I actually think I was thirteen going on fourteen when I first saw THE THIRD MAN, as part of Halifax CJCH-TV's nightly series of movies in the early evening.
I had read plenty of media account of the horrors of the Holocaust by then but hadn't really see anything cinematic about it, nothing to hit me really hard emotionally.
But THE THIRD MAN, centred on the morality of mis-used penicillin, did indeed hit me really hard.
No wonder, for it was a film that remains (65 years later) on many critics' lists of the top ten movies of all time.
As a small child, I had always found the events of WWII and the ten years thereafter very exciting and had always regretted never been being there mentally at firsthand (I was born in late 1951).
And in particular, I became an aware young person too late in the antibiotics revolution to be able to imagine the intense impact of this first miracle medicine upon human thought.
But the events in this film set in postwar Vienna changed all that : I could now feel, in my bones, for the first time how it was for people of that period.
How, for moviegoers back then, the ultimate good must be in providing penicillin to dying little ones and so the ultimate evil was not yet Auschwitz but rather those who would deny lifesaving penicillin to dying little ones.
I think the emotional wallop of that old B&W movie set my current penicillin project in motion --- only this time substituting Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, Newton Richards and Winston Churchill for Harry Lime in the denying penicillin to dying children department ....
Showing posts with label howard florey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label howard florey. Show all posts
Monday, September 28, 2015
Saturday, September 5, 2015
#HumanityWashesAshore ---- a threatening flood or a saving fountain ?
Aylan Kurdi : potentially harmful or potentially helpful ?
One can view this week's refugee crisis (just as one can view WWII and WWII Penicillin) as a conflict over varying ways to best control our fears of the future.
Because all humanity, all the time (sometimes consciously but often also unconsciously) worries about the unknown future.
It remains the sole most distinctive thing that we humans do that other lifeforms don't seem to do.
Controlling fears of Future by controlling everything... or nothing
Many of us humans feel that we can best control our fears of the future by controlling everything ---- after totally eliminating everything else that we judge potentially harmful. What remains is a knowable future we can control and direct.
Control freaks.
(Think Adolf Hitler, Howard Florey and their ilk.)
But others of us humans feel that we can best control our fears of the future by not controlling anything ---- diversifying our biological portfolio to totally retain everything potentially helpful, giving humanity lots of Plan Bs, Cs,Ds, etc.
Portfolio diversifiers.
(Think Henry Dawson and his supporters.)
To many of a Vancouver newspaper's letter writers, a little three year old refugee boy seems a potential terrorist, best drowned at birth - overseas if possible.
If this was 1940, perhaps by drowning on a badly overcrowded boat, filled with Europe's Jews, on its way to exile in Madagascar.
If not drowned, then perhaps gassed and burned, just in case any little baby grows up as a Jewish terrorist.
But this is 2015, and their new phobia is Arabs not Jews, so a Turkish beach will have to do instead until new furnaces can be stoked up.
To other newspaper letter writers the little three year old boy was potentially a genius and savior who would grow up to solve our environmental crisis (or perhaps not), but in any case a child to be held and cherished, a fellow human being.
Potential terrorist or potential savior - or just little three year old -- now we will never know...
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
"Primitive Penicillin For Everyone, Now !"
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....
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....
Saturday, August 29, 2015
What if Penicillin really was a miracle ?
What if we never find the mis-laid personal account from Henry Dawson, finally explaining the reasons for the other Manhattan Project, because that document never actually existed.
Because perhaps Dawson could never explain, even to himself, just why he began the project.... and why he carried it through at the cost of his own life.
Because Dr Dawson perhaps sometimes felt propelled forward by forces beyond his ken, to do what he did, regardless of the cost.
I can and I will, give my best educated guesses as to why Dawson rationally and deliberately did what he did --- but I have no proof, no proof at all.
Another reason, a very celestial reason, makes just as much sense and has just as much proof.
Or maybe a bit more - because in 1943-1946, it was very common indeed, among the devout and among the atheists alike, to speak of the "miracle" of penicillin.
As a Roman Catholic doctor* once remarked to Margaret Jennings about the atheist Howard Florey and penicillin and miracles, wouldn't Florey have been surprised, if it really had been a miracle.
But won't we all have been surprised as well, the nominally devout at least as much as the militant doubter ?
What if God did choose to come back at the height of the horrible WWII, as a blob, like none of us, just a smear on a subway wall --- or on a tenement hall.
Once again, just to help Humanity find its way home....
*************
*recalled in Trevor Williams' biography of Howard Florey
Because perhaps Dawson could never explain, even to himself, just why he began the project.... and why he carried it through at the cost of his own life.
Because Dr Dawson perhaps sometimes felt propelled forward by forces beyond his ken, to do what he did, regardless of the cost.
I can and I will, give my best educated guesses as to why Dawson rationally and deliberately did what he did --- but I have no proof, no proof at all.
Another reason, a very celestial reason, makes just as much sense and has just as much proof.
Or maybe a bit more - because in 1943-1946, it was very common indeed, among the devout and among the atheists alike, to speak of the "miracle" of penicillin.
As a Roman Catholic doctor* once remarked to Margaret Jennings about the atheist Howard Florey and penicillin and miracles, wouldn't Florey have been surprised, if it really had been a miracle.
But won't we all have been surprised as well, the nominally devout at least as much as the militant doubter ?
What if God did choose to come back at the height of the horrible WWII, as a blob, like none of us, just a smear on a subway wall --- or on a tenement hall.
