Occasionally I encounter the shameful side of scientific "skepticism" in common publications. Here's one below. Author Peter Weiss opens his STM/AFM article with an inside view of how the experts received news of this new (and Nobel-prizewinning) invention.

I believe that this sort of behavior is typical. It's scary, since it suggests that weaker, harder-to-prove discoveries will be laughed off the stage, entirely supressed by the same sort of ridicule. Evidence in support of STM microscopes is fairly easy to produce. Once the idea is out, even high school students can build them. But what of the other experiments which are more difficult to replicate? Won't the contempuous laughter of the experts (and their responses during peer review) act to suppress new and unconventional discoveries?

I dearly hope that most new discoveries withstand the attacks of the belittlers, and survive to make the world a different place. My suspicion is that there are enormous numbers of discoveries which did not survive, not because they were invalid, but because their discoverers did not have the resources needed to defeat the forces of intellectual intolerance and scientific xenophobia.