Top ‘I told you so’ moments in the history of science

Below, Matt Kaplan shares five key insights from his new book, I Told You So!: Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right. Matt is a science correspondent at The Economist, where he has written about everything from paleontology and parasites to virology and viticulture over the course of two decades. His writing has also appeared in National Geographic, New Scientist, Nature, and the New York Times. What’s the big idea? Science often suppresses bold, unconventional, or threatening ideas due to ego, hierarchy, competition, sexism, and fraud. This culture harms progress. To truly serve society, science needs structural and cultural reform that protects integrity and encourages intellectual risk-taking. Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Matt himself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book. 1. Stupidly silenced In the middle of the pandemic, I was interviewing researchers who were trying to defeat COVID-19