Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - The Doctor Everyone Mocked — Until His 'Crazy' Theory Wiped Out a Killer Disease

Starting point is 00:00:00 One in 10 mothers died after giving birth. One doctor figured out why. And then they destroyed him for it. Roughly, one woman in 10 would get a disease called preparal fever. And once they got it, they died. He got all of the other doctors to sign on to this. And the infection rate went from 21% to zero. And he would say this in front of powerful people like the director of the hospital.

Starting point is 00:00:25 And when he said, no, your hands are dirty. They said, sir, we are gentlemen, all of us. us. Our hands cannot be dirty. And for all of that, he got thrown in an insane asylum after being exiled to Hungary by his peers, and he died there. The more the pressure goes up, the more likely a scientist who has built a career on a certain paradigm, the more they will defend that paradigm vigorously, even if the evidence is staring them in the face that some upstart newbie to the field might be right. 85% of the time science journalists do not do not. do a good job of talking about how science works. This is instrumental to the problem with modern science.

Starting point is 00:01:07 You speak to your ethics and you speak candidly about how sometimes there's pressure because you have to report the facts, but you also are embedded and maybe you know too much. So talk about your proposal to embed journalists with scientific teams and what reaction do you expect that might have? So you've got to be talking about how science actually operates, right? A lot of the friction that we face with science in the general public today stems from the pandemic. It was almost like walking into a dressing room and seeing science naked, right? It was like people had not really seen how science operates because, frankly, 85% of the time science journalists in most papers do not do a good job of talking about how science works. And now suddenly, the whole world is paying a lot

Starting point is 00:02:01 of attention to science and how it works. And they're aghast when they see scientists shocking, disagreeing with each other, or scientists not sharing information with one another as they should. Or scientists, wait for it, being wrong. And that, of course, to you and I operating in the scientific realm. We understand that. We know that that's normal. The general public doesn't know that. And we've done a bad job of communicating and we need to do a better job of it. To get more down to the point, it's not just talking about the process because my newspaper has long argued that laws and sausages, you do need to know how they're made. If you want to be a good democracy and if you want to have good media, you have to talk about how legislation is passed. It's ugly,

Starting point is 00:02:48 it's disgusting, but you need to know. The same applies to science. We have to talk about how the science is created. And I think the book does a really good job of that by looking at how ideas have been handled, important ideas have been handled and mishandled over the past 500 years, and then pairing that, because the book, my book is not a straightforward, one scientist, one chapter. I think a lot of people wanted to have that. The book is braided. I'll talk about Ignossimo Weiss in Hungary, and then I'll segue into Carl Wos or Kati Kotik Kariko, and I talk about how what we saw in history is still very much alive today. These are important discussions for us to be having.

Starting point is 00:03:33 And then when we talk about it, the more we put it on the agenda to try to fix it. You know, as I see the central thesis, and you left out one of my favorite characters, my friend Galileo, he's a major figure in this book as well. And quite frankly, I am getting a little sick of my friend, you know, the maestro, as he demanded he be called by his acolyte. And that was really due to the fact that stuff like AI and chatbots have made it incredibly simple for the general public to propose wild scientific ideas and then send them to their favorite scientist as being chat GPT verified. And I always get letters like this. Professor Keating, this is my new idea for crystalline vibrations that explain the lumineiferous ether.

Starting point is 00:04:18 And maybe they throw in some, you know, germ theory of disease is wrong. everything but the kitchen sing and they say like it may sound crazy but people laughed at galileo too and if you just help me with the math i'll share my Nobel Prize with you so i'm wondering you know what at what level do we need to kind of have a filter a very strong filter people accuse me often of being a gatekeeper well we have a gate around campus i don't want my you know 14 million dollar telescope walking off with some person i don't know who thinks they're galileo right so we we have a border fence. I have a pool fence. You know, if you live in California, I have to have a pool fence. We need gates. How do we draw the line between, you know, not wanting to exclude the

Starting point is 00:04:58 cates of the world, but also being, you know, kind of not so open as another great science communicator and friend, at least his wife is a friend of the show. Carl Sagan said, having your mind so open that your brains fall out. Yeah. Okay, so two points. First of all, Galileo had a lot of people who really liked him and thought his work was awesome. and some of those people were pretty powerful. So Mafio Barbarini, Cardinal Mafio Barbarini, who became Pope Urban the 8th, actually really liked Galileo's writings, and he got on well with Galileo so much so that Galileo, I think it was, of course, a political decision, dedicated I'll Sagittorio, one of his major works

Starting point is 00:05:38 to Cardinal Barbarini before he became Pope. And that, I think, was to gain goodwill, but also they liked each other. and Barbarina was really interested in his work. Similarly, Galileo was phenomenally friendly with Ferdinando de Medici, who was the Grand Duke of Tuscany. I mean, if there was anyone almost equal to power to the Pope in Italy at that time, it was the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He and his brother owned like a dozen telescopes.

