Showing posts with label james duhig. Show all posts
Showing posts with label james duhig. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

James Baxter's Pulitzer Prize winning nonsense about wartime penicillin

As part of OSRD's campaign to spin its considerable successes and many failures, William College president and historian  James Phinney Baxter III was hired in mid war (1943) to assemble a bewitching mixture of hitherto-secret facts and sheer blarney, called "Scientists Against Time".

It sure fooled the 1947 Pulitzer Committee, but it shouldn't continue to fool us.

Monday, January 21, 2013

Vitamin C pills vs oranges: a metaphor for the dueling penicillin of Aussie docs, Florey and Duhig

A nice big fresh juicy orange and a tiny white pill can both have the exact same amount of vitamin c in them : about 100 mg ,  just above the recommended daily intake of the vitamin for a adult.

The synthetic vitamin c pill (first invented in the 1930s) is of course  supposedly pure, but actually consists mostly of "harmless" filler . It is usually taken with a small glass of water.

The orange was - in the eyes of the Modernist 1930s - an impure source of vitamin c. The orange consisted mostly of harmless filler (pulp fibre and a great taste) and about the same amount of water as needed to fill a small glass.