The first is Russ George who dumped a ship load of iron filings off the coast of Vancouver Island this summer. George had to do this surreptitiously because the entire scientific community in the field of oceanography and climate were totally against his experiment.
More than 20 years ago it was determined that high plankton growth occurred at the outlets of rivers that had high iron content. It was surmised that there was a connection. The interest in the subject was driven by the fact that plankton consumed CO2 and when they die they sequester the CO2 at the bottom of the ocean.
A few halfhearted experiments were carried out on this subject. But nothing significant was done in the past 20 years. The environmentalists world was afraid some damage might be done to the oceans. These people have no idea of the size of the oceans and they are absurdly precious.
To me, this is a lesson in the ideology of science: don't do anything that is not politically correct.
The second man who provides an important lesson about science is Stanford Ovshinsky. What is so stunning about Ovshinsky is that he is the man responsible for modern flatscreen TVs, tablet computers and anything else requiring amorphous thin surface electronics.
Ovshinsky, never went to college and never got a scientific degree. He was a pure technologist and made a greater contribution than nearly everyone else in the field of science. We are not talking 18th-century. We are talking late 20th century when science claimed complete dominance in the world.