WWII Columbia filters natural penicillin AND natural uranium

It is easy to see how Columbia University's two wartime Manhattan Projects differed : after all one saved countless thousands of lives while the other one caused countless thousands of deaths.

But it never hurts to consider how much they had in common - together - set against other parts of the Allied wartime nuclear and antibiotics effort.
Because, in truth, most of the top Allied physicists focused all their pride on the Washington State based efforts to artificially synthesize Plutonium to make endless amounts of nuclear bombs and nuclear energy.

They found this far more exciting than Columbia's painful war-long efforts to filter out tiny amounts of natural U-235 from its more plentiful kissing cousin natural U-238.

Similarly, the Allies' top chemists found the thought of artificially synthesized penicillin far more exciting than they did thinking about ways to aid the painful efforts to separate tiny amounts of pure natural penicillin from all other metabolites thrown up by the penicillium fungus.

(Though I must remind readers that while U-235 won't go BOOM if it remains mixed with U-238, natural penicillin - like the Vitamin C in oranges - works equally well pure or if still mixed with the rest of the penicillium juice.)

Both the natural uranium bomb and natural penicillin needle ended up being the classic understudy Plan Bs, the ones that came in at the last minute to save the Allied bacon when the synthesists failed to deliver as promised ...

Penicillin meeting is just the cover story for atomic bomb meeting

On December 17 1941, the medical wing of America's famous OSRD war research agency held a rare - possibly unique - meeting outside the Washington beltway.

Even rarer was the presence of one attendee, the boss of the OSRD himself, Vannevar Bush, never one to think war would be won by advances in medicine.

What on earth was really going on ?

Manhattan's twin wartime projects collide

Supposedly the meeting was held in New York city's highly exclusive University Club to please the CEOs of America's drug companies - but to do that , Chicago would have been a more central choice.

The head of the medical wing, Merck chief scientific consultant A N Richards , had really brought his committee to New York City solely as a favour to Bush.

Bush needed a suitable cover story for a series of meetings on something he felt far more important than Henry Dawson's little Manhattan based natural penicillin project.

Bush was finalizing a plan to ask FDR to approve a wartime atomic bomb as the top Allied war project : the atomic Manhattan Project.

So far most of America's atomic bomb research had happened at the same university where Dawson was doing his penicillin work : Columbia.

Its dean of science George Pegram and its Nobel winning physical chemist Harold Urey had just returned from a special fact finding mission to check out Britain's atomic efforts.

On their return their letter to Bush had made it clear the British plans were well advanced and that America needed to get on board or be left behind in strategic strength.

Bush was there in NYC to hear this confirmed in detail by Pegram - a man he trusted completely to be 'sound' .

Bush had to be sure , before he gave the red light to this hugely expensive project that would suck scarce resources from other (possibly war-winning) new weapons.

Bush gave so much money to Columbia for its atomic Manhattan Project work during the war - money that the entire university badly needed - that Columbia was completely willing to throw Dawson's penicillin Manhattan Project 'under the bus' when Dawson's efforts roused Bush and Richards' ire.

For in Manhattan , the twin projects Bomb/ death and penicillin/life intertwine constantly....

Aaron Alston , penicillin's first SBE patient but second to get the historical injection

The known published facts are few

All the contemporary (1945 era) newspaper and book accounts - written by (or coming second hand from) participant eyewitnesses to the events themselves - make it clear that Martin Henry Dawson's first SBE/penicillin patient was a "negro" "man".

And that his name was"Aaron Alston" and that he subsequently "died".

The available record of the amounts and dates that Aaron received Dawson's penicillin - as published by key Dawson team member Dr Gladys L Hobby in her 1985 book on penicillin , Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge , ceases near the end of January 1941.

And that is all the published accounts show.

But now for new research and reasoned suppositions...

We can say that 1940s medical statistics indicate that Alston was a more likely than not a young adult when he entered the hospital with SBE .

It is clear from the census that the names Aaron and Alston is a combination found in a fair number of men in America in the first half century of the 29th century.

