- 6/14/2025
Throughout history, many individuals were ridiculed, ostracized, or worse for their revolutionary ideas and warnings. From scientists fighting against established beliefs to whistleblowers exposing corruption, these brave souls stood their ground despite facing intense opposition. Time would ultimately prove them right.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00There are no stars on television. You have TV personalities, but no TV stars.
00:05Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down our picks for 20 figures whose discoveries
00:09or beliefs led them to derision and ridicule throughout their lives.
00:13History, though, would go on to vindicate them all.
00:16To me, the Pope symbolizes everything that is evil.
00:21Number 20. Billy Mitchell.
00:23Before Tom Cruise made jets sexy, Billy Mitchell was shouting from the rooftops about their
00:28importance. Air power, he believed, was the future of warfare.
00:31But his greatest battle came after the war, when he attacked his own military superiors
00:37in a controversy that shocked the nation.
00:39A U.S. Army general with the subtlety of a howitzer, Mitchell spent the 1920s warning that
00:44aircraft would revolutionize combat. He also told anyone that would listen that America's
00:49Navy was dangerously vulnerable. When he literally bombed a captured battleship from the air to prove
00:54his point, the military brass court-martialed him for insubordination.
00:57But the court hears the prosecutor call Mitchell an ambitious opportunist. He's a danger to
01:03military discipline, the prosecutor says. Throw him out of the army.
01:07He resigned as a colonel, frustrated by the army ignoring him. 15 years later, Japanese planes
01:13sank battleships at Pearl Harbor, just like Mitchell had predicted.
01:17Number 19. Christine Collins.
01:19When Christine Collins' 9-year-old son went missing in 1928, she did everything a mother could.
01:25She contacted the police, launched a search, and held out hope.
01:29I'm calling to report a missing child. A missing child.
01:32What's your relation to the child, ma'am?
01:35It's my son.
01:37Months later, the LAPD made a big show of finding him for the papers. But there was one wrinkle.
01:43The boy they presented to Christine was not her kid. When she protested, they tossed her into a
01:48psych ward. They held her under a code 12, a psych hold for annoying or inconvenient people.
01:53The boy was indeed an imposter, part of a police cover-up to hide their massive incompetence.
01:58Sadly, her real son was never found.
02:01Still think he's out there?
02:02Why not?
02:05Three boys made a run for it that night, detective, and if
02:07one got out, then maybe either or both of the others did too.
02:12Maybe Walter's out there having the same fears that he did.
02:15Collins spent years fighting for justice, and died without ever finding her son.
02:19Number 18. William Coley.
02:21William Coley believed he could potentially cure cancer by giving people infections.
02:26It may sound insane, and his contemporaries accused him of worse.
02:31And so he hypothesized that maybe there was some kind of connection between whatever was happening
02:35during or after an infection and cancer disappearing.
02:40But he wasn't crazy. After one of his patients' tumors shrank following a serious infection,
02:45Coley leaned all the way in. He injected cancer patients with a cocktail of dead bacteria to
02:50supercharge their immune systems. The results were inconsistent, but sometimes he produced
02:55miracles. Instead of celebrating him, the medical establishment rolled its eyes and tossed his
03:00work aside in favor of surgery and radiation. Today, Coley is seen as the godfather of immunotherapy,
03:06one of the most promising frontiers in cancer treatment.
03:08This whole process is enhanced when the immune system is boosted.
03:13And that's exactly what Coley's toxins were doing.
03:16The Cancer Research Institute even named an award after him.
03:20Number 17. Rose McGowan.
03:22For years, Rose McGowan was just the girl from Charmed to most people.
03:26Did you ever try to meet the sisters? Ask them about it?
03:29Yeah, right.
03:30After all, when the show ended, her career didn't exactly blossom. That's because behind the scenes,
03:35she was fighting a darker battle. McGowan was one of the first women in Hollywood to publicly
03:40accuse Harvey Weinstein of misconduct. She did so long before Me Too became a movement,
03:45and long before anyone else stood up to back her story. Instead of support,
03:49she was gaslit, blacklisted, and smeared by powerful PR machines.
03:53Weinstein even allegedly hired ex-Massad agents to dig up dirt on her.
03:57These are people that hurt people, and that's their job.
04:00Their job is to hurt other people, so, you know, I hope they're proud at night.
04:04While others stayed silent, she kept shouting, forcing the industry to reckon with its rot.
04:09Rose was vindicated in 2018.
04:12Number 16. William Harvey.
