Told You So! with Matt Kaplan

25:59And did he know he was doing that or this is just something intuitively he was like, okay, I'm just going to keep going until something happens. So he had had a mentor named Joseph Skoda, who was honestly, for lack of better words, the best description is he was like the 1800s Vienna example of Sheldon Cooper. Socially inept, genius, knew exactly what he was talking about with numbers, and was an outcast amongst the doctors at the Vienna Hospital. Semmelweis got on well with him and learned a lot from this fellow. and he learned how to make notes and keep records and start considering the concept of statistical significance.

26:39Although you don't need statistical significance when your rate of 21 % goes to zero. That doesn't require p-values or chi-squared tests or anything.

26:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:There's an old saying, this is not literally true, but it's figuratively true. If your results need statistics to prove it, you need a better experiment. Oh, that's funny. That's funny. Design a better experiment. Right, right. Matt, what eventually is the final chapter for Ignaz Semmelweis? Does he get lauded and adored for his work, or does he just unplug himself from this scenario? Well, unfortunately, it was far worse than that. It's amazing. He got all of the doctors in his facility to adopt the chlorine washing mechanism and drop the rates of preparal fever. but Semmelweis had made a lot of missteps politically.

27:33Hungary rose up against Vienna because it didn't want to be a vassal state anymore. And Semmelweis had openly supported the rebels against the Austrians. And you have to remember, he was reporting to Austrian doctors. So that did not go well. Similarly, Semmelweis had on multiple occasions derided his supervisors who said, yeah, we have these really bad cases of preparal fever because the sun, the moon, and the stars are out of alignment. And then Semmelweis, being really not very attentive to social interaction, said, yeah, but we have the same sun, the moon, and stars over both clinics, and the rate is really low in the nurse's clinic.

28:13And he would say this in front of the politicians funding the hospital. So it did not win him a lot of friends. Ultimately, he was fired, even though he had dropped the rate to zero. He was exiled back to Hungary and eventually a group of his own peers put him into an insane asylum where he died. Wow. And they lived happily ever after. And there you go. It was, yeah. So if we moved, Matt, forward a little bit to someone who is probably the polar opposite to Ignaz Semmelweis, Louis Pasteur. Oh boy. Never met the man, But from having read parts of your book, I believe it would be fair to say he did not lack self-confidence and has a penchant for the deviousness.

29:00And I think you called him brilliant, tenacious, something else, and then you finished with arsehole. Would you enlighten us to the Louis Pasteur story? That's kind of cool. Yeah, sure. So Semmelweis was so mild-mannered in his way and ultimately, I think, really suffered because of it. Louis Pasteur was theatrical. He understood how to make a demonstration that would grab the limelight. Neil, there are some similarities there. He really knew how to talk. But he also, he had been, as a university student, he had a supervisor named Auguste Laurent, who had been very involved with the student rebellion that you see a lot in this reflected in Les Miserables at the barricades where the students rose up against the right-wing government to demand rights for the poor.

29:58And Auguste Laurent had taken their side and Pasteur watched as his research supervisor lost funding from the government for being on the wrong side of politics. And it was a valuable lesson to Pasteur because he made sure that he never was on the wrong side of politics, ever. So he knew how to milk the French government for money, but he also knew how to tell a story. And he knew how to make sure that those stories never, ever had flaws in them so that people could raise doubt. So for example, chicken cholera was a major problem for the poultry industry in Louis Pasteur's day. It's not related to the cholera that kills people, but the end result is basically the same.

30:40Cholera causes you to have such severe diarrhea that you die, and it causes chickens to have such severe diarrhea that they dehydrate and die. And Pasteur was in a race to create the vaccine or a treatment for that and then went on to try to defeat the disease anthrax that killed lots and lots of animals.

30:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait, wait. If a chicken poops, how do you know it's diarrhea? Doesn't it all look like diarrhea? It's the sound they make. more liquid more liquid neil more liquid you know bird poop lots more liquid yeah i was gonna say just triple the liquid and and you've got it and the smell apparently is is bad i've not ever seen chicken cholera in first person nor do i really want to agree um anyway back to anthrax that sounds that sounds quite palatable on the back of yeah yeah much better ever before so anthrax was affecting livestock all across Europe, and there was a desperate need to create a vaccine against it.

31:37And earlier on in his career, Pasteur knew about this veterinarian named Henry Toussaint. And Henry Toussaint had said, you know, I think a way to create a vaccine against chicken cholera and then anthrax is to kill whatever the microbe is that is causing this. So he started messing with heat to heat treat samples and then inject them into animals. And the animals he noted would get ill, but then not die and then become resistant to the disease afterwards. And Pasteur had been on the record saying, I think you are totally off. I think that killing the microbe isn't helpful. I think we need to weaken it.

