When the Renaissance scientist Galileo defended the heliocentric model of the Universe, he was condemned by the Catholic Church. Modern scientists, however, frequently face their fiercest opposition not from religious authorities but from within their own ranks. In his new book, I Told You So!, Matt Kaplan—a longtime science correspondent for The Economist—traces a lineage of internal resistance to paradigm-changing scientific ideas from the Victorian era to today. The engaging narrative, which draws on historical archives and interviews with contemporary researchers, also highlights fault lines the scientific community must address to meet pressing challenges.

Central to Kaplan’s narrative is the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, an obstetrician at the Vienna General Hospital in the mid-19th century who discovered that puerperal fever was often spread by doctors moving directly from autopsies to the delivery ward. His remedy—thorough handwashing with calcium hypochlorite—could have spared countless women. Yet the finding languished for decades. Semmelweis’s observations were rejected at the time, Kaplan notes, partly because physicians resisted examining their own role in maternal deaths and partly because the obstetrician lacked a theoretical framework. Germ theory would later reveal microbes to be the true agents of infectious disease and explain the efficacy of Semmelweis’s intervention.

Louis Pasteur, who helped transform germ theory—a minor medical theory in the mid-19th century—into a cornerstone of modern medicine, drew on the work of rivals, omitted their contributions, and withheld methodological details to present a simplified narrative for funders. Those invested in Pasteur’s legend excuse these actions by saying that he “knew how to play the game.” Through Pasteur, Kaplan exposes a pattern: scientific prestige sometimes built on ethical shortcuts and a system that too often rewards them.

Such patterns persist in the modern scientific enterprise. Biochemist Katalin Karikó—a Hungarian immigrant to the United States—played a crucial role in developing the mRNA technology behind the COVID-19 vaccine, yet the implications of her research were not recognized immediately. At the University of Pennsylvania, where she spent nearly two decades, she was demoted and shunted between labs before leaving for the private sector, where her ideas finally received the support they deserved. She won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

When a former colleague casually remarks to Kaplan that the university was right to fire Karikó because she did not bring in grants, he is stunned by the cold, mercenary logic. But the colleague is correct that securing funding is inseparable from doing science. Karikó’s story exposes a larger truth: Money tends to flow to projects with a better chance of success, leaving researchers with unusual ideas out in the cold.

Kaplan points to alternative funding mechanisms—among them a well-designed lottery system and the Villum Foundation’s “golden ticket” model, which allows individual reviewers to champion high-risk ideas that consensus-driven committees would almost certainly overlook. He also highlights proposals to reduce bias related to an investigator’s gender, nationality, or seniority by blinding committees to grant-seekers’ identities. The blinding tactic is hardly new, but it could be adopted far more widely than it is today.

Where big money flows, corruption can follow. Kaplan argues that the scientific community must devote more resources to identifying and punishing fraud, noting that publications, too, are a kind of currency. When gatekeepers admit low-quality or fabricated papers into the literature, they erode the very foundation of science, which depends on the reliability of prior results.

Kaplan also illustrates another fault line in science: Cooperation collapses under competitive pressure. Here, he recounts the story of two groups racing to rescue the northern white rhino who chose competition over collaboration. The contest to be the first to do so—despite the risk of dooming an endangered species—captures a deeper malaise. Just like Pasteur, he writes, these modern researchers were keeping their cards well concealed so that they could best reap the glory of their efforts by being first. Under these circumstances, he argues, collaboration should have been the only option.

Threaded through the book is Kaplan’s own story. With academic publications to his name as an undergraduate, he left paleontology for science journalism, provoking disdain from some of his research peers. That same background, however, makes him fluent in science’s language and culture, and it gives this book its authority and authenticity. If success in science requires knowing “how to play the game,” Kaplan invites readers to consider the possibility that the game itself is fundamentally flawed—no small achievement. I Told You So! makes a compelling case that if science is to remain faithful to its core principles, reform is overdue.

Here is the pdf.

