Got a quick insight about how penicillin works: interferes with cell-wall building which is a destroy and recreate process by preventing the recreate part.
Got a quick view into the scientific process and communication: Fleming focused on the insight - penicillium kills staphylococcus - and left out the circuitous detail. This is important so that the big win here is very clear.
And got an insight into human nature and memory: Fleming didn’t tell the accidental contamination story until much later. It could possibly be even an idea someone else might have come up with which then took root in his mind (ironic haha!)
The communication aspect reminds me of Mendel’s far too perfect ratios for his pea plants. That kind of “repeat till difference clear” statistics would be decried today but perhaps that was to communicate rather than to determine.
And finally, I really enjoy reading about human process innovation because I think it’s a big factor in how Humanity grows. The lab notebook has to be some kind of star performer here - Fleming’s notes allow us to look back like this.
When I experiment with things, I naturally lean to keeping notes on my test protocol, observations, and results. But not because of some personal genius. It’s just the standard way I was taught as a child in our science labs.
I won’t claim to the rigor of a microbiology lab but even just the process notes help a lot, which is useful since I’m just testing molecules on myself.
If you are not familiar with more of Mendel or plant biology, he got extremely lucky in picking a two chromosome species. The next plant he picked had more than two chromosome types so he spent the rest of his life hitting his head against the wall - obvious to us but him not having a theory and expertise with microscopes to explain his pea results hampered him greatly beyond his initial pea plant studies.
So many other good details that get to how impossibly multivariate biology research is, like the need to have several days at the exact temperature.
It's not uncommon for results in biology to have this kind of snag in reproducibility even now. Sometimes it's due to attributing variations to something like "steady hands at the bench", but other times it can even be a deliberate attempt to prevent rivals from duplicating a process before it can be patented and privatized.
Hmm, sounds like the spores must have come from the outside. Otherwise he'd be saying his colleague has contaminated the building with improperly stored fungal colonies and he himself let those spores contaminate his lab. So yeah, definitely from the outside.
“Despite this close professional association, however, Hare claims to have played no part in the discovery or original research on penicillin nor to have discussed them with Fleming”
It’s nice to see that the bickering about who stole whose research does not affect all old discoveries.
One of my favorite "myths" about the discovery of stainless steel:
Metallurgist is trying out all kinds of steels looking for a particular attribute. He would dutifully record each recipe + test in a notebook but if a particular batch didn't have the attribute, he would throw it out a window into an outdoor scrap pile.
Several months go by and he's cleaning up the pile and notices that one of the blocks has no rust or corrosion. He knows that the pile is six months old but doesn't know which of the recipes this block was connected to.
So he repeats ALL of the block recipes from the last 6 months but labels each block so he can figure out which recipe led to the "stainless" steel.
I recall reading that the microwave oven was invented by a physicist after he walked by a radiation chamber and the chocolate bar in his pocket melted... makes me wonder if there was any historic license taken in that case as well.
That was a lot of words to get to the point that Fleming probably misremembered the sequence of events when he retold the story 15 years later. He even mentioned this possibility at the time. Interesting article but not much of a mystery.
Tangentially related: doxycycline helps improve muscle and tendon tear recovery by enhancing the performance of matrix proteins that form "scaffolding", by inhibiting factors that break them down. "By inhibiting MMPs, doxycycline helps preserve and remodel the ECM, accelerating repair and improving biomechanical strength (e.g., tensile strength and reduced creep/strain)". Crazy. I'm a big fan off high-ROI off-label uses of well-tolerated, cheap, out-of-patent "WHO essential medecines list" pharmas. There's much to be found there.
Another tidbit: inderol (propranolol, beta-blocker) can aide PTSD recovery by reducing the emotional potency of traumatic memories when taken in a therapeutic replay.
In my opinion, we're possessed by a cultural epidemic of think pieces doing rich and nuanced science history, but wrongly framed in the form of correcting "myths" that, in their substance amount to quibblings over narrative emphasis. It's easy to get taken in by the framing because it truly is enlightening, and the argument goes down so smooth because its embedded in a rich, curious, and fascinating scientific history that otherwise embodies best practices I would happily celebrate.
But the key details about the story of penicillin are that a moldy plate showed bacteria-free clearing, Fleming saw it, isolated the mold, proved its germ-killing filtrate and published the finding, which is the heart of the story and which is not a myth.