32:22And so he was a big proponent of using oxygen to weaken bacteria so that you could create a vaccine with a pathogen that was weak but not destroyed. And he said, Henry Toussaint is totally wrong. In the end, there was tremendous pressure for Pasteur to be able to deliver an anthrax vaccine. And he did deliver in a very public way by injecting all of these sheep with anthrax. Half of them had been vaccinated with Pasteur's vaccine and none of the ones that had been vaccinated died. It was a very public demonstration of his work and he proved that he had created a very successful vaccine. Except when his journals and lab notebooks were opened a hundred years later, it was revealed that this was entirely fraud.

33:06He had stated that he had created the vaccine by exposing the pathogen to oxygen. Not true. He had used Henry Toussaint's mechanism, the one that he had derided and discredited Toussaint for and lied about it. Toussaint died a pauper. Louis Pasteur went on to be celebrated as a national hero, but it was largely because of Pasteur's treatment of him that that happened. And the same thing happened with rabies. Pierre Gaultier, a veterinarian again, had developed a mechanism for creating a rabies vaccine. Louis Pasteur effectively stole that mechanism, created the vaccine, tested it on people, killed some people in the process, buried the evidence that he had killed people along with the bodies, and then lied about the mechanism and where he had got it from, effectively discrediting Gaultier as well.

33:55So he was pretty vicious, and he was very successful as a scientist, but not in a nice way. Maybe he should have figured out a way to get light inside of the body.

34:10No. Or perhaps a little bit of bleach in a shot glass.

34:16Neil deGrasse Tyson:Just shout out. Anyone else saw the bleach coming? I saw it coming. Took you that long to get the bleach and the joke. Very effective. How is it that you have access to this information and was it revealed earlier in the century? Yeah. So in 2003, it got published in a pretty academic book by, what was his name? I'm going to forget the guy's name, but he translated Pasteur's journals. And what was really interesting, actually, in this piece, the author wrote, but you have to excuse this behavior of Pasteur because of the high-pressure environment of late 1800s French academic life. Like, being in a high-pressure environment made it acceptable to so horrendously plagiarize and destroy people.

35:09And so, you know, I'm not the one who translated the journals, but the journals haven't had a lot of discussions since they were translated. And I think, you know, it's important to point out that Louis Pasteur, yeah, he was phenomenally successful, but he was phenomenally successful. Yes, he was a genius, but he was also very effective at discrediting people who could get in his way. And he was also very good at telling positive stories without mentioning any places where he had faltered. And that was pivotal to him getting money. No one knows how cutthroat this business is. Business. So he was an a-hole.

35:45Yeah, he was a big, giant. But I got to tell you, I mean, he was French. I mean, that's kind of okay. Don't you stop. You just throw the nation under the bus. I'm just saying. Like, if you're an a-hole and you're French, you get away with it. It's all right. I'll have what you're saying. You know, it's like part of their thing. You know what I mean? It's like, hi, may I have some water? You may, you may not. What is your problem talking to me? Oh, come on. There were nice French people. There were nice French. I mean, Pierre-Alexandre Louis was a really good guy, and he ended up being a mentor to a very important American scientist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had also tried to defeat preparal fever.

36:25I mean, so, I mean, there are good French doctors. Okay, so I love them. I love them because you found one. Oh, damned with faint praise. In your research, is there any reason why the sun, moon, and stars, particularly the stars, Neil, people thought was influencing health? I mean, this is a theme. I mean, influenza actually is influence of the stars. This is something that persisted until like the early 1900s. What's going on there that people look up and say, okay.

37:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in your stars, but in ourselves. Look at that. Shakespeare. Well said. Yeah. I mean, did you uncover anything that would make, explain why that is? Yeah, what are the urges? Yeah. Is it just an extension of astrology at that level? It is and it isn't. So think about chickenpox. Chickenpox has a season, right? It's spring. Influenza has a season, right? It's the winter. Certain diseases, and it was more so back then before we vaccinated people so effectively, Certain diseases had certain times. And you could measure that with the stars. You knew where you were, not just based upon whether the leaves were falling, but based upon what you could see with your telescope or even with the naked eye.

37:52And so there was this, I mean, it was, and also you have the power of narrative. Once people believe something and you've had the story for a long time, it's very, very hard for them to stop believing in it. But there's another side to this. We were talking about the infrastructure underpinning pharmaceuticals and the medical community. There is also the fact that these doctors at the hospitals who were supervising Semmelweis were very, very well established in the Austrian aristocracy. They had it good and they had a steady paycheck and there was no reason for them to change anything about the way they were working.

