Funding original ideas

The conventional view of the time was wrong.

If a granting body of that time was giving money for medical research, it would have given money for projects about masks, shaped like a bird’s beak with flowers in the ends. It might have given money for projects looking at better shaped masks or the distance the flowers had to be away from the nose or whether some types of flowers or strong smelling substances were superior to others, and so on. It would have withheld money for anyone who dared to suggest a more modern cause of the plague.

Second, up to the time of Nicholas Copernicus everyone followed the cosmological theory of Ptolemy (Goldstein, Bernard R., “Saving the phenomena: The background to Ptolemy’s Planetary Theory: History of Astronomy, 28, 1997). It was Ptolemy who assumed that the earth was the centre of the universe - the so-called geocentric theory - and that all planets and stars rotated around the earth. Ptolemy’s theories were consistent with observations at that time and with religious beliefs and they had unquestioned acceptance for 1,400 years.

Followers of Thomas Kuhn will know that many theories are accepted initially if they fit with current observations, but that those theories develop flaws with continued observation, “scientific revolutions” then occur and that another paradigm is likely to emerge.

The flaws in Ptolemaic cosmology had become increasingly serious. There was a need to propose the existence of crystal spheres, invisible to humans to make the Ptolemaic theory work still - so that theory was ripe for revision.

Then along came Nicholas Copernicus (Hoyle F., The World of Nicolaus Copernicus, Proc. Roy. Soc. London, Ser A336, 1974). He published his learned book The Revolution of the Celestial Orbs in 1530. Had he been dependent on peer review then he would have got no money to do his work.

The historical story does not end there. Galilei Galileo was a mathematician and philosopher. He was arrested by the inquisition after he published his book Dialogue on the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems and he had to recant his views under threat of torture. The Church even had a special name - “the heliocentric heresy” (Brooks, G., People of the Book, Fourth Estate, 2008) - for what was being written and said by people like Galileo. It took the church 350 years to admit that Galileo had been on the right track all along (“Vatican admits Galileo was right” New Scientist, November 7, 1992). Galileo would have failed to get a project grant to support this work under a peer review system.

If you want a bit more history consider the story of Ignaz Phillip Semmelweiss. This Hungarian physician believed that hand washing, particularly after autopsies, cut the incidence of puerperal fever from about 10 per cent to 2 per cent. He had evidence to support his claim which ran counter to contemporary continental theories which were based on innate individual factors being the cause of puerperal sepsis. He was ridiculed because it was “known” that childbed fever was spread by the hysteria of the birthing mothers and couldn't possibly be attributed to doctors who wiped their hands on their frock coats. He was derided and ridiculed by his colleagues, was forced to resign his post in Vienna, move to Budapest, and was eventually committed to a mental institution where he quickly died.

He was proven right eventually about the cause of puerperal infection. It was just that microbiology was not a science then and germs, as a cause of disease, were not understood.

Under a peer review system he would have done even worse than he did in real life.

Peer review of project applications rewards orthodoxy and conventional thinking, the use of accepted paradigms, and the placing of more bricks in walls that others have imagined and built.

When assessing projects for the NHMRC, for possible funding, one is asked to consider “track record” among other factors (e.g. Nicol, M. B., Heradeera, K., Butler, L, NHMRC grant applications: a comparison of “track record” scores allocated by grant assessors with bibliometric analysis of publications. Med. J. Aust., 2007, 187). This gives marks to established players in any field and mitigates against new entrants, particularly any not associated with an established laboratory or those espousing heterodox ideas. Using that criterion it is easy to understand why Warren and Marshall failed to get project funding. They got the Nobel Prize instead. And the NHMRC seems to have taken a Panglossian view of the whole awful event.