Told You So! with Matt Kaplan

What happens when scientists are right and nobody wants to hear it? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore the frustrating history of brilliant minds who were ignored, mocked, and punished for telling the truth with science writer Matt Kaplan.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on special edition, I told you so.

• 0:03Gary O'Reilly?

  What'd you tell me now?

• 0:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Said some scientists that have known what no one else did.

• 0:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, after they were prosecuted, tortured and killed.

• 0:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, coming right up.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, special edition. When you hear special edition, it means Gary O'Reilly is in the house.

• 0:35Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey Neil.

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gary, former soccer pro.

• 0:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Allegedly.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not, we're not alleging that, because there's a Wiki page of you in a soccer outfit.

• 0:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, I was.

• 0:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we can see your hairy legs.

• 0:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we're glad to have you, man.

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  Yes, no Wiki pages with my hairy legs, unfortunately.

• 0:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So comedian, actor and the lord of nice. There it is. All right, so Gary, what show did you put together today?

• 1:01Gary O'Reilly?

  Uh, interesting one. If you think for centuries, science has at times aligned with and fought against religion.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who?

• 1:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Government, establishment and even itself. But when the sticky up nail confronts historic theories and shouts change, it gets hammered. So who were these history's confrontationists? The groundbreakers of science and medicine, the ones whom we owe so much. All right, with that said, let's bring on our guest now.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. We've got with us, reporting in from UC Davis, is that correct? Matt Kaplan, Matt, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:41Chuck Nice?

  Hey, thanks for having me, Neil. Yeah, yeah, I'm in Davis, California right now.

• 1:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go, there you go. You're a science correspondent at The Economist, loves science correspondents. You know who doesn't have science correspondents anymore? CNN. Right, they're always calling me up to do their job.

• 1:55Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, and you're like, pay somebody, you cheap bastards.

• 2:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Author a bunch of books, you know, my favorite title among these is The Science of Monsters. That's just.

• 2:05Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's cool, man.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the funnest thing.

• 2:07Chuck Nice?

  That's cool, so that's about Jeffrey Epstein, huh?

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  See what I did?

• 2:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  See what I did there?

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see what you did there.

• 2:16Speaker 03

  I have heard that joke before, too.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your latest in 2026, "Told You So." Scientists who were ridiculed, exiled, and imprisoned.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For being right.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Saint Martin's press.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  And that's, well, see, that is the problem with scientists.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 2:36Speaker 03

  They never go, "Told you." See that? See that? See what I said? I knew I was right. They never do that. And we need some of that from science right now.

• 2:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a book such as that, Matt, it would be full of anecdotes and stories of cases throughout history.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We don't do enough history on this program, I don't think. Well, now we're gonna get a chance to warden down memory lane. We're gonna get a taste of that. So, Matt, why don't 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?

• 3:23Speaker 03

  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.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  And this is very much where Galileo Galilei found himself long, long ago.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  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 Oratio Graci, who was saying, "Look, I think the comets are going around the Earth." And Galileo was fairly certain they were not. And he wrote this piece called Discourse on Comets and eventually wrote a book called Il Sagittore, which eviscerated Graci not based upon anything else other than his methods. And Sagittarius is so important because Sagittarius 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.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  And no one had really done that before Galileo. And it was a really big deal.

• 5:04Gary O'Reilly?

  So when do you think we started to establish, "we" being the obviously, I mean, scientists of the day, began to establish that structure to enable them to think with rigor about the things that they were proposing?

• 5:18Speaker 03

  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 analyze things in different ways. Medicine was a catastrophe. So in medicine, during the Renaissance, researchers in Britain rediscovered the ways of Hippocrates. Now Hippocrates was a Greek medic, or 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 the sense that, "Oh, you're ill with a fever. You have bad blood or too much blood.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Let's drain that bad blood out of you." Put some leeches on it. Oh, man. 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 attach 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 phlegm. So let's put you in a hot, steamy room and have you get the phlegm out. And actually, that's still used in medicine today. I was gonna say, that's actually a good thing.