38:29they were going to continue getting what they wanted regardless. And actually shaking things up put them at risk of being identified as, wait a minute, you were using this crazy method before, and now it's been proved wrong. Why were we paying you all this money? So you've got the power of long-established narrative with selfish self-interest. And then, of course, you also have the seasonality of these things, which made sense. So they ran into a lot of walls trying to overturn and lots and lots of people beyond Semmelweis fought the good fight and lost. So at the foundation here is science and science results.

39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:I don't want to absolve Pasteur and others for their impropriety, but you have science intersecting culture and society. And so there are forces operating that are not purely scientific forces. Right. There's fame, there's money, there's - Influence. Power, power. Politics. Politics. All these things. They're all in there. These are contaminating forces on the purity of the science that should have none of that. Right. And you wrote a whole book on it. So, Matt, if we fast forward, do you think there's an echo of that malaise still present in our scientific medical environments today? Of what?

39:48Of the malaise? An echo. An echo. Oh, echo, echo. And if it is an echo, when did the sound go away? When did we move away from all of that as part of the whole process and get down to just science? Unfortunately, we've really not abandoned it. And first of all, by the way, I want to emphasize actually, you know, while Pasteur behaved very badly, Galileo behaved. He was excellent at diplomacy and negotiation in a manner that saved a lot of his ideas. And you don't have to backstab people to take unpopular ideas to get them across in the end.

40:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, but in terms of the a-hole factor. Yeah. You stuck with that. You got to admit that when Galileo wrote the dialogue of the two chief world systems, you're arguing there's earth in the center, there's the sun in the center. And he has these two sort of, let's call them avatars of, one of them is Simplicio. And Simplicio was arguing the points that are not scientifically valid. And he put all of the arguments that the Pope made in the character Simplicio. By the way, that's brilliant. It's brilliant, but it's like - I'm sorry, but that is brilliant. Wait, and he publishes it in Italian so that everybody can read it.

41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's not just Latin. Okay, so - So that's kind of a-hole. So he's an a-hole, but he's a smart a-hole. See, because that's brilliant. I mean, honestly, that's like, you want to convince some people of an argument. So you create two characters, He's dumbass and smarter pants. Right, but if the dumbass said all the words that the Pope said, and the Pope is powerful. Well, but guess what? It's like, then you look at the Pope and say, well, that's not you, that's dumbass.

41:34You know? Okay, he's a smart a-hole. Unfortunately, the Pope was smart enough to work things out, but Galileo was clever, and he dedicated that particular work, the dialogue of two systems to Ferdinando de' Medici, who was the grand duke of Tuscany. And if there was anyone powerful enough to interfere with the Inquisition, it was Ferdinando de' Medici. And it's amazing because Ferdinando de' Medici had Galileo on the payroll. He was their chief scientist in Tuscany. And similarly, Galileo was bosom buddies with the ambassador to Rome for Tuscany. So when Galileo ultimately was called before the Inquisition, Ferdinando to Medici interfered and ensured that Galileo was not tortured and ensured that Galileo was fed three meals a day made by the ambassador's wife.

42:28And then when he was eventually taken over to the Inquisition and living there, he was in a five-bedroom luxury apartment, a stone's throw from the Sistine Chapel. So Galileo, we now know, was not tortured. And we've been aware of that for hundreds of years. But again, the power of narrative really sticks. It does make a difference. I like that narrative better. I have more respect for Galileo. That's like me getting arrested. And they're like, all right, Chuck, we're going to give you five to 10. And you're going to live in this mansion with the warden's wife.

43:06Wait, but I had not,

43:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:that is a piece of history that had eluded me because I always was suspicious why it was that Giordano Bruno is brought up in front of the Inquisition. and he's burned at the stake. Burned at the stake. Okay. Right. Whereas Galileo was brought up in front of the Inquisition. Not that many years later. Okay. And lost that free. Well, he was on house arrest. On house arrest. Yeah, yeah. But he wasn't like put on the rack and tortured. Now, in the hood, we would have said that Galileo was a snitch. Because Bruno went down and Galileo didn't. I think Bruno went down before. It's like, clearly, you are an informant.

43:40Now, in Galileo's defense, I think Bruno went down in advance. Yes, he did. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's important to note that the Inquisition wrote that Galileo was exposed to rigorous examination. And that was code for torture back then. Galileo was in his what, Neil, like 68, 69 when he got brought in. And their method of torture was to tie your hands behind your back and hoist you with your hands tied behind your back and then drop you abruptly. and Galileo would not have walked back to the Tuscan embassy on his own two feet at 69 if that had been done to him. Also, I mean, fun fact, the Inquisition was the epitome of organized evil.

