Wednesday, October 05, 2005

-- Of Ivory-bills and Nobel Prizes --

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Maybe worth noting: A couple days ago Larry Marshall and Robin Warren won the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery almost 25 years ago that a bacterium helicobacter pylori was the cause of most stomach ulcers and gastritis. At the time (when it was widely believed ulcers were caused by over-acidity) peers called the contention "preposterous," since bacteria obviously couldn't survive in stomach acid. The findings and discoverers were shunned and denigrated, and it took many years for Marshall and Warren to prove themselves right and the skeptics wrong. Today researchers are looking at what role microbes may play in many other inflammatory ailments, no longer scoffing at this one-time un-establishment notion. Medicine is a field full of instances of entrenched 'accepted knowledge' being overturned in time. So too... field biology.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Medicine is a field full of instances of entrenched 'accepted knowledge' being overturned in time. So too... field biology.

And the "accepted knowledge" now is that Ivory-bills are still alive and well.