By 1945, this was Henry Dawson's winning approach in the battle over what direction wartime penicillin should take.
Of course, that year the Swedes chose to give their Nobel Prize to the losing side in this debate over penicillin's course, rewarding it to losers Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey.
Label the losers' approach as "Synthetic Penicillin For Some, Someday."
On October 16th 1940, Dawson considered primitive penicillin (concentrated, semi-purified excretions from the tiny penicillium) fully ready for primetime.
Fully ready to inject - now ! - into dying patients, civilian or serviceman, of all races, genders and incomes, in an effort to save their life when nothing else worked.
Good enough to put into unlimited mass production - by government owned plants if need be.
By contrast, his opponents in the medical establishments of Britain and America - people like Fleming and Florey and their warm friends at Vannevar's OSRD and at Merck - didn't want penicillin to go into (limited) mass production until it had been synthesized by big Pharma, if and when that ever came about.
(It never has been totally synthesized commercially and we still have Dawson's primitive penicillium making the base penicillin that lies behind all our best antibiotics to this day.)
Even if it was synthesized to produce a cheap and abundant pure penicillin, the drug was still to be held back, for use as a secret weapon of war, rather than to be used among the general soldier and civilian population, saving lives.
Penicillin was intended to finally be introduced only on D-Day, to the total surprise of the Germans.
All to return lightly wounded Allied combat troops back into the line of fire far faster than what the Germans could for their lightly wounded with only Sulfa drugs at their command, giving the Allies a little extra break at the odds.
If I was telling this tale to daycare kids like Sam, I say it was a argument between giving small penicillin to small people versus giving Big penicillin to Big people....
Showing posts with label alexander fleming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alexander fleming. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Way out of his comfort zone
I was not truly 'surprised' that the normally highly diffident Dr Martin Henry Dawson broke his own team protocol and became the first person in history to inject an antibiotic (dirty natural penicillin) into a patient, 75 years ago this October 16th.
For the diffident Dawson had done something similar at least once before, pushing on with his equally pioneering research into the horizontal transfer of DNA between microbes, against the express orders of his boss at NYC's Rockefeller Institute.
That totally ruined his career prospects at the world's most attractive centre for doing medical research --- so this new decision to merely jump his own tiny team's protocol would have far less dire career consequences.
But what did surprise me - and did so for a very long time (years and years and years in fact) - was his twin decisions made the month earlier.
First was his decision to grow massive amounts of the fungus mold, penicillium n.
Massive as in obtaining 50 US gallons of penicillium liquid per run - the very size of a typical drug industry pilot plant project.
Like most ambitious bacteriologists, Dawson was extremely narrowly focused on learning all he could about just one tiny segment of the bacteria world and so he gave only a glance at all the other bacteria - and tried to ignore viruses and fungus, etc,etc completely.
In his case, he had focused on the then deadliest of all microbe families - the streps (which included the s. pneumococcus).
He had grown massive amounts of the various streps successfully and routinely but massive fungus growing for clinical not lab work would be much different.
Firstly, it would all have to be done with an eye to making penicillin economically on a long term basis, particularly when set against penicillin's cheap and abundant competitors, the sulfa drug family.
Occasionally growing small amounts of pathogens like pneumococcus for some personal science experiments is one thing - 'costs versus sale returns' don't really come into it.
It is far different when one grows de-natured pathogens to supply a huge public market demanding equal and cheap access to vaccines, as Alexander Fleming well knew, because he ran such a business in his London hospital.
His hard earned knowledge of costs versus profits may have lessened the willingness of Fleming and his huge drug company partner (Parke Davis) to grow large amounts of 'his' penicillium, considering how small the amounts of penicillin produced as a result.
Unlike his naturally made - and very profitable - vaccines, Fleming always insisted his penicillin would only come into clinical use when it was made artificially by chemists.
Secondly, Dawson would be growing massive amounts of penicillium fungus to an effort to scale up tiny amounts of an infrequently produced and highly fragile distinctly second rate secondary metabolite.
Why is that so noteworthy ?
Because all bacteriologists, like all farmers, work to make as much biomass as possible, as cheaply, quickly and easily as possible.
As many big viable bacteria/apples/pigs as quickly, cheaply and routinely as possible.
It was a piece of cake to get the penicillium n. to bulk up quickly and cheaply but when they did so, they produced no penicillin at all !
It seemed to everyone that penicillin was sort of like green poop in humans - a rare waste product produced when a body ate a food it didn't like and got very sick as a result .
Learning to grow penicillium n. so as to make lots of penicillin routinely and economically went on after the war as well as during it and it involved at least as much scientific manpower hours as did the entire nuclear Manhattan Project.
And - a distinct rarity - most scientists thought this might be the case, right from the start, and this is why Fleming and Howard Florey and almost all the others differed from Dawson and focused totally on man-made synthetic penicillin making efforts.
I can't really explain Dawson's decision to get involved in mass fungus making except to say that his career had been devoted to demonstrating how smart the supposedly stupid microbe really was.
He certainly thought the penicillium might be damed good at making penicillin, merely by dint of hundreds of millions of years of trying.
Perhaps then it was the overweening hubris of the 'synthetic penicillin' crowd that might have perversely pushed him much further into mass making of fungus than his own personal inclinations would have done.
For the diffident Dawson had done something similar at least once before, pushing on with his equally pioneering research into the horizontal transfer of DNA between microbes, against the express orders of his boss at NYC's Rockefeller Institute.
That totally ruined his career prospects at the world's most attractive centre for doing medical research --- so this new decision to merely jump his own tiny team's protocol would have far less dire career consequences.
But what did surprise me - and did so for a very long time (years and years and years in fact) - was his twin decisions made the month earlier.
Fungus growing - and starving - on a massive scale
First was his decision to grow massive amounts of the fungus mold, penicillium n.
Massive as in obtaining 50 US gallons of penicillium liquid per run - the very size of a typical drug industry pilot plant project.
Like most ambitious bacteriologists, Dawson was extremely narrowly focused on learning all he could about just one tiny segment of the bacteria world and so he gave only a glance at all the other bacteria - and tried to ignore viruses and fungus, etc,etc completely.
In his case, he had focused on the then deadliest of all microbe families - the streps (which included the s. pneumococcus).
He had grown massive amounts of the various streps successfully and routinely but massive fungus growing for clinical not lab work would be much different.
Firstly, it would all have to be done with an eye to making penicillin economically on a long term basis, particularly when set against penicillin's cheap and abundant competitors, the sulfa drug family.
Occasionally growing small amounts of pathogens like pneumococcus for some personal science experiments is one thing - 'costs versus sale returns' don't really come into it.
It is far different when one grows de-natured pathogens to supply a huge public market demanding equal and cheap access to vaccines, as Alexander Fleming well knew, because he ran such a business in his London hospital.
His hard earned knowledge of costs versus profits may have lessened the willingness of Fleming and his huge drug company partner (Parke Davis) to grow large amounts of 'his' penicillium, considering how small the amounts of penicillin produced as a result.
Unlike his naturally made - and very profitable - vaccines, Fleming always insisted his penicillin would only come into clinical use when it was made artificially by chemists.
Secondly, Dawson would be growing massive amounts of penicillium fungus to an effort to scale up tiny amounts of an infrequently produced and highly fragile distinctly second rate secondary metabolite.
Why is that so noteworthy ?
Because all bacteriologists, like all farmers, work to make as much biomass as possible, as cheaply, quickly and easily as possible.
As many big viable bacteria/apples/pigs as quickly, cheaply and routinely as possible.
It was a piece of cake to get the penicillium n. to bulk up quickly and cheaply but when they did so, they produced no penicillin at all !
It seemed to everyone that penicillin was sort of like green poop in humans - a rare waste product produced when a body ate a food it didn't like and got very sick as a result .
Learning to grow penicillium n. so as to make lots of penicillin routinely and economically went on after the war as well as during it and it involved at least as much scientific manpower hours as did the entire nuclear Manhattan Project.
And - a distinct rarity - most scientists thought this might be the case, right from the start, and this is why Fleming and Howard Florey and almost all the others differed from Dawson and focused totally on man-made synthetic penicillin making efforts.
I can't really explain Dawson's decision to get involved in mass fungus making except to say that his career had been devoted to demonstrating how smart the supposedly stupid microbe really was.
He certainly thought the penicillium might be damed good at making penicillin, merely by dint of hundreds of millions of years of trying.
Perhaps then it was the overweening hubris of the 'synthetic penicillin' crowd that might have perversely pushed him much further into mass making of fungus than his own personal inclinations would have done.
SBE rather than septic arthritis
Dawson ran a day clinic for chronic arthritic patients, people who normally who returned to their home and daily work afterwards.
About as low on the totem pole in status at a world famous research-oriented teaching hospital as one can go.
About as low on the totem pole in status at a world famous research-oriented teaching hospital as one can go.
SBE, sub-acute bacterial endocarditis, is today seen as a dire medical emergency disease, likely to be fatal even with the best and extremely extensive treatment, and something managed by the top heart specialists and heart surgeons.
A disease near the top of the status world of big hospitals.
A disease near the top of the status world of big hospitals.
Not to be handled by the guy in the basement running a day clinic for little old ladies with badly bent fingers.
If it was an impossibly long stretch for Dawson to focus on SBE we must ask why he did not focus on septic arthritis instead.
This (surgically oriented) disease of dangerously infected joints was still a bit of a stretch for a day clinic director but it was a form of arthritis, his speciality after all, and like SBE it also a disease likely to prove fatal and one that would only be cured by penicillin.
Now, Dawson certainly did deal with septic arthritis cases in his wartime penicillin work but he didn't really focus on them.
As a result of his wondering off his own arthritis estate onto the faraway property of the SBE experts, Dawson greatly aroused a lot of anger from his colleagues.
He may have intended just that.
I have found no indication that the efforts by medical conservatives to use "war preparation" as an excuse to roll back Social Medicine ever evoked septic arthritis as a disease and patient type to be abandoned and left to die.
But that definitely turned out to be the case with SBE - I suspect Dawson saw this plan coming early on and for this reason, and this reason alone, he focused on the SBE patient rather than the septic arthritic patients....
Monday, August 24, 2015
October 1940 : purifying or preserving the Gene Pool of 'useless' penicillium & SBE genes
Is the world safer by minimizing or maximizing the Gene Pool ?
In the Fall of 1940, American Science renewed its century long efforts at triaging and then discarding much of the world's gene pool; this time under the new guise of a sudden need for "American Military Medicine Preparedness".
It was a movement, ironically enough, that was mostly led by conservative Isolationists among the scientists, men who had long opposed military intervention to help the little peoples of Europe from the evil axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.
These conservative Isolationists had long opposed intervening to help the little peoples of America as well (opposing Social Medicine for example) so they could not be accused of inconsistency, merely of heartlessness.
That Fall, they gave off plenty of indications that the stripping down for military preparedness meant the final death of Social Medicine.