04:14For most of human history, so-called experts believed that blood just sloshed around inside
04:19of you. Doctors believed blood was created in the liver and just kind of soaked into the body.
04:24We don't know exactly when Harvey realized he had discovered the circulation of the blood.
04:29We do know he was very surprised and taken aback by this, because it contradicted all the teaching
04:36about medicine and about the functioning of the body for 2,000 years.
04:40William Harvey looked at centuries of medical wisdom and said, well, actually, the heart's a pump.
04:45He believed that blood circulates in a loop driven by the heart.
04:49Almost no one believed him. His colleagues mocked him.
04:52His patients ditched him. Some folks even accused him of heresy.
04:56Most physicians who read it thought it was nonsense, indeed, heretical.
05:01How could William Harvey, an Englishman, oppose the views of the great Galen?
05:06And they wrote against him.
05:08But Harvey kept cutting open animals, taking measurements, and publishing the receipts.
05:12It took decades, but he was eventually proven correct.
05:15Today, his circulatory model is in every textbook, and his detractors are lost to time.
05:21Number 15. Barry Marshall
05:22Imagine being so sure you're right that you drink a glass of bacteria to prove it.
05:27The concept of discovering a new bacteria, which proved that all the medical books were wrong
05:32and had to be rewritten, that was kind of exciting to us.
05:35That's exactly what Barry Marshall did in the 1980s.
05:38Marshall was trying to convince the medical world that ulcers were not caused by stress or spicy food.
05:43He believed the culprit was H. pylori, a nasty little bacterium.
05:47Doctors laughed him off for years, clinging to outdated theories while their patients suffered.
05:52So, Marshall did something insane.
05:54He infected himself, developed gastritis, and then cured it with antibiotics.
05:59It was a mic drop moment, earning Marshall a Nobel Prize.
06:02He didn't just change how we treat ulcers.
06:05He put his money where his mouth is to prove he was right.
06:07The discovery by Dr. Warren and myself has benefited millions of people.
06:14Maybe saved a million lives over the last 10 years or 20 years.
06:17Number 14. Ludwig Boltzmann
06:19Ludwig Boltzmann believed atoms were real.
06:22That may sound obvious now, but in the 19th century, it was scientific heresy.
06:26He spent his days crunching the math, writing equations to describe the behavior of particles.
06:31His work laid the foundation for modern statistical mechanics.
06:34At the time, though, Boltzmann was a laughingstock.
06:37Despite having the math to back it up, Boltzmann spent much of his career isolated and ridiculed.
06:42Tragically, he took his own life in 1906.
06:45Just a few years later, atomic theory was vindicated, and his work became a cornerstone of modern physics.
06:51Number 13. Alice Catherine Evans
06:53If history and modern life tells us anything, it's that women often have to fight twice as hard to prove their right.
07:00Alice Catherine Evans is a prime example.
07:02While studying bacteria and dairy, Evans discovered that brucella, a particularly nasty microbe,
07:08could be transmitted from cows to humans through unpasteurized milk.
07:12Raw milk, she realized, could kill.
07:14When she went public, male scientists dismissed her findings as, quote, alarmist.
07:19The scientific establishment couldn't admit that they were wrong and a woman was right.
07:23Years later, after thousands got sick and her research was confirmed,
07:27the U.S. finally mandated milk pasteurization.
07:29Evans didn't just change food safety.
07:32She was a trailblazer for women in science, even as the men around her curdled with resentment.
07:37Number 12. Mayor Kotoku Wamura
07:39After World War II, the town of Fudai, Japan, elected Kotoku Wamura as mayor, hoping he'd rebuild.
07:45They obviously liked what they saw, re-electing him over and over until 1987.
07:51Wamura remembered Fudai getting hammered by a tsunami back in 1933.
07:54He saw the damage after a tsunami in 1933 and vowed it would never happen again.
08:00They were hit by another decades before that.
08:03The mayor vowed it would never happen again.
08:05In the 1970s, he pushed through a massive 51-foot floodgate.
08:09It was a controversial public works project mocked as overkill.
08:13Critics said it ruined the view.
08:14Wamura insisted.
08:16He died in 1997, but he was eventually proven right when the 2011 tsunami devastated much of Japan's coast.
08:23Fudai, though, was spared.
08:24Villagers are coming to his grave to pay their respects and give thanks that he had the foresight to save them.
08:31The wall he built, the one everyone laughed at, saved the entire town.
