- 13 hours ago
Prepare to have your minds blown... Join us as we shine a light on the extraordinary individuals whose radical ideas were once dismissed as madness, only for history to later confirm their undeniable brilliance. From groundbreaking scientific theories to shocking revelations, these vindicated visionaries challenged the status quo and endured ridicule, before the truth finally emerged. Get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about foresight and integrity.
Category
đź—ž
NewsTranscript
00:00How much money did Fairfield make off Bernie Madoff every year?
00:04Hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:05Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at people who were written off as insane or wrong,
00:11only to be proven right the entire time.
00:13Unfortunately, his peers weren't very receptive.
00:16There was no mechanism to explain how the continents might plow through the oceans.
00:22Frances Oldham Kelsey.
00:24When she was hired to work for the Food and Drug Administration,
00:26neither she nor the country knew what the extent of her work would lead to.
00:30In 1960, Frances Oldham Kelsey was tasked with reviewing thalidomide
00:34so that it could be prescribed to expecting mothers suffering from morning sickness.
00:38She denied it, and eventually asked that it be tested after finding evidence that it caused birth defects.
00:44The problem is some drugs may not show a toxicity until they've been used for several years.
00:49Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical company refused her request.
00:53They grew angry with her and hounded her relentlessly for approval.
00:56They first tried to convince her to approve the drug over a series of calls and visits.
01:01When these failed to sway her,
01:03Merrill executives complained that stubborn and nitpicking Kelsey was the problem.
01:08Her research was corroborated just a year later,
01:10when thousands of infants were born with severe defects.
01:13In that moment, her discretion became the expectation,
01:16and by 1962, her reviewing process was the norm for all prospective drugs.
01:22Dr. Kelsey was hailed as a heroine in the United States.
01:25Science is an ever-evolving field,
01:29and as such, those that were once considered wrong can be proven right once more evidence arises.
01:35Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin learned that for herself in 1925,
01:39while she was a graduate student at Radcliffe College working at the Harvard College Observatory.
01:44After extensive research, she came to the conclusion that stars were primarily made up of the elements hydrogen and helium.
01:51Thanks to your work, I've discovered that the stars are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium.
01:56There's a million times more hydrogen and helium than the metals in the stars.
02:01This went against the accepted reasoning at the time,
02:03and as such, several established astrophysicists disregarded her findings.
02:08It is clearly impossible that hydrogen should be a million times more abundant than the metals.
02:14Years later, more studies on the subject were conducted,
02:17where it was revealed that her hypothesis had been correct the entire time.
02:21With that confirmation, all of her hard work and the dissent she had faced was finally made worth it.
02:26It would be four years before Russell realized that Payne was right.
02:30To his credit, as soon as he did, he acknowledged that it was her discovery.
02:35Lindy Chamberlain.
02:36In 1980, her worst nightmare became reality.
02:40During a camping trip that year, Lindy and Michael Chamberlain's daughter, Azaria, disappeared from their tent.
02:46Lindy insisted it was a dingo, but the authorities had another theory,
02:50that she had been the one to take her child's life.
02:52I really couldn't believe the evidence in my own eyes,
02:55and I called her my girl, that dingo's got the baby.
02:59The media picked the accusation up and ran with it.
03:02Everything from her religion to her reactions following the disappearance were picked apart.
03:06She was convicted in 1982 and sentenced to life behind bars.
03:10The verdict in Mrs. Chamberlain's case, guilty.
03:13For Mr. Chamberlain, guilty.
03:15It wasn't until 1986 that more of Azaria's remains were found,
03:19corroborating Lindy's initial claims leading to her release.
03:22While she was exonerated, her true vindication came in 2012,
03:26when a coroner finally declared that Azaria's cause of death was a dingo attack.
03:30Please accept my sincere sympathy on the death of your special and loved daughter and sister, Azaria.
03:38I'm so sorry for your loss.
03:40Jose Canseco.
03:41As the old proverb goes, winners never cheat and cheaters never win.
03:45In Major League Baseball, that wasn't the case,
03:48and it took Jose Canseco speaking out for the truth to be revealed.
