Facts can evolve, they can be renegotiated, they can change relevance, significance, they can also cease to exist. Before Steele and co, others have stood on theoretical ground from which Weismann's fact looked shaky. Paul Kammerer and his brilliant biographer Arthur Koestler stood there, and so have 20th century advocates of cellular inheritance documented by Jan Sapp's historical researches. The counter claim, the counter fact needs more than to be asserted, it has to be breathed into scientific practice, to some degree at least. Hopeful candidates to become new facts, new discoveries, begin their lives as weak and vulnerable claims, mere claims, hedged about with lots of argument, footnotes, massaged data, skilled rhetoric of presentation.
Most claims die, never taken up, even to be refuted.
Some live on in footnotes or as minor agreed pieces in some later arguments. Steele's early attempts to establish the inheritance of acquired characteristics at the molecular level in the immune system were controversial and met with legitimate as well as somewhat political and personal resistance. His early bids were not taken up. Steele's early claims were based on quite different modes of experiment, instrumentation and data than at present. In recent years the assemblage of new teams, and the adoption of new techniques of investigation, have led first to a slow, and now to a quickening flow of evidence in favour of Steele's claims.