Told You So! with Matt Kaplan

Summary

StarTalk Radio: Special Edition – "Told You So!" with Matt Kaplan

Host: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Guests: Matt Kaplan (Science Correspondent, The Economist)
Co-hosts: Gary O’Reilly, Chuck Nice
Date: April 3, 2026

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Episode Overview

This StarTalk Special Edition, inspired by Matt Kaplan’s latest book, “Told You So: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right,” dives deep into the history of scientists who challenged the consensus, faced persecution, ridicule, or exile, yet ultimately transformed our understanding of the world. The discussion weaves through the fraught intersections of science, society, medicine, politics, and ego, exploring both the personalities and system-level forces that shape scientific progress—and hinder it.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Science and Its Confrontations With Society

[04:14]

• The Early Days: Kaplan frames the longstanding tension between scientific discovery and entrenched interests: religion, government, tradition, and even science itself.
• Neil: “There was a time before which anything organized fell under religious institutions... including any efforts put forth by scientists.”
• Matt: Outlines the birth of the scientific method in the 1500s–1600s, when figures like Galileo challenged the Church’s Earth-centered cosmology.

2. The Birth of the Scientific Method

[04:38] – [06:19]

• Galileo: Pioneered the scientific method; his battle with Grassi over comets led to "Il Saggiatore," which established systematic inquiry: question, investigate, conclude.

  “Sagittaire effectively established what we know today as the scientific method.” – Matt Kaplan [05:30]

3. Historical Medicine: From Humors to Data

[06:33] – [11:19]

• Humor Theory: Prevalent in Renaissance medicine. Treatments like bloodletting and leeching were the norm.
• Pierre Louis (France, 19th c.): Questioned leeching’s effectiveness, ran comparative data-based experiments, and found early application of leeches increased death rates.

  “He did the extraordinary thing of actually recording his data sets... the application of Galileo’s scientific method in medicine.” – Matt Kaplan [09:04]

• Consequences included being ignored, shunned, or forgotten, due to industry and entrenched economic interests (“leech lobby”).

4. Economic and Social Forces in Science Suppression

[11:19] – [13:23]

• Discusses how sub-industries, profit, and established interests resist change, a dynamic still seen today in pharma (Gary, Chuck counter discussion on pharmaceutical rigor).

5. The Semmelweis Story: Tragedy of an Outcast Innovator

[13:24] – [18:15], [21:34] – [27:53]

• Ignaz Semmelweis (Vienna, 1840s):
  • Noticed dramatic differences in puerperal fever rates between nurse- and doctor-tended wards—21% vs. 6%.
  • Hypothesized contagion from doctors’ hands (after autopsies); introduced handwashing with lime, dropping death rates from 21% to zero.

    “The infection rate dropped... from 21% to zero.” – Matt Kaplan [25:00]

  • Politically inept, insulted superiors, and was exiled and institutionalized, ultimately dying in an asylum.

    “He was fired, even though he had dropped the rate to zero. He was exiled back to Hungary, and eventually... put into an insane asylum where he died.” – Matt Kaplan [27:36]

6. Louis Pasteur: The Genius and the Asshole

[27:57] – [35:47]

• Pasteur’s Skills: Brilliance in both science and self-promotion, always on the right side of politics.
• Moral Complexity: Pasteur often took (or stole) credit for breakthroughs, e.g. with the anthrax and rabies vaccines— discrediting rivals and covering up failures.

  “When his journals and lab notebooks were opened 100 years later, it was revealed that this was entirely fraud.” – Matt Kaplan [32:55]

• Contrast with Semmelweis: Pasteur thrived by mastering narrative and court politics; Semmelweis perished as an outsider.

7. The Power of Narrative, Bias, and Rejection

[35:54] – [38:20]

• Astrology, Tradition, and Seasonality in Medicine: The role of persistent narratives (e.g. stars influencing health).
• Societal Inertia: Personal and institutional self-interest, not just ignorance, keeps outdated practices alive—doctors comfortable with lucrative, status-quo arrangements had little reason to listen to outliers.

8. Modern Echoes: Kati Karikó, mRNA, and Academic Gatekeeping

[44:31] – [49:38]

• Kati Karikó (mRNA): Pioneered mRNA therapeutics, repeatedly denied grants, demoted, and nearly deported, but persisted—her research underpins COVID-19 vaccines and eventually won her the Nobel Prize.

  “She landed at this little pharma company called BioNTech... and then the pandemic hit, and they said, okay, screw that. Could you create a COVID vaccine with this? And she did.” – Matt Kaplan [45:51]

• Systemic Barriers: Lack of diplomatic skills or mainstream narrative skills hinders outsiders, with parallels to Semmelweis.
• Grant Funding: Discussion of how institutions reward rhetoric and pedigree over risky or innovative ideas; proposals from outsiders often dismissed for lack of polish, not substance.

9. Solutions: Funding, Lotteries, and Communication

[56:44] – [62:47]

• Democratizing Research Grants: Some organizations use lotteries to allocate funding among “good enough” proposals, counteracting subjective human bias (accent, institution, unfamiliar ideas).

  “You’re left now with 350 grant applications, but let’s say you can only give 50... rather than try to discern the difference between good, great and excellent... you’re going to select them at random.” – Matt Kaplan [57:41]

• Need for More Funding: Underfunding increases pressure for fraud and conservatism.

10. Science’s Human and Institutional Limits

[62:47] – [67:31]

• Can We Learn? Will history’s lessons foster progressive change, or will we keep repeating patterns of suppression?
• Importance of Conservatism:

  “The conservatism of science is not just necessary, Neil. It’s critical. It’s healthy. It’s like the immune system...” – Matt Kaplan [65:37]

• Distinction: Skepticism is essential; character assassination and institutional retaliation are not.

11. Science as a Process, Not an Answer Machine

[71:59] – [76:00]

• COVID-19 as a Case Study:
  • Science’s public image was as an “answer machine,” but the pandemic exposed the true, iterative nature of research—process, self-correction, and uncertainty.

  “Science debates, it argues, it disproves. And that’s normal.” – Matt Kaplan [71:59]

  • Need for better science communication: ongoing, transparent updates about knowledge, uncertainty, and change.

  “Every week... what they should have done was get up there and said, this is what we know today... Check back in a week in case some of these results have changed...” – Neil deGrasse Tyson [73:27]

• Public Expectation: Many treat science like religion—providing fixed answers—rather than an evolving field.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “That was the first hammer blow to old methodologies.” – Matt Kaplan on Louis’ medical trials [09:04]
• “You know, the leech lobby...” – Neil deGrasse Tyson [11:03]
• “What he should have done was cure egos before he tried to cure the disease of childbed fever.” – Gary O’Reilly [17:08]
• “He was fired, even though he had dropped the rate to zero.” – Matt Kaplan on Semmelweis [27:36]
• “I think you called him... brilliant, tenacious... and then you finished with asshole.” – Gary O’Reilly on Louis Pasteur [28:08]
• “Pasteur’s treatment of [rival scientists]... was pivotal to him getting money.” – Matt Kaplan [34:59]
• “The conservatism of science is not just necessary... It’s like the immune system.” – Matt Kaplan [65:37]
• “Skepticism is essential; character assassination is not.” – Matt Kaplan [67:31]
• “Science’s process was exposed in some pretty big ways [during COVID]... The debate that occurs in science is part of science.” – Matt Kaplan [51:24]
• “Science is not an answer machine.” – Matt Kaplan [74:58]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [04:38] – Galileo and the Scientific Method
• [09:04] – First uses of data-based inquiry in medicine; resistance to change
• [13:24]/[21:34] – The full Semmelweis story and its tragic aftereffects
• [28:07] – Louis Pasteur’s cut-throat rise and legacy
• [44:31] – Kati Karikó and innovation despite systemic barriers
• [56:44] – New approaches for grant funding and reduction of bias
• [62:47] – Will history teach us or repeat itself?
• [71:59] – Lessons from COVID-19: conveying the real scientific process

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Themes and Takeaways

Science is inherently contentious and slow to change by design—skepticism and reproducibility protect us from errors, but they can also sideline innovators when social, political, or personal dynamics get in the way.

