Below, Matt Kaplan shares five key insights from his new book, I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right.
Matt is a science correspondent at The Economist, where he has written about everything from paleontology and parasites to virology and viticulture over the course of two decades. His writing has also appeared in National Geographic, New Scientist, Nature, and the New York Times.
What’s the big idea?
Science often suppresses bold, unconventional, or threatening ideas due to ego, hierarchy, competition, sexism, and fraud. This culture harms progress. To truly serve society, science needs structural and cultural reform that protects integrity and encourages intellectual risk-taking.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Matt himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. Stupidly silenced
In the middle of the pandemic, I was interviewing researchers who were trying to defeat COVID-19 or help patients in hospitals. Something that blew me away during this period was how often I would hear really impressive ideas that I thought were worth reporting on, but then the scientist would say, “Oh no, no, no. You can’t say that.” And when I asked why, these are some of the responses I got:
- “Well, other scientists wouldn’t take me seriously anymore if you shared that.”
- “I’m a PhD student and the idea I just shared with you would be a threat to the work done by my PhD supervisor. I might be fired.”
- “Well, I really need to test my idea out extensively first and I’m never going to get funding for this, so it’s not even worth talking about or reporting on.”
- “This is immunology, Matt, and let’s face it, I’m a woman.”
I thought this was nuts. We were in the middle of a pandemic with thousands of people dying, and I’ve got researchers who are saying, “Yeah, don’t share my ideas with anybody else because either my PhD supervisor won’t accept it, or other people might laugh at me, or because I’m a woman.” These are not good reasons to hide important ideas during a time when many people are losing their lives.
Has science always been like this? Have we always had behaviors like this cropping up in the field? The answer is yes.
