Scientists Causing Trouble!

Kaplan, Matt.  I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being 

        Right.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 2026.  ISBN: 9781250372277

 

 

Science is supposed to be a process governed by logic and evidence.  A hypothesis is presented, evidence is gathered and folks try to disprove the idea.  If they can't disprove it,  the hypothesis is accepted as fact.  That is the idealized view of science. But Matt Kaplan's latest title - I Told You So! - focuses on the contrast between how science is supposed to work versus how science is practiced in the real world.   

 

Matt Kaplan opens the book with a description of him attending the 72nd meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in North Carolina as the science correspondent for The Economist (he had been paleontologist before becoming a journalist).  There he encountered numerous scientists in an uproar because a PhD student named Allison Moyer had the gall to present a poster session that challenged some semi-deeply held beliefs about dinosaur color and how we could know what color the dinosaurs were.  Luckily, Alison had Mary Schewitzer and Jack Horner, two established scientists backing her up.  As Kaplan goes on to state in the opening, this is not an isolated occurrence, rather, this is almost normal because scientists are people before they are scientists and people let emotions, cherished beliefs, and prestige shape their responses to challenges.

 

Kaplan looks at issues of bullying, bias, fabrication, sexism, personality conflicts, and other issues that plague science by interweaving the stories of a number of scientist, doctors, and other researchers (both historical figures and more recent scientists) into a coherent story.  Among those discussed is Ignaz Semmelweis who advocated the use of carbolic wash to prevent puerperal fever in Austria, Alexander Gordon, who was chased out of Aberdeen, Scotland, for suggesting that medical staff was spreading puerperal fever, Pierre Louis who created the medical trial by accident while investigating bloodletting in France during the 1800s and one of his students Oliver Wendell Holmes (the father of the Supreme Court justice) who got chased out of medicine because of his views on puerperal fever.  Holmes got his revenge on his critics by becoming a teacher of anatomy and physiology at Harvard who helped train the next generation of doctors on his theories. Then there is Louis Pasteur who played fast and loose in regard to his claims and would go out of his way to sabotage those he felt might claim his fame.  Carl Woese changed the classification of bacteria.  Katalin Kariko created mRNA which led to the Covid-19 vaccine and other possible vaccines but faced numerous challenges as immigrant scientist  before she found success.  Joseph Lister was another who used a microscope to start to identify bacteria in the 1850s.  Then there is Charles Darwin and Galileo Galilei who each had strong allies that helped defend them from attack.  Kaplan rounds off the book with brief discussions of authorship, power dynamics, and funding in relation to how science currently practiced.

 

So if you have an interest in science, read this title!  I Told You So! will get the reader thinking about how science could work if scientists were not people first.  A highly recommended book!