Distance From Harvard and lesswrong discussion of it seems relevant to this.

Barry Marshall once said that if he had gone to Harvard, he would have known that stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and wouldn’t even have considered the possibility that they might be caused by a bacterium. There are a number of other important innovators that sure look as if they benefited from living as far as possible from the sources of establishment opinion. Back when continental drift was officially nonsense, quite a few geologists in South Africa and Australia thought it must be correct – partly because there are local geological facts that are hard to explain any other way (like ancient glacial moraines in Australia whose rocks originated in South Africa) but also because physical distance translates into mental distance.