No good news for the young patients suffering from then invariably fatal SBE.
The conservative isolationists considered that even if the SBEs survived one bout, eventually another would certainly kill them.
Meanwhile the SBEs just consumed lots of scarce medical resources without any prospects they would recover enough to become useful servicemen or do productive work in war industries.
With many conservative doctors believing that SBE, along with most diseases afflicting the poor and minorities, were highly genetically based, it could even be asked why even bother keeping them alive long enough for them to breed and pass on their defective genes to another generation of the collective human gene pool ?
Weren't the SBEs' genes something rather to purify and discard out of the human gene pool ,by a strict policy of deliberate government neglect, and wasn't the excuse of a planning for a Total War the best time to start doing so ?
Even lower on the conservatives' scale of genes worth retaining than those of the SBEs were the genes of that common household pest, the blue green penicillium mold.
If obtaining adequate amounts of lifesaving penicillin meant keeping the genes alive of the slimey mold that originally made penicillin, many were against it.
Better that human chemists, the smartest in the universe, quickly bested the slimey little chemists and made better penicillin cheaper and faster and far more predictably.
Synthetic man-made penicillin in this war or no penicillin, said Howard Florey, while Alexander Fleming and the Allied medical establishment cheered assent.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly disagreed.
He felt the world would be better off, enriched even, if SBE patients like Bobby Darin was allowed to live, perhaps even to sing, dance and act, rather than to squalidly die from deliberate government neglect.
And his entire scientific career had been devoted to proving up his belief that the small and the weak and the useless 'gene carriers' all had something to bring to the commensal table of global Life.
Dawson had demonstrated more than enough examples showing that the microbe chemists were far far smarter than anyone had ever imagined.
He was not at all sure that the penicillium chemists hadn't polished the production of penicillin to a fine velvet sheen over hundreds of millions of years of trying -- and that the smartest chemists in the universe mightn't be able to beat them in a few frantic months of trying.
No matter how much money and labs and bombast was thrown at the problem.
So on October 16th 1940, a day the nation specifically set aside to triage all the 1A young men in America, Dr Dawson injected natural, freshly squeezed, orange colored penicillium juice into two 4Fs of the 4Fs patients, SBE sufferers Negro Aaron Leroy Alston and Jew Charles Aronson.
A product from rejected microbe genes injected to save some rejected human genes, as Dawson sought (against the grain of 1940s thinking on the topic) to preserve and protest the existing gene pool, not purify it and shrink it.
So began our present Age of Antibiotics - in a wartime scientific dispute over whether it was better to reduce or preserve the world's gene pool.
Dawson and Florey certainly weren't the only ones to dispute this issue : on the wider stage, Hitler certainly had his own take, as did Europe's Jews.
But, as is well known, the Dawson-Florey dispute was the only one that ended happily for humanity ....
Saturday, June 27, 2015
WWII's battling Penicillins, Ancient and Modern : Who makes it ? Who receives it ?
Initially the Allied medical-scientific elite had planned that penicillin was to made the modern way, man-made by synthetic chemists in huge factories.
And then it was to only be distributed, during wartime, to lightly wounded frontline Allied troops, after the surprise D-Day landings had been successful.
In the end, thankfully nothing of this horrific scheme came to pass.
For a start, no commercial synthetic penicillin was ever made during WWII (and still hasn't happened yet).
Instead ancient, tiny but highly efficient penicillium factories made penicillin production seem effortless and easy, rather like Nijinsky dancing ballet.
Manhattan doctor Martin Henry Dawson had introduced the penicillin-making fungus to Brooklyn soda pop industry supplier Charles Pfizer & Co and Pfizer alone made 85% of the penicillin landed on the D-Day beaches.
Pfizer made so much penicillin in 1944 that it could - all by itself - supply enough penicillin to treat all those in the world dying for lack of it.
And it found governments suddenly willing to buy all that naturally-made penicillin and to distribute to all in need, without fear or favour.
Because Dr Dawson had also introduced the lifesaving capabilities of penicillin to WPB heavyweight Floyd Odlum.
And it was the WPB's OPRD that overruled Vannevar Bush's ORSD, together with Sir Howard Florey & Sir Alexander Fleming, in their desire to only use wartime penicillin as a secret weapon of war.
Instead the OPRD picked up on Dawson's efforts to see that wartime penicillin was distributed to all in need of it.
The terminally-ill Dawson had started his penicillin-for-all crusade in October 1940, given history's first ever antibiotic injections to two minority patients he knew would be denied real medical care under the guise of 'we need all resources to go to front line troops'.
He lived just long enough to see his efforts come to full fruition ...
And then it was to only be distributed, during wartime, to lightly wounded frontline Allied troops, after the surprise D-Day landings had been successful.
In the end, thankfully nothing of this horrific scheme came to pass.
For a start, no commercial synthetic penicillin was ever made during WWII (and still hasn't happened yet).
Instead ancient, tiny but highly efficient penicillium factories made penicillin production seem effortless and easy, rather like Nijinsky dancing ballet.
Manhattan doctor Martin Henry Dawson had introduced the penicillin-making fungus to Brooklyn soda pop industry supplier Charles Pfizer & Co and Pfizer alone made 85% of the penicillin landed on the D-Day beaches.
Pfizer made so much penicillin in 1944 that it could - all by itself - supply enough penicillin to treat all those in the world dying for lack of it.
And it found governments suddenly willing to buy all that naturally-made penicillin and to distribute to all in need, without fear or favour.
Because Dr Dawson had also introduced the lifesaving capabilities of penicillin to WPB heavyweight Floyd Odlum.
And it was the WPB's OPRD that overruled Vannevar Bush's ORSD, together with Sir Howard Florey & Sir Alexander Fleming, in their desire to only use wartime penicillin as a secret weapon of war.
Instead the OPRD picked up on Dawson's efforts to see that wartime penicillin was distributed to all in need of it.
The terminally-ill Dawson had started his penicillin-for-all crusade in October 1940, given history's first ever antibiotic injections to two minority patients he knew would be denied real medical care under the guise of 'we need all resources to go to front line troops'.
He lived just long enough to see his efforts come to full fruition ...
Friday, June 12, 2015
When a scientific consensus was proven wrong : DNA and Penicillium
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was widely considered a minor medical researcher, all because he had bet on two clearly losing horses.
In 2020, it might no longer be seen that way.
In the first case back in between the wars, the general scientific consensus was that large proteins had to be complicated and hence 'smart' and long chains of mere repeating acids had to be simple and hence 'stupid'.
So when Dawson's pioneering 1920s test tube research on the ability of some bacteria to take up the genes of other species (today known as HGT) led to one of these long simple repeating chains rather than to a protein, the scientific jungle telegraph dot dashed out a signal : "Dawson --- dead wrong, dead end !"
But of course, the telegraph signal is itself nothing but long chains of very simple repeating sub units, a mere dot and a dash, yet it has no problem transmitting the most complicated examples of human reasoning perfectly accurately.
And so to with the simple-appearing DNA .
For as it turns out, it (the tortoise not the hare) was the actual brains behind genetics, while the complicated protein was merely a (highly useful) spindle for the coil of DNA.
Bacteria, it seems, can smoothly nip and tuck DNA bits and bobs ( genes basically) and we humans still can't.
Oh, we appear to, but actually we let the bacteria take all the hard work while we take all the credit.
Round One, ultimately, to Dr Dawson.
During WWII, many scientists again thought Dawson had backed the wrong horse.
They felt that he had chosen, in effect, to endanger dying patients by delivering Vitamin C via old fashioned crude un-purified natural orange juice rather than via modern, progressive pure synthetic Vitamin C pills.
For in 1940, the scientific consensus was that German chemists were very very brilliant and the tiny microbes were very very stupid.
Dawson thought that if supposedly simple bacteria could do excellent gene engineering while Man could only fumble about, maybe other microbes might also be better at certain types of chemistry than even the smartest chemists in the universe.
So Dawson bet that the humble penicillium mold might just do the job of making massive amounts of (admittedly impure but totally safe) penicillin better and cheaper (and certainly quicker) than all that human chemists had produced, after a fifteen years of fruitless trying.
Dawson (along with his fellow believers at Pfizer and the OPRD) were proven spectacularly right and the synthetic-obsessed Nobel Prize winning pair of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey (along with Merck and Vannevar Bush's feckless OSRD) were proven wrong, wrong, wrong.
We humans - 75 years later - still can't make economical Penicillin G by total synthesis and the little bugs still make it by the tens of thousands of tons, which we then modify to produce most of the antibiotics we use today.
And the wartime efforts of German chemists were even worse when it came to making penicillin (their wartime successes were mostly limited to producing the Zyklon B gas used in the Holocaust.)
If the doubly right Dawson remains unknown today, it is hardly surprising, because a scientist rarely wins fame by bucking a worldwide scientific consensus of their elders.
Now I fully believe the burning of fossil fuels is causing a highly dangerous greenhouse gas effect in our atmosphere -and my view is also the consensus of scientists worldwide.
But I hope that I am still historically-minded enough to recall that many similar scientific consensus in the past have proven to be totally wrong.
Totally, totally, totally wrong ....
In 2020, it might no longer be seen that way.
In the first case back in between the wars, the general scientific consensus was that large proteins had to be complicated and hence 'smart' and long chains of mere repeating acids had to be simple and hence 'stupid'.
So when Dawson's pioneering 1920s test tube research on the ability of some bacteria to take up the genes of other species (today known as HGT) led to one of these long simple repeating chains rather than to a protein, the scientific jungle telegraph dot dashed out a signal : "Dawson --- dead wrong, dead end !"
But of course, the telegraph signal is itself nothing but long chains of very simple repeating sub units, a mere dot and a dash, yet it has no problem transmitting the most complicated examples of human reasoning perfectly accurately.
And so to with the simple-appearing DNA .
For as it turns out, it (the tortoise not the hare) was the actual brains behind genetics, while the complicated protein was merely a (highly useful) spindle for the coil of DNA.
Bacteria, it seems, can smoothly nip and tuck DNA bits and bobs ( genes basically) and we humans still can't.
Oh, we appear to, but actually we let the bacteria take all the hard work while we take all the credit.
Round One, ultimately, to Dr Dawson.
Kitchen Mold
They felt that he had chosen, in effect, to endanger dying patients by delivering Vitamin C via old fashioned crude un-purified natural orange juice rather than via modern, progressive pure synthetic Vitamin C pills.
For in 1940, the scientific consensus was that German chemists were very very brilliant and the tiny microbes were very very stupid.
Dawson thought that if supposedly simple bacteria could do excellent gene engineering while Man could only fumble about, maybe other microbes might also be better at certain types of chemistry than even the smartest chemists in the universe.
So Dawson bet that the humble penicillium mold might just do the job of making massive amounts of (admittedly impure but totally safe) penicillin better and cheaper (and certainly quicker) than all that human chemists had produced, after a fifteen years of fruitless trying.