Note:

The book’s message seems to have found resonance. I have been hearing from original thinking researchers who (rightly) think I am sympathetic to their cause. It does sound like the book’s message has some resonance. Another reason I am receiving these mails may be simply this: the author Matt Kaplan does not seem to have left contact information anywhere — not even on his excellent and aptly titled website.

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On 4 October 1960, Eastern Air Lines Flight 375 took off from Logan International Airport on a clear fall evening and plunged almost immediately into the icy waters of Boston Harbor, killing all but ten of the seventy-two people on board. It remains the deadliest air crash in New England history.

When the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) announced the cause of the crash, the public was incredulous: A flock of European Starlings, which weighed less than three ounces each, had brought down the 98,000-pound plane. In total, the plane’s engines had ingested fewer than a dozen of the small songbirds, but the freak accident highlighted the threat the creatures posed to airplanes in flight.

Bird strikes happen all the time, though they do not always lead to plane crashes. Knowing which species and weight of birds hit planes frequently could help manufacturers build bird-resistant aircraft and enable ecologists to guide programs to reduce bird populations near runways. In the tragedy’s aftermath, the FAA instructed all airlines to mail a “feather or more” of birds sucked into aircraft engines to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. There, it fell to 50-year-old taxidermist Roxie Laybourne to take the mangled bits of the bird – often only wisps of degraded feathers – and make an accurate species identification. Insiders now call the process—which involves examining feathers’ microstructures— the “Roxie Method.”

In The Feather Detective, Chris Sweeney traces Laybourne’s career as the world’s first forensic ornithologist, who made aviation safer, and whose work also helped build criminal cases against murderers and poachers. Laybourne died in 2003, so Sweeney’s account draws on interviews with her colleagues, court transcripts, press clippings, correspondence, and archival recordings, including an eight-part oral history interview conducted by the Smithsonian.

Laybourne started her career as an unpaid apprentice at the North Carolina State Museum where she discovered a talent for taxidermy. To become a full-fledged scientist, which she aspired to do despite having a full-time job, a troubled marriage, and a toddler, she enrolled in a graduate program in zoology at North Carolina State.

In 1944, on a professor’s recommendation, she applied for a temporary taxidermist position at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. and moved to Washington, D.C. As she skinned birds and prepared specimens, her superiors noticed her work, and her work ethic. At the end of the year, she joined the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS) and also stayed on at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, working with thousands of bird specimens. “You learn a lot washing feathers, if you pay attention,” she argued. Six years after arriving in Washington, she completed her master’s degree at George Washington University.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) eventually sought her expertise as well. Typically, her work for them involved matching a feather found at the scene of a crime with an object that belonged to the perpetrator or the victim— a pillow or a down jacket, for example. But even though her efforts helped prosecute criminals, her FWS boss felt that this “service work” distracted from the laboratory’s research mandate and abolished it in 1974. However, she continued her feather identification work as a private consultant.

At 64-years-old that year, Laybourne realized it was time to start handing down her hard-won knowledge to promising young researchers. Mentoring did not come easy to Laybourne. Her criticisms could sting. FBI special agent Doug Deedrick, who Laybourne trained to become the bureau’s in-house feather expert, recalls that she “wouldn’t hesitate to give [him] ‘a slap across the face,’ so to speak,” when he failed to meet her expectations, Sweeney writes.

At the Smithsonian, Beth Ann Sabo—an apprentice who persisted despite Laybourne’s tough love— left to lead feather-related work at a high-tech forensic lab in Oregon dedicated to crimes against nature, and Laybourne’s quest for potential successors continued. She saw promise in a technician called Carla Dove. Laybourne, who had endured a secondary status without a PhD, arranged for the U.S. Air Force – which outsourced bird strike identification to the Smithsonian – to fund her protégé’s doctoral studies. For her doctoral degree, Dove studied the microstructures of shorebirds, because many important airports are located on marshy shorelines. In the scientific community of the Smithsonian, Laybourne who did not have a PhD, had endured eyerolls and snide comments in her time.

