Friday, August 29, 2014

1929 : Penicillin discovery announced in journal NATURE , world aroused

What would Alexander Fleming's historical report on penicillin have looked like if he had decided to see it published in LANCET, BMJ or the journal NATURE ?

My guess is that would only have happened if one of his junior team members - acting against Fleming's express orders - had injected a sick mouse with his penicillin juice and found that contrary to the boss's "opinion" , the mouse was cured.

Fleming would swallow his anger , and adopt a much more positive view of his new medicine and seek a more positive tone to describe it , in a much more important journal.

Instead he mentally damned its application as an internal (ie life saving ) medicine for all eternity , damned even its use as an antiseptic unless first synthesized and  so decided to bury his report of a new discovery in a new - relatively obscure - Britain-circulating-only - journal ....


No comments:

Post a Comment