The mould in Dr Florey’s coat: the remarkable true story of the penicillin miracle by Micronesia RPCV Eric Lax
The mould in Dr Florey’s coat: the remarkable true story of the penicillin miracle by Eric Lax (Little, Brown, £16.99)
Reviewed by George Rosie
Nobody is quite sure whose was the first life to be saved by penicillin. It may well have been that of a 31-year-old US housewife called Anne Miller. In March, 1942, she lay dying in New Haven Hospital, Connecticut, with infections raging through her body. Everything the doctors tried had failed. But there happened to be a tiny quantity of penicillin in the US, and on the advice of a British scientist called Norman Heatley, it was decided to pump it into Mrs Miller. Eight days later Heatley was writing in his diary “the temperature charts, records, and patient’s own statements … amazing”. Thanks to penicillin, Miller lived on until 1999.
It was Miller’s obituary in the New York Times that enticed the American author Eric Lax into writing this new account of penicillin, the “wonder drug” of the 1940s and 1950s.
But this is not just another biography of Alexander Fleming, the dour little Scotsman who has soaked up most of the glory attached to penicillin. It’s mainly about the largely forgotten team of Oxford-based scientists led by an Australian called Howard Florey who picked up where Fleming left off and produced penicillin in a usable form. Without them, penicillin may have languished in Fleming’s Petri dishes.
Lax is very good at describing the internal dynamics of the little group. Florey, the sardonic Aussie whose irony was often misinterpreted. His mistress Margaret Jennings, whose upper-class ways had everyone else bristling. Ernst Chain, the Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany who was brilliant, temperamental, artistic but a pain in the backside, and who regarded every criticism of his work as evidence of British anti-Semitism. By far the most likeable of Florey’s team was Norman Heatley, the gifted English technologist who put together the hardware with which the penicillin was extracted from the cultures in which it grew.
But somehow this crew of bright, ambitious, quarrelsome folk pulled together long enough and well enough to produce what Alexander Fleming had stumbled across in 1928 – the bacteria-killer we know as penicillin. Lax’s book puts Fleming in his place without rubbishing him. There’s no doubt that the man from Darvel with the boxer’s nose made a substantial breakthrough with his 1929 paper, On The Antibacterial Action Of A Penicillium With Special Reference To Their Use In The Isolation of B Influenzae. But the scientific world failed to realise its importance and Fleming grew discouraged, then gave up, more or less.
It was not until Fleming’s work was picked up by Ernst Chain in 1938 that things began to happen. Chain took the idea of penicillin to his boss Howard Florey who quickly saw the potential and began wheedling and begging the money to fund the research. Extracting money from the British scientific establishment was no easier then than it is now. But he managed – just. The rest, as they say, is history.
And hugely intriguing history it is too. According to Lax much depended on chance. For example, Heatley, a crucial member of the team, was about to leave for Copenhagen on a scholarship in the autumn of 1939 when the second world war broke out. “Had Heatley departed as scheduled,” Lax writes, “without doubt the work on penicillin would have suffered and quite possibly not succeeded at all.”
Lax quotes the science writer Henry Harris who neatly linked the four principles in the penicillin story. “Without Fleming, no Chain; without Chain, no Florey; without Florey, no Heatley; without Heatley, no penicillin.”
The book’s odd (rather cutesy) title is a reference to the Oxford team’s wartime escape plans. Heatley had calculated that if Hitler’s troops ever marched into Oxford, the team could smuggle their research out of the country; “… if they rubbed spores of the mould into the fabric of their coats, the dingy brown motes would blend into the material and could lie dormant for years.” The ploy was never needed. But Florey and Heatley did take samples of penicillin to the US in the early 1940s where it was tried out (on Anne Miller and others) then manufactured in quantities that British industry could never match. As a result, thousands – maybe millions – of Allied lives, war injured, were saved.
The advent of penicillin was good news for the human race. It was one of the great medico-scientific events of the last century. Big enough, certainly, to warrant Nobel prizes. But who was to get them? Alexander Fleming who had happened on the substance? Or Howard Florey’s team in Oxford who had rendered it useable? In the event, three Nobel gongs were handed down in 1945 – to Fleming, Florey and Chain. The endlessly ingenious Norman Heatley – who died earlier this year aged 92 – went largely unsung. Florey and Chain went to their graves feeling that Fleming had hijacked the project.
It’s all gripping stuff. But as Lax points out, penicillin may have helped us win a battle against our invisible foe, but not the war. Microbes learn from their experience and from their enemies. Fleming himself warned (in his 1945 Nobel lecture) that if penicillin was misused we risked “educating” bacteria in how to cope with antibiotics. His warning went unheeded and the bugs are getting smarter by the day. They’re out there, regrouping. And we’re producing very few new antibiotics.
Anyone with an interest in science and/or medicine will find much to enjoy in Lax’s book. It’s a thoroughly good piece of scientific history. The writing is lively, the personalities are well drawn, the story well told, the science understandable. Lax has an eye for the telling detail. There are eight pages of photographs to put faces to the names but oddly, no close-up of the star – penicillin itself.
09 May 2004