Dawson (along with his fellow believers at Pfizer and the OPRD) were proven spectacularly right and the synthetic-obsessed Nobel Prize winning pair of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey (along with Merck and Vannevar Bush's feckless OSRD) were proven wrong, wrong, wrong.
We humans - 75 years later - still can't make economical Penicillin G by total synthesis and the little bugs still make it by the tens of thousands of tons, which we then modify to produce most of the antibiotics we use today.
And the wartime efforts of German chemists were even worse when it came to making penicillin (their wartime successes were mostly limited to producing the Zyklon B gas used in the Holocaust.)
If the doubly right Dawson remains unknown today, it is hardly surprising, because a scientist rarely wins fame by bucking a worldwide scientific consensus of their elders.
Now I fully believe the burning of fossil fuels is causing a highly dangerous greenhouse gas effect in our atmosphere -and my view is also the consensus of scientists worldwide.
But I hope that I am still historically-minded enough to recall that many similar scientific consensus in the past have proven to be totally wrong.
Totally, totally, totally wrong ....
Friday, October 3, 2014
Henry Dawson DIDN'T discover penicillin , but after penicillin endured underemployment for 12 years , he did give it its first real job : lifesaving
There are always tons of people who claim to have "discovered" this or that movie star, after the fact, but only a handful who actually gave them their first part way back when.
As Scottish Christians are wont to say : there is a huge difference between all those who just talk the talk and the very few that actually walk the walk.
They should know.
Because when it came to giving penicillin a real job (saving lives) old scotsman Alexander Fleming only talked the talk - it was new scotsman Henry Dawson who actually walked the walk : October 16th 1940...
As Scottish Christians are wont to say : there is a huge difference between all those who just talk the talk and the very few that actually walk the walk.
They should know.
Because when it came to giving penicillin a real job (saving lives) old scotsman Alexander Fleming only talked the talk - it was new scotsman Henry Dawson who actually walked the walk : October 16th 1940...
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Impurity IS Danger : Mary Douglas explains the revulsion towards natural penicillin
In the relatively new academic fields of Horror Theory and Monster Theory , Mary Douglas's 1966 classic "Purity and Danger" is frequently evoked.
In the ancient academic field of penicillin studies, Douglas's Big Idea has never been braced ---- until now.
Her stunningly original thesis was that "dirt" is merely 'order out of place' : that we believe that gardening soil 'belongs' strictly in the garden field and everything is in order while it remains there.
It can never properly belong among the bed sheets.
Pure (that is , in the right place only) gardening soil is not intrinsically dirty, impure or dangerous - just as bed sheets, on beds, are equally pure and 'in order' .
But have either item leave the mental box we have inserted them into and danger, dirt and impurity quickly emerges.
They are now dynamically fluid hybrids - fused beings - a little garden soil and a little bed sheet with much of our fear coming from the uncertainty over just how much the fused creature is of each.
Douglas also does discuss the opposite of fusion - fission.
This is when a normally solid dry complete object (say a living body) becomes a dynamically uncertain mixture of part solid dry normal body and part mold-dissolved gooey wet decaying nothingness.
This produces another hybrid that crosses mental borders - with the living being solid, dry and complete - while the decayed dead is wet , dissolving and incomplete.
Something similar happens early on when as children we realize that the cooked whole fish, still biologically complete and detailed , will later emerge from us as just a pile of shapeless gooey feces.
This putrefaction of a single being, for all of us, is as least as disgusting and disturbing as any fused being.
Physically, we the living are totally unharmed by the fact that penicillium threads will soon weave their way through the dead body of our beloved in their coffin.
But mentally, that image shakes us to our core.
And that image and dozens like it centring on our revulsion to molds crippled our use of natural penicillin for twenty years : from 1928 to 1948.
Quite quickly, after only a few weeks work in 1928, it was shown that natural penicillium mold juice was both harmless and a great lifesaver.
Rather like oranges are to scurvy threatened sailors on the seas for a long time - a small amount of active Vitamin C buried in a tasty impure mixture of dozens of others of non-toxic materials.
But for about twenty wasted years, Normal science and scientists/doctors ( including the man who first determined it was perfectly safe - Alexander Fleming !) absolutely refused to save the lives of the dying.
Not if that meant having to accept the use of natural - impure - penicillium juice inside the temple of the human body.
Rationally they claimed to accepted the 1928 evidence as a scientific fact (and they were never able to disprove it) --- but emotionally they could not.
"Impurity IS Danger" was their unconscious mantra - and they consciously found ways to rationalize this emotional response into excuses as why they declined to use natural penicillin to save the dying.
Hippocrates weep !
In the ancient academic field of penicillin studies, Douglas's Big Idea has never been braced ---- until now.
Her stunningly original thesis was that "dirt" is merely 'order out of place' : that we believe that gardening soil 'belongs' strictly in the garden field and everything is in order while it remains there.
It can never properly belong among the bed sheets.
Pure (that is , in the right place only) gardening soil is not intrinsically dirty, impure or dangerous - just as bed sheets, on beds, are equally pure and 'in order' .
But have either item leave the mental box we have inserted them into and danger, dirt and impurity quickly emerges.
They are now dynamically fluid hybrids - fused beings - a little garden soil and a little bed sheet with much of our fear coming from the uncertainty over just how much the fused creature is of each.
Douglas also does discuss the opposite of fusion - fission.
This is when a normally solid dry complete object (say a living body) becomes a dynamically uncertain mixture of part solid dry normal body and part mold-dissolved gooey wet decaying nothingness.
This produces another hybrid that crosses mental borders - with the living being solid, dry and complete - while the decayed dead is wet , dissolving and incomplete.
Something similar happens early on when as children we realize that the cooked whole fish, still biologically complete and detailed , will later emerge from us as just a pile of shapeless gooey feces.
This putrefaction of a single being, for all of us, is as least as disgusting and disturbing as any fused being.
Physically, we the living are totally unharmed by the fact that penicillium threads will soon weave their way through the dead body of our beloved in their coffin.
But mentally, that image shakes us to our core.
And that image and dozens like it centring on our revulsion to molds crippled our use of natural penicillin for twenty years : from 1928 to 1948.
Quite quickly, after only a few weeks work in 1928, it was shown that natural penicillium mold juice was both harmless and a great lifesaver.
Rather like oranges are to scurvy threatened sailors on the seas for a long time - a small amount of active Vitamin C buried in a tasty impure mixture of dozens of others of non-toxic materials.
But for about twenty wasted years, Normal science and scientists/doctors ( including the man who first determined it was perfectly safe - Alexander Fleming !) absolutely refused to save the lives of the dying.
Not if that meant having to accept the use of natural - impure - penicillium juice inside the temple of the human body.
Rationally they claimed to accepted the 1928 evidence as a scientific fact (and they were never able to disprove it) --- but emotionally they could not.
"Impurity IS Danger" was their unconscious mantra - and they consciously found ways to rationalize this emotional response into excuses as why they declined to use natural penicillin to save the dying.
Hippocrates weep !
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
The poor poor pitiful slimed - always misunderstood , always maligned ...
In 1928, the year Fleming discovered and then rejected (three times) the penicillium that makes lifesaving penicillin, there were about two billion humans on the planet.
That year , tens and tens of millions of miscarriages and premature deaths were caused or hastened by bacteria and virus.
Everybody knew somebody who had died from bacteria or virus - everyone knew the primeval fear of raging epidemics.
That same year tens and tens of hundreds of people died from fungus - their individual deaths - spotted here and there almost at random- usually just seen as the result of eating 'bad' food.
Except in a few remote cultures, almost no one knew anyone who had died from fungus.
Yet in the world of cultural horrors and monsters , did we see this reality reflected at all ?
Of course not - no giant viruses or bacteria stalking the innocent maiden of movie screen and genre literature ---- it was always some faceless, shapeless, smelly, flowing, slimy gooey thing : fungus, in other words !
One suspects that this is because the virus or bacteria seems invisible ( though if we walk across the rocks of a shallow stream, the slime on the rocks is bacteria made visible).
But while most mold colonies are as equally invisible as bacteria colonies, the fungus frequently grows to highly visible sizes - easily drawfing even the bacteria colonies force feed to visible size on lab petri dishes.
In our homes or out in forests , molds easily grow big, fast, furry and slimy --- and always are extremely colorful.
The slime mold (a mold indeed as the word is understood by all but experts, just not a fungus mold) actually moves and quivers - a real life monster just waiting to be scaled up to the movie screen.
But molds are definitely the least harmful to humans of the big four of microbes life forms - more a danger to plant life than to humans and animals.
They simply are - to turn a phrase around - in sight and in mind ....
That year , tens and tens of millions of miscarriages and premature deaths were caused or hastened by bacteria and virus.
Everybody knew somebody who had died from bacteria or virus - everyone knew the primeval fear of raging epidemics.
That same year tens and tens of hundreds of people died from fungus - their individual deaths - spotted here and there almost at random- usually just seen as the result of eating 'bad' food.
Except in a few remote cultures, almost no one knew anyone who had died from fungus.
Yet in the world of cultural horrors and monsters , did we see this reality reflected at all ?
Of course not - no giant viruses or bacteria stalking the innocent maiden of movie screen and genre literature ---- it was always some faceless, shapeless, smelly, flowing, slimy gooey thing : fungus, in other words !
One suspects that this is because the virus or bacteria seems invisible ( though if we walk across the rocks of a shallow stream, the slime on the rocks is bacteria made visible).
But while most mold colonies are as equally invisible as bacteria colonies, the fungus frequently grows to highly visible sizes - easily drawfing even the bacteria colonies force feed to visible size on lab petri dishes.
In our homes or out in forests , molds easily grow big, fast, furry and slimy --- and always are extremely colorful.
The slime mold (a mold indeed as the word is understood by all but experts, just not a fungus mold) actually moves and quivers - a real life monster just waiting to be scaled up to the movie screen.
But molds are definitely the least harmful to humans of the big four of microbes life forms - more a danger to plant life than to humans and animals.
They simply are - to turn a phrase around - in sight and in mind ....
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Rumours of death of wartime penicillins : "Greatly Exaggerated"
Seventy five years on , the wartime penicillins are just dusty relics , found only in some museum of medical curios, right ?
(You been talking to your GP again ?)
It is simply amazing how many family doctors dismiss wartime penicillins and say 'we physicians are all into the latest beta lactams today' .
Viagra and Lipitor are some of the best known and best selling drugs of all time.
So how much of them are produced annually ?
Two Hundred and fifty metric tons each - very impressive numbers in the world of drug production.
So how much of the old wartime penicillins ( Penicillins G , V and N) are still produced annually ?
How about fifty thousand tonnes (!!!!)
So much so, and at such cheap prices ,that some statistic indices rate them as commodity chemicals like caustic soda and ethyl alcohol - the cheap bulk raw materials intended for further chemical or biological processing.
