Told You So! with Matt Kaplan

I told you so. What'd you tell me now?

I said some scientists that had known what no one else did.

Yeah? After they were prosecuted, tortured and killed. Yes. Coming right up. Welcome to Startalk.

You're a place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Startalk begins right now. This is Startalk, special edition. When you hear special edition, it means Gary O'Reilly's in the house. Neil Gary, former soccer pro, led you to think that's not a legend, that's a wiki page

of you. All right. I'll soccer outfit. Yes, I will. We can see your hairy legs.

Thank you. Chuck. I can have you man. Yes. No wiki pages with my hairy legs.

Unfortunately. Yeah. So comedian actor and the Lord of Nice. There it is. All right.

So Gary, what showed did you put together today? Interesting one. If you think for centuries, science has at times aligned with and fought against religion. Oh. Government, establishment, and even itself.

But when the sticky upnale confronts historic theories and shouts change, it gets hammered.

“So who were these histories, confrontationists, the ground breakers of science and medicine?”

The ones who we owe so much. All right. With that said, let's bring on our destiny. Oh, okay. Okay.

We've got with us reporting in from UC Davis's that correct. Matt Kaplan, Matt. Welcome to Start Talk. Hey, thanks for having me, Neil. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm in Davis, California right now. There you go. You're a science correspondent at the economist, love science correspondent. You know who doesn't have science correspondence anymore?

CNN. Right.

They're always calling me up to do their job.

He says, and you're like, pay some body. I see. Bastards. Yeah. All there are bunch of books, you know, my favorite title among these is the science

of monsters. That's just, that's cool. That's the funnest thing. That's cool. That's about Jeffrey Epstein.

Oh. Oh. See what I did there? I see what you did there. I heard that joke before, too.

Yeah. And you're latest in a 2026, told you so, scientists who were ridiculed, exiled, and imprisoned for being right. Yeah. Right.

And that's what's seen. That is the problem with scientists.

“They never go, told you, see that, see what I said?”

I know I was right. They never do that. And we need some of that from science. Right. 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. Well, now we're going to get a chance to hold them to down the memory line. We're going to get a taste of that.

So Matt, once 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? 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 at 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 Eurasio

“Gracie, who was saying, look, I think the comets are going around the earth and Galilei”

was fairly certain they were not, and he wrote this piece called discourse on comets and eventually wrote a book called ill-sagitori, which eviscerated drossy not based upon anything else other than his methods. And such is how so important, because such a tour 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.

So 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 rigour about the things”

that they were proposing? 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 analyzed things in different ways, medicine was a catastrophe. So in medicine, during the renaissance, researchers in Britain rediscovered the ways of

hypocrites. Now, hypocrites was a Greek medic, at least we think he was, there's not a lot of evidence as to whether or 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. Put some leeches on it. Oh, man. It's not it.

But, you know, what's so crazy about the bleeding?

Was that we mock folks who did it, but if you had a fever, if you have a fever, and I attached 50 leeches to your abdomen, I guarantee you that fever will go 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 ancient Greeks, like, oh, you've got too much flim, so let's put you in a hot, steamy room and have you get the flim out. And actually, that's still used in medicine.

I'm going to say that's, so that's actually a good thing. Well, hence, the concept of being flagmatic, I guess, is that, that's an adjectival for certain conduct, the behavior. Yeah. So, so they were, they were messing around in medicine with these different ideas.

And it took years after Galileo before you started having signed to say, wait a minute, are leeches actually helping? There's one guy. He was in France, Pierre Charles Alexander 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. The 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 in the sun aren't alignment.”

We think disease is going to happen. And that's, I mean, that was how science was done in medicine at that time. And Louis raised the question, are leeches actually helping? I don't think the leeches are actually doing anything. And so he said, ah, sakura blue, 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 controlled group that had known 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 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?

What was the first hammer blow to old methodology?

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 Massachusetts, who were starting to take notes and record the outcomes of patients. And that was really the application of Galileo 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 populists did not like what they had to say. Many more people would have been alive had those methods and tools made it into medicine

sooner. And the principle could have, is that correct? Is that, but what was the loomly?

