[HN Gopher] The Penicillin Myth
___________________________________________________________________
The Penicillin Myth
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 124 points
Date : 2025-12-01 14:13 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.asimov.press)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.asimov.press)
| tetris11 wrote:
| (Off-topic:) Scrollbars, and their non-existence.
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| It's not the best implementation, but it's there (you just have
| to scroll a bit to get it to show).
| arjie wrote:
| Oh I really enjoyed this one.
|
| Got a quick insight about how penicillin works: interferes with
| cell-wall building which is a destroy and recreate process by
| preventing the recreate part.
|
| Got a quick view into the scientific process and communication:
| Fleming focused on the insight - penicillium kills staphylococcus
| - and left out the circuitous detail. This is important so that
| the big win here is very clear.
|
| And got an insight into human nature and memory: Fleming didn't
| tell the accidental contamination story until much later. It
| could possibly be even an idea someone else might have come up
| with which then took root in his mind (ironic haha!)
|
| The communication aspect reminds me of Mendel's far too perfect
| ratios for his pea plants. That kind of "repeat till difference
| clear" statistics would be decried today but perhaps that was to
| communicate rather than to determine.
|
| And finally, I really enjoy reading about human process
| innovation because I think it's a big factor in how Humanity
| grows. The lab notebook has to be some kind of star performer
| here - Fleming's notes allow us to look back like this.
|
| When I experiment with things, I naturally lean to keeping notes
| on my test protocol, observations, and results. But not because
| of some personal genius. It's just the standard way I was taught
| as a child in our science labs.
|
| I won't claim to the rigor of a microbiology lab but even just
| the process notes help a lot, which is useful since I'm just
| testing molecules on myself.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| > Mendel's far too perfect ratios for his pea plants.
|
| "Remember, if you flip a coin 200 times and it comes heads up
| exactly 100 times, the chances are the coin is actually _un_
| fair. You should expect to see something like 93 or 107
| instead".
| fainpul wrote:
| Isn't 100 / 100 the most likely outcome for a fair coin? Sure
| it's unlikely that you hit exactly that result, but every
| single other result is even less likely.
|
| What I'm trying to say: if you get 100 / 100, that's not a
| sign of an unfair coin, it's the strongest sign for a fair
| coin you can get.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Well, yes. But the expected deviation from the mean is
| still [?]7.07. And the probability that the outcome will be
| either 93/107 _or_ 107 /93 is (slightly) higher than the
| outcome being exactly 100.
| fainpul wrote:
| But those are 2 results. 100 / 100 is more likely than 93
| / 107 (or any other specific result) is what I'm saying.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Depends what you count as a result, I guess. "There is
| exactly N flips of a single kind" is also a viable
| definition, just as "The exact sequence of flips was x_0,
| x_1, ... x_199" is.
| paddleon wrote:
| You can tell the difference between
|
| 93 heads, 107 tails and
|
| 93 tails, 107 heads
|
| but not between
|
| 100 heads, 100 tails and
|
| 100 tails, 100 heads.
|
| So while those are two results (93/107 and 107/93), they
| really only count as two separate outcomes if you pre-
| specify that the first number is heads.
|
| If instead you consider symmetries, where there are 2
| ways to get 93/107 and only one wall to get 100/100, then
| you have more likelihood for the 93/107 outcome because
| you have two ways to get it.
| kalaksi wrote:
| I don't think that makes 100 / 100 the most likely result
| if you flip a coin 200 times. It's not about 100 / 100
| vs. another single possible result. It's about 100 / 100
| vs. NOT 100 / 100, which includes all other possible
| results other than 100 / 100.
| andoando wrote:
| If you flip a coin 200 times, and repeat that a billion
| times, 100/100 will be more likely than any other ratio.
|
| It will be a bell curve with 100/100 as the peak
| eviks wrote:
| Why not go one abstraction further and go expected
| deviation from deviation? Probably the word "expected"
| plays a mind trick? "Expected" doesn't mean the
| probability increases, the easiest way to understand it
| is just by looking at the probability distribution
| function chart for coin tosses - you'll immediately see
| that mean has the highest chance of happenning, so
| exactly 100 is the most likely outcome
| voakbasda wrote:
| I would guess that a single trial of 200 flips can be
| treated as one event, so getting 100/100 is but one
| outcome. It may be the most likely individual outcome, but
| the odds of getting that exact result feel less likely than
| all of the other possible outcomes. The 100/100 case should
| be seen the most over repeated trials, but only marginally
| over other nearby results.