Because that is exactly what the wartime penicillin are produced in such huge amounts for - to be worked up into the varied anti-bacterial drugs we call the modern beta lactams.
The old geezers are still the foundation beneath the largest component of the anti-bacterial armoury (and one of the largest components of overall acute care medications).
Seventy five years on , the best of chemistry and microbiology has still not bettered how cheaply and efficiently the tiny penicillium chrysogenum eat cheap farm wastes and turn them into valued lifesavers.
Alexander Fleming was dead wrong, Howard Florey was dead wrong, almost every WWII era doctor, scientist and science journalist was dead wrong.
The wartime chemists did not quickly and decisively eclipse these tiny un-super heroes of the era of antibiotics .
And they still haven't done so, even today...
(You been talking to your GP again ?)
It is simply amazing how many family doctors dismiss wartime penicillins and say 'we physicians are all into the latest beta lactams today' .
Time for some FACTS, Doc :
Viagra and Lipitor are some of the best known and best selling drugs of all time.
So how much of them are produced annually ?
Two Hundred and fifty metric tons each - very impressive numbers in the world of drug production.
So how much of the old wartime penicillins ( Penicillins G , V and N) are still produced annually ?
How about fifty thousand tonnes (!!!!)
So much so, and at such cheap prices ,that some statistic indices rate them as commodity chemicals like caustic soda and ethyl alcohol - the cheap bulk raw materials intended for further chemical or biological processing.
Because that is exactly what the wartime penicillin are produced in such huge amounts for - to be worked up into the varied anti-bacterial drugs we call the modern beta lactams.
The old geezers are still the foundation beneath the largest component of the anti-bacterial armoury (and one of the largest components of overall acute care medications).
Seventy five years on , the best of chemistry and microbiology has still not bettered how cheaply and efficiently the tiny penicillium chrysogenum eat cheap farm wastes and turn them into valued lifesavers.
Alexander Fleming was dead wrong, Howard Florey was dead wrong, almost every WWII era doctor, scientist and science journalist was dead wrong.
The wartime chemists did not quickly and decisively eclipse these tiny un-super heroes of the era of antibiotics .
And they still haven't done so, even today...
Active inventor Alfred Nobel screwed by passive academic discoverers
You write your will with the help of the smartest lawyers in the universe , you die , and then you take your chances.
Because no matter how simple blunt and explicit your will instructions were , the ambitious and the dishonest will still find a way to screw the dead.
Like the disgusting way the worldwide academic science community has screwed poor dead Alfred Nobel and all his fellow (living) inventors.
Because Nobel's fortune came from his inventions and not his discoveries, he naturally wanted to honor inventions , as well as discoveries ,that had helped humanity the most in the previous year.
The thousands of intellectually dishonest - elite - academics who nominate candidates for the Nobel Prizes and the handful of intellectual dishonest - elite - academics who decide on which candidates to reward have long ago throw out Nobel's silly dying request to focus on the events of the last year.
Because that awkward request throws far too much weight on inventions (or discoveries) that are in active use now .
Ignoring Alfred's dying request lets the juries award discoveries made many years earlier that lay fallow until someone much less passive than their initial discoverer invented ways to make them useful.
(Think of the notably passive Alexander Fleming winning a Nobel for being the first to discover penicillin , despite his refusing to invent ways to use it to actually save lives.)
Academics are notorious both for disdaining applied science and for worshipping the alpha male pissing contest of 'who discovered something first' , aka primacy of discovery.
Putting them in charge of the Prize system in hope that they will honor Nobel's command to reward urgency , ie that useful things will happen to humanity within a year of discovery or invention , is like putting foxes in charges of chicken coops and hoping for eggs.
The full reason most discoveries lay fallow for decades and thus the reason why Nobel committees reward work done up to a half century earlier isn't just academics' reluctance to apply their discoveries by getting their hands dirty in the commercial marketplace.
Rather it is also because of the heavy inertia of Normal Science ( ie the whole of the scientific world - scientists, corporations & universities, even science journalists) against having their comfortable careers and assumptions upset by a paradigm-busting new discovery or invention.
Most discoverers are reluctant to get their hands dirty in the scientific marketplace of ideas - old incorrect ones with powerful friends fighting off new correct ones with no friends.
If humanity is going to avoid environmental self destruction , it needs a new world class medal and prize - awarded to the people who actively invent new scientific paradigms and with the courage and endurance needed to destroy the old one in the process.
Maybe we need a prize that awards active scientific courage instead of just passive primacy of discovery...
Because no matter how simple blunt and explicit your will instructions were , the ambitious and the dishonest will still find a way to screw the dead.
Like the disgusting way the worldwide academic science community has screwed poor dead Alfred Nobel and all his fellow (living) inventors.
Because Nobel's fortune came from his inventions and not his discoveries, he naturally wanted to honor inventions , as well as discoveries ,that had helped humanity the most in the previous year.
The thousands of intellectually dishonest - elite - academics who nominate candidates for the Nobel Prizes and the handful of intellectual dishonest - elite - academics who decide on which candidates to reward have long ago throw out Nobel's silly dying request to focus on the events of the last year.
Because that awkward request throws far too much weight on inventions (or discoveries) that are in active use now .
Ignoring Alfred's dying request lets the juries award discoveries made many years earlier that lay fallow until someone much less passive than their initial discoverer invented ways to make them useful.
Nobelling ultra-passive academic Alexander Fleming for 'lifesaving' is the posterboy of all that is wrong with Nobel Prize committees
(Think of the notably passive Alexander Fleming winning a Nobel for being the first to discover penicillin , despite his refusing to invent ways to use it to actually save lives.)
Academics are notorious both for disdaining applied science and for worshipping the alpha male pissing contest of 'who discovered something first' , aka primacy of discovery.
Putting them in charge of the Prize system in hope that they will honor Nobel's command to reward urgency , ie that useful things will happen to humanity within a year of discovery or invention , is like putting foxes in charges of chicken coops and hoping for eggs.
The full reason most discoveries lay fallow for decades and thus the reason why Nobel committees reward work done up to a half century earlier isn't just academics' reluctance to apply their discoveries by getting their hands dirty in the commercial marketplace.
Rather it is also because of the heavy inertia of Normal Science ( ie the whole of the scientific world - scientists, corporations & universities, even science journalists) against having their comfortable careers and assumptions upset by a paradigm-busting new discovery or invention.
Most discoverers are reluctant to get their hands dirty in the scientific marketplace of ideas - old incorrect ones with powerful friends fighting off new correct ones with no friends.
If humanity is going to avoid environmental self destruction , it needs a new world class medal and prize - awarded to the people who actively invent new scientific paradigms and with the courage and endurance needed to destroy the old one in the process.
Maybe we need a prize that awards active scientific courage instead of just passive primacy of discovery...
Monday, September 8, 2014
Twelve year resistance against injecting crude natural penicillin was normal...science
Doctors Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey did nothing at all about injecting crude natural penicillin into patients to try and save lives during the 12 long years between the Fall of 1928 and and the Fall of 1940.
But they did nothing more (less ?) than did all the other doctors in the world.
Their (lack of) response to the great potential in a crude penicillium liquid that was very non-toxic to primates and very toxic to death-dealing bacteria was perfectly normal..science.
Because doctors - just like the rest of us - also have unconscious Ids and also have unconscious fears about monsters.
Back in that era - pace H P Lovecraft and innumerable horror movies - the unconscious monster feared the most were the slime beings lying an uneasy halfway between stable solids and mobile liquids.
The scientific reluctance to inject the poop and pee of slime molds into the temple of the human body might have had a multiple of scientific excuses to support it but let's be frank - it was really was just an Id thing .
After all , doctors had no such reluctance to inject all sorts of man-made chemicals into the body - very dangerous chemicals like Salvarsan and Sulfa drugs.
They also had no reluctance to inject dangerous horse serum into humans.
These too were biological products like the much avoided penicillin juice.
But in the case of serums and vaccines the paradigm shift over using deadly bacteria and foreign serum as internal medicines had been heavily fought over (and settled) centuries earlier with Jenner's first successful smallpox treatment.
Today, of course, doctors (often indeed the children and grandchildren of the earlier generation of reluctant doctors) routinely inject medications taken from various slimy members of the fungal family without ever blinking an eye.
It's all perfectly normal...science.
But let us recall the doctor who first flaunted his willingness to break this taboo.
After a five month effort, Fleming and his two young assistants had concentrated and semi-purified penicillium juice to a point similar to that reached by Florey 12 years later.
Despite this great advance, Fleming would still only use it cautiously , on external infections, and he also cautiously declined to give many details of this clinical work in his initial paper.
By contrast, after just five weeks of work, a much less refined penicillium juice concentrate was available to Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.
The word he used publicly to describe it was "crude" - the first time this normally pejorative term was ever used to describe penicillin , albeit by a firm proponent of penicillin !
Nevertheless , he eagerly injected it into some patients on October 16th 1940.
While one survived his invariably fatal disease, Dawson frankly indicated in the resulting published paper (May 5 1941) that there had been no reduction in the number of bacteria colonies in the man's blood after the treatments.
Dawson did not decline to discuss his dismal clinical results nor did he choose to bury them in a relatively obscure journal.
Instead he released his results before eight hundred research doctors at one of North American medicine's most important traditional big international conferences held every Spring in Atlantic City*.
(*Largely held there each year because Prohibition (along with laws against gambling and prostitution) was never enforced in Atlantic City - research doctors drink just as much as the rest of us - as well as having Ids and fearing monsters.)
There it proved a surprise hit with various science reporters, was given a big headline in the New York Times and Newsweek, was picked up by the wire services , and reported upon in a medical journal in faraway South Africa.
Most importantly, this sort of important international conference attracted ambitious drug companies eager to get a jump on their competition by learning early about drug breakthroughs.
In Dawson's case, the firm he impressed the most was Pfizer - then tiny , today huge thanks largely to this early teaming up with Dawson which led Pfizer to be WWII's by far biggest producer of penicillin .
Natural penicillin...naturally.
Because Fleming backed three wrong horses with regards to penicillin - the most important one perhaps being that he insisted it would only work (and even then only as a minor antiseptic) if it was a patentable chemical synthetic : no slime juice in the human temple for him.
But with Pfizer's unexpected success - thanks mostly to a big big assist from Miloslav Demerec - the paradigm shifted and natural was , if not totally rad cool, at least passably coolish...
But they did nothing more (less ?) than did all the other doctors in the world.
Their (lack of) response to the great potential in a crude penicillium liquid that was very non-toxic to primates and very toxic to death-dealing bacteria was perfectly normal..science.
Because doctors - just like the rest of us - also have unconscious Ids and also have unconscious fears about monsters.
Back in that era - pace H P Lovecraft and innumerable horror movies - the unconscious monster feared the most were the slime beings lying an uneasy halfway between stable solids and mobile liquids.