03:52In his 2005 book, Juiced, he detailed using performance-enhancing drugs during his career.
03:57He also claimed that other players used them as well, and even named them.
04:01You say this.
04:02I would never have been a Major League-caliber player without steroids, right?
04:09Oh, well, it is a true statement.
04:10Nor from what's about it.
04:11Those athletes immediately denied the claims, painting Canseco as a liar.
04:15The Mitchell report being released in 2007 changed everything.
04:19It laid out every detail of a nearly two-year-long investigation into the league,
04:24including the names of dozens of players who had used enhancers.
04:27Some of the teammates Canseco called out were named, proving that he had been right the whole time.
04:32It could make an average athlete a super athlete.
04:35Russ Tice.
04:36No citizen wants to believe that their government would ever spy on them.
04:40In 2005, intelligence analyst Russ Tice claimed just that.
04:44It all began in 2003, when Tice himself suspected he was being tracked.
04:48It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country,
04:52and you never made a foreign communications at all.
04:56They monitored all communications.
04:58After voicing those concerns, he was forced to undergo a psychological evaluation,
05:03and he knew then and there that he was being punished for coming forward.
05:06By May of 2005, he had been fired.
05:09He continued speaking out, and it wouldn't take long for him to be proven right.
05:13That's really disgraceful.
05:14You gotta back it up, your accusations, my man.
05:17Disgraceful?
05:19Disgraceful?
05:22Over that hill is an agency that spied on every f***ing American in this country.
05:26On December 17, 2005, President Bush confirmed that he had given the National Security Agency
05:32clearance to do so.
05:34Tice was vindicated even more with the release of Edward Snowden's evidence in 2013,
05:39cementing his claims a decade prior as the truth.
05:42Because even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded,
05:45and the storage capability of these systems increases every year.
05:50John O'Neill.
05:51After living through one attack, he was adamant to stop the next.
05:55He'd painstakingly pieced together bits of information gathered from sources around the
05:59world.
06:00Unfortunately, he was the only one who believed it would happen.
06:03After helping apprehend one of the perpetrators of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center,
06:08John O'Neill had just one thought, that if it occurred once, it could occur again.
06:13He became obsessed with studying terrorist cells and their motivations,
06:17all while continuing to issue warnings about another attack potentially taking place.
06:21My dad had a lot of video of Osama bin Laden.
06:25Whatever was out there was actually in his apartment.
06:27He studied him several times, watched the videos I know several times.
06:33Even after he left the FBI, he maintained his position.
06:37On September 11, 2001, his horrific prediction was proven correct.
06:41He lost his life that day while helping others escape, a horrible end that could have been
06:46prevented had the agency listened to him years beforehand.
06:49In the aftermath, what John O'Neill had come so tantalizingly close to discovering
06:54became clear.
06:56Louis Pasteur
06:57Like other scientists, his initial findings were not always accepted.
07:01During the 1860s, Louis Pasteur tried understanding why wine was spoiling.
07:06Through some experimentation, he deduced that the issue was microorganisms creating lactic acid.
07:11He also found that when certain affected liquids were heated, the organisms were eradicated.
07:16This new process, dubbed pasteurization, wasn't accepted at first.
07:21Sommeliers scoffed at the idea and insisted that the impacted taste caused by the process
07:25was worse than the potential for illness.
07:28It was disregarded for decades until people began contracting diseases caused by contaminated
07:33milk in the early 20th century.
07:35Once pasteurization was done on a mass scale, those instances dropped significantly.
07:40It was then that many realized that Pasteur had been right from the very beginning.
07:44Rachel Carson
07:45In some cases, being right doesn't always come with a feeling of vindication.
07:50For some, like Rachel Carson, it meant that something awful was taking place.
07:54In the conservationist's case, she was worried about the potential negative effects of the
07:59pesticide DDT.
08:00She published a book on the topic in 1962, where she revealed the potential dangers it posed to
08:05humans and the environment.
08:06In the zealous quest for mastery, Carson argued, synthetic pesticides had been used indiscriminately,
08:13excessively, heedlessly, upsetting the delicate balance of nature and putting all life at risk.