Major breakthroughs have often come at personal costs for their discoverers—ostracism, exile, or theft by better-connected rivals.

The structures and narratives in science funding and communication need reform:

• More randomized grant funding can increase innovation.
• Science, journalists, and the public need better education about the iterative, self-correcting nature of scientific knowledge.

In today's climate, misunderstanding science as “an answer machine” leads to disillusionment and anti-science sentiment; candidly presenting science as a process—uncertain, sometimes messy, and always evolving—is essential for public trust.

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Final Insights

• Matt Kaplan: “It is incredibly important for there to be debate... What’s not okay is to engage in character assassination… Science has got us so far. We don’t want to abandon what we’ve got, but we want to make sure the people with the great ideas... still get the attention that they need.” [51:24]
• Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Can you make this sensible to someone who’s not an expert? And that doesn’t happen enough in the sciences... That’s a big problem.” [72:48]
• Chuck Nice: “Most people look at science like religion. Religion has answers... That’s not how science works. And I think that’s the first thing that people need to realize.” [75:04]

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“Keep looking up!” – Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Transcript

[A]

Startalk Radio is supported by Claude from Anthropic Science isn't about rushing to conclusions. It's about sitting with the uncertainty until it starts to make sense. Claude is the AI built for that kind of thinking and Anthropic committed to not running ads in Claude. So when you're chasing down an idea, there's nothing pulling you towards someone else's agenda. Try Claude for free at Claude AistaTalk and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner. This episode is brought to you by Progressive where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average. Plus auto customers qualify for an average of 7 discounts. Quote [e-mail] to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June and May 2023. Potential savings will vary. Discounts not available in all states and situations.

[B]

Coming up on Special edition. I told you so.

[A]

What'd you tell me now?

[B]

Said some scientists that have known what no one else did.

[C]

Yeah. After they were prosecuted, tortured and killed.

[B]

Yes, Coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where SC and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. When you hear Special Edition, it means Gary O'Reilly is in the house.

[A]

Hey, Neil.

[B]

Gary, former soccer pro.

[A]

Allegedly.

[B]

That's. No, we're not alleging that. There's a wiki page of you in a soccer outfit.

[A]

Yes, I was.

[B]

So we can see your hairy legs.

[A]

Thank you, Chuck.

[B]

Good to have you, man.

[C]

Yes, no wiki pages with my Harry Lades, unfortunately.

[B]

So comedian, actor and the lord of Nice. There it is. So, Gary, what show did you put together today?

[A]

Interesting one if you think for centuries science has at times aligned with and fought against religion, who, government, establishment and even itself. But when the sticky up nail confronts historic theories and shouts change, it gets hammered. So who were these histories, confrontationists, the groundbreakers of science and medicine, the ones whom we owe so much. All right, with that said, let's bring on our guest now.

[D]

Ooh.

[B]

Okay, we've got with us reporting in from UC Davis. Is that correct, Matt Kaplan? Matt, welcome to StarTalk.

[D]

Hey, thanks for having me, Neil. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Davis, California right now.

[B]

There you go. You're a science correspondent at the Economist. Love science correspondent. You know who doesn't have science correspondents anymore? Cnn. Cnn, right. They're always calling me up to do their job.

[C]

And you're like, pay somebody, you cheap bastards.

[B]

Author a bunch of books, you know. My favorite title among these is the Science of Monsters. That's just.

[C]

Oh, that's cool, man.

[B]

That's the funnest thing.

[C]

That's cool. So that's about Jeffrey Epstein ever. Oh, see what. Oh, see what I did there?

[B]

I see what you did there.

[D]

I have heard that joke before, too.

[B]

And your latest in 2026, told you so. Scientists who were ridiculed, exiled and imprisoned. Yeah, for being right. St. Martin's Press.

[C]

And that's. But see, that is the problem with scientists. They never go, told you see that? See that? See what I said? I knew I was right. They never do that. And we need some of that from science right now.

[B]

So a book such as that, Matt, it would be full of anecdotes and stories of cases throughout history. We don't do enough history on this program, I don't think.

[A]

Well, now we're gonna get a chance

[C]

to wander down the memory lane.

[B]

We're gonna get a taste of that. So, Matt, why don't you start us out? Because there was a time before which everything, anything organized fell under religious institutions, including any efforts put forth by scientists. So can you comment on that fact? And when did that science sort of begin to tear free from those shackles?

[D]

So you gotta go back to the 15 and 1600s. And this is really a time where the church was pretty adamant that the Earth was the center of the universe. And it was problematic because people invented the telescope. And folks started looking through the telescope and noticing the movements of things like comets and planets and saying, well, hang on a second. I've plotted where those things are going. And my calculations suggest that we are not the center. There might be something else that is the center. It might be the sun. And unfortunately, the Church didn't like that. That was heresy. And it could get you into an awful lot of trouble. And this is very much where Galileo Galilei found himself long, long ago. And in fact, it became a huge political issue in his time. And it really started out with his Discourse on Comets, which was a battle with this other mathematician named Orego Grassi, who was saying, look, I think the comets are going around the Earth. And Galileo was fairly certain they were not. And he wrote this piece called Discourse on Comets and eventually wrote a book called Il Sagittore, which eviscerated Grassi not based upon anything else other than his methods and Sagittarius. So important, because Sagittoire effectively established what we know today as the scientific method. I'm going to ask a question, I'm going to explore it and then come up with some conclusions based upon what I found. And no one had really done that before Galileo, and it was a really big deal.

[A]

So when, when do you think we started to establish, we being the obviously main scientists of the day, began to establish that structure to enable them to think with rigor about the things that they were proposing?

[D]

Well, it really started with Galileo. And then from that point forward, researchers started trying to analyze the world around them. But different fields of science analyze things in different ways. Medicine was a catastrophe. So in medicine during the Renaissance, researchers in Britain rediscovered the ways of Hippocrates. Now, Hippocrates was a Greek medic, or at least we think he was. There's not a lot of evidence as to whether or not, not he actually existed. But the notion of the humors was rife during the Greek period. The humors was this sense that, oh, you're ill with a fever, you have bad blood or too much blood, let's drain that bad blood out of you,

[C]

put some leeches on it.

[D]

Oh man. But you know what's so crazy about the, the, the, the bleeding was that we, we, we mock folks who did it. But if you had a fever, if you have a fever and I attach 50 leeches to your abdomen, I guarantee you that down, you might die in the process because you're being drained of blood, but your temperature goes down. So they believed they were treating it. Yeah, yeah. But there were also a lot of notions back during the, the ancient Greeks, like, oh, you've got too much phlegm. So let's put you in a hot, steamy room and have you get the phlegm out. And actually that's still used in medicine today.

[C]

I was going to say that's. So that's actually a good thing.

[B]

Well, hence the, this concept of being phlegmatic, I guess. Is that adjectival for certain conduct behavior?

[D]

Yeah, so, so they, they were, they were messing around in medicine with these different ideas. And it took years after Galileo before you started having scientists say, well, wait a minute, are leeches actually helping? There's one, one guy, he was in France, Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, quite the name. Born shortly after the guillotine came down on Charles, on Louis xvi. So this is a major time of change in France. And Louis was in this world where people were using leeches. They were, they were holding their finger up and saying, well, you know, the winds aren't quite right. So I think we're going to have disease tomorrow, or the stars and the sun aren't in alignment, we think disease is going to happen, and that's that. I mean, that was how science was done in medicine at that time. And Louis raised the question, are leeches actually helping?

[C]

I don't think the leeches are actually doing anything.

