Last night on BBC4 television there was a dramatic reconstruction of the discovery of penicillin in the late 30s and 40s. Of course the tow great heroes were Chain and Florey.
As my father worked with both of them at the William Dunn School of pathology in the mid-30s I thought I would watch it.
Sadly within 5 minutes they made a historical mistake. It had Florey speaking to Chain about his previous work and published paper on the isolation of Lysozyme. However Chain had nothing to do with it - he was working on snake venom at the time. The actual worker on that project was none other than my father.
A minor point some might say but it illustrates the sloppiness of much TV and media stuff on science. The drama was based on a book which made the same error.
In other words don't trust what you read
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Thu Jul 30 02:20:19 2009
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu Jul 30 2009 - 02:20:19 EDT