However , the censuses generally indicates they are usually negro and that their residences seem centred in the South - from rural Carolina into urban black centres like Washington and Baltimore.

But in the critical 1940 census , there is no Aaron Alston recorded in New York City or in nearby New Jersey and Connecticut.

Now the first SBE patients that Dawson dealt with in the public wards of his upper Manhattan Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital were simply there because they were poor and his hospital happened to be close to where their family lived or close to where they lived when they took ill.

They were not drawn there from great distances because Dawson was then a famous and successful expert in this nearly 100% invariably fatal disease.

Far from it , he hadn't in fact handled any SBE cases up to then as the lead doctor.

Alston almost certainly had to be residing within a three or four miles circle of the Presbyterian hospital, at most , at the time he took ill. But the census does not show this.

He may have moved to New York City after April 1940 and before September 1940 : because southern blacks were still coming north to the unofficial American black capital of Harlem , though there was rarely gold for them at the end of its tattered rainbow.

Harlem is well within the catchment area for the Presbyterian's public wards.

We seemed to have failed to find out anything more about Mr Alston.

But as it happens, the New York City individual death records up to 1948 have been hand indexed on computer by many volunteers and made available via Ancestry.com.

They show an Aaron Alston , born about 1911 , (that is about age 29 on date of his admission to the hospital in September-October 1940) has having died on Jan 25th 1941 in Manhattan.

I am not sure that the original  death record will reveal more more - but perhaps a last address in New York and the name of next of kin and their home town , but I feel 100% certain this is our Mr Alston.

All we have really confirmed so far is that he was indeed a young man at time of his admission , as expected.

Why first patient but second to get the historic penicillin injection

Now while I am certain that Mr Alston was first SBE patient Dawson intended to treat with penicillin, I think he got it moments after Charles Aronson , the other SBE patient to get the historic penicillin injections on October 16th 1940.

Dawson's first major paper on penicillin and SBE was significantly the first penicillin paper not written by him with the help of the very reticent (as he himself was !) Dr Gladys Hobby, his lab chief.

Co-written instead with young Dr Thomas H Hunter, it positively gushes - for Dawson anyway - in giving forth the ages, initials of their name, gender, ethnicity,  dates of treatment, medical condition etc of all the SBE patients that Dawson had treated.

This was a style that Dawson had never shown before in 20 years of writing many, many medical articles.

Some doctors ("clinicians") simply tend to write articles that minutely detail the very 'grain' of  one (person's) case - while others ("researchers") prefer to report on the general conclusions drawn from treating one hundred similar cases.

(Both are valuable to doctors and scientists - but biographers won't be human if they didn't prefer the intimate details of the first type of articles !)

Dawson gets a chance in mid April 1944 to treat Charles Aronson a second time with penicillin for SBE .

This was because the little penicillin Charles had gotten in October 1940 had helped him survive his first bout of SBE.

He thus became that rare successful SBE case (about one in a hundred) that did so , back then.

Dawson indicates  in 1945 , that Charles had first entered the Presbyterian three and a half years earlier - ie mid October 1940 , confirming the common assumption that he was a very late addition to Dawson's Penicillin SBE program.

(Dawson knew he had too little penicillin to even treat Alston adequately, but he kind-heartedly treated both.

He was hoping perhaps that any small sign of a clinical response from either one of them might move Big Pharma to step up to the plate and mass produce the stuff --- for Aaron, Charlie and everyone else.)

Literally : the last shall be first 

But did Dawson really add Charlie at the last minute out of kind-heartedness alone ?

I believe the real reason was because Charlie was such a late addition to his ward's SBE patients.

When a new patient arrived with suspected SBE - a relatively slow killer, first a number of blood tests over a number of days must show the continued and not merely transitory presence of green strep in the blood stream to match all the other classic clinical signs of SBE,.

Then the ethical response is to immediately start treatment with the newest miracle drug , sulfa, and pray.

This is what happened to Aaron, who had been in the ward about a month when he first got his penicillin.