[D]

And so he said, oh, sacre bleu. I will put on the leeches onto these people on day one of their pneumonia. My outrageous French accent, it's terrible. But he tried an experiment where he put leeches onto patients with pneumonia on day one to try to get the bad blood out of them. And with the other half of the population, he put leeches on day seven. Note. He did not create a control group that had no leeches whatsoever because that would have been heresy. You weren't allowed to not treat people with leeches back then. You needed to apply the leeches. But he found that people who had leeches on day one were far more likely to die than the people who had the leeches applied quite late. And to his mind, that made no sense, because if you're trying to get rid of the bad blood, you should apply leeches early, and that will help. But why were so many of them dying if they had the leeches applied early as opposed to late? And so that was the first hammer blow to old methodologies. And he did the extraordinary thing of actually recording his data sets. And he was not alone. There were folks in Hungary and Vienna and also in. In Massachusetts who were starting to take notes and record the outcomes of patients. And that was really the application of Galileo's scientific method, but in medicine, and it had taken hundreds of years to get there. And these people who recorded these notes and said, hey, I don't think this is helping, did not do terribly well. The rest of the populace did not like what they had to say.

[B]

Many more people would have been alive had those methods and tools made it into medicine sooner. And they, in principle, could have. Is that correct? Is that one of the.

[D]

Oh, absolutely. So, okay, we could talk about bleeding, for starters, right? So Pierre Alexander Louis was running this experiment and saying, look, I applied leeches on day one and, ugh, it was not good. And he published those results and he was forgotten. People did not take kindly to the notion that leeches weren't helping. And there was a sizable industry.

[B]

Industry, leech farms, you know, oh, my God.

[D]

Big leech leech. Oh, oh, my God. They were. They were importing 15 to 20,000 of the little suckers a year into Paris alone. Back in those days.

[C]

Wow.

[D]

So, I mean, there was an enormous demand for leeches and being told, look, that's not helping, didn't go very far. People weren't ready to hear it.

[C]

I was going to say Neil made the joke, the leech lobby. But what you're talking about, I think we still see in many respects today where we do something, it creates a sub economy and then things must be done to maintain the sub economy, even though the reason it was created is no longer a problem.

[B]

Right. Economic system forces are the greatest, but

[A]

that's one of the main mechanisms of pharmaceutical right now. Creating this sub industry, creating that lobby. But you can copy and paste out the subject matter and it still has that dynamic. So we still haven't quite, pun intended, cured ourselves of it.

[C]

You know, I kind of take. I might not agree with that 100%. I might not. Only because of the rigors that are involved with bringing something to market. If you follow all the rules, then what you bring to market is necessary. And what you might do is figure out ways to optimize your profits, but you're still optimizing profits on something that is necessary. That's why I don't believe when people say, oh, they've had a cure for cancer forever. And I'm like, nobody would ever hide that. It just doesn't make sense.

[A]

But the rate of failure for new drugs is amazingly high.

[B]

It's hidden in Area 51.

[A]

So, Matt, you mentioned a couple of places around Europe, but there's that big example in Vienna in the General hospital in the 1880s.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Where they had a 15% bed fever.

[D]

Yeah. Death rate.

[A]

And yeah, it was still sort of practicing this Hippocratic method. And yet someone comes along and becomes that very different thinking outlier, but has to go against the machinery of the establishment.

[C]

Well, what is this story?

[A]

Please tell.

[D]

So you are talking about Ignaz Semmelweis. Let us go back to the 1840s. In early 1800s, Maria Theresa, who was the empress of the Habsburg Empire, she had a whopping. I want to say it was 16 children. A lot. I mean, she had lots of kids and she was uncommon amongst emperors in that she actually really cared about a lot of her subjects. And there was a massive problem back in the day was that women would get pregnant and they had no money to take care of the children. So they would throw their children into the river when they were born. And Maria Teresa thought this was terrible. They had established dropboxes. You know how if you're. You gotta hand back that Book at the library.

[A]

No, you're kidding.

[D]

But you're out of hours. So you got that Dropbox at the library where you can put the book and they'll sort it the next day. And you'd have to pay the late fees.

[C]

They had a kid Dropbox.

[D]

They had kid Dropboxes.

[C]

Oh, well, now, by the way, I'm just gonna say, Matt, that's not a really bad idea. As a man with three children, what is the expiration date on Dropbox?

[D]

Well, I think it was the size of the Dropbox that was really mattered. So it depends how. How large are your children? So Maria Teresa really cared about all of these women in her empire who were having babies and were desperately poor. So she ordered the construction of a hospital in Vienna that was unheard of in terms of its size, absolutely enormous. And it was built to look after the urban poor, which is an incredible thing. But there were major issues. And this was known as puerperal fever, or childbed fever. And back in the day, upwards of 20% of the women in the hospital in Vienna would contract this disease. And if you got it, you died. We're talking about one in five women, after delivering their baby, would develop these swollen blue and black splotches around their abdomen and their thighs, and they would develop horrendous fevers. They'd become delirious. And, I mean, it was so bad that within two to three days of developing the infection, even the gentle sheets on their bed laying across their abdomen was too much for them to bear. And they would die in frozen, speechless terror from the pain about five days after childbirth. And their child would go to the grave with them. The children would die, too. It was beyond horrendous. And no one really seemed to care. There was attention being paid to tuberculosis and smallpox, and that was because men could get it per peril. Fever, men did not contract. And so there was very little tension paid. Ignaz Semmelweis, this Hungarian obstetrician, cared he. And he was an extraordinary individual. He was so good at what he did. He had emigrated out of Hungary and was working in Vienna. Hungary was a vassal state to the Habsburgs, and so it was not unheard of for Hungarians to be working in Vienna. But Semmelweis watched this infection spread throughout the hospital, regularly losing patients to it, and was stunned by the indifference by the doctors at the hospital to the disease. And he set his mind about trying to figure out what caused it and how to stop it spreading. He worked this out. And I can tell you about that, if you like. And when he revealed the mechanisms, he ultimately got shouted down and thrown out of his post.

[C]

Wow.

[A]

So really what he should have done was cure egos before he tried to cure the disease of childbed fever.

[D]

Well, that's certainly part of it, but there's so much more to it than that, because we remember Galileo as an astrologer, an astronomer of incredible ability, but we forget what an exceptional diplomat Galileo was. He was charismatic beyond words. He made all the right friends, he moved in all the right circles. When he got into trouble, he was friends with very powerful people who saved his ass. Semmelweis was from a vassal state with no friends, and he had a habit of putting his foot in his mouth and crossing the wrong people in the Vienna circles. So even though he worked out solutions to puerperal fever and they were extraordinary, he ultimately wasn't listened to. And it was because of a cacophony of causes. There were so many issues with some of Weiss's interactions that he ultimately shot himself in the foot.

[C]

Foreign.

[A]

Is supported by Claude from Anthropic Science isn't about rushing to conclusions. It's about sitting with the uncertainty until it starts to make sense. Claude is the AI built for that kind of thinking and anthropic committed to not running ads in Claude. So when you're chasing down an idea, there's nothing pulling you towards someone else's agenda. Try Claude for free at Claude AI StarTalk and see why problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner.

[C]

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[D]

I'm Joel Cherico and I support Startalk on Patreon. This is Startalk with Neil Degrasse Tyson.

[A]

We have to assume that this, this particular fever was cured and they found out how and why this was occurring. So does Semmelweis get the credit, or does he actually pop his clogs before this all comes to fruition?

