BEING AHEAD OF TIME IS BRAVE, BUT NOT EASY

Progress is made by those who challenge the contemporary. They have the courage to contest the prevalent norm and boldly think out of the box. But this act of defiance of what is considered true is not always easy. The life stories of these 5 scientists prove that sometimes it takes a lot of time for people to appreciate your effort, as each of them were rejected in their lifetime, or even shamed for their theories. In the end, however, all 5 of these scientists turned out to be right, and modern science took so much priceless knowledge and inspiration from their scientific research. So, if you and your ideas are rejected time and time again, although you know you’re right, never give up. Let us be inspired by their lives of these great men and learn to persevere no matter what.  

 

Ignaz Semmelweis (1818-1865)

The Father of Disinfection Semmelweis was the first doctor to suggest that infectious diseases can spread when doctors don’t wash their hands or disinfect their tools, years before we learned about the germ theory of disease. Semmelweis was an obstetrician in Vienna, and he noticed that the mortality rate of women post childbirth was much higher in hospital births than in midwife-delivered births. He believed that this was because doctors at the time used to routinely examine corpses and perform autopsies, and then they would carry on assisting births, which, as Semmelweis concluded, must have spread the disease to the women. To counteract this, he made the doctors and nurses wash their hands before assisting childbirth and even started disinfecting tools. This decreased the death rate of post-delivery deaths almost immediately, and Semmelweis published several papers about this phenomenon, but no one believed him. He was ultimately fired from his job in Vienna and continued his practice in Budapest, and there too, the mortality rates among women dropped by 25%.

Semmelweis could not explain why hand-washing was effective – he didn’t know about germs – he just saw that it worked and that patients no longer caught fevers and other diseases. This was the first tragedy. The second tragedy was that although Semmelweis reduced death rates in his own hospital, his attempts to spread the word failed. Many people died because hand-washing was not made a routine part of hospital practice.

The third tragic part of the story took place in 1865. Semmelweis had become clinically depressed when his work was rejected and he started behaving oddly. He was lured by another doctor into an insane asylum in Vienna. Realizing it was a trap, Semmelweis tried to get out, but was held and badly beaten by guards and placed in a straightjacket. He died two weeks later, most likely from injuries he suffered during the beating.

With Semmelweis gone, the fourth tragedy was that his hospital went back to running ‘properly’ again, discarding his ‘crazy’ ideas. Mortality rates increased by a factor of six, but nobody cared.

 

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)

Mendel discovered Genetic Inheritance, a science which has multifaceted use today from confirming parentage to treating cancers. A monk by trait, Gregor Mendel was a born scientist: he was both a talented mathematician and a brilliant biologist. Mendel single handedly founded the science of genetics when, while working in the garden of the monastery, he noticed that some of the sweet pea flowers had a mixed coloring, whereas others only had one color. This made him think that there are some traits, such as the color of the flowers, must be passed on generation to generation, and when these traits are different in the “mother” and the “father” plant, it can yield in a mixed trait. He then carried on interbreeding pea plants with various traits and traced the basic mechanisms of genetic inheritance, which he published in a paper that was completely ignored. A year after he published his work, Mendel became Abbot of his monastery and spent his remaining years managing the monastery and its monks.

The importance of Mendel’s work was only properly appreciated in 1900, 16 years after his death, and 34 years after he first published it. This rediscovery of Mendel’s contribution became the basis of genetics, as we know it today. 

William B. Coley (1862-1936)

William Coley was the Founder of Immunotherapy. At the end of the 19th century, there was no radiation, chemotherapy, or cancer drugs, and the standard procedure for cancerous tumors involved cutting them out tumors or cancerous tissues. William Coley was a bone surgeon who worked at New York Cancer Hospital. He noticed that some patients suffering from bacterial infections, such as streptococcus infections, were more likely to recover from cancer without surgeries than other patients. This made Coley inject several patients with a weakened version of strep and another bacteria, which, in some cases, made the patients cancer shrink dramatically, but in others, patients ended up dying from the infections he administered. This cancer treatment was called  Coley's toxins, and he and a few other doctors who believed Coley’s theory used it to treat cancer. Unfortunately, Coley’s theory was not accepted well in the scientific community and was forgotten for almost half a century.

Only in the 1960’s, many years after his death, the idea of immunotherapy reappeared in medical research, and Coley’s numerous papers played an important role in establishing this field of cancer treatment.

 

Alfred Wegener (1880-1930)

Alfred Wegner was the first to propose the Theory of Continental Drift.  He was a geophysicist and meteorologist, whose life is as tragic, as it was exciting. Wegener studied earth samples from various continents and noticed a strange pattern: the composition of the samples from the Americas was eerily similar to that of Western Europe, and Australian fossils and rocks had an uncanny resemblance to those of Asia and New Zealand. This urged him to suggest in a series of papers that Earth’s continents can move and have moved over millions of years. Once again, Wegener’s theory, too, was rejected by other scientists at the time.

In 1930, he went on an expedition to Greenland and died at the age of 50. Wegener’s theory of continental drift was rejected by most other scientists during his lifetime. It was only in the 1960s that continental drift finally became part of mainstream science.

 

Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543)

Copernicus discovered the Heliocentric Solar System.  During antiquity, scientists established that we live in a heliocentric solar system, meaning that all the planets revolve around the sun. However, this knowledge was lost for hundreds of years, until Copernicus re-established it in 1543 in his book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which was widely ignored, and people continued believing that the Earth was the center of the universe. 

It also didn’t help that the Catholic Church condemned his book and even banned it for centuries. Still, Copernicus’ study is considered to be one of the most notable astronomical achievements on the Middle ages and Copernicus is known by practically everyone.

 

These stories go to show that persistence and devotion to the truth transcends time, whereas mockery and malevolence don’t, so be courageous and don’t be afraid to speak your truth. Prevalent ideas can have a bias of time, social acceptance, religious belief and most importantly, ignorance. It takes a brave researcher to take a stand against what is considered normal or standard. Ignorant minds have always made fun of a genius, only to repent and grudgingly accept the latter’s superiority.