But because Charlie was such a late addition, there hadn't been time to start treatment with sulfa drugs .

So if Charles was treated with penicillin alone and did show a clinical improvement, Dawson's sulfa worshipping naysayers (and their lineup began around the block) could not say it was all due to their established sulfa , not his new penicillin.

(Remember that a lot of middle-aged doctors , the same age as Dawson , had first made their mark as early sulfa drug pioneers - any new miracle drug meant their acclaim was over. )

Behind the polite rancour of academic/scientific 'critiques' is often a lot of half-hidden ego and income concerns.

Dawson recalled, in his 1945 article , that the 1940 Charles was treated with penicillin on October 16 and 17th and then immediately (first) "started" on sulfa on October 22 and that he responded so well that he was released in December and was illness free for three plus years.

Ethically, Dawson would never have wasted half of his tiny amount of penicillin he intended for Aaron on Charles --- if he was already responding well to sulfa.

I think the reason it became so urgent to treat Aaron in mid-October (well in advance of the Dawson team's own original timetable for starting clinical trials) was because he had already been treated with sulfa and it had failed.

And maybe even made him extremely sick  because allergies to sulfa are common and serious.

But treating Aaron alone risked having any penicillin success disputed by the pro-sulfa lobby and this would only forestall drug company involvement - hurting Aaron as well as all others.

Hence Charlie not only getting treatment but getting treated ahead of Aaron , if only by moments.

Ask anyone : nothing starts off a (soon to be citation classic) medical article quite like an opening sentence like this one ---

"The first patient  ever treated with systemic penicillin had (then invariably fatal) SBE , but had not yet had time to start a sulfa treatment, however he responded so well to the penicillin that he has now been home fully recovered for over six months months."

In fact Dawson saw no clinical response at all between cases of endocarditis and penicillin for one and a half long years and he didn't save anyone with the disease purely on penicillin alone until two years later.

But Charles's recovery might have been helped by the morale uplifting affect of simply knowing that he was Patient One of a touted new Miracle drug .

I can only hope that my research efforts eventually help Aaron Alston's relatives to gain some comfort from his short life.

They will learn that he helped bring penicillin into this world and that while it didn't help him personally, it has directly and indirectly helped ten billion of us in the seventy five years since he first received it.....

On a day when most other youth got America's first peacetime draft card, Aaron & Charlie got History's first needle of antibiotics : Dies Mirabilis ,October 16 1940

When the possibility of  your nation joining a world wide war looms, getting your first ever draft registration card must feel just like getting the kiss of death, to a young man on the campus of Columbia University.

But when you are a young man on another part of Columbia's campus who has been written off  'as soon to die from an invariably fatal disease', getting instead History's first ever needle of antibiotics, must feel just like getting the kiss of life.

Hence the spooky Janus-like nature of Dies Mirabilis , October 16th 1940.....

Who am I ? asks a very famous bright yellow powder from WWII

OK, Manhattan : Who am I ????

(a) In the popular imagination, I am often thought of as being a bright yellow powder (though if fact I might often be dark red or brown or even some other color).

(b) Oddly enough, it is exactly the same for me.

(a)  Some of my most important developments happened on Manhattan island, with strong Canadian involvement --- I think that was all about the word "Hope".

(b) Wow ! Me ditto,ditto,ditto !

(a) The international visual symbol for me is characters in dense black type on a bright yellow background.

(b) That's me too .

(a) A large sample of Americans (men mostly) voted me the top news story of the 20th century for the Newseum.

(b) A large sample of Americans (women mostly) also voted me the top news story of the century for the Newseum.

(a) A little boy is the dramatic climax of my story.

(b) Strange, a baby girl is the dramatic climax of my story as well.

(a) Much of my story happened on a campus at Columbia university and involved Columbia university professors.

(b) So did my story !

(a) I was top secret through most of WWII and I was regarded as one of the best Allied military weapons of the war.

(b) What can I say : ditto ditto .

(a) I am regarded as one of the top scientific discoveries to come out of WWII.