08:20To say it was poorly received would be an understatement.
08:24From having vicious insults lobbed at her to people writing parodies mocking her findings,
08:29she was dragged through the mud.
08:30They formed essentially a war council to get together and develop a propaganda campaign
08:35to discredit Carson, to discredit the science in her book, and to defend their practices.
08:41Years after it was released, more tests were carried out, which revealed how dangerous DDT was.
08:47It was officially banned in the United States in 1972, a full decade after Carson's initial warning.
08:54Her message was that there's an ongoing story.
08:58It doesn't just stop with the removal of pesticides.
09:01Harry Markopoulos.
09:03Had he been listened to, billions of dollars may have been saved.
09:06Instead, Harry Markopoulos was all but ignored when he reported several red flags within financier
09:12Bernie Madoff's portfolio.
09:14When initial press coverage didn't result in an investigation, he knew he had to try again.
09:18One of the most successful businessmen in New York, and certainly one of the most powerful
09:22men on Wall Street, you would never suspect him of fraud, unless you knew the math.
09:26He filed a second complaint to the SEC, which was also ignored.
09:31Markopoulos persevered, even though he knew he was putting himself at risk.
09:35He sent one final memo in 2005, only for that to go nowhere as well.
09:40I would talk to the people I had trading relationships with and ask,
09:42did you have a trading relationship with Mr. Bernard Madoff?
09:46And they all said, no, we don't think he's for real.
09:48Afterwards, all he could do was watch as Madoff's scheme folded in 2008.
09:53He took to the stand the following year, where he finally lambasted those that had ignored
09:58his warnings for so many years.
10:00But today he enjoys an almost heroic status, pursued by journalists and movie producers,
10:06and honored by colleagues as the man who went to the Securities and Exchange Commission
10:11and blew the whistle on Bernie Madoff in his $50 billion fraud.
10:15Alfred Wegener.
10:16He realized that all the continents in the world had once formed a giant, single landmass
10:22that he called Pangaea.
10:24Most people today are aware of Pangaea, a giant landmass that broke apart.
10:28What some don't know is that the alleged process it underwent, known as continental drift, was
10:33once considered a farce.
10:34In 1912, Alfred Wegener proposed that each individual continent drifted into their new positions.
10:40Over hundreds of millions of years, Pangaea had split apart, and its jigsaw pieces had
10:46drifted to their present locations.
10:48To prove his case, he showed that life forms on opposite ends of the globe were similar,
10:53and used paper to create a visual representation.
10:56However, due to a lack of precision and experience, he was derided by geologists.
11:01Decades passed, and scientists began finding more evidence supporting Wegener's theory.
11:05Though it isn't fully confirmed, enough has come out to deduce that he had an early understanding
11:10of how the phenomenon may have worked.
11:12Due to the constant churning of magma underneath the Earth's crust, they all split up and moved
11:17to their modern-day positions.
11:19Billy Mitchell.
11:20Before Tom Cruise made jets sexy, Billy Mitchell was shouting from the rooftops about their
11:24importance.
11:25Air power, he believed, was the future of warfare.
11:27Battle came after the war, when he attacked his own military superiors in a controversy
11:33that shocked the nation.
11:34A U.S. Army general with the subtlety of a howitzer, Mitchell spent the 1920s warning that
11:39aircraft would revolutionize combat.
11:41He also told anyone that would listen that America's Navy was dangerously vulnerable.
11:46When he literally bombed a captured battleship from the air to prove his point, the military
11:50brass court-martialed him for insubordination.
11:53But the court hears the prosecutor call Mitchell an ambitious opportunist.
11:57He's a danger to military discipline, the prosecutor says.
12:01Throw him out of the Army.
12:03He resigned as a colonel, frustrated by the Army ignoring him.
12:06Fifteen years later, Japanese planes sank battleships at Pearl Harbor, just like Mitchell
12:12had predicted.
12:13Christine Collins.
12:14When Christine Collins' nine-year-old son went missing in 1928, she did everything a
12:19mother could.
