3 days ago
The man who orchestrated a British medical scandal
Joanne Briggs's debut, The Scientist Who Wasn't There, is an astonishingly original memoir about truth, identity and the ethics of science. It's thrilling, unsettling – and really rather odd. Winner of the inaugural Bridport Prize for Memoir in 2023, the award that cinched the book's publication, it explores the enigmatic – if not completely bizarre – life of Briggs's father, Professor Michael Briggs, a man whose illustrious, globe-trotting scientific career concealed a vast labyrinth of deception.
Born in Manchester, Professor Briggs became a research scientist who worked at NASA, an advisor to the World Health Organisation, and a successful executive in the pharmaceutical industry. On paper, his was a classic rags-to-riches story: he was a self-made, charismatic visionary who surfed the post-war technology boom. But in 1986, his career imploded when a Sunday Times exposé linked him to the hormone pregnancy test Primodos, which worked by triggering menstruation in non-pregnant women, and was alleged to have caused serious birth defects. It seemed Professor Briggs had been faking results.
Things get stranger. Professor Briggs not only appears to have forged his qualifications, laundered research funds and bullied sceptical colleagues and anyone who doubted him – he may also have been a spy. He appears to have worked for the British government, possibly connected to Cold War intelligence gathering; may have been involved in espionage in East Berlin, and then somehow got caught up in the making of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey. His death abroad, aged 51, was so sudden that Briggs speculates that there may have been some kind of cover-up.
What begins, then, as a daughter's ostensibly simple search for the truth about her absent father, soon becomes a forensic and yet also fantastical investigation – part legal inquiry, part philosophical meditation. A trained lawyer, Briggs approaches the evidence as a prosecutor would: poring over professional records, interviewing colleagues and meeting with the victims of her father's lies and misconduct.
Primodos involved high doses of synthetic hormones and though the causal link has never been confirmed, women who used it reported children with defects such as spina bifida, limb abnormalities, and heart issues. Briggs reveals that her father manipulated or suppressed data about these effects while being professionally involved with the pharmaceutical company producing it.
But the book is also wildly surreal: Briggs imagines conversations with her father in which they debate the boundaries between science and science fiction, and the book eventually resolves into musings and reverie. The overall effect, frankly, is dizzying – pleasantly so. Briggs often hints that she herself doesn't know the difference between fact and fantasy; in a rather cryptic, ambivalent author's note, she writes: 'My memory of the past is as much made up of dreams, impressions, false beliefs, fantasies, feelings and notions as it is of facts [...] which I hope makes my memoir authentic. But is that a true story? Well, yes, it is to me.'
True or not, the book defies neat categorisation. It's certainly a book about a very peculiar, unsavoury man, but it's also a vivid depiction of a world in which ambition and imagination collide, with devastating human consequences. Briggs does, at various points, express deep moral ambivalence about writing the book: she wrestles with the ethics of exposing her father's legacy, particularly given the trauma already borne by his victims.
She describes a childhood overshadowed by confusion, secrecy and emotional neglect, but also moments of awe and admiration for her father. Their relationship, as reconstructed here, was fraught and complex – marked more by absence than presence, but never entirely devoid of connection or longing.
The Scientist Who Wasn't There is not only an indictment of one man's lies and deceit and his descent into moral oblivion, therefore, but a study of duplicity; personal, institutional, even national and international. Briggs slowly assembles a counterbalanced, complex kind of truth, one that acknowledges the impossibility of total objectivity but which nonetheless insists on the value of the attempt. 'He only ever travelled in one direction,' Briggs writes of her father. 'Forwards, away from the smoke of burning bridges.' She, in contrast, with admirable insight and considerable nerve, turns back – to sift through the still smouldering ruins.
The Scientist Who Wasn't There is published by Ithaka at £20. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
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