Starting point is 00:06:06 They were huge Galileo fanboys. So there was a lot of interest in what Galileo was doing, and it was not a case of everyone saying, we hate him. It was actually very much a decision by the church to come after him, and I don't think it was Pope Urban the eighth's real interest to go after him. I think he had to for political reasons. So let's segue to your second question about gatekeepers, because this is really important. It's a separate issue. So I ran my book past Carl Zimmer at the New York Times, who I've written for years. I said, look, I'm going to be publishing this in six months. I want you to tear it down.

Starting point is 00:06:46 own. Go through it and tell me everything that's wrong with it. Carl's really good at that. And it went through it and you said, there is a vulnerability here that you're going to have people who are going to say you are paving the way for crazies to talk about their ideas being really valid.

Starting point is 00:07:06 I rewrote vast sections of the book to emphasize, first of all, science has got us a phenomenal distance. And it is an engine of discovery. It's a clunky engine. It's definitely not efficient. Could it be better? Yes. I identify lots of ways it could be better. And we need it to be better because we've got some really, really big problems on this planet. With that said, the engine is faulty and one of the key ways in which it is faulty is that when debate occurs between scientists, when we disagree, the gloves come off more often than they should.

Starting point is 00:07:47 disagreement and the debate should be respectful. It should be intelligent, and it should not involve character assassination. And yet, more and more, we allow the character assassination to occur. And there are a lot of reasons for that. Part of it, I mean, I'm not going to lie, we don't want to talk about the elephant in the room, but budget cuts ratchet up the pressure dramatically on the academic community. and the more you cut the budget, the more people really worry about the kitchen table issues. And when I say people, I mean the scientists. Scientists have mortgages too. They have families.

Starting point is 00:08:27 They have kids who they need to feed and clothe. And if you lose your job because you can't get grants, that's bad. And so the more the pressure goes up, the more likely a scientist who has built a career on a certain paradigm or group of ideas, the more they will defend that paradigm vigorously, even if the evidence is staring them in the face, that some upstart newbie to the field might be right. And that doesn't help us. We need to be able to have that newbie upstart lay out their evidence and then have the established scientists say, okay, well, let's hear this. Let's talk. Okay, no, I think you're wrong there. but this point has merit, and I think this point might be off.

Starting point is 00:09:16 And that's healthy. Healthy debate is critical. But when you tear people apart, which we see happen, especially when there's territoriality in science, we do all of ourselves, everyone, a vast disservice. The problem is, as I've said in the past, I don't really know if there's a solution to it, but science is an infinite game, right? You can't win science. You can win a Nobel Prize.

Starting point is 00:09:39 You can get a high H index. you can do all sorts of things, but you can't win it, right? You're fighting all-powerful enemy, Mother Nature, right? She's undefeated. On the other hand, you can win all these finite games along the way, tenure, you know, getting into grad school, getting into undergrad, getting a postdoc, getting a faculty, business. It's all these academic hunger game hurdles that we can get passed. But there is at every level a gaykeeping, and there is at every level a temptation to punish the heretic rather than reward the truth teller. And I think that is, You propose some ways we can get around it.

Starting point is 00:10:13 I agree the elephant. The mastodon in the room, as they say, is funding. But the real central character is, you know, really a tragic figure. So much so that my son was talking about him, he didn't know his name, but he was talking about the Semmelweis effect and what Igna Semiulvice discovered. He had it kind of conflated with they killed him. That's not really what happened. So talk about Igna Semelweis.

