As I've laid out this week (part 1, part 2, part 3), the realization that a fairly simple, toxin-carrying bacterium could cause a "complex" and mysterious disease like hemolytic uremic syndrome came only with 30 years' of scientific investigation and many false starts and misleading results. Like many of these investigations, the true cause was found due to a combination of hard work, novel ways of thinking, and simple serendipity--being able to connect the dots in a framework where the dots didn't necessarily line up as expected, and removing extraneous dots as necessary. It's not an easy…
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