08:35Number 11. Marshall McLuhan
08:37Back in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan must have sounded like a raving madman.
08:41Listening to him in 2025 feels like witnessing a decades-old lecture from a time-traveling media studies professor.
08:47I don't use concepts. I use percepts.
08:50I seek to perceive, not to conceive, what's in front of me.
08:56And perception is exploration.
08:58Decades before anything close to modern mass media came to fruition, he predicted it all.
09:03The rise of the internet, meme culture, and media-slash-political echo chambers.
09:08The medium is the message, he warned.
09:10And most people just blinked in confusion.
09:12McLuhan saw it coming.
09:14That technology would reshape not just communication, but consciousness itself.
09:18He was dismissed as an academic weirdo with a flair for buzzwords.
09:21Now, we're living in his global village, hypnotized by screens, shaped by algorithms, and still not quite getting the message.
09:28Danger is of the very element that we live in, in the 20th century.
09:34And extinction is the immediate possibility every hour of the day.
09:38Number 10. John Yudkin
09:40In the 1970s, nutritionist John Yudkin dropped a bombshell.
09:44Sugar, and not fat, was the real driver of heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.
09:49And he gave lots of correlative data, saying sugar's the problem, and we need to reduce our consumption.
09:54His 1972 book, Pure, White, and Deadly, made the case.
09:58Sadly, the shockingly powerful sugar industry wasn't about to let that narrative take hold.
10:02I'd be very happy if everybody had four pounds of sugar a year.
10:06They eat a hundred pounds.
10:08They smeared Yudkin's reputation, buried his research, and propped up the fat-is-bad ethos in pop culture.
10:14Their accomplices in the food industry flooded shelves with low-fat, sugar-loaded products, fueling a global health crisis.
10:21Decades later, study after study proved Yudkin right.
10:25Sugar is a silent killer.
10:26The Journal of the American Medical Association reveals that scientists were paid in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease, and instead, make saturated fat the culprit.
10:37Once dismissed as a crank, he's now recognized as a trailblazer in nutritional science.
10:43If only the world had listened sooner.
10:45Number 9. Bennett Omalu
10:46Today, it's widely understood that the brains of star athletes can sometimes be ticking time bombs.
10:52Repeated head trauma can lead to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
10:57At 28, to start experiencing memory problems and cognitive changes was quite alarming.
11:08You may be surprised to learn then that the man who discovered CTE in NFL athletes received more than a little pushback.
11:15What were some of the things people called you back then?
11:16Forensic pathologist Bennett Omalu's study of former NFL players should have been groundbreaking.
11:27Instead, the NFL tried to bury it.
11:29In 2005, Omalu's research linking repeated head trauma to long-term brain damage was initially asked to be retracted, and met with ridicule.
11:37What do they want?
11:39Your head on a spike.
11:40They want you to retract your findings.
11:42They want you to say you made it all up.
11:46I made it up.
11:47Further findings were dismissed and or met with outright denial.
11:51But as more ex-players suffered from memory loss, aggression, and tragic self-harm, the truth became undeniable.
11:57The league was forced to acknowledge the dangers of concussions, leading to massive lawsuits and game-changing reforms.
12:04You have rejuvenated my hope, and together by faith, we shall do great things.
12:11The impossible shall become possible.
12:13Thank you so much.
12:17This is the boss of the team.
12:18Number 8.
12:19Ernest Hemingway
12:20Ernest Hemingway was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
12:23Sadly, he spent his final years in a paranoid spiral, convinced that the FBI was watching him.
12:29Friends and family thought his paranoia was a symptom of his declining mental health, and he was subjected to multiple unsuccessful electroshock treatments.
12:37They put the electrodes to your head, and you know it's coming, and it's...
12:43It's like being electrocuted 20 times.
12:50It turns out, though, that he was right.
12:52Declassified documents later revealed that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI had been tailing Hemingway for years.
12:58They had monitored his movements and wiretapped his phone due to suspected ties with Cuba.
13:03Ironically, Hemingway had reportedly dabbled in espionage himself.
13:07He's suspected to have done some spy work for the predecessors to both the CIA and KGB.
13:12What I found was the record of Hemingway having agreed to a recruitment by the NKVD, which is the predecessor to the KGB.
13:21So that's kind of a pivotal moment in the spy business.
13:25It's like a sale to a realtor.
13:28Haunted by surveillance, Hemingway tragically took his own life in 1961, never knowing just how real his fears had been.
13:36I think he would have made such a marvelous old man.
