I just finished watching a BBC/Discovery Channel documentary about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

In 1972, a respected SIDS researcher published a paper linking SIDS with an infant breathing problem called apnea, following his study of a family where all five children died in infancy.

"Hooray!" cried researchers, "an answer!", and it became *the* paper on SIDS in America, even after a paediatrician in Britain, using a sample of over 9000 babies, found no correlation between breathing difficulties and SIDS.

Twenty years of largely-wasted SIDS research, and thousands of dead infants, later, the apnea hypothesis had its legs hacked out from underneath it when it was determined that the original five babies were murdered by their mother.