A centralized "Penicillin Los Alamos" would have cost ten of millions of lives

Thank God, thank God, thank God ----- for unanswered prayers.

Thank God that all penicillin research was not as centralized as the atomic bomb research effort was.

Because the overwhelming consensus of the loudest, most aggressive, most powerful voices in science held a rigid dogma that synthesis was the only way forward for wartime penicillin.

But wartime (& postwar) penicillin synthesis efforts proved a total failure.

A total waste.

Thank God , not so much in money lost, but a total waste of lots and lots of lost precious time.

(Pause here to say a prayer for all the poor mommies that needn't have died and to all the daddies and kiddies that grieved their loss).

"Big (Tents) are always Better"

But among the many small, diverse, de-centralized, home-made,amateur, DIY, stones that these bull-headed builders rejected (the humble people who actually gave us our precious age of antibiotics) let me cite but one example.

His name is Milislav Demerec, wartime head of the Cold Spring Harbour Institute which until then was known mostly as the Eugenics Movement's main research centre.

Early in the war, Demerec, acting as a patriotic individual and not as representing his Institution's collective opinion, suggested that a mini radiation attack (from a suntan lamp) on the growing penicillium spores.

He reasoned the radiation might kill most of them but might also throw up mutations with extraordinary penicillin producing qualities.

("What doesn't kill you, only makes you stronger" ?)

He was totally ignored by Penicillin Central (Vannevar Bush's OSRD) but Bush's much smaller rival in Washington's bureaucratic conflicts (always America's real war), the WPB's OPRD, took up his idea.

His idea worked so well that today the best in the little penicilliums produce 50,000 times as much as they did back in 1940 !

So even if it had been possible to commercially synthesize penicillin , it would only be so at a cost level thousands of times above the little ones' efforts.

It took a 'coalition of all possible talents', small as well as big, a Big Big Tent, to bring wartime penicillin forth.

So, truly, FP Schumacher's "Small is Beautiful" might have just as accurately labelled "Big (Tents) are always Better".

But he didn't --------- and I just did.....

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 ...

wartime penicillin's Progressives vs Naturalists

The Progressives (people such as Sir Howard Florey, the OSRD and Merck) literally intended to RE-FORM things, wholesale - the human body in particular.

They advocated a sort of 'synthetic autarky' with Man replacing everything that came from Mother Nature with a better and cheaper & quicker to make artificial form.

But such re-forming, in practise, often broke down the very old fashioned farming practise of culling out whatever was regarded as 'unfit' and selecting and favouring whatever was regarded as the 'fittest'.

(Here cue the word : Eugenics.)

But with eyes only for the future, no Progressive would ever publicly admit to using such old fashioned farming techniques.

Clinging to such vestiges of the past were supposed to be the preserves of their opponents, the Naturalists, people such as Florey's opponent, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, the OPRD and Pfizer.

But all efforts - by  hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe with money to burn- to synthesize commercial penicillin failed.

Instead, a few Naturalists, with very little resources, patiently picked the best of the best of the best of the best penicillin producing penicillium molds to greatly up penicillin yields at the point of the cow's utter rather than in improving the machinery in the milk factory.

Only near the end of the war, did a scientist finally get the chance to set a $20 UV heat lamp (bog ordinary variety !) upon a sample of the naturally best penicillin producing molds.

All this to deliberate fry the poor penicillium's DNA with UV rays, in the hope that among the dead and living dead offspring, a few fully alive cells' DNA might be altered (re-formed) to produce even more penicillin.

He indeed found these winners by the old fashioned farmers' method of patiently picking the most likely big producers and putting them to it - the proof was in the penicillin they did produce.

Against the Progressives' 'terrible simplicities', my brief account shows the unexpected wartime success of natural penicillin was a bit more complicated than might be expected ----- as usual ....

OSRD (and academia's) dirty little secret : just how little the OSRD spent on penicillin - not how MUCH it spent on A-Bomb

Vannevar Bush grew a whole lot fonder of penicillin after it was highly successful (and highly popular among voters and congressmen) than when its future lay in doubt and only he had the power to ensure it succeeded.

