On 02/23/2012 04:16 PM, Ron Hoggan wrote:
... More recently, helicobacter pylori was identified in
> 1982 by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. Their work was summarily
> dismissed because, to use your words, "widely accepted scientific
> theory based on facts" convinced their detractors that no bacteria
> could survive in the highly acidic environment of the human stomach.
> Those authorities dismissed Marshall and Warren's findings as a
> personal, deeply flawed belief.
>

"widely accepted scientific theory" may be really only another 
hyposthesis, so it is politics and not science.
Someone said it better than I, see below:

"Let's be clear: The work of science has nothing whatever to do with 
consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the 
contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which 
means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the 
real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is 
reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great 
precisely because they broke with the consensus."

From:http://friendsoffreedom.org/

William