(a) Yeah ? Well so am I .

(a) I was a big project for the OSRD, who spent a fortune on me, until another government agency took me over : but the bosses at the OSRD still kept their hand in.

(b) The OSRD spent quite a bundle on me too - still kept doing so, even after I was taken over by another government agency.

(a) Oh yeah, well I was so important that I was flown all over the world in big bombers.

(b) Bet you weren't flown about as much as me in big bombers.

(a) I was a big deal in Britain : they even act like they invented me.

(b), Oh boy, don't I know that feeling.

(a) The British chemical giant, ICL looked for a while like it would be running me but Vannevar Bush of the OSRD soon stopped that.

(b) And that goes for me too.

(a) In my natural state, I hardly seem to exist, consisting of less than 1% of the natural mix.

(b) I know the feeling, too, actually being much less than 1% of the natural mix.

(a) Well I am so similar to others in the mix, at least in conventional chemical terms, that its a life's work to separate me from them.

(b) That's what all the chemists say about me - usually with a very deep sigh.

(a) I won't work at all, unless I am separated from my natural mix and am about 88% pure.

(b) Now there we finally do differ : because I still work perfectly well even if I am only one part in million of the original natural mix.

(a) There was (and is) a tremendous moral row over whether I should have been built at all but none whatsoever about all the money and effort spent on separating me from my natural mix.

(b) Odd, because while there is no debate at all about whether I should have been built, there is a serious moral debate underway about whether so much scarce wartime energy and resources should have been spent on separating me from my natural mix.

 (a) I am considered one of the biggest killing machines in history.

(b) Boy or girl, do we ever part company there : I am one of the smallest lifesavers ever, and one of the best too.

Can you answer this puzzler ?

(a) and (b)  So, dear reader : Who am I ? Who am I ?

Answer : (a) the U-235 in the Little Boy Bomb  (b) an early vial of Penicillin, who baby Patty Malone and  teenagerAnne Shirley Carter helped make an overnight world sensation in August-September 1943 .....

Almost 15 years after Penicillin discovered, most of the world's serious penicillin cases had been treated by one doctor : Martin Henry Dawson

1943 Annual Report, Columbia University

In the Spring of 1943, Columbia University released its Annual Report and mentions , in passing, that Dr MH Dawson had supervised the treatment of 65 serious cases with penicillin for the National Research Council.

(Generally Columbia's lengthy wartime annual reports successfully managed to avoid talking about penicillin - a sure sign that it was ignored by academic science elsewhere as well throughout the war.)

If we can take "serious" to mean "treated systemically" , that probably means that the largest percentage of the world's systemic penicillin cases up to that point in time had been done by Dr Dawson alone !


(It is unclear whether or not the five endocarditis cases and the unknown number of other illnesses treated by Dawson with penicillin in 1940-1941 before the NRC got involved are among that total , but in any case it is an astounding figure.)

What we among the non-medical laity may still want to know is why was the world's best ever lifesaver ignored for so long by almost every other doctor in the world  ----  except by Dr Dawson ?

Why was his vision of the potential of hospital grown natural penicillin so different from their's ?

Has a cure for cancer already been found but no doctors recognize it ?

Was penicillin really a "Miracle" drug, a miracle instantly seen by all as is typical with Bible miracles - or was it more like the message to the three poor shepherd children at Fatima - a secret given only to those who retain a child's openness to new things ?

If almost all the world's doctors can ignore the open secret of penicillin right under their noses for 15 years way back then, would they recognize a cure for cancer if it appeared in the medical literature today ?

Thumbing their nose at MODERNITY.....

During WWII (the very apogee of MODERNITY) in New York City (the very epicenter of Modernity) , a dying doctor and his few square feet of Mother Nature quietly thumbed their nose at MODERNITY...

.... and changed our whole world, for the better, for ever.

Homegrown, natural , systemic penicillin is Dr Martin Henry Dawson's practical legacy, leading on from his insights into the commensal nature of Life that is his scientific legacy.

