In almost every profession - whether it's law or journalism finance or medicine or academia or running a small business - people rely on confidential communications to do their jobs. We count on the space of trust that confidentiality provides. When someone breaches that trust we are all worse off for it.
When a scientist is ahead of his times it is often through misunderstanding of current rather than intuition of future truth. In science there is never any error so gross that it won't one day from some perspective appear prophetic.