[D]

It's incredible. So Semmelweis followed the scientific method and made notes. He noticed, for example, there were two wards in this giant hospital. One was tended to by nurses, one was tended to by doctors. And he kept a record of how many patients in each ward over the course of many months got puerperal fever. And he noticed that the infection rate was hovering around 5 to 6% in the ward where nurses were present and about 21% in the ward where doctors were present. And he thought, well, wait a minute, I've been told that the sun, the moon, the stars, the wind direction control what diseases we get. But if that's true, we have the same sun, moon and stars over the Vienna Hospital right now. Why do we have such a different infection rate? So he tried feeding the patients in the doctor's ward the food that was being delivered to the nurse's ward. No change. I mean, it was a legitimate question, right? I mean, what was causing it? Then he tried burning all the sheets in the doctor's ward and replacing them with sheets from the nurse's ward. No dice. He went so far as to note that the priest in the temple that was adjacent to the hospital, he would walk through with incense and a bell every day when patients were dying. And since more patients were dying in the doctor's ward, he thought, well, maybe the incense causes perperal fever. So he had a word with the priest and said, could you not go in here for three or four months? I just want to take some notes. And the priest listened. None of this worked. Then one morning, Semmelweis was in the morgue. As doctors back in that day did, their habit every morning all across the world was to go down and to dissect the patients who had died the previous day to better understand why they might have died. So, you know, noble task, right? And when he finished, he washed up with soap and water, and he smelled his hands, and he thought, my hands still smell of corpse. Is there. Because no one had any idea about bacteria back in the day. No clue. You know, is there a. An aura of death that is contaminating my hands from the corpse, that then when I go and deliver a baby, is infecting the birth canal? Is there something that I am doing? And so he went to the local sewage treatment plant because, you know, raw human sewage smells pretty bad, too. He noticed they were dumping chloride of lime into the sewer to try to make it stink less. And he asked the sewage treatment folks, hey, can I have some of that? Created a solution that was, you know, way more powerful than what you would ever put in your swimming pool. Doused his hands in it and went, huh?

[C]

No more death.

[D]

Of death is gone. No, no more death. Never mind that the skin fell off his hands five days later because the solution was so strong. Strong. But, you know, I mean, he went, wow, the smell is gone. And then he started testing this, and he asked all the other doctors in the ward to follow suit. And remarkably, they did. And the infection rate dropped. Wait for it. From 21% to zero.

[A]

How about that?

[C]

So the doctors were infecting the children with death itself. Yes, they were bringing death to the birth canal. It kind of goes back to the scientific method of testing and looking at the results and then testing and looking at the results. And did he know he was doing that? Or this is just something intuitively, he was like, okay, I'm just going to keep going until something happens.

[D]

So he had had a mentor named Joseph Skoda, who was, honestly, for lack of better words, the best description is he was like the 1800s Vienna example of Sheldon Cooper. Socially inept social genius, knew exactly what he was talking about with numbers, and was an outcast amongst the doctors at the Vienna Hospital. Semmelweis got on well with him and learned a lot from this fellow. And he learned how to make notes and keep records and start considering the concept of statistical significance. Although you don't need statistical significance when your rate of 21% goes to zero. That doesn't require P values or chi squared tests or anything.

[B]

There's an old saying, this is not literally true, but it's figuratively true. If your results need statistics to prove it, you need a better experiment.

[C]

Oh, that's funny. That's funny.

[B]

Design a better experiment.

[C]

Right, right.

[A]

Matt, what eventually is the final chapter for Ignaz Semmelweis? Does he get lauded and adored for his work, or does he just unplug himself from this scenario?

[D]

Well, unfortunately, it was far worse than that. It's amazing. He got all of the doctors in his facility to adopt the chlorine washing mechanism and drop the rates of puerperal fever. But Semmelweis had made a lot of missteps politically. Hungary rose up against Vienna because it didn't want to be a vassal state anymore. And Semmelweis had openly supported the rebels against the Austrians. And you have to remember, he was reporting to Austrian doctors, so that did not go well. Similarly, Semmelweis had on multiple occasions derided his supervisors, who said, yeah, we have these really bad cases of puerperal fever because the sun, the moon, and the stars are out of alignment. And then Semmelweis, being really not very attentive to social interaction, said, yeah, but we have the same sun, moon and stars over both clinics, and the rate is really low in the nurses clinic. And he would say this in front of the politicians funding the hospital.

[C]

Right.

[D]

So it. It did not win him a lot of friends. Ultimately, he was fired, even though he had dropped the rate to zero. He was exiled back to Hungary, and eventually a group of his own peers put him into an insane asylum where he died.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

And they lived happily ever.

[C]

There you go. It was.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So if we moved Matt forward a little bit to someone who is probably the polar opposite to Ignaz Semmelweis, Louis Pasteur.

[D]

Oh, boy.

[A]

Never met the man. But from having read parts of your book, I believe it would be fair to say he did not lack self confidence and has a penchant for the deviousness. And I think you called him brilliant, tenacious, something else. And then you finished with asshole. Would you enlighten us to the Louis Pasteur story?

[C]

That's kind of cool.

[D]

Yeah, sure. So Semmelweis was, was so mild mannered in his way, and ultimately I think really suffered because of it. Louis Pasteur was theatrical. He understood how to make a demonstration that would grab the limelight. Neil, there are some similarities there. He really knew how to talk. But he also, he had been, as a university student, he had a supervisor named Auguste Laurent who had been very involved with the student rebellion that you see a lot in this reflected in Les Miserables at the barricades where the students rose up against the right wing government to demand rights for the poor. And Auguste Laurent had taken their side. And Pasteur watched as his research supervisor lost funding from the government for take being on the wrong side of politics. And it was a valuable lesson to Pasteur because he made sure that he never was on the wrong side of politics, ever. So he knew how to milk the French government for money, but he also knew how to tell a story, and he knew how to make sure that those stories never, ever had flaws in them so that people could raise doubt. So, for example, chicken cholera was a major problem for the poultry industry in Louis Pasteur's day. It's not related to the cholera that kills people, but the end result is basically the same. Cholera causes you to have such severe diarrhea that you die, and it causes chickens to have such severe diarrhea that they dehydrate and die. And Pasteur was in a race to create the vaccine or a treatment for that, and then went on to try to defeat the disease anthrax that killed lots and lots of animals.

[B]

Wait, wait, just. If a chicken poops, how do you know it's diarrhea? Doesn't it all look like diarrhea?

[C]

It's the sound they make.

[D]

More liquid, more liquid, Neil, more liquid. You know, bird poop, Lots more liquid. Just triple the liquid and you've got it. And smell apparently is bad. I've not ever seen chicken cholera in first person, nor do I really want to.

[A]

Agreed. Anyway, back to anthrax. That sounds, that sounds quite palatable on

[D]

the back of the anthrax ever before. So anthrax was affecting livestock all across Europe and there was a desperate need to create a vaccine against it. And earlier on in his career, Pasteur knew about this veterinarian named Henry Toussaint. And Henry Toussaint had said, you know, I think a way to create a vaccine against chicken cholera and then anthrax is to kill whatever the microbe is that is causing this. So he started messing with heat to heat treat samples and then inject them into animals. And the animals, he noted, would get ill, but then not die and then become resistant to the disease afterwards. And Pasteur had been on the record saying, I think you are totally off. I think that killing the microbes isn't helpful. I think we need to weaken it. And so he was a big proponent of using oxygen to weaken bacteria so that you could create a vaccine up with a pathogen that was weak but not destroyed. And he said, henry Toussaint is totally wrong. In the end, there was tremendous pressure for Pasteur to be able to deliver an anthrax vaccine. And he did deliver in a very public way by injecting all of these sheep with anthrax. Half of them had been vaccinated with Pasteur's vaccine, and none of the ones that had been vaccinated died. It was a very public demonstration of his work, and he proved that he had created a very successful vaccine. Except when his journals and lab notebooks were opened 100 years later, it was revealed that this was entirely fraud. He had stated that he had created the vaccine by exposing the pathogen to oxygen. Not true. He had used Henry Toussaint's mechanism, the one that he had derided and discredited Toussaint for and lied about it to. Saint died a pauper. Louis Pasteur went on to be celebrated as a national hero. But it was largely because of Pasteur's treatment of him that that happened. And the same thing happened with rabies. Pierre Gaultier, a veterinarian, again, had developed a mechanism for creating a rabies vaccine. Louis Pasteur effectively stole that mechanism, created the vaccine, tested it on people, killed some people in the process, buried the evidence that he had killed people along with the bodies, and then lied about the mechanism and where he had got it from, effectively discrediting Gaultier as well. So he was pretty vicious, and he was very successful as a scientist, but not in a nice way.

[C]

Maybe he should have figured out a way to get light inside of the body.