44:23And they, have you ever, have you ever watched The Princess Bride? Yes, of course. You know, when they're, when they're torturing Wesley, there is like, you know, please tell us everything. This is for posterity. Well, that's what the Inquisition actually did. As people were tortured, they would write down every moan, every gasp, every scream. It was all noted for posterity. And it's not like the cleric who was doing this fell asleep at the job when Galileo was brought in. It didn't happen, and that's because Ferdinando de' Medici. And by the way, the de' Medici family by that time had already supplied two queens to France and four popes.

44:59So these folks who were really powerful had ensured that Galileo did not end up tortured. So there was a lot of political disruption that occurred to protect Galileo and make sure that he didn't get burned at the stake.

45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson:They're friends in high places. That's it. I like Galileo even more now. He's a total gangster. If I sort of outline a story here, there's another level of suppression that even exists today where someone who's going to go on and win a Nobel Prize for saving millions of lives, gets their belongings and all their work in a couple of bags in a hallway and told to leave the university. All right, Matt, would you do me a favor and fill in the blanks? Because this one blew me away when I read it. So this is Kati Kariko. And Kati Kariko was working on messenger RNA back in the 90s. And messenger RNA, she worked out, you could effectively program messenger RNA to produce any protein you damn well pleased in the lab.

46:03And that had tremendous potential because if you could program messenger RNA and inject it into somebody and have it start producing proteins of a specific type, that could be really useful for all kinds of medicines, particularly things like vaccines. Absolutely. But the problem was, as Cathy was working, every time the mRNA got injected inside an animal, it would just fall apart. And she could demonstrate that there was potential here, but she couldn't work out what the issue was. And when she applied for grants, the grants were rejected because the narrative that existed in the academic community was messenger RNA isn't going anywhere.

46:39It's not worth your time. Even if the proposals were written well, even if the experiments were well thought out, she got nowhere as a result because in academia today, you are only as good as the money you bring into the university. If you're not bringing in lots of resources from grants, the university takes a dim view and you slowly get pushed out. Kati was first demoted for exploring messenger RNA and not getting enough grants. And then she was fired by the university because they felt she really was a waste of time. She was threatened by the U.S. government with deportation back to Hungary.

47:18I mean, it's frustrating because ultimately we're very lucky that after 25 years of pain and suffering with all of this, she didn't just say, screw this. I'm going to go become a dental hygienist or a florist or something. We're really lucky she stuck with it because she landed at this little pharma company called BioNTech. And BioNTech said, we think this technique that you're working on has potential for an influenza vaccine. Can you develop it? And then the pandemic hit and they said, okay, screw that. Could you create a COVID vaccine with this? And she did. Now, it's important to mention that in her last years at the university, she started partnering with Drew Weissman, who was an immunologist.

48:01And Weissman said, I think what we're seeing with the breakup part of the mRNA is an immune reaction. There's something about the messenger RNA that you're injecting in that is causing it to be targeted by the immune system in a way that the messenger RNA that naturally forms in your body is not attacked. There must be something. We have to do something to the messenger RNA, decorate it with the right proteins that make the immune system say, oh, you belong here, so it doesn't get mobbed. And Weissman was integral to identifying that key fact. And ultimately, Kati Kariko's work with Weissman paved the way for the COVID vaccine to be created in record time and effectively pulled the world out of lockdown and she won the Nobel Prize.

48:46Well, she should have. Yeah. But it's important to notice that Kati Kariko was so like Semmelweis. Semmelweis believed that he didn't need to publish. He didn't feel like he needed to stand on a soapbox like Pasteur and shout about his ideas. He didn't feel like he needed to manipulate the government or convince them to do anything. He just believed that doing good work would get him somewhere, and it got him to the insane asylum, which wasn't good. Katsi Kariko, I've interviewed her, and she's lovely. She's very fast. She's hard to follow. So she's a science journalist, not their dream. Let's put it that way.

49:21It's hard to interview. I think her grant proposals were also not perfect. and when you've got thousands of grant proposals going out to grant warning bodies and there's they're only going to grant one percent of the money um it's very they're very quick to remove anything that doesn't look exactly right and i think kati fell into interesting idea but not exactly right and as a result she wasn't getting funded and so simul weiss and kati are actually kindred spirits i almost called the book a tale of two hungarians instead of i told you so scientists who are ridiculed, I've been in prison for being right, because I thought the parallel between the two of them was so strong.

50:01But then you also look at other people who are on to childbed fever, per peril fever, and trying to defeat it, and other scientists who were right and got excoriated for it. And I realized, no, I don't want to make it just about these two Hungarians. It's a bigger story. But we see it all the time in science today. And it's terrible. But you know what? Let me just, for one second, I just gotta, because I don't want us to veer into a place where right now there's this pervading sense amongst people who are wellness influencers and people who are anti-traditional science. And what I don't want people to think is that because these things happen, that we should eschew or throw away the stuff that got us to where we are right now.