Starting point is 00:10:34 He is a real tragic figure, this brilliant Cassandra who saw the future and was punished for it. He is a fascinating tale, and what I find most fascinating about him is that he's not alone. There were so many other folks who went down exactly the same path, and most of them had poor outcomes. Their outcomes were different. Semmel Weiss was working in the 1830s and 1840s as an obstetrician. He was Hungarian by birth, but he was pretty good at his work, and as a result, he ended up working as an obstetrician in the Vienna-Hyne-Harmes. hospital in Austria. The history element of it is important because it's relevant to his story and what happened to him. It's relevant to his science. As a Hungarian, Hungary was a vassal state to Austria at the

Starting point is 00:11:23 time. The Habsburg Empire effectively controlled Hungary, but because Samuel Weiss was so capable, he was able to work at the Vienna Hospital as an obstetrician. So even though he was working there, even though he was very good, he was working for doctors who were mostly Austrian aristocrats. Very well established, very wealthy. Semmel Weiss did well, but he was always going to be a second-class doctor in that hospital. And Semmel Weiss, as he was doing his work, noticed that patients, when he delivered babies, roughly one woman in 10 would get a disease called preparal fever. and once they got it, they died.

Starting point is 00:12:07 There was no saving somebody from preparal fever, and it was a vile disease. Swollen black and blue splotches would appear around the abdomen and the upper thighs. The patient would develop a horrendous fever, become delirious, suffer seizures, and in the last two days, and it usually lasted about five or six days, the last two days of the disease, their abdomen would become so exquisitely sensitive and painful that even the gentle pressure of sheets on the hospital bed touching their belly would leave them frozen in speechless terror.

Starting point is 00:12:44 And they died with these frozen screams on their lips. The baby would always follow them to the grave so mother and baby would be buried together. And it's going to sound really terrible. But doctors really didn't care. Most doctors just shrugged their shoulders and went, it happens. But the thing is it didn't happen. There were places where it didn't occur. And so if you went to a private medical clinic to have your baby delivered instead of a hospital, the rate of preparal fever was much lower, but people weren't keeping notes. The notion of having an Excel spreadsheet

Starting point is 00:13:23 and writing down, who gets it, who doesn't, was not really done. Semmel Weiss was different. He started taking notes. He had learned from a statistician named Joseph. of Skoda, who was really into numbers. But he was an oddball and considered kind of an outsider. He was Austrian, but not liked by most of the other doctors. And the fact that Semmelweis got along well with him did not do a lot for Semmelweis. Semmelweis started keeping notes and recording, who got the disease, who didn't, how often. And he made an extraordinary discovery.

Starting point is 00:13:56 There were two maternity wards in the Vienna hospital, one that was dominantly controlled by nurses, and one that was effectively controlled by doctors. And as Semmelweis kept his notes, he made this extraordinary discovery. The rate of infection was 6% in the nurse's ward, and 21% in the doctor's ward. So something was different. And so he was, again, an extraordinary doctor. There were others like him, but not many, because most doctors in that day and age were taught diseases brought by the sun,

Starting point is 00:14:31 the moon, and the stars. Which way is the wind going? What position is Apollo in? You know, all of this stuff. What's going on on the planet? And we laugh at that and say that's crazy. But actually, chickenpox has a season. It's spring.

Starting point is 00:14:48 Influenza has a season. It's winter. So the notion that certain diseases arrived with the stars made sense, but they tried to explain everything with it. And Semmelweis started keeping notes and said, well, wait a minute. Why, if the stars are in alignment for peripheral fever causing 21% infection in the doctor's ward, do we see only 6% in the nurse's ward?

Starting point is 00:15:12 So he started running experiments. He tried giving all of the patients in the doctor's ward the food that the patients and the nurses were getting. And that didn't change a thing. Then he tried burning all the sheets in the doctor's ward and replacing them with sheets from the nurse's ward. No change. He even went so far as to ban the priest who wanted to be.

Starting point is 00:15:33 around with incense to visit patients giving last rights. Because, of course, if you've got more preparal fever in the doctor's ward, then there's more incense in the doctor's ward than there is in the nurse's ward. Maybe the incense is causing it. Maybe it's the bell that the assistant to the priest is ringing as the priest comes. Maybe that's filling people with dread and making them ill. So he banned the priest for three months and kept notes. No change. Finally, he made this extraordinary discovery. He was in the morgue in the morning, as all doctors across the world did every morning. He would dissect the patients who had died the previous day to try to understand why they had died. He then washed his hands with soap and water and went,

Starting point is 00:16:18 Still smells like corpse. Wait a minute. I go and deliver babies with these hands. I remove the umbilical cord from the neck of the mother from of the baby. Sometimes. I sometimes rotate the baby inside the mother to help avoid a cesarean. I wonder if having aura of death, because he had no idea about microbes, bacteria had not been discovered yet. Pasteur, character that he was, would not make that discovery for 40 years. Semmelweis went, my hands still smell. So we made a visit to the local sewage treatment plant where they were dumping chlorine in the sewer to get rid of the smell of raw human waste.

