That's a good idea--forget it or test it? The case of sudden infant death

Abstract

Good ideas only come occasionally. Most of mine have come in the middle of the night and, unless I have forced myself to write them down, they have gone by morning. Perhaps it is just as well, since the path of new ideas, like that of love, rarely runs smooth. Much of science progresses slowly and incrementally but occasionally, like a beneficial genetic mutation, a leap in understanding is made that changes everything about the subject. As Alexander Pope had it, Nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night; God said ‘Let Newton be!’, and all was light. And of course Einstein had his annus mirabilis in 1909 or, as JC Squire put it, It could not last: the Devil howling ‘Ho, let Einstein be’, restored the status quo. These ideas come from somewhere. Sometimes they are the product of years of reasoning and experiment, as in Darwin’s case, sometimes they come from the coincidence of two or more disparate lines of thought, sometimes serendipity or just a chance encounter. But having arrived, they require pursuit and this is where the trouble starts. What do you do with a new idea? Withering’s investigation of the foxglove was not strictly his idea but that of an old woman in Shropshire who had used it in the dropsy; he was asked what he thought about it and proceeded to his investigation, eventually published in the hope of stopping its over-enthusiastic use and its side effects. From 1775 until 1785, he patiently examined its effects on 163 patients and …