My famous father — the fraudulent, fantasist scientist
'When I was small,' Joanne Briggs writes touchingly. 'I believed my dad to be the only man who knew all science.' Michael Briggs had all but disappeared from her life in the early 1970s when she was seven after walking out on her mother, but she would correct anyone who showed pity for her as a fatherless child. Dad hadn't gone, she would tell them, he was just in another country being a very famous scientist in the fields of space, and poisons, and having babies. 'Anything you can think of, really, he's an expert in it.'
She wasn't the only one to have this inflated view of her father's expertise. Indeed, the scientific establishment shared it, at least for a while. Michael was a Nasa space scientist turned pharmacologist, a renowned specialist in biochemistry, an adviser to the World Health Organisation and a university dean of sciences. He had written papers on topics ranging from human hormones to meteorites and intergalactic travel. The son of a typewriter mechanic from Manchester, he was a self-made man, bouncing round the world from Australia to Pasadena, taking on ever more prestigious positions, pushing at the boundaries of the scientific imagination and 'grabbing hold of everything the Jet Age had to offer'.
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My famous father — the fraudulent, fantasist scientist
'When I was small,' Joanne Briggs writes touchingly. 'I believed my dad to be the only man who knew all science.' Michael Briggs had all but disappeared from her life in the early 1970s when she was seven after walking out on her mother, but she would correct anyone who showed pity for her as a fatherless child. Dad hadn't gone, she would tell them, he was just in another country being a very famous scientist in the fields of space, and poisons, and having babies. 'Anything you can think of, really, he's an expert in it.' She wasn't the only one to have this inflated view of her father's expertise. Indeed, the scientific establishment shared it, at least for a while. Michael was a Nasa space scientist turned pharmacologist, a renowned specialist in biochemistry, an adviser to the World Health Organisation and a university dean of sciences. He had written papers on topics ranging from human hormones to meteorites and intergalactic travel. The son of a typewriter mechanic from Manchester, he was a self-made man, bouncing round the world from Australia to Pasadena, taking on ever more prestigious positions, pushing at the boundaries of the scientific imagination and 'grabbing hold of everything the Jet Age had to offer'.
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