In my opinion, we're possessed by a cultural epidemic of think pieces doing rich and nuanced science history, but wrongly framed in the form of correcting "myths" that, in their substance amount to quibblings over narrative emphasis. It's easy to get taken in by the framing because it truly is enlightening, and the argument goes down so smooth because its embedded in a rich, curious, and fascinating scientific history that otherwise embodies best practices I would happily celebrate.

But the key details about the story of penicillin are that a moldy plate showed bacteria-free clearing, Fleming saw it, isolated the mold, proved its germ-killing filtrate and published the finding, which is the heart of the story and which is not a myth.

I'm sure it's true enough that St Mary's windows were usually kept shut to keep pathogens in and contaminants out, that London's August 1928 cold snap would have slowed staph growth, that Fleming's first notes Or 8 weeks later than the actual event, and that a modern plate seeded with bacteria first will not produce the celebrated halo unless the mold is given a head start. The article makes much of the fact that today’s researchers cannot reproduce the famous halo if they add staph first, yet that difficulty rebuts a sequence Fleming never claimed to have used.

These points are significant, even fascinating, yet the article inflates them into a strobe-lit "MYTH" banner, turning normal human imprecision about times and temperatures into evidence of wholesale fiction, which abuses the ordinary friction of any retrospective account and punishes the story for the very human messiness that makes it instructive.

The window quibble, the incubator gap, and the replication protocol do not touch the central, uncontested fact that chance contamination plus observational curiosity gave medicine its first antibiotic.

It's a myth in the most literal way. Fleming published and promoted his results despite a lack of reproducibility. By the time he won the Nobel Prize, he had backformed or misremembered a folksy story about an open window. That's textbook mythmaking.

It can both be fine to have a glib story to tell schoolkids and important to recognize that the actual intellectual process is messier and more complex.

> The window quibble, the incubator gap, and the replication protocol do not touch the central, uncontested fact that chance contamination plus observational curiosity gave medicine its first antibiotic.

This is the same conclusion as the article. IMO, the importance of challenging the myth is that it has hisotrically taken precendence over your (and the article's) conclusion.

FTA

> Fleming’s 1929 penicillin paper may have been written as a linear process, but that’s almost certainly not how the discovery occurred. And by eliminating these complicated twists and turns, Fleming inadvertently obscured what may be one of the most important lessons in scientific history: how combining a meticulous research program with the openness to branch out into new directions led him to Nobel Prize-winning success. Neither rigid plans nor the winds of chance are enough on their own; discovery requires both.

> The window quibble, the incubator gap, and the replication protocol do not touch the central, uncontested fact that chance contamination plus observational curiosity gave medicine its first antibiotic.

Personally for me, while less important, I really appreciate the investigation into the narrative.

I agree that the science is more important and the results don't care about the story.

The balance is that we don't need to go around correcting everyone, but knowing more about the details of the story is worth my time in reading this piece. I think the article strikes the right tone.

Definitely worded for clicks, but remember that "myth" doesn't mean "false story", it just means "story".