The uncomfortable fact is that it was Washington's tiny New Deal-oriented OPRD (and not the similar-sounding but Republican Party-dominated much larger ORSD) that actually gave the world cheap abundant natural penicillin in time to save millions of lives during the wartime and postwar health crises.

While the OPRD had all the ideas and all the energy, it was the OSRD that had all the money --- and all that money bought plenty of tame academics  prepared to rewrite war history - for money - in a manner than would have even given Goebbels himself pause.

Bush - never a top drawer scientist but always a Beltway bureaucrat with very sharp elbows - was determined to use the 'miracle of penicillin' as a weapon to bludgeon money out of a hitherto reluctant Congress to fund the postwar dreams of university academics.

But he could only do so if all the university academics kept up their end of the implicit bargain.

That was their agreeing never to probe his claims of wartime 'success' too closely - because frankly, if right wing Bush's legacy was screwed as a result, so would be a whole lot of still living left wing professors also hoping for a pot of federal gold for their pet project....

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

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

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

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

du Vigneaud's synthetic success (read synthetic = fake)

For Vincent du Vigneaud's team at Cornell Medical in NYC did indeed produce a little biologically active penicillin in the course of their efforts to synthesize penicillin.

So thousands of the world's top chemists got to take a public bow for yet another signal triumph in modern - BIG - science's endless progress ever upward.

But privately most knew that du Vigneaud synthetic goal was towards a molecule shape that did not match the necessary shape of biologically-active natural penicillin.

So this tiny amount of real penicillin must have been an accidental impurity of a mis-conceived theoretical approach !

More than 85 years after it was discovered, chemists have still not commercially synthesized a better or cheaper base penicillin molecule than what the tiny weak fungi can do on its own ...

Time to end the much-told cover-up of UNSUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin and tell the untold tale of SUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin

Against about fifty previous books about wartime penicillin , I want my penicillin book to do something wildly different --- I want to celebrate success, not cover-up failure.

If the wartime deployment of penicillin was ultimately successful (and everybody seems to agree it was) what exactly did this successful  penicillin look like?

It turns out it actually was :

(a)  naturally made penicillin - not man made.

(b) and (via exports of massive amounts of American penicillin under Lend-Lease and other programs), it was made available to all in the wartime world dying from any and all diseases it could cure - not just reserved for a relatively small number of frontline Allied soldiers judged capable of returning to immediate combat, if given penicillin.

Ie , what successful wartime penicillin definitely was not, was synthesized and weaponized.


I am writing this book because I believe , 75 years after the start of wartime penicillin , it is overdue time to finally have a long, hard and brutally honest look at the actual record of the people and institutions universally regarded as the heroes of wartime penicillin.

Chief among them - by general consensus - are Fleming, Florey along with the MRC and the Ministry of Supply in Britain.

 In America : the OSRD-CMR, NRRL chief Coghill , Merck Inc and the NAS-COC .

Yet all these heroes spent the entire war stridently opposed both to (a) the immediate mass production of naturally made penicillin and (b) its wartime production in quantities sufficient for all dying for lack of it in the world .

If they be the 'heroes' of wartime penicillin , it hardly needed villains !

By contrast , institutions like the British Royal Navy, Glaxo , Pfizer , the WPB and people like Dawson , Demerec , Pulvertaft and Duhig rate a paragraph (or at best , a page or two) in even lengthy accounts of wartime penicillin.

Yet these people and institutions strongly promoted the immediate wartime mass production of naturally produced penicillin for all  - and then set out and did it - they made the successful version of wartime penicillin.

They did not advocate holding off on the wartime production of badly needed penicillin until it had been totally synthesized at commercial prices (something that hasn't happened yet).

Nor did they advocate that wartime penicillin be only used for those who were moderately injured, among the frontline Allied troops.

All these people and institutions shared one more thing in common (besides achieving the only universally popular scientific success of WWII).

They were not part of the Anglo-American medical-scientific establishment.

Thus they did not have privileged access (during the crucial years of 1944-1948) to information still labelled secret and only released - on a highly selective basis - in self-serving official histories that successfully polished the turd that was the total failure of weaponized synthetic penicillin.