That same university on Manhattan Island ( Columbia) that Dawson worked at all during those war years, was also home to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb.

Columbia University thus was home to the Twentieth Century's biggest high tech disaster and its smallest low tech triumph : home to the stories of the Little Boy Bomb and the Baby Girl Patty Malone: the nadir and the apogee of Twentieth Century Humanity.

Sometimes Fact truly is stranger than Fiction ever could be...

Iron Ring to Martin Henry Dawson's kids

People sometimes ask if I think if Martin Henry Dawson deserves a Nobel Prize for all his efforts in medicine and science.

Nobel Prizes only go to living scientists -a maximum of three per prize - and more often than not the Nobel Committee gives it to the wrong living scientists !

No, I think we Canadians should honor our fellow Canadian Henry Dawson in our own Canadian way.

He was not - formally - an engineer, unlike his two brothers.

But I think he fully deserves the symbol of a true engineer - the famous iron ring.

Engineers don't usually invent something truly new and significant - that is the scientist's job.

But they are the people called in to scale it up from the lab bench to pilot plant, then to full scale production, so it can start doing some good for humanity.

The people who should have been ordering the engineers in to do this work in the case of penicillin - the owners and executives of the big and little pharma firms in the UK,USA and Canada - declined to do so.

So a dying doctor - Henry Dawson - did it all up instead.

The first patient cured back in 1931 (by Cecil Paine) with penicillin-the-antiseptic, a newborn baby facing a lifetime of blindness, needed only the equivalent of one microgram (mcg) of pure penicillin.

That is the amount found in a milliliter (ml) --- or an eyedropper's worth--- of the unprocessed penicillium juice.

(A microgram is a thousandth of a milligram or a millionth of
a gram or a billionth of a kilogram.)

A milliliter (ml) aka a cubic centimeter (cc) aka a gram (gm) of liquid penicillium juice was needed (during 1928-1941) to produce that microgram.

That is a extraction ratio of one to a million, solid from liquid.

In terms of solid out from solids in, it took about 100 grams of relatively expensive solid "food"/ medium to produce 1 mg of solid bioactivity -BEFORE the huge producing and purifying losses found in large scale operations run at routine competency.

I would say that only 10% of nominal penicillin producing capacity was actually converted to finished clinical penicillin, between 1940-1942 ,in the larger pilot plant operations, based on the numbers and type of patients treated.

That is, in plain english, a conversion ratio of 1 kg of solid food producing 1 mg of solid bioactivity - a million to one ratio.

With these sort of ratios, engineers can already see the difficulties that lie ahead - before I tell them about penicillin's extreme lability and fragility...

The smallest test tube we have available is all the factory needed to produce a mcg or two of penicillin.

 Which is enough to save Paine's baby, or one of Howard Florey's famous baby mice, or provide the material needed for Fleming to do all his 1928-1929 initial research using his patented micro-slide cell approach.

Scale it up 1000 times, you would now need a half dozen 2 liter Ernlenmeyer flasks to grow 1000 mcg's ( ie one milligram) worth of penicillin  - about as much as Duhig and Gray used to save lives with in Brisbane in 1943.

But Dawson wanted to scale the Mount Everest of infectious disease - green SBE - the  most dreaded form of the dreadful endocarditis.

He had a few lucky patients who held a strain of green strep in their heart valves that was as sensitive to penicillin as ordinary pyogenes strep was - so he could cure them with just a million times as much penicillin as Pain's baby or Florey's mouse - ie a gram of the stuff.

But other patients of his had SBE from strains about one thousand times less sensitive than ordinary pyogenes strep.

For them, he needed a kilo of pure penicillin- one billion times as much as Paine's baby needed.

That means he and his tiny pilot plant on the eighth floor of Columbia P and S would need
to process a million liters of penicillium juice over a two or three month period - ie 10 production runs of 100,000 liters each.

(That is about 200,000 milk bottles a run. In a big city dairy setup, that means processing 1000 milk bottles an hour, every hour, 24/7 for eight days straight, for each run.)