“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 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.

Industry. Leech from. You know? Oh my God. Bleach.

Bleach. Oh my God. Neal. They were importing 15 to 20,000 to the little suckers a year into parasolone, in fact

Wow.

And enormous demand for leeches.

“And being told, look, that's not helping.”

Didn't go very far. People weren't ready to hear it. I was going to say Neal 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. But 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 to cure ourselves of it. And you know, I kind of take, I might not agree with that, I'm 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, "Yee, nobody would ever hide that." It just doesn't make sense. That's the rate of failure for new drugs is amazingly higher. It's hidden in Area 51. Oh, no, that is a lot of trouble.

Man, you mentioned a couple of places around Europe, but there's that big example in Vienna

in the general hospital in the 1880s, where they had a 15 percent child.

They had fever. Yeah. Deaths. Oh, 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. Oh, what is this story? Please tell. So you are talking about Igna's similar ways.

Let us go back to the 1840s in early 1800s, Maria Teresa, 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 the 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 got to hand back that book at the library. Oh, you're kidding. You're out of, you're out of hours, so you got that Dropbox at the library, we can put the book, and they'll sort it the next day and you'll have to pay the late fees.

They had a kid Dropbox. They had kid Dropboxes. Oh, well. Now, by the way, I'm just going to say, Matt, that's not a really bad idea. As a man with three children.

“I'm just saying, how, what is the expiration date on Dropbox?”

Well, I think it was the size of the Dropbox. It was really matter. So it depends, 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 a known as prepareal fever or child-bed 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 the swollen, blue and black splotches around their abdomen and their thighs. 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. Prepareal fever, men did not contract. And so there was very little attention paid. Ignos Semmelweiss, this Hungarian obstetrician cared.

He was so good at what he did.

He had immigrated 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 Semmelweiss 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 at spreading. He worked this out and I can tell you about that, if you like. And when he revealed to the mechanisms, he ultimately got shouted down and thrown out of his post.

Wow. So really what should have done was cure egos before we tried to cure the disease of child bad fever. Well, that's certainly part of it.

“But there's so much more to it than that, because we remember Galileo as an astronomer”

of an incredible ability, but we forget what an exceptional diplomat Galileo was.

He was charismatic beyond words. He made all the right friends. He moved and all the right circles. When he got into trouble, he was friends with very powerful people who saved his ass.

Galileo Weiss 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 prepare a 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' interactions that he ultimately shot himself

in the foot.

I'm Joel Cherico, and I support StarTalk on Patreon.

This is StarTalk with Neil Degras Tyson. We have to assume that this particular fever was cured, and they found out how and why this was occurring. So does Samil Weiss get the credit or does he actually pop his clogs before this all comes to fruition?

It's incredible. So Samil Weiss followed the scientific method and made notes. He noticed, for example, there were two words 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 prepareal 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 we tried feeding the patients in the doctors' ward, the food that was being delivered to the nurses' ward. No change.

“I mean, I was a legitimate question, what was causing it?”

Then he tried burning all the sheets in the doctors' ward and replacing them with sheets from the nurses' 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 of the doctors'

ward, he thought, "Well, maybe the incense causes prepareal 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. And one morning, Samuel Weiss 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." He's there. There's no one had any idea about bacteria back in the day. No clue. You know, is there 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 there were dumping chloride of lime into the sewer to try

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. No more death." No more death.

It's gone. No more death.

Never mind that the skin fell off his hands five days later because the solution was so strong.

But, you know, I mean, he went, "Wow, the smell has gone." and then he started testing this and he asked all the other doctors in the word to follow suit and remarkably, they did. And the infection rate dropped, wait for it, from 21% to zero. How about that?

So the doctors were infecting the children with death itself. 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 didn't he know he was doing that word? This is just something, so it's simply he was like, "Okay, I'm just going to keep going

and tell something happens."