When the museum celebrated its sesquicentennial anniversary in 1996, Laybourne – now in the sixth decade of her career – set up a table at the National Mall to share her work with the public. Marcy Heacker, a veterinary technician looking for a career change, approached her. Through an accelerated apprenticeship, Heacker trained in forensic ornithology. Dove and Heacker reported to Laybourne, as though she was their boss, but each worried about her as if she were their mother, Sweeney writes. When Laybourne died at age ninety-three, the two women who carried her scientific legacy forward were among the pallbearers at her funeral.

Among the 34 portraits that constitute the Division of Bird’s “Hall of Fame,” Laybourne remains the sole woman. While “the Roxie Method” creator may never become a household name, this engagingly written biography brings her remarkable story to a wider audience.

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Newspaper reports credited Sergeant Louis R. Vitullo, but a few also mentioned a woman collaborator. Kennedy proceeded to investigate, and the result is this cogent narrative about this feminist technology and its true inventor, the activist Martha “Marty” Goddard. The Secret History of The Rape Kit is a gripping book about a grim topic, written with exemplary grace.

In 1972, Goddard, a volunteer for a teen crisis helpline in Chicago, realized that many of those runaway teens had fled home after being molested by a family member or teacher. Goddard, Kennedy writes, was moved to speak to rape survivors, attorneys, and hospital workers to gain insights into a crime that left a victim feeling hopeless, even responsible for her own condition.

What if there was a way to prove that rape had happened, Goddard had asked.

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If there is a book reading/discussion by Dava Sobel at a bookstore near you — you should absolutely go. Dava is such a charming, intelligent and articulate person, chances are, you will immediately decide to read anything/everything she has ever written. Her beat is historical women in science. Her stories are for most part about women whose contributions to science should be better known, or some like Marie Curie who are already household names, but there is still more to know about them. It’s easy to forget the context in which these women did science.

From the Q & A with Sobel following her reading:

Is Marie Curie still relevant? I would say yes. I came from a family where women were never dissuaded from studying science. But this I have learnt is not the case for everyone, here, in the United States or elsewhere in the world. Nor is it just about getting advanced degrees in science. Many women with advanced degrees in science still drop out after becoming mothers. Childcare, sadly, remains an issue for mothers in science.  Marie Curie herself was very fortunate. Her father-in-law took care of her two daughters. Further, even today, women do not find it easy rise to top positions in research institutes. There still seems to be plenty of bias against women in science.

How did you come to write this book? When an editor suggested I write about Madame Curie, I turned out down the idea. Later, I was asked to review a book about some early women in the field of radioactivity. A Devotion to Their Science by Marelene and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham.

“The women profiled in this book were not assistants or helpers—they were scientists in their own right, often working under conditions that denied them recognition, resources, or even basic respect.”
— Marelene and Geoffrey Rayner-Canham, A Devotion to Their Science

As it read it, it soon became evident that many of these women had spent time, during their formative years in Curie’s lab. It was a magnet for young women scientists back then.  There were some 45 of them in all!  Now the idea of working on a new biography became interesting.  She had so many intellectual daughters in science apart from Irene, her eldest child, who would also go on to win a Nobel in chemistry. This was a fairly unknown part of her legacy.

What it was like writing the book?  I worked on the book during the pandemic years and quite enjoyed the research and writing. Of course, the trips to Paris to look up archives and walk around in some of her haunts were out of the question. The research was done online. I quite enjoyed my time alone with Curie. She was such wonderful company!

Marie’s personality seemed to scream “leave me alone to my science please,” but, clearly, she was a shining example to many in her lifetime and beyond. She inspired women to take up science as a career. If women did have an opportunity to work in this space, it was thought that they were not the ones who had the Aha! moments.  Women were thought be doing a different kind of science — patient, low-paid grunt work. But this is not the case and that truth has to be widely known…

My review of Dava Sobel’s book for Science.

P.S.