It was not until 1972, with Lennard Bickel's invaluable book "RISE UP TO LIFE" , that many of the secrets of wartime penicillin began to be revealed - at least to the majority of the world that looked to British-oriented authors to explain penicillin.

Bickel was actually merely trying to boost credit to Howard Florey over that given to Alexander Fleming, but his book was just late enough to avoid the strictures of wartime secrecy and just early enough to interview many penicillin pioneers before they died.

And his account tried very hard to balance the British-oriented accounts published to date with information about lesser known but very important penicillin efforts around the world.

But Bickel , like all others to date, did not set  WPB-Pfizer-Glaxo natural penicillin in total opposition to OSRD-Merck-Oxford synthetic penicillin.

Rather, like all accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project, he sees them as being equally funded, equally ardently pushed parallel efforts towards a common (time-sensitive) goal.

But in the case of the atomic bomb , the documentary record is very clear - almost any and all ways that might help to make enough nuclear material for even a few bombs before the war's end were massively funded and whipped into a flurry of activity by General Groves .

So for example,  a trillion dollar (in 2014 dollars) gaseous diffusion production plant were built as fast as possible , before any pilot plant had even shown that particular process might work !

Even so, America only got enough weapon material for just two small bombs a scant month before Japan surrendered.

By contrast, natural penicillin's breakthrough technology ( a repeated process of selecting the best natural mutations of the penicillium mold, radiating them to produce more mutations and so on) only required a few biologists working a few months at a cost of a few thousands of dollars.

Thanks to this breakthrough, most countries outside of the USA successfully provide much of their wartime penicillin needs with a scaled up version of the primitive technology that Fleming first used - and rejected - way back in 1928 !

Only a political and moral unwillingness to create more of these primitive factories kept the UK, Canada and Australia from supplying all possible needs with scaled up 1928 technology.

It was the WPB's totally unknown OPRD , a latecomer to the penicillin effort , that quickly and cheaply made penicillin production with mutated natural penicillin such a success that we still produce all the world's antibiotics the same way to this day.

It was clear in the case of penicillin that almost everyone (outside our valiant few) from government ministers to newspaper reporters to ordinary GP doctors to Big Pharma, felt that penicillin was going to have to be first made synthetically to make enough for a wartime world and that this event was going to be quickly achieved.

(At the same time, I should say that most of the synthetic advocates generally didn't know the full extent of the intention to weaponize penicillin and that thankfully many seemed to oppose that idea when its morally repugnant nature was made clearer.)

Efforts to synthesize penicillin were fully backed by the British and American medical scientific establishment while efforts to push natural penicillin production that came from people like Cold Spring Harbour Lab chief Miloslav Demerec and Glaxo's boss Harry Jephcott were rebuffed by that same elite.

Spurred by the efforts of Dr Dawson , Dr Dante Colitti got  he Hearst media empire to rouse the Dr Moms of the world with the plight of baby Patty Malone.

Even the powerful men running the Anglo-American medical-scientific establishment (& Big Pharma) momentarily quailed before the uproar from Dr Mom , but soon they returned to pushing for perfected synthetic penicillin before seeking any all-out production.

But Big Pharma was not totally united - one man within its ranks differed - and sometimes one individual is more than enough to change a whole world.

John L Smith, boss of Pfizer, was prompted by his own Dr Mom - his wife - to connect Patty Malone to the death of his own daughter - a death that Fleming could have helped prevent if only he had promoted - rather than negating - penicillin by needle.

As an ordinary patriotic American , Smith also knew D-Day was due soon.  Unlike ordinary Americans, he also knew that only penicillin could prevent the war deaths by infection the sulfa drugs were no longer effective against.

Like General Groves on steroids, Smith whipped Pfizer employees to produce tons of penicillin - now ! - for D-Day and civilian patients.

In a surprisingly few months ( by the Spring of 1944) - Smith - thanks admittedly greatly to the timely efforts of Miloslav Demerec - had solved the world's penicillin crisis.

