I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right

Books

An energetic work of popular science about various scientists who have had to fight for their revolutionary ideas to be accepted-from Darwin to Pasteur to modern day Nobel Prize winners. The Problem With Being Right is a critical history of the scientific community, past and present, as Matt Kaplan shows how scientific breakthroughs often occur in spite of, rather than because of, the scientific community. Alternating between the past and the present, the book is anchored by the story of Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis, who helped discover germ theory by realizing Puerperal fever-a devastating infection that most often strikes women who have recently given birth-was spread by doctors not washing their hands. Semmelweis was met with overwhelming hostility by those offended at the notion that doctors were at fault. Semmelweis as a prime example of the inefficiency of scientific progress-how hard the scientific community fights new ideas and new research, even when the facts are staring them in the ...