Almost every groundbreaking idea that surfaced went through a period of obscurity and dismissal.
So, its really difficult to judge a revolutionary theory. Crackpot theories are easier to judge however. They often have very provable falsehoods.
This is an interesting insight. Yeah, I think you are onto something here.
Groundbreaking ideas, as opposed to new technologies, tend not to have obvious real world applications/results for years. As such, they aren't easily distinguishable from random crackpottery.
We tend to validate ideas by their later applications, or, at the very least, a heap of corroborating evidence. Both takes a lot of time to aggregate.
Even if it was not easy pharmaceutical companies finally did invest.
No, it shows there are weaknesses in the government-funded research grants. But it is far from clear which other system would be better overall not just in this case.
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn’t they discover that the new number was higher right away? It’s a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it’s apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan’s, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan’s value they didn’t look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.
There was some article a while back that talked about the fact that measurements from the oil drop experiment pretty much moved as the input data got better.
IIRC, the experimental value went in one direction, from Millikan's to the currently accepted value.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/44092/is-feynma...
The linked SE question is relevant. https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/264/timeline-of-meas...
You clearly couldn't be bothered to put in even a minimal amount of effort to follow the citations that have existed for 12 hours prior to your useless post.
I will give your post as much consideration as you gave mine.
You cannot even realize how many people in academia are running for wild and fanciful ideas. Don't blame the scientists, they are probably the most open-minded to the new ideas. But filtering out bad ideas is a part of their job, and they grew thick-skinned from constant bombardment of fancy ideas, we cannot pursue them all.
So I'd say this story is pretty traditional in the history of revolutionary ideas (e.g. a similar story of John Snow vs. cholera -- how many years and lives it took).
The original article is gone!
Just an constantly evolving page that likely has things deleted for reasons other than accuracy (e.g., like narrative coherency).
Just write another article! Damn!
> On Monday, they were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their research.
And added "Long Overlooked" to the title.
Wiki tells me that she started publishing about mRNA in 2005. The first mRNA vaccine was not approved until Dec 2022. That kind of timeline is impossible for private investment to fund. It needs to come from gov'ts and non-profits.
"Dr. Kariko’s struggles to stay afloat in academia have a familiar ring to scientists. She needed grants to pursue ideas that seemed wild and fanciful. She did not get them, even as more mundane research was rewarded. “When your idea is against the conventional wisdom that makes sense to the star chamber, it is very hard to break out,” said Dr. David Langer ... Leading scientific journals rejected their work. When the research finally was published, in Immunity, it got little attention. ... “We talked to pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists. No one cared,” Dr. Weissman said. “We were screaming a lot, but no one would listen.[1]”
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-k...