Once again, just to help Humanity find its way home....
*************
*recalled in Trevor Williams' biography of Howard Florey
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 ....
Sunday, June 28, 2015
battling penicillins : ancient & modern / battling medicines : social & warlike
Whom would make wartime penicillin ?
Henry Dawson's tiny ancient "natural" fungi factories with a few hundred million of years of experience under their belt ?
Or Howard Florey's big clumsy lumbering "synthetic" chemists' factories, built along lines more familiar to Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg fans than to fans of the ever graceful Nijinski ?
To whom would wartime penicillin go to ?
Just to lightly injured front line Allied troops, but only after D-Day, with penicillin used for a secret weapon of war, as Florey and the American OSRD planned ?
Or to everyone in a war-shattered world who was dying for lack of it, as Dawson wanted ? Penicillin to be used both as a medical lifesaver and as tardy but tangible proof of the long claimed moral difference between Allies and Axis ?
Henry Dawson's tiny ancient "natural" fungi factories with a few hundred million of years of experience under their belt ?
Or Howard Florey's big clumsy lumbering "synthetic" chemists' factories, built along lines more familiar to Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg fans than to fans of the ever graceful Nijinski ?
To whom would wartime penicillin go to ?
Just to lightly injured front line Allied troops, but only after D-Day, with penicillin used for a secret weapon of war, as Florey and the American OSRD planned ?
Or to everyone in a war-shattered world who was dying for lack of it, as Dawson wanted ? Penicillin to be used both as a medical lifesaver and as tardy but tangible proof of the long claimed moral difference between Allies and Axis ?
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 ....
Monday, April 27, 2015
Their revolutions WERE rhetoricized : Jacob Burckhardt's "terrible simplifiers"
Just as the famous Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt had earlier predicted, the Age of Modernity (1865-1965) was a time when 'terrible simplifiers' made that century the most violent and horrific on record.
A time of Grand - simple - Narratives, of soaring rhetoric , when all of life's problems and solutions seemed 'clearcut' , to use a word greatly overused by Sir Howard Florey, a much honored doyen of Modernity.
To his great penicillin rival, Martin Henry Dawson, nothing was ever simple or clearcut - a viewpoint that naturally won him no honours at all during the Era of Modernity.
And Dawson died in 1945, years away from being honoured under the very different value system of our current post-modern Era of Global Commensality....
A time of Grand - simple - Narratives, of soaring rhetoric , when all of life's problems and solutions seemed 'clearcut' , to use a word greatly overused by Sir Howard Florey, a much honored doyen of Modernity.
To his great penicillin rival, Martin Henry Dawson, nothing was ever simple or clearcut - a viewpoint that naturally won him no honours at all during the Era of Modernity.
And Dawson died in 1945, years away from being honoured under the very different value system of our current post-modern Era of Global Commensality....
Thursday, March 12, 2015
No second acts for most war veterans - except in booming NY ?
F Scott Fitzgerald's most famous line is also his most misquoted line.
For Fitzgerald - like his character Jay Gatsby - was ever the eternal optimist , never the cynic.
For in fact, in a published essay written just after the Stock Market Crash, "My Lost City", Fitzgerald admitted that while he once thought there are no second acts in America , the exception had to be for those living in eternally booming New York City.
I thought of this while reading, in passing, literally hundreds of brief biographies of WWI veterans in the British and Commonwealth media, to mark this the one hundred anniversary of the start of WWI.
For these biographies tend to offer a twisted take on the true reality of WWI veterans.
For the relatively few lives taken up, from a choice of the literally millions of possible lives, and put in the newspapers almost always are of those men who were in the infantry frontlines and among those who died during the war.
Died as either notable heroes --- or as happenstance victims.
My home province of Nova Scotia, for example, has made much of its first and last soldiers to die in the Great War : both men died undramatically in routine frontline activities when almost randomly shot by snipers.
But maybe only a third of WWI veterans occupied the most forward infantry trench and actually went 'over the top'.
The rest served in the Navy and Air Force, in the Artillery, Engineers, Pioneer and Forestry Brigades, in Supply, in the Medical Corps and as battalion musicians - on and on, in situations more to the rear of No Man's Land.
Death and injury was almost as common to them as to the infantry but their living conditions did tend to take less of a toll on their lifelong general health.
And in pure statement of fact, most frontline infantry soldiers in almost all WWI armies did come home alive.
Alive, but broken to some degree - suffering losses in both mental and physical health.
Wounded limbs and scarred lungs did tend to heal, for you had to be relatively young and healthy to even make it to the tough frontline life.
But the damage doesn't really ever go permanently away and can lead to a lessened capacity to enjoy life and an earlier than expected death.
Many WWI veterans did not simply return to humdrum lives that failed to ever match the achievements of this brief youthful experience, to sound the old cliche - instead they became even more distinguished in their later civilian careers.
I have often thought it worth detailing whether those WWI vets with the most noted successful civilian careers were also the ones who suffered the least wretched physical conditions during the war.
Because success is often measured as much by sheer quantity (length of time doing an activity) as by quality while doing that activity.
Frequently Genius dies young and unknown while the more ordinary figure can achieve fame by having a long career and merely doing their job competently.
To be honest, I am thinking now of the twice-wounded war vet and penicillin pioneer Martin Henry Dawson who died tragically young and relatively unknown at 48 versus his rival Howard Florey who successfully avoided war service, kept his health and died age seventy world famous.