12:19She contacted the police, launched a search, and held out hope.
12:23I'm calling to report a missing child.
12:25A missing child.
12:26What's your relation to the child, ma'am?
12:30It's my son.
12:31Months later, the LAPD made a big show of finding him for the papers.
12:36But there was one wrinkle.
12:37The boy they presented to Christine was not her kid.
12:40When she protested, they tossed her into a psych ward.
12:43They held her under a code 12, a psych hold for annoying or inconvenient people.
12:48The boy was indeed an imposter, part of a police cover-up to hide their massive incompetence.
12:53Sadly, her real son was never found.
12:55Still think he's out there?
12:57Why not?
12:59Three boys made a run for it that night, Detective, and if one got out, then maybe either or both
13:04of the others did too.
13:06Maybe Walter's out there having the same fears that he did.
13:09Collins spent years fighting for justice, and died without ever finding her son.
13:14William Coley.
13:15William Coley believed he could potentially cure cancer by giving people infections.
13:19It may sound insane, and his contemporaries accused him of worse.
13:24And so he hypothesized that maybe there was some kind of connection between whatever was
13:28happening during or after an infection and cancer disappearing.
13:34But he wasn't crazy.
13:35After one of his patients' tumors shrank following a serious infection, Coley leaned all the way in.
13:40He injected cancer patients with a cocktail of dead bacteria to supercharge their immune
13:45systems.
13:45The results were inconsistent, but sometimes he produced miracles.
13:49Instead of celebrating him, the medical establishment rolled its eyes and tossed his work aside in
13:54favor of surgery and radiation.
13:56Today, Coley is seen as the godfather of immunotherapy, one of the most promising frontiers in cancer
14:01treatment.
14:02This whole process is enhanced when the immune system is boosted.
14:07And that's exactly what Coley's toxins were doing.
14:10The Cancer Research Institute even named an award after him, Rose McGowan.
14:14For years, Rose McGowan was just the girl from Charmed to most people.
14:18Did you ever try to meet the sisters, ask them about it, or?
14:21Yeah, right.
14:22After all, when the show ended, her career didn't exactly blossom.
14:26That's because behind the scenes, she was fighting a darker battle.
14:29McGowan was one of the first women in Hollywood to publicly accuse Harvey Weinstein of misconduct.
14:34She did so long before Me Too became a movement, and long before anyone else stood up to back her
14:39Instead of support, she was gaslit, blacklisted, and smeared by powerful PR machines.
14:45Weinstein even allegedly hired ex-Massad agents to dig up dirt on her.
14:49These are people that hurt people, and that's their job.
14:53Their job is to hurt other people, so, you know, I hope they're proud at night.
14:56While others stayed silent, she kept shouting, forcing the industry to reckon with its rot.
15:01Rose was vindicated in 2018.
15:04William Harvey
15:05For most of human history, so-called experts believed that blood just sloshed around inside of you.
15:11Doctors believed blood was created in the liver and just kind of soaked into the body.
15:15We don't know exactly when Harvey realized he had discovered the circulation of the blood.
15:21We do know he was very surprised and taken aback by this,
15:25because it contradicted all the teaching about medicine and about the functioning of the body for 2,000 years.
15:31William Henry looked at centuries of medical wisdom and said,
15:35Well, actually, the heart's a pump.
15:37He believed that blood circulates in a loop driven by the heart.
15:40Almost no one believed him.
15:42His colleagues mocked him.
15:43His patients ditched him.
15:44Some folks even accused him of heresy.
15:47Most physicians who read it thought it was nonsense, indeed heretical.
15:52How could William Harvey, an Englishman, oppose the views of the great Galen?
15:57And they wrote against him.
15:59But Harvey kept cutting open animals, taking measurements, and publishing the receipts.
16:03It took decades, but he was eventually proven correct.
16:06Today, his circulatory model is in every textbook, and his detractors are lost to time.
16:12Barry Marshall.
16:13Imagine being so sure you're right that you drink a glass of bacteria to prove it.
16:17The concept of discovering a new bacteria, which proved that all the medical books were wrong and had to be
16:23rewritten, that was kind of exciting to us.
