Alexander Fleming never asserted his quite spurious claim that he had long advocated a lifesaving role for penicillin until the beginning of September 1941.
That was exactly the time when the person most likely to be able and willing to accurately dispute that claim, his friend and fellow penicillin pioneer Howard Florey, was (in) conveniently out of the country and unable to respond because of war restrictions on communications.
When one of the UK's biggest newspapers - the Daily Herald - took up Fleming's claim from his letter to the editor in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) , the infamous "Fleming Myth" was fully made.
Because , quite quickly, both popular and learned journalists took up and repeated the myth on and on throughout the next month.
Nobody from Florey's team at Oxford University refuted the the myth before it grew.
None there dared speak up for the boss , for like present day Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Florey was a controlling individual who particularly hated the popular media.
Florey had done nothing to diminish Fleming and had been the picture of kindness to him - which itself was rather unusual for Florey.
He would continue to bend over backwards towards Fleming for at least another year .
For example, by personally delivering some of his own precious penicillin to Fleming to help him save a life - the only injection of penicillin Fleming ever gave in the 14 years since he first discovered the substance.
I feel that Alexander Fleming was sneaky in the way he operated this end run around his friend when that friend's back was turned.
I have a feeling that Leonard Colebrook could provide other examples of when his friend Alexander Fleming also was sneaky in how he had gradually replaced Colebrook in the affections of their joint boss, Sir Almroth Wright.
In person, Florey was instantly hard to like and Fleming was instantly easy to like - but superficial surface impressions did not convey the true nature of either man ..
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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