IN HISTORY OF SCIENCE, A 'FACT' AIN'T NECESSARILY SO

Saturday, January 31, 2004

Physicist Tony Rothman has a rollicking good time showing visitors through the metaphysical museum of science and technology he calls the Contemporary Panopticon of Present and Past Concepts, the repository of everything people know or think they know about science, true and false.

The term panopticon, with its faint echo of the sideshow and the carnival, the display of things that aren't what they seem, suggests that a lot of what people think they know is false. Or at best, far more complicated than anybody can be bothered with remembering, or putting into textbooks.

You know the kind of thing you probably learned in school: Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his work on relativity, Fleming discovered penicillin.

In Everything's Relative, and Other Fables from Science and Technology, Rothman explains why science doesn't work that way.

Perhaps you have in your head, as I do in mine, the image of Galileo dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that Aristotle was wrong about heavier objects falling faster than light ones of the same shape. There's the postcard view of the tower, with one of the images of Galileo vaguely superposed on it, obviously not to scale, and the dropped objects keeping pace in midair.

But there is no contemporary evidence Galileo did anything of the sort. It was attributed to him in a biography by his student Vincenzio Viviani, published long after Galileo's death, in a single sentence that gives no details of the supposed experiments.

In his own notebooks, Galileo writes that he has tested Aristotle's theory and that lead weights "move far out in front" of wood weights. But someone else you've never heard of carried out the experiment. "Simon Stevin of Bruges (1548-1620) did drop weights from a tower before 1605 and, unlike Galileo, arrived at the correct answer," Rothman says.

"As we move on," he writes, "note to the right the entrance to one of the largest wings at the Panopticon: the Hall of Misattribution. Almost anything you can think of is named for the wrong person."

He also notes the Principle of Redistribution, which is that credit for anything is likely to be bestowed on the most famous person around (or sometimes, just the noisiest). Sometimes it goes to the most famous person around who is of the same nationality as the one assigning credits. And the Infinite Chain of Priority: Somebody else always did it first.

For instance, the accidental discovery of penicillin.

The fable has it that Alexander Fleming, returning from a vacation in September 1928, discovers that one of his petri dishes -- now a historical treasure in the British Museum -- has been contaminated with mold, and as he is about to throw it away, he notices that there is a clear ring around the mold where the bacteria have disappeared.

"Eureka!" he shouts -- no, that was Archimedes in his bathtub, but then again, more than likely it wasn't -- and we're off to the brave new world of miracle drugs.

The story as it's usually told isn't so much wrong as that it ignores "60 years of what went before and 15 years of what came after," Rothman says. "By my count, Fleming was at least the sixth person to discover the action of penicillin."

In 1871, Sir John Burdon-Sanderson wrote a report on how the mold of the Penicillium group inhibited the growth of what were then called "microzymes." That persuaded Joseph Lister (after whom Listerine is named) to use it to treat a woman with a wound that hadn't healed.

William Roberts read a paper on the subject to the Royal Society in 1876, and John Tyndall of Ireland experimented with the interaction of bacteria and mold. In 1897 a French medical student wrote a doctoral dissertation on the subject, citing experiments done on infected animals.

So why does Fleming get the credit? His discovery came at a time when bacteriology was much better understood, and when the technology to mass-produce the substance was available. And even that didn't happen until the outbreak of World War II, which suddenly produced a great eagerness to spend money figuring out how to mass produce it.

The two researchers who primarily demonstrated penicillin's effectiveness in clinical trials shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Fleming. Their names are Howard Florey and Ernst Chain, and I bet you never heard of them.

"While Fleming indulged the press, Florey, unaware of the supreme maxim, 'Without publicity there is no prosperity,' spurned it. As a result, the glory accrued to Fleming, and the others were gradually forgotten," Rothman says. By the time the prize winners were announced, "it was too late; the press usually forgot to mention two of them."

There are lessons to be drawn from all this, but they do not burden the narrative.

Read it for fun, and the lessons will be clear.