Some Colourful Legends are Based in Fact - 15 August 2003

All great men, and especially inventors, sooner or later get legends attached to them which usually prove the more false the oftener they're retold and sentimentalised.

I had in the mail, a week ago, a heartbreaking story sent to me by a kind stranger who felt I might never have heard it. I hadn't.

But I sent it on to a friend who spent part of his time, for many years, examining the hundreds of legends that have accumulated around this famous man.

Briefly the letter told about "a noble lord" out for a country stroll one day and saw his little son floundering in a bog and about to drown.

He was saved by a poor farmer and thereupon the noble lord, after learning that the farmer had a son of about the same age - a tot of five - the noble lord swore he would pay to give the farmer's boy the same education as his own rescued son.

The name of the sinking son was Winston Spencer Churchill. And the poor farmer? Fleming.

And, lo, the generous offer was accepted. And the studious farm boy went on to become the very Alexander Fleming who discovered penicillin, which - here's the marvellous clincher - which subsequently saved Mr Churchill's life one time when, in remote Tunis, he was far gone with pneumonia and, his doctor feared, close to death.

This is a compact and moving tale and absolutely comically false.

My friend, the expert in mythical Churchilliana, tells me that the story first appeared in print in the late 1940s and has ever since been festooned and filigreed in various ways.

One version has the farmer telephoning the noble lord at his mansion - Blenheim, no less - to recount the dramatic and finally happy story.

I must say the chances of a poor farmer or a rich farmer's telephoning anybody at that time are about one in a million, due to the collision of two awkward facts.

Young Winston in 1879 was five. Only two years before - 3,000 miles away - Alexander Graham Bell had demonstrated the very first test telephone and the miraculous instrument was not available to poor farmers or rich farmers or even noble lords of that day.

Nor, by the way, was penicillin available to Churchill in December 1943. He was saved by a sulphur drug which was the magic drug of the time.

All the rest of the story, while heartbreaking, is false. But some lies are true and the mention of Fleming reminds me sharply that the main legend about him is true.

Looking over a specimen whose mouldiness would have made most researchers throw it away, Dr Fleming paused long enough to work on the mould itself and find it could stop or inhibit the growth of some bacteria and become universally known, I suppose, as the first antibiotic.

And you'll recall how Monsieur Laennec, strolling one day in the Champs Elysees, noticed two little boys playing an odd game. One put his ear to the end of a fallen log and listened to the amplified tappings of the boy at the other end.

Gave the doctor an idea. He went home, folded a thick sheet of paper into the shape of a cone in order to listen to the chest of a very fat patient whose bronchi or other wheezings were barely audible through the naked ear.

And behold: the stethoscope was born.

Well just as casually as eye surgery was made possible when Sigmund Freud complained to a friend that after he took a nip of a new drug the tip of his tongue was numb, so we can now add another homely idea, which gave birth to the immense discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid, slangily known as DNA.

We should, I think, note and salute the passing of a lady who offered a simple suggestion to her research boss - one Dr Hershey - which within 11 months had inspired the famous discovery of the two molecular biologists Watson and Crick and subsequently helped Dr Alfred Hershey to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine.

The name of this gifted - and incidentally rather beautiful - woman, who has just died, is Martha Chase, a biology student from Ohio.

Just out of college she got a job with this Dr Hershey who came to be concerned with the methods whereby viruses repeat or rather make replicas of themselves.

In an experiment described as "simple and elegant" they wanted to find out if the DNA core of a bacterial virus and/or an associated protein was a carrier for infection or as they technically say "carried the genetic information for infection".

But how to separate the DNA from its protein colleague? At an historic but unnoticed moment in time Miss Chase said "How about a kitchen blender?"

The humblest, you'd guess the crudest, of separators. It worked.

At the moment of infection the DNA alone entered the bacteria and so the DNA was the only replicator of the virus.

Within less than a year Watson and Crick had their helix model.

So, dead at 75, Martha Chase will remain an important footnote in the history of medicine and proof that some simple and colourful legends are based in fact.

One hundred years ago the California city of Los Angeles, a growing city of 50,000, was already popularly or slanderously known as Los Diablos - the city of devils - because of its grisly reputation for one murder a day.

In time Los Angeles, as we know, became known for many other distinctions - a centre of education, finance, of medical research, famous for its museums, its contributions to modern architecture, not forgetting a neighbouring tiny sheep town in the hills, to which only four years later arrived a little band of immigrant glove salesmen from the east.

They remarked on the balmy, sunfilled days and quickly turned the place into the world capital of a new form of entertainment - variously known as the bio, the pictures, the cinema and the movies.

Within two decades Los Angeles had been overrun by an oil rush and a land rush and the arrival of every kind of developer and exploiter and off beat religious sect.

Together they gave Los Angeles its label as the capital of isms and only last week an eminent European newspaper called it "a legendary gathering ground of California's kooks and crazies".

But exactly one hundred years ago Los Angeles introduced a new wrinkle to American government.

The city charter of Los Angeles in 1903 introduced something called the recall - the institution of a special election to decide whether a public office holder should be replaced - superseded - before his elected term had expired.

Los Angeles at the time was a rowdy and ungovernable town. Later inhabitants would say - well you know, it was still after 50 years a Mexican city.

Anyway it was so unreliably governed that quite often an elected official quickly turned out to be a crook or a runner for the mob.

The recall election was an idea whose need had come to several other western settlements. And after Oregon made it a state-wide option, it was soon put into the state constitutions of California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Idaho.

Once however the recall provision was extended from city government into state constitutions, thoughtful politicians in Washington, beginning with President Taft, began to wonder if it couldn't become a quick way of bypassing the elected representatives in the legislature - in fact overturning the democratic system at the whim of enough political opponents with a grudge.

Californians, way back then as now, suddenly decided to think of the recall idea as direct democracy.

In 1903 - and now in 2003 - the phrase has been recited to justify the recall solution which prescribes a special election to throw the elected governor out of office and then have another election at which the people will choose a new governor from the huge field of candidates. Anybody, in fact, who can put up $3,500 and 65 signatures.

What a gas, young Californians are crying. And as you've no doubt heard the already registered candidates include the film star - the ex-Mr Universe - comedians, a hard pornography publisher, a well-endowed stripper whose platform is to tax breast implants.

Already the country is shaking with laughter or disdain at this new California melodrama.

And now a young but veteran politician has stepped into Governor Davis's picture to polish it up for a third term.

He - enlisting to retain the traditional system and forget direct democracy - is a man named William Jefferson Clinton.

A national survey indicates he's long forgiven for his sins and much admired still as a politician.

He should give weight to the view, not only of the Democratic Party in California but to many more of its voters, that the recall movement is a dangerous one, no laughing matter and could make Lincoln's "government by the people" into a prescription for anarchy.

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