Dawson - I would hold - was never the conventional scientist or much admired by his more ordinary and conventional fellow scientists - but one more likely to break old paradigms and create new ones.
But he didn't live long enough, in good enough health, to do more than start down this path.
By contrast, Florey was highly conventional in both his lifestyle and in scientific thought -no ground breaker here - but nonetheless a hard worker, ambitious, a life-long striver.
The early death of his more successful penicillin rival ensured Florey ended up showered in honors and a baron, rewards more for his science administration skills than for his science experiments.
But back to Dawson - he might well have had a moderately successful life if he had stayed in Canada after the war - nothing perhaps to ever match the glory of his war record.
But instead he went to booming 1920s New York City, where among other things, he became the person to ever work with DNA in a test tube , ushering in our era of microbiology and also the first to ever inject penicillin into a patient, ushering in our era of antibiotics as well.
A notable second act .
F Scott Fitzgerald would have been proud indeed ....
For Fitzgerald - like his character Jay Gatsby - was ever the eternal optimist , never the cynic.
For in fact, in a published essay written just after the Stock Market Crash, "My Lost City", Fitzgerald admitted that while he once thought there are no second acts in America , the exception had to be for those living in eternally booming New York City.
I thought of this while reading, in passing, literally hundreds of brief biographies of WWI veterans in the British and Commonwealth media, to mark this the one hundred anniversary of the start of WWI.
For these biographies tend to offer a twisted take on the true reality of WWI veterans.
For the relatively few lives taken up, from a choice of the literally millions of possible lives, and put in the newspapers almost always are of those men who were in the infantry frontlines and among those who died during the war.
Died as either notable heroes --- or as happenstance victims.
My home province of Nova Scotia, for example, has made much of its first and last soldiers to die in the Great War : both men died undramatically in routine frontline activities when almost randomly shot by snipers.
But maybe only a third of WWI veterans occupied the most forward infantry trench and actually went 'over the top'.
The rest served in the Navy and Air Force, in the Artillery, Engineers, Pioneer and Forestry Brigades, in Supply, in the Medical Corps and as battalion musicians - on and on, in situations more to the rear of No Man's Land.
Death and injury was almost as common to them as to the infantry but their living conditions did tend to take less of a toll on their lifelong general health.
And in pure statement of fact, most frontline infantry soldiers in almost all WWI armies did come home alive.
Alive, but broken to some degree - suffering losses in both mental and physical health.
Wounded limbs and scarred lungs did tend to heal, for you had to be relatively young and healthy to even make it to the tough frontline life.
But the damage doesn't really ever go permanently away and can lead to a lessened capacity to enjoy life and an earlier than expected death.
Many WWI veterans did not simply return to humdrum lives that failed to ever match the achievements of this brief youthful experience, to sound the old cliche - instead they became even more distinguished in their later civilian careers.
I have often thought it worth detailing whether those WWI vets with the most noted successful civilian careers were also the ones who suffered the least wretched physical conditions during the war.
Because success is often measured as much by sheer quantity (length of time doing an activity) as by quality while doing that activity.
Frequently Genius dies young and unknown while the more ordinary figure can achieve fame by having a long career and merely doing their job competently.
To be honest, I am thinking now of the twice-wounded war vet and penicillin pioneer Martin Henry Dawson who died tragically young and relatively unknown at 48 versus his rival Howard Florey who successfully avoided war service, kept his health and died age seventy world famous.
Dawson - I would hold - was never the conventional scientist or much admired by his more ordinary and conventional fellow scientists - but one more likely to break old paradigms and create new ones.
But he didn't live long enough, in good enough health, to do more than start down this path.
By contrast, Florey was highly conventional in both his lifestyle and in scientific thought -no ground breaker here - but nonetheless a hard worker, ambitious, a life-long striver.
The early death of his more successful penicillin rival ensured Florey ended up showered in honors and a baron, rewards more for his science administration skills than for his science experiments.
But back to Dawson - he might well have had a moderately successful life if he had stayed in Canada after the war - nothing perhaps to ever match the glory of his war record.
But instead he went to booming 1920s New York City, where among other things, he became the person to ever work with DNA in a test tube , ushering in our era of microbiology and also the first to ever inject penicillin into a patient, ushering in our era of antibiotics as well.
A notable second act .
F Scott Fitzgerald would have been proud indeed ....
Friday, October 17, 2014
Howard Florey : a dominant Alpha Male ... fiercely defending the banal and conventional ideas of Normal Science !
An irony there : the fearsome Howard Florey stands revealed as an intellectual milquetoast , behind his public persona as verbal and physical monster terrifying the calm corridors of 1930s British academic science.
By contrast, to fellow scientists the 1930s Henry Dawson was seen as a submissive and an Omega male , but intellectually his personal ideas created great unease among those same scientists , in almost an Alpha manner.
Howard Florey gauged his very public and very blunt opinions extremely carefully.
He was always - always - on the cutting edge of medical progress - never ever before that edge and never ever behind it.
He distilled the commonplace ideas of the scientifically powerful and then spat them back at them as bluntly and loudly as he could.
"Oh, what a roaring colonial rebel that Florey is - but his new ideas make perfect sense to me" said his flattered superiors about this artful sycophant.
But when the meek and mild Dawson mumbled his shocking personal ideas, his superiors shifted uneasily in their seats and dismissed him as a good ('sound') man in the relative backwater of arthritis studies - but wildly off base in his wide claims about the fundamental importance of microbial variance.