50:54I think it's important to recognize that not only are these things at play in science, they're at play in pretty much everything. So when you think about fine art, the artists that are very famous are the ones that have the best rhetoric. They're not necessarily the most talented. They're the ones that can talk about their work in ways that are soaring and aspirational or they have someone that does that for them. Politics. We don't elect the person who is best qualified. We elect the person that we like and who sounds good and who says the things that tickle our ears. So this is a human problem.

51:40It's not necessarily— Preach it. Lord nice. Preach. It's not necessarily a science problem. And I just want to say that because as we look at this, especially these two particular anecdotes, it can make it seem like the industry of, if you want to call science an industry, is stacked against people who don't have the right pitch or narrative. I think you're absolutely right. And I think it's really important to point out that the issue with science, we should be having debate. It is incredibly important for science to challenge new ideas. It is incredibly important for there to be debate. It is incredibly important for us to remain skeptical.

52:26mRNA was an out there idea when Kati Kariko was developing it. The notion that there might be an aura of death around your hands after touching a corpse was an out there idea back in the day. And it was important for people to say, are you sure about that? Can we test this? Those are important responses to have. What's not okay is to engage in character assassination and to imprison people or exile them because you don't like what you're hearing. That's not what science is about. And let's be honest, science has got a man on the moon. Science has been able to resolve, I mean, transform HIV into a manageable condition from a death sentence.

53:11I mean, science is doing extraordinary. I mean, look at the number of people living in deserts because of desalinization plants, which are now all threatened by missiles, but nevermind. And the technology and the science has got us so far. So we don't want to abandon what we've got. But what we want to do is make sure that the scientists who are not the Galileos, who don't have the master diplomacy, the scientists who are not the Machiavellian fiends like Pasteur, we want to make sure the people with the great ideas who don't have the skill set to take their ideas further still get the attention that they need.

53:47Because we've got some really big problems on this planet. And we need every good mind to be at our disposal to solve them. And just removing someone from the options because they don't speak loudly enough or are not diplomatic enough is an issue. And part of that comes down to scientists. We've got to work with scientists to better have them better communicate what they're on about. But it also is about the public and it's about journalists. Science journalists in particular have a tremendous responsibility to not just say, hey, look what was discovered, but to say, this scientist wondered this.

54:26They did this to find out. And look what they discovered as a result. You've got to tell the story so the public understands. During the pandemic, science's process was exposed in some pretty big ways. The debate that occurs in science, which is part of science, was exposed to a lot of people who didn't know it existed. And it left a lot of people doubting. And we've got to do a lot of catch-up here to make sure that everyone understands how science works. The newspaper I've spent my entire adult life writing for has forever argued against the phrase laws and sausages. You never want to hear how they're made because they're both disgusting.

55:08The Economist has argued that you got to talk about how laws are made to have a healthy democracy. And I think we have to do the same thing with science. We have to talk about how it's being run so that the public understands that debate and questioning and replication and then discovering when the replication reveals that an initial experiment was invalid, that that's okay. That's normal. That's how it's supposed to work. Absolutely. But most people don't understand that. Yeah.

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57:10Neil deGrasse Tyson:The wrongs we must right. The fights we must win. The future we must secure together for our nation. This is what's in front of us. This determines what's next for all of us. We are Marines. We were made for this.

57:47So with Cati and her Nobel Prize, does she now break the glass ceiling? Is there any movement in the needle?

57:57Neil deGrasse Tyson:After her phenomenon. Yes. So I don't think the glass ceiling is so much an issue about female making their way in science versus male, although there's certainly elements of that. And I don't think it's a matter of Hungarian versus American. I think the glass ceiling that really needs to be addressed here is the, it's an out there idea and look, she was right. And I think we are starting to see reform. And I'm really excited about it because a number of organizations, several governments, including the Austrian government, which I think is hysterical, the Willem Foundation, Volkswagen are supporting programs that democratize funding in research.

58:42Let me expand on that for a moment. So right now, you write your grant application, and it's considered by a grant committee. And the grant committee can probably award 30 labs funding, and they get thousands of applications. So the competition is fierce. And there's no doubt that when you get 1 ,000 applications, it's really easy for the grant awarding body to say, okay, these 650, they're not close. Remove. Let's just get those out of the pool. You're left now with 350 grant applications, but let's say you can only give 50 of them funding. Rather than try to discern the difference between good, great, and excellent, which is really hard to do.