The scientific reluctance to inject the poop and pee of slime molds into the temple of the human body might have had a multiple of scientific excuses to support it but let's be frank - it was really was just an Id thing .
After all , doctors had no such reluctance to inject all sorts of man-made chemicals into the body - very dangerous chemicals like Salvarsan and Sulfa drugs.
They also had no reluctance to inject dangerous horse serum into humans.
These too were biological products like the much avoided penicillin juice.
But in the case of serums and vaccines the paradigm shift over using deadly bacteria and foreign serum as internal medicines had been heavily fought over (and settled) centuries earlier with Jenner's first successful smallpox treatment.
Today, of course, doctors (often indeed the children and grandchildren of the earlier generation of reluctant doctors) routinely inject medications taken from various slimy members of the fungal family without ever blinking an eye.
It's all perfectly normal...science.
But let us recall the doctor who first flaunted his willingness to break this taboo.
Henry Dawson breaks the slime taboo
After a five month effort, Fleming and his two young assistants had concentrated and semi-purified penicillium juice to a point similar to that reached by Florey 12 years later.
Despite this great advance, Fleming would still only use it cautiously , on external infections, and he also cautiously declined to give many details of this clinical work in his initial paper.
By contrast, after just five weeks of work, a much less refined penicillium juice concentrate was available to Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson.
The word he used publicly to describe it was "crude" - the first time this normally pejorative term was ever used to describe penicillin , albeit by a firm proponent of penicillin !
Nevertheless , he eagerly injected it into some patients on October 16th 1940.
While one survived his invariably fatal disease, Dawson frankly indicated in the resulting published paper (May 5 1941) that there had been no reduction in the number of bacteria colonies in the man's blood after the treatments.
Dawson did not decline to discuss his dismal clinical results nor did he choose to bury them in a relatively obscure journal.
Instead he released his results before eight hundred research doctors at one of North American medicine's most important traditional big international conferences held every Spring in Atlantic City*.
(*Largely held there each year because Prohibition (along with laws against gambling and prostitution) was never enforced in Atlantic City - research doctors drink just as much as the rest of us - as well as having Ids and fearing monsters.)
There it proved a surprise hit with various science reporters, was given a big headline in the New York Times and Newsweek, was picked up by the wire services , and reported upon in a medical journal in faraway South Africa.
Most importantly, this sort of important international conference attracted ambitious drug companies eager to get a jump on their competition by learning early about drug breakthroughs.
In Dawson's case, the firm he impressed the most was Pfizer - then tiny , today huge thanks largely to this early teaming up with Dawson which led Pfizer to be WWII's by far biggest producer of penicillin .
Natural penicillin...naturally.
Because Fleming backed three wrong horses with regards to penicillin - the most important one perhaps being that he insisted it would only work (and even then only as a minor antiseptic) if it was a patentable chemical synthetic : no slime juice in the human temple for him.
But with Pfizer's unexpected success - thanks mostly to a big big assist from Miloslav Demerec - the paradigm shifted and natural was , if not totally rad cool, at least passably coolish...
Friday, September 5, 2014
How can you tell when a scientist is lying? They don't footnote : the sad case of Gwyn MacFarlane
Before I knew much about penicillin , I really enjoyed Gwyn Macfarlane's two books on penicillin - he's such a smooth writer.
But now that I have seen many of the primary documents and more particularly now that I have the exact 20 year chronology of early penicillin firmly set in my mind (one of the very few things I don't mind saying that I am very good at) , MacFarlane severely depresses me.
Why are so many scientists such morally bad historians ?
He sought in both books to redress the wrong done to his old boss Howard Florey by the many fabrications in the Fleming Myth that gives almost all the credit for anything good in wartime penicillin to Fleming alone.
A worthy objective.
But he can only do so it seems by doing a Fleming - by seeking to denigrate all the good done by Florey and Fleming's North American counterpart, Henry Dawson.
Macfarlane claims that Dawson's announcing of the first penicillin injections in human patients in history got little press attention.
But no footnote to back up his claim, basically saying that he has checked such indices as the North American Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and found nothing.
(See page 182 in the 1984 British edition of his book Alexander Fleming ) .
In fact, Dawson's May 5th 1941 announcement at a big big international medical convention in Atlantic City was a big press story.
More importantly, it was that rarity, an unexpected big story.
At least in the recollection of the New York Times' top science reporter William L Laurence - a man with a world reputation for knowing all and seeing all that was newsworthy in new science.
So a big headline in his New York Times , right next to the business section ,where it inspired Pfizer management to take up penicillin.
And Pfizer (let me remind you) made most of WWII's penicillin, all by itself.
Ditto big headlines Philadelphia's biggest paper and in the then giant newsmagazine Newsweek .
Naturally then both American wire services picked it up so that it appeared in remote communities all over North America the next day.
Reported at far afield as the South African Medical Journal.
By contrast, I have never found any contemporary news coverage of the complete cure of Yale university's Ann Miller in March 1942 in any periodical.
And nobody - particularly nobody from that time period from Merck or Yale , with a great interest in seeking such material - has shown any such press citations.
As part of Macfarlane's campaign against Fleming , this cure in far off America can only add to Florey's fame - because his closest scientific friends in America were all from Merck or Yale.
So page 196 of Macfarlane's Alexander Fleming has him claiming (as always without a footnote of proof) that the American popular press made much of her cure and that it pressed for rapid factory production of this miracle cure - one paper at this time, he claims , even called it a "giant germ killer".
Err, no they didn't.
But the headline in the New York Times a year earlier on May 6th 1941 (you can look it up ) did call Dawson's pioneering efforts a Giant Germ Killer.
So MacFarlane did know that Dawson had gotten much press attention in May 1941 , but he ignored this fact .
All because it stole some of the lustre from his old boss.
So instead he took this 1941 press acclaim away from Dawson and transferred it instead to an 1942 event that lacked any press attention -- all to help bolster Macfarlane's case about Florey's right to more penicillin fame.
I call this sort of academic card shark tactics sleazy and if Macfarlane was in a room with me I'd tell him so to his face - but unfortunately he died not long after publishing Alexander Fleming.
Read Macfarlane ? Yes, I do - all the time. Trust him?
No, I don't....
But now that I have seen many of the primary documents and more particularly now that I have the exact 20 year chronology of early penicillin firmly set in my mind (one of the very few things I don't mind saying that I am very good at) , MacFarlane severely depresses me.
Why are so many scientists such morally bad historians ?
He sought in both books to redress the wrong done to his old boss Howard Florey by the many fabrications in the Fleming Myth that gives almost all the credit for anything good in wartime penicillin to Fleming alone.
A worthy objective.
But he can only do so it seems by doing a Fleming - by seeking to denigrate all the good done by Florey and Fleming's North American counterpart, Henry Dawson.
Macfarlane claims that Dawson's announcing of the first penicillin injections in human patients in history got little press attention.
But no footnote to back up his claim, basically saying that he has checked such indices as the North American Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and found nothing.
(See page 182 in the 1984 British edition of his book Alexander Fleming ) .
In fact, Dawson's May 5th 1941 announcement at a big big international medical convention in Atlantic City was a big press story.
More importantly, it was that rarity, an unexpected big story.
At least in the recollection of the New York Times' top science reporter William L Laurence - a man with a world reputation for knowing all and seeing all that was newsworthy in new science.
So a big headline in his New York Times , right next to the business section ,where it inspired Pfizer management to take up penicillin.
And Pfizer (let me remind you) made most of WWII's penicillin, all by itself.
Ditto big headlines Philadelphia's biggest paper and in the then giant newsmagazine Newsweek .
Naturally then both American wire services picked it up so that it appeared in remote communities all over North America the next day.
Reported at far afield as the South African Medical Journal.
By contrast, I have never found any contemporary news coverage of the complete cure of Yale university's Ann Miller in March 1942 in any periodical.
And nobody - particularly nobody from that time period from Merck or Yale , with a great interest in seeking such material - has shown any such press citations.
As part of Macfarlane's campaign against Fleming , this cure in far off America can only add to Florey's fame - because his closest scientific friends in America were all from Merck or Yale.
So page 196 of Macfarlane's Alexander Fleming has him claiming (as always without a footnote of proof) that the American popular press made much of her cure and that it pressed for rapid factory production of this miracle cure - one paper at this time, he claims , even called it a "giant germ killer".
Err, no they didn't.
But the headline in the New York Times a year earlier on May 6th 1941 (you can look it up ) did call Dawson's pioneering efforts a Giant Germ Killer.
So MacFarlane did know that Dawson had gotten much press attention in May 1941 , but he ignored this fact .
All because it stole some of the lustre from his old boss.
So instead he took this 1941 press acclaim away from Dawson and transferred it instead to an 1942 event that lacked any press attention -- all to help bolster Macfarlane's case about Florey's right to more penicillin fame.
I call this sort of academic card shark tactics sleazy and if Macfarlane was in a room with me I'd tell him so to his face - but unfortunately he died not long after publishing Alexander Fleming.
Read Macfarlane ? Yes, I do - all the time. Trust him?
No, I don't....
How a handful of Gotham unfits rescued the unbroken bronco of modern medicine (un-patentable natural lifesaving penicillin-for-all) and set it free to do good
When your life hangs in the balance because of bacterial infection and all else has failed, hospitals reach for Plan G - a needleful of Penicillin G - 87 years old and still our most potent , safest and yet by far the cheapest lifesaver.
Big Pharma practically giving away its most potent and yet safest lifesaver - that hardly sounds like the Big Pharma you and I know --- and hate !
Penicillin still remains un-patentable - still remains made naturally by tiny bugs in a bottle , not by human chemists in a factory.
It still finds its main use as an internal lifesaver not as an external antiseptic for cuts and scrapes.
And it still is a widely available lifesaver - regardless of skin color or lack of income .
Partly because it is cheap because it is un-patentable so no one firm or nation can control its production but mostly because making it available for all is a longstanding tradition since the last year of WWII.
But if Alexander Fleming , that Presbyterian-raised Scot from Old Scotland had had his will, none of this good news would have happened.
Thankfully, another Presbyterian-raised Scot , but this time from New Scotland (Henry Dawson), was there to thwart his will ...
Big Pharma practically giving away its most potent and yet safest lifesaver - that hardly sounds like the Big Pharma you and I know --- and hate !
Penicillin still remains un-patentable - still remains made naturally by tiny bugs in a bottle , not by human chemists in a factory.
It still finds its main use as an internal lifesaver not as an external antiseptic for cuts and scrapes.
And it still is a widely available lifesaver - regardless of skin color or lack of income .
Partly because it is cheap because it is un-patentable so no one firm or nation can control its production but mostly because making it available for all is a longstanding tradition since the last year of WWII.
But if Alexander Fleming , that Presbyterian-raised Scot from Old Scotland had had his will, none of this good news would have happened.
