Heretics: The Scientists Who Were Mocked But Later Proven Right
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 12 March 2026
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why do some world-changing ideas get ignored, attacked, or buried for years before anyone takes them seriously?
Michael Shermer sits down with The Economist science correspondent Matt Kaplan to discuss the scientists who got there first and paid the price. They talk about why institutions resist new ideas, why careers can depend on defending the status quo, and why being right is often not enough.
They discuss figures like Katalin Karikó, whose work on mRNA was dismissed long before it helped transform modern medicine, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who faced fierce backlash for arguing that doctors themselves were spreading deadly infections.
This is a fascinating look at what happens when evidence collides with ego, reputation, and scientific orthodoxy. It's also a conversation about truth, status, intellectual courage, and the deeply human side of science.
Matt Kaplan is a science correspondent at The Economist. He has written about everything from paleontology and parasites to virology and viticulture over the course of two decades. His new book is I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The biographer of Pasteur says, |
| 0:01.9 | but you have to understand the high pressure environment of French academia. |
| 0:05.6 | There's on top of it, he did human testing with his rabies vaccine. |
| 0:09.7 | And when people died, he buried it along with the people. |
| 0:13.5 | The people died. |
| 0:14.6 | And he didn't want to mention that his rabies vaccine hadn't worked because that would lose him money. |
| 0:20.1 | So he hid that. And I mean, in academia, |
| 0:23.2 | you have to report when you do something wrong so other people don't kill people too, right? |
| 0:27.2 | We had a vaccine in record time under a year and that's never been accomplished before. |
| 0:32.2 | From that perspective, defeating COVID was an extraordinary thing. We were also extraordinarily lucky because the MRNA technique that had been developed |
| 0:41.3 | that the COVID vaccine largely depended upon came from Katikariko, |
| 0:45.4 | who had been demoted, fired, threatened or deportation by the Department of State |
| 0:51.2 | because no one saw a future in the research she was doing. |
| 0:55.1 | And we were really lucky. |
| 0:56.9 | She's not of the sort who went, you know what, screw all of this. |
| 0:59.5 | I want to go be a florist. |
| 1:00.9 | We see it with Ignaz, Semmel Weiss, and we see it with Joseph Lister, though I discuss in the book, |
| 1:05.4 | both of whom talked about bacterial infection in medicine and were just vigorously attacked. Semmel Weiss was |
| 1:12.6 | destroyed for it. Lister was forced into exile for 20 years because he said, you know, this activity |
| 1:19.5 | of using a scalpel encrusted with blood to show my station as an experienced surgeon might not be |
| 1:25.8 | a good idea. Other people went, how dare you say that? |
| 1:29.3 | Scalples and crested in blood are the sign of a capable surgeon. |
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