“So he had had a mentor named Joseph Scoda who was, honestly, for lack of better words,”

the best description is he was like the 1800s Vienna example of Sheldon Cooper, socially in Nefts, genius, knew exactly what he was talking about with numbers and was an outcast amongst the doctors at the Vienna Hospital. Simal-wise 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 you're rate of 21% goes to zero. That doesn't require p-values or chi-squared tests or anything. Here'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. Oh, that's funny.

That's funny. Yeah, design a better experiment. Yeah, right, right. What eventually is the final chapter for Igna Simal-wise? Does he get Lordead and adored for his work or does he just unplug himself from this scenario?

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 prepareal fever. But Simal-wise had made a lot of missteps politically.

Hungry rose up against Vienna because it didn't want to be a vassal state anymore. Simal-wise 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, Simal-wise had on multiple occasions derided his supervisors, who said, "Yeah, we have these really bad cases of prepareal fever because the sun, the moon, and the stars are out of alignment." And then Simal-wise, being really not very attentive to social interaction, said, "Yeah, but we have the same sun, the 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. Right. So 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. Wow. And it looked happily ever. There he is.

That was it. So, if we moved Matt forward a little bit to someone who has probably the polar opposite to Igna's Simal-wise, Louis Pasteur. Oh boy. 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 poncho on for the deviousness, and I think you called him brilliant to nature something else and then you finished with asshole. Do we lie not to the Louis Pasteur story? That's cool. Yeah, sure.

So, Simal-wise 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 Vagost LaRont, who had been very involved with the student rebellion that you see a lot in this reflected in Lame as a rob at the barricades, where the students rose up against the right-wing government to demand rights for the poor. And a Gost LaRont has taken their side, and Pasteur watched as his research supervisor,

lost funding from the government for taking on the wrong side of politics.

side of politics ever.

“So he knew how to milk the French government from money, but he also knew how to tell”

a story.

And he knew how to make sure that those stories never 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. So wait, just if a chicken poops, how do you know it's diarrhea, then it all looks

like diarrhea? It's the sound they make. More liquid, more liquid, Neal, more liquid, Neal, more liquid. It's a bird poopy. Lots more liquid.

Yeah. Just triple the liquid, and you've got it, and you know what I mean, apparently is bad.

I've not ever seen chicken cholera in first person nor do I really want to.

Really? Anyway, back to when Threx. That sounds good. That sounds quite palatable on the back of your mouth. Yeah, much better ever before.

And 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 to saunt.

“And Henry to saunt 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 microbe 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 with a pathogen that was weak, but not destroyed.

And he said, Henry to saunt 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 as 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 a hundred 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 to saunts mechanism. The one that he had derided and discredited to saunt for and lied about it. The saunt died a popper, 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 discredited in Gaultier as well. So he was pretty vicious and he was very successful as a scientist, but not in a nice way. Maybe he should have figured out a way to get light inside of the body.

No. I'm perhaps a little bit of bleach in a circle. And then when I saw the bleach coming, I saw coming. I saw coming. I saw a bleach in the circle.

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

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 a 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 was pivotal to him getting money.

So, no one knows how gut throat this business is. So he wasn't a whole, yeah, he was a big giant, but I got to tell you, I mean, he was French, I mean, that's kind of okay. I'm just trying to nation under the bus, I'm just saying, like your nation's calling

“your French, you get away with it, it's like, oh, that's what you know, it's like part”

of the thing, you know what I mean, it's like, hi, man, it has some water.

You may, you may not, what is your problem talking to me. Oh, come on, there were nice French people, they're nice French, I mean, Pierre Alexander Louie was a really good guy and he ended up being a mentor to a very important American scientist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was also treated for a prepareal fever, I mean, so, I mean, they're good French doctors, okay, so I love them to found one.

Oh, damn to fight price 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 something that persisted until like the early 1900s, what's going on there that people look up and say, okay, the folk, their Buddhist lies not in your stars, look at that, Shakespeare, well said for

that. Yeah, I mean, did you, did you, did you uncover anything that would make, yeah, explain why that is? What are the urges?

“Look, yeah, does it just an extension of astrology at that level?”