Starting point is 00:17:00 And he said, could you give me some of that? So they gave him this very concentrated chlorine solution. He dipped his hands in it and smell went away. Incidentally, the skin on his hands went away five days later, according to his journals. Because the concentration was so strong, the skin cells all died and his hands shed like a snake. I didn't write that in my book in the end because I didn't think it was really relevant. It was hysterical. He got all of the other doctors to sign on to this, which is extraordinary.

Starting point is 00:17:27 I mean, really, that he could get other people to do this. this is amazing and the infection rate went from 21% to zero. You didn't need statistical significance. You didn't need P values. You didn't need to do any kind of statistical analysis to know that this worked. And yet, in spite of that, he made so many political errors, so many diplomatic fauxas, largely because of his Hungarian background, but also because he was kind of a Sheldon Cooper of the the medical world. He said it like it was when other doctors were talking about the sun and the stars. He would openly defy them and say, no, there's no evidence for that. And he would say this in front of powerful people like the director of the hospital or politicians. And it got him into tons of

Starting point is 00:18:17 trouble and ultimately the doctors rebelled. And when he said, no, your hands are dirty. Your hands are dirty. They said, sir, we are gentlemen, all of us. Our hands cannot be dirty. And for all of that, He got thrown in an insane asylum after being exiled to Hungary by his peers, and he died there. What do you attribute the perseverance of another Hungarian, you know, a century and a half later, a friend Katty Karako, where she was able to not go crazy, carries no bitterness. Even against people like her post-a or her advisor, Sudolnik, who threatened to deport her for the crime of considering a job offer with almost no repercussions. impressions on him. I mean, she was simultaneously so valuable that he had to threaten her with deportation, but also he wouldn't give her a raise or advocate for her to get a permanent position. How do you think she persevered, but people like Asimovice and later Boltzman, who you don't

Starting point is 00:19:13 write about in this book, went crazy and committed suicide. This is what the book is all about. And I can't talk about all the scientists here, obviously. The book has so many characters. You have to buy the book, and we have to review the book. I mean, I listened to the book. It was great. Katikariko, I really sat down and analyzed because she's Hungarian too. I mean, that shouldn't really be relevant. But I found I almost called the book A Tale of Two Hungarians. Their two stories are so compelling.

Starting point is 00:19:39 There are dozens of others. So you really get down to the analysis. And I asked myself, does Katte have the diplomacy and guile that Galileo had? Because Galileo, we appreciate him as a scientist. And he was a great astronomer. but he was really he was so charismatic everybody liked him

Starting point is 00:20:00 he made all these very shrewd political moves and we don't respect him enough for that because that was his everything I mean he was so capable Katty didn't have that either you've talked to her you've had her on the show you know that she's not diplomatic she's hard to follow

Starting point is 00:20:18 she's a whirlwind of ideas Katty if you look had something that someone white didn't and that was she had shelter so she had Elliott Barnathan who became her friend Penn and Elliot when when the storm came Elliot stepped in and said I've got your back David Langer who was originally just a student in the lab with Elliot Barnet then went on to become a doctor and ultimately really shielded Katy for years to ensure that she could keep doing her very important work.

Starting point is 00:21:02 Semmel Weiss was an odd duck in terms of social ability. And again, the connection, I think, to Sheldon Cooper is poignant. Many people know young Sheldon or Big Bang theory, and that's relevant because Semmel Weiss got along with this Joseph Skoda, who was a numbers guy, but he was also esoteric and awkward. socially. He's written about as wearing threadbare clothing into the hospital. He was mocked for his odd clothing choices. You know, all you have to do is look at Sheldon Cooper's clothing choices and ask that question too, right? So Semmelweis really didn't build allies and he didn't get alliances.