59:25And all of our studies show that when you're trying as a grant body to differentiate between good, great, and excellent, you often are subtly affected by, oh, who published this? Was this, so who wrote this? Is this from Harvard or is this from the University of Whitwatersand in South Africa? Or is this an application written with a vague accent in English that makes it obvious that the person is an English second language speaker? You're not even aware of these kinds of biases, but we know that when people are trying to separate from great and excellent, those biases start to impact. We also know that if the idea isn't all that well-established, still well thought out, but not well-established, that's a strike against you too, which makes our research less creative, less innovative, and we continue to do more of the same rather than coming up with new ideas.

1:00:18So a way to solve that problem is to create a lottery. You take those 300 or 350 good, great, and excellent applications, and rather than try to select the top 50, say, you know what, we're putting these all into a fishbowl, and we're going to select them at random. Or select 25 that you think are all outstanding, and the remaining 25 will be selected from the fishbowl. And the cost to this is you got to buy a fishbowl, you probably need to get some blindfolds, and then you're going to pull them out at random. but there's very little cost to this and it would start to spread out the creativity in our science a fair bit more.

1:00:58I like that idea. That's a great idea.

1:01:00Neil deGrasse Tyson:Once you take out the bottom fraction and then you pluck the very top that everyone agrees with, if the rest could be so subtly filtered just by institution or accent or name or whatever, then that's bad. That is bad. That's just bad. So just make that random. I love that. Has that been implemented? It is. So the Willem Foundation is doing it. The Austrian government is supporting it. I think British Medical is starting to consider it. There are a number of places that are rolling this out. And I think it has the potential to bring about more creativity and more tolerance for outside ideas and researchers who might normally not get the attention of big grant awarding bodies.

1:01:46And I don't want to say that this is my idea. Other people have had this idea, but it's starting to make its mark. And I think that's a good thing. You know what else would be good is if governments just gave more money to science. How about that? I mean, that's a novel idea. It's true. How about the richest nation in the world, in the history of the world, just gives, you know, a percentage more to science. It would change everything. Well, it actually would reduce fraud because when you're a scientist and you've got to pay your mortgage and you've got to put food on the table for your kids, ensuring that you continue to get the grant money is incredibly important.

1:02:25And if an experiment is not working out and you're off by just a tiny fraction of a percent, there is a powerful incentive to adjust the numbers in a manner that no one would ever detect. And that leads us to more Louis Pasteur-like behavior that's becoming ever more common. And right now you do that. And I mean, that's bad because if you and I were to steal$100 ,000 from a bank, we would go to jail. But if you lie about your results and someone reads those results and goes, oh, that's really interesting. I want to run a follow-up experiment on that and applies for$100 ,000 grant to follow up, but they don't know that your work is fraudulent.

1:03:07They have now just taken$100 ,000, very likely from taxpayers to do work that is built on a house of cards that is going to collapse one day, and it's a waste. And right now, if you engage in fraud, there's very little punishment other than being put on administrative leave from the university and being removed from your teaching circuit. If we were to establish some significant penalties for engaging in fraud and also establishing some better systems for detecting it, that would probably help too. But you have, if you increase the pressure on researchers by cutting funding, it increases the pressure for them to then behave badly.

1:03:44If we ease the pressure, then I think fewer people are put into that sort of a situation. Matt, before we wrap this up, I have this one thought that's stuck in my mind. We are experiencing in some places an anti-science stance. This history lesson that you've brought to us today, which was very enjoyable, will it? Illuminating.

1:04:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:We don't enjoy stories of people lying and cheating and stealing. Then illuminating it is. This illuminating history lesson. Will it actually teach us anything? Are we going to rinse and repeat or will we be learning, do you think? You know, the first step to resolving the anti-science stance that we've got, and I was just talking about laws and sausages and talking about how science needs to communicate what it's doing better because there were a lot of miscommunications during the pandemic. I think talking about the problem, recognizing that we've got a problem, and then stating how we're going to solve that problem by having scientists communicate more clearly, getting the science journalists on task and educating the public as to how science is supposed to operate.

1:04:49We're supposed to argue. We're supposed to get things wrong. I think that will help a lot. Okay.

1:04:54Neil deGrasse Tyson:I would add to this something that has yet to come up. You have picked from the history of science these examples that are most egregious. We agree. Some are even offensive when you lay it out for you. Yeah. Very French. Very French. And so this is a, it's kind of, let's call it a knee-jerk reaction of the scientist to reject something that is novel, new, odd, or unusual. Let's just say that for the moment, okay? And then you say, well, but it was a correct idea and we're losing it. Yes. However, that same skepticism over the novelty rejects 999 other ideas that flow into the house that are completely batshit crazy, that would never have a chance of being correct.

