Good day all, today we continue with Robert Beckers 'The Body Electric'...

..With three major papers in three major journals after my first year of research, I felt I'd arrived. The world has a way of cutting you down to size, however, and in the science game the method is known as citation. No matter how important your paper is, it doesn't mean anything unless it's cited as a reference in new papers by others and you get a respectable number of requests for reprints. On both counts, I was a failure. I was learning how science treats new ideas that conflict with old ones.

I didn't stay discouraged long, though. I was doing science for the love of it, not for praise. I felt the concepts emerging from my reading and research were important, and I was passionately committed to testing them. I knew that if the results were ever to change any minds, I would have to be careful not to misinterpret data. In going deeper into the electrical properties of nerves, I realized, I was about to get over my head in an area I really wasn't trained for—physics. I made one of the best decisions of my life; I looked for a collaborator.

The basic scientists at the State University of New York Upstate Medical Center, the medical school affiliated with the VA hospital, were not only uninterested, they were horrified at what I was doing and wouldn't risk their reputations by becoming associated with me in any way. So, I walked across the street to the physics department of Syracuse University and spoke to the chairman, an astronomer whom I'd met a few years earlier when I volunteered to watch the northern lights during the International Geophysical Year. After a few minutes' thought, he suggested that a guy on the third floor named Charlie Bachman might be "as crazy as you," and wished me luck.

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2022/03/part-2-body-electric-sign-of-miracle.html