• 6:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, hence the concept of being phlegmatic, I guess. Is that adjective for certain conduct, behavior.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they were messing around in medicine with these different ideas. And it took years after Galileo before you started having scientists 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. And 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 gonna have disease tomorrow. Or the stars and the sun aren't in alignment. We think disease is gonna happen. And that's, I mean, that was how science was done in medicine at that time.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  And Louis raised the question, are leeches actually helping? I don't think the leeches are actually doing anything.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  And so he said, oh, sacre bleu. I will put on the leeches onto these people on day one of their pneumonia. My outrageous French accent, that's terrible. But he tried an experiment where he put leeches on to 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 treat a control group that had no 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 the leeches on day one were far more likely to die than the people who had the leeches applied quite late. And to his mind, that made no sense. Because if you're trying to get rid of the bad blood.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  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? And so that was the first hammer blow to old methodologies. And he did the extraordinary thing of actually recording his data sets. And he was not alone. There were, there were folks in Hungary and Vienna and also in, in Massachusetts, who were starting to take notes and record the outcomes of patients. And that was really the application of Galileo's 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 populace did not like what they had to say.

• 9:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Many more people would have been alive had those methods and tools made it into medicine sooner. And they in principle could have, is that correct? Is that?

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. 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, ugh, 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.

• 9:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Industry?

• 9:50Gary O'Reilly?

  Leech farms.

• 9:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know?

• 9:52Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 9:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Big leech.

• 9:54Speaker 03

  Leech. Oh, oh, my God. Neil, they were, they were importing 15,000 to 20,000 of the little suckers a year into Paris alone, back in those days.

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 10:06Speaker 03

  So, I mean, there was an enormous demand for leeches. And being told, look, that's not helping, didn't go very far. People weren't ready to hear it.

• 10:14Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, Neil 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.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 10:28Chuck Nice?

  And then, things must be done to maintain the sub-economy, even though the reason it was created is no longer a problem.

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Economic forces are the greatest.

• 10:37Gary O'Reilly?

  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 cured ourselves of it.

• 10:53Chuck Nice?

  You know, I kind of take, I might not agree with that a hundred percent. 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, nobody would ever hide that. It just doesn't make sense.

• 11:32Gary O'Reilly?

  But the rate of failure for new drugs is amazingly high.

• 11:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's hidden in Area 51.

• 11:39Gary O'Reilly?

  Matt, you mentioned a couple of places around Europe, but there's that big example in Vienna in the General Hospital in the 1880s.

• 11:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 11:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Where they had a 15% child bed fever.

• 11:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Gary O'Reilly?

  Death rate.

• 11:52Chuck Nice?

  So it.

• 11:53Gary O'Reilly?

  And 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.

• 12:08Chuck Nice?

  Oh, what is this story?

• 12:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Please tell.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  So you are talking about Ignaz Semmelweis. Let us go back to the 1840s. In early 1800s, Maria Theresa, 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 there was a 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 Theresa thought this was terrible. They had established drop boxes.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  You know how if you're, you gotta hand back that book at the library? No, you're kidding. But you're out of, you're out of hours, so you got that drop box at the library where you can put the book and they'll sort it the next day and you'd have to pay the late fees?

• 13:07Chuck Nice?

  They had a kid drop box?

• 13:08Speaker 03

  They had kid drop boxes.

• 13:09Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well, now, by the way, I'm just gonna say, Matt, that's not a really bad idea. As a man with three children, uh... You had a drop box to move out of three? I'm just saying, how, how, what is the expiration date on drop box?

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Well, I think it was the size of the drop box that was really mattered. So it depends, how, how large are your children?

• 13:29Speaker 03

  So Maria Theresa 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 known as periperal fever or childbed 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,

• 14:13Speaker 03

  would develop these swollen, blue and black splotches around their abdomen and their thighs, and 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. Perperil fever,

• 14:58Speaker 03

  men did not contract and so there was very little attention paid. Ignaz Semmelweis, this Hungarian obstetrician, cared. He, and he was an extraordinary individual. He was so good at what he did. He had emigrated 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 Semmelweis 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

• 15:41Speaker 03

  it and how to stop it spreading. He worked this out and I can tell you about that if you like. And when he revealed the mechanisms, he ultimately got shouted down and thrown out of his post. Wow.