16:26That's exactly what Barry Marshall did in the 1980s.
16:29Marshall was trying to convince the medical world that ulcers were not caused by stress or spicy food.
16:33He believed the culprit was H. pylori, a nasty little bacterium.
16:37Doctors laughed him off for years, clinging to outdated theories while their patients suffered.
16:42So, Marshall did something insane.
16:44He infected himself, developed gastritis, and then cured it with antibiotics.
16:49It was a mic drop moment, earning Marshall a Nobel Prize.
16:53He didn't just change how we treat ulcers.
16:55He put his money where his mouth is to prove he was right.
16:58The discovery by Dr. Warren and myself has benefited millions of people, maybe saved a million lives over the last
17:0610 years or 20 years.
17:08Ludwig Boltzmann.
17:09Ludwig Boltzmann believed atoms were real.
17:11That may sound obvious now, but in the 19th century, it was scientific heresy.
17:15He spent his days crunching the math, writing equations to describe the behavior of particles.
17:21His work laid the foundation for modern statistical mechanics.
17:23At the time, though, Boltzmann was a laughingstock.
17:26Despite having the math to back it up, Boltzmann spent much of his career isolated and ridiculed.
17:31Tragically, he took his own life in 1906.
17:34Just a few years later, atomic theory was vindicated, and his work became a cornerstone of modern physics.
17:40Alice Catherine Evans.
17:42If history and modern life tells us anything, it's that women often have to fight twice as hard to prove
17:48they're right.
17:48Alice Catherine Evans is a prime example.
17:51While studying bacteria and dairy, Evans discovered that brucella, a particularly nasty microbe, could be transmitted from cows to humans
17:58through unpasteurized milk.
18:00Raw milk, she realized, could kill.
18:02When she went public, male scientists dismissed her findings as, quote, alarmist.
18:07The scientific establishment couldn't admit that they were wrong and a woman was right.
18:11Years later, after thousands got sick and her research was confirmed, the U.S. finally mandated milk pasteurization.
18:17Evans didn't just change food safety.
18:20She was a trailblazer for women in science, even as the men around her curdled with resentment.
18:25Mayor Kotoku Wamura.
18:26After World War II, the town of Fudai, Japan, elected Kotoku Wamura as mayor, hoping he'd rebuild.
18:33They obviously liked what they saw, re-electing him over and over until 1987.
18:38Wamura remembered Fudai getting hammered by a tsunami back in 1933.
18:41He saw the damage after a tsunami in 1933 and vowed it would never happen again.
18:48They were hit by another decades before that.
18:50The mayor vowed it would never happen again.
18:53In the 1970s, he pushed through a massive 51-foot floodgate.
18:57It was a controversial public works project mocked as overkill.
19:00Critics said it ruined the view.
19:02Wamura insisted.
19:03He died in 1997, but he was eventually proven right when the 2011 tsunami devastated much of Japan's coast.
19:10Fudai, though, was spared.
19:12Villagers are coming to his grave to pay their respects and give thanks that he had the foresight to save
19:17them.
19:18The wall he built, the one everyone laughed at, saved the entire town.
19:22Marshall McLuhan.
19:23Back in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan must have sounded like a raving madman.
19:27Listening to him in 2025 feels like witnessing a decades-old lecture from a time-traveling media studies professor.
19:34I don't use concepts.
19:35I use percepts.
19:37I seek to perceive, not to conceive, what's in front of me.
19:42And perception is exploration.
19:44Decades before anything close to modern mass media came to fruition, he predicted it all.
19:49The rise of the internet, meme culture, and media-slash-political echo chambers.
19:54The medium is the message, he warned.
19:56And most people just blinked in confusion.
19:58McLuhan saw it coming, that technology would reshape not just communication, but consciousness itself.
20:04He was dismissed as an academic weirdo with a flair for buzzwords.
20:08Now, we're living in his global village, hypnotized by screens, shaped by algorithms, and still not quite getting the message.
20:15The danger is of the very element that we live in, in the 20th century.
20:20And extinction is the immediate possibility every hour of the day.
