Perhaps the best summary of life in academia that I have ever heard:
There are four stages of adopting new ideas
The first is “It’s impossible”
The second is “Maybe it’s possible, but it’s weak and uninteresting”
The third is, “It’s true and I told you so”
And the fourth is, “I thought of it first”
From H. Koprowski, "Vaccines and sera through plant biotechnology," Vaccine, 23 (2005), 1757-1763.