|
| Intuitively, this seems right to me, but sometime
| statistics do not follow intuition.
| shakow wrote:
| > every single other result is even less likely.
|
| But the summed probability of the "not too far away
| results" is much higher, i.e. P([93, 107]\\{100}) >
| P([100]).
|
| So if you only shoot 100/100 with your coin, that's
| definitely weird.
| fainpul wrote:
| > So if you only shoot 100/100 with your coin, that's
| definitely weird.
|
| Not if you only try once.
| kalaksi wrote:
| I'm sorry, but try what once? 200 flips once?
| shakow wrote:
| Even if you shoot only once, you still have a higher
| chance of hitting something slightly off the middle than
| the perfect 100/100. And this because that's one point-
| precise result (100/100) vs. a cumulated range of
| individually less-probable results, but more probable
| when taken as a whole.
|
| For a fair coin, hitting 100/100 is ~5%, vs. ~30% falling
| in [97; 103] \ {100}. You can simulate here:
| https://www.omnicalculator.com/statistics/coin-flip-
| probabil...
| tshaddox wrote:
| > you still have a higher chance of hitting something
| slightly off the middle than the perfect 100/100
|
| That's because "something slightly off the middle" is a
| large group of possible results. Of course you can
| assemble a group of possible results that has a higher
| likelihood than a single result (even the most likely
| single result!). But you could make the same argument for
| any single result, including one of the results in your
| "slightly off the middle" group. Did you get 97 heads?
| Well you'd have a higher likelihood of getting between 98
| and 103 heads. In fact, for any result you get, it would
| have been more likely to get some other result! :D
| zdragnar wrote:
| > But you could make the same argument for any single
| result
|
| Isn't that the point? The odds of getting the "most
| likely result" are lower than the odds of getting not the
| most likely result. Therefore, getting exactly 100/100
| heads and tails would be unlikely!
| tshaddox wrote:
| But as I said, getting any one specific result is less
| likely than getting another other possible result. And
| the disparity in likelihoods is _greater_ for any one
| specific result other than the 50% split.
| alwa wrote:
| I think the disagreement is about what that unlikeliness
| implies. "Aha! You got _any result_? Clearly you 're
| lying!"... I'm not sure how far that gets you.
|
| There's probably a dorm-quality insight there about the
| supreme unlikeliness of being, though: out of all the
| possible universes, this one, etc...
| zdragnar wrote:
| Let's look at the original quote:
|
| > "Remember, if you flip a coin 200 times and it comes
| heads up exactly 100 times, the chances are the coin is
| actually unfair. You should expect to see something like
| 93 or 107 instead".
|
| Inverting the statement makes it read something like
| this:
|
| You are more likely to not get 100/100 than you are to
| get exactly 100/100
|
| ...which is exactly what I was saying. Nobody is arguing
| that there is a single value that might be more likely
| than 100/100. Rather, the argument is that a 100/100
| result is _suspiciously fair_.
| e12e wrote:
| Should that be 25% for 97..193 excluding 100?
| shakow wrote:
| "[97; 103] \ {100}" means the interval [97; 103] without
| the set {100}; so no, still ~30%.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Okay, but it doesn't make sense to arbitrarily group
| together some results and compare the probability of
| getting any 1 result in that group to getting 1
| particular result outside of that group.
|
| You could just as easily say "you should be suspicious if
| you flip a coin 200 times and get exactly 93 heads,
| because it's far more likely to get between 99 and 187
| heads."
| wat10000 wrote:
| It's suspicious when it lands on something that people
| might be biased towards.
|
| For example, you take the top five cards, and you get a
| royal flush of diamonds in ascending order. In theory,
| this sequence is no more or less probable than any other
| sequence being taken from a randomly shuffled deck. But
| given that this sequence has special significance to
| people, there's a very good reason to think that this
| indicates that the deck is not randomly shuffled.
|
| In theory terms, you can't just look at the probability
| of getting this result from a fair coin (or deck or
| whatever). You have to look at that probability, _and_
| the probability that the coin (deck etc.) is biased, and
| that a biased coin would produce the outcome you got.
|
| If you flip a coin that feels and appears perfectly
| ordinary and you get exactly 100 heads and 100 tails, you
| should still be pretty confident that it's unbiased. If
| you ask somebody else to flip a coin 200 times, and you
| can't actually see them, and you know they're lazy, and
| they come back and report exactly 100/100, that's a good
| indicator they didn't do the flips.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > It's suspicious when it lands on something that people
| might be biased towards.
