COWARDLY ACTS and EVERYDAY REBELLIONS

The Old Guard versus the Crackbrained 
and big news at the end of this post

“When a true genius appears in this world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him,” wrote Jonathan Swift in 1706.  With that one sentence, Swift deliciously summed up the abuse the gifted suffer at the hands of the ordinary and provided the prophetic title for John Kennedy Toole’s 1980 best-selling novel, A Confederacy of Dunces.  

That manuscript’s first editor wanted the book reworked to make it more marketable, but after much dickering Toole refused, sank into a warren of depression and paranoia, and committed suicide.  Toole’s tormented mother spent a decade fielding rejection notices from publishers before the book was finally published—and won the Pulitzer Prize.

When 17^th century British physician William Harvey argued that the heart was not a spiritual entity but rather just a pump that circulated blood, he was dismissed as “crackbrained.”  Harvey’s theory flew in the face of the 1,400-year-old widely held “fact” that blood originated in the liver, snaked through the heart and drained into the tissues.

Change may be inevitable, but it isn’t measured or fair.  It’s bitter and bloody with the old guard on tenterhooks, fighting to the death to stave off its own obsolescence.  “Unrewarded

genius is almost a proverb,” remarked Calvin Coolidge in 1914.  “Yes,” bemoaned playwright Oscar Wilde, “the public is wonderfully tolerant.  It forgives everything except genius.”

Cowardly acts
Institutions—entrenched in the status quo, jealous guardians of their turf—stomp out creativity and color inside the lines.  The result is that throughout history many brilliant, defiant minds have lived haunted lives of ridicule and disaster, while their sheep-like counterparts prosper.  The abuse the gifted suffer from those who are not is, like all cowardly acts, based on fear.

That is why French chemist Louis Pasteur, who had already created in 1885 the first therapeutic vaccine (for rabies) and who would go on to invent pasteurization and prove that microbes caused infectious disease and fermentation, was nonetheless denied admittance to the prestigious Academy of Sciences, in Paris.  According to biographer Patrice Debré, Pasteur wrote a prophetic letter to his wife about it:  “Everyone knows that I am the valid candidate…. But they are afraid (at least many of them are) of chemistry.  They are saying that chemistry wants to take over everything.”  Pasteur was not surprised when the Academy rejected him.

Pasteur’s germ theory built on the work of Hungarian obstetrician Ignaz Semmelweis, who was ridiculed for his seemingly modest request that in the interim between doing autopsies and delivering babies, physicians wash their hands.  Semmelweis reasoned deductively that the high postpartum mortality rate among new mothers following delivery by male physicians, as opposed to the low mortality rate by female midwives, was due to infection from a “poisoned” cadaverous substance, inadvertently passed on by physicians who went directly from autopsy room to delivery room. 

The midwives, however, didn’t conduct autopsies, so their hands were, relatively speaking, clean. Now known as sepsis, in Semmelweis’s time the infection was called childbed or puerperal fever.  But Semmelweis’s theory was dismissed, and his distress over thousands of women needlessly dying landed him in a mental institution, where he spent the remainder of his life.

Now even kindergartners know to wash their hands when they’re dirty.

Emergence versus acceptance
The late physicist and science historian Thomas Kuhn, who authored the groundbreaking book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, believed the lag between the emergence and acceptance of new ideas is natural and inevitable.  Change, he postulated, can come about only after long periods of stasis because “frameworks must be lived with and explored before they can be broken.” 

Compounding the inertia, and contrary to popular belief, Kuhn held that most scientists are not objective and independent thinkers.  Rather they are conservatives who do their best to implement exactly what they've been taught.  While Kuhn addressed the scientific process, this rigidity is characteristic of all disciplines and is longstanding.  “Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development,” claimed a blasé Julius Sextus Fontinus, a Roman engineer, in the first century after Christ. 

Nearly two thousand years later, in 1943, an equally blinkered Thomas Watson, then chairman of IBM, declared:  “I think there’s a world market for maybe five computers."
   
Abram Hoffer and Linus Pauling
In the 1950s, the great Canadian psychiatrist Abram Hoffer, an early proponent of vitamin therapy, and two of his colleagues discovered that high-dose niacin lowered bad cholesterol and raised good cholesterol. Later, Hoffer joined Nobel laureate Dr. Linus Pauling to test out Pauling’s theory that Vitamin C was an effective adjunct therapy for cancer patients.  The duo found that the vitamin prolonged the length and the quality of life, and in some cases, particularly in lung cancer, effected long remissions. 

In response to both findings, the medical establishment vilified them.  The bruised Pauling was offended that no one would listen.  But the circumspect Hoffer reasoned that it can take two generations—forty years—for new ideas to be accepted.  With all the speed of a glacier melting (in pre-global-warming time), scientific derision morphed into doubt and, finally, acceptance of niacin as a cholesterol remedy.  While vitamin C hasn’t exactly been embraced as a cancer treatment, in the past few years researchers at the NIH and elsewhere have found it to be effective.  
  
Paul Cheney and Daniel Peterson
In 1984, Dr. Paul Cheney and Dr. Daniel Peterson contacted the CDC about an outbreak of a debilitating illness afflicting the residents of Incline Village, Nevada. As chronicled by Hillary Johnson in her book Osler's Web, epidemiologists Jon Kaplan and Gary Holmes arrived at the tony resort town, saw about 10 ME/CFS patients, then went gambling and skiing.  Twenty-six years later, not much has changed as far as the government response to ME/CFS is concerned.  As a result, many physicians, researchers and citizens still don't understand that it's a grave and sometimes fatal neuroimmune illness. Some continue to debate its existence, as if the disease were a matter of theology, not science. 

Was Abram Hoffer right?  Will it take another 14 years before the government stops shrinking back and dismissing the collection of scientific data, if by their denial they could make fact fiction and alter the grim misadventure this disease has become?  Or, perhaps the fed-up patients will push through and the FDA/NIH XMRV Chronic Fatigue Syndrome study will be published intact in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and, like the flip of a switch, the energy changes.

 ***

Apparently, at least for today, it's the latter.  The news from the CFIDS Association this morning:  "The [FDA/NIH] researchers have conducted additional experiments as requested by the reviewers, and their paper is expected to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences within weeks."  Sources to CFS Central say that the researchers' conclusions have not changed.  PNAS Editor Dr. Randy Schekman is on vacation and could not be reached for comment.
 

This article, “Cowardly Acts and Everyday Rebellions,” is copyright CFS Central 2010.  All Rights Reserved. You may quote up to 150 words from this article as long as you indicate in the body of your post (as opposed to a footnote or an endnote) that the excerpt is by Mindy Kitei for CFS Central.  You may not reprint more than 150 words from this article on blogs, forums, websites or any other online or print venue.  Instead, refer readers to this blog to read the article.