SCIENCE PROCEEDS ONE FUNERAL AT A TIME
“Science proceeds one funeral at a time.” What does that mean?
It means that science is resistant to change, and original ideas are slow to take root. As Naomi Oreskes asserts in her 2019 book Why Trust Science?, the field is based on consensus rather than universal truths. When scientists with varying backgrounds and points of view arrive at the same conclusions through observation and analysis, consensus is born. Then, even “absolutes” can change. Ideally, a scientist retains a beginner’s mind throughout her career, remaining open to new data even when they contradict earlier findings. The profession requires that one modifies interpretations, formulates new hypotheses, and tests them. If, however, a researcher becomes mired in certain dogma, she ceases to practice science and begins practicing religion.
Regardless, researchers who’ve built their careers defending a worldview often champion their beliefs even in the face of conflicting evidence. Only after they die, or their influence wanes, do the edicts of a new generation take hold.
As a result, while writing a biography of Candace Pert, the maverick scientist who proved the mind-body connection, I often felt frustrated that, for decades, her research fell on deaf ears. After all, beginning in the early 1980s, Candace created an entirely new field of research that formed the basis of integrative or functional medicine. Her findings form the basis of books such as The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk’s bestselling primer on trauma, yet she remains largely unknown.
Sadly, it is precisely because Candace’s work caused a paradigm shift that she was denigrated or ignored. By attesting that the mind and body are linked in a unified whole and therefore must be addressed holistically, she wasn’t merely pushing the bounds of her field. She was contesting a notion that had governed modern science and medicine for more than 400 years – that the brain reigned supreme, dictating a logical roadmap followed by the body.
Likening herself to virtuosi throughout the ages, Candace was adamant that eventually she would be proven right. She cited Galileo, who was tried and condemned by the Inquisition in 1633 for stating that the Sun is the center of the universe, and she compared herself to Mozart in the film Amadeus. “The genius Mozart is given a review by his peer, the jealous musical expert Salieri, who pronounces his latest composition as having ‘too many notes,’” she writes in her memoir. “It struck us that the problem with [our scientific paper] was that it also had too many notes, causing the ‘experts’ to find it too unfocused to comprehend.”
Candace recalled the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis, who was derided by peers in 1840s Vienna for suggesting that doctors should wash their hands before examining pregnant women. Semmelweis had observed that poor women treated by hospital midwives who scrubbed their hands were less susceptible to fever and infection than wealthier women in the care of doctors, who sauntered about covered in blood after sticking their hands into corpses. When Semmelweis and doctors on his ward began washing their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime, they found that less than one percent of their patients became infected. But without an understanding of germs, colleagues disparaged his ideas and subjected him to prolonged ridicule. Semmelweis eventually suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum, and it would take forty years and the dawn of germ theory before hospitals prioritized cleanliness.
Candace also found a modern touchstone in Jesse Roth, a clinical director at the NIH in the 1980s who’d found insulin not only in the brain but also in single-cell organisms outside the human body. The medical establishment roundly rejected his discovery, averring that only a pancreas can make insulin, and Roth’s papers were declined at every major journal until other researchers finally confirmed his results.
Citing cognitive bias, Candace consoled herself that radical leaps in science are never embraced, regardless of their origin, and scientists who’ve established a prevalent paradigm are disinclined to see their ideas overturned. Consequently, each novel or controversial idea is scrutinized, and often tarred and feathered, before becoming the status quo.
Candace died before her perspective was fully embraced by the scientific establishment, but she’d pioneered a course of study that did not previously exist. “So much of what she wrote about are not hypotheses anymore; they’re ground assumptions, assumed to be fact, to the extent that they’re not even attached to her name,” says Lisa Feldman Barrett, a Professor of Psychology at Northeastern University who is among the top 1 percent of most-cited scientists in the world for her research in psychology and neuroscience. “I walk in this woman’s shoes. I stand on her shoulders.”
Hence, science proceeds one funeral at a time.