But the Anglo-American medical scientific establishment - as always with bureaucrats spending other peoples' money - kept pushing hard on synthetic penicillin for two more wasted years.

Their Plan B ( eventually employed) was to push the Big Half Truth that they were always fully behind natural penicillin from 1939 onward and were merely held up by the pesky penicillium spores themselves.

In fact,  the only way they could think to totally synthesize artificial penicillin was to repeatedly destroy massive amounts of natural penicillin and then examine the resulting entrails.

Thus they did in fact support the limited production of natural penicillin - all through the war - but mostly for their chemists to destroy and then analysis - not to give to any and every patient dying for lack of it.

Shamefully, academic historians have let them get away with this particular Big Half Truth ever since ....

Oxford Artificial versus Manhattan Natural

Howard Florey (along with Alexander Fleming and Winston Churchill's government) spend ten years before during and after WWII pursuing the chimera of totally artificial (patentable) penicillin --- to no avail.

As did Florey's supporters in America - Merck, Squibb and Vannevar Bush's all-powerful OSRD.

Set against then, on the opposite side of the Hudson River , was Dr Martin Henry Dawson and John l Smith , chemist and boss of Pfizer.

They saw possibilities in the fermentation of the (public domain - free for all to grow) natural penicillium to produce antibiotics.

This was despite its current yields being admittedly low: they felt as it was a totally new way of doing medicine , it might well improve drastically with more practise.

(I should mention that two other strong skeptics of the whole idea of the commercial viability of total synthesis of penicillin were also practising chemists : Glaxo boss Harry Jepcott and the WPB's penicillin czar Larry Elder.

 It was chemist manques like Florey and the OSRD's Dr Richards who were the most likely to feel that of course man-made Chemistry was always bound to be superior to Mother Nature.)

Today of course, with penicillin being produced at 50,000 times the levels of Fleming for the same cost in time labour and materials, the case against oxford Artificial seems clear - but it wasn't so throughout the war and beyond.

Long Island scientist Miloslav Demerec deserves a lot more credit than he ever gets (which is none !) for his major role in making our wonderful world of relatively cheap abundant antibiotics ....

Memo to RAMZI YOUSEF : Wartime Manhattan gave the world's first penicillin shots --- as well as the world's first A-bomb

Manhattan's first ever penicillin shots (75 years ago next  October 16th 2015) were a deliberate act of provocation by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Penicillin shots across the bow against the Allied medical establishment for using the excuse of war medicine preparation to dismiss efforts of social medicine directed at the poor and minorities.

He felt that penicillin should be deliberately given a high enough wartime production priority to be able to give penicillin to all those in wartime dying from lack of it .

This would serve as a very public rebuttal to the Axis who felt only the 'fit' from the 'fittest' nations deserved medicine, food and indeed life itself.

Wartime penicillin for all the Allied armed forces and civilians , as well as for Allied and enemy POWs, and the people in Neutral lands ,  even via the Red Cross into the occupied lands and eventually used to save the lives of former enemies.

The aftershock from Manhattan's first penicillin shots radiated out in ever-widening circles.

The then modest biological firm of Pfizer , from Brooklyn , was quickly recruited by news of those historical first shots and began helping out Dawson.

But first Dawson had to demonstrate success against a hitherto invariable fatal disease (SBE) to really suggest what penicillin might do if it was mass produced.

 He did so, starting in November 1942, by 'going off the reservation' and used some OSRD controlled penicillin to save a group of women dying of SBE - something the OSRD strictly forbade - which meant abandoning them to a certain death.

But the astounding success he had with SBE was enough evidence for Dawson's former patient , industrialist Floyd Odlum , to suggest to his boss at the powerful (the New Deal-oriented) War Production Board (WPB) that it greatly up the original production proposed by its rival Vannevar Bush's OSRD .

But Big Pharma sat on its hands, convinced it could make much more money for a much smaller investment (and without a need to learn new skills) when it had synthetic (aka patentable) penicillin instead of this dangerous natural penicillin - which could be made by any competitor.

Such as Dawson - whose modest hospital pilot plant was for several months , the world's "biggest" penicillin producer !

