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<p>Well, in fairness, there is no evidence that Amy Bishop’s research was actually ridiculed.</p>
<p>However, I would also advance the example of Stanley Prusiner, whose work on prions was widely ridiculed for decades, and he was initially denied tenure at UCSF (although he did win on appeal), until his work was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1997. </p>
<p>*The response from many researchers to this prion hypothesis went well beyond normal scientific scepticism. Prusiner was ridiculed and vilified. His hypothesis was dismissed as so ridiculous that it wasn’t worth checking out. *</p>
<p>[Mad</a> cow cause is still a mystery](<a href=“http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/sweats52503.cfm]Mad”>http://www.organicconsumers.org/madcow/sweats52503.cfm)</p>
<p>One can also consider the example of Barbara McClintock, whose discovery of the transposon ‘jumping gene’ was greeted with stony silence followed by vicious mocking, only to be awarded the Nobel Prize decades later as transposons have become a pillar of modern-day genetic science. {It didn’t help that she was a woman and her discovery was first put forth in 1950; her Nobel wasn’t awarded until 1983.} </p>
<p>One can also consider the example of the Wright Brothers’ airplane. After the successful first flights in Kitty Hawk, they returned to Dayton to demonstrate their invention for nearly an entire year in an open field next to a busy railyard, in the wake of utter disbelief and disinterest by both the scientific/engineering community and the media. No serious academics came to view any of their demonstrations, nor did even any of the local Dayton newspapers send a reporter, although they did run op-eds complaining about the piles of letters they were receiving from startled local onlookers who must have ‘clearly’ been cranks concerning the brothers’ flights. Scientific American ran a now infamous article entitled “The Lying Brothers”. The USPTO rejected the brothers first patent application on the grounds that their achievement was ‘scientifically impossible’. The Wright Brothers had to move to Europe to make an impact, where their public demonstrations caused a sensation. </p>
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<p>Sure, but having your obscure work rediscovered years later doesn’t exactly help the junior faculty member who has already been denied tenure and was relegated to a lesser university or perhaps drummed out of academia entirely.</p>