I'm sure it's true enough that St Mary's windows were usually kept shut to keep pathogens in and contaminants out, that London's August 1928 cold snap would have slowed staph growth, that Fleming's first notes Or 8 weeks later than the actual event, and that a modern plate seeded with bacteria first will not produce the celebrated halo unless the mold is given a head start. The article makes much of the fact that today’s researchers cannot reproduce the famous halo if they add staph first, yet that difficulty rebuts a sequence Fleming never claimed to have used.
These points are significant, even fascinating, yet the article inflates them into a strobe-lit "MYTH" banner, turning normal human imprecision about times and temperatures into evidence of wholesale fiction, which abuses the ordinary friction of any retrospective account and punishes the story for the very human messiness that makes it instructive.
The window quibble, the incubator gap, and the replication protocol do not touch the central, uncontested fact that chance contamination plus observational curiosity gave medicine its first antibiotic.
Hare's theory predicts that there would need to be a cold snap at just the right time, and lo and behold there was. Probability isn't an issue if the only reason you are considering the probability is because the event already happened. Indeed the low probability of such an event transpiring goes a long way towards explaining why the discovery was not made earlier.
Root-Bernstein's theory makes no such testable predictions, and it solves the issue of an incomplete record on September 3rd with incomplete or inaccurate records elsewhere. It seems to me extremely plausible that fleming did not record the results of a botched, uncontrolled experiment but still recognized it as an indicator of something interesting that warranted follow-up. If I were in his position I would preserve the random dish for comparison to the more rigorous follow up experiment. I certainly don't put any stock into the argument that if the story had gone as Root-Bernstein describes it would have been too circuitous for scientific publishing, if anything it would be much more harmonious with standard scientific writing than the chance observation story.
"Presenter[John Cleese]: Penguins, yes, penguins. What relevance do penguins have to the furtherance of medical science? Well, strangely enough quite a lot, a major breakthrough, maybe. It was from such an unlikely beginning as an unwanted fungus accidentally growing on a sterile plate that Sir Alexander Fleming gave the world penicillin. James Watt watched an ordinary household kettle boiling and conceived the potentiality of steam power. Would Albert Einstein ever have hit upon the theory of relativity if he hadn't been clever? All these tremendous leaps forward have been taken in the dark. Would Rutherford ever have split the atom if he hadn't tried? Could Marconi have invented the radio if he hadn't by pure chance spent years working at the problem? Are these amazing breakthroughs ever achieved except by years and years of unremitting study? Of course not. What I said earlier about accidental discoveries must have been wrong. "
The Flemming/Florey story is actually an interesting bit of science history, but it's about popular media and the romance of science v.s. how real science is done with patience, selfless dedication and a literature search. When Chain joined the Oxford lab, a literature search turned up 6 candidate "penicillins" which they went on to investigate. Fleming smoked a pipe, got to the office about 10, and was accessible (being in London). This version of the story admittedly comes from a Howard Florey biography I read 10 years ago..
For me the biggest plot hole of the popular penicillin discovery myth is clearly the open window story, including its multiple side plots with meteorological events.
And that that story exists and has PREVAILED despite the fact that everyone knows that the same building was housing a mycology laboratory only a flight of stairs away, and that it was the mycology colleague La Touche who identified the penicillin.
23 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 51.5 ms ] threadGot a quick insight about how penicillin works: interferes with cell-wall building which is a destroy and recreate process by preventing the recreate part.
Got a quick view into the scientific process and communication: Fleming focused on the insight - penicillium kills staphylococcus - and left out the circuitous detail. This is important so that the big win here is very clear.
And got an insight into human nature and memory: Fleming didn’t tell the accidental contamination story until much later. It could possibly be even an idea someone else might have come up with which then took root in his mind (ironic haha!)
The communication aspect reminds me of Mendel’s far too perfect ratios for his pea plants. That kind of “repeat till difference clear” statistics would be decried today but perhaps that was to communicate rather than to determine.
And finally, I really enjoy reading about human process innovation because I think it’s a big factor in how Humanity grows. The lab notebook has to be some kind of star performer here - Fleming’s notes allow us to look back like this.
When I experiment with things, I naturally lean to keeping notes on my test protocol, observations, and results. But not because of some personal genius. It’s just the standard way I was taught as a child in our science labs.