So the wartime clash between Florey and Dawson - over penicillin - was bound to lack verbal and physical fireworks , with no efforts by Florey to get into a fist fight with Dawson as he had done with others in the past.
The fight was all intellectual - all about Dawson's Paradigm Science surmounting Florey's Normal Science - and here the Alpha Male lost completely ....
By contrast, to fellow scientists the 1930s Henry Dawson was seen as a submissive and an Omega male , but intellectually his personal ideas created great unease among those same scientists , in almost an Alpha manner.
Howard Florey gauged his very public and very blunt opinions extremely carefully.
He was always - always - on the cutting edge of medical progress - never ever before that edge and never ever behind it.
He distilled the commonplace ideas of the scientifically powerful and then spat them back at them as bluntly and loudly as he could.
"Oh, what a roaring colonial rebel that Florey is - but his new ideas make perfect sense to me" said his flattered superiors about this artful sycophant.
But when the meek and mild Dawson mumbled his shocking personal ideas, his superiors shifted uneasily in their seats and dismissed him as a good ('sound') man in the relative backwater of arthritis studies - but wildly off base in his wide claims about the fundamental importance of microbial variance.
So the wartime clash between Florey and Dawson - over penicillin - was bound to lack verbal and physical fireworks , with no efforts by Florey to get into a fist fight with Dawson as he had done with others in the past.
The fight was all intellectual - all about Dawson's Paradigm Science surmounting Florey's Normal Science - and here the Alpha Male lost completely ....
Friday, October 10, 2014
This Era of Plentudism : the post modern welcoming of plenitude vs modern plenticide
We are - deniers aside - all plentudists these days.
We actually welcome and cherish the chaos and complexity of a multilayered world - welcome and cherish communities composed of many wildly different little neighbourhoods.
'The more the merrier' is today our motto.
We are all Jane Jacobs and not Robert Moses today - we are all Henry Dawson and not Howard Florey these days.
We no longer have a an almost physical phobia against the mere thought of anything that is all mixed together.
Be that a bunch of different New York City ethnicities, New York City neighbourhoods or various unknown compounds in New York City crude penicillin juice.
We no longer seek to replicate the chemists' process of separation and purification outside the beaker and flask.
We no longer practise it on human cities ( via the doctrine of widely separated uses and strict zoning) or on so called human 'races' ( with white separated and superior to blacks and Jews).
Adolf Hitler, Robert Moses and Howard Florey all tried that during WWII , and all failed and all were eventually discredited .....
We actually welcome and cherish the chaos and complexity of a multilayered world - welcome and cherish communities composed of many wildly different little neighbourhoods.
'The more the merrier' is today our motto.
We are all Jane Jacobs and not Robert Moses today - we are all Henry Dawson and not Howard Florey these days.
We no longer have a an almost physical phobia against the mere thought of anything that is all mixed together.
Be that a bunch of different New York City ethnicities, New York City neighbourhoods or various unknown compounds in New York City crude penicillin juice.
We no longer seek to replicate the chemists' process of separation and purification outside the beaker and flask.
We no longer practise it on human cities ( via the doctrine of widely separated uses and strict zoning) or on so called human 'races' ( with white separated and superior to blacks and Jews).
Adolf Hitler, Robert Moses and Howard Florey all tried that during WWII , and all failed and all were eventually discredited .....
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Ironically, for a man in a hurry, Howard Florey takes a very very slow plane to America
By March 1941, according to young eye witness John Hedley-Whyte , Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey both knew (via gossipy trans-Atlantic letters between eye specialists) that there had been a gratifying academic response in America to Florey's August 1940 penicillin article in LANCET.
This, after it had fallen on deaf ears throughout the rest of the world.
Much 'too gratifying' for Florey's taste (and potentially very embarrassing for Fleming).
After all, Dr Fleming had, for 12 years, consistently and confidently insisted penicillin would not work if used as an antibiotics, ie as an internal lifesaving drug against severe bacterial infections.
Fleming saw penicillin as a viable drug only if a synthetic form could be invented - and even then it would be only useful as a topical antiseptic.
Now seemingly natural penicillin had been used as an internal antibiotic by Canadian born American doctor Henry Dawson , to successfully save Charles Aronson from invariably fatal SBE.
"Ouch !" said the ever tender Fleming ego.
Florey was even more alarmed - alarmed enough to halt his own efforts to synthesis penicillin after he had treated two patients in February.
He returned, posthaste, to treating more patients and to preparing a massive - frank and complete - article.
An article completely different from his earlier short and secretive article of August 1940.
Time for The Big Dog to piss along his chosen territory limits - time for the Australian to completely destroy this upstart Canadian colonial rival , Dawson.
He would submit his article for publication before Dawson and then go to America armed with the unpublished manuscript to regain his claim to "own" penicillin's bragging rights.
His chance came in early April when Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Research Foundation was unexpectedly delayed in London when his fact-finding trip was broken by a car accident.
Florey nabbed him in his London hospital , feeding him on exaggerated tales of bombed out British drug companies.
Florey neglected to tell Weaver that Oxford hadn't been bombed and never would be bombed . Or that many drug companies - particularly outside London hadn't and won't be bombed.
But it was a seemingly good excuse to justify Florey's willingness to trade his patentable-in-Britain penicillin process off to an American drug firm merely for producing one kilogram of 2.5% (semi-pure) penicillin, to help him resume clinical trials.
