Alexander Fleming

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 309 The second concerns the known limitations of acoustic methods in submarine detection. Readers should be made aware that sonar was a qualified success story; while it represented an important advance in naval technology, it was not—in either strategic or tactical terms—a technological breakthrough on the order, say, of radar. Throughout the time covered by this study, sonar was notorious for its technical and operational limitations. Indeed, confidence in the effectiveness of so­ nar technologies waxed and waned and actually was quite low at the end of the author’s story. Thus, one wonders why, in the author’s opinion, officials of the world’s navies were so willing for so long to invest so much in so limited a technology. These shortcomings (which resulted from the magnitude of the task and not from any deficiencies on the part of the author) do not obscure the fact that this is a very impressive book. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of 20th-century science and tech­ nology. John A. S. Pitts* Alexander Fleming: The Man and the Myth. By Gwyn Macfarlane. Cam­ bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. Pp. xiv + 304; illus­ trations, notes, bibliography, index. $20.00. The Enchanted Ring: The Untold Story ofPenicillin. By John C. Sheehan. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982. Pp. xvi + 224; illustrations, bibliography, index. $15.00. Surely by now everyone knows the story of the discovery of penicil­ lin. How, one fine fall day in 1928, a mold came through Alexander Fleming’s laboratory window at St. Mary’s, landed on a culture plate, and wiped out a colony of staphylococcal bacteria. How “chance favors the prepared mind,” and how Fleming was a good enough scientist to recognize the importance of that unique event. How he fought for years to make the world realize the importance of penicillin as an antibiotic, and how Fleming was granted the 1945 Nobel Prize in medicine for his efforts (along with a couple of other people, whom nobody ever seems to remember). Like most good stories, this one contains both fact and fantasy. Although the two books reviewed here are not the first to revise this simple hagiography, each makes a somewhat different addition to the story. Gwyn Macfarlane, emeritus professor of clinical pathology at Oxford, had earlier written a biography of Howard Florey. Florey and *Dr. Pitts, a command historian with the U.S. Army in Europe, is the author of The Human Factor: Biomedicine in theMannedSpaceProgram to 1980 (Washington, D. C., 1985). In his former position as historian of the Naval Research Laboratory, his research concentrated on the history of undersea warfare R&D in the United States Navy. 310 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Ernst Chain performed the critical studies at Oxford in the 1940s that demonstrated penicillin’s importance as an antibiotic. They shared equally in the Nobel Prize with Fleming, but never received the public adulation Fleming did. Although Macfarlane’s sympathies clearly lie with Florey, he has succeeded in writing a well-balanced biography of Fleming. The subtitle accurately reflects the book’s purpose, for Macfarlane has set out to examine critically the myth of Alexander Fleming. Macfarlane’s primary contribution is a careful discussion of three elements of the myth. First, how did Fleming actually make the bacte­ riological identification of penicillin in 1928? The events of this discov­ ery are examined in detail, including the daily London temperature, to explain how both the penicillin mold, which grows best at room temperature, and the staphylococcal bacteria, which grow best at 37°C, could have grown on the same plate. Macfarlane retraces Fleming’s steps but fails to conclude more than that a highly improbable series of events must have transpired. The second question is why Fleming did not pursue his research on penicillin. The myth addressed here is that Fleming struggled from 1930 to 1940 to convince the world of the importance of his discovery. This part of the story makes a nice prelude to canonization, a single man fighting tirelessly to help mankind. But, in fact, Fleming was quite happy and productive during that decade. For a variety of reasonable reasons, he

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