• 15:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So really what he should have done was cure egos before he tried to cure the disease of child bed fever.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  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 incredible ability, but we forget what an exceptional diplomat Galileo was. He was charismatic beyond words. He made all the right friends. He moved in all the right circles. When he got into trouble, he was friends with very powerful people who saved his ass. Semmelweis was from a vassal state with no friends and he had a habit of putting his foot in his mouth and crossing the wrong

• 16:41Speaker 03

  people in the Vienna circles. So even though he worked out solutions to Perperil 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 Semmelweis's interactions that he ultimately shot himself in the foot.

• 17:08Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 17:23Gary O'Reilly?

  We have to assume that this particular fever was cured and they found out how and why this was occurring. So, does Semmelweis get the credit or does he actually pop his clogs before this all comes to fruition?

• 17:40Speaker 03

  It's incredible. So Semmelweis followed the scientific method and made notes. He noticed, for example, there were two wards 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 pruripal 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

• 18:25Speaker 03

  right now. Why do we have such a different infection rate?" So he tried feeding the patients in the doctors' ward the food that was being delivered to the nurses' ward. No change. I mean, it was a legitimate question, right? I mean, 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 in the doctors' ward, he thought, "Well, maybe the incense causes pruripal 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.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  None of this worked. Then one morning Semmelweis 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, a 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. Is there, because no one had any idea about bacteria back in the day, no clue. You know, is there a, an aura of death that is contaminating my hands from the corpse

• 19:54Speaker 03

  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 low local sewage treatment plant because, you know, raw human sewage smells pretty bad too. He noticed they were dumping chloride of lime into the sewer to try to make it stink less. And he asked the sewage treatment folks, hey, could 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. Aura of death is gone. No, 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 is gone.

• 20:36Speaker 03

  And then he started testing this and he asked all the other doctors in the world to follow suit and remarkably they did. And the infection rate dropped, wait for it, from 21% to zero. How about that?

• 20:49Chuck Nice?

  So the doctors were infecting the children with death itself. Yes. 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 did he know he was doing that or is this is just something intuitively he was like, okay, I'm just going to keep going until something happens.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  So he had had a mentor named Joseph Skoda, who was honestly, for lack of better words, the best description is he was like the 1800s Vienna example of Sheldon Cooper. Socially inept genius, knew exactly what he was talking about with numbers and was an outcast amongst the doctors at the Vienna hospital. Semmelweis got on well with him and learned a lot from this fellow. And, 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 your rate of 21% goes to zero. That, that doesn't require p-values or chi-squared tests or anything.

• 21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a, there'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.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  Oh, that's funny.

• 22:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's funny. Yeah, design a better experiment.

• 22:09Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 22:10Gary O'Reilly?

  Matt, what eventually is the final chapter for Ignaz Semmelweis? Does he get lauded and adored for his work? Or does he just unplug himself from this scenario?

• 22:24Speaker 03

  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 per-peril fever. But Semmelweis had made a lot of missteps politically. Hungary rose up against Vienna because it didn't want to be a vassal state anymore. And Semmelweis 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, Semmelweis had, on multiple occasions, derided his supervisors who said, "Yeah, we have these really bad cases of per-peril fever because the sun, the moon, and the

• 23:08Speaker 03

  stars are out of alignment." And then Semmelweis, being really not very attentive to social interaction, said, "Yeah, but we have the same sun, moon, and stars over both clinics, and the rate is really low in the nurse's clinic." And he would say this in front of the politicians funding the hospital.

• 23:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  So it, 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 they lived happily ever after. There you go. It was, yeah.

• 23:45Gary O'Reilly?

  So if we moved, Matt, forward a little bit to someone who is probably the polar opposite to Ignace Semmelweis, Louis Pasteur.

• 23:56Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 23:56Gary O'Reilly?

  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 penchant for the deviousness. And I think you called him brilliant, tenacious, something else, and then you finished with asshole. Would you enlighten us to the Louis Pasteur story?