Thankfully, another Presbyterian-raised Scot , but this time from New Scotland (Henry Dawson), was there to thwart his will ...
Friday, August 29, 2014
1929 : Penicillin discovery announced in journal NATURE , world aroused
What would Alexander Fleming's historical report on penicillin have looked like if he had decided to see it published in LANCET, BMJ or the journal NATURE ?
My guess is that would only have happened if one of his junior team members - acting against Fleming's express orders - had injected a sick mouse with his penicillin juice and found that contrary to the boss's "opinion" , the mouse was cured.
Fleming would swallow his anger , and adopt a much more positive view of his new medicine and seek a more positive tone to describe it , in a much more important journal.
Instead he mentally damned its application as an internal (ie life saving ) medicine for all eternity , damned even its use as an antiseptic unless first synthesized and so decided to bury his report of a new discovery in a new - relatively obscure - Britain-circulating-only - journal ....
My guess is that would only have happened if one of his junior team members - acting against Fleming's express orders - had injected a sick mouse with his penicillin juice and found that contrary to the boss's "opinion" , the mouse was cured.
Fleming would swallow his anger , and adopt a much more positive view of his new medicine and seek a more positive tone to describe it , in a much more important journal.
Instead he mentally damned its application as an internal (ie life saving ) medicine for all eternity , damned even its use as an antiseptic unless first synthesized and so decided to bury his report of a new discovery in a new - relatively obscure - Britain-circulating-only - journal ....
Thursday, August 28, 2014
How New York rescued natural life-saving penicillin-for-all from Alexander Fleming
If you are Alexander Fleming you only have to make three big mistakes to win a Nobel prize and eternal acclaim.
Mistake one : insist that penicillin will never be a success unless man first synthesizes it.
(We're still waiting !)
Mistake two : insist that penicillin will never work if taken internally but will only work as a topical antiseptic.
(In fact, penicillin really only works when taken internally, as an antibiotic, to save lives while as an antiseptic it may actually impede healing of minor scrapes and cuts.)
Mistake three : go along with the Churchill government's decision to only make enough wartime penicillin to help frontline Allied forces with wounds moderate enough to be likely to quickly return to battle.
(When America's New Deal-oriented WPB (War Production Board) decided to mass produce wartime natural penicillin, American diplomats were soon using that bounty to save lives (and win hearts and minds) all over the Allied, Neutral and Occupied world.
Soon a Pax Americana (Pax Penicillia ?) was replacing a century-old Pax Britannica.)
By contrast , on October 16th 1940 , Gotham City's Dr Henry Dawson set out to challenge these three tenets of fellow Scot Alexander Fleming, line by line.
In just five weeks, he read an early - vague -report on penicillin, located some spores, grew them, tested them on himself for toxicity and then gave the world's first ever "crude" natural antibiotic shots.
To two young men dying of SBE , a then invariably fatal form of endocarditis.
(A) Dawson was never shy about admitting that his penicillin shots were not 100% synthetical pure or even 100% naturally pure.
In fact he was the first to label his type of penicillin as 'crude' and natural --- and the label stuck.
(B) Crude or not, he had shown that natural penicillin was non toxic - in fact far less toxic than the conventional alternative, the sulfa drugs. So why not use it internally , to save lives ?
(C) Social Medicine (a sort of 1930s version of Obamacare) was in the Fall of 1940 being destroyed by conservatives under the guise of War medicine.
War medicine's eugenic claim (the same claim as Hitler made on the first day of WWII) was that we couldn't afford to waste precious medicine on useless 4Fs when our precious 1A soldiers need all our help.
Top of the list among the 4Fs to be Code Slow-ed to death by war medicine's Death Panels were the SBEs - which is why Dawson so insolently chose the SBEs as the ones he gave history's first penicillin needles to.
To make the sting of his rebuke even more obvious, he gave those historic needles to these '4Fs of the 4Fs' on the very day that America was conducting its very first peacetime draft registration, seeking out all of its 1As.
As is well known, Alexander Fleming's synthetic penicillin laid a big egg .
So it was left to the NYC firm that had most bought into Dawson's vision, Pfizer (then a modestly sized supplier to the soda pop industry) to supply 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - in fact to supply most of the world's penicillin during WWII.
And that is how New York rescued the miracle of penicillin from the man who found it - like an unwanted gift - on his desk 16 years earlier...
Mistake one : insist that penicillin will never be a success unless man first synthesizes it.
(We're still waiting !)
Mistake two : insist that penicillin will never work if taken internally but will only work as a topical antiseptic.
(In fact, penicillin really only works when taken internally, as an antibiotic, to save lives while as an antiseptic it may actually impede healing of minor scrapes and cuts.)
Mistake three : go along with the Churchill government's decision to only make enough wartime penicillin to help frontline Allied forces with wounds moderate enough to be likely to quickly return to battle.
(When America's New Deal-oriented WPB (War Production Board) decided to mass produce wartime natural penicillin, American diplomats were soon using that bounty to save lives (and win hearts and minds) all over the Allied, Neutral and Occupied world.
Soon a Pax Americana (Pax Penicillia ?) was replacing a century-old Pax Britannica.)
By contrast , on October 16th 1940 , Gotham City's Dr Henry Dawson set out to challenge these three tenets of fellow Scot Alexander Fleming, line by line.
In just five weeks, he read an early - vague -report on penicillin, located some spores, grew them, tested them on himself for toxicity and then gave the world's first ever "crude" natural antibiotic shots.
To two young men dying of SBE , a then invariably fatal form of endocarditis.
(A) Dawson was never shy about admitting that his penicillin shots were not 100% synthetical pure or even 100% naturally pure.
In fact he was the first to label his type of penicillin as 'crude' and natural --- and the label stuck.
(B) Crude or not, he had shown that natural penicillin was non toxic - in fact far less toxic than the conventional alternative, the sulfa drugs. So why not use it internally , to save lives ?
(C) Social Medicine (a sort of 1930s version of Obamacare) was in the Fall of 1940 being destroyed by conservatives under the guise of War medicine.
War medicine's eugenic claim (the same claim as Hitler made on the first day of WWII) was that we couldn't afford to waste precious medicine on useless 4Fs when our precious 1A soldiers need all our help.
Top of the list among the 4Fs to be Code Slow-ed to death by war medicine's Death Panels were the SBEs - which is why Dawson so insolently chose the SBEs as the ones he gave history's first penicillin needles to.
To make the sting of his rebuke even more obvious, he gave those historic needles to these '4Fs of the 4Fs' on the very day that America was conducting its very first peacetime draft registration, seeking out all of its 1As.
As is well known, Alexander Fleming's synthetic penicillin laid a big egg .
So it was left to the NYC firm that had most bought into Dawson's vision, Pfizer (then a modestly sized supplier to the soda pop industry) to supply 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - in fact to supply most of the world's penicillin during WWII.
And that is how New York rescued the miracle of penicillin from the man who found it - like an unwanted gift - on his desk 16 years earlier...
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
God knows what Henry Dawson did - even if Stockholm didn't
Sometimes people ask me if I think Henry Dawson should have gotten a Nobel Prize for his successful pushing of the wartime mass production of natural penicillin.
As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to Howard Florey (and Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.
(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)
I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.
Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.
The UK was depressed after winning a war but then being forced to see massive amounts of Manhattan Natural penicillin liberally used by American diplomats to save the lives of countless people in Neutral and Liberated countries overseas.
Because, at the time, Britain (the discoverer but not the developer of penicillin) didn't really have enough penicillin for its own Commonwealth troops - let alone to give to British civilians at home or for foreigners abroad.
This was solely a moral failure - not a technical failure - of the Churchill-led government.
Because America had just as many Big Pharma firms , scientists and government bureaucrats as the UK equally convinced that it was better (a) to wait for synthetic penicillin and (b) to restrict production to immediate military use only.
And both nations basically had access to the same advanced level of penicillin technology or could easily afford to license it - if they choose.
But fortunately for wartime humanity , a few - a very few - American firms, scientists and bureaucrats felt differently from the majority of their Allied comrades.
Thanks to Henry Dawson's constant prodding , the top man at both the New Dealerish WPB (War Production Board) and Pfizer saw the need for the production of enough penicillin - now ! - to heal all those in a world at war who were dying for lack of it.
As Pfizer's natural penicillin took off on countless overseas mercy missions it slowly but surely produced a new Pax Americana that gradually drove out the century old Pax Britannica.
All the global goodwill towards Britain built up while The Few held off the Nazi bombers alone was thus lost in an diplomatic instant.
All because Churchill's government was unwilling to see any more badly needed penicillin plants built -- not if it meant even as few as one less heavy bomber squadron was commissioned.
Penicillin was a total disaster for the British Tories - it might have even cost them the 1945 General Election - but it was also a disaster solely of their own making ...
As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to Howard Florey (and Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.
(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)
I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.
Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.
The UK was depressed after winning a war but then being forced to see massive amounts of Manhattan Natural penicillin liberally used by American diplomats to save the lives of countless people in Neutral and Liberated countries overseas.
Because, at the time, Britain (the discoverer but not the developer of penicillin) didn't really have enough penicillin for its own Commonwealth troops - let alone to give to British civilians at home or for foreigners abroad.
Churchill's moral failure over penicillin
This was solely a moral failure - not a technical failure - of the Churchill-led government.
Because America had just as many Big Pharma firms , scientists and government bureaucrats as the UK equally convinced that it was better (a) to wait for synthetic penicillin and (b) to restrict production to immediate military use only.
And both nations basically had access to the same advanced level of penicillin technology or could easily afford to license it - if they choose.
But fortunately for wartime humanity , a few - a very few - American firms, scientists and bureaucrats felt differently from the majority of their Allied comrades.
Thanks to Henry Dawson's constant prodding , the top man at both the New Dealerish WPB (War Production Board) and Pfizer saw the need for the production of enough penicillin - now ! - to heal all those in a world at war who were dying for lack of it.
As Pfizer's natural penicillin took off on countless overseas mercy missions it slowly but surely produced a new Pax Americana that gradually drove out the century old Pax Britannica.
All the global goodwill towards Britain built up while The Few held off the Nazi bombers alone was thus lost in an diplomatic instant.
All because Churchill's government was unwilling to see any more badly needed penicillin plants built -- not if it meant even as few as one less heavy bomber squadron was commissioned.
Penicillin was a total disaster for the British Tories - it might have even cost them the 1945 General Election - but it was also a disaster solely of their own making ...
Monday, August 25, 2014
Manhattan Natural : green Life-Saving , from the concrete jungle ...
The urban jungle that is Manhattan, with all its concrete skyscrapers, should be the very last place on earth where one might expect to see the start of a turning away from the Modern obsession with the artificial and the synthetic and a turn to the Postmodernity's renewed relationship with Nature.
But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .
