From “Plague Time” by Paul Ewald:
In 1874, eight years before Robert Koch presented his discovery of the bacterial agents that cause tuberculosis, a lesser-known microbe hunter, Arthur Boettcher, published a paper on a small, curved bacterium that he found repeatedly in ulcers of the stomach. Over the next half century, several other scientists confirmed Boettcher’s finding. Some also extended the research by experimentally transmitting the bacterium in lab animals. By the late 1940s peptic ulcers were being successfully treated with antibiotics in New York City hospitals. Paul Fremont-Smith was a young intern in 1948 at Manhattan’s New York Hospital. He remembers the orders he was given there by his no-nonsense supervisor, Connie Guion. She told him, “The people over at Mount Sinai have found that Aureomycin [a trade name for chlortetracycline] is effective against peptic ulcers. Use it. It works.” He did, and it worked. Then, around 1950, discussions of infectious causation of ulcers disappeared from the literature and from the treatment regimen. The medical texts from 1950 through the early 1990s attributed peptic ulcers to gastric acidity, stress, smoking, alcohol consumption, and genetic predispositions – everything bu infection. Generally there was not even a reference to the possibility of infectious causation.
I don’t feel like quoting more than a paragraph, so I’ll ruin the suspense by telling you that in 1981 an Australian internist named Barry Marshall who was ignorant of that history independently came to Guion’s conclusion. He went further by intentionally swallowing a dose of the bacteria to give himself gastritis. It was worth it, because he promptly cured himself with an antibiotic and wound up winning a Nobel. Other examples of the Whig history of science going wrong are alleged in a thread (which I can’t find now) at the Distributed Republic where Constant (or was it Current) said that around the 70s textbooks purged any mention of Lamarck inventing common descent. Jared Diamond has also famously discussed how Tasmanians forgot some stone age technology they had possessed when they migrated from Australia.
June 7, 2010 at 12:02 am
My high school biology textbook claimed that Darwin basically lived a miserable life since he discovered evolution and it conflicted with religious views at the time. Later, I was shocked to find out that some of Darwin’s college buddies were already evolutionists before Darwin’s “discovery” and that Erasmus Darwin (Charles’ grandfather) even wrote a poem about common descent before Charles Darwin was even born!
I can’t quite figure out why “hard science” textbooks can contain fabricated histories without anyone noticing or caring.
June 7, 2010 at 12:51 am
I can’t quite figure out why “hard science” textbooks can contain fabricated histories without anyone noticing or caring.
Strange, isn’t it? Yet most of the people I studied science with in college were interested in cutting edge ideas and nothing else. Interest in the history of science was a minority taste; indeed, I did not develop it myself until later on. Inasmuch as historical material was presented, we zapped through it as quickly as possible, eager to get to “what we really know”.
June 7, 2010 at 1:53 pm
Darwin actually got buried down the memory hole for awhile after his Victorian hey-day. Once people started asking how inheritance worked, they saw that for lots of things such as height, offspring seemed to be a blend of their parents. Blending inheritance was thought to keep natural selection from taking off the ground.
The anti-Darwinian vogue got so bad that there’s a long-term study ca. 1905 — years, maybe more than 10 years — on the attempt to apply artificial selection for various traits in chickens. There was no change over time, so that disproved natural selection.
Only problem? The experiment was done with “homozygous lines,” which I take to mean ones with almost no genetic variability. For some reason that’s what people thought you had to do — natural selection could only be proven if done on genetically identical individuals.
Of course, natural selection *requires* genetic variability, so it’s no wonder this stupid experiment went nowhere.
It wasn’t until the 1930s, about a decade after R.A. Fisher wrote his 1918 marriage of Mendelian inheritance and continuous traits studied by the biometricians, that natural selection was again taken seriously.
But that still leaves about 40 or 50 years after his initial burst of popularity where it was thought to be not just passe or implausible but demonstrated to be wrong by experiments.
June 7, 2010 at 1:58 pm
And of course everyone needs to get around to reading Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes. It’s not a diet book at all. It’s a sociology of science book, taking the health / nutrition / biochemistry fields as the subject, all tied together by how they relate to human diet and health.
So many results, observational and experimental, about the harmfulness of a carb-y diet were known earlier in the 20th C., some even back to the mid-19th C., but were flushed down the memory hole once fat, cholesterol, and salt became the villains.
You want to talk about lost progress, how about where virtually all national Diabetic Associations recommend to diabetics that they work sugar into their diet!
June 7, 2010 at 4:11 pm
Darwin’s novelty doesn’t lie in common descent, or in evolutionism in the strict sense (as opposed to belief in static eternal species).
When we say evolution today we basically mean evolution by natural selection. The latter was more or less fully conceived of, before Darwin, by a tiny handful of people at most, not by dozens.
June 7, 2010 at 5:02 pm
One of the best examples of lost progress is the loss of the theory of combustion advanced by the Polish alchemist and diplomat Sendivogius. He believed that saltpetre contained a “nitro-aerial spirit” that accounted both for the explosive properties of gunpowder and for the respiration of men and beasts. His fellow courtier at Rudolph II’s imperial capital of Prague, Cornelis Drebbel, later invented a submarine that crossed the Thames underwater in the presence of James I and his court. The crew were kept from suffocating by the chemical generation of this nitro-aerial spirit inside the sub. The discovery by Harvey of the circulation of the blood is well known, but less known is the credit shared with him by John Mayow, who, following the Sendivogian theory, posited that as the blood passed through the lungs, it absorbed this vivifying nitro-aerial spirit, which accounted for the change in color from the purplish-blue of venous blood to the scarlet of that found in the arteries. See Zbigniew Szydlo, “Water that does not wet hands” (1994: Polish Academy of Sciences).