• 24:16Speaker 03

  That's kind of cool. Yeah, sure. So Semmelweis 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.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  He really knew how to talk, but he also, he had been, as a university student, he had a supervisor named Auguste Laurent, who had been very involved with the student rebellion that you see a lot in, is reflected in Les Misérables at the barricades, where the students rose up against the right-wing government to demand rights for the poor. And Auguste Laurent had taken their side. And Pasteur watched as his research supervisor lost funding from the government for being on the wrong side of politics. And it was a valuable lesson to Pasteur because he made sure that he never was on the wrong side of politics, ever.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  So he knew how to milk the French government for money, but he also knew how to tell a story. And he knew how to make sure that those stories never, ever 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.

• 26:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just if a chicken poops, how do you know it's diarrhea? Doesn't it all look like diarrhea?

• 26:12Speaker 03

  It's the sound they make.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  More liquid, more liquid, Neil, more liquid.

• 26:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, bird poop is-

• 26:20Speaker 03

  Lots more liquid. Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah. Just triple the liquid and you've got it. And smell apparently is bad. I've not ever seen chicken cholera in first person, nor do I really want to.

• 26:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Agreed. Anyway, back to anthrax. That sounds, that sounds quite palatable on the back of-

• 26:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, much better.

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ever before.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  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 Toussaint. And Henry Toussaint 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.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  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 up with a pathogen that was weak but not destroyed. And he said, Henry Toussaint 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's vaccine and none of the ones that had been vaccinated died.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  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 100 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 Toussaint's mechanism, the one that he had derided and discredited Toussaint for, and lied about it. Toussaint died a pauper. 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.

• 28:45Speaker 03

  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 discrediting Gaultier as well. So he was pretty vicious. And he was very successful as a scientist, but not in a nice way.

• 29:09Chuck Nice?

  Maybe he should have figured out a way to get light inside of the body.

• 29:18Chuck Nice?

  Or perhaps a little bit of bleach

• 29:23Chuck Nice?

  in a shot glass.

• 29:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Anyone else saw the bleach coming? No.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  I saw it coming.

• 29:32Chuck Nice?

  Very effective.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How is it that you have access to this information? And was it revealed earlier in the century?

• 29:39Speaker 03

  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 the 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,

• 30:21Speaker 03

  but the journals haven't had a lot of discussions since they were translated. 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 discrediting people who could get in his way. And he was also... So very good at telling positive stories without mentioning any places where he had faltered. And that that was pivotal to him getting money.

• 30:48Chuck Nice?

  So no one knows how cutthroat this business is.

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Business. So so he was an a-hole.

• 30:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he was a big giant, but I gotta tell you, I mean, he was French. I mean, that's kind of okay.

• 30:59Gary O'Reilly?

  You just throw the nation under the bus.

• 31:01Chuck Nice?

  I'm just saying, like, if you're an a-hole and you're French, you get away with it. It's all right. You know, it's like part of their thing. You know what I mean? It's like, hi, may I have some water? You may, you may not. What is your problem talking to me?

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Oh, come on. There were nice French people. There were nice French. I mean, Pierre Alexandre Louis was a really good guy and he ended up being a mentor to a very important American scientist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had also tried to defeat paraparilla fever. I mean, so I mean, they're good French doctors.

• 31:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, okay, so.

• 31:37Chuck Nice?

  I love them. I love them. She found one.

• 31:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Oh, damned with faint praise.

• 31:45Chuck Nice?

  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 what's going on there that people look up and say, okay?

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in your stars, but in ourselves.

• 32:13Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Shakespeare.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Well said.

• 32:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Chuck Nice?

  I mean, did you did you uncover anything that would make?

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:20Chuck Nice?

  Explain why that is?

• 32:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what are the urges?

• 32:22Chuck Nice?

  Look, yeah.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does it just an extension of astrology at that level?

• 32:26Speaker 03

  It is and it isn't. So think 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.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  And you could measure that with the stars. You knew where you were, not just based upon whether the leaves were falling.

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  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 Semmelweis 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.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  And actually shaking things up put them at risk of being identified as, "Wait a minute, 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 Semmelweis fought the good fight and lost.

• 34:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So at the foundation here is science and science results. I don't want to absolve Pasteur and others for their impropriety, but you have science intersecting culture and society. And so there are forces operating that are not purely scientific forces.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's fame, there's money, there's...

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Influence, power, politics.

• 34:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Politics.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  All these things.

• 34:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're all in there. These are contaminating forces. Totally. On the purity of a science that should have none of that.

