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Abstract
The history of science is full of rejections of novel discoveries that challenged
the dominant paradigm. The reasons for rejection on the part of the scientific community
are discussed. Nonetheless, scientific anomalies are crucial to promoting continuous
scientific innovation and breakthroughs. The most challenging anomalies are recognized
only after a reasoned explanation has been offered and accepted. Many of these anomalies
come from the ‘frontier sciences’, areas of scientific inquiry that are not yet mainstream.
The extraordinary obstacles that frontier scientists face are elaborated. In the light
of this, strategies are offered toward progress, particularly for research in homoeopathy
and low dose bio-effects.
Several frontier areas of research in biology and medicine relate to the subtler features
of life that seem to defy explanation by conventional molecular mechanism. Frontier
scientists working in the areas of consciousness studies, epigenetic inheritance,
certain topics in bio-electromagnetics, and homoeopathy and other low dose bio-effects
offer science the gift of new questions that go beyond the dominant paradigm of mechanical
reductionism. Often regarded as isolated anomalies by the mainstream, the results
of their investigations taken collectively show need for a larger paradigm to accommodate
them. Biology appears to entering a crisis. Whereas conventional science maintains
that biological information is stored and transferred via biomolecular structures
such as DNA, the novel frontier findings suggest that other informational signals
not attributable to discrete chemical structures may elicit biological effects. These
signals may be interacting with a more subtle bioregulatory system that is a property
of the whole organism, such as its endogenous electromagnetic field.