1:05:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:And you don't write a book about that. I don't want to shed light on that. Because that's not interesting to talk about the ideas that never would have worked. Okay? So I guess what I'm saying is, I don't mind if there's some people who want to sort of verify all these thousand ideas to find the one that was correct. But the operations of science and the methods and tools and the procedures are getting other science that does have a higher statistical likelihood of being correct. And that's why we have modern civilization the way it is today. Okay, science is an active functioning enterprise. So if I get your reaction to the idea that the conservatism of science is almost necessary.

1:06:36And yes, occasionally one goes out with the bathwater. So the conservatism of science is not just necessary, Neil. It's critical. It's healthy. We have got, it's like the immune system. It looks at things that it recognizes and then when it sees it totally doesn't recognize, it attacks it and removes it. Very, very good example. Oh, I'm a biologist. There you are. But there is a difference between being skeptical, challenging, and saying, I don't think that's right. I don't think that's right. And you may have to say that dozens and dozens of times. And that is part of science, is saying, look, I've analyzed your methods, I've looked at your theory, and I disagree.

1:07:20And that's fine. That's what you have to do in science. As you point out, there's lots of batshit crazy ideas out there. What we can't do is take the gloves off. It is important, especially if someone is persistent and continues to push the idea that they've found something that they think is worth talking about, and you continue to disregard it. It is important to continue to hear them and say, nope, I've thought about it, and you're wrong. A good example is Alfred Wegener, who looked at the continents and said, hey, look, South America fits into Africa. Isn't that interesting? And look, the rocks on the coast of New England match the rocks that are on the coast of England.

1:08:00And maybe these two places were once together. I mean, he was derided as crazy. And ultimately, we worked out that plate tectonics was a thing. But my point is, it's important for us to fight back and say, I disagree, I disagree, I disagree. We can't engage in character assassination. Even if we think it's batshit crazy, we just have to say, no, that doesn't fit. That doesn't work. And if they come back to us five years later with a different angle on why they think they're right, You got to read it and say, nope, still disagree. Or wait a minute, why do I disagree? What's the reason that I disagree?

1:08:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:So with your Wagner story, it was not 100 years that that idea was rejected. It was just a few decades. And yes, there was some geologists behaving badly over that period, no doubt about it. But really, it was a matter of how strong is the evidence? if South America fits into Africa and other countries don't fit neatly, then this looks like it's a coincidence. So I'm going to be skeptical of that. And I probably would have been one of those that said, this guy, you know, he's still at it. It was not until, I think, the discovery of the separation in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge when we were mapping the bottoms of the ocean, primarily for submarine movement in the Second World War.

1:09:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's always war. then I don't think there were many people who were still holdouts back then because that was the, we saw the smoke, that was the gun that fired that allowed us to say, us, Mike, our geology brethren. So it was a matter of how much evidence is there for it. And there wasn't sufficient evidence to convince everybody. Just because he was later shown to be right is not an argument against people rejecting his idea when it was first before. Absolutely. Yeah, I think you guys are saying the same thing, though. Yeah. You're saying the same thing differently. But there's a difference between arguing and saying, look, I disagree with you, I disagree with you, and deriding him so aggressively that he was thrown out of the scientific community.

1:10:05Right. Okay. That's the behaving badly part. That's the behaving badly part. Yeah, yeah. It's like there was a difference between Semmel Weiss making his remarks and being thrown in a lunatic asylum by his own peers. I think – and same thing with Katikariko. it would have been okay for scientists to continue to say, look, I don't think you're on to anything. I think you're wrong. But threatening her with deportation, I think is we can all come together and say that's probably a step too far. Totally. So, but I think that goes back to when you talked about the random selection illustration that you gave.

1:10:38What it really does is put a blindfold on bias. And I think for Samuas and for Katya, Katya, you're looking at unspoken biases that are at play here. Let's just be honest. That's really what it comes down to. And yeah, I think systemically, if you're able to remove that in any way, science benefits as a whole. Yeah, of course.

1:11:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:Of course. And just going to give an actual example from my own field. There's a guy named Fred Hoyle who was never a big bang guy. He was a big proponent of the steady state hypothesis of the universe. Steady state theory, they called it. And he was rejecting the notion that the universe had a beginning. And he was a smart guy, and he's done other great things. So it was hard to completely discount him, but the field just kept moving along. And he was wrong to his grave, thinking that we're all wrong and that he's right. but he was just wrong. He was wrong. He was just wrong. And so in this case, no, there was no character assassinations.

1:11:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:There was no, but he was a very visible opponent of a prevailing consensus that he could not, to his deathbed, accept. Wow. Yeah. See, now that just sounds like a guy with a personal problem. Well, you can be emotionally invested in your own ideas. That's what I'm saying. Don't we call that stubbornness? Stubborn, yeah. Pig-headed is the word. So Matt, we got to land this plane. Let me send a question back to you. You've cited scientists behaving badly. You've cited society behaving badly. And these are all amazing examples. And it's a brilliant compilation that you've created. What is the lesson to the public, given what we've been through with COVID, given the anti-science sentiment, given all that we see going around us?