Dawson had certainly convinced a fellow colleague and fellow WWI vet, Dr Rudolph (Rudy) N Schullinger in the Surgical Service of his hospital.

Rudy went overseas in mid 1942 with the CUMC's wartime Second General Hospital unit to Oxford England. Dawson had full-blown Myasthenia Gravis (MG) by that date or he would have been the Lab Chief for that military hospital.

Rudy Schullinger tried very hard to get some of the OSRD's penicillin sent into the European Theatre of War so he could both treat wounded American troops in wartime and contribute the results to the ongoing research pool.

Despite repeated entreaties the OSRD would have done of it !

Thankfully Schullinger's protests finally did pull some some penicillin out of the hands of stay-at-home civilian researchers and into the frontlines (before the war ended).

Though it was only to be used to treat american troops , he broke Regulations and used a good deal of it to save the life of a British soldier dying of the same disease Dawson was trying to cure - endocarditis !

(Dawson's "Acting Up" was infectious .)

Then another former patient , med resident Dr Dante Colitti , threw an emotional spanner in the works - suggesting to the parents of a dying two year old girl from Queens called Patty Malone that they call up Citizen Hearst's biggest paper and beg them to get penicillin the OSRD was denying her.

The Hearst media empire's emotional accounts of rushing the penicillin to the little girl with "just seven hours to spare" gripped first a nation and then a world.

It gripped - in particular - the hearts of Mr and Mrs John L Smith . They had lost a young girl to meningitis that mass produced penicillin - as Dr Dawson always insisted - could easily have cured.

The normally hyper-cautious Smith - the boss of Pfizer - now threw all caution to the wind - ordering his firm to build the world's first really big penicillin plant in as few months as a 24/7 schedule could produce.

Bolder yet - he decided to use the penicillin allocated to his firm to do synthetic studies (to secure a share of the future patents) to save the lives of people in New York  with SBE that his government was refusing to save.

A mysterious woman (probably the otherwise very upright Gladys Hobby) would arriving offering bottles of penicillin without labels to doctors like Ward J MacNeal and Leo Loewe with the oblique suggestion it might just help their SBE patients - and then disappear.

At the time it seemed clear to people inside Big Pharma that Smith had recklessly threw away a certainty of big future profits for Pfizer, just to help save the lives of a few worthless nobodies.

But his - and our - salvation lay in the most unlikeliest of all places : the former eugenic laboratories at Cold Spring Harbour in Long Island , once one of the intellectual godfathers to the Nazi holocausts agains Jews, Slavs and the 'unfit'.

For several years, its new (non-eugenically oriented) director Milislav Demerec had pleaded in vain with Vannevar Bush's OSRD to let him help develop more productive natural strains of penicillin-producing penicillium.

But the OSRD - like Florey and Fleming in England - had its heart set on a man-made synthetic triumph with penicillin - they had no intention to share the glory with anyone small and weak  - let alone microbes.

Once again , the WPB saved the day. Its Office for Production Research and Development (OPRD) had about one hundredth the budget and influence of Vannevar Bush's better known Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).

But the OPRD had street smarts in spades and it wisely gave a tiny amount of money and a lot of morale-boosting support to Demerec's and the spectacular results has repaid that debt a million fold and more ever since.

Demerec gave the penicillium spores a nasty sunburn under an ordinary tanning lamp - most died from the radiation.

But a few survived and were soon producing ten - then one hundred and today 50,000 times as much penicillin from the same amount of feedstock as Fleming's original strain (and Fleming's was an extraordinarily good natural producer !)

Yet Demerec remains the most unsung among all the unsung true heroes of the wartime penicillin story : a case once again where the moral scum - not the moral cream - rises to the top of the fame charts.

Now Dawson's team wasn't the only team in New York thumbing their nose at Big Pharma and Big Medicine by starting a penicillin grow-op.

A doubting doctor John Mahoney out on Staten Island Marine Hospital questioned the OSRD's claim that penicillin couldn't cure syphilis .

With unofficial help from Dawson's team they started growing their own and tested their theory on "Easter" Bunnies (as they told their innocent children) that they kept in their home garages over the Easter holidays !