[D]

No.

[C]

Or perhaps a little bit of bleach in a shot glass.

[A]

Anyone else saw the bleach coming?

[B]

No bleach.

[D]

I saw it coming.

[C]

Very effective.

[B]

How is it that you have access to this information and was it revealed earlier in the century?

[D]

Yeah. So in 2003. It got published in a pretty academic book by. What was his name? I'm going to forget the guy's name, but he translated Pasteur's journals. And what was really interesting, actually in this piece, the author wrote. But you have to excuse this behavior of Pasteur because of the high pressure environment of late 1800s French academic life, like being in a high pressure environment, made it acceptable to so horrendously plagiarize and destroy people. And so, you know, I'm not the one who translated the journals, but the journals haven't had a lot of discussions since they were translated. And I think, you know, it's important to point out that Louis Pasteur, yeah, he was phenomenally successful, but he was phenomenally successful. Yes, he was a genius, but he was also very effective at discrediting people who could get in his way. And he was also very good at telling positive stories without mentioning any places where he had faltered and that that was pivotal to him getting money.

[B]

So he.

[C]

No one knows how cutthroat this business is business.

[B]

So. So he was an a hole.

[C]

Yeah, he was a big giant. But I gotta tell you, I mean, he was French. I mean, that's kind of okay.

[A]

He just throw the nation under the bus.

[C]

I'm just saying, like the whole nation calling your French, you get away with it. It's all right. You know, it's like part of their thing. You know what I mean? It's like, hi, may I have some water? You may, you may not. What is your problem talking to me?

[A]

Oh, come on.

[D]

There were nice French people. They were nice French. I mean, Pierre Alexander Louis was a really good guy. And he ended up being a mentor to a very important American scientist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had also tried to defeat puerperal fever. I mean, so, I mean, there are good French doctors.

[A]

Yeah. Okay, So I love them.

[C]

To found one.

[A]

Oh, damn. To faint praise.

[C]

In your research, is there any reason why the sun, moon and stars, particularly the stars, Neil, people thought was influencing health? I mean, this is a theme. I mean, influenza actually is influence of the stars. This is. Is something that persisted until like the early 1900s. What's going on there that people look up and say, okay, the fault, dear

[B]

Brutus, lies not in your stars, but in ourselves. Look at that. Shakespeare.

[D]

Well said.

[C]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, did you uncover anything that would make. Explain why that is?

[B]

What are the urges? Yeah. Is it just an extension of astrology at that level?

[D]

It is and it isn't. So think about chickenpox. Chickenpox has a season, right. It's spring. Influenza has a season. Right. It's the winter. Certain diseases. And it was more so back then, before we vaccinated people so effectively, certain diseases had certain times. And you could measure that with the stars. You knew where you were not just based upon whether the leaves were falling.

[C]

Gotcha.

[D]

But based upon what you could see with your telescope or even with the naked eye. And so there was this. I mean, it was. And also, you have the power of narrative. Once people believe something and you've had the story for a long time, it's very, very hard for them to stop believing in it. But there's another side to this. We were talking about the infrastructure underpinning pharmaceuticals and the medical community. There is also the fact that these doctors at the hospitals who were supervising Semmelweis were very, very well established in the Austrian aristocracy. They had it good, and they had a steady paycheck. And there was no reason for them to change anything about the way they were working. They were going to continue getting what they wanted regardless. And actually shaking things up put them at risk of being identified as. Wait a minute. You were using this crazy method before and now it's been proved wrong. Why were we paying you all this money? So you. You've got the power of long established narrat with selfish self interest. And then of course, you also have the seasonality of these things, which made sense. So they ran into a lot of walls trying to overturn it. And lots and lots of people beyond Semmelweis fought the good fight and lost.

[B]

So at the foundation here is science and science results. I don't want to absolve Pasteur and others for their impropriety, but you have science intersecting culture and society. And so there are forces operating that are not purely scientific forces.

[C]

Right?

[B]

There's fame, there's money, there's influence, power, politics, politics.

[C]

All these things, they're all in there.

[B]

These are contaminating forces on the purity of the science that should have none of that.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And you wrote a whole book on it.

[D]

So, Matt, if we.

[A]

Fast forward, fast forward. Do you think there's an echo of that malaise still present in our scientific, medical environments today?

[B]

What other than malaise?

[C]

An echo.

[A]

An echo.

[B]

Oh, echo, Echo.

[C]

And if it is an echo, when did the sound go away? When did we move away from all of that as part of the whole process and get down to just science?

[D]

Unfortunately, we've really not abandoned it. And first of all, by the way, I want to emphasize, actually, you Know, Pasteur behaved very badly. Galileo behaved. He was excellent at diplomacy and negotiation in a manner that saved a lot of his ideas. And you don't have to backstab people to take unpopular ideas to get them across in the end.

[B]

Yeah, but in terms of the a hole factor.

[D]

Yeah, he stuck with that.

[B]

You gotta admit that when Galileo wrote the Dialogue, of the two chief world systems, you're arguing is Earth in the center, is the sun in the center? And he has these two sort of, let's call them avatars of one of them is Simplicio. And Simplicio was arguing the points that are not scientifically valid. And he put all of the arguments that the Pope made in the character Simplicio.

[C]

Simplicio, by the way, that's brilliant.

[B]

It's brilliant. But it's like.

[C]

I'm sorry, but that is brilliant.

[B]

Wait, wait and wait. And he publishes it in Italian so that everybody can read it. So everybody can read it. It's not just Latin.

[C]

Okay, so, so that's kind of a hole. So he's an a hole, but he's a smart a hole. See? Cause that's brilliant. I mean, honestly, that's like you want to convince some people of an argument, so you create two characters, Dumbass and smart opinions, right?

[B]

But if the dumbass said all the words that the Pope said, and the Pope is powerful, well, but guess what

[C]

it's like then you look at the Pope and say, well, that's not you, that's dumbass.

[B]

You know, okay, he's a smart. Yeah, okay, okay.

[D]

Unfortunately, unfortunately, the Pope was smart enough to work things out, but Galileo was clever and he dedicated that particular work, the Dialogue of Two Systems, to Ferdinando de Medici, who was the Grand Duke of Tuscany. And if there was anyone powerful enough to interfere with the Inquisition, it was Ferdinando de Medici. And you know, it's amazing because Fernando de Medici had Galileo, you know, on the payroll. He was their chief scientist in Tuscany. And similarly, Galileo was bosom buddies with the ambassador to Rome for the, for Tuscany. So when Galilei ultimately was called before the Inquisition, Ferdinando de Medici interfered and ensured that Galileo was not tortured and ensured that Galileo was fed three meals a day made by the ambassador's wife. And when he was, when he was eventually taken over to the. The Inquisition and living there, he was in a five bedroom luxury apartment a stone's throw from, you know, the Sistine Chapel. So Galileo was, we now know, was not tortured. And that's been, we've been aware of that for hundreds of Years. But again, the power of narrative really sticks.

[C]

It does make a difference. I like that narrative better. I have more respect for Galileo. That's like me getting arrested. And they're like, all right, Chuck, we're going to give you 5 to 10, and you're gonna live in this mansion with the warden's wife.

[B]

Wait. But I had not. That is a piece of history that had eluded me because I always was suspicious. Why it was that Giordano Bruno is brought up in front of the Inquisition. He's burned at the stake.

[C]

Burned at the stake.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Whereas Galileo was brought up in front of the Inquisition. Not that many years later, Locke's got free. Well, he was on house arrest. On house arrest, yeah. Yeah, but he wasn't like, put on the rack and tortured.

[C]

And in the hood, we would have said that Galileo was a snitch.

[B]

Cuz Bruno.

[C]

Bruno went down and Galileo didn't.

[A]

I think Bruno went down before.

[B]

You are an informant.

[A]

No, in Galileo. I think Bruno went down in advance of.