|
| Eh, this only makes sense if you're incorporating
| information about who set up the experiment in your
| statistical model. If you somehow knew that there's a 50%
| probability that you were given a fair coin and a 50%
| probability that you were given an unfair coin that lands
| on the opposite side of its previous flip 90% of the
| time, then yes, you could incorporate this sort of
| knowledge into your analysis of your single trial of 200
| flips.
| grraaaaahhh wrote:
| >But the summed probability of the "not too far away
| results" is much higher, i.e. P([93, 107]\\{100}) >
| P([100]).
|
| That's true of every result. If you're using this to
| conclude you have a weird coin then every coin is weird.
| dooglius wrote:
| "fair coin" refers to both the probability of heads and
| tails being equal (which is still justified) as well as the
| trials being independent (unlikely with 100/200; more
| likely the "coin" is some imperfect PRNG in a loop)
| tshaddox wrote:
| > more likely the "coin" is some imperfect PRNG in a loop
|
| "More likely"? How can you even estimate the likelihood
| of the coin being "an imperfect PRNG" based on a single
| trial of 200 flips?
| ajuc wrote:
| Bayesian vs frequentist in a nutshell :)
|
| If a student was tasked with determining some physical
| constant with an experiment and they got it exactly right
| to 20th decimal place - I'll check their data twice or
| thrice. Just saying. You continue believing it was the
| most likely value ;)
| dooglius wrote:
| You can use combinatorics to calculate the likelihood. If
| your PRNG is in a cycle of length N in its state space
| (assuming N>200), and half the state space corresponds to
| heads (vs tails), then the likelihood would be (N/2
| choose 100)^2/(N choose 200) versus your baseline
| likelihood (for a truly random coin) of (200 choose
| 100)/2^200.
|
| Graphing here https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=graph+
| %28%28N%2F2+choos... and it does look like it's only a
| slight improvement in likelihood, so I did overstate the
| claim. A more interesting case would be to look at some
| self-correcting physical process.
| buildsjets wrote:
| A truly fair coin would never land heads or tails. It would
| land standing on it's edge, every single time.
| munchbunny wrote:
| The chance of exactly 100 heads from 200 fair coin flips is
| approximately 5-6%. Qualitatively, that's not particularly
| strong evidence for an unfair coin if you did only one trial.
|
| You could also argue that 100 out of 200 on a fair coin is
| more likely than any other specific outcome, such as 93/200,
| so if the argument is that the coin is "too perfect", you
| then also have to consider the possibility that the coin is
| somehow biased to produce 93/200 much more often than
| anything else, vs. 100/200.
| n1b0m wrote:
| In a real-world scenario, if you saw a result significantly
| far from 100 (like 150 heads), you might suspect the coin is
| unfair. However, seeing exactly 100 heads gives no reason to
| suspect the coin is unfair; it's the result most consistent
| with a fair coin.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| If you are not familiar with more of Mendel or plant biology,
| he got extremely lucky in picking a two chromosome species. The
| next plant he picked had more than two chromosome types so he
| spent the rest of his life hitting his head against the wall -
| obvious to us but him not having a theory and expertise with
| microscopes to explain his pea results hampered him greatly
| beyond his initial pea plant studies.
| dexwiz wrote:
| What do you mean by a two chromosome species? A quick google
| says pea plants have 14 chromosomes. I only looked because I
| had never heard of a species only having two chromosomes. Do
| you mean the traits he was selecting for only had two
| alleles?
| stevenwoo wrote:
| Right, my bad for wrong terminology as biology nor botany
| is not my speciality either. I was thinking along the lines
| of XY for humans, then the ordinary two row, two column
| chart used to teach the basics of Mendel with pea plants
| and dominant/recessive non polygenic traits in introductory
| biology classes.
| dekhn wrote:
| The traits he picked- hope I get this detail pedantically
| correct: had only two alleles, each allele had an obvious
| phenotype controlled mostly by that gene, the two
| phenotypes were binary (no intermediate "half-wrinkled-
| half-smooth"). and all segregated independently (different
| chromosomes, or far enough that the linkage was extremely
| weak). I remember my high school teacher speculating he
| inspected many different phenotypes and then reported his
| results on the final ones he picked where the results were
| nice.
