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That's nothing. The most extreme such example is that everything that Barbara McClintock published for decades about jumping genes was questioned because it se
by btilly 7y ago
That's nothing.
The most extreme such example is that everything that Barbara McClintock published for decades about jumping genes was questioned because it seemed like an impossible result. It got so bad that she stopped even trying to submit papers for publication anywhere after 1953. Then in the 1960s and 1970s the mechanics of transposons was discovered and she became hailed as a pioneer and was awarded the Nobel.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock for more.
- panpanna 7y agoConsider this next time you have a good idea and everyone in the room very loudly questions you.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoHindsight is 20/20, but I suspect that for every revolutionary idea that's initially dismissed as crackpot nonsense, there's a thousand dismissed ideas that actually are crackpot nonsense. It's hard to draw strong general conclusions from looking at outliers.
- panpanna 7y agoSure but looking back, I can also tell you that almost all great ideas I have ever had were initially rejected. For a long time I thought this was due to poor presentation. Then one day it hit me: the reason boss/coworker doesn't get it is the same reason why he could not come up with the idea himself.
- jjaredsimpson 7y agoBut how do you know the ideas were/are great? Rejection isn't evidence of quality.
- panpanna 7y agoWell, that's a very valid question. My point is that with time, you can look back at ideas that turned out to be great and recall how they were initially received.
- jacques_chester 7y agoPersonal recollection is highly unreliable. Especially if you have a mental schema that correlates idea quality with social rejection.
- avip 7y agoWhat's the rejection rate of your poor ideas?
- gamblor956 7y agoA lot of truly terrible ideas are also initially rejected. Rejection is not an indicator for the merit of an idea.
- btilly 7y agoThe problem is that impossible seeming results tend to get rejected out of hand no matter how carefully they were done, or how easy to replicate. This is an extreme example of that, and should stand as a cautionary tale that data should be believed especially when it is in conflict with theory. Rather than being rejected and ignored.
- cauthon 7y ago> This is an extreme example of that, and should stand as a cautionary tale that data should be believed especially when it is in conflict with theory. Rather than being rejected and ignored. This is a terrible sentiment and it needs to stop spreading with these articles about Nobel rejections. Noticing that your data is in conflict with theory is the best way of realizing that you have made a mistake. Go back to your analysis and work through it until you realize what you did wrong. If you can't find the mistake, then share it with your colleagues/PI, and get them to tell you what you did wrong. If all of their ideas don't explain your result, then you may have found an interesting finding, but you should probably triple check your work and then try to reproduce the finding in new data.
- btilly 7y agoIt is true that most impossible results are experimental error of one sort or another. But it is a systemic failure that biologists broadly rejected a result out of hand that had been successfully replicated many times, at multiple labs, over decades. And the attitude that you describe is part of why it happened. Data that does not fit in existing paradigms should be scrutinized with extra care, not rejected out of hand.
- lonelappde 7y agoAll data should be scrutinized. If you are going to blindly accept data that matches prediction, than don't waste resources collecting the data you aren't going to use -- just use the theory and don't lie about verifyit it.
- lonelappde 7y ago
- jacques_chester 7y ago> But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. Carl Sagan.
- BurningFrog 7y agoAnother version of this is "I struggle in school, much like Einstein, therefore etc..."
- dr_coffee 7y agoThat is indeed an extreme example, given how matter of factly they teach transposons in molecular bio these days. When we couldn't get a paper published, my old PI would always joke, "There's always BBRC!", referring to the journal biochemical and biophysical research communications. The impact factor was and still is quite low, and it would make the post docs bristle when he said it. But I once asked him, why BBRC? and he explained that Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Herschko published their first paper on ubiquitinylation (how proteins get tagged for degradation in the proteasome) in that journal [1,2]. It won them a Nobel prize 26 years later and exploded into a huge field. You just never know sometimes. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26325464/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/26325464/ [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0006291X78912494 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0006291X78... (The BBRC text is paywalled sorry)
- jacquesm 7y ago> (The BBRC text is paywalled sorry) No problem, I think this is the paper you were looking for: https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.bbrc.2015.08.109 https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.bbrc.2015.08.109
- JorgeGT 7y agoThere are many prestigious/important journals within specific fields with very low IF. For instance in acoustics the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America or Acta Acustica united with Acustica.