“The Scientist Who Wasn’t There”, Joanne Briggs

[Joanne Briggs is an occasional contributor to this magazine. She has written a memoir of her father.]

The Scientist Who Wasn’t There
Joanne Briggs
Ithaka Press
270 pp
£20

“Always try to do more than you know you can” said Edward Albee whose most famous play is set on a university campus. Professor Michael Briggs’ range of knowledge seemed boundless; it covered everything from vitamin deficiencies seen in mental illness to the origins of the solar system, nutritional problems of manned space flight to the radio emissions of Jupiter, Martian society to the potential of robots. Elegant articles about the eye-colour of crabs were dashed off for the journal Nature and I have just read one of these in the University of Sussex library where Briggs was a visiting professor. In the Sixties, he was perhaps the closest thing we have had to Copernicus – a man who appeared to know all science while oozing the flair and polymath qualities of Inigo Jones.

But there was a problem. Briggs (1935-1986 though even that second date has been questioned since he may have faked his own death) was a conscious, naked fraud who made up qualifications and either fudged or never performed many of his experiments.

Joanne Briggs extends recollections of her biochemist father to an assessment of his work, ambition, and almost psychotic treatment of those around him. The coercive behaviour was directed at everybody from a spouse to research colleagues. There is an almost operatic element to the credible speculation late in the book that Briggs may have tried to poison his first wife, Joanne’s mother Marion, by getting her to consume excessive amounts of vitamin D.

The wonderful writing style here sweeps between investigative journalism (it’s a core merit of the book) to a compound of magical realism and first-rate travel writing. Joanne’s viewpoint can flit from the macro to the everyday as if she is staring through the holes of the hag stones that her mother, a Blakean mystic, would collect at low tide on a Sussex beach.

There is an honesty and bravery to all this. It even extended to the handling of a question from the floor during a launch event for the book when a woman who had taken Primodos during pregnancy made herself known. Primodos was a pregnancy test that may well have caused birth defects in the children of women who took it from 1959 until discontinuation in the UK in 1978. It was produced by Schering AG for whom Briggs worked between 1966 and 1970.

The creation of Primodos predated his time with the company, but perceived lack of rigour in Briggs’ methods makes you wonder if he can be blamed for it remaining on the shelves (or more precisely in bottom drawers at GPs’ surgeries) for longer than it should have done. The alleged birth defects can be viewed in the same perspective as those of thalidomide, and Primodos has been the subject of litigation.

The writing style here is often dizzying, and as the story gets on the trail of one of her father’s (reputable) collaborators, Briggs is able to make her narrative a page-turner. As with the book launch question, there is candour and respect for everybody touched by the fallout.

The broader chemistry and physics discussions use Michael Briggs’ favourite sci-fi writers such as H.G. Wells and Ray Bradbury as springboards. Joanne relays conversations with her mathematician brother Andrew (holder of a legitimate PhD). The pair indulge in laconic almost Delphic aphorisms about history and physics that prove amusing. It’s almost certain that Briggs Snr’s PhD dissertation was faked; there are chronology problems that would make a cat laugh.

Briggs was exposed by Sunday Times journalist Brian Deer in September 1986 after an interview that must have persuaded its subject that the game was up and his race run. “Bogus Boffin Unmasked” was the headline in red-top sister publication The News of the World. Briggs was dead three months later with only his second wife as a mourner. But the detail of the corpse being placed above ground in a rock niche rather than buried or cremated sticks in my craw.

It’s difficult to get into the mind of an egotist and fraud of this magnitude. Perhaps the best weapon is indeed irony, and Joanne’s quotation of Regan’s reflection on Lear, “He hath but slenderly known himself” hits the mark. Or does it? Only Briggs himself would have known if he was free of delusion when telling whoppers about research and making up qualifications. I particularly like the hubris with which he said he was about to experiment with beagles at a university (Deakin in Australia) when it had no beagles.

Deakin saw some resolute investigation and eventually whistle-blowing in the 1980s from paediatrician Dr Jim Rossiter who chaired the university’s ethics committee. Rossiter had misgivings about the neatness and prolific nature of Briggs’ work with female subjects on contraception research. It seemed improbable that he could find so many non-smoking women of the right age with the right BMI who were taking no medication. Rossiter received hundreds of abusive phone calls for his pains. He died in 2018 at the age of 86. In 1992 (six years after Briggs’ death of course) Rossiter went further to claim that his former colleague had had no right to be on the academic staff of a university let alone any claim to be called a professor. Rossiter argued that Briggs was a liar and charlatan. It was a hallmark of Briggs’ career path that after almost certainly inflating his experience of a taught-course master’s at Cornell into a PhD, he made a point of working at new institutions where he was unlikely to run into former colleagues from Cornell which is Ivy League.

The charisma and force of personality that may have seen an affair with a minor celebrity are certainly conjured up here. Many of the sentences fire off like darts. Brother and sister come across as stoic but thoughtful and sensitive. I’m not sure how I would react if I saw a mugshot of my own father blown up to cover the whole ceiling of BBC science programme Tomorrow’s World. I imagine most readers will take delight in the wry tone of all this, “Fraud is a crime, after all, though the larger and more impressive it is, the less likely the perpetrator is to see the inside of a jail cell.” Joanne makes the obvious distinction that a cavalier attitude to polished essays about trips to Mars are of a different moral order to lack of candour over a tablet that may have caused women to give birth to children with missing limbs.

Father and daughter both quote Paracelsus to the effect that it’s the dose not the poison that kills you. At 270 pages with the writing style changing according to topic (there are some hairpin turns) across the huge canvas, I’d judge the dose here to be just right. Briggs frequently digs up material like a cultural archaeologist. It’s a debut book that shows charm, modesty, courage, and exceptional honesty.

 

The Scientist Who Wasn’t There
Joanne Briggs
Ithaka Press
ISBN-10 : ‎ 1804189723
ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-1804189726
Available on Amazon.