|
| Unfortunately, most modern genotypes and phenotypes in
| humans don't follow these patterns, and over the years,
| genetics devloped an entire vocabulary and physical model
| to explain them, although at a fairly abstract level. None
| of it made any sense to me so I follow the
| biophysics/molecular biology approach which tends to
| consider many more underlying physical details
|
| There's a related story,
| https://review.ucsc.edu/spring04/bio-debate.html and
| https://review.ucsc.edu/spring04/twoversions.html which
| shows how different fields think about the
| genotype/phenotype relationship. Grinding up steering
| wheels to figure out how they work...
| awkward wrote:
| So many other good details that get to how impossibly
| multivariate biology research is, like the need to have several
| days at the exact temperature.
|
| It's not uncommon for results in biology to have this kind of
| snag in reproducibility even now. Sometimes it's due to
| attributing variations to something like "steady hands at the
| bench", but other times it can even be a deliberate attempt to
| prevent rivals from duplicating a process before it can be
| patented and privatized.
| microtherion wrote:
| cf The Harvard Law: "Under controlled conditions of light,
| temperature, humidity, and nutrition, the organism will do as
| it damn well pleases."
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| The Hare theory is a better story, regardless of whether it is
| true. I am surprised that it hasn't seeped into pop science lore.
| mordae wrote:
| Hmm, sounds like the spores must have come from the outside.
| Otherwise he'd be saying his colleague has contaminated the
| building with improperly stored fungal colonies and he himself
| let those spores contaminate his lab. So yeah, definitely from
| the outside.
| pickledoyster wrote:
| imo, this paragraph covers the essence of a good chunk of the
| article:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_of_penicillin#Replic...
| tolerance wrote:
| Writing like this does not belong on Substack.
| niemandhier wrote:
| This stood out to me:
|
| "Despite this close professional association, however, Hare
| claims to have played no part in the discovery or original
| research on penicillin nor to have discussed them with Fleming"
|
| It's nice to see that the bickering about who stole whose
| research does not affect all old discoveries.
| dooglius wrote:
| Is it common in cases for someone with no involvement at all to
| claim involvement? Usually disputes I've heard of are when
| multiple people are involved, and they're arguing about who
| played a crucial vs minor role.
| jjk166 wrote:
| It's common for people who have close associations to have
| events that could be construed as involvement, and when
| someone does believe they are involved in something
| important, they tend to claim their involvement was
| important. It would be so easy to inflate a random
| conversation or a little common courtesy assistance as
| something more. It takes some genuine humility to take stock
| of all your interactions and conclude that you had nothing to
| do with one of the most important discoveries in history, and
| more still to admit that you thought nothing of it at the
| time.
| dooglius wrote:
| Can someone with more experience in scientific writing comment on
|
| > It's too circuitous and indirect for a scientific report
|
| The preceding paragraph does not seem unreasonable to me--maybe a
| bit too glib, but nothing that couldn't be touched up.
| paddleon wrote:
| in scientific writing, you need to take
|
| 100 articles at 6 pages each
|
| and condense them to 1 article of 6 pages
|
| And add how your method/insight moves the conversation forward,
| along with describing your method/insight.
|
| The reason why scientific writing can be hard to read from the
| outside is the 100:1 compression. Decompression of that can
| require some knowledge of the field.
|
| Also, some people are just bad at writing.
| advisedwang wrote:
| The goal of a paper is to write up the actual discovery, not to
| tell a story or explain irrelevant background. The steps he
| wrote there would confuse rather than elucidate the actual
| discovery.
| alexpotato wrote:
| One of my favorite "myths" about the discovery of stainless
| steel:
|
| Metallurgist is trying out all kinds of steels looking for a
| particular attribute. He would dutifully record each recipe +
| test in a notebook but if a particular batch didn't have the
| attribute, he would throw it out a window into an outdoor scrap
| pile.
|
| Several months go by and he's cleaning up the pile and notices
| that one of the blocks has no rust or corrosion. He knows that
| the pile is six months old but doesn't know which of the recipes
| this block was connected to.
|
| So he repeats ALL of the block recipes from the last 6 months but
| labels each block so he can figure out which recipe led to the
| "stainless" steel.
|
| (Probably not the real story but always loved this telling of it.
| Actual Wikipedia history is here:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_steel#History)
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I recall reading that the microwave oven was invented by a
| physicist after he walked by a radiation chamber and the
| chocolate bar in his pocket melted... makes me wonder if there
| was any historic license taken in that case as well.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| That one I could totally believe. Radar equipment + chocolate
| bar = very likely to occur.
