4 ms·

Makes complete sense that there was resistance until a viable mechanism was proposed. Otherwise it just sounds like voodoo.

dekhn 5y ago
No, because the underlying data demonstrated that there was a statistically significant death effect occurring, with a wide range of evidence implicating prions, before there was a mechanism. You shouldn't require a plausible mechanism to trust your experiments (seen this a hundred times, like in RNA enzymes, heart of the ribosome, various dna-is-the-heritable-agent experimetns).
- XorNot 5y ago
  Yes you should: because all you have otherwise is a death rate that could be caused by any number of things. Biological organisms die all the time for all sorts of reasons: there's a difference between showing a series of factors lead to an death rate, and proposing the specific mechanism by which that happens and it's important. That light behaves like a wave did not summarily prove there was an aether through which it propagated, and not finding it up-ended physics.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    Not only did they know the death rate, they had an infectious agent in a tube they knew was protein. If you identify a reproducible agent you can study in the lab, you don't need any plausible mechanism. Note that aether was the plausible mechanism, and it mislead people for a long time. The experiment that "disproved" aether just showed that the mechanistic proposal was simple, and wrong.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    Clearly you do not need to know the mechanism by which light waves propagate to prove that light waves do propagate. It would be ass-backwards to wait until special relativity was formulated to accept the existence of electromagnetic waves.
    - XorNot 5y ago
      Showing you have an infectious agent in a vial is not showing what that agent is.
contravariant 5y ago
It's not exactly that rare for a phase transition out of a metastable state to happen spontaneously when given an appropriate nucleation seed.
boxed 5y ago
Not really. Look at how Darwins theory of evolution was published in 1859, while the mechanism wasn't really clear until at earliest 1928, and in some ways it's still not fully understood.
ricksunny 5y ago
If ancient Romans could have shown correlation & causation between lead pipes & drinking vessels to poor health outcomes, they should have ceased using lead for these purposes even while lacking the capability of understanding the underlying mechanism. There's no voodoo in that.

dekhn 5y ago

No, because the underlying data demonstrated that there was a statistically significant death effect occurring, with a wide range of evidence implicating prions, before there was a mechanism. You shouldn't require a plausible mechanism to trust your experiments (seen this a hundred times, like in RNA enzymes, heart of the ribosome, various dna-is-the-heritable-agent experimetns).

XorNot 5y ago
Yes you should: because all you have otherwise is a death rate that could be caused by any number of things. Biological organisms die all the time for all sorts of reasons: there's a difference between showing a series of factors lead to an death rate, and proposing the specific mechanism by which that happens and it's important. That light behaves like a wave did not summarily prove there was an aether through which it propagated, and not finding it up-ended physics.
- dekhn 5y ago
  Not only did they know the death rate, they had an infectious agent in a tube they knew was protein. If you identify a reproducible agent you can study in the lab, you don't need any plausible mechanism. Note that aether was the plausible mechanism, and it mislead people for a long time. The experiment that "disproved" aether just showed that the mechanistic proposal was simple, and wrong.
- jjk166 5y ago
  Clearly you do not need to know the mechanism by which light waves propagate to prove that light waves do propagate. It would be ass-backwards to wait until special relativity was formulated to accept the existence of electromagnetic waves.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    Showing you have an infectious agent in a vial is not showing what that agent is.

contravariant 5y ago

It's not exactly that rare for a phase transition out of a metastable state to happen spontaneously when given an appropriate nucleation seed.

boxed 5y ago

Not really. Look at how Darwins theory of evolution was published in 1859, while the mechanism wasn't really clear until at earliest 1928, and in some ways it's still not fully understood.

ricksunny 5y ago

If ancient Romans could have shown correlation & causation between lead pipes & drinking vessels to poor health outcomes, they should have ceased using lead for these purposes even while lacking the capability of understanding the underlying mechanism. There's no voodoo in that.