Starting point is 00:21:41 And so when when the storm came, he didn't have shelter. Katie had for well over a decade, she was shielded by people who respected her, and we're going to pull out all the stops to make sure that she was shielded. When we look at the other main character, the thread and the story that's braided together, involving your field paleontology, we see sort of this notion of the infallible scientist and this trope that no scientist believes this. I mean, I was talking with Nick Lane, who's a famous biochemist at UC London. He was saying, you know, one of the biggest kind of mental models that people get wrong is that the scientific theory of mind, you know, is that I'm never wrong, but you're always wrong. Like, you don't know anything as to another scientist, but we don't realize to them, we're them, right? So we can't conceive of the fact that we're wrong. And yet, if you don't have that, you can't do anything in science.

Starting point is 00:22:42 You have to have this balance, I say, of hutspa and humility. and people like, you know, we see the Einstein's and the Feynman's, but for every one of them, there's dozens more that didn't have this kind of, you know, outsized ego. But Catalin, you know, she claims it's the ego of the scientist, perhaps, you point out, is the root cause. Let's talk about the scientists. We are, we are not without blame. So what can we do to reform that? Because we make fun of our friends in the law school, but at least they take an ethics class on the business school, the medical school. We never teach ethics as if you're going to learn it by osmosis. I say to my colleagues, do you learn quantum mechanics through osmosis? So you teach what you think is

Starting point is 00:23:22 valuable. What's your solution to the core, the real, the central gear in the worm is the scientist. So what can we do? For starters, we can talk about it. Because as long as we have the perception that there's an ivory tower, we put ourselves on the back foot. It's really important that we talk about how science works and we accept that the engine of discovery needs a tune-up and that we need to do better. Look, I've worked at the economist for two decades and so that does funny things to your brain.

Starting point is 00:23:57 It makes it hard to write in the first person, for example. It will be known. It was found that. But it also makes you think about financial models and the implications that certain types of funding have on the behavior that we've got. When we have systems that reward first, but not second, at all, that's unhelpful. When we have systems that do not at all monetize replication of research,

Starting point is 00:24:28 that creates a distinct threat to science, because if we're not replicating our work, we function on a 95% confidence model. If we're not replicating, and there's thousands and thousands of papers, there are going to be a lot that we're 95 confident that there was results, but in fact, it was statistical fluke. And we currently don't support replication at all anymore. It's really, really hard to find a replication. This is crazy. But that's not the fault of the scientists so much as it's the fault of the system. The journals are not reporting replications because they think nobody wants to hear them. The scientists aren't doing it because there's no funding for it. The journalists don't write about replications because they think the public won't care.

Starting point is 00:25:17 I would like to say, by the way, I pitch at least a dozen replications a year to my editor. Editors, I hope you're listening. And my editors very rarely allow me to write a piece about a replication. And if I do, it's because something fails to replicate and it has implications. I don't think I've ever written anything where a replication was done on an important experiment. And I've said, this replication occurred. And it's a big deal because this study that we thought was right really is right. Isn't that great?

Starting point is 00:25:51 That's a very hard sell in news. But it shouldn't. So it is in science, by the way. Sorry to interrupt. We don't teach all the wrong turns that scientists went down. Galileo was wrong almost as often as he was right. Same with Einstein. And this is actually an important point.

Starting point is 00:26:06 So, I mean, Samuel Weiss, he did the thing with the priest, right? He threw the priest out. He burned the sheets. He fed people different food. He did everything. And he was wrong. Over and over again for years, he was wrong.

Starting point is 00:26:21 It took him five years of experimentation to work out what was really going on. But he kept being funded. And this, this is instrumental to the problem with modern science. And it really is that we, You apply for a grant with NSF, and if you then run work based on that funding and it doesn't yield interesting results, you are very, very unlikely to get that funding again. As a result, what happens? You already run your experiment.

Starting point is 00:26:52 You know the results are going to be good. And then you apply for funding for the experiment that you've already succeeded in because you know that's there and you can publish it and make NSF happy so they'll give you more money in the future. So you're only running experiments with funding that you already had. And it makes us much more cautious as well because we're less likely to run an experiment where we think it might not yield interesting results. So the really cool stuff like Katikariko with MRNA, which was really out there, doesn't get done very often because people are being so careful. And that's not the fault of the scientist. That's the fault of the economic model.