The public clamour from Doctor Mom for "more penicillin now !" that had started with the story of Patty Malone really took off with the thought that with penicillin families need no longer be threatened with VD from errant husbands.

We can't negate the atomic Manhattan Project and Hiroshima.

But Manhattan Penicillin ,the other Manhattan Project , can point with pride to the fact that 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day (in its first ever mass clinical trial) came from Pfizer's Marcy Avenue Brooklyn plant and that plant went on to supply the biggest chunk of the world's penicillin for the rest of the war.

So much penicillin that America - not the Britain of Nobel prize winners Florey and Fleming ( who were still chasing the decade old chimera of synthetic penicillin and only then mass production) - supplying most of the penicillin for the Allied, Neutral, occupied and Enemy lands.

And that in turn ushered in a Pax Americana based on diplomatic gifting of abundant New York penicillin.

Dawson's dream of abundant - non-patented - penicillin cheap enough to help all has come true - it is life-saving too cheap to meter, lifesaving far cheaper than bottled water.

It has beaten back age old diseases kept endemic by residing among remote and poor people not reached by clean water, adequate food and proper health care.

As a result a sort of herd immunity has occurred as ten billion of us since 1940 have indirectly had better health from seeing diseases like Rheumatic Fever fade from sight.

No, the 250,000 lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki can never be re-gained by actions in other areas - but I think I have offered up evidence to terrorists like Ramzi Yousef and others that wartime Manhattan was at least as much from Venus as it was from Mars.

And if Manhattan citizens are too modest to blow their own horn about its decisive role in making cheap abundant penicillin available to ALL in a world tired, huddled and wretched - then the rest of us should do it for them.

We can't continue to let a terrorist like Ramzi Yousef be the last word on Manhattan's wartime role ....

science LOST world war two...

'What ?! Don't be foolish : if historians of all stripes agree on one thing, it is that 'science' won WWII - the freedom-loving Allies simply had better 'science' then did the dictators of the Axis.'

I doubt that all historians think that way.

 I am fairly sure that British historian David Edgerton hardly agrees that mere science , rather than an extraordinary advantage held by the Allies in terms of population, territory and resources, 'won the day' (albeit six long years after the war began).

What I think best describes WWII is that all sides constantly expected one thing to happen, based on their scientific beliefs, and over and over another unexpected thing actually happened.

Let us look at the mid term American elections for what I mean : if ,when asked 'who won' I said 'the politicians' , you'd think me very rude indeed.

'Yes, yes, but who won :  Republicans or Democrats ?'

We expect conflicts , with winners and losers , in almost every aspect of human life - but not in science.

Everything that happened scientifically in the war is simply credited to 'science' , with no sense of the possibility of scientific winners and losers or of scientific conflicts.

1940's Allied plans for precision bombing with the Norden bombsight and the 1945 Allied atomic fire bombing all of civilian Hiroshima merely to burn down its naval base are in 100% opposition to each other - scientifically - but they get rolled up together as just two of the many scientific triumphs of WWII.

Wartime penicillin was delayed for decades by the Allied scientific elites' determination to first make it as highly profitable patentable synthetic penicillin.

But when this failed and the underdog natural penicillin proved the real winner, the academic history of penicillin elided synthetic penicillin from our memory banks, like a Stalinist commissar vanished from a group photo.

Reading the published histories of penicillin, one might think that the OSRD proponents of synthetic penicillin (and the steadfast opponents of the OPRD's natural crude penicillin) had been ardent champions of the natural method all along.

Here are two rival Washington bureaucracies , competing. No surprise surely, but because they are scientific bureaucrats , conflict is denied by science-cheerleading historians and the great triumph of the tiny OPRD is transferred to the mighty OSRD, by implication.

So if the story of wartime penicillin's fierce internecine war is ever to be told, a political scientist, not a medical scientist, is the best person for the job....

Penicillin in wartime: an alphabet soup of organizations passing the buck then hogging the credit

I am still not fully recovered from the disaster of my first public talk on wartime penicillin before Dalhousie University's  Medical History Society.