For just a relatively small amount of penicillin , 40 Mega Units , it remains unclear why if his own process was so good and if Oxford had totally escaped the Blitz, that he and his top production worker, Norman Heatley, didn't simply stay home and produce it themselves rather than slowly production why waltzing off to America.
Or why a series of letters to various American drug firms, via Rockefeller Foundation research executives, together with advance copies of his latest detailed article wouldn't work just as well as a personal pitch and at the same time allow the pair to stay home producing penicillin all the while.
It was because the kilo of penicillin was never the real point.
Florey spent little time in America (only one day three months) actually doing any penicillin research there.
Instead he spend the entire three months barnstorming countless university researchers and drug research heads alike , talking up how his team had been the first to discover the method purify penicillin and then to use it as an antibiotic.
Even in a wartime crisis, there are many scientists to whom claiming personal priority for discovery is the real priority.
So Florey, the infamous Bushwacker of medical research, was out on the warpath again and taking no prisoners because he played science like he played tennis : ruthlessly.
Pleasing then to report that the man-in-a-hurry Florey got hoisted on his own petard.
For he rejected taking the conventional two week long ship route to America via Liverpool to Halifax and then by train to New York .
And he rejected paying for it on his own nickel.
But by the time the Rockefeller Foundation approved funding and the US and UK governments approved Florey's passage on the supposedly fast clipper plane route, four months had passed.
Four long months since Dawson had first revealed his clinical results with three SBE patients, before a small public lecture audience at the New School of Social Research.
In that period, Dawson had revealed more details of his results with a total of 4 SBE patients and eight eye patients ,but this time in a paper delivered before the biggest medical research conference in North America.
The story had broken wide over the wire services and been published in the New York Times and Newsweek.
Had even got reviewed overseas in South Africa's medical journal !
The main reason Weaver and Rockefeller had given Florey $6000 was to have him go to America to pool his results with that of Dawson and Rene Dubos ( working on another antibiotic) --- all for the good of the allied effort against Hitler.
Florey stiffed Weaver, the Rockefeller Foundation, Dawson and Dubos by dog-dancing his three months in America against any chance he might even accidentally run into Dubos and Dawson.
He wasn't about to share his glory with any others, war effort or not.
Florey was at least intellectually consistent - he had also successfully avoided aiding the WWI war effort as well.
But his long delay in getting to America (not till July 1941) certainly didn't help his claim to be first - everywhere he went, he was asked about Dawson's earlier pioneering efforts .
Perhaps the slow ship, paid on his own nickel, might have been a lot faster than the fast plane paid for by others....
This, after it had fallen on deaf ears throughout the rest of the world.
Much 'too gratifying' for Florey's taste (and potentially very embarrassing for Fleming).
After all, Dr Fleming had, for 12 years, consistently and confidently insisted penicillin would not work if used as an antibiotics, ie as an internal lifesaving drug against severe bacterial infections.
Fleming saw penicillin as a viable drug only if a synthetic form could be invented - and even then it would be only useful as a topical antiseptic.
Now seemingly natural penicillin had been used as an internal antibiotic by Canadian born American doctor Henry Dawson , to successfully save Charles Aronson from invariably fatal SBE.
"Ouch !" said the ever tender Fleming ego.
Florey was even more alarmed - alarmed enough to halt his own efforts to synthesis penicillin after he had treated two patients in February.
He returned, posthaste, to treating more patients and to preparing a massive - frank and complete - article.
An article completely different from his earlier short and secretive article of August 1940.
Time for The Big Dog to piss along his chosen territory limits - time for the Australian to completely destroy this upstart Canadian colonial rival , Dawson.
He would submit his article for publication before Dawson and then go to America armed with the unpublished manuscript to regain his claim to "own" penicillin's bragging rights.
His chance came in early April when Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Research Foundation was unexpectedly delayed in London when his fact-finding trip was broken by a car accident.
Florey nabbed him in his London hospital , feeding him on exaggerated tales of bombed out British drug companies.
Florey neglected to tell Weaver that Oxford hadn't been bombed and never would be bombed . Or that many drug companies - particularly outside London hadn't and won't be bombed.
But it was a seemingly good excuse to justify Florey's willingness to trade his patentable-in-Britain penicillin process off to an American drug firm merely for producing one kilogram of 2.5% (semi-pure) penicillin, to help him resume clinical trials.
For just a relatively small amount of penicillin , 40 Mega Units , it remains unclear why if his own process was so good and if Oxford had totally escaped the Blitz, that he and his top production worker, Norman Heatley, didn't simply stay home and produce it themselves rather than slowly production why waltzing off to America.
Or why a series of letters to various American drug firms, via Rockefeller Foundation research executives, together with advance copies of his latest detailed article wouldn't work just as well as a personal pitch and at the same time allow the pair to stay home producing penicillin all the while.
It was because the kilo of penicillin was never the real point.
Florey spent little time in America (only one day three months) actually doing any penicillin research there.
Instead he spend the entire three months barnstorming countless university researchers and drug research heads alike , talking up how his team had been the first to discover the method purify penicillin and then to use it as an antibiotic.
Even in a wartime crisis, there are many scientists to whom claiming personal priority for discovery is the real priority.
So Florey, the infamous Bushwacker of medical research, was out on the warpath again and taking no prisoners because he played science like he played tennis : ruthlessly.
Pleasing then to report that the man-in-a-hurry Florey got hoisted on his own petard.