• 34:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 34:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You wrote a whole book on it.

• 34:46Gary O'Reilly?

  So Matt, if we fast forward, do you think there's an echo of that malaise still present in our scientific medical environments today?

• 34:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of what, of the malaise?

• 34:56Chuck Nice?

  An echo.

• 34:57Gary O'Reilly?

  An echo.

• 34:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, echo, echo.

• 34:58Chuck Nice?

  And, and, 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?

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, we've really not abandoned it. And first of all, by the way, I want to emphasize, actually, you know, Pasteur behaved very badly. Galileo behaved, he was excellent at diplomacy and negotiation in a manner that saved a lot of his ideas. And he, you don't have to backstab people to take unpopular ideas to get them across in the end.

• 35:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but in terms of the, the a-hole factor.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:37Gary O'Reilly?

  He's stuck with that. Oh, you had that.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta admit that when Galileo wrote the dialogue of the two chief world systems, you're arguing, there's earth in the center, there's a sun in the center. And he has these two sort of, let's call them 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.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Into Simplicio.

• 36:03Chuck Nice?

  By the way, that's brilliant.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's brilliant, but it's like.

• 36:06Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, but that is bril.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, and, wait, and he publishes it in Italian so that everybody can read it. It's not just Latin.

• 36:14Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so.

• 36:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's kind of a-hole.

• 36:16Chuck Nice?

  So he, he's an a-hole, but he's a smart a-hole. See, because that's brilliant. I mean, honestly, that's like, you want to convince some people of, of an argument. So you create two characters, dumbass and smart pants.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, but if the dumbass said all the words that the Pope said, and the Pope is powerful.

• 36:34Chuck Nice?

  Well, but guess what? It's like, didn't you look at the Pope and say, well, that's not you, that's dumbass?

• 36:42Chuck Nice?

  You know?

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, he's a smart.

• 36:45Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A-hole, okay.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  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 Ferdinando de Medici, who was the Grand Duke of Tuscany. And if there was anyone powerful enough to interfere with the Inquisition, it was Ferdinando de Medici. And, you know, it's amazing because Ferdinando de Medici had Galileo, you know, on the payroll. He was their chief scientist in Tuscany. And similarly, Galileo was bosom buddies with the Ambassador to Rome for Tuscany. So when Galileo ultimately was called before the Inquisition, Ferdinando de Medici interfered and ensured that Galileo was not tortured

• 37:30Speaker 03

  and ensured that Galileo was fed three meals a day made by the Ambassador's wife. And then when he was, when he was eventually taken over to the Inquisition and living there, he was in 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.

• 37:58Chuck Nice?

  It does make a difference. I like that narrative better. I have more respect for Galileo. That's like me getting arrested and they're like, all right, Chuck, we're going to give you five to 10 and you're going to live in this mansion with the warden's wife.

• 38:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, but I had not, that is a piece of history that had eluded me because I always was suspicious why it was that Giudano Bruno is brought up in front of the Inquisition and he burned at the stake.

• 38:25Speaker 03

  Burned at the stake.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  Right.

• 38:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas Galileo was brought up in front of the Inquisition, not that many years later.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  Later.

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 38:32Speaker 03

  And lost that faith.

• 38:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And well, he was on house arrest.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  On house arrest.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, but he wasn't like put on the rack and tortured.

• 38:38Chuck Nice?

  Now, in the hood, we would have said that Galileo was a snitch. Because Bruno Bruno went down and Galileo didn't.

• 38:45Gary O'Reilly?

  I think Bruno went down before.

• 38:46Chuck Nice?

  Clearly you are an informant.

• 38:48Gary O'Reilly?

  No, in Galileo, I think Bruno went down in advance of.

• 38:51Chuck Nice?

  Yes, he did, yeah.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's important to note that the the Inquisition wrote that Galileo was exposed to rigorous examination, and that was code for torture back then.

• 39:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  Galileo was in his, what, Neil, like sixty eight, sixty nine, 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 two feet at sixty nine if that had been done to him. Also, I mean, fun fact, the Inquisition was the epitome of organized evil. And they, have you ever, have you ever watched The Princess Bride?

• 39:34Chuck Nice?