Starting point is 00:27:32 But where the fault of the scientist does lie, scientists need to be better about discussing what they're actually doing, what their question was, what they did, why they did it, and what the findings were, and why it matters. It's going to sound crazy. It's just a beginning, a middle, and an end. It's a simple narrative. But simple narrative is why Disney is a multi-billion-dollar company. People really latch on to stories. Having a beginning and middle end is critical. And when a scientist says, we found this.

Starting point is 00:28:04 Without the other stuff, first of all, it gives people a false impression of what's actually going on. That's damaging. But it also strips away why money needed to go to it in the first place. Why was it expensive? I do think that, you know, people don't do enough, not just talking about how science works, but talking about science in general. I mean, my colleagues, if I tell them, you know, I have a YouTube channel, Half the time, they'll look at me, roll their eyes, you know, what do you think you are, Mr. Beast? Or like a real scientist doesn't do that. And, you know, there are very few tenured professors doing what I do. I mean, I can only think of two or three. This is my side hustle. I like to talk to interesting people like yourself. So it gives me a sense of joy. It's more like a hobby. But I tell my colleagues, I think we have a moral obligation. We're taking money from the public besides the practical element that if they don't understand what we're doing, I mean, I often say, if I told you Matt,

Starting point is 00:29:00 I'm working at a law firm. And I say, like, my, the partner, lead partner comes in and says, Brian, what are you working on? And I say, oh, you can't understand it. And my techniques, Matt, you can't understand that either. We'd be out of a job almost instantaneously, more, all the more so, for taking public funding. Every scientist, even at a private institution, gets copious amounts of public support. So I think we do so at our risk. And yet, every time I try to propose that our colleagues, my colleagues, you know, spend 10% of their time to it, they'll either say, no, I'm better.

Starting point is 00:29:30 more useful in the lab or I'm not good at it. And to that I always say, well, I forgot you came out of the womb knowing quantum electrodynamics, right? And of course, they'll say no, but it just means they don't prioritize it. But I think we're in a new error, right, Matt, that if we don't have more transparency and accountability, this way we've done science is not going to continue much longer, especially in the age of pehacking, Epstein, and AI, right? It is a very delicate balancing act. So as a science journalist, having done this for over two decades, I read the papers, I read the abstracts. If I think the abstract is interesting, I then look at the discussion, and I think the discussion is interesting. I read the methods and the results and say, this stands up.

Starting point is 00:30:17 I think we should write about it. That is how I get 95% of what I write in The Economist. I do, on occasion, have scientists email me. Some scientists email me with stuff they want me to write about a lot more than others. And it's interesting, just doing a psychological analysis of myself. If a scientist emails me roughly once every two months, their emails are almost certainly ignored. If I only see an email from them once in a blue moon, I will give what they've proposed to me attention. it's usually corrected proof of a paper that's been accepted

Starting point is 00:30:59 because I tell people, look, don't pitch ideas to me unless they've gone through peer review. It doesn't have to be published yet. In fact, it's better if it hasn't been published yet. But if it's been accepted, it's in the process, tell me, and I'll line up coverage in the newspaper and make sure it goes in, especially if I think our readers are going to care about it. But I don't like people who push the salesmanship too far

Starting point is 00:31:21 because that feels like they've departed science and gone into salesmanship, which is a weird thing. It's not fair, but it is what it is. Similarly, scientists who are set on transmit

Starting point is 00:31:36 a lot, I think, are using a gift, but it needs to be, that gift needs to be wielded carefully. That gift needs to be used like you're using it to communicate how science operates

Starting point is 00:31:49 and have interesting conversations rather than trying to push their specific research out there more. That doesn't mean they shouldn't try to push their specific research when a journalist contacts them if they're ready to talk about the narrative of their finding, great. That's wonderful. We need that. And there should be training in it. And there should also be an acknowledgement that not everybody is Galileo, that if I sat with Semmelweis and spoke Hungarian, which I don't, but if I did, or German, I think he spoke German too, if I sat with him and explained to him,

Starting point is 00:32:24 him how he needed to hone his message, I think it would have been like sitting with Sheldon Cooper to try to explain why he should explain string theory to the public. It would be laughable. And I don't think Simmel Weiss would ever get there, but that doesn't mean Semmelweis shouldn't be a scientist any more than someone like Sheldon Cooper should be out there. We need people with those kinds of minds. They are critical. And so we also have to be able to say, look, we try to help people to communicate their science. We accept when they can't. We celebrate when they can. And, you know, there are there going to be people in between? And we need to wield what we've got to get the message out there. And when people can't do it, that's why we have science journalists who can pave the way