For he rejected taking the conventional two week long ship route to America via Liverpool to Halifax and then by train to New York .
And he rejected paying for it on his own nickel.
But by the time the Rockefeller Foundation approved funding and the US and UK governments approved Florey's passage on the supposedly fast clipper plane route, four months had passed.
Four long months since Dawson had first revealed his clinical results with three SBE patients, before a small public lecture audience at the New School of Social Research.
In that period, Dawson had revealed more details of his results with a total of 4 SBE patients and eight eye patients ,but this time in a paper delivered before the biggest medical research conference in North America.
The story had broken wide over the wire services and been published in the New York Times and Newsweek.
Had even got reviewed overseas in South Africa's medical journal !
The main reason Weaver and Rockefeller had given Florey $6000 was to have him go to America to pool his results with that of Dawson and Rene Dubos ( working on another antibiotic) --- all for the good of the allied effort against Hitler.
Florey stiffed Weaver, the Rockefeller Foundation, Dawson and Dubos by dog-dancing his three months in America against any chance he might even accidentally run into Dubos and Dawson.
He wasn't about to share his glory with any others, war effort or not.
Florey was at least intellectually consistent - he had also successfully avoided aiding the WWI war effort as well.
But his long delay in getting to America (not till July 1941) certainly didn't help his claim to be first - everywhere he went, he was asked about Dawson's earlier pioneering efforts .
Perhaps the slow ship, paid on his own nickel, might have been a lot faster than the fast plane paid for by others....
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
When (and why) Toronto's famed Hospital for Sick Children DIDN'T report a miracle
Miracles and Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children are mostly associated with Nobel winner Fred Banting, eleven year old Elsie Needham and insulin back in the 1920s.
Unfortunately ,they are NOT associated with July 1942, penicillin and a dying nine year old boy (possibly still alive today) known only as R. V.
Much against the will of the anglo-american medical establishment, both insulin and sulfa had their very public miracles (as in "worldwide newspaper headlines") involving saving the lives of dying children.
Banting himself pushed insulin baby miracle cures into the popular media - it seems ordinary hospital doctors in Britain did the same in the case of sulfa.
The medical research establishment didn't really fear the effect of such news headlines upon the patients and their families.
Instead, they feared its affect upon their colleagues who were not as 'measured' , 'level headed','rational' and 'scientific' as themselves.
In their minds anyway.
Because , in fact , when it comes to trying new treatments for dying patients, GPs can be faulted for being too slow off the mark, not too fast.
First the average GP trys all the conventional treatments, in a descending order of unconventionality.
Then when the patient is visibly 'decomposed' as they say in medical articles - hours from the grave - they try sulfa or insulin or penicillin and when the patient - despite all this delay - survives and quickly goes home fully healed, it truly does seem a miracle.
Now imagine a penicillin that - by and large - doesn't work , despite the bold initial claims made for it.
The GP seeing a nearly dead patient before them , despite all the current conventional and even unconventional treatments tried upon them.
Desperate they even try this here 'pen-i-cill-in' - and it fails.
The patient dies - as seemingly they were about to anyway.
Morally,who has been harmed by all this ?
The patient and their family knows that the doctors did everything - even went the extra four miles - to try and save someone with a limited likelihood of survival.
So they failed - but at least they tried and tried hard.
No, what the medical research community chiefs fear is not failure but success.
Because then there would be big headlines celebrating drug X when drug X is still in low supply , because the drug companies are patiently waiting for the researchers' results from long term, large scale, double blind studies, before deciding whether to invest large sums in scaling up production.
Forgotten in all this long term 'research leisureliness' is that there are many real people dying needlessly and families hurting needlessly.
Because nothing speeds up mass production like the spur of real competition - and competition can come out of the woodwork whenever front page headlines scream "medical miracle -new drug - short supply".
Not every investor reads medical journals but all can translate that bit of headlinese into plain old business English : dollars, lots and lots of potential dollars, to the firm that supplies Doctor Mom first.
The first few years of penicillin miracle cures in North America deliberately went unreported in the medical media --- let alone the popular media.
In Britain, one series was published in a medical journal but the popular press was successfully avoided by its lead author, Howard Florey.
Somehow, all the British daily newspapers' science cum medical journalists normally assigned to read medical journals for potential stories were charmed into staying mum on this big headline story.
Even in wartime, Fleet Street is highly competitive - it must have been a hell of a scientific "D" notice to silence the lot of them.
The reason was that the anglo american medical research leadership was hoping to turn penicillin-the-universal-lifesaver into penicillin-the-Allies-secret-weapon-of-war.
And - to their eternal shame - anglo american science slash medical specialist reporters matched them into forgetting their sacred professional vows.
That these medical researchers - all men - were smart there can be no doubt.
Perhaps the smartest thing they ever did was to successfully evade the front line trenches in WWI , despite being fit enough.
Now that they were all fat and all over forty, they had become positively warrior fierce.
They would help win the war by denying lifesaving penicillin to dying Allied , Neutral, Occupied and Enemy civilians - despite that oath thingy they all swore when they first became doctors .
That same ancient oath was incorporated into the requirement to give equal treatment too all the sick and wounded, under the Geneva Convention on warfare.
They would even deny giving penicillin to Allied POWs in enemy hands - and to Allied wounded judged too damaged to ever likely see combat again.
Just for a few years ,you understand - just a few years of keeping news of penicillin miracles out of the Allied popular media read by neutral officials friendly to Nazi Germany.