20:24John Yudkin.
20:25In the 1970s, nutritionist John Yudkin dropped a bombshell.
20:29Sugar, and not fat, was the real driver of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.
20:34And he gave lots of correlative data, saying, sugar's the problem, and we need to reduce our consumption.
20:40His 1972 book, Pure, White, and Deadly, made the case.
20:43Sadly, the shockingly powerful sugar industry wasn't about to let that narrative take hold.
20:48I'd be very happy if everybody had four pounds of sugar a year.
20:51They eat a hundred pounds.
20:53They smeared Yudkin's reputation, buried his research, and propped up the fat-is-bad ethos in pop culture.
21:00Their accomplices in the food industry flooded shelves with low-fat, sugar-loaded products, fueling a global health crisis.
21:06Decades later, study after study proved Yudkin right.
21:10Sugar is a silent killer.
21:12The Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that scientists were paid in the 1960s to play down the link
21:18between sugar and heart disease and instead make saturated fat the culprit.
21:22Once dismissed as a crank, he's now recognized as a trailblazer in nutritional science.
21:28If only the world had listened sooner.
21:30Bennett Omalu, today, it's widely understood that the brains of star athletes can sometimes be ticking time bombs.
21:37Repeated head trauma can lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
21:41At 28, to start experiencing memory problems and cognitive changes was quite alarming.
21:53You may be surprised to learn, then, that the man who discovered CTE in NFL athletes received more than a
21:59little pushback.
21:59What were some of the things people called you back then?
22:01You know, that's insinuated I was a voodoo doctor.
22:05That was fraudulent.
22:07Forensic pathologist Bennett Omalu's study of former NFL players should have been groundbreaking.
22:11Instead, the NFL tried to bury it.
22:14In 2005, Omalu's research linking repeated head trauma to long-term brain damage was initially asked to be retracted and
22:21met with ridicule.
22:22What do they want?
22:23Your head on a spike.
22:25They want you to retract your findings.
22:27They want you to say you made it all up.
22:31I made it up.
22:32Further findings were dismissed and or met with outright denial.
22:35But as more ex-players suffered from memory loss, aggression, and tragic self-harm, the truth became undeniable.
22:42The league was forced to acknowledge the dangers of concussions, leading to massive lawsuits and game-changing reforms.
22:49You have rejuvenated my hope.
22:51And together by fate, we shall do great things.
22:55The impossible shall become possible.
22:58Thank you so much.
23:02Ernest Hemingway
23:03Ernest Hemingway was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
23:07Sadly, he spent his final years in a paranoid spiral, convinced that the FBI was watching him.
23:13Friends and family thought his paranoia was a symptom of his declining mental health,
23:17and he was subjected to multiple unsuccessful electroshock treatments.
23:21They put the electrodes to your head, and you know it's coming, and it's like being electrocuted 20 times.
23:34It turns out, though, that he was right.
23:36Declassified documents later revealed that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had been tailing Hemingway for years.
23:42They had monitored his movements and wiretapped his phone due to suspected ties with Cuba.
23:47Ironically, Hemingway had reportedly dabbled in espionage himself.
23:50He's suspected to have done some spy work for the predecessors to both the CIA and KGB.
23:56What I found was the record of Hemingway having agreed to a recruitment by the NKVD,
24:04which is the predecessor to the KGB.
24:06So that's kind of a pivotal moment in the spy business.
24:09It's like a sale to a realtor.
24:12Haunted by surveillance, Hemingway tragically took his own life in 1961,
24:16never knowing just how real his fears had been.
24:19I think he would have made such a marvelous old man.
24:23And that's what I am most sorry for, that he did not have the chance to be a marvelous old
24:31man.
24:32Dushan Dushko-Popov
24:33Dushko-Popov wasn't just an infamous double agent.
24:37He was a master manipulator, a ladies' man, and a trickster who played the Nazis like a fiddle.
24:42Dushko-Popov, double agent, was born.
24:47Codename Ivan for the Germans, codename Tricycle for the British.
24:52As a British spy, he fed misinformation to the Germans.