Starting point is 00:33:11 to bridge that gap. And you want to have a science journalist who understands the paper and can do the research justice rather than just saying, look, it was discovered. When I see these newspapers that are laying people off and saying, well, we don't need journalists anymore because we can have the AI do it. And then you read what the AI produces. It's very worrying, especially when it tries to explain natural selection. Arthur C. Clark has many quotes and many quips. And one of them is that the only way to determine the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. And that's the origin of the name of this podcast. He also said the following. He said, which is echoed by a proposal you make in the book. He said when a distinguished but older scientist says something is possible,

Starting point is 00:33:56 he, and I assume he would have said nowadays, she is very much likely to be correct. But when he says something is impossible, he's very much likely to be wrong. And you very provocatively write in the book that older scientists at the top of the game, quote, suck up valuable resources and are resistant to novel ideas. Should there be a mandatory retirement age for my colleagues or forced research reallocation in scientists such as my colleague. I'm not old. I have taken so much heat for that paragraph in the book. So I was sitting with Enki Ramakrishan on last year who wrote why we die is a Nobel laureate in biochemistry. And we were talking about exactly this issue. And he commented to me, you know, Matt, in my field, it is very rare that I find someone in their

Starting point is 00:34:43 70s or 80s who I can't think of someone who's in their 20s or 30s who could do a better job. And it's astounding how many cling on rather than gracefully stepping down. I do think that as we sit in our fields for longer and longer, we adhere ourselves more and more to the paradigms that we've known for 10, 20, 30 years. and it's all the harder for us to let go of those ideas because they become more entrenched in our sclerotic minds. But we do become more entrenched. There's tons of research in the journal Cognition showing this, I've written about it.

Starting point is 00:35:24 So we know we become less flexible, less adaptable, less open to change as we get older. It is fact. Does that mean that those folks need to retire? Absolutely not. but I think we need to be having a conversation about shifting gears and who is really in control of the money and where the research is going. And whether we want someone who is very, very set in their ways, deciding how a million dollars in NS funding is going to go in their labs, maybe that ultimate decision should shift to somebody who is more recently stepped into the field because they are not. a better position to say, well, why do we do things this way? Why do we accept that idea? Have we

Starting point is 00:36:11 replicated that? That's a common theme. Like, didn't we replicate that? Or, you know, just asking questions and being more open to the possibility that the way we've done things for decades might be wrong is so critical. And the older we get, and I speak personally, the harder it is for us to accept that something that is enshrined in our head might be... off or might not be true. I mean, that's what science is all about. It's about being open. And this is where I go back full circle. You don't want the gloves to come off. And as we get older, when our core beliefs get challenged, we often feel more threatened and our behavior declines. You talk in the book about this famous misapprehension about Galileo, that he was tortured,

Starting point is 00:37:01 you know, for his beliefs. He stood up bravely to the church. Of course, nothing of the sort is true. fact, I've hosted multiple conferences in Galileo's prison in our Chetri, Italy, which I don't know if you've been there, but if I had to do my time, you know, anywhere like that, I would consider myself quite lucky, the view of El Duomo and the resplendent Tuscan Hills. But why do you think he's persist? I mean, is it this need for hero worship that kind of promulgates this notion that he was tortured for science, that lone geniuses persist? What is the, is it some sort of urge, like in the movie, a few good men, you know, that we want you on that wall. You know, we want these scientists out, these dispassionate arbiters of truth.

Starting point is 00:37:42 We need them on that wall, right? As Jack Nicholson said, no matter how the sausage gets made, as you said, is it some impulse or need that the public has to worship heroes and those heroes have to wear lab coats? So in this case, it's not that. So I've written two other books on science of monsters and science of the magical, which looks at the folklore beliefs that stem largely from our misunderstandings of the natural world. And those books deal with a lot of stories that were created by our ancestors, in some cases, thousands of years ago, and point out that once narratives are established,

Starting point is 00:38:18 they're incredibly resistant to change. Once we tell a good story around the fire, even when it's only orally transmitted, there's some really great evidence that those stories persist. So the message and the story that were stated back in the day of Galileo, we're talking like 1620s here, was that he was tortured and that he answered once he was tortured in a Catholic manner, which meant, you know, Pope, he's telling the truth. And that's what the Pope needed the followers to hear. So that's the narrative that was shared.

