Max Planck is oft-quoted as saying that new theories do not triumph by convincing their opponents but by their opponents dying off and a new generation taking over. The claim is plausible but some evidence suggests it is false (Hull et al. 1978; Diamond 1980).
Our elders may sometimes be obstacles to progress, but they also may sometimes instead be catalysts of progress.
Those who deviate from mainstream views often suffer in terms of job security and career advancement. So most tone down their deviations and swim with the current.
But when you retire, your money and your time are your own. The penalties of deviation are fewer. And some, when they retire, want to take advantage of a last chance to make the world better. So to pursue their ikigai they swim toward progress, not toward prudence.
Take Ira Long who died recently. She had been an organic chemist. When she retired she wanted to take more direct action to do good. The AIDs epidemic was in full swing, so she contributed her expertise to the AIDs activists who stood up against the FDA to save lives by making new therapies available sooner.
Those involved with both sides of the conflict, say that Iris Long made a difference:
(p. 30) Iris Long, a chemist whose knowledge of the intricacies of pharmaceutical clinical trials and the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process made her a transformational figure in ACT UP, the militant political action group dedicated to ending the AIDS crisis, died on April 4 [2026] in Astoria, Queens.
. . .
By 1987, when Dr. Long first attended a meeting of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, she had retired from her work as an organic chemist. She was looking to help people directly, rather than in a laboratory. She was not politically active, didn’t know anyone with AIDS and wasn’t even sure she had ever met anyone who was gay.
“God, the epidemic was getting so bad, and she thought she could help,” Jim Eigo, a writer and leading ACT UP member who worked closely with Dr. Long, said in an interview.
. . .
“She was their scientific North Star,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview. “She told them that if you’re going to interact with the scientific community, you’re going to have to understand the science.”
. . .
Her guidance, Mr. Eigo said, empowered key ACT UP members, including Mark Harrington, to communicate with researchers and officials at the F.D.A. and other government agencies on a more equal, and therefore less confrontational, footing.
“They became so expert,” said Peter Staley, a prominent member of ACT UP, “that I witnessed some shocking conversations between Mark Harrington and Fauci talking about his lab work, and Fauci would just look stunned by Mark’s questions.”
. . .
Dr. Long, Mr. Eigo and Garry Kleinman, another ACT UP member, made a presentation to New York University doctors who were conducting clinical trials for AIDS drugs. The meeting soon led the F.D.A. to adopt parallel drug trials — with the result that patients who had exhausted azidothymidine, or AZT, the first drug approved to treat AIDS, could now take another drug (initially ganciclovir) that had passed the agency’s safety trials even while it was still being tested for effectiveness.
. . .
. . . Dr. Long knew that her background could be useful to the group. Her research had focused on a class of antiretroviral drugs called nucleoside analogues — altered sugar molecules trained to lure diseased cells away from healthy cells — of which AZT was one.
“She fully recognized that this would be one of the biggest epidemics in the history of mankind, and that not enough people were stepping up,” Mr. Staley said.
At an early meeting, Dr. Long was speaking to a large group that was growing restless with her presentation. She was not a gifted speaker — although she was better in small groups — but the activist Vito Russo rose to her defense.
“Shut up and listen!” he shouted, according to Mr. France’s book. “Listen! I don’t think any of you paid Iris Long the respect you should. There is no one doing any work in ACT UP that has a greater chance of doing real good for people with AIDS.”
. . .
“I was always a laboratory person, and now, interacting with people, it was completely different and something I had never done before,” she told the ACT UP Oral History Project in 2003. “I was not a joiner before, at all. But I was a fighter-type person that would fight for somebody’s rights.”
The AIDs activist rebellion is an important proof-of-concept. The concept is that the FDA should allow patients more choice of what medicines they consume. (Or another way to say it is that the power of the FDA to restrict free choice should be limited.) This is one of the rare cases where those with urgent ‘skin-in-the-game’ succeeded in speeding up or unbinding the regulatory process, in order to save lives (see Bhidé 2017).
While waiting for more libertarian policies, those with limited longevity may infer from the AIDs example that guerilla activist tactics can be justified and effective (see Thierer 2020, Tusk 2018).
Other cases where those who quit their jobs, or retired from them, swam toward progress can be found in in Richard Harris’s Rigor Mortis exposé. Contaminated cell lines are apparently endemic in medical research, undermining the reproducibility and clinical usefulness of much research. Scientists using the cell lines do not have the time or incentive to investigate this. If they discovered that their cell lines were contaminated, their past research and future careers could be jeopardized.
So to identify the contamination it takes the rare mission-oriented persons who are free of (or who have freed themselves from) perverse incentives.
Roland Nardone, at the age of 77, “was asked what he intended to do with the rest of his life” (Harris 2017, p. 96). He embarked on a “ten-year quest to straighten out . . . [the] glaring problem” of “bogus cell lines” (Harris 2017, pp. 96-97).
Amanda Capes-Davis “quit her job” at an institute in Sydney, Australia “to devote her full attention” to identifying contaminated cell lines (Harris 2017, pp. 97-98).
Christopher Korch “retired from academic, spends his energy, . . . , trying to untangle decades of bungled science surrounding cell cultures” (Harris 2017, p. 102).
Those with their own resources are less constrained to conform, and so pay a lower price when they choose to catalyze progress. This group includes the retired, as well as self-made entrepreneurs, the inheritors of wealth, or the occupiers of sinecures. PalmPilot founder and neuroscientist Jeff Hawkins (2021) is an example, as are some of the Victorian gentlemen scientists (see Champlin 1994; Harris 2017, pp. 169-170; Knell 2000; Maddox 2017; Repcheck 2004; Rudwick 1985).
The Iris Long obituary quoted above is:
Richard Sandomir. “Iris Long, 92, Chemist, Virus Expert And Science Mentor to AIDS Activists.” The New York Times, First Section (Sun., April 19, 2026): 30.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed word, added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date April 17, 2026, and has the title “Iris Long, Scientific Mentor to AIDS Activists, Dies at 92.”)
Bibliography of Other Articles and Books Mentioned above:
Bhidé, Amar. “Constraining Knowledge: Traditions and Rules That Limit Medical Innovation.” Critical Review 29, no. 1 (Jan. 2017): 1–33.
Champlin, Peggy. Raphael Pumpelly: Gentleman Geologist of the Gilded Age. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1994.
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. “Age and the Acceptance of Cliometrics.” Journal of Economic History 40, no. 4 (Dec. 1980): 838–41.
France, David. How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed Aids. New York: Knopf, 2016.
Harris, Richard. Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy Science Creates Worthless Cures, Crushes Hope, and Wastes Billions. New York: Basic Books, 2017.
Hawkins, Jeff. A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence. New York: Basic Books, 2021.
Hull, David L., Peter D. Tessner, and Arthur M. Diamond, Jr. “Planck’s Principle: Do Younger Scientists Accept New Scientific Ideas with Greater Alacrity Than Older Scientists?” Science 202 (Nov. 17, 1978): 717–23.
Knell, Simon J. The Culture of English Geology, 1815-1851. Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2000.
Maddox, Brenda. Reading the Rocks: How Victorian Geologists Discovered the Secret of Life. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2017.
Repcheck, Jack. The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of Earth’s Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books Group, 2003.
Rudwick, Martin J. S. The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.
Thierer, Adam. Evasive Entrepreneurs and the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments. Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 2020.
Tusk, Bradley. The Fixer: My Adventures Saving Startups from Death by Politics. New York: Portfolio, 2018.