Fiction's drive for the smooth closure of all narrative lines demands that penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming (in his brand new 1931 hospital factory) should have been the first one to grow the green stuff in amounts sufficient to begin to save the world's fatally infected - but he didn't.
Instead it was Columbia's Martin Henry Dawson and Pfizer's John L Smith that rose to World War Two's moral challenges.
And very soon it was postmodern natural penicillin from Manhattan's concrete jungle that was radiating hope all around a war-shattered world --- while Fleming and Florey's modern artificial penicillin from leafy-green Oxford University never even got off the drawing board.
The natural from concrete and the artificial from green : life is filled with ironies isn't it ?
So why should I ever think of writing 'mere fiction' ?
No novel-writing for me - not when the extraordinary truth is so much stranger than any fantasied fiction....
But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .
Fiction's drive for the smooth closure of all narrative lines demands that penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming (in his brand new 1931 hospital factory) should have been the first one to grow the green stuff in amounts sufficient to begin to save the world's fatally infected - but he didn't.
Manhattan Natural -- fermenting a life-saving revolution from the concrete jungle
Instead it was Columbia's Martin Henry Dawson and Pfizer's John L Smith that rose to World War Two's moral challenges.
And very soon it was postmodern natural penicillin from Manhattan's concrete jungle that was radiating hope all around a war-shattered world --- while Fleming and Florey's modern artificial penicillin from leafy-green Oxford University never even got off the drawing board.
natural from concrete --- artificial from greenery
So why should I ever think of writing 'mere fiction' ?
No novel-writing for me - not when the extraordinary truth is so much stranger than any fantasied fiction....
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Penicillin for patients : stable ? pure ? or just 'safe enough' ? -- the essential disagreement between Fleming, Florey and Dawson
Alexander Fleming was famously known for his frugality : in speech, in the use of materials and in his physical exertions on his paid job.
Being too self confident in his own intellectual abilities (and perhaps also being too frugal cum lazy in the physical exertion department ?) fatally led him to avoid doing the needed series of experiments to prove up his claim that penicillin would never have time to do its work inside the body.
So he misled himself - and more importantly , the entire world, for 14 years that penicillin would only work on the body, never in the body - and tens of millions died premature deaths that could have/ should have been avoided.
However, because Fleming saw penicillin as only working outside the body he had no need for Howard Florey's delusions about penicillin having to be highly purified to work safely inside the body.
Fleming merely want the chemists to make penicillin as a stable powder in a bottle any doctor could readily buy from a near by druggist, store on an unrefrigerated shelf for years and still expect to work as an external antiseptic at 100% efficiency when needed.
Call this 'lazy man medicine' or call it normalcy.
Because only one doctor in ten thousand world wide ever tried making homemade penicillin even after it was proclaimed a life-saving miracle.
They all preferred to simply patiently wait until this miracle came to them as a stable and certified safe powder in a bottle from Big Pharma.
(I am not sure all their dying patients were as patient.)
Howard Florey - to his credit - seemed to have never bought Fleming's tale that penicillin would never work inside the body - as had every other medical scientist in the world .
But because he thought it had to be purified first and that purification would be very difficult , if not impossible , he did nothing until he got a competent full time chemist on staff together with a large long term grant to sustain the effort.
Meanwhile ten wasted years (1929-1939) went by.
Clearly Florey was no medical crusader, burning to save lives NOW!
And he , too , had too much faith in his own intellectual powers.
In 1939 he requested grant money for his co-worker Ernst Chain's work on three bacteria-killing chemicals produced by living microbes against other living microbes (what scientists call antibiosis).
One was penicillin and one key phrase in the grant request reveals his thinking and his fatal flaw.
He believed that penicillin , if it can be purified, will prove safe and effective inside the body (eventually and hopeful inside the bodies of infected human patients).
But he just assumes this , again just like Fleming .
Without actually doing any of the needed experiments to prove his contention, one simply can not say that penicillin is non toxic inside the body and it is the impurities that will be unsafe inside the body.
Actually there are always - in advance of the actual experiments - a range of possibilities sliding between three poles (that represent absolutes rather than real world situations.)
The three poles are (a) only the main product is toxic (b) only the impurities are toxic (c) both are equally toxic or equally non toxic.
Let us get concrete with a few examples.
You are a chemical firm making the poison prussic acid. You discover impurities in the resulting mix (impurities being anything that isn't prussic acid).
Prussic acid is almost uniquely toxic and it is the main product - any impurities thrown up may or maybe not toxic but are unlikely to be anywhere as toxic as prussic acid.
But in this case, you are seeking pure toxicity - impure non-toxicity is the problem , not the solution.
Grapefruit are a so so source of pure vitamin C . A 500 gram fruit might hold only 50 mg of vitamin C - one bit in 10,000 is pure vitamin C and the rest is - technically - impurities.
So why do we bother ?
Well they are very tasty , providing lots of water, fibre, sugar and various other minerals and vitamins - as well as some of the tasteless vitamin C we could get from a pill.
(And surprise surprise, that pill , when taken with the needed glass of water, is also mostly dross and a tiny amount, often only 100 mg, of vitamin C !)
And all those grapefruit 'impurities 'are safe - we eat them without any danger and in fact with a great deal of enjoyment.
All our food mostly consists of a vast bulk of relatively safe impurities and tiny amounts of pure vitamins and minerals.
But some foods - some very tasty mushrooms - consist of mostly nice food and tiny amounts of impurities called toxins that kill us.
So it all depends.
First we must define what is the main product we want from a mixture before we can define its 'impurities'.
Do grapefruits consist of 90% food (discarding only the skin and seeds) or do they consist of .001 % vitamin C and 99.99% dross ?
Then we need to do the experiments before drawing any conclusions.
Because sometimes , as with weak impure penicillin juice versus pure strong penicillin powder , it turns out that penicillin allergy deaths only began with massive amounts of the 100% pure stuff !
By sheer good luck, in this particular mushroom (this strain of the sometimes dangerous penicillium mold), the impurities were non-toxic as was the penicillin .
But for a relatively large percent of people, if given large amounts of pure penicillin direct into a vein by careless doctors, it can kill on the spot in a severe allergy reaction.
The safe solution is to go on using pure penicillin but to test new patients with tiny amounts - just beneath the skin - first.
Florey spent more than ten years - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s seeking ever purer penicillin to increase the safety of this injectable drug.
His obsession was scientifically wrong, logically deluded and it delayed the wartime introduction of mass produced penicillin for years.
Florey was an eugenicist and a racist from his youth and I believe this sort of racial purity thinking leaked over into the science side of his brain - he saw penicillin as the Anglo Saxons and the impurities as the Blacks.
Blood that was 99% Anglo Saxon and 1% Black was impure and defiled - and much the same applied to pure versus impure penicillin.
In Florey's twisted mind.
Another problem was that both Fleming and Florey were far more lab doctors than ward doctors - while Martin Henry Dawson divided his time equally between both.
Sheltered university chemists quickly lose their delusions about the academic awards for obtaining 100% total synthesis ,regardless of expense or yield, once on the factory floor of a profit-seeking chemical firm.
So too with busy ward doctors balancing a dying patient versus a very dangerous drug that might injure them as well as save their life.
My mother , in her early thirties, was saved from certain infectious death by a single course of streptomycin .
It left her deaf in one ear - by that time, in 1962 , this was a well known risk of high doses of that drug.
She didn't complain then and she never ever did .
She told how grateful she was to lose her hearing to gain her life just three days before she suffered her fatal stroke - when she was in her eighties, a half century later.
So call me prejudiced - I like doctors who take chances to save patients' lives.
I like Martin Henry Dawson.
He saw two patients about to die from invariably fatal endocarditis.
All other known medical solutions had failed.
He knew penicillin seemed non toxic in various animals and in human blood - from his own research and that of Fleming and Florey.
He tested a small amount of penicillin that he suspected to be probably very weak , on himself, injected just under his skin.
No toxic results.
He did the same on the two patients - not toxic.
He gradually and slowly upped the amounts and also moving gradually to injection methods that introduced the penicillin far quicker into the blood and hence was far more potentially dangerous.
Only local pain at the injection site and a temporary fever and shakes was noted - routine for most injected drugs then.
All Dawson sought from penicillin was that it was relatively safe - and effective.
He used the penicillin he made himself with hours or days - he wasn't afraid of hard work, unlike Fleming - so stability was an non-issue to him.
Like the food that Dawson ate and enjoyed, his crude penicillin was hardly pure - but so what - it was basically safe.
Safer in fact - even in crude form - than the 100% pure sulfa drugs that were then routinely saving many lives while also making many people very very sick in the process.
Like a chemist on the shop floor ( think Smith, Elder and Jephcott ) Dawson saw life as full of compromises and the job was determining what was really Job One.
For all of them , it was saving as many patients as they could - NOW !
And God Bless 'Em for that...
Being too self confident in his own intellectual abilities (and perhaps also being too frugal cum lazy in the physical exertion department ?) fatally led him to avoid doing the needed series of experiments to prove up his claim that penicillin would never have time to do its work inside the body.
So he misled himself - and more importantly , the entire world, for 14 years that penicillin would only work on the body, never in the body - and tens of millions died premature deaths that could have/ should have been avoided.
Howard Florey's fatal flaw
However, because Fleming saw penicillin as only working outside the body he had no need for Howard Florey's delusions about penicillin having to be highly purified to work safely inside the body.
Fleming merely want the chemists to make penicillin as a stable powder in a bottle any doctor could readily buy from a near by druggist, store on an unrefrigerated shelf for years and still expect to work as an external antiseptic at 100% efficiency when needed.
Call this 'lazy man medicine' or call it normalcy.
Because only one doctor in ten thousand world wide ever tried making homemade penicillin even after it was proclaimed a life-saving miracle.
They all preferred to simply patiently wait until this miracle came to them as a stable and certified safe powder in a bottle from Big Pharma.
(I am not sure all their dying patients were as patient.)
Florey's great insight
Howard Florey - to his credit - seemed to have never bought Fleming's tale that penicillin would never work inside the body - as had every other medical scientist in the world .
But because he thought it had to be purified first and that purification would be very difficult , if not impossible , he did nothing until he got a competent full time chemist on staff together with a large long term grant to sustain the effort.
Meanwhile ten wasted years (1929-1939) went by.
Clearly Florey was no medical crusader, burning to save lives NOW!
And he , too , had too much faith in his own intellectual powers.
In 1939 he requested grant money for his co-worker Ernst Chain's work on three bacteria-killing chemicals produced by living microbes against other living microbes (what scientists call antibiosis).
One was penicillin and one key phrase in the grant request reveals his thinking and his fatal flaw.
He believed that penicillin , if it can be purified, will prove safe and effective inside the body (eventually and hopeful inside the bodies of infected human patients).
But he just assumes this , again just like Fleming .
Without actually doing any of the needed experiments to prove his contention, one simply can not say that penicillin is non toxic inside the body and it is the impurities that will be unsafe inside the body.