• Check out this episode of Google Talks where Dava speaks about her book The Glass Universe — about female human “computers” at Harvard University and their contributions to astronomy.
• Galileo’s Daughter. Read the Q & A with Dava titled: Galileo’s Contradiction: The Astronomer Who Riled the Inquisition Fathered 2 Nuns
•  Longitude.  “As much a tale of intrigue as it is of science…A book full of gems for anyone interested in history, geography, astronomy, navigation, clock making, and—not the least—plain old human ambition and greed.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “

 

Pattipati Ramaiah Naidu: The Radiologist Who Followed Curie’s Glow

• Born: June 3, 1904, in Madanapalle, British India
• Academic Path: Studied at Banaras Hindu University, then earned his M.Sc. from the University of Paris in 1929
• Curie Connection: Naidu wrote directly to Marie Curie expressing his desire to work with her. She accepted him into the Radium Institute in Paris, where he conducted doctoral research under her guidance for four years
• Research Focus: His thesis explored the ionization curves of alpha rays in noble gases like krypton and xenon. He published his findings in French journals in 1934
• After Curie’s Death: Following her passing in 1934, Naidu reportedly ran her lab for a short time—a quiet but profound continuation of her legacy
• Legacy in India: He helped establish India’s first Radon production facility for cancer treatment and became Chief Physicist at Tata Memorial Hospital in Bombay. Also, he is the father of the beautiful actor Leela Naidu.

During his European stint in the mid-1920s, Satyendra Nath Bose spent time in Madame Curie’s laboratory in Paris. He was introduced to her by physicist Paul Langevin, and she graciously spoke with him in English. While Bose didn’t participate in any of the groundbreaking experiments underway at the time, his presence in her lab was part of a broader intellectual pilgrimage: he also worked in Maurice de Broglie’s X-ray lab and met several leading physicists of the era.

 

 

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When a senior male scientist claimed the data from sawfish she’d tagged, Jasmin Graham –an early career shark researcher in Florida– felt powerless. It was not one individual’s behavior but the failure of the larger scientific community to take appropriate action was frustrating. Dejected, Graham quit graduate school. Working late one night soon thereafter on a research paper that might be her last, Graham scrolled on Twitter and found herself swept up in the trending #BlackinNature and connected with three other Black women shark scientists she had never met before.

On Juneteenth 2020 — within weeks of meeting on Twitter — the quartet formed Minorities in Shark Sciences (MISS)— a group devoted to providing opportunities and support to any minority of color studying sharks. Catherine Macdonald, a white shark scientist who was all too familiar with the misogyny, discrimination, harassment, assault, and bullying rampant in the field, offered the group the use of a research vessel, docked in Miami, for a meet-up. Finding community reinvigorated Graham and convinced her to recommit to pursuing shark science on her own terms. Her memoir, Sharks Don’t Sink, documents how a young Black woman dared to establish herself as a shark scientist outside academia. The book is also an ode to sharks themselves.

Graham fell in love with the ocean as a child when she went fishing with her father every summer in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. At a summer camp in high school, she learned “marine scientist” was an actual job. She held a shark—a bonnethead— for the first time as an undergraduate researcher and fell in love with the creature, which was “all muscle and hydrodynamic perfection.” Sharks are prehistoric creatures that have survived all five known mass extinctions, but more than a quarter of the world’s identified shark species are now threatened by extinction. Much research in shark science, Graham writes, is based on the idea that if we can better understand these creatures, we can better protect them.

The public mostly tends to see sharks as deadly killers – likely, in part, to the fictional Great White featured in the 1975 Hollywood thriller Jaws. They are rarely viewed as diverse, fascinating creatures that play a key role in maintaining balance in marine ecosystems. Graham, who sees herself and her people in sharks, writes, “All too often Black people are perceived and treated much like sharks: feared, misunderstood, and brutalized, often without recourse; assumed to be threatening when so often we’re the ones under threat; portrayed unfairly in the media, so that others are predisposed to have a negative interaction with us.” She works to change people’s perception, providing diversity, equity, and inclusion training at universities to prevent attrition of talented people of color.

