How do heretic-heroes fit into your theory of crackpottery?



Heretic-heroes are deeply creative, substantive scientists whose contrarian ideas are initially dismissed, rejected and ridiculed by their colleagues. In a few cases, their ideas are utterly ignored.



Heroes are stubborn. They are passionate. They can be egotistical and ambitious. But they are also open-minded, willing to digest the evidence that nature provides. They might be laughed off the stage when they propose their ideas, but these ideas are eventually incorporated into the mainstream, because they expand the edge of discovery.



Who comes to mind?



Barbara McClintock, a plant geneticist who worked on chromosomal crossing over. In 1950, she published her radical findings on transposition, or jumping genes. She met with so much hostility she stopped publishing on transposition in 1953 — but kept working on it.

It wasn’t until the mid-1960s, after her retirement, that her work earned recognition. Eventually, she won the usual string of awards leading to the Nobel. Her first recognition by the scientific community was Brandeis’ Rosenstiel Award in 1977, followed in 1981 by the first MacArthur Foundation Grant ever given.



Australian physicians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren are another good example of heretic-heroes. They overturned the universally held view that peptic ulcers are caused by anxiety or excess acid, showing that ulcers and certain stomach cancers are caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. To test his conviction, Marshall drank a culture of H. pylori excavated from a patient’s stomach juice. He experienced severe gastritis within a week, then cured himself with antibiotics.



What clues give the scientific crackpot away?



No features infallibly identify a crackpot. But certain indicators do raise our suspicions. Crackpots frequently see themselves as revolutionaries, and create extended narratives about their own contrarian position in a controversy.



For example, many of Ling’s books include “revolution” in their title. Berkeley virologist and AIDS denier Peter Duesberg — he claims HIV is a harmless passenger virus — has referred to himself as a “courageous independent scientist resisting orthodoxy,” modestly invoking Galileo as an example.



This sort of revolutionary flag-waving is absent among the heroes, who focus on specific scientific problems, not their personal position in a controversy.



Also, an odor of Napoleonic, delusionary certainty often infects crackpot narratives and is never seen in hero narratives.



Consider Linus Pauling, arguably the greatest 20th-century chemist. He was convinced vitamin C could prevent the common cold, despite many double-blind trials finding no effect. He continued pushing vitamin C as a cure for cancer, heart disease and AIDS, claiming that “75 percent of all cancer can be prevented and cured by vitamin C alone.”



At the end of the day, this determined lack of open-mindedness is the clearest sign of crackpottery.



Ironically, it seems Ling set you on a course to becoming a successful scientist.



Ling had more influence on me than any other scientist I have known. But he is a tragic figure — his wealth of personal and professional virtues were nullified by his rigid attachment to a theory. He violated the first commandment of science: When nature speaks, listen.



He instilled in me a bizarre love for small inorganic ions. But his greatest influence on me, I reckon, was to instill a profound aversion to becoming emotionally attached to one’s own ideas.



Science seems to require a strong stomach for ambiguity.



The pervasive ambiguity of biological science is one of its greatest delights. When a scientist navigates through muck and suddenly cracks a problem, there is the sublime excitement of discovery. My own research into membrane biophysics has given me a career’s worth of happy ambiguity, in both observation and interpretation.



But ambiguity also creates the soft spots where mountebanks, con men and crackpots are free to ply their trade.