1:12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because that's a different science climate than what I grew up in. What I grew up in, people saw science as our savior, as it would cure us. It would take us into the future. And I don't feel that anymore in our culture. So how do you turn what you've compiled here into the positive for the public to take a civilization ahead. Science still solves a lot of problems. The thing we need to all be aware of is that science debates, it argues, it disproves, and that's normal. That's the way it has been for a very, very long time. It just was on show during COVID in a very public way, and I think a lot of people found that disquieting.

1:13:25We need to talk more about how science works, That's a responsibility that falls on scientists. It's a responsibility that falls on people like me writing in the newspaper. And it also falls down to everyone out there to say, hang on, I don't understand how that works. Can you explain that to me? And we need to start asking more questions and being more tolerant of the fact that sometimes science doesn't know. And we're still debating it and trying to figure it out.

1:13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:So Matt, at my PhD defense, after I was grilled on the content of the thesis, the final question was, how would you tell a New York Times reporter about your work? Okay. That was part of it. Can you translate this? Can you make this sensible to someone who's not an expert? And that doesn't happen enough in the sciences. We're not trained, nor is it valued, what is your capacity to communicate? This is not. So that's a big problem that was in your list there, Matt. But also, I knew this while it was happening, but there was nothing I can do about it because COVID was a novel - It was called the novel coronavirus.

1:14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson:Correct, exactly. Okay, so I was thinking to myself, what they should do is every week, whoever was the chosen person to report progress on this, you don't get a politician. You get someone that's got some expertise, like Fauci, okay? He was the voice. So here's what should have happened. And I knew this at the time. Every week, what he should have done was get up there and said, this is what we know today. This is our recommendations based on the science research up to the moment. Check back in a week in case some of these results have changed based on more evidence that has arrived. Then people would have seen a scientific process unfold in real time.

1:15:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. And so, but when I hear people say about anything, they'll say, even scientists don't agree on this. As though scientists sit back in our chairs with our legs up on the table, masters of everything we know. No! On the frontier, that is so not the case. So, do you agree with me that that would have, it would have been a science lesson for people, and there would have been less cynicism to derive from that whole episode? Not only do I agree, but I think that the culture of science doubt that we are faced with now would either be greatly diminished or non-existent if we had engaged in that behavior during the pandemic.

1:15:56Because we shattered people's view of science being an answer machine.

1:16:02Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. That's a perfect sentence right there. And we revealed quite publicly how science works. There you go. And that's the problem. I think what also has to happen is the public has to understand that, oh God, I'm going to get in trouble. Most of the people look at science like religion. Religion has answers. Whether the answers are right or not does not make a difference. There's an answer. And that's what comforts you in religion. There is an answer for it speaks to everything. That's not how science works. and I think that's the first thing that people need to realize. And another example would have been, based on what we know of the virus, it may be transmitted over the surfaces with fluids.

1:16:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:So right now, hose down your groceries. Well, that was the first couple of weeks. Wash down your grocery bags. Okay, so then the next week we say, we're finding, no, it's more airborne than liquid. And so then we could just follow along. That would have been even fun. Right, exactly. Let's see what's going to happen next. What's happened next week. And please remember, it's the novel coronavirus. We don't know because it's new. And another one, another point of disappointment there was you get vaccinated and no one told you at that vaccination that you might still get COVID again and you have to be vaccinated again.

1:17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:No one said that. Okay. And then when you get COVID again, of course, it was a milder case and the COVID mutated. But we didn't get a whole discussion of the mutation either. It was just, oh, now we're vaccinated. Well, I'll get back to work. And then we get the omega. And then the, you know. And that's because we didn't find a way to put light inside of the body.

1:17:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:So these are brilliant lessons here for you to share with us from the history of time, the history of science and civilization. Lots of lessons there. Matt, it's been a delight to have you here. What's the book again? Oh, my gosh. I told you so. Love it. Scientists who were ridiculed, exiled, and imprisoned for being right. Nice. Yep. Yes. Told you so. If you don't know, now you know. Okay. Matt Kaplan, good luck on the tour for this book. Thanks for including us in your efforts to spread this very important insights into the conduct of us all. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a joy.

1:18:31All right. All right.

1:18:32Neil deGrasse Tyson:Thank you. All right, Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. Gab Ray. Thank you, Neil. Pleasure. All right, this has been StarTalk Special Edition. We're just talking about scientists and the public behaving badly. You knew. All right, until next time, Neil deGrasse Tyson, keep looking up.

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