Who, besides atheists and the BBC, produces hagiographies any more ?
BBC FOUR's "BREAKING THE MOULD" is - intellectually - filmed through reverential gauze, with blessed petroleum jelly on the lens for added good measure, only this time it is penicillin pioneer Howard Florey it is busy beatifying when earlier BBC types did the same for another penicillin pioneer, Alec Fleming.
A matter of redress , the producers claim.
But actually, the supposed FLOREY-FLEMING rivalry and highly public "feud" , on matters where it really counted for the lives of the dying millions, never ever existed.
It always had more than a whiff of Hollywood press agent handiwork about it - a feud dreamed up by a menage a trois of Hedda Hooper, Louella Parsons and Walter Winchell.
And all beside the point anyway.
Because all the wartime penicillin that saved so many lives on the D-Day beaches and in post-war European refugee camps was produced by a method (naturally-grown) that both Florey and Fleming did their darn best to diss for years.
The nag they backed - the mirage of man-made artificial synthetic penicillin -finished well out of the race and only served to consume vast amounts of taxpayers money and delay the widespread production of penicillin for vital years and years during the dark days of WWII.
Fleet Street and its cellmate Oxbridge still sells a lot of copies re-cycling this feud , hoping nobody in Britain dares asks, " if these two pioneers were so wonderful, how come it was their truly unknown rivals (the heads of then unknown Glaxo and Pfizer for a start) who actually produced the penicillin that saved me auntie ?"
Yes Glaxo and Pfizer were relatively unknown in the early 1940s - until the moral capital they gained by delivering the D-Day penicillin while their synthetic rivals only produced hot air - led them to become today's biggest pharmaceutical firms....
BBC FOUR's "BREAKING THE MOULD" is - intellectually - filmed through reverential gauze, with blessed petroleum jelly on the lens for added good measure, only this time it is penicillin pioneer Howard Florey it is busy beatifying when earlier BBC types did the same for another penicillin pioneer, Alec Fleming.
A matter of redress , the producers claim.
But actually, the supposed FLOREY-FLEMING rivalry and highly public "feud" , on matters where it really counted for the lives of the dying millions, never ever existed.
It always had more than a whiff of Hollywood press agent handiwork about it - a feud dreamed up by a menage a trois of Hedda Hooper, Louella Parsons and Walter Winchell.
And all beside the point anyway.
Because all the wartime penicillin that saved so many lives on the D-Day beaches and in post-war European refugee camps was produced by a method (naturally-grown) that both Florey and Fleming did their darn best to diss for years.
The nag they backed - the mirage of man-made artificial synthetic penicillin -finished well out of the race and only served to consume vast amounts of taxpayers money and delay the widespread production of penicillin for vital years and years during the dark days of WWII.
Fleet Street and its cellmate Oxbridge still sells a lot of copies re-cycling this feud , hoping nobody in Britain dares asks, " if these two pioneers were so wonderful, how come it was their truly unknown rivals (the heads of then unknown Glaxo and Pfizer for a start) who actually produced the penicillin that saved me auntie ?"
Yes Glaxo and Pfizer were relatively unknown in the early 1940s - until the moral capital they gained by delivering the D-Day penicillin while their synthetic rivals only produced hot air - led them to become today's biggest pharmaceutical firms....
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