  Yes, of course.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  You know, when they're, when they're torturing Wesley, there is like, you know, please tell us everything, this is for posterity. Well, that's what the Inquisition actually did. 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 Ferdinando de Medici, and by the way, the de Medici by that time, de Medici family by that time, had already supplied two queens to France and four popes.

• 40:06Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 40:07Speaker 03

  So these folks were really powerful, had ensured that Galileo did not end up tortured. So there was a lot of political disruption that occurred to protect Galileo and make sure that, you know, he didn't get burned at the stake.

• 40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're friends in high places.

• 40:21Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 40:22Chuck Nice?

  I like Galileo even more now. He's a total gangster.

• 40:26Gary O'Reilly?

  If I sort of outline a story here, there's a, there's another level of suppression 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, would you do me a favor and fill in the blanks? Because this, this one blew me away when I read it.

• 40:53Speaker 03

  So this is Katya Kariko, and Katya Kariko was working on messenger RNA back in the nineties. 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 Katy 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,

• 41:38Speaker 03

  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 the 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. Katy was first demoted for exploring messenger RNA and not getting enough grants. And then she was fired by the university

• 42:19Speaker 03

  because they felt she really was a waste of time. She 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 a dental hygienist or a florist 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

• 43:01Speaker 03

  she did. Now, it's important to mention that in her last years at the university, she started partnering with Drew Weisman, who was an immunologist. And Weisman said, I think what we're seeing with the break apart of the mRNA 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,

• 43:43Speaker 03

  Katy Kariko'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.

• 43:53Chuck Nice?

  Well, she should have, yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  But it's important to notice that Katy Kariko was so like Semmelweis. Semmelweis believed that he didn't need to publish. He didn't feel like he needed to stand on a soapbox like Pasteur 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. Katy Kariko, 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 interview. I think her grant proposals were also not perfect. And when you've got thousands of grant proposals going out to grant awarding bodies,

• 44:39Speaker 03

  and they're only going to grant 1% of the money, they're very quick to remove anything that doesn't look exactly right. And I think Katy fell into interesting idea, but not exactly right. And as a result, she wasn't getting funded. And so Semmelweis and Katy are actually kindred spirits. I almost called the book A Tale of Two Hungarians, instead of I told you so scientists who are ridiculed, exiled, and imprisoned 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, perperal fever, and trying to defeat it, and other scientists who were right and got excoriated for it. And I realized, no, I don't want to make it just about these two Hungarians. It's

• 45:21Speaker 03

  a bigger story. But we see it all the time in science today. And it's terrible.

• 45:27Chuck Nice?

  But you know what, let me just, for one second, I just gotta... Because I don't want us to veer into a place where right now, there's this pervading 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 eschew 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.

• 46:10Chuck Nice?

  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 Preach it, Lord Nice. Preach, preach. It's not necessarily a science problem.

• 46:53Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  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 Katikariko was 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.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  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. It, I mean, science is doing extraordinary. I mean, look at the number of people living in deserts because of desalinization plants, which are now all threatened by missiles. But 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 Galileos,

• 48:40Speaker 03

  who don't have the master diplomacy, the scientists who are not the Machiavellian fiends like Pasteur, we want to make sure that people with the great ideas who don't have the skill set 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.

• 49:23Speaker 03

  Journalists have, science journalists in particular, 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 the story so that the public 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 it left a lot of people doubting. And we've got to do a lot of catch-up here to make sure that everyone understands how science works.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  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 gotta, you gotta talk about how laws are made to have a healthy democracy. And I, 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 when the replication reveals that an initial experiment was invalid, that that's okay, that's normal, that's how it's supposed to work. Absolutely. But most people don't understand that. Yeah.

• 51:02Gary O'Reilly?

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

• 51:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After, after her phenomenon.

• 51:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  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 the, 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 reform. And I'm, I'm really excited about it because a number of organizations, several governments, including the Austrian government, which I think is hysterical, the Wilhelm Foundation, Volkswagen are supporting programs that democratize funding in research. And let me expand on that for a moment.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  So, uh, right now, you write your, your grant application and it's considered by a grant committee and there are, you know, 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

• 52:43Speaker 03

  to differentiate between "good," "great," and "excellent," you often are subtly affected by, "Oh, who published this? Was this... Sorry, who wrote this? Is this from Harvard? Or is this from the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa? Or is this an application written with a vague accent in English that makes it obvious that the person is an 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,

• 53:26Speaker 03

  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 gotta buy a fishbowl. You probably need to get some blindfolds, 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

• 54:10Speaker 03

  in our science a fair bit more.