13:40And that's what I am most sorry for, that he did not have the chance to be a marvelous old man.
13:48Number 7. Dushko Popov
13:50Dushko Popov wasn't just an infamous double agent.
13:54He was a master manipulator, a ladies' man, and a trickster who played the Nazis like a fiddle.
13:59Dushko Popov, double agent, was born.
14:04Codename Ivan for the Germans.
14:07Codename Tricycle for the British.
14:09As a British spy, he fed misinformation to the Germans.
14:12This work gave him access to top-secret Nazi intelligence.
14:16His most crucial discovery came in 1941.
14:19Along with the information his sources in Germany provided suggesting Japan was planning a massive attack on Pearl Harbor,
14:25Popov warned that actions should be taken.
14:28On the 10th of August 1941, he took the equivalent of $40,000 from von Kastor for Plan Midas and boarded a plane for the USA.
14:37Unfortunately, J. Edgar Hoover was less than impressed.
14:41Dismissing Popov because he was a double agent, the FBI director ignored his warning.
14:45Hoover believed that being a double agent made Popov doubly untrustworthy.
14:50Months later, Pearl Harbor was in flames.
14:52Number 6. Sinead O'Connor
14:54The 90s were chock-full of iconic pop culture moments.
14:57Few were as controversial as Sinead O'Connor's performance on SNL in 1992.
15:03Everywhere is war.
15:05There, she famously ripped up a photo of Pope John Paul II.
15:10Fight the real enemy.
15:12With the words, fight the real enemy, she called out the Catholic Church's rampant abuse of minors.
15:17The world of pop culture subsequently treated O'Connor as a social pariah.
15:21She was mocked, blacklisted, and ridiculed, even by fellow musicians.
15:25It was funny because after the first song, there was loads of people around and they all came into the dressing room and everything.
15:29But then after that, there was nobody around.
15:31There was silence.
15:32For about half an hour, there was nobody around.
15:33Less than a decade later, the truth she tried to expose erupted into global headlines thanks to the Boston Globe's spotlight team.
15:41By then, the damage to O'Connor's career was irreversible.
15:45The world eventually realized she was right, but history took its time apologizing.
15:49And we can't heal ourselves unless we fight the right enemy.
15:52The right cause is no good just dealing with the symptoms.
15:54Number 5. Claire Patterson
15:56The scientific community knows Claire Patterson as the man who figured out Earth's age.
16:01He did it by examining lead content in the ground.
16:04It was 4.5 billion years old.
16:07If that sounds familiar, it's because it's basically the number we still cite today.
16:12But his greatest fight wasn't against time, but the very element he had dedicated his life to studying.
16:17In the 1950s and 60s, while measuring lead levels from various places around the globe, Patterson made a horrifying discovery.
16:25Modern humans could have over 1,000 times more lead in their bodies than our ancestors.
16:30The culprit, of course, was leaded gasoline.
16:32In this paper, Patterson attempted to draw public attention to the problem of increased lead levels in the environment and the food chain.
16:39When he blew the whistle, big oil and the lead industry came after him hard.
16:43They funded counter-research, blocked him from getting any more funding, and even tried to sack him.
16:48Patterson wouldn't back down.
16:50Thanks to his decades-long crusade, leaded gas was finally banned, reducing lead exposure and saving countless lives.
16:57Number 4. John Snow
16:59In the mid-1800s, cholera outbreaks were wiping out entire London neighborhoods.
17:04Over 600 people died in just a few weeks.
17:07The disease had been the bane of many of the world's cities for centuries, and the medical consensus blamed bad air or miasma.
17:14But Dr. John Snow thought otherwise.
17:17He noticed a pattern.
17:18Victims in a local neighborhood were clustered around a single water pump on Broad Street.
17:22Snow proposed a radical idea.
17:24The cholera was spread through contaminated water, not foul air.
17:28And then the cholera bacteria began to multiply, and then people would ingest the water,
17:33which provides the human intestine a place where the bacteria multiply fast.
17:38When the pump handle was removed, the outbreak slowed dramatically.
17:42You'd think this would have convinced the authorities, but Snow had no such luck.
17:46His theory was dismissed, and the pump eventually reinstated.
17:50Years later, science caught up, and Snow was vindicated as one of the fathers of modern epidemiology.
17:55John Snow had plenty of evidence to say that this water from this well contained the contaminant that caused the disease.
18:03Number 3.
18:04Martha Mitchell
18:04Martha Mitchell was known as a bit of a gossip in Washington.