So it could give a big medical advantage to the Allies when casualties got really heavy after D-Day.
Canadians went along too of course - there can't be many American or British asses we won't lick , if asked politely enough.
So back to the Hospital for Sick Children and poor little R.V.
He appeared deadly ill upon arrival at the hospital from blood poisoning brought on by a (botched ?) effort to remove a mildly diseased tooth.
Sixteen days of sulfa drugs had still left the boy in dire state - never conscious , high fever, high bacterial colony blood count , etc.
His health then took a turn from very very bad to 'death is near'.
The American doctor charged with controlling the limited supplies of penicillin being made (for clinical testing), Chester Keefer in Boston, was contacted.
Perhaps a personal contact between this very well known research doctor and someone big in research in Toronto, who knows for sure ?
Keefer gets Squibb Drugs in New Jersey to send up some of the badly filtered penicillin that Squibb was famous for turning out.
After some more filtering in the Toronto hospital, the penicillin is injected into R.V. and quickly claws him back from the grave and soon sends him on his way home.
This miracle was not reported in the medical or popular media despite July 1942 being perhaps the lowest point of the war for British Commonwealth morale (the fall of the Tobruk fortress) - such a severe morale crisis that even Churchill himself thought he might be forced to resign).
A Commonwealth lad saved by British medicine might seem to be the very morale tonic needed to pick up everyone's spirits - but it was not to be.
It was finally reported in December 1943 by Dr Nelles Silverthorne in the Canadian Medical Journal, CMJ.
Or should I say Silverthorne was allowed (or encouraged) to publish a crucial four months after Dr Dante Colitti took revenge on New York's medical elite and spilled all about penicillin, babies and miracle cures to Citizen Hearst's vast media empire ---- and ultimately to the whole world.
Dante's miracle baby ultimately died but not before his apparent early success with Baby Patty Malone touched so many mothers' hearts that the mass production of penicillin-for-all was assured from that point on.
But Canada, Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children ?
They all just blew it ....
Unfortunately ,they are NOT associated with July 1942, penicillin and a dying nine year old boy (possibly still alive today) known only as R. V.
Much against the will of the anglo-american medical establishment, both insulin and sulfa had their very public miracles (as in "worldwide newspaper headlines") involving saving the lives of dying children.
Banting himself pushed insulin baby miracle cures into the popular media - it seems ordinary hospital doctors in Britain did the same in the case of sulfa.
The medical research establishment didn't really fear the effect of such news headlines upon the patients and their families.
Instead, they feared its affect upon their colleagues who were not as 'measured' , 'level headed','rational' and 'scientific' as themselves.
In their minds anyway.
Because , in fact , when it comes to trying new treatments for dying patients, GPs can be faulted for being too slow off the mark, not too fast.
First the average GP trys all the conventional treatments, in a descending order of unconventionality.
Then when the patient is visibly 'decomposed' as they say in medical articles - hours from the grave - they try sulfa or insulin or penicillin and when the patient - despite all this delay - survives and quickly goes home fully healed, it truly does seem a miracle.
Now imagine a penicillin that - by and large - doesn't work , despite the bold initial claims made for it.
The GP seeing a nearly dead patient before them , despite all the current conventional and even unconventional treatments tried upon them.
Desperate they even try this here 'pen-i-cill-in' - and it fails.
The patient dies - as seemingly they were about to anyway.
Morally,who has been harmed by all this ?
The patient and their family knows that the doctors did everything - even went the extra four miles - to try and save someone with a limited likelihood of survival.
So they failed - but at least they tried and tried hard.
No, what the medical research community chiefs fear is not failure but success.
Because then there would be big headlines celebrating drug X when drug X is still in low supply , because the drug companies are patiently waiting for the researchers' results from long term, large scale, double blind studies, before deciding whether to invest large sums in scaling up production.
Forgotten in all this long term 'research leisureliness' is that there are many real people dying needlessly and families hurting needlessly.
Because nothing speeds up mass production like the spur of real competition - and competition can come out of the woodwork whenever front page headlines scream "medical miracle -new drug - short supply".
Not every investor reads medical journals but all can translate that bit of headlinese into plain old business English : dollars, lots and lots of potential dollars, to the firm that supplies Doctor Mom first.
WWII's penicillin almost never became a miracle drug.
The first few years of penicillin miracle cures in North America deliberately went unreported in the medical media --- let alone the popular media.
In Britain, one series was published in a medical journal but the popular press was successfully avoided by its lead author, Howard Florey.
Somehow, all the British daily newspapers' science cum medical journalists normally assigned to read medical journals for potential stories were charmed into staying mum on this big headline story.
Even in wartime, Fleet Street is highly competitive - it must have been a hell of a scientific "D" notice to silence the lot of them.
The reason was that the anglo american medical research leadership was hoping to turn penicillin-the-universal-lifesaver into penicillin-the-Allies-secret-weapon-of-war.
And - to their eternal shame - anglo american science slash medical specialist reporters matched them into forgetting their sacred professional vows.
That these medical researchers - all men - were smart there can be no doubt.
Perhaps the smartest thing they ever did was to successfully evade the front line trenches in WWI , despite being fit enough.
Now that they were all fat and all over forty, they had become positively warrior fierce.
They would help win the war by denying lifesaving penicillin to dying Allied , Neutral, Occupied and Enemy civilians - despite that oath thingy they all swore when they first became doctors .