• 54:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that idea. That's a great 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.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  That is bad.

• 54:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

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

• 54:37Speaker 03

  It is. So the Vilma 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.

• 55:08Chuck Nice?

  You know, what else would be good is if governments just gave more money to science. How about that? I mean, that's a

• 55:14Speaker 03

  Oh, well, it's true.

• 55:16Chuck Nice?

  How about like, how about the richest nation in the world in the history of the world just gives, you know, a percentage more to science. It would change everything.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  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 to get the grant money is incredibly important. And if an experiment is not working out and you're 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 Pasteur-like behavior that's becoming ever more common. And right now, you do that. And I mean, that's bad because if you and I were to steal $100,000

• 56:06Speaker 03

  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 run a 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 a waste. And right now, if you engage in fraud, there's very little punishment, other than being put on administrative leave from the university and being being removed from your teaching circuit. It's right. If we were to establish some significant penalties for engaging in fraud and also establishing some better systems for detecting it, that

• 56:49Speaker 03

  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.

• 57:05Gary O'Reilly?

  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 was very enjoyable, will it?

• 57:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Illuminating. We don't enjoy stories of people lying and cheating and stealing.

• 57:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Illuminating, 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?

• 57:34Speaker 03

  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.

• 58:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, 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. Yeah, very French.

• 58:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so this is a, it's kind of a, 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 it 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 of being correct. And you don't write a book about that.

• 59:03Speaker 03

  I don't want to shed light on that.

• 59:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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 does 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 your reaction to the idea that the conservatism of science is

• 59:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  almost necessary, and yes, occasionally one, one goes out with the bathwater.

• 59:55Speaker 03

  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, it looks at things that it recognizes and then when it sees it totally doesn't recognize, it attacks it and removes it.

• 1:00:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very, very good example.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  I'm biologist, 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 there, as you point out, there's lots of batshit crazy ideas out there. What we can't do is take 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.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  It is important to continue to hear them. And say, nope, I've thought about it and you're wrong. A good example is Alfred Wegener, who looked at the continents 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 once together. I mean, he was derided as crazy. And ultimately, we worked out that 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

• 1:01:38Speaker 03

  back to us five years later with a different angle on why they think they're right, you gotta read it and say, nope, still disagree. Or, wait a minute, why do I disagree? What's the reason that I disagree?

• 1:01:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So with your Wegener story, it was not 100 years that that idea was rejected. It was just a few decades. And yes, there were some, there were 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 I 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, for submarine

• 1:02:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  movement in the Second World War.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  It's always war.

• 1:02:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then, then, then I don't think there were many people who were still holdouts back then. Because that was, we saw the smoke, that was the gun that, that fired, that allowed us to say, our, our geology brethren, 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 first.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I think you guys are saying the same thing though.

• 1:03:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you're saying the same thing differently.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:03:19Chuck Nice?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:03:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the behaving badly part.

• 1:03:22Chuck Nice?

  That's the behaving badly part.

• 1:03:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, you know, there was a difference between Samuel Weis making his, his remarks and being thrown in a lunatic asylum.

• 1:03:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Speaker 03

  By his own peers, you know, I, I think, and same thing with Katya Kariko. It was, would have been okay for scientists to continuously 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.

• 1:03:45Chuck Nice?

  Totally. So, but I think that goes 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 Samuel Weis and for.

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  Katya.

• 1:04:01Chuck Nice?

  Katya, the, you're looking at unspoken biases that are at play here.

• 1:04:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:06Chuck Nice?

  Let's just be honest. That's really what it comes down to. And, um, yeah, I, I think systemically, if you're able to remove that in any way, science benefits as a whole.

• 1:04:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course, of course. And just, I'm gonna give an actual example from my own field. Uh, there's a, a guy named, um, Fred Hoyle.

