- Machiavelli's Laboratory is a free ebook that I published on April 13, 2010. It is a satiric discourse on scientific ethics, from the perspective of an unethical scientist. Please don't take any of the advice and opinions in the book (or the excerpts featured in this blog) seriously.
Stigler's law of eponymy, "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."
-SM Stigler
One of the most rigid rules of scientific discovery is that the person credited with being "the first" ..... is not.
Christopher Columbus was not the first European to lead an expedition to North America. Alexander Graham Bell was not the first person to invent the telephone. Guglielmo Marconi was not the inventor of radio. Joseph Fourier was not the first mathematician to invent what is now known as the Fourier transform. Einstein did not invent the field of relativity. In all these cases, the credited "firsts" were preceded by others, who made important contributions to the "final" discoveries.
In the field of cancer research, James Ewing (1866-1943) is credited with being the first to use the term "precancer" to describe the early and treatable phase of cancer development.[1] In a 1914 paper, Ewing wrote:[2]
"If inoperable advanced cancer is incurable, and localized cancer eradicable, the disease is preventable by dealing with its preliminary stages. Precancerous lesions are not cancers. Practically they differ enormously from the established disease. They can usually be removed by trivial or safe operations, and they are sometimes amenable to less violent treatment."
Thanks to Google's ngram viewer, we can actually test this assertion by searching for the years in which the term "precancerous" appears in the English literature.
Here is the result:
"Precancerous" was used in 1849 (before Ewing was born) and 1876 (when Ewing was 10 years old) and throughout the latter 19th century (preceding Ewing's 1914 paper).
This only goes to show that ideas percolate through scientific communities before they bubble out as a finished idea. As Carl Sagan said (but perhaps he was not the first to say so), "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
REFERENCES
1. Cardiff RD. Borowsky AD.Precancer: sequentially acquired or predetermined? Toxicol Pathol 2010 38:171-179, 2010.
2. Ewing J. Precancerous diseases and precancerous lesions, especially in the breast. Medical Record 86, 951-958, 1914.
- © 2011 Jules Berman