| johnyzee wrote:
| That was a lot of words to get to the point that Fleming probably
| misremembered the sequence of events when he retold the story 15
| years later. _He even mentioned this possibility at the time._
| Interesting article but not much of a mystery.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Tangentially related: doxycycline helps improve muscle and tendon
| tear recovery by enhancing the performance of matrix proteins
| that form "scaffolding", by inhibiting factors that break them
| down. "By inhibiting MMPs, doxycycline helps preserve and remodel
| the ECM, accelerating repair and improving biomechanical strength
| (e.g., tensile strength and reduced creep/strain)". Crazy. I'm a
| big fan off high-ROI off-label uses of well-tolerated, cheap,
| out-of-patent "WHO essential medecines list" pharmas. There's
| much to be found there.
|
| Another tidbit: inderol (propranolol, beta-blocker) can aide PTSD
| recovery by reducing the emotional potency of traumatic memories
| when taken in a therapeutic replay.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| Not a mention of Clorito Picado?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clodomiro_Picado_Twight
|
| The contest is cold, but it deserves at least a fleeting hint
| glenstein wrote:
| 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.
| kieranmaine wrote:
| > 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.
| awkward wrote:
| 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.
| quesera wrote:
| Definitely worded for clicks, but remember that "myth" doesn't
| mean "false story", it just means "story".
| mandevil wrote:
| The cartoon 60% of the way down the article definitely feels like
| an "artists barely concealed fetish" thing.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Hare's theory predicts that there would need to be a cold snap at
| just the right time, and lo and behold there was. Probability
| isn't an issue if the only reason you are considering the
| probability is because the event already happened. Indeed the low
| probability of such an event transpiring goes a long way towards
| explaining why the discovery was not made earlier.
|
| Root-Bernstein's theory makes no such testable predictions, and
| it solves the issue of an incomplete record on September 3rd with
| incomplete or inaccurate records elsewhere. It seems to me
| extremely plausible that fleming did not record the results of a
| botched, uncontrolled experiment but still recognized it as an
| indicator of something interesting that warranted follow-up. If I
| were in his position I would preserve the random dish for
| comparison to the more rigorous follow up experiment. I certainly
| don't put any stock into the argument that if the story had gone
| as Root-Bernstein describes it would have been too circuitous for
| scientific publishing, if anything it would be much more
| harmonious with standard scientific writing than the chance
| observation story.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > I would preserve the random dish for comparison to the more
| rigorous follow up experiment
|
| This would also explain why the dish was treated with
| formaldehyde for preservation, and why the dish still exists
| today.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Yeah, I don't see the huge improbability here.
|
| Given that we know that:
|
| - Fleming lived next door to an unsecure mycology lab.
|
| - The temperature during the time period was low enough that if
| Fleming had left a contaminated culture unattended and non-
| incubated, he would have had a very high chance of getting the
| results he became famous for...
|
| Well, given that the probability of discovering penicillin in
| those conditions is pretty high (say, if he forgot/neglected to
| incubate one out twenty batches, a 5% chance), and the prior
| probability of discovering penicillin any other way is
| extremely low (otherwise other scientists would have found it),
| bayesian calculus says the stroke of luck hypothesis is
| probably correct.
| mandevil wrote:
| Best take on serendipty versus effort in the history of science
| is, naturally enough, from Monty Python:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1Hu0f_ti9EQ
|
| Text from http://montypython.50webs.com/scripts/Series_3/99.htm
|
| "Presenter[John Cleese]: Penguins, yes, penguins. What relevance
| do penguins have to the furtherance of medical science? Well,
| strangely enough quite a lot, a major breakthrough, maybe. It was
| from such an unlikely beginning as an unwanted fungus
| accidentally growing on a sterile plate that Sir Alexander
| Fleming gave the world penicillin. James Watt watched an ordinary
| household kettle boiling and conceived the potentiality of steam
| power. Would Albert Einstein ever have hit upon the theory of
| relativity if he hadn't been clever? All these tremendous leaps
| forward have been taken in the dark. Would Rutherford ever have
| split the atom if he hadn't tried? Could Marconi have invented
| the radio if he hadn't by pure chance spent years working at the
| problem? Are these amazing breakthroughs ever achieved except by
| years and years of unremitting study? Of course not. What I said
| earlier about accidental discoveries must have been wrong. "
| fn-mote wrote:
| I wish this story were not framed as a "myth". Far fewer people
| would read it if they knew the (presumed) truth - a small
| deviation from the story.
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