Freedberg found bacteria which may have been Helicobacter in a third of his ulcer patients - not exactly an overwhelming correlation. Contrary to the idea that he was dismissed as a “crank”, the article states that others tried to replicate his work and could not. Other theories were more widely accepted and stood until there was good, reproducible evidence to the contrary.
That’s how science works.
Here you are wrongly suggesting that all the therapy for gastric ulcers was completely useless - not the case.
It would’ve been highly useful if the role of H. pylori had been proven earlier, but it was not…and the lack of a proven link cannot be conveniently ascribed to a scoffing, hidebound medical/scientific establishment. It makes for a nice exploitable myth, but it’s still a myth.
I would say any discovery that serious medical conditions can be prevented or cured with nutrition has been and is still extremely controversial.
Some people were promoting various fruits as a treatment for scurvy 200 years before it became a treatment the world actually took seriously.
It was discovered several years ago that children in developed nations who got vitamin A supplements had about 30-40% lower mortality than those who did not. It was ridiculed at first.
It is now being discovered that vitamin D may play a role in various mental illnesses (depression, autism) as well as many chronic diseases of old age (osteoarthritis, cancer, type II diabetes, CVD).
So I’d say anything to do with preventing or treating serious disease with nutrition or orthomolecular medicine is criticized heavily.
Quite so. Skepticism and, indeed, sustained and vigorous criticism of new ideas and claims is a normal, proper and necessary part of the scientific process. Every new idea or finding that is worth a damn gets those, and a good thing too. Most new scientific ideas and “discoveries” turn out to be wrong, and those that don’t (i.e., those that survive all the criticism) will generally emerge from the ordeal in a very different, and much improved form.
No doubt, also, people engaged in this critical process will occasionally make wisecracks about the ideas that they think are wrong. By contrast (and contrary to certain popular beliefs) widespread and sustained ridicule of significant new ideas or findings is rare.
No, they did not all laugh at Christopher Columbus, when he said the world was round.
No, they simply pointed out that his theory that Japan was 3,000 miles west of Lisbon was almost certainly wrong. And it was
If the evidence for the existence of radioactivity hadn’t been overwhelmingly strong, no physicist of the day would have credited it. It flatly contradicted everything scientists thought they knew about how physics worked. A hypothesis of how it worked had to be built from the bare experimental facts uncovered.
Can we see some evidence for this supposed “ridicule”?
There is a problem with leaping on any bandwagon that says that vitamins or other nutritional supplements have widespread beneficial effects against disease.
Not long ago vitamin E was considered to be extremely promising as a cancer preventative. One application with some supporting data was in the prevention of prostate cancer. But lo and behold, when a large clinical trial was done, vitamin E (and selenium, another supposed protective agent) did not have a protective effect against prostate cancer. Similarly, vitamin E was not found to help prevent lung cancer; in fact there’s some indication it may heighten lung cancer risk when taken as a supplement.
Before raising recommended daily allowances for vitamins and minerals, or encouraging supplement use, researchers and clinicians would like to see good evidence from clinical trials that these changes would have value and not have unsuspected negative effects. This is not “ridicule” or “cynicism”, but good science and medicine.
A lot of people want to think there are cheap supplements that are effective in preventing or treating a wide range of diseases, and are eager to believe that these magic bullets exist. The multi-billion dollar supplement industry is eager to support such beliefs despite flimsy or nonexistent evidence.
Well, some *ideas *are met with skepticism, but few real scientific Theories have met met much serious ridicule.
Let’s take Wegener’s continental drift “theory” . It wasn’t a *Theory *at all- it was a *Hypothesis *that had no testable data to back it up. Yes, he was right but he had no evidence of any mechanism. He just made a educated guess and was lucky enough to be right.
So, although perhaps the *Hypothesis *met with more ridicule than it deserved, Scientists of the day were quite right to say “Interesting hypothesis-when you get testable data come back, until then we’ll shelve it”. In fact, if they had accepted it, they would have been wrong.
This doesn’t really fit the OP’s criteria, but I’ve heard there was a “fact” widely espoused way back when that the human body cannot withstand speeds of x miles per hour (30mph, 40mph etc), and so train travel can never catch on.
As I recall, much of the ridicule, from me f’rinstance, came from claims that a prion could remain infectious after complete (not partial) incineration and its reduction to its component oxates etc. It gave a prion an almost-supernatural quality.
ETA: Creepy proteins? I’m all over them. Ones that can be reduced to carbon dioxide, simple nitrogen compounds, and water and can still replicate? You lost me.
From wiki. Prions will resist boiling and cooking but will not survive temps high enough to de-nature them, and these temps are well below “incineration”.
Probably because the discovery that mitochondria developed from independent organisms doesn’t have much direct impact on medicine, and there’s no Nobel prize for biology in general.
Yes, the Nobel Prize categories are a bit dated. Biology seems like a good feild. I wonder if they will ever update the categories. With biology as a category, perhaps there would be room for some of the deserving chemistry research that gets pushed out by biochemisty. Most of the biochemistry could go either way.
