How wrong we are

[drdoug]

This article about Scott and Scurvy is gripping stuff. I knew Scott's expedition had been troubled by scurvy, but I had put that down as yet another of his bad-management decisions. I had totally failed to clock that he was following the best scientific advice available at the time. Which was closer to identifying Vitamin C than ever before ... but

Comments

[thekumquat]

If the conventional wisdom that the central nervous system neurons never grow nor make new connections had been overturned about 2 years earlier, I'd probably have got a Nature paper out of my MSc project.

As it was, my pictures of neurons in adult hippocampus and cerebral cortex showing expression of a protein only found in embryonic neural growth cones, in structures looking like growth cones, were assumed to be some interesting new role for this protein and the shapes must have been artefacts...

Though gossip got round so I like to think it contributed to the research that got all the attention later.