing people who engage in really bad behavior. The punishments could be upped to create a disincentive to people doing what they shouldn't be doing.

Tommy Mischke (51:31)

I mentioned peer review. I've heard you say Peer review is broken.

Matt Kaplan (51:36)

Peer review is like a clunky old engine. Will it get us from point A to point B? Yes, it will. Will it do so efficiently? Not in its current form. Peer reviewers, when they look at the papers of their peers, sometimes you have peers who are very harried and don't have the time. Because peer review, you don't get paid anything for it. Most of the time you're doing it as a service to the scientific community. Scientists are already under so much pressure and have to do so much that they don't get the time allocated to actually really look through a paper as well as they should sometimes. And that leads peer review to be not as effective as it really could be. Is it broken? No, I don't think peer review is broken. I think peer review could do with a tune up.

Tommy Mischke (52:26)

Let me pass this along to you and get your reaction. Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. They're not very good at this. There are several studies I looked at. 30% of the major flaws were caught in one study, 25% in another, 29% in another. And these were critical flaws, saying that a study was randomized, controlled, and it wasn't and it was missed. A graph was put in the study that clearly showed no effect, yet the authors drew conclusions as if there was effect not caught. 70%. There is some real world data out there that fraudulent papers can get published and do all the time. And I'm trying to figure out what is going on. As you say, there's no great incentive to review rigorously.

Matt Kaplan (53:24)

The other side of it is you must publish or you will perish as a scientist. And so, I mean, the number of papers that are coming out is just vast and it goes up and up and up. And we do not have the resources to be able to thoroughly check all of these things. There's just too much content and there's not enough time being spent really thoughtfully thinking through the experiments and putting the time into them that they often need. And this is largely due to the fact that we expect results fast. We're addicted to speed here. Unless we put the brakes on and slow things down a bit so that we can think a bit more, we're going to continue to have these problems.

Tommy Mischke (54:11)

Can you tell me the story of the cold mice, Betsy Rapacki?

Matt Kaplan (54:17)

Yes. Oh, man, this takes me back. So I was living in Wimbledon at the time. I was talking to Betsy about her research that she had Done. Where she demonstrated that mice that were kept in standard laboratory enclosures had different immune function to mice that were kept in much warmer enclosures. Mice like to live in holes, usually next to radiators. They live in holes where there are lots of little other mice that keep them very, very warm. And being left in a spacious, well, aerated cave in A lab at 70 degrees Fahrenheit is a very alien environment for a mouse. And Betsy asked the question, is being cold bad for these mice? And the answer to that question was, well, it's not necessarily bad for them, but if you give the mouse a disease and then run experiments with drugs on that mouse, if that mouse is at a toasty 85 or 90 degrees Fahrenheit, it will often fare much better than a mouse that's held at 7 degrees Fahrenheit. And I'm putting all this in Fahrenheit because presumably most of your listeners are American.

Tommy Mischke (55:34)

Thank you. Translated in my head, 7 is pretty damn cold. That's what the labs are at.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Matt Kaplan (55:43)

No, no, 70. 70.

Tommy Mischke (55:45)

70. I'm sorry. Okay.

Matt Kaplan (55:46)

It would be like 19 degrees C, whatever the hell that is. And so she started saying, look, we're doing all these biomedical experiments with mice and we're testing drugs on them, but all these mice are basically hypothermic. They're used to much warmer temperatures than we are. All these experiments where we've never run the experiment with mice at warmer temperatures. These drugs might work if the mice weren't hypothermic, or the drugs might work differently if the mice aren't hypothermic. Were basically running tests, thousands and thousands and thousands of them, on mice that are being immune, sabotaged by being cold. And you would have thought she was screaming heresy because nobody wanted to listen to what she was saying. It's taken her. I mean, we're talking about 15 years now. She is finally getting attention, demonstrating that there is an issue here and it needs to be addressed. And the reason, Tommy, because people didn't want to change the enclosures and labs. It was going to be expensive.

Tommy Mischke (56:46)

Well, think about it. Think about what this woman was saying. She was calling into question worldwide research for decades.

Matt Kaplan (56:57)

Yes.

Tommy Mischke (57:00)

I mean, that throws a wrench into the whole thing. Wait a minute. It matters what temperature the room is at for the mice. Oh, my God. Look at all the experiments we've done on these things. Who is the famous person who said something like, science is just a series of funerals?

Matt Kaplan (57:19)

Oh, God. Yeah, that rings a bell.

Tommy Mischke (57:21)

Somebody said that the idea being that someone just comes along and puts a knife into the heart of what was believed before, and then someone else comes along and puts the knife in the heart of the new thing believed. And then someone else comes along and takes that, and on and on and on we go. And she had one big knife going into one big heart there.

Matt Kaplan (57:44)

And honestly, the fact that that was 2011 and now we're in 2026, I'm both simultaneously shocked and totally unsurprised that we do not have 50 replication experiments with mice now at warmer temperatures. I know about research being done at Roswell Park, Roswell park in New York. I know there's a researcher there doing cancer work with mice at both standard lab temperatures and warm temperatures, and that he is getting massive results. I'm not allowed to say the name because he hasn't submitted it to the journal yet and it needs to be approved. It is such a big deal. But we should have been doing this 15 years ago when she raised the alarm. And the fact that we haven't is because old habits die hard and people don't like changing. But we really should.

Tommy Mischke (58:34)

All of this and much more can be found in Matt Kaplan's book, I Told you'd so. Scientists who were ridiculed, exiled and imprisoned for being right. It's been a pleasure speaking with you, Matt. Thanks so much for your time.

Matt Kaplan (58:51)

My pleasure to be here, too. Thank you so much for having me.

Tommy Mischke (58:53)

It.