The recent announcement of Barry Marshall and Robin Warren's Noble Prize in Medicine has spurred some interesting commentary - not just for their findings that bacteria causes ulcers, but for the fact that they had to buck established conventional wisdom to prove their point. Some, such as the Wall Street Journal, A 'Preposterous' Nobel smugly tell us that this is "a useful reminder that just because there's a scientific 'consensus,' that doesn't mean it's true."
One wonders what consensus the Journal's editorial writers have in mind. Global warming? Evolution? Probably not the economic "Washington consensus," which encapsulates the Journal's theories on economic growth.
Rather than it an indictment of the "scientific consensus" or an example how science sometimes gets it wrong, this prize is a celebration of the process of inquiry and how science really works. It is an example of what Kuhn describes in the The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; it proves that science evolves through bold steps. Marshall and Warren join a long and distinguished line of scientist who bucked the system.
This Noble Prize also shows how science progresses through rigorous attention to the facts and the verification of those facts through experimentation. As Madeline Drexler describes in her article, A Nobel Prize for intuition:
At first, Marshall couldn't produce the crowning scientific proof of his claim: inducing ulcers in animals by feeding them the bacterium. So in 1984, as he later reported in the Medical Journal of Australia, "a 32-year-old man, a light smoker and social drinker who had no known gastrointestinal disease or family history of peptic ulceration" - a superb test subject, in other words - "swallowed the growth from a flourishing three-day culture of the isolate."
The volunteer was Marshall himself. Five days later, and for seven mornings in a row, he experienced the classic and unpretty symptoms of severe gastritis.
Scientific proof - not simply conjecture - is what won Marshall and Warren the Noble Prize. With scientific proof, the scientific consensus was altered.
That is exactly how the process is supposed to work.
For those who would defend their ideological preferences by pointing to how conventional wisdom and the scientific consensus was proved wrong, I would simply point out that at one point both evolution and global warming were once dismissed by those who upheld the conventional wisdom. They, like the theories of Marshall and Warren, eventually won out - because they best fit the facts.
Facts, information and knowledge - not ideology - are what drive the I-Cubed Economy.
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