I Told You So! Scientists Who Were Ridiculed, Exiled, and Imprisoned for Being Right, Matt Kaplan, St. Martin’s Press, 2026, pp. 288, $22.00 hardcover.
I confess to being dubious when I was asked to review this book. Start with the title: I Told You So! evokes an image of science as that bratty little sibling who lords it over you when the consequence of some hare-brained mischief on your part comes to roost on your shoulder. “I told you so,” followed by “you should have listened to the Science!” Then there’s the author’s self-description as “science journalist,” a tribe whose norms (with a few exceptions) usually encompass neither science nor journalism.
Never mind: books should never be judged by their covers, and I’m glad I didn’t for this one. I Told You So is an insightful book into the strengths, human foibles, and inner weaknesses that have always been at the core of the scientific enterprise. Would we expect anything else, given that science is done by inherently flawed human beings? It also helps that Matt Kaplan came into his craft from advanced study in science (paleontology in his case) rather than from the usual credentials of science “journalists” who come from one variety or another watered-down quasi-scientific “studies.”
Kaplan opens I Told You So with an incident of scientists behaving badly, paleontologists in this instance. It was over a topic that would interest perhaps a couple of dozen people worldwide (including me, tangentially). In dispute was whether dinosaurs had granules of melanin in their skins, scales, and feathers, tiny bodies called melanosomes which determine skin and plumage color. Birds have them, after all, and birds are really dinosaurs, so why shouldn’t the extinct varieties have them? Entire careers in paleontology had been built on this premise, and you can see the fruits of those careers in modern renderings of brightly-colored dinosaurs. The bad behavior Kaplan describes came at a poster session of an annual meeting of the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology, and was focused on a Ph.D. student, Alison Moyer, who was presenting evidence that these structures were not melanosomes, but fossilized red blood cells. What followed can best be described as a scientific mobbing, several of the silverbacks of paleontology surrounding this student and hurling shouted insults at her.
That incident sets the tone for the overarching theme of I Told You So: that it is mostly the work of mavericks that advance our scientific understanding of the world, and that the major impediments they face are too often the duplicitous actions of their fellow scientists. To quote: “Modern science is rife with greed, where key information is intentionally withheld so that one person or team can get all the glory and leave all their competitors in the dust.”
The structures had to be melanosomes, you see, because if they weren’t, our glory would go up in smoke. Kaplan could have left off the “modern” modifier, by the way. From that introductory episode, Kaplan goes on to dissect several other scientific discoveries that faced heavy weather on their way to a better understanding of the world. I Told You So! is as much a corrective historical narrative as it is a tale about science itself.
Some of the tales are familiar, seemingly well-plowed ground from which a perennial narrative has grown. One such tale concerns the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweiz, who discovered that childbed fever (puerperal fever), a painful and often fatal complication of childbirth, could be prevented if physicians attending women in labor would simply wash their hands before coming into the obstetrical wards. Everyone knows the conventional story about Semmelweiz: that he was before his time, ultimately vindicated two decades after his death, when Louis Pasteur established the germ theory of disease. Not quite true, says Kaplan the science journalist, who painstakingly reconstructs Semmelweiz’s convoluted journey to his realization that childbed fever was spread, not by miasma or phases of the moon, but by poor medical hygiene. He arrived at that conclusion through a novel (for the time) method of logical inference based on mortality statistics, comparing mortality in different obstetrical wards, or between poor women who gave birth in the Vienna slums and poor women who came to the hospital. Both populations got puerperal fever, but the mortality skyrocketed when they came to the hospital. In short, Semmelweiz had made his case independent of the germ theory. His physician colleagues did not have to wait for Pasteur to change their practices. What Semmelweiz met, rather, was deflection and self-justifying rationales that were sustained by self-interested hospital administrations, professional pride and obstinance, and simple class dislike.
And Pasteur, by the way, does not get off lightly.
Nor is the situation much improved today. Kaplan devotes considerable space to the story of Katalin Karikó, who shared the 2023 Nobel Prize (with Drew Weismann) for research into the use of messenger RNA (mRNA) technology for development of mRNA vaccines. Some readers might believe the honor to be misplaced, owing to the dubious reputation that clouded the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine. Leave aside the policy failures that gave mRNA vaccines that bad name, the science behind its development was nothing less than brilliant, and Katerina Karikó was a central player in the saga: she deserved her honor. Yet, like Odysseus returning to Ithaca, obstacle after obstacle was thrown up in Karikó’s way. Rather than being the plaything of vengeful Poseidon, Karikó was treated mostly as an inconvenient distraction to the ostensibly “real” business of modern science, namely bureaucratic management and garnering of research dollars. One is left with a simple question that should be foremost in the minds of everyone concerned with the state of science today: “why?”
For me, Kaplan’s exploration of that question was the best part of I Told You So. Being simultaneously a science “insider” (Ph.D. in paleontology) and an “outsider” (science correspondent for The Economist, although I shan’t hold that against him), Kaplan is well placed to cast a comparatively jaundiced eye on science’s ills.
As Kaplan weaves through the stories of Semmelweiz and Pasteur along to Moyer and Karikó, two common themes emerge. First, that scientists are often not very nice people. This in itself is neither a new nor a compelling insight. Ever since the 1968 publication of The Double Helix, James Watson’s memoir of his and Francis Crick’s journey to the discovery of the structure of DNA, it has become commonplace to acknowledge that science is a form of social Darwinism, the struggle for scientific progress red in tooth and claw. Second, that science moves forward not so much from mavericks’ new insights but from an ally who emerges that can stand up for them. Semmelweiz can emerge as a hero because he had colleagues who would buck the people holding him back. Karikó was lucky because she always had someone who would throw her a lifeline. It can work the other way: Pasteur is a hero for the rabies vaccine, but he crushed the competitors who had pioneered the work to sustain his own glory.
Is this how science is supposed to work? Science has always based its special truth claim on being above such petty matters, that science is an objective conversation about nature as nature itself tells us through measurement, observation, and data. Kaplan makes it difficult to sustain that myth, and has a biting commentary on what gives the myth its power. His answer will not make the Sadducees of science happy: that our current landscape of science is subsidizing the very things that impede scientific progress: the striving, the careerism, the crowd-following, and pressure to conform that is crushing the creative mavericks that are the real engines of the scientific enterprise.
Scott Turner is Director of the Science Programs at the National Association of Scholars; turner@nas.org. Dr. Turner is a physiologist retired from the faculty of SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry, though still active in his research specialty, the study of termite colonies. His books include Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something “Alive” and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It (HarperOne, 2017). He last wrote for AQ in spring of 2026 with “Darwin’s Moon,” a review of James T. Costa’s Radical by Nature: The Revolutionary Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (Princeton, 2023).