I won’t claim to the rigor of a microbiology lab but even just the process notes help a lot, which is useful since I’m just testing molecules on myself.
It's not uncommon for results in biology to have this kind of snag in reproducibility even now. Sometimes it's due to attributing variations to something like "steady hands at the bench", but other times it can even be a deliberate attempt to prevent rivals from duplicating a process before it can be patented and privatized.
“Despite this close professional association, however, Hare claims to have played no part in the discovery or original research on penicillin nor to have discussed them with Fleming”
It’s nice to see that the bickering about who stole whose research does not affect all old discoveries.
> It’s too circuitous and indirect for a scientific report
The preceding paragraph does not seem unreasonable to me--maybe a bit too glib, but nothing that couldn't be touched up.
Metallurgist is trying out all kinds of steels looking for a particular attribute. He would dutifully record each recipe + test in a notebook but if a particular batch didn't have the attribute, he would throw it out a window into an outdoor scrap pile.
Several months go by and he's cleaning up the pile and notices that one of the blocks has no rust or corrosion. He knows that the pile is six months old but doesn't know which of the recipes this block was connected to.
So he repeats ALL of the block recipes from the last 6 months but labels each block so he can figure out which recipe led to the "stainless" steel.
(Probably not the real story but always loved this telling of it. Actual Wikipedia history is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_steel#History)
Another tidbit: inderol (propranolol, beta-blocker) can aide PTSD recovery by reducing the emotional potency of traumatic memories when taken in a therapeutic replay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clodomiro_Picado_Twight
The contest is cold, but it deserves at least a fleeting hint
But the key details about the story of penicillin are that a moldy plate showed bacteria-free clearing, Fleming saw it, isolated the mold, proved its germ-killing filtrate and published the finding, which is the heart of the story and which is not a myth.
I'm sure it's true enough that St Mary's windows were usually kept shut to keep pathogens in and contaminants out, that London's August 1928 cold snap would have slowed staph growth, that Fleming's first notes Or 8 weeks later than the actual event, and that a modern plate seeded with bacteria first will not produce the celebrated halo unless the mold is given a head start. The article makes much of the fact that today’s researchers cannot reproduce the famous halo if they add staph first, yet that difficulty rebuts a sequence Fleming never claimed to have used.
These points are significant, even fascinating, yet the article inflates them into a strobe-lit "MYTH" banner, turning normal human imprecision about times and temperatures into evidence of wholesale fiction, which abuses the ordinary friction of any retrospective account and punishes the story for the very human messiness that makes it instructive.
The window quibble, the incubator gap, and the replication protocol do not touch the central, uncontested fact that chance contamination plus observational curiosity gave medicine its first antibiotic.
Root-Bernstein's theory makes no such testable predictions, and it solves the issue of an incomplete record on September 3rd with incomplete or inaccurate records elsewhere. It seems to me extremely plausible that fleming did not record the results of a botched, uncontrolled experiment but still recognized it as an indicator of something interesting that warranted follow-up. If I were in his position I would preserve the random dish for comparison to the more rigorous follow up experiment. I certainly don't put any stock into the argument that if the story had gone as Root-Bernstein describes it would have been too circuitous for scientific publishing, if anything it would be much more harmonious with standard scientific writing than the chance observation story.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1Hu0f_ti9EQ
Text from http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_3/99.htm
"Presenter[John Cleese]: Penguins, yes, penguins. What relevance do penguins have to the furtherance of medical science? Well, strangely enough quite a lot, a major breakthrough, maybe. It was from such an unlikely beginning as an unwanted fungus accidentally growing on a sterile plate that Sir Alexander Fleming gave the world penicillin. James Watt watched an ordinary household kettle boiling and conceived the potentiality of steam power. Would Albert Einstein ever have hit upon the theory of relativity if he hadn't been clever? All these tremendous leaps forward have been taken in the dark. Would Rutherford ever have split the atom if he hadn't tried? Could Marconi have invented the radio if he hadn't by pure chance spent years working at the problem? Are these amazing breakthroughs ever achieved except by years and years of unremitting study? Of course not. What I said earlier about accidental discoveries must have been wrong. "
And that that story exists and has PREVAILED despite the fact that everyone knows that the same building was housing a mycology laboratory only a flight of stairs away, and that it was the mycology colleague La Touche who identified the penicillin.