“ I believe both those things , ” replied Yudkin . “ That is exactly the opposite of what my doctor told me , ” said McGovern . In a 2015 paper titled Does Science Advance One Funeral contact.funeralvigil.meet at a Time ? , a team of scholars at the National Bureau of Economic Research sought an empirical basis for a remark made by the physicist Max Planck : “ A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light , but rather because its opponents eventually die , and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it . ” The researchers identified more than 12,000 “ elite ” scientists from different fields . The criteria for elite status included funding , number of publications , and whether they were members of the National Academies of Science or the Institute of Medicine .