24:56This work gave him access to top-secret Nazi intelligence.
24:59His most crucial discovery came in 1941.
25:02Along with the information his sources in Germany provided suggesting Japan was planning a massive attack on Pearl Harbor,
25:08Popov warned that action should be taken.
25:11On the 10th of August 1941, he took the equivalent of $40,000 from Von Kastor for Plan Midas and
25:18boarded a plane for the USA.
25:20Unfortunately, J. Edgar Hoover was less than impressed.
25:24Dismissing Popov because he was a double agent, the FBI director ignored his warning.
25:28Hoover believed that being a double agent made Popov doubly untrustworthy.
25:32Months later, Pearl Harbor was in flames.
25:35Sinead O'Connor
25:36The 90s were chock-full of iconic pop culture moments.
25:40Few were as controversial as Sinead O'Connor's performance on SNL in 1992.
25:45Everywhere is war.
25:48There, she famously ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II.
25:52Fight the real enemy.
25:54With the words, fight the real enemy, she called out the Catholic Church's rampant abuse of minors.
25:59The world of pop culture subsequently treated O'Connor as a social pariah.
26:03She was mocked, blacklisted, and ridiculed, even by fellow musicians.
26:07It was funny because after the first song, there was loads of people around and they all came into the
26:11dressing room and everything.
26:12But then after that, there was nobody around.
26:13There was silence.
26:14For about half an hour, there was nobody around.
26:16Less than a decade later, the truth she tried to expose erupted into global headlines thanks to the Boston Globe's
26:22spotlight team.
26:23By then, the damage to O'Connor's career was irreversible.
26:27The world eventually realized she was right, but history took its time apologizing.
26:31And we can't heal ourselves unless we fight the right enemy.
26:34The right cause is no good just dealing with the symptoms.
26:36Claire Patterson.
26:37The scientific community knows Claire Patterson as the man who figured out Earth's age.
26:42He did it by examining lead content in the ground.
26:45It was 4.5 billion years old.
26:48If that sounds familiar, it's because it's basically the number we still cite today.
26:53But his greatest fight wasn't against time, but the very element he had dedicated his life to studying.
26:58In the 1950s and 60s, while measuring lead levels from various places around the globe, Patterson made a horrifying discovery.
27:06Modern humans could have over 1,000 times more lead in their bodies than our ancestors.
27:11The culprit, of course, was leaded gasoline.
27:13In this paper, Patterson attempted to draw public attention to the problem of increased lead levels in the environment and
27:20the food chain.
27:20When he blew the whistle, big oil and the lead industry came after him hard.
27:24They funded counter-research, blocked him from getting any more funding, and even tried to sack him.
27:30Patterson wouldn't back down.
27:31Thanks to his decades-long crusade, leaded gas was finally banned, reducing lead exposure and saving countless lives.
27:39John Snow.
27:39In the mid-1800s, cholera outbreaks were wiping out entire London neighborhoods.
27:44Over 600 people died in just a few weeks.
27:48The disease had been the bane of many of the world's cities for centuries, and the medical consensus blamed bad
27:53air or miasma.
27:55But Dr. John Snow thought otherwise.
27:57He noticed a pattern.
27:58Victims in a local neighborhood were clustered around a single water pump on Broad Street.
28:03Snow proposed a radical idea.
28:05The cholera was spread through contaminated water, not foul air.
28:08And then the cholera bacteria began to multiply, and then people would ingest the water, which provides the human intestine
28:15a place where the bacteria multiply fast.
28:18When the pump handle was removed, the outbreak slowed dramatically.
28:22You'd think this would have convinced the authorities, but Snow had no such luck.
28:27His theory was dismissed, and the pump eventually reinstated.
28:30Years later, science caught up, and Snow was vindicated as one of the fathers of modern epidemiology.
28:36John Snow had plenty of evidence to say that this water from this well contained a contaminant that caused the
28:43disease.
28:43Martha Mitchell
28:44Martha Mitchell was known as a bit of a gossip in Washington.
28:47And in this case, that was a good thing.
28:49Well, sweetie, I'll tell you what.