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:04:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who, uh, was never a Big Bang guy. He was a big proponent of the steady state hypothesis of the universe, steady state theory, they called it. And, uh, 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.

• 1:04:58Chuck Nice?

  He was wrong.

• 1:04:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was just wrong. And so in, 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 accept.

• 1:05:13Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:05:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:14Chuck Nice?

  See, now that just sounds like a guy with a personal problem.

• 1:05:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, he's, you can be emotionally invested in your own, in your own idea.

• 1:05:20Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm saying, like, you know, at some point. Don't we call that stubbornness? Stubborn, yeah. Tick headed is the word.

• 1:05:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, we got to land this plane. Let me send a question back to you. You've cited scientists behaving badly. You've cited society behaving badly. And these are all amazing examples, and it's a brilliant compilation that you've created. What is the lesson to the public, given what we've been 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. When I grew up in, people saw science as our savior, as a cure us. It would take us into the future. And I don't feel that anymore in our culture.

• 1:06:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So how do you, how do you turn what you've compiled here into the positive for the public to take us civilization ahead?

• 1:06:18Speaker 03

  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 a 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, hang on, I don't understand how that works. Can you explain that to me? And we need to start asking more questions and being more tolerant of the fact

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  that sometimes science doesn't know, and we're still debating it and trying to figure it out.

• 1:07:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Matt, in my PhD defense, after I was grilled on the content of the thesis, the final question was, how would you tell a New York Times reporter about your work?

• 1:07:18Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:07:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was part of it. It's just, can you translate this?

• 1:07:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:07:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, 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, I knew this while it was happening, but there was nothing I can do about it. Cause COVID was a novel, a novel.

• 1:07:45Chuck Nice?

  It was called the novel coronavirus.

• 1:07:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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, like Fauci, okay? He was the voice. He was the 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.

• 1:08:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:08:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, 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 our legs up on the table, masters of everything we know. No! On the frontier, that is so not the case. So, so do you agree with me that that would have, it would have been a science lesson for people and there would have been less, less cynicism to derive from that whole episode?

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  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 nonexistent if we had engaged in that behavior during the pandemic. Because we shattered people's view of science being an answer machine.

• 1:09:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. That's a perfect sentence right there.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  And we revealed quite publicly how science works.

• 1:09:22Chuck Nice?

  There you go. And that's the problem. I think what also has to happen is the, the public has to understand that, oh God, I'm gonna get in trouble. Most of the people look at science like religion. Religion has answers. Whether the answers are right or not does not make a difference. There's an answer.

• 1:09:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 1:09:43Chuck Nice?

  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.

• 1:09:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 1:10:07Chuck Nice?

  Well, that was the first, that was the first couple of weeks. Wash down your grocery bag.

• 1:10:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so then the next we say we're finding, no, it's more airborne than liquid. And so then we could just follow along. That would have been even fun.

• 1:10:18Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly. Let's see what's gonna happen next.

• 1:10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's happened next week.

• 1:10:21Chuck Nice?

  And please remember it's the novel coronavirus. We don't know because it's new.

• 1:10:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And another one, another point of disappointment there was you get vaccinated and no one told you at 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, of course, it was a milder case and the COVID mutated. But we didn't get a whole discussion of the mutation either. It was just, oh, now we're vaccinated, we'll all get back to work. And then we get the omega and then the, you know.

• 1:10:50Chuck Nice?

  And that's because we didn't find a way to put light inside of the body.

• 1:10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  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.

• 1:11:11Chuck Nice?

  What's the book again?

• 1:11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh. I told you so.

• 1:11:16Chuck Nice?

  Love it.

• 1:11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scientists who were ridiculed, exiled and imprisoned for being right.

• 1:11:22Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 1:11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 1:11:23Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Told you so.

• 1:11:26Chuck Nice?

  If you don't know, now you know.

• 1:11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt Kaplan, 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.

• 1:11:42Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:11:43Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. It's been a joy.

• 1:11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right. Thank you. All right, Chuck, always good to have you.

• 1:11:48Chuck Nice?

  Always.

• 1:11:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Ray. Thank you, Neil. All right, this has been Startalk Special Edition. We're just talking about. Scientist and the public behaving badly.

• 1:12:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who knew? All right, until next time, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Keep looking up.