I also don’t know how the factors interacted; but the fact that the attention brought the…quality…of the research to light might also have been a factor.
If work had been of high quality they might have managed to keep a “whiny medical ethicists whine about the future they aren’t decisive enough to invent” narrative going (indeed, at least in some comment sections there is still a ‘hooray for the disrupter!’ brigade); but the more scientific attention he attracted the less flattering the quality of his work, even if the ethics don’t bother you, became.
That revelation of frankly shoddy work bites you in at least a couple of ways: the serious risk that your results will be trash is an obvious problem for the notion that such sorry ends could justify your means; and, when there are people doing much more technically proficient work(just not in humans because they aren’t cranks) you look much less like a figure of progress and much more like someone who drifted away from the ongoing advances your discipline is actually making, albeit on lower profile projects, and toward something of a backwater where scrutiny is light and you get to be a relatively big fish; but which is saved from being kind of pathetic only by also being generally condemned.
That’s not a flattering look.
