But, I say, isn’t Kang’s work at least a sign of receptiveness to your ideas? You said nobody would fund a classical approach, but here it is.

“My concern is, if and when it is shown to fail, it will discredit the concept even further. And I said that to him. Of course, that doesn’t stop him,” Dorman answers.

He got published, I say. He got funding from government agencies in two countries, and a pharma company.

Dorman insists he’s rooting for Kang, but a lot of people get funding and get published with early-stage HIV vaccines. “You can’t think your way to a vaccine. You have to experiment your way,” he says. “And that is an idea that the Tony Faucis of the world have never digested. Is that a criticism? No. They’re in a different business, and their business does a tremendous amount of good. But it doesn’t get a vaccine in short order.”

Science—the set of methods, not the institution—remains the best way humans have developed for apprehending the world. By extension, it’s also the way humans learn to change that world, to build something new.

But that doesn’t mean science and scientists are always right. Those methods are iterative; the idea is to get more right, or understand where you were wrong.

Science—the institution, not the set of methods—is made of people doing the hard work of apprehending the world and trying to change it. But those people are just as subject to social forces as any other group of humans. They are vulnerable to bias, blind spots, and groupthink. That’s not an excuse to stop believing in scientific conclusions. (Vaccines prevent disease. Life on Earth develops and continues to change through a process of evolution. Human industrial emission of carbon into the atmosphere is altering the planetary ecosystem.) It just means scientists aren’t always right.

They certainly haven’t been right about an AIDS vaccine. “We’re 30 years in and we don’t have anything. RV144, that’s it,” Levy says. “Burt has tried to get independent funding, and I think he still could, but it has to be from some pretty forward-thinking philanthropists, because you’re not going to get it from a foundation and you’re not going to get it from the government.”

Dorman thinks that the vaccine community’s resistance to classical vaccinology is an example of bias, of cleaving to a set of ideas in the absence of evidence for them. “Until fairly recently, expert opinion held that the earth was flat! Erroneous ideas sometimes are difficult to dislodge, as has been noted by many observers including Leo Tolstoy and Upton Sinclair,” he writes me in an email timestamped at 3:05 am the morning after I asked him about Kang’s research. To the email Dorman attached a PDF with quotes from Tolstoy and Sinclair. The Tolstoy was in the original Russian, with a translation.

I’d suggest that the problem here isn’t bias so much as what the philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm. Scientists establish paradigms, Kuhn wrote in a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and those sets of ideas inform and guide research until another paradigm overturns them. Those paradigm shifts are hard to predict, nearly impossible to engineer, and, when they happen, tectonic. (In some cases, literally—it took decades for geologists to accept the idea of plate tectonics.)

The dominant paradigm moved away from Burt Dorman 35 years ago. That dominant paradigm has not produced a vaccine. The fact that Dorman has never gotten to try his approach is certainly a missed opportunity. And, perhaps, a tragedy.

1 UPDATE 6/1/18 10:45 AM Corrected first name

2 UPDATE 6/3/18 3:45 PM Fixed attribution

3 UPDATE 6/21/18 2:15 PM Clarified Dorman's work on feline leukemia.

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