[D]

Yeah, I mean, it's important to note that the, The. The Inquisition wrote that Galileo was exposed to rigorous examination and that was code for torture back then. But Galileo was in his what, Neil? Like, like 68, 69 when he got brought in. And their method of torture was to put a rope, tie your hands behind your back, and hoist you with your hands tied behind your back and then drop you abruptly. And Galileo would not have walked back to the Tuscan embassy on his own two feet at 69 if that had been done to him. Also, I mean, fun fact, the Inquisition was the epitome of organized evil. And they. Have you ever. Have you ever watched the Princess Bride?

[C]

Yes, of course.

[D]

You know, when they're, when they're torturing Wesley, they're like, you know, please tell us everything. This is for posterity. Well, that's what the Inquisition actually did. As people were tortured, they would write down every moan, every gasp, every scream. It was all noted for posterity. And it's not like the cleric who was doing this fell asleep at the job. When Galileo was brought in, it didn't happen. And that's because Ferdinando de Medici, and by the way, the de Medici, by that time, de Medici family, by that had already supplied two queens to France and four popes. So these folks were really powerful, had ensured that Galileo did not end up tortured. So there was a lot of political disruption that occurred to protect Galileo and make sure that, you know, he didn't get burned at the stake.

[B]

They're friends in High places.

[C]

That's it. I like Galileo even more now. Total gangster.

[A]

If I sort of outline a story here, there's a. There's another level of suppression that even exists today, where someone who's gonna go on and win a Nobel Prize for saving millions of lives gets their belongings and all their work in a couple of bags in a hallway and told to leave the university. All right, Matt, would you do me a favor and fill in the blanks? Cause this one blew me away when I read it.

[D]

So this is Kati Carico. And Kati Carico was working on Messenger RNA back in the 90s, and Messenger RNA, she worked out you could effectively program Messenger RNA to produce any protein you damn well pleased in the lab. And that had tremendous potential, because if you could program messenger RNA and inject it into somebody and have it start producing proteins of a specific type, that could be really useful for all kinds of medicines, particularly things like vaccines.

[B]

Absolutely.

[D]

But the problem was, as Kati was working, every time the MRNA got injected inside an animal, it would just fall apart. And she could demonstrate that there was potential here, but she couldn't work out what the issue was. And when she applied for grants, the grants were rejected. Because the narrative that existed in the academic community was, messenger RNA isn't going anywhere. It's not worth your time. Even if the proposals were written well, even if the experiments were well thought out, she got nowhere as a result. Because in academia today, you are only as good as the money you bring into the university. If you're not bringing in lots of resources from grants, the university takes a dim view and you slowly get pushed out. Katzi was first demoted for exploring messenger RNA and not getting enough grants, and then she was fired by the university because they felt she really was a waste of time. She was threatened by the US government with deportation back to Hungary. I mean, it's frustrating because ultimately we're very lucky that after 25 years of pain and suffering with all of this, she didn't just say, screw this, I'm going to go become a, you know, a dental hygienist or a florist or something. You know, we're really lucky. She stuck with it because she landed at this little pharma company called Biontech. And Biontech said, you know, we think this technique that you're working on has potential for an influenza vaccine. Can you develop it? And then the pandemic hit, and they said, okay, screw that. Could you create a COVID vaccine with this? And she did. Now it's Important to mention that in her last years at the university, she started partnering with Drew Weissman, who was an immunologist. And Weissman said, I think what we're seeing with the break apart of the MRNA is an immune reaction. There's something about the messenger RNA that you're injecting in that is causing it to be targeted by the immune system in a way that the messenger RNA that naturally forms in your body is not attacked. There must be something. We have to do something to the messenger rna, decorate it with the right proteins that make the immune system say, oh, you belong here, so it doesn't get mobbed. And Weissmann was integral to identifying that key factor. And ultimately, Katikariko's work with Weissman paved the way for the COVID vaccine to be created in record time and effectively pulled the world out of lockdown. And she won the Nobel Prize.

[C]

Well, she should have. Yeah.

[D]

But it's important to notice that Katikariko was so like Semmelweis. Semmelweis believed that he didn't need to publish. He didn't feel like he needed to stand on a soapbox like Pasteur and shout about his ideas. He didn't feel like he needed to manipulate the government or convince them to do anything. He just believed that doing good work would get him somewhere. And it got him to the insane asylum, which wasn't good. Katsi Carico, I've interviewed her and she's lovely. She's very fast, she's hard to follow. So she's a science journalist, not their dream, let's put it that way. It's hard to interview. I think her grant proposals were also not perfect. And when you've got thousands of grant proposals going out to grant warning bodies and they're only going to grant 1% of them money, they're very quick to remove anything that doesn't look exactly right. And I think Kati fell into interesting idea, but not exactly right. And as a result, she wasn't getting funded. And so Semmelweis and Kati are actually kindred spirits. I almost called the book A Tale of Two Hungarians instead of I told you so scientists who are ridiculed, exiled in prison for being right. Because I thought the parallel between the two of them was so strong. But then you also look at other people who are on to childbed fever, perperal fever, and trying to defeat it, and other scientists who were right and got excoriated for it. And I realized, no, I don't want to make it just about these two Hungarians. It's a bigger story, but we see it all the time in science today. And it's, it's, it's terrible.

[C]

But you know what? Let me just, for, for one second, I just gotta. Because I don't want us to veer into a place where right now there's this pervading sense amongst people who are wellness influencers and people who are anti traditional science. And what I don't want people to think is that because these things happen, that we should eschew or throw away the stuff that got us to where we are right now. I think it's important to recognize that, that not only are these things at play in science, they're at play in pretty much everything. So when you think about fine art, the artists that are very famous are the ones that have the best rhetoric. They're not necessarily the most talented. They're the ones that can talk about their work in ways that are soaring and, and aspirational or they have someone that does that for them. Politics. We don't elect the person who is best qualified. We elect the person that we like and who sounds good and who says the things that tickle our ears. So this is a human problem. It's not necessarily lord nice. It's not necessarily a science problem. And I just want to say that because as we, you know, as we look at this, especially these two particular anecdotes, it can make it seem like the industry of, if you want to call science and industry is stacked against people who don't have the right pitch or narrative.

[D]

I think you're absolutely right. And I think it's really important to point out that the issue with science, we should be having debate. It is incredibly important for science, us to challenge new ideas. It is incredibly important for there to be debate. It is incredibly important for us to remain skeptical. MRNA was an out there idea when Katikariko was developing it. The notion that there might be an aura of death around your hands after touching a corpse was an out there idea back in the day. And it was important for people to say, are you sure about that? Can we test this? Those are important responses. To have what's not okay is to engage in character assassination and to imprison people or exile them because you don't like what you're hearing. That's not what science is about. And let's be honest, science has got a man on the moon. Science has been able to resolve, I mean, transform HIV into a manageable condition from a death sentence. I mean, science is doing Extraordinary. I mean, look at the number of people living in deserts because of desalinization plants which are now all threatened by missiles. But never mind the technology. And the science has got us so far. So we don't want to abandon what we've got. But what we want to do is make sure that the science who are not the Galileos who don't have the master diplomacy, the scientists who are not the Machiavellian fiends like Pasteur, we want to make sure the people with the great ideas who don't have the skill set to take their ideas further, still get the attention that they need. Because we've got some really big problems on this planet and we need every good mind to be at our disposal to solve them. And just removing someone from the options because they don't speak loudly enough or are not diplomatic enough is an issue. And part of that comes down to scientists. We've got to work with scientists to better have them better communicate what they're on about. But it also is about the public and it's about journalists. Science journalists in particular have a tremendous responsibility to not just say, hey, look what was discovered, but to say, this scientist wondered this, they did this to find out, and look what they discovered as a result. You've got to tell the story so the public understands. During the pandemic, science's process was exposed in some pretty big ways. The debate that occurs in science, which is part of science, was exposed to a lot of people who didn't know it existed and it left a lot of people doubting. And we've got to do a lot of catch up here to make sure that everyone understands how science works. The newspaper I've spent my entire adult life writing for has forever argued against the phrase laws and sausages. You never want to hear how they're made because they're both disgusting. The Economist has argued that you gotta talk about how laws are made to have a healthy democracy. And I think we have to do the same thing with science. We have to talk about how it's being run so that the public understands that debate and questioning and replication and then discovering when the replication reveals that an initial experiment was invalid, that that's okay, that's normal, that's how it's supposed to work.

