StarTalk Radio · Neil deGrasse Tyson

Told You So! with Matt Kaplan

April 3, 2026·1 hr 12 min·5 clips

Ignaz Semmelweis discovered doctors were killing mothers by not washing their hands, cutting deaths from 21% to zero.

The premise is blunt. Some scientists knew something real, said it out loud, and paid for it before later generations could point back with Told You So certainty. Gary sets up the fight: science running into religion, government, the establishment, and sometimes science itself. The sticky-up nail gets hammered when change makes people uncomfortable. Matt Kaplan brings the receipts, laying out scientists who were prosecuted, tortured, killed, ridiculed, exiled, or imprisoned before being proved right. Then Pasteur walks in, and the mood gets sharper. Kaplan describes him as more ruthless than the classroom version: brilliant and successful, but also good at discrediting people who got in his way. Neil asks for the evidence. Kaplan points to translated journals and says the material surfaced in a pretty academic book in 2003. The defense does not land cleanly. As Kaplan tells it, the author's excuse leaned on the pressure of late 1800s French academic life. The room turns that into a comic riff about French brusqueness, then snaps back to reputation management. Pasteur still mattered. Kaplan is not denying the genius or the success. He is saying the success came with positive storytelling, plagiarism, and damage to other people. That tension gives the episode its bite. Science looks tidy from a distance, but the people doing it can be vain, scared, ambitious, and very human. By the end, the target is bigger than Pasteur: scientists and the public both know how to behave badly.

As heard by us

A lively StarTalk conversation about scientists vindicated late, and the institutions and rivals that resisted them.

StarTalk frames scientific progress as a bruising human story, where new evidence can run into religion, government, the establishment, and rival scientists.

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Why you'd press play

Some scientists were jailed for being right. Others got famous for stealing from them.

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