It is in the response to mistakes, of technique or of judgment, that one sees most clearly the human side of science's practitioners: a mix of pride, stubbornness, humility, honesty, dismay, and regret that one could expect to encounter in any section of the population. There are the inevitable diehards, whose pride forces them to concoct ever-more-elaborate explanations for the facts in order to avoid confession of error. There are the crusaders, determined at all costs to expose the foolishness. And there are the "told-you-so's," generally members of the scientific elite, who make little contribution while the debate is raging but are ready to heap scorn on the perpetrators afterward for their "obvious" mistakes. All this, of course, is the antithesis of objective science, but follows as inevitably as night follows day from the fact that science is practiced by people and not by automatons.

A Biography of Water: Life's Matrix [18, p. 291]