At one time, when a woman wondered whether she was pregnant, she could ask a toad.
Testing labs kept female toads, or frogs, ready to go to work as living pregnancy tests. Injected with urine from a pregnant woman, the amphibians would respond by laying eggs. Alternatively, no toad eggs meant no pregnancy (probably).
It sounds archaic compared with today’s DIY tests, but that’s how things were done in many countries, New Zealand included, into the 1960s.
Given the challenge of maintaining a steady supply of toads, German pharmaceutical company Schering AG was on to a winner when it came up with a more convenient test. Called Primodos, it used the same hormones as the contraceptive pill, in much higher doses. Introduced to the UK in 1959, sales were boosted by this fine example of the slogan writer’s art: “A toad is slow to let you know.”
Which brings us to the subject of this book: the title’s absent scientist.
In the late 1960s, “Dr” (the quotation marks will be explained) Michael Briggs was a world authority on the pill and research director at Schering’s UK arm. He defended Primodos against claims that it caused birth defects and miscarriages. Though his exact role remains unclear, he was later accused of engineering the collapse of a court case against the drug company.
The Schering job was one more rung up a ladder that had taken Briggs a long way from his working-class family in Manchester. There was a PhD from Cornell University in the US, a doctor of science degree from Wellington’s Victoria University at just 27 years old, leadership of the science department at Deakin University in Australia, work for Nasa advising on missions to Mars, hundreds of scientific papers, inventions – in all, he was a biochemist with a most impressive CV.
Until, suddenly, it all came crashing down.
At Deakin, there were rumours that Briggs was making up test results and diverting funds into his own bank account. Then, in 1986, a Sunday Times story exposed “The bogus work of Prof Briggs”. (The News of the World headline was punchier: “Bogus boffin is unmasked”.) The Sunday Times called Briggs “one of the most influential international experts on contraceptives and an adviser to the World Health Organisation”, and accused him of fabricating research into the health risks of new-generation pills. In an interview, Briggs admitted to deceptions in his work.
Drug companies had relied on Briggs to show their pills were safe; now, his fakery raised doubts about the side effects of contraceptives used by millions of women around the world.
By the time the story broke, Briggs had abruptly fled from Deakin, thwarting university inquiries into his conduct, arriving in Spain, where he died soon afterwards at the age of 51. He’d already fled his family, leaving behind a wife and two small children.
Now, almost four decades later, his daughter sets out to reconstruct the life story of a man who was always moving on, from job to job, from his family, always “away from the smoke of burning bridges”.
Joanne Briggs is clear that this is a memoir, not a history. Given the passage of time, and the shortage of hard evidence, there’s a high speculation-to-fact ratio.
One fact she does discover is that the Cornell doctorate – the foundation of Briggs’ career – was a fake. It was easily done: take a master’s dissertation, written after only a year’s study, bulk it out with extra material, add a new title page describing it as a PhD thesis, get it rebound, put it on your office bookshelf and hope no one looks too closely, or checks with Cornell, which still has the original version.
As for the New Zealand degree, how “Dr” Briggs got that remains murky; the dissertation he submitted is a hodge-podge of unrelated articles, earning a thumbs-down from two eminent external examiners.
All of which might be just a matter for academic tut-tutting, but for the fact that so many women relied on Briggs’ supposed research.
Away from academia, there are hints of classified work for the British government, clandestine trips into East Germany, even a suggestion that he poisoned his first wife, the author’s mother.
But they’re only that – hints. The doctored thesis is one of the few pieces of hard evidence. Even Briggs’ death is a blur – alive one minute, dead and buried the next.
In the end, this isn’t so much an exposé of shoddy science as a daughter’s attempt to understand the father she never had a chance to know.
“When I was small,” she writes, “I believed my dad to be the only man who knew all science.”
Now, she uses fiction to imagine her way into her father’s life, and discovers a man whose most audacious invention was himself.
The Scientist Who Wasn’t There, by Joanne Briggs (Ithaka, $39.99), is out now.