[C]

Absolutely.

[D]

But most people don't understand that.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

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[A]

So with Kati and her Nobel Prize, does she now break the glass ceiling? Is there any movement in the needle

[B]

after, after her phenomenon, after her story?

[D]

So I don't think the glass ceiling is so much an issue of balance female making their way in science versus male, although there's certainly elements of that and I don't think it's a matter of Hungarian versus American. I think the glass ceiling that really needs to be addressed here is the it's an out there idea. And look, she was right and I think we are starting to see reform and I'm really excited about it because a number of organizations, several governments, including the Austrian government, which I think is hysterical article the Willem Foundation, Volkswagen are supporting programs that democratize funding in research. And let me expand on that for a moment. So right now you write your grant application and it's considered by a grant committee and there are, you know, the grant committee can probably award 30 labs funding and they get thousands of applications. So the competition is fierce and there's no doubt that when you get 1000 applications it's really easy for the grant awarding body to say okay, these 650, they're not close remove. Let's just get those out of the pool, you're Left now with 350 grant applications, but let's say you can only give 50 of them funding, rather than try to discern the difference between good, great and excellent, which is really hard to do. And all of our studies show that when you're trying as a grant body to differentiate between good, great and excellent talent, you often are subtly affected by, oh, who published this? Was this. Sorry, who wrote this? Is this from Harvard? Or is this from the University of Witwater Send in South Africa? Or is this an application written with a vague accent in English that makes it obvious that the person is an English second language speaker? You're not even aware of these kinds of biases. But we know that when people are trying to separate from great and excellent, those biases start to impact. We also know that if the idea isn't all that well established, still well thought out, but not well established, that's a strike against you too, which makes our research less creative, less innovative, and we continue to do more of the same rather than coming up with new ideas. So a way to solve that problem is to create a lottery. You take those 300 or 350 good, great and excellent applications, and rather than try to select the top 50, say, you know what, we're putting these all into a fishbowl and we're going to select them at random, or select 25 that you think are all outstanding and the remaining 25 will be selected from the fishbowl. And the cost to this is you got to buy a fishbowl, you probably need to get some blindfolds and then you're going to pull them out at random. But there's very little cost to this and it would start to spread out the creativity in our science a fair bit more.

[B]

I like that idea.

[C]

That's a great idea.

[B]

Once you take out the bottom fraction and then you pluck the very top that everyone agrees with, if the rest could be so subtly filtered just by institution or accent or name or whatever, then that's bad, right?

[C]

That is bad.

[B]

That's just bad. So just make that random. I love that.

[C]

I love that.

[B]

Has that been implemented?

[D]

It is. So the Willem foundation is doing it, the Austrian government is supporting it. I think British Medical is starting to consider it. There are a number of places that are rolling this out and I think it has the potential to bring about more creativity and more tolerance for outside ideas and researchers who might normally not get the attention of big grant awarding bodies. And I don't want to say that this is my idea. Other people have had this idea, but it's starting to make its mark. And I think that's a good thing.

[C]

You know what else would be good is if governments just gave more money to science. How about that? I mean that's a little true. How about like, how about the richest nation in the world, in the history of the world just gives, you know, a percentage more to science? It would change everything.

[D]

Well, it actually would reduce fraud because when you're a scientist and you've got to pay your mortgage and you've got to put food on the table for your kids, ensuring that you continue to get the grant money is incredibly important. And if an experiment is not working out and you're off by just a tiny fraction of a percent, there is a powerful incentive to adjust the numbers in a manner that no one would ever detect. And that leads us to more Louis Pasteur like behavior that's becoming ever more common. And right now you do that. And I mean that's bad because if you and I were to steal a hundred thousand dollars from a bank, we would go to jail. But if you lie about your results and someone reads those results and goes, oh that's really interesting, I want to run a follow up experiment on that and applies for a hundred thousand dollar grant to follow up. But they don't know that your work is fraudulent. They have now just taken $100,000 very likely from taxpayers to do work that is built on a house of cards that is going to collapse one day and it's a waste. And right now if you engage in fraud, there's very little punishment other than being put on administrative leave from the university and being removed from your teaching circuit. If we were to establish some significant penalties for engaging in fraud and also establishing some better systems for detecting fraud, it that would probably help too. But you have, if you increase the pressure on researchers by cutting funding, it increases the pressure for them to then behave badly. If we ease the pressure, then I think fewer people are put into that sort of a situation.

[A]

Matt, before we wrap this up, I have this one thought that's stuck in my mind. We are experiencing in some places an anti science stance. This history lesson that you, that you've brought to us today, which was very enjoyable, will it illuminating.

[B]

Don't enjoy stories of people lying and cheating and stealing.

[A]

Illuminating it is this illuminating history lesson, will it actually teach us anything? Are we going to rinse and repeat or will we be learning?

[D]

Do you think you know the first step to resolving the anti science stance? That we've got. And I was just talking about laws and sausages and talking about how science needs to communicate what it's doing better because there were a lot of miscommunications during the pandemic. I think talking about the problem, recognizing that we've got a problem, and then stating how we're going to solve that problem by having scientists communicate more clearly, getting the science journalists on task and educating the public as to how science is supposed to operate. We're supposed to argue, we're supposed to get things wrong. I think that will help a lot.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

I would add to this something that has yet to come up. You have picked from the history of science these examples that are most egregious. We agree some are even offensive when you lay it out for you. Very French, Very French. And so this is a, it's kind of, let's call it a knee jerk reaction of the scientists to reject something that is novel, new, odd or unusual. Let's just say that for the moment. Okay? And then you say, well, but it was a correct idea and we're losing it.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

However, that same skepticism over the novelty rejects 999 other ideas that flow into the house that are completely batshit crazy that would never have a chance of being correct. And you don't write a book about that.

[D]

I don't wanna shed light on that.

[B]

Cause that's not interesting to talk about the ideas that never would have worked. Okay. So I guess what I'm saying is I don't mind if there's some people who want to sort of verify all these thousand ideas to find the one that was correct. But the operations of science and the methods and tools and the procedures are getting other science that does have a higher statistical likelihood of being correct. And that's why we have modern civilization the way it is today. Okay. Science is an active, functioning enterprise. So if I get your reaction to the idea that the conservatism of science is almost necessary. And yes, occasionally one goes out with the bathwater.

[D]

So the conservatism of science is not just necessary, Neil. It's critical. It's healthy. We have got. It's like the immune system. It, it looks at things that it recognizes and then when it sees it totally doesn't recognize, it attacks it and removes it.

[C]

Very, very good example.

[D]

I'm a biologist. There you are. But there is a difference between being skeptical, challenging, and saying, I don't think that's right, I don't think that's right. And you may have to Say that dozens and dozens of times. And that is part of science is saying, look, I've analyzed your methods, I've looked at your theory, and I disagree. And that's fine. That's what you have to do in science. Because as you point out, there's lots of batshit crazy ideas out there. What we can't do is take the gloves off. It is important, especially if someone is persistent and continues to push the idea that they've found something that they think is worth talking about and you continue to disregard it. It is important to continue to hear them and say, nope, I've thought about it and you're wrong. A good example is Alfred Wegener, who looked at the continents and said, hey, look, South America fits into Africa. Isn't that interesting? And look, the rocks on the coast of New England match the rocks that are on the coast of England. And maybe these two places were once together. I mean, he was derided as crazy. And ultimately we worked out the plate tectonics was a thing. But my point is, it's important for us to fight back and say, I disagree, I disagree. I disagree. We can't engage in character assassination, even if we think it's batshit crazy. We just have to say, no, that doesn't fit. That doesn't work. And if they come back to us five years later with a different angle on why they think they're right, you gotta read it and say, nope, but still disagree. Or wait a minute, why do I disagree? What's the reason that I disagree?