It isn't, it isn't, so I'm thinking 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, 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 semi-wise 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 women. You were using this crazy method before and now it's been proved wrong. Why were we paying you all this money? So you've got the power of long-established narrative 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 semi-wise, fought the good fight and lost. So at the foundation here is science and science results. I don't want to absolve past year and others for their in-properiety, but you have science intersecting culture and society.

And so they're forces operating that are not purely scientific forces, the fame, the money, the influence, the power, politics, politics, all these things. They're all in there. Yeah. These are contaminating forces on the purity of a science that should have none of that.

Right. And you have a whole book on it. So Matt, if we fast forward, do you think there's a echo of that malaise still present in our scientific medical environments today? What other than the ways?

An echo. An echo. 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?”

Unfortunately, we really not abandoned it.

And first of all, by the way, I want to emphasize, actually, you know, pasture behaved

very badly, Galileo behaved, he was excellent at diplomacy and negotiation in a manner that

And you don't have to backstab people to take unpopular ideas to get them across in the end. Yeah. But in terms of the A whole factor, you got to admit that when Galileo wrote the dialogue of the two chief world systems, you're arguing, there's a rough in the center, there's

a sudden the center. And as he's two sort of, let's call it, an 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 of the Simplicio. And Simplicio.

By the way, that's brilliant. It's brilliant. But it's like I am sorry, but that is brilliant. And he publishes it in Italian so that everybody can read it. It's not just Latin.

Okay. So that's kind of a whole. He's an A whole, but he's a smart, a whole. Same. Because 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 things. Right. But it's dumbass. It's all the words that the Pope said. Right.

And the Pope is powerful.

Well, but guess what? It's like you didn't look at the Pope. It's what? That's not you. That's dumbass.

You know. Okay. You just smart. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. 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 Ferdinand to Damedici, who was the grand Duke of Tuscany.

“And if there was anyone powerful enough to interfere with the inquisition, it was Ferdinand”

to Damedici.

And you know, it's amazing because Ferdinand to Damedici had Galileo on the payroll.

He was their chief scientist in Tuscany. And similarly, Galileo was bosom buddies with the Ambassador to Rome for the Tuscany. So when Galileo ultimately was called before the inquisition, Ferdinand to Damedici 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 then when he was eventually taken over to the inquisition and living there, he was 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.

It doesn't make a difference. I like that narrative better. I have more respect for Galileo. That's like me getting arrested in her life. All right, Chuck, we're going to give you five to ten.

And you're going to live in this mansion with the Warden's wife. Wait, but I have not, that is a piece of history that had looted me.

Because I always was suspicious.

White was the Judeo-Nobruno is brought up in front of the inquisition, burned at the start. Yeah. Okay. Where as Galileo was brought up in front of the inquisition, not that many years later. Later.

Okay. Watch that phrase. Well, he was on house around this restaurant. Yeah, yeah. Put on the rack and tortured in the hood, we would have said that Galileo was a snitch.

Yeah. Because Brown threw it down and Galileo did not improve the way down to the floor. You are an informant. No, in Galileo. Well, funny thing Bruno went down in a vault.

So yes, he got it. Yeah. I mean, it's important to note that the inquisition wrote that Galileo was exposed to rigorous examination. And that was code for torture back then.

Right. Galileo was in his what? You know, like 68, 69 when he got brought in. And their method of torture was to put a 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 to feet at 69 if that had been done to him. Also, I mean, fun fact, the inquisition was the epitome of organized evil. And if you ever have ever watched the princess bride, of course, you know, when they're torturing Wesley, there's like, you know, please tell us everything.

This is for posterity.

“Well, that's what the inquisition actually did.”

And 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 for ananda de Medici and by the way, the de Medici by that time, had already supplied two queens to France and four popes. So these folks were really powerful, had insured that Galileo did not end up tortured. So there was a lot of a political disruption that occurred to protect Galileo and make sure that, you know, he didn't get burned at the stake.

The friends and high places, that's the thing. I like Galileo even more now, he's total gangster.

That even exists today, where someone who's going to 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, but you do me a favor in the blanks because this, this one blew me away when I read it. So this is Cati Carricol and Cati Carricol 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. Absolutely.

