[TomB]

Whoops, looks like you've got another bad article. While it doesn't make anything up, it certainly embellishes Dr. Kilmer's plight:

His work was not met with applause in the scientific community, which coalesced in a herd mentality around the concept of cholesterol.

McCully was denied tenure, and soon left Harvard. In 1995, Meir Stampfer of Harvard recalled for NBC's Tom Brokaw what McCully went through for daring a different idea.

Here is an interview which paints quite a different picture:

"McCully: The immediate reaction when I first started was supportive. I had a number of colleagues who were interested, and the chairman of my department was interested for a period of about five or six years. I was able to publish the basic elements of the theory until about 1975, when the chairman of my department retired. The new chairman informed me that I would have to support my work in some way but no he made no effort to help obtain this support. My laboratory was removed from the department to another part of the hospital. It was made clear to me that I should look elsewhere for support. The Director of the hospital told me that Harvard Medical School believed that I hadn't proven my theory. I left Harvard at the end of December of 1978 and came to Providence VA Medical Center in 1981 where I have worked ever since.

Sounds like he wasn't getting anywhere with his research and was let go (perhaps he didn't get along well with the new chairman?).

Anyway, the real story is much less "sexy" than what you posted.

You really need to quite taking these articles at face value.

[krodriguesdc]

Kilmer McCully, M.D. had this to say in an interview as well - is this article bad too?...

here's the link...

"I had discovered a new explanation for our deadliest disease," he said, "I thought I would get a big-shot professorship out of it." Instead, his research was labeled ‘malpractice’ and ‘errant nonsense,’ and he lost his junior faculty position at Massachusetts General. After fifty-one job rejections, the Harvard-trained pathologist took a position at a small VA hospital in Providence, where he borrowed money from better-funded colleagues to continue his research. In the late nineties, a slew of new studies supported McCully’s findings, and homocysteine levels are now routinely screened as a risk factor for heart disease. “

Hmmmm...