How can you tell when a scientist is lying? They don't footnote : the sad case of Gwyn MacFarlane

Before I knew much about penicillin , I really enjoyed Gwyn Macfarlane's two books on penicillin - he's such a smooth writer.

But now that I have seen many of the primary documents and more particularly now that I have the exact 20 year chronology of early penicillin firmly set in my mind (one of the very few things I don't mind saying that I am very good at) , MacFarlane severely depresses me.

Why are so many scientists such morally bad historians ?

He sought in both books to redress the wrong done to his old boss Howard Florey by the many fabrications in the Fleming Myth that gives almost all the credit for anything good in wartime penicillin to Fleming alone.

A worthy objective.

But he can only do so it seems by doing a Fleming - by seeking to denigrate all the good done by Florey and Fleming's North American counterpart, Henry Dawson.

Macfarlane claims that Dawson's announcing of the first penicillin injections in human patients in history got little press attention.

But no footnote to back up his claim, basically saying that he has checked such indices as the North American Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and found nothing.

(See page 182 in the 1984 British edition of his book Alexander Fleming ) .

In fact, Dawson's May 5th 1941 announcement at a big big international medical convention in Atlantic City was a big press story.

More importantly, it was that rarity, an unexpected big story.

At least in the recollection of the New York Times' top science reporter William L Laurence - a man with a world reputation for knowing all and seeing all that was newsworthy in new science.

So a big headline in his New York Times , right next to the business section ,where it inspired Pfizer management to take up penicillin.

 And Pfizer (let me remind you) made most of WWII's penicillin, all by itself.

Ditto big headlines Philadelphia's biggest paper and in the then giant newsmagazine Newsweek .

Naturally then both American wire services picked it up so that it appeared in remote communities all over North America the next day.

Reported at far afield as the South African Medical Journal.

By contrast, I have never found any contemporary news coverage of the complete cure of Yale university's Ann Miller in March 1942 in any periodical.

And nobody - particularly nobody from that time period from Merck or Yale , with a great interest in seeking such material - has shown any such press citations.

As part of Macfarlane's campaign against Fleming , this cure in far off America can only add to Florey's fame - because his closest scientific friends in America were all from Merck or Yale.

So page 196 of Macfarlane's Alexander Fleming has him claiming (as always without a footnote of proof)  that the American popular press made much of her cure and that it pressed for rapid factory production of this miracle cure - one paper at this time, he claims , even called it a "giant germ killer".

Err, no they didn't.

But the headline in the New York Times a year earlier on May 6th 1941 (you can look it up ) did call Dawson's pioneering efforts a Giant Germ Killer.

So MacFarlane did know that Dawson had gotten much press attention in May 1941 , but he ignored this fact .

All because it stole some of the lustre from his old boss.

So instead he took this 1941 press acclaim away from Dawson and transferred it instead to an 1942 event that lacked any press attention -- all to help bolster Macfarlane's case about Florey's right to more penicillin fame.

I call this sort of academic card shark tactics sleazy and if Macfarlane was in a room with me I'd tell him so to his face - but unfortunately he died not long after publishing Alexander Fleming.

Read Macfarlane ? Yes, I do - all the time. Trust him?
No, I don't....