But the problem was, as Cati 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 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.

Cati 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. It 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 up at dental hygienist or a forest or something.

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 year's 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 them RNA 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 Weissman was integral to identifying that key fact.

And ultimately, Kati Kariiko'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. Well, she said that. Yeah. But it's important to notice that Kati Kariiko was so like, semel-wise.

Semel-wise believed that he didn't need to publish. He didn't feel like he needed to stand on a soap box like Pastor 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.

Kati Kariiko, 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 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 there's only going to grant 1% of the money, it's 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 Semel-wise 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 a bit of a killed-actile 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, prepareal fever,

and trying to defeat it, and other scientists who were rights, and got excoriated for it. And I realize, 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 terrible.

us to be here into a place where right now there is just provading 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

“issue or throw away the stuff that got us to where we are right now, I think it's important”

to recognize 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 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 a Lord nice person, 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 an industry, is stacked against people who don't have the right”

pitch or narrative. 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 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 Kotikara goes 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 desalination plants, which are now all threatened by missiles,

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 scientists who are not the Galileo's, who don't have the master diplomacy, the scientists who are not the Machiavellian fiends like pasture, we want to make sure the people with the great ideas who don't have the skillset 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. Journalists have, it's science, journalism, particularly 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 a story process, Hitler 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 left a lot of people doubting and we've got to do a lot of ketchup 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 got to 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

That's how it's supposed to work. Absolutely. Most people don't understand that. Yeah.

[Music]

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

After her phenomenon? Yeah. So I don't think the glass ceiling is so much an issue about 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 that 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 a reform. And I'm really excited about it because a number of organizations,

several governments, including the Austrian government, which I think is hysterical. The

villain of foundation, Volkswagen are supporting programs that democratize funding in research. 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 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 a thousand 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, you often are subtly affected by, oh, who published this? Was this, I saw who wrote this? Is this from Harvard or is this from the University of Whitwater, Sand in South Africa? Or is this an application written with a vague accent in English that makes it obvious that the person is in 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 blind folds, 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. I'd like that idea. Once you take out the bottom fraction, and then you pluck the very top that everyone agrees with, if the rest are so could be so subtly filtered just by institution or accent or name or whatever, then that's bad. That is bad.

“That's just bad. So you just make that random. I love that. Has that been implemented?”

It is. So the villain 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 from 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. You know, what else would be good is if governments just gave more money to science? How about that? I mean, that's a great idea. How about the richest nation in the world, in the history of the world, just gives a percentage more to science. It would change everything. 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

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 Pasteuric like behavior,”

that's becoming ever more common. And right now, you do that. And I mean, that's bad, because if you are not, we're to steal $100,000 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 follow up experiment on that." And applies for $100,000 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 waste. And right now, if you engage in fraud, there's very little punishment, other than being put on an administrative leave from the university and being being removed from your teaching circuit. If we were to establish some significant penalty as for engaging in fraud, and also establishing some better systems for detecting 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.”

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've brought to us today, which is very enjoyable. Will it illuminating? We don't enjoy stories of people lying and cheating. That's stealing. Aluminating. It is. This illuminating history lesson. Will it actually teach us anything? Are we going to rinse and repeat or will we be learning

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. 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. And so this is a, it's kind of, let's call it a knee-jerk reaction of the scientist 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 there was a correct idea and we're losing it. Yes,

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 to be incorrect. And you don't

write a book about that. I don't want to shed light on that. Look, because 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 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 I just, if I get you a reaction to the idea that the conservatism of science is almost necessary. And yes, occasionally one goes out with the bathwater. 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 looks at things that are recognized and then when it sees it totally doesn't recognize, it attacks it and removes it. That very, very good example. Um, biologists, 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, you may have to say that dozens and dozens of times. And that's, that is part of science is saying, look, I've, 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

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 thought about it and”

you're wrong. A good example is Alfred Wagner, who looked at the continent 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 ones 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 rides, you gotta read it and say, nope, still disagree or wait a minute. Why do I disagree? What's the reason that I disagree? So with your Wagner 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 going to be skeptical of that. And probably would have been one of those that said,