Actually there are always - in advance of the actual experiments - a range of possibilities sliding between three poles (that represent absolutes rather than real world situations.)
The three poles are (a) only the main product is toxic (b) only the impurities are toxic (c) both are equally toxic or equally non toxic.
Let us get concrete with a few examples.
You are a chemical firm making the poison prussic acid. You discover impurities in the resulting mix (impurities being anything that isn't prussic acid).
Prussic acid is almost uniquely toxic and it is the main product - any impurities thrown up may or maybe not toxic but are unlikely to be anywhere as toxic as prussic acid.
But in this case, you are seeking pure toxicity - impure non-toxicity is the problem , not the solution.
Grapefruit are 99.99% impure of vitamin C - thanks be to God
Grapefruit are a so so source of pure vitamin C . A 500 gram fruit might hold only 50 mg of vitamin C - one bit in 10,000 is pure vitamin C and the rest is - technically - impurities.
So why do we bother ?
Well they are very tasty , providing lots of water, fibre, sugar and various other minerals and vitamins - as well as some of the tasteless vitamin C we could get from a pill.
(And surprise surprise, that pill , when taken with the needed glass of water, is also mostly dross and a tiny amount, often only 100 mg, of vitamin C !)
And all those grapefruit 'impurities 'are safe - we eat them without any danger and in fact with a great deal of enjoyment.
All our food mostly consists of a vast bulk of relatively safe impurities and tiny amounts of pure vitamins and minerals.
But some foods - some very tasty mushrooms - consist of mostly nice food and tiny amounts of impurities called toxins that kill us.
So it all depends.
First we must define what is the main product we want from a mixture before we can define its 'impurities'.
Do grapefruits consist of 90% food (discarding only the skin and seeds) or do they consist of .001 % vitamin C and 99.99% dross ?
Then we need to do the experiments before drawing any conclusions.
Because sometimes , as with weak impure penicillin juice versus pure strong penicillin powder , it turns out that penicillin allergy deaths only began with massive amounts of the 100% pure stuff !
By sheer good luck, in this particular mushroom (this strain of the sometimes dangerous penicillium mold), the impurities were non-toxic as was the penicillin .
But for a relatively large percent of people, if given large amounts of pure penicillin direct into a vein by careless doctors, it can kill on the spot in a severe allergy reaction.
The safe solution is to go on using pure penicillin but to test new patients with tiny amounts - just beneath the skin - first.
Florey spent more than ten years - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s seeking ever purer penicillin to increase the safety of this injectable drug.
His obsession was scientifically wrong, logically deluded and it delayed the wartime introduction of mass produced penicillin for years.
Florey was a racist
Florey was an eugenicist and a racist from his youth and I believe this sort of racial purity thinking leaked over into the science side of his brain - he saw penicillin as the Anglo Saxons and the impurities as the Blacks.
Blood that was 99% Anglo Saxon and 1% Black was impure and defiled - and much the same applied to pure versus impure penicillin.
In Florey's twisted mind.
Ward doctors are like shop floor chemists - they hold few illusions
Another problem was that both Fleming and Florey were far more lab doctors than ward doctors - while Martin Henry Dawson divided his time equally between both.
Sheltered university chemists quickly lose their delusions about the academic awards for obtaining 100% total synthesis ,regardless of expense or yield, once on the factory floor of a profit-seeking chemical firm.
So too with busy ward doctors balancing a dying patient versus a very dangerous drug that might injure them as well as save their life.
My mother would have backed Martin Henry Dawson 110%
My mother , in her early thirties, was saved from certain infectious death by a single course of streptomycin .
It left her deaf in one ear - by that time, in 1962 , this was a well known risk of high doses of that drug.
She didn't complain then and she never ever did .
She told how grateful she was to lose her hearing to gain her life just three days before she suffered her fatal stroke - when she was in her eighties, a half century later.
So call me prejudiced - I like doctors who take chances to save patients' lives.
I like Martin Henry Dawson.
He saw two patients about to die from invariably fatal endocarditis.
All other known medical solutions had failed.
He knew penicillin seemed non toxic in various animals and in human blood - from his own research and that of Fleming and Florey.
He tested a small amount of penicillin that he suspected to be probably very weak , on himself, injected just under his skin.
No toxic results.
He did the same on the two patients - not toxic.
He gradually and slowly upped the amounts and also moving gradually to injection methods that introduced the penicillin far quicker into the blood and hence was far more potentially dangerous.
Only local pain at the injection site and a temporary fever and shakes was noted - routine for most injected drugs then.
All Dawson sought from penicillin was that it was relatively safe - and effective.
He used the penicillin he made himself with hours or days - he wasn't afraid of hard work, unlike Fleming - so stability was an non-issue to him.
Like the food that Dawson ate and enjoyed, his crude penicillin was hardly pure - but so what - it was basically safe.
Safer in fact - even in crude form - than the 100% pure sulfa drugs that were then routinely saving many lives while also making many people very very sick in the process.
Like a chemist on the shop floor ( think Smith, Elder and Jephcott ) Dawson saw life as full of compromises and the job was determining what was really Job One.
For all of them , it was saving as many patients as they could - NOW !
And God Bless 'Em for that...
Wartime Penicillin Drama : 3 non-chemists promote chemical penicillin while 3 working chemists promote natural penicillin ...
Three middle-aged chemist manques who disgracefully put youthful dreams before the public good - at the height of a total war
Three of wartime penicillin's chief protagonists were men who, as youths, had hoped to become hands-on lab research chemists but whom necessity had pushed them instead into becoming medical science desk administrators.
Their names ?
Howard Florey, director of Oxford University's Dunn Path Institute , A. Newton Richards, head of the Medical Division of Vannevar Bush's famous OSRD war-science agency and George W. Merck , head of Merck.
All three greatly respected each other and worked as closely together as the American and British governments (nominally allies) allowed.
Wartime penicillin gave all three a second childhood as chemist manques and disgracefully, they ran with it* .
Even as a world at war panted instead for lots of disease-fighting drugs in any form , as long as they worked , were safe and were available NOW .
"Middle Aged Crazy"
For ten useless years (before , during and after WWII) they placed their highest priority on producing totally synthesized artificial (patentable) commercially viable penicillin.
They didn't get it and we still haven't.
If we had left penicillin just to them - as most at the top of the American and British governments had wanted - we'd never seen any amount of penicillin . Not during the war and not for long after, until newly elected governments came to their senses , cut their losses and moved on.
Let us now honour the three chemists who put public good before their chosen profession
The best solution perhaps for all time but certainly during a war emergency with its shortages of time and resources.
Let us now honour their names - as true patriots , as people who put the good of humanity before gaining more fame for their chosen profession.
These largely unknown and unhonoured heroes of the wartime penicillin saga made sure we had penicillin when it was most needed - D-Day and after.
And these three laid the groundwork for the kind of micro-biology technology that still produces all our antibiotics and many other medicines as well.
They are the American WPB's (War Production Board) Larry Elder , Glaxo chief Harry Jephcott and Pfizer chief John L Smith.
While we can show our disappointment for what Alexander Fleming, Florey , Martin Henry Dawson and all their co-workers did or didn't do with penicillin , it is my contention that all their actions were predictable , based on my through study of their personalities as displayed from youth on into middle age.
But I can't honestly say the same about Elder, Jephcott and Smith : they were the true wildcards of the whole wartime penicillin drama....
* I am mindful of former Nova Scotia premier John Buchanan who became a lawyer and a very very successful politician but who had really wanted to be a civil engineer.
Once in power, he drove the province into tremendous debt building anything and everything in sight : the once young engineer manque who finally got to 'drive the excavator'.
Most middle aged men - once they get money, a pot belly and grey hair - content themselves with finally buying the Corvette or Harley Davidson that Dad would never let them buy - but some (like Florey , Richards and Merck) do far more harm than that when they get a chance to go "middle aged crazy" .
Monday, August 11, 2014
New York Times - succinct for once - on Fleming's penicillin vs Dawson's penicillin
On Feb 23rd 2009 , the New York Times did a story about the first times it ever mentioned penicillin on its pages.
In that article the Times reporter , Nicholas Bakalar , correctly (and yet so succinctly) said that in a major story on May 6th 1941 , the Times described the first ever use of penicillin IN a patient (Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , October 16th 1940 at Manhattan's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital).
Completely true , because all previous clinical use of penicillin - stretching back 12 years and all in the UK - had involved the use of penicillin ON a patient.
The breakthrough from harmless to lifesaving happened in North America - in NYC - first.
It was left to Dr Martin Henry Dawson from new Scotland - not Dr Alexander Fleming from old Scotland -to elevate penicillin from a harmless enough antiseptic (ON) to the potent lifesaver it became (IN) - thus ushering in the Age of Lifesaving Antibiotics.
Overwhelming , external antiseptic medications* by themselves do not save patients from acute life-threatening infections - but internal antibiotic medications do .
(*Surgical and nursing procedures that follow strict disinfectant and antiseptic protocols of course do save hundreds of millions of lives worldwide each year , but indirectly, by avoiding future potential infections.)
It was Dr Dawson who lifted penicillin out of a dusty museum of medical curios and stuck it into a dying man's arm and saved his life - not Fleming.
Fleming thought penicillin was only useful as an antiseptic and only if it was first made artificially synthetic - neither which proved in any way accurate.
Bravo Nicolas ------ Fleming : first to put penicillin ON a patient , Dawson : first to put penicillin IN a patient ...
In that article the Times reporter , Nicholas Bakalar , correctly (and yet so succinctly) said that in a major story on May 6th 1941 , the Times described the first ever use of penicillin IN a patient (Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , October 16th 1940 at Manhattan's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital).
Completely true , because all previous clinical use of penicillin - stretching back 12 years and all in the UK - had involved the use of penicillin ON a patient.
The breakthrough from harmless to lifesaving happened in North America - in NYC - first.
It was left to Dr Martin Henry Dawson from new Scotland - not Dr Alexander Fleming from old Scotland -to elevate penicillin from a harmless enough antiseptic (ON) to the potent lifesaver it became (IN) - thus ushering in the Age of Lifesaving Antibiotics.
Overwhelming , external antiseptic medications* by themselves do not save patients from acute life-threatening infections - but internal antibiotic medications do .
(*Surgical and nursing procedures that follow strict disinfectant and antiseptic protocols of course do save hundreds of millions of lives worldwide each year , but indirectly, by avoiding future potential infections.)
Antibiotics can only save patients from imminent death if used IN the body - never ON the body
It was Dr Dawson who lifted penicillin out of a dusty museum of medical curios and stuck it into a dying man's arm and saved his life - not Fleming.
Fleming thought penicillin was only useful as an antiseptic and only if it was first made artificially synthetic - neither which proved in any way accurate.
Bravo Nicolas ------ Fleming : first to put penicillin ON a patient , Dawson : first to put penicillin IN a patient ...
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...