Then, in the late seventeenth century, an alternative theory of combustion was advanced by Becher and Stahl, that of phlogiston, a substance that burning fuels were supposed to give up as they burnt. This supplanted the old Sendivogian theory – until Lavoisier, having apparently found the idea in the works of van Helmont, revived it, and called the nitro-aerial spirit “oxygen.”
June 7, 2010 at 8:35 pm
Read my comment, though, where I point out that it was Darwin’s novel idea of natural selection that was under attack and dismissed for 40 to 50 years, not evolution in general.
June 7, 2010 at 9:43 pm
I had heard Darwin was depressed because his children were often ill and he thought marrying his cousin had something to do with it. His wife was also fairly religious, and that was supposedly a reason he delayed publishing his theory for so long (until Wallace forced his move).
I agree on the oft-forgotten importance of Mendel as a missing component of the Darwinian synthesis.
Ewald’s book gives a reason why red meat was regarded as unhealthy: high iron content in a form (unlike that of supplements) less suppressed by the body’s homeostatic equipment. People with sub-normal amounts of iron lose out in some ways, but may also be starving bacteria which thrive on it.
I thought that most of our genetic experiments were done on highly inbred lines of drosophilia, white rats, nematodes etc. They’ll intentionally introduce a mutation and then cross-breed, but the samples aren’t usually “from the wild”. I would like to hear more about that chicken study though.
A modern defense of phlogiston theorists is here.
June 8, 2010 at 2:33 pm
The Jim Loy article makes the point that Lavoisier’s experiments were quantitative, and took account of the role of gases which were mostly ignored by the advocates of phlogiston. Szydlo shows that van Helmont (who introduced the word “gas”) had already made such quantitative experiments in the early seventeenth century. So phlogistonism was a step backwards from the nitro-aerial spirit of Sendivogius, even though in many respects it explained phenomena to the satisfaction of the ordinary observer.
Incidentally, our continued use of the word “oxygen” enshrines an error of Lavoisier’s. He thought that the element was necessary to the formation of acids, hence devised the name based of Gr. oxus (acid) and genesthai (to give birth). Of course this is erroneous, as there are many binary acids that do not contain oxygen. Sendivogius’s and Mayow’s “vivifying nitro-aerial spirit” was more accurately descriptive – the gas is a component of nitre (saltpetre) and of air, it is truly a “spirit,” being respired, and it is vivifying, indeed, necessary to animal life.
Many erroneous theories explain phenomena to the satisfaction of the ordinary observer. It was possible to predict many astronomical events by the Ptolemaic theory, and celestial navigation reached a point of considerable sophistication before the theory was abandoned. It would still be possible to use it, just as it would be possible to use the phlogiston theory based on Loy’s suggestion of assigning phlogiston an atomic weight of -16. To do so would needlessly complicate chemistry, just as reintroducing the epicycles, equants, and retrograde motion of late Ptolemaic theory would needlessly complicate astronomy. Occam’s razor favors the current theories.
June 8, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Most of social endeavors consist mostly of finding ways to impress others and improve your standing in the pack – and methodology aside, science and medicine are both social endeavors.
The techniques and questions which lead to actual progress terrify people – they will avoid using and/or recognizing them at all costs.
I’ve found this out the hard way, in a long and tedious series of attempts to get people to look skeptically at certain irrationally-held beliefs. Traditional ‘religions’ are just the tip of the iceberg.
June 8, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Perhaps oxygen should be called sourstuff.
I heard that the Ptolemaic system was actually superior at predictions relative to the initial version of the Copernican/Galilean theory. Of course it had spent of lot of time fitting curves.
What other heretical promotions are you referring to, Caledonian? Medicine?
June 9, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Sourstuff (sauerstoff) is just a Germanic rendition of the Greek-derived word oxygen. Sauer refers to acidity – stoff to the raw material from which it is made. Merely translating the Greek to German hasn’t removed Lavoisier’s misconception.
Lavoisier was a disciple of Condillac and as such a sort of nominalist. He believed the elements should be named in such a way as to identify how they fit into his theoretical structure.. Sir Humphry Davy and other English chemists objected to making theory implicit in the names given to substances, on the sensible ground that theory might change as further research disproved current assumptions. They were right, but Lavoisier’s nomenclature persisted, and we have now mostly forgotten its erroneous origins.
Of course the highly refined Ptolemaic system of the late 16th century was better predictive than the original Copernican one. It was not until Kepler established that the planets’ orbits were elliptical rather than circular, and developed his laws of planetary motion, that the superiority of the heliocentric theory became clear.
June 8, 2010 at 9:36 pm
I just thought I’d provide another example of lost science. The cure to scurvy was found, then lost, and then found again: http://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm .
June 9, 2010 at 9:22 pm
Interesting account, which happens to go directly against Ewald’s preferred paradigm.
October 20, 2010 at 8:43 am
[…] Yet as the Atlantic article points out, having recourse to randomization isn’t sufficient to generate knowledge. The real problem there is experimenter bias. When there are large incentives to produce results in a particular way, those results tend to be published. Trial-and-error got us thousands of medical papers, but it appears that the vast majority of them are just wrong (one researcher above suggests 90%). In some cases, our knowledge even regresses over time. Ulcers are caused by a bacteria, for instance, not stress — a fact that we used to know, but then somehow forgot. […]