“this guy, you know, he's still at it. It was not until I think with the discovery of the separation”

in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, when we were mapping the bottoms of the ocean primarily for summerine

movement in the second world war. It's always war. Then, then I don't think there were many people

who were still holdouts back then because that was the, we saw the smoke that was the gun that that fired that allowed us to say our geology, whether I was just right. So it was a matter of how much evidence is there for it. And there wasn't sufficient evidence to convince everybody, just because he was later shown to be right, is not an argument against people rejecting his idea to be, when it was for absolute. Yeah, I think you guys are saying the same thing. Yeah,

yeah, you're saying the same thing differently. But there's a difference between arguing and saying, look, I disagree with you, I disagree with you, and deriding him so aggressively that he was thrown out of the scientific community. Right. Okay. That's the behaving badly, that's the behaving badly part. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, there was a difference between some of why he's making his remarks and being thrown in a lunatic asylum by his own peers.

“You know, I think, and same thing with Kati Kariko, 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. Totally. So, but I think that's caused 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 Samalyze and for Kati, you're looking at unspoken biases that are at play here. Let's just be honest,

that's really what it comes down to. Yeah. And yeah, I think, systemically, if you're able to remove that in any way, science benefits as a whole. Yeah, of course, of course. And just I'm going

to give an exactual example for 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. Stay 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 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, except wow. Yeah. See, now that's just sound like a guy with a personal problem. Well, you can be emotionally invested in your own in your own ideas. So, I'm saying that, you know, it's a completely stubbornness. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Take at it. It's the word. So, Matt, we got to land this plane. Let me send a question back to you. You cited scientists

behaving badly. You cited society behaving badly. And these are all amazing examples. And it's

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. But I grew up in people saw sciences are savior as a, we cure us. It would take us into the future. And I don't feel that anymore in our culture. And so, how do you, how do you turn what you've compiled here into the positive for the public to take a civilization ahead? 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 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, "Hey, I don't understand how that works. Can you explain that to me?" And we need to start to ask and 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. 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 time's reporter about your work? Okay. That was a part of it. You translate it. 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's nothing I can do about it because COVID was a novel novel that was called the novel coronavirus. Correct. 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, and you don't get a politician.

You get someone that's got some expertise. You like Fauci, okay? It was a 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. Right. And so, 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 a 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 been a science lesson for people, and there would have been less cynicism to derive from that whole episode. 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. Right. It's a perfect sentence right there. And we revealed quite publicly how science works. There you go. And that's the problem. I think what also has to happen is the public has to understand that, oh God, I'm going to get in trouble. Most of the people look at science like

religion, religion has answers. Whether the answer is a 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. And another example would have been, based on what we know of the virus, it may be transmitted over the surfaces of with fluids. So right now, you know, hose down your groceries when that was the first couple of weeks. First of all, you're back grocery bags. Okay, so then the next we say, we're fighting, no, it's more airborne than liquid. And so then we could just follow along.

That would have been even fun. Right. Exactly. Let's see what's going to happen next week. And please remember, it's the novel coronavirus. And we don't know because it's new. And another one, another point of disappointment there was you get vaccinated and no one told you 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, it, of course, was a milder case and the COVID mutated.

vaccinated. We'll get back to work. And then we get the Omega. And then the, you know,

that's because we didn't find a way to put light inside of the body. So these are brilliant lessons

here for you to share with 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. What's the book again?”

Oh my gosh. I told you so. I love it. Scientists who are ridiculed, exiled and imprisoned for being right. Nice. Yep. Yes. Told you so. If you don't know, now you know. Matt Kaplan, a 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. Yeah. Thank you so much for having”

me. It's been a joy. All right. All right. All right. Chuck, always good to have you always. Yeah,

right. Thank you, Neil. Oh, all right. This has been a start talk special edition. We're just talking

“about scientists and the public behaving badly. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Until next time,”

Neil the Grass Titan. Keep looking up.