Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Coming up on Special Edition, I told you so. What'd you tell me now? Said some scientists that have known what no one else did.
Yeah. After they were prosecuted, tortured, and killed. Yes.
Coming right up. Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Special Edition. When you hear Special Edition, it means Gary O'Reilly's in the house.
Hey, Neil.
Gary. Former soccer pro. Allegedly. We're not alleging that. There's a wiki page of you in a soccer outfit.
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Chapter 2: How have scientists been treated throughout history for their discoveries?
Yes, I was.
And we can see your hairy legs.
Thank you.
Chuck, good to have you, man.
Yes, no wiki pages with my hairy legs, unfortunately. So, comedian, actor, and the lord of nice. There it is. So, Gary, what show did you put together today?
Interesting one. If you think for centuries, science has at times aligned with and fought against religion, government, establishment, and even itself. But when the sticky-up nail confronts historic theories and shouts change, it gets hammered. So who were these histories' confrontationists, the groundbreakers of science and medicine, the ones whom we owe so much?
All right, with that said, let's bring on our guest now. Oh, okay.
We've got with us, reporting in from UC Davis, is that correct? Matt Kaplan. Matt, welcome to StarTalk.
Hey, thanks for having me, Neil. Yeah, yeah, I'm in Davis, California right now.
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Chapter 3: Who were the key figures in the history of science that faced ridicule?
There might be something else that is the center. It might be the sun. And unfortunately, the church didn't like that. That was heresy. And it could get you into an awful lot of trouble. And this is very much where Galileo Galilei found himself long, long ago. And in fact, it became a huge political issue in his time.
And it really started out with his discourse on comets, which was a battle with this other mathematician named Orazio Grassi. who was saying, look, I think the comets are going around the earth, and Galileo was fairly certain they were not.
And he wrote this piece called Discourse on Comets, and eventually wrote a book called Il Sagittore, which eviscerated Grassi not based upon and anything else other than his methods. And Sagittore's so important. Because Sagittarius effectively established what we know today as the scientific method.
I'm going to ask a question, I'm going to explore it, and then come up with some conclusions based upon what I found. And no one had really done that before Galileo, and it was a really big deal.
So when do you think we started to establish, we being the obviously main scientists of the day, began to establish that structure to enable them to think with rigor about the things that they were proposing?
Well, it really started with Galileo. And then from that point forward, researchers started trying to analyze the world around them. But different fields of science analyze things in different ways. Medicine was a catastrophe. So in medicine, during the Renaissance, researchers in Britain rediscovered the ways of Hippocrates. Now, Hippocrates was a Greek medic, or at least we think he was.
There's not a lot of evidence as to whether or not he actually existed. But the notion of the humors was rife during the Greek period. The humors was the sense that, oh, you're ill with a fever. You have bad blood or too much blood. Let's drain that bad blood out of you. Put some leeches on it. Oh, man. But you know what's so crazy about the bleeding was that we mock folks who did it.
But if you had a fever, if you have a fever and I attach 50 leeches to your abdomen, I guarantee you that fever will go down. You might die in the process because you're being drained of blood. But your temperature goes down, so they believed they were treating it.
But there were also a lot of notions back during the ancient Greeks like, oh, you've got too much phlegm, so let's put you in a hot, steamy room and have you get the phlegm out. And actually, that's still used in medicine today. I was going to say, that's actually a good thing.
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Chapter 4: What role did Galileo play in the evolution of scientific methods?
So they would throw their children into the river when they were born. And Maria Teresa thought this was terrible. They had established drop boxes. You know how if you're... You got to hand back that book at the library. No, you're kidding. But you're out of hours.
So you got that drop box at the library where you can put the book and they'll sort it the next day and you don't have to pay the late fees. They had a kid drop box? They had kid drop boxes.
Oh, well... Now, by the way, I'm just going to say, Matt, that's not a really bad idea. As a man with three children, I'm just saying, what is the expiration date on Dropbox?
Well, I think it was the size of the Dropbox that really mattered. So it depends. How large are your children? So Maria Theresa really cared about all of these women in her empire who were having babies and were desperately poor. So she ordered the construction of a hospital in Vienna that was unheard of in terms of its size. Absolutely enormous.
And it was built to look after the urban poor, which is an incredible thing. But there were major issues, and this was known as preparal fever or childbed fever. And back in the day, upwards of 20% of the women in the hospital in Vienna would contract this disease permanently. And if you got it, you died.
We're talking about one in five women after delivering their baby would develop these swollen blue and black splotches around their abdomen and their thighs, and they would develop horrendous fevers. They'd become delirious.
And I mean, it was so bad that within two to three days of developing the infection, even the gentle sheets on their bed laying across their abdomen was too much for them to bear. And they would die in frozen, speechless terror from the pain about five days after childbirth. And their child would go to the grave with them. The children would die, too.
It was beyond horrendous, and no one really seemed to care. There was attention being paid to tuberculosis and smallpox, and that was because men could get it. Per peril fever, men did not contract, and so there was very little attention paid. Ignaz Semmelweis, this Hungarian obstetrician, cared. And he was an extraordinary individual. He was so good at what he did.
He had emigrated out of Hungary and was working in Vienna. Hungary was a vassal state to the Habsburgs, and so it was not unheard of for Hungarians to be working in Vienna. But Semmelweis watched this infection spread throughout the hospital, regularly losing patients to it, and was stunned by the indifference by the doctors at the hospital to the disease.
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Chapter 5: How did Ignaz Semmelweis revolutionize medical practices?
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. So 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. I like that idea. That's a great idea.
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.
And 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. And 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 accordingly.
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