[B]

So with your Wegener story, It was not 100 years that that idea was rejected. It was just a few decades. And yes, there was some geologists behaving badly over that period, no doubt about it. But really, it was a matter of how strong is the evidence. If South America fits into Africa and other countries don't fit neatly, then this looks like it's a coincidence. So I'm gonna be skeptical of that. And I probably would have been one of those that said, this guy, he's still at. Was not until, I think, the discovery of the separation in the mid Atlantic Ridge when we were mapping the bottoms of the ocean primarily for submarine movement in the Second World War.

[C]

It's always war then.

[B]

Then I don't think there were many people who were still holdouts back then, because that was. We saw the smoke. That was the gun that fired that allowed us to say, us, our geology brethren. So it was a matter of how much evidence is there for it, and there wasn't sufficient evidence to convince everybody just cuz he was later shown to be right is not an argument against people rejecting his idea to be be when it was first.

[D]

Absolutely, yeah.

[C]

I think you guys are saying the same thing though. Yeah, you're saying the same thing differently.

[D]

But there's a difference between arguing against saying, look, I disagree with you, I disagree with you, and deriding him so aggressively that he was thrown out of the scientific community.

[C]

Right, okay.

[B]

That's the behaving badly part.

[C]

That's the behaving badly part.

[D]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, there was a difference between Semmelweis making his remarks and being thrown in a lunatic asylum by his own peers. You know, I think, and same thing with Katikariko. It was would have been okay for scientists to continue to say, look, I don't think you're on to anything. I think you're wrong. But threatening her with deportation, I think is. We can all come together and say that's probably a step too far.

[A]

Totally.

[B]

So.

[C]

But I think that goes back to when you talked about the random selection illustration that you gave. What it really does is put a blindfold on bias. And I think for Semmelweis and for Katie Katya, you're looking at unspoken biases that are at play here. Let's just be honest. That's really what it comes down to. And yeah, I think systemically, if you're able to remove that in any way, science benefits as a whole.

[B]

Yeah, of course, of course. And just I'm going to give an exact example from my own field. There's a guy named Fred Hoyle who was never a Big Bang guy. He was a big proponent of the steady state hypothesis of the universe. Steady state theory, they called it. And he was rejecting the notion that the universe had a beginning. And he was a smart guy and he's done other great things, so it was hard to completely discount him. But the field just kept moving along. And he was wrong to his grave, thinking that we're all wrong and that he's right. But he was just wrong. He was wrong. He was just wrong. And so in this case, no, there was no character assassinations. There was no. But he was a very visible opponent of a prevailing consensus that he could not to his deathbed accept.

[C]

Wow, see, now that just sound like a guy with a personal problem.

[B]

Well, yeah, you could be emotionally invested in your own. In your own idea.

[C]

That's what I'm saying.

[A]

Don't we call that stubbornness?

[B]

Stubbornness, yeah.

[C]

Pigheaded is the Word.

[B]

So, Matt, we gotta land this plane. Let me send a question back to you. You've cited scientists behaving badly, you've cited society behaving badly. And these are all amazing examples. And it's a brilliant compilation that you've created. What is the lesson to the public, given what we've been through with COVID given the anti science sentiment, given all that we see going around us? Because that's a different science climate than what I grew up in. What I grew up in. People saw science as our savior. It would cure us, it would take us into the future. And I don't feel that anymore in a our culture. So how do you turn what you've compiled here into the positive for the public to take a civilization ahead?

[D]

Science still solves a lot of problems. The thing we need to all be aware of is that science debates, it argues, it disproves. And that's normal. That's the way it has been for a very, very long time. It just was on show during COVID in a very public way. And I think a lot of people found that disquieting. We need to talk more about how science works. That's a responsibility that falls on scientists. It's a responsibility that falls on people like me writing in the newspaper. And it also falls down to everyone out there to say, hang on, I don't understand how that works. Can you explain that to me? And we need to start asking more questions and being more tolerant of the fact that sometimes science doesn't know. And we're still debating it and trying to figure it out.

[B]

So, Matt, at my PhD defense, after I was grilled on the content of the thesis, the final question was, how would you tell a New York Times reporter about your work? Okay, that was just part of it. Just, can you translate this? Can you make this sensible to someone who's not an expert? And that doesn't happen enough in the sciences. There's no. We're not trained, nor is it valued. What is your capacity to communicate? This is not. So that's a big problem. That was in your list there, Matt. But also, I knew this while it was happening, but there was nothing I can do about it. Cause Covid was a novel. A novel.

[C]

It was called the novel coronavirus.

[B]

Correct? Okay. So I was thinking to myself, what they should do is every week, whoever was the chosen person to report progress on this, you don't get a politician. You get someone that's got some expertise, like Fauci, okay? He was the voice. So here's what should have happened. And I knew this at the time. Every week what he should have done was get up there and said, this is what we know today. This is our recommendations based on the science research up to the moment. Check back in a week in case some of these results have changed based on more evidence that has arrived, then people would have seen a scientific process unfold in real time. But when I hear people say about anything, they'll say, even scientists don't agree on this. As though scientists sit back in our chairs with our legs up on the table, masters of everything we know. No, on the frontier, that is so not the case. So do you agree with me that that would have, it would have been a science lesson for people and there would have been less cynicism to derive from that whole episode.

[D]

Not only do I agree, but I think that the culture of science doubt that we are faced with now would either be greatly diminished or non existent if we had engaged in that behavior during the pandemic. Because we shattered people's view of science being an answer machine.

[B]

Right, That's a perfect sentence right there.

[D]

And we revealed quite publicly how science works.

[C]

There you go. And that's the problem. I think what also has to happen is the, the public has to understand that, oh God, I'm gonna get in trouble. Most of the people look at science like religion. Religion has answers. Whether the answers are right or not does not make a difference. There's an answer and that's what comforts you. In religion, there is an answer for it speaks to everything. That's not how science works. And I think that's the first thing that people need to realize.

[B]

And another example would have been, based on what we know of the virus, it may be transmitted over the surfaces with fluids. So right now, hose down your groceries when they come back.

[C]

Well, that was the first couple of weeks. First couple weeks. That's why you grocery badge.

[B]

Okay, so then the next we say we're finding no, it's more airborne than liquid. And so then we could just follow along. That would have been even fun, right?

[C]

Exactly. Let's see what's going to happen next.

[B]

What's happened next week?

[C]

And please remember it's the novel coronavirus. We don't know because it's new.

[B]

And another one, another point of disappointment there was you get vaccinated and no one told you at that vaccination that you might still get Covid again and you have to be vaccinated Again, no one said that. Okay. And then when you get Covid again. Of course, it was a milder case and the COVID mutated. But we didn't get a whole discussion of the mutation either. It was just, oh, now we're vaccinated. We'll get back to work. And then we get the omega and then the. You know, and that's because we didn't

[C]

find a way to put light inside of the body.

[B]

So these are brilliant lessons here for you to share with us. Us from the history of time, the history of science and civilization. Lots of lessons there. Matt, it's been a delight to have you here.

[C]

What's the book again?

[B]

Oh my gosh, I told you so.

[C]

Love it.

[B]

Scientists who were ridiculed, exiled and imprisoned for being right nice. Yep.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

Told you so.

[C]

If you don't know, now you know.

[B]

Okay, Matt Kaplan, good luck on the tour for this book. Thanks for including us in your efforts to spread this very important insights into the conduct of us all.

[D]

Yes, thank you so much for having me. It's been a joy.

[B]

All right, all right.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

All right, Chuck, always good to have you.

[C]

Always a pleasure.

[B]

Gab Ray.

[A]

Thank you, Neil.

[B]

Pleasure. All right, this has been StarTalk Special Edition. We're just talking about scientists. Scientists and the public behaving badly. All right, until next time, Neil Degrasse Tyson. Keep looking up.

[D]

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