These are terribly sad and unfair situations. These anecdotes are just the tip of the iceberg, I'm sure, too.
There are at least two books for those interested in the radical notion that science should continually consider challenges to the status quo, rather than perpetuate a suffocating chorus of uniformity.
One is "Ideas in Conflict" by Theodore J. Gordon, 1966. In it, he recounts multiple case histories of visionaries whose ideas were correct, but were severely derided by their scientist buddies. One case history was about the guy who insisted that Venus was a planet, not a comet as dictated by the astronomers of the time. I think some of the right thinkers died before their ideas came to be known as scientific and then popular truths.
Another really excellent book on the changes in who controlled science over history is "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Thomas S. Kuhn. Make sure you get the 3rd edition (1996) because the older ones are extremely difficult to read. This is more of a scholarly style book than Gordon's.
The tyranny of statistics did not begin until 1820 in the Western world. Statistics, like polls, are used and abused by scientists to advance their agendas.
> One case history was about the guy who insisted that Venus was a planet, not a comet as dictated by the astronomers of the time.
Entirely backwards. Velikovsky [sic?] loudly proclaimed that Venus was a comet spat out (somehow) from Jupiter, that (somehow) wandered around the inner solar system and (somehow) caused much of the ruckus described in the Odl Testaments (stopping the sun ion the sky, partign the Red Sea, etc.) and then (somehow) settled into a perfectly sedate solar orbit.
Astronomers have known that Venus was a planet and not a comet for millenia.
You do raise a point with Velikovsky, though. Many people have produced "radical" views, like Galileo, Kepler, Darwin and Einstein, and been sometimes badly and wrongly mauled by their peers. But many *more* radical ideas, like Velikovsky, the Dean Drive, Larmarck, Marx, the IDers, etc. are just dead wrong. Just because you're novel doesn't mean you're right.