That same ancient oath was incorporated into the requirement to give equal treatment too all the sick and wounded, under the Geneva Convention on warfare.
They would even deny giving penicillin to Allied POWs in enemy hands - and to Allied wounded judged too damaged to ever likely see combat again.
Just for a few years ,you understand - just a few years of keeping news of penicillin miracles out of the Allied popular media read by neutral officials friendly to Nazi Germany.
So it could give a big medical advantage to the Allies when casualties got really heavy after D-Day.
Canadians went along too of course - there can't be many American or British asses we won't lick , if asked politely enough.
So back to the Hospital for Sick Children and poor little R.V.
He appeared deadly ill upon arrival at the hospital from blood poisoning brought on by a (botched ?) effort to remove a mildly diseased tooth.
Sixteen days of sulfa drugs had still left the boy in dire state - never conscious , high fever, high bacterial colony blood count , etc.
His health then took a turn from very very bad to 'death is near'.
The American doctor charged with controlling the limited supplies of penicillin being made (for clinical testing), Chester Keefer in Boston, was contacted.
Perhaps a personal contact between this very well known research doctor and someone big in research in Toronto, who knows for sure ?
Keefer gets Squibb Drugs in New Jersey to send up some of the badly filtered penicillin that Squibb was famous for turning out.
After some more filtering in the Toronto hospital, the penicillin is injected into R.V. and quickly claws him back from the grave and soon sends him on his way home.
This miracle was not reported in the medical or popular media despite July 1942 being perhaps the lowest point of the war for British Commonwealth morale (the fall of the Tobruk fortress) - such a severe morale crisis that even Churchill himself thought he might be forced to resign).
A Commonwealth lad saved by British medicine might seem to be the very morale tonic needed to pick up everyone's spirits - but it was not to be.
It was finally reported in December 1943 by Dr Nelles Silverthorne in the Canadian Medical Journal, CMJ.
Or should I say Silverthorne was allowed (or encouraged) to publish a crucial four months after Dr Dante Colitti took revenge on New York's medical elite and spilled all about penicillin, babies and miracle cures to Citizen Hearst's vast media empire ---- and ultimately to the whole world.
Dante's miracle baby ultimately died but not before his apparent early success with Baby Patty Malone touched so many mothers' hearts that the mass production of penicillin-for-all was assured from that point on.
But Canada, Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children ?
They all just blew it ....
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...
Sunday, September 7, 2014
In Howard Florey's Dunn , nurturing penicillium was women's work . REAL men didn't change diapers or penicillin vessels...
No women were ever allowed to be lab technicians at Howard Florey's Dunn Institute on the conservative campus of Oxford University*.
Tech work was way over their pretty little heads.
But then suddenly, because raw natural penicillin juice is basically the piss and poop of the stinky, slinky, slippery penicillium slime , no man - at least no real man - ever wanted to touch the stuff the Dunn was forced to grow for the chemists to destroy analytically.
(In those days, no real man ever changed a diaper or had anything else to do with all those dark damp dank things , you know, "down there".)
So enter ,stage left : Ruth Callow and Clare Inayat Khan. Pioneering "penicillin girls" aka Dunn lab techs.
(Memo to Twin Tower terrorist Ramzi Yousef: lifesaving penicillin pioneer Claire was a Moslem, just like yourself - only she did good, not evil.)
But the indignity of having to deal with the unpredictable penicillium was hated by all the men at the Dunn , not something to be proud of.
So as soon as possible all the elaborate equipment used to grow and extract natural penicillin was dumped - without ceremony - into the nearest rubbish pile.
Nothing was retained to serve as historical evidence for this supposedly noble effort.
Because the real show was all in the chemistry section, trying to synthesis patentable artificial penicillin analogues.
And there - need I say more - the workers were all men.
Real men ...
* As reported by David Wilson in his book "Penicillin in perspective ",1976 - page 176.
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....
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Abundant Penicillin by 1942 - only if Howard Florey didn't come to America ?
When ,in April 1941, Howard Florey learned that his best shot at world acclaim (as the only begetter of systemic penicillin) was at risk because Henry Dawson had got there first, the old claim jumper boot scooted over to America to shake a little dust.
Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
Together the pair agreed that most of the wartime penicillin effort should go into first synthesizing it - rather than merely scaling up existing natural penicillin fermentation technology and getting penicillin to the military and civilian patients dying for lack of it - now.
Richards (who never met a conflict of interest he didn't like) was mindful that Merck's cross harbour rival, Pfizer, was likely to be the big winner if natural fermentation - and not Merck's strength artificial synthesis - was used to produce this priceless new drug.
Left alone, Pfizer (with Henry Dawson's team assisting) was already on the way, during that Fall in 1941 , to producing enough penicillin to get the show on the road.
A pity then that Florey had to spoil the show ...
Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
Together the pair agreed that most of the wartime penicillin effort should go into first synthesizing it - rather than merely scaling up existing natural penicillin fermentation technology and getting penicillin to the military and civilian patients dying for lack of it - now.
Richards (who never met a conflict of interest he didn't like) was mindful that Merck's cross harbour rival, Pfizer, was likely to be the big winner if natural fermentation - and not Merck's strength artificial synthesis - was used to produce this priceless new drug.
Left alone, Pfizer (with Henry Dawson's team assisting) was already on the way, during that Fall in 1941 , to producing enough penicillin to get the show on the road.
A pity then that Florey had to spoil the show ...
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 ...
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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...