28:51If I'm doing anything wrong in this government, just tell me about it.
28:55The outspoken wife of Nixon's attorney general, Martha the Mouth got wind of the Watergate scandal long before the press
29:01did.
29:02Did you see where Martha Mitchell did?
29:04You know, he called somebody.
29:06He called the New York Times.
29:07She refused to be quiet about her suspicions, even calling a member of the press when she couldn't reach her
29:12husband.
29:13The White House scrambled to silence her, literally and secretly locking her in a hotel room while her husband played
29:19damage control.
29:20They told the public she was in a mental health facility, while the media mocked her and much of her
29:25family rejected her.
29:26I'll tell them all.
29:27And you know what they're going to do.
29:29They'll probably end up killing me.
29:30But guess what?
29:31She was right.
29:32Nixon's cronies had bugged, bribed, and burgled their way into political infamy.
29:37Years later, journalists admitted to the existence of what they called the Martha Mitchell effect, where they dismiss truth-tellers
29:44as delusional.
29:45In the end, Martha lost everything.
29:47But the whistleblower took Nixon down with her.
29:49We're teaching the politicians to be straight and not crooked.
29:53Giordano Bruno
29:54Giordano Bruno looked at the stars and saw infinity.
29:57The 16th century philosopher dared to suggest that the universe had no center and was filled with countless other worlds.
30:04Where he believed Copernicus's interpretation fell short, and what he wished to see rectified, was in his failure to recognize
30:11and propagate the obvious conclusion that what he had discovered disproved the notion of a finite universe put forth by
30:18the scholastic and Aristotelian minds which hitherto dominated the academic hive mind.
30:23The Catholic Church had a big problem with him.
30:26Bruno wasn't just burned at the stake in 1600.
30:29He was erased.
30:30His works were banned, and his rejection of multiple Catholic codifications of beliefs were labeled as heresy.
30:37To this, Bruno sallied forth, a second Socrates, and exclaimed,
30:42Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.
30:47But time proved him at least partially right.
30:50Decades later, Galileo would face his own persecution for insisting the Earth wasn't the center of the universe.
30:55Unlike Bruno, he recanted and was spared the flames,
30:59spending the rest of his life under house arrest.
31:01Today, Bruno's vision of an infinite cosmos is the foundation of modern cosmology.
31:06Bruno was not without his faults.
31:09But even so, he remains to this day a symbol of free thought and tolerance of differences.
31:14Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about our latest
31:20videos.
31:20You have the option to be notified for occasional videos or all of them.
31:24If you're on your phone, make sure you go into your settings and switch on notifications.
31:31Ignace Semmelweis
31:32Ignace Semmelweis had some wild notions back in his day.
31:35Doctors, he believed, should wash their hands.
31:38Although he couldn't explain why hand disinfection was so effective,
31:42his research in 1847 would go on to transform the way surgery is carried out,
31:47and infectious diseases are controlled today.
31:50In the mid-1800s, obstetrical clinics were deadly places.
31:54New mothers died of childbed fever at alarming rates.
31:58Semmelweis noticed a fascinating trend.
32:00Maternity wards run by midwives had far fewer deaths than those run by doctors,
32:05who often went straight from autopsies to delivering babies.
32:08He ordered the students to wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before each examination.
32:14The mortality rate fell from 18% to 1%.
32:18His solution was chlorinated hand washing,
32:20which actually significantly reduced the mortality rate once instituted.
32:24The medical community responded with rage, mockery, and rejection.
32:29Semmelweis was dismissed from his position,
32:31ridiculed into obscurity,
32:32and eventually committed to a mental health facility.
32:35If you try to go against authority and convention,
32:38you can run into and make some enemy.
32:42He died there in agony from septic shock.
32:45A contemporary, Joseph Lister, expanded on his work.
32:48This father of modern surgery was a trailblazer in antiseptic surgery,
32:53proving Semmelweis right.
32:54Which of these people do you think received the most unfair treatment prior to being proven right?
32:59Let us know in the comments.
33:03Let us know in the comments.
33:04Let us know in the comments.
33:04You
Comments