Scientists, she writes, often have a particularly hard time accepting their biases because they believe themselves to be entirely rational. So, she gives them tangible tools they can use to ensure that they are not making unfair assumptions about minority students or mentees. Graham has moved forward with her shark research as well. She published the paper that caused her so much angst with a robust dataset gathered through collaboration. The scientist who took her data resigned. Macdonald, “the original Friend of MISS”, took his place.

And Graham, who now serves on the board of the American Elasmobranch Society, could decide to earn her PhD and re-enter the academy, but she chooses to remain an independent researcher. “Going forward, I’m committed to contributing to peer-reviewed, quality publications, and doing research in a**hole- free spaces, only,” she writes.

For her next project, Graham plans to collect information about fishing stock and patterns from Black fishermen who have been fishing in Myrtle Beach for decades. In conservation circles, she writes, most assume that small fishers, especially those of color, are uneducated and have little to contribute to scientific research. Graham knows this is wrong. She will also continue her work with MISS. “I truly can’t wait for the day when MISS no longer needs to exist,” she writes, “when we don’t need to fight to be heard or create a safe space. But, until then, we are here to help you insulate you as much as we can from the BS we had coming up.”

Sharks Don’t Sink is an accessible book about life as a marine scientist – and an empowering one. Graham writes in a simple, direct way about the sexism and racism many in the sciences have become inured to. Doing nothing, she reminds readers—whether in response to social injustice or to the destruction of the natural world— supports the status quo. We owe it to ourselves and to the planet to take action.

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After linguist Philip Seargeant’s grandmother suffered a stroke, her thoughts remained trapped in her body. Although she had no cognitive damage, her paralyzed muscles didn’t allow her to speak or write. To communicate, she would point to letters printed on one side of a tattered communication board to spell words, while the other side had some simple pictures.

The idea of typing using the mind is at the core of brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, which aims to let people type simply by imagining themselves speak. Technology giants are investing heavily in neurological research that promises to revolutionize the way we communicate with our devices and with each other – with the future aim of transferring our thoughts directly to another person.

“You wouldn’t need to talk,” said Elon Musk, founder of the brain implant company Neuralink,  , adding that we could still speak for sentimental reasons. In his new book, The Future of Language, Seargeant explores technologies like BCI, as well as AI tools such as autocomplete, predictive texting and ChatGPT and invites us to consider the implications of innovations that seem poised to transform the future of language as we know it.

He offers context from history, philosophy and literature to show how changes in communication tools impact language, which, in turn, reshapes society. The myth of the Tower of Babel, which he cites several times, suggests that humans once had a universal language and that this was considered an ideal thing. The global popularity of English has brought us close to a universal language, but machine translation does one better and promises to make us mutually intelligible to one another, without sacrificing linguistic diversity.

Seargeant reports that the science-fiction vision of a universal translation device seems close, but in a multilingual world, with over 7000 languages, there are many challenges. If machine translation can be used effectively for both text and speech as the tech companies plan, phrasebooks may soon be history.­­­­­­­ While Google Translate cannot yet be used in literary translation, machine translation may be good enough for functional purposes – except in settings like hospitals, where translation errors can have such serious consequences that we need back-up systems, warns the author.

He also reminds us that communication is largely mediated by technology owned by the multinational companies whose business model is built around selling behavioural insights gleaned from a user’s personal online experiences. Technology like BCI, augmented reality and the metaverse, will only increase the amount of such data available to the big tech companies.

And this could lead to new ways of manipulating us. For example, when AI programs compose responses for you, sometimes they suggest a reply which is better phrased than the one that occurred to you. With BCI, AI has the potential to sit directly between our thoughts and our ability to express them, writes Seargeant. And it might not be too much of a jump to say — those who control these technologies will be better able to direct our behaviour, from personal spending to voting.

So next time we hit “Tab” to complete a sentence, pick the most appropriate emoji or use clever prompts to craft a document with ChatGPT, we should pause. In his scholarly, must-read book, Seargeant makes us think about the underpinnings of these convenient tools and what they portend for language, one of the cornerstones of human identity.

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