"The 'Cillium is a Roan that's never been rid , though thousands of chemists once claimed they did "

The title is a snatch of a song about the penicillium chrysogenum , with apologies to Curley Fletcher and his rather better known tale of the Strawberry Roan that also was never successfully rode.

To justify the expense of the Manhattan Project , America's military research bosses at the OSRD saw to it that A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then credited (wrongly) with being the sole cause for ending WWII.

To justify all the OSRD money wasted on not synthesizing penicillin, particularly when their rival WPB-OPRD spent far less to quickly make natural penicillin a resounding success, the OSRD bosses faked a synthetic success (about penicillin) to release to the gullible scientific media.