This article was taken from the October issue of Wired UK magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online
Nearly all great scientists start out as heretics nailing their theories to the door of conventional scientific wisdom. Galileo, Darwin and Einstein were all at some point in a minority of one; Alfred Wegener was dead before continental drift was taken seriously.
So somewhere today there is a scientific heretic being ridiculed by the orthodox scientific clerisy, but who will later be recognised as a visionary. Trouble is, the fact that all great scientists were heretics does not mean that all heretics are right. Science is plagued by self-proclaimed geniuses furious at the establishment's refusal to recognise their disproof of relativity.
It is easy to judge heretics in retrospect. Ignaz Semmelweis was the Viennese physician who noticed in 1847 that doctors were killing women by not washing their hands in between dissecting corpses and delivering their babies. The death rate from childbed fever was twice as high for doctor-assisted births as it was for midwife-assisted births. But Semmelweis's reward for pointing this out was vilification, ostracism and eventually the insane asylum, where he died.
All over the world, doctors resisted the idea of antiseptic hygiene. Take the surgeon who treated US president James Garfield after he was shot in 1881 - he invited colleagues to probe the wound with their fingers. Garfield died two months later from infection, not injury.
That could never happen now, could it? Well, consider the case of Barry Marshall, the Australian medical researcher who in the 1980s suggested that stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, not stress and spicy food. Antacid drugs were among the pharmaceutical industry's biggest cash cows at the time, and Marshall's theory was dismissed. So he infected himself by drinking a brew of Helicobacter pylori, then cured himself with antibiotics. The bacterial theory was still not accepted for many years, but it won him the Nobel prize in 2005.
Or take dietary fat. As recounted in Gary Taubes's book The Diet Delusion, the hypothesis that fatty food was responsible for heart disease became an article of faith with the medical establishment despite studies failing to verify the link. But by citing only the relatively few studies that did find a correlation, and ignoring the ones that did not, a powerful body of evidence was assembled. Heretics who said that dietary carbohydrate mattered more were brushed aside until very recently.
Yet I could cite just as many heretics who were ignored and were wrong. Peter Duesberg, who believes that HIV does not cause Aids, and Andrew Wakefield, who thought the MMR vaccine caused autism, have their tales of ranks closing against them, as do various kinds of intelligent designers.
Right on the cusp of plausibility, in my view, lies the heresy championed by Edward Hooper in his book The River, that the Aids epidemic may have been started by trials of experimental polio vaccines in Congo and Burundi in the late 1950s. I hope it is not true, yet I have always thought the circumstantial evidence Hooper exhaustively gathered was strong enough to merit serious discussion. Early, live polio vaccines were indeed contaminated with animal viruses such as SV40; huge vaccine trials were done in the year before the oldest surviving HIV-positive blood sample was taken and in areas where Aids epidemics later broke out among the young adults likely to have been vaccinated as children; and a large chimpanzee colony was maintained for polio research by the very team developing the vaccine in the Congo (HIV is a chimp virus). But there are some good arguments against the theory: the family tree of the virus seems to show earlier infection of human beings, and no sample of chimp tissue used for locally amplifying the vaccine has ever come to light.
Scientists are human. They allow their prejudices, their interests and their loyalties to get in the way of reason. Sometimes, ideas in science cannot prevail until their diehard opponents have died hard. Theory, it is said, advances "funeral by funeral".
And as for the financial heretics? Yes, I also wish I had listened more to them.
Want more Wired UK magazine? Get your copy every month bysubscribing online today
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