He couldn't have done that in P and S , even if his bosses had been helpful - which they weren't--- to put it mildly.

But Columbia University is set in th verye heart of New York's dairy factory district - the university fathers could have leased a vacant dairy and produced this quantity of penicillin, (much as the University of Toronto did with insulin in 1922 when they had an opportunity to help humanity.)

Dawson wanted so badly to save any and all SBE patients, not just those who were relatively healthy and had sensitive strains of bacteria, but died in early 1945 before he could get his hands on the huge amounts of penicillin needed.

But his assistant Thomas H Hunter soon had enough penicillin to save anyone who had SBE, no matter how old and sick - Dawson's ultimate goal.

Dawson knew penicillin could do the job from the moment he first read about it back in September 1940 - he knew it didn't need more purifying and perfecting for years and years - just a swift application of the production engineer's "MORE button" .

His "Manhattan Pilot" had to be content with only producing between 50 Imperial gallons and 100 US gallons of penicillium juice per eight day run - with a 50% production loss, just enough to save one SBE patient (with a very sensitive green strep strain)  every two months.

However, he never  actually got that level out of his 700 two liter Erlenmeyer flasks pilot plant, because he never got the cool dark room (or two or three) he needed on a permanent basis, if his penicillium were to settle down and produce.

Columbia chose instead - because it did have a choice, as Brian Mulroney said - to perfect the process (gaseous diffusion) that produced most of the world's nuclear bombs  ---- ironically in that same dairy district that was more suited to making life-saving penicillin...

Columbia drops ball,Oxford runs with it

For ten months,(early September 1940-early July 1941) Columbia University had a clear lead on bringing mass produced penicillin to the world, but it blow it.

America had to give up its lead to Oxford University and the British. America lost the moral edge on this story.

But before Congress and the federal government bring out committees and commissions to investigate Columbia, it should remember it ,too, had a chance and it blew it.

"You sir, had a Choice"

Columbia and Washington may say 'we had no choice' but as Mulroney says, "you sir, had a choice."

During those same ten months, Columbia and America had another clear lead - in atomic energy.

This is the one that the federal government choose to fund, this is the one that Columbia administrators choose to find rooms for.

And as the Manhattan Project grew and grew, Columbia and the federal government found new rooms for it in the heart of Manhattan's traditional milk plant district, in north west Harlem, in the corridor connecting the downtown campus to the medical campus.

Even the Japanese hardly a milk-guzzling nation and totally cut off from all the events in Britain and America surrounding penicillin from 1940 to 1944, could instantly tell that every photo they could find of an interior of a penicillin plant looked like nothing but a typical milk plant.

Most of the world's first penicillin plants used the equipment,technologies,staff - and sometimes the very plants - of milk companies.

Columbia had the team - and very nearby it had the equipment, to start saving millions of lives, way back in 1941.

But it blew it - it morally blew it.

Columbia developed three world-shaking ideas on its campus during World War Two.

The Age of Antibiotics started there -millions of lives saved by the actions of a decorated frontline combat hero named Dawson.

With Adorno and Horkheimer's seminal text, in humble mimeographed form, the age of Postmodernity started there.

And the technology that powered the Cold War, on both sides, was started and perfected there - in that life-giving milk plant  district - perfected by a life-long pacifist named Harold Urey.

Yes, most of the uranium that blew up Hiroshima was not made by Columbia's technology.

But the instance the war was over, the competing totally inefficient plants were closed and massive gas diffusion plants were built instead using Columbia's technology, to create the tens of thousands of bombs on all sides during the Cold War.

That same deadly uranium is still around, fashioned into today's current bombs.

Thanks Columbia, 'Home of the Cold War' !

Now if you went to the Columbia campus today , would you find a plaque to Dawson and Adorno or to Urey ?

You guessed right - Adorno and Dawson are non-persons but Urey and death are honored to the hilt at Columbia.

 And in Washington.

The self-promoting Florey and Britain get all the moral glow of penicillin instead.

Columbia blew it - and it is still blowing it......