Starting point is 00:38:59 That's the story that was told. A couple hundred years later, evidence emerged that Galileo was definitely not tortured. Evidence emerged that he actually was never even housed in a cell. He was very comfortably put in a five-bedroom apartment, which is a marvelous story in the book. It's definitely a lot of fun to read. And because those narratives, the torture and recanting and prison cells were told hundreds of years earlier, those narratives had spread and countering them even with all of the evidence that it wasn't true has proved incredibly hard over the years because stories get entrenched.

Starting point is 00:39:44 And that's just the way the human mind works. Written language with editors like you do has been around for like a nanosecond on the cosmic clock and storytelling around the campfires. Much older, but again, not much older, not that old as a species. as you know, studying ancient mammals. And maybe we can kind of, you know, conclude with just a vignette from your days as a scientist and paleontology. I was struck by kind of the biases that you speak about, very candidly, you were certainly

Starting point is 00:40:12 such a wonderful journalist, not the least of which, because of your vulnerability. And you talk about your own, you know, kind of lacunae in the past. And one of them was, you know, like you're on a dig and you literally mistook, you know, the find of a graduate student. you know, career or whatever. Talk about that. Talk about the biases that all scientists, good, bad, medium, indifferent were all victim to. I studied small mammals. I was looking at isotopes in the teeth of these animals to work out what kind of environment they had been living in millions of years ago. And when you're looking for small mammals, you're mostly looking at rodent teeth

Starting point is 00:40:50 because, you know, our teeth, you have to dunk them in Coca-Cola overnight to dissolve them. Or, you know, other types of acids. Our teeth are subjected to vast amounts of punishment and they don't erode away. So mammal teeth are great because you find them in like river beds and such. And once you develop a search image for certain types of mammal teeth in your head, you get really good at finding them really quickly. It's like a super ability to go, there's one, there's one, there's one, there's one, there's one, there's one. And I remember vividly sitting there in the sediment in the baking sun in Oregon. Or rattlesnakes all over the place.

Starting point is 00:41:28 I hate snakes. My research supervisor comes up behind me and says, I can see a shadow kind of bleeding over me. And he says, Matt, you missed one. And I'm like, what are you talking about? I found everything. How are you? How have I missed something?

Starting point is 00:41:44 And he points. And right there in the middle of the sediment is this rhinoceros tooth. And because I hadn't been looking for anything like that, I just, my brain dismissed it as it's a rock. And this happens to all of us. And it's why replication is so important. It's why we need to double check what we're doing. It's why we need to keep questioning.

Starting point is 00:42:08 And we're not doing it as often as we should. I think we're doing it less and less as these years goes by. It's going to catch up with us. So we got to change our ways. And that's part of what the book's about. Well, it's an excellent book. We congratulated on this great work. And I think it's a be of interest to, you know, scientists and non-scientists the like, which covers everybody, of course.

Starting point is 00:42:28 But I do want to make sure that in particular students read it because we do a bad job, as I said, of doing what, you know, should come easy to us, which is unfortunately very rare. It's ethical training. You know, we have these mandatory two-hour seminars each year about sexual harassment. But it's all these online things and ethics and research. And you can never tell if you passed it or failed it. I think we could do well by doing what our colleagues do in the journalism and business and even in the law school, those lawyers, you've got to keep your eye on them. Matt Kaplan, thank you so much for taking this on this tour of scientific history, the legacies.

Starting point is 00:43:03 So thank you so much. Congratulations on this great book. And I hope we do get to meet in person. And I hope you get your luggage eventually from wherever it may be in space. Brian, thank you so much for having me. I think you agree that Matt Kaplan just made the case that the way we fund science is actually suppressing the next big breakthrough. That changes how you think about the rest.

Starting point is 00:43:20 replication crisis, hit subscribe, turn your notifications on so you don't miss what's coming next. Drop me a comment. And let me know. Do you think there should be mandatory retirement ages for scientists? If you want to go deeper into how paradigm shifting resistance is nearly killing discoveries, check out my conversation with Melbault Prize winner, Catalin Carrico. It's a link right here. Go ahead, click it, and don't forget to subscribe. See you next week on Into the Impossible.

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