The path to discovery and the impact on culture

It wasn't an earth-shaking discovery. It didn't fundamentally revamp our cultural and cosmological worldview. But it was a fairly surprising one. The revelation that a microbe, H. pylori, is the cause of peptic ulcer disease seemed so counterintuitive to many that a myth has quietly grown up that the scientific establishment dogmatically resisted and delayed acceptance of the hypothesis. Is that true?

In a revealing case study in the recent history of science, Kimball C. Atwood IV, an anesthesiologist and assistant clinical professor of medicine, takes a deeper look at exactly how the hypothesis developed and made its way through the many steps that constitute acceptance of a new scientific idea. He describes the complexity of demonstrating that a microbe is the cause of a specific disease and the legitimate scientific and medical reasons the H. pylori hypothesis was subjected to (normal) scientific scrutiny. His conclusion? He shows that the hypothesis, far from being ignored, caused a scientific stir from the very beginning. Independent clinical studies had to be carried our, and they take time. All in all, Atwood finds, the whole process from start to finish took eight to ten years (depending on whether you define the end point as 1992 or 1994). The journey of the H. pylori hypothesis from proposal to acceptance "was quite ordinary." He finds, in fact, "the hypothesis was accepted right on schedule."

This kind of examination is interesting in itself, but it carries some lessons about the processes of science. The steps may seem slow in hindsight, but seldom are major scientific advances achieved overnight. And what is sometimes perceived as closed-minded resistance is in fact more often than not the normal careful workings of scientists methodically doing their job of ensuring that new claims are validated.

Scientific discoveries that do shake our worldview, however, seem to come along more often than we sometimes want. Sometimes it seems as though the more we learn about ourselves and the rest of nature the less we really understand. Often, as Austin Dacey writes in this issue, the latest science makes it the case that we no longer understand what we once did (or thought we did). As he says, emerging science speaks to central cultural questions, "but precisely what it says is unclear." He gives some examples in regard to our understanding of the self. But these unsettlements of our understanding provide an opportunity and need for a new multidisciplinary academic field--"science and the public," he and others are calling it--"with tremendous intellectual and social significance." Needed is a new appreciation of me scientific outlook, one that brings humanistic qualities as well as scientific or mechanistic attributes to bear, and linking with cultural beliefs and values. He describes how the Center for Inquiry, which houses CSICOP and the SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, is working to pioneer this activity.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group