18:08And in this case, that was a good thing.
18:10Well, sweetie, I'll tell you what.
18:12If I'm doing anything wrong in this government, just tell me about it.
18:16The outspoken wife of Nixon's attorney general,
18:18Martha the Mouth got wind of the Watergate scandal long before the press did.
18:22Did you see where Martha Mitchell did?
18:24No.
18:25He called somebody.
18:26He called the New York Times.
18:28She refused to be quiet about her suspicions,
18:30even calling a member of the press when she couldn't reach her husband.
18:33The White House scrambled to silence her,
18:36literally and secretly locking her in a hotel room while her husband played damage control.
18:40They told the public she was in a mental health facility,
18:43while the media mocked her and much of her family rejected her.
18:46I'll tell them all, and you know what they're going to do.
18:49They'll probably end up killing me.
18:51But guess what?
18:52She was right.
18:53Nixon's cronies had bugged, bribed, and burgled their way into political infamy.
18:58Years later, journalists admitted to the existence of what they called the Martha Mitchell effect,
19:03where they dismissed truth-tellers as delusional.
19:05In the end, Martha lost everything, but the whistleblower took Nixon down with her.
19:10We're teaching the politicians to be straight and not crooked.
19:13Number 2.
19:14Giordano Bruno
19:15Giordano Bruno looked at the stars and saw infinity.
19:18The 16th century philosopher dared to suggest that the universe had no center and was filled
19:24with countless other worlds.
19:25Where he believed Copernicus' interpretation fell short, and what he wished to see rectified,
19:31was in his failure to recognize and propagate the obvious conclusion that what he had discovered
19:36disproved the notion of a finite universe put forth by the scholastic and Aristotelian minds,
19:42which hitherto dominated the academic hive mind.
19:44The Catholic Church had a big problem with him.
19:47Bruno wasn't just burned at the stake in 1600.
19:50He was erased.
19:52His works were banned, and his rejection of multiple Catholic codifications of beliefs
19:56were labeled as heresy.
19:58To this, Bruno sallied forth, a second Socrates, and exclaimed,
20:03Perchance you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.
20:08But time proved him at least partially right.
20:11Decades later, Galileo would face his own persecution for insisting the Earth wasn't
20:15the center of the universe.
20:17Unlike Bruno, he recanted and was spared the flames, spending the rest of his life under
20:22house arrest.
20:23Today, Bruno's vision of an infinite cosmos is the foundation of modern cosmology.
20:28Bruno was not without his faults.
20:29But even so, he remains to this day a symbol of free thought and tolerance of differences.
20:35Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified
20:40about our latest videos.
20:42You have the option to be notified for occasional videos or all of them.
20:45If you're on your phone, make sure you go into your settings and switch on notifications.
20:491. Ignaz Semmelweis
20:54Ignaz Semmelweis had some wild notions back in his day.
20:57Doctors, he believed, should wash their hands.
21:00Although he couldn't explain why hand disinfection was so effective, his research in 1847 would
21:06go on to transform the way surgery is carried out, and infectious diseases are controlled
21:12today.
21:12In the mid-1800s, obstetrical clinics were deadly places.
21:16New mothers died of childbed fever at alarming rates.
21:20Semmelweis noticed a fascinating trend.
21:22Maternity wards run by midwives had far fewer deaths than those run by doctors, who often
21:28went straight from autopsies to delivering babies.
21:30He ordered the students to wash their hands in a solution of chlorinated lime before each
21:35examination.
21:36The mortality rate fell from 18% to 1%.
21:40His solution was chlorinated hand washing, which actually significantly reduced the mortality
21:45rate once instituted.
21:46The medical community responded with rage, mockery, and rejection.
21:51Semmelweis was dismissed from his position, ridiculed into obscurity, and eventually committed
21:55to a mental health facility.
21:57If you try to go against authority and convention, you can run into and make some enemy.
22:04He died there in agony from septic shock.
22:07A contemporary, Joseph Lister, expanded on his work.
22:10This father of modern surgery was a trailblazer in antiseptic surgery, proving Semmelweis right.
22:17Did we miss any contentious, vindicated figures?
22:19Let us know in the comments.
22:20But really, most of the things that happened during that self-experiment were a bit of a
22:25surprise.
Recommended
0:34
|
Up next
1:18:02
18:32
14:39
12:01
12:27
10:46
11:04
11:50
11:24
34:56
11:09
11:49
24:15
12:03