I was given a very generous amount of time by the Society's Jock Murray and Allan Marble to state my case but it didn't help : my choice for a title slide in my powerpoint presentation simply covered far too big a subject and left me no 'on the spot' wiggle room.

" Wartime Penicillin : from secret 'war weapon' to widely publicized 'beacon of hope' " is not a topic line easy to compress.

 (Though last night's blog entry on the Janus Month of March 1943 would have been a good attempt at compression.)

Within a minute or two into the talk, I felt like crawling into a hole  and disappearing forever --- I could see by the faces of the audience that I was giving far too much unknown information far too quickly.

Any two or three of my powerpoint slides, from the forty two I had actually come with, could have formed the basis of an interesting talk and a lively amount of discussion afterwards.

Eight and a half years of research has finally made me more or less comfortable with the vast array of sound-alike organizations involved in wartime penicillin,  and their activities are just as important as the individual stories of individuals like  Fleming, Florey and Dawson.

But trying to establish what the OSRD and OPRD were in the first place, even before trying to show how much at odds these two similar sounding government agencies really were on penicillin is a month's work - not a small part of a 40 minute talk.

It is entirely my fault - because the night before the lecture I had noticed that even a well known expert on the history of wartime penicillin (name omitted !) still managed to badly confuse the two in an major article in a digitalized book I found on the internet.

And when a printed work is digitalized and put on the internet, an error is forever and eternity --- and visible to all, worldwide.

That is why my penicillin work  will remain electronically fluid on this blog and in website e-books.

 My errors of fact and interpretation (and I expect and even hope to make many) will be instantly correctable as new information comes to light or savvy readers spot errors and typos.)

And another thing about individuals and institutions when Cinderella unexpectedly turns into the Queen of the Ball.

 After passing the buck for years, they now suddenly tack hard right and start clawing each other to take all the credit .

Sorting who actually did what when, not what they claimed ,after the war ,in expensive official histories, that they did, is  itself a work of many lifetimes...

America LOSES WWII : because of quarrels between government agencies, such as over Penicillin

The above headline sounds bizarre to our ears, because we are  used to only hearing it being used as the standard explanation given as to why Japan and Germany lost the (largely technical and scientific) world war against the Allies.

After all, both of these nations had talented and committed cadres of scientists and engineers but endless feuding between various sub sections of the government seriously diluted the impact they might have had on the war, if only they had worked together.

In Japan the Army and Navy Departments frequently seemed more at war with each other, than with America.

In the case of Germany, each of the senior figures in the Nazi hierarchy commanded a lot of semi-independent resources and each Nazi war lord seemed to spend as much time trying to grow at the expense of their political bureaucratic rivals, as in uniting against the common enemy.

But Vannevar Bush chooses, in the foreword to his famous "ENDLESS FRONTIER",  not to see any serious conflicts in the American and Allied scientific and technical effort.

And we believe him - the historians (grateful for the steady diet of research grants to peacetime academics that he is credited with having created) above all .

And after all his side won ----- shouldn't that alone silence all potential criticism ?

Still, in this particular foreword, he chooses to blow his particular agency's horn very very carefully indeed,  when it comes to penicillin.

So for once, it is not his own OSRD that he credits with seeing that "our grievously wounded men" got penicillin in time : he says  it was "the government"  that did the bang up job of co-ordinating the research and development that speeded penicillin up to the front.

For a very conservative Republican ,like Bush, to be praising "the government" is truly a startling sight. He more usually carefully distinguishes agencies like his own highly conservative OSRD from the left wing agencies filled with New Dealers, such as the WPB's own OPRD.

But what could he do ?

For his own right wing OSRD agency chose to take the totally wrong turn on the way to moving penicillin to the D-Day beaches and delivered not one tiny sliver of its vaunted synthetic penicillin to our troops or anyone else : not on June 6th 1944 and in fact, not ever.

It was left to the left wingers in the OPRD to get literally tons of penicillin to the Allied side, between the time they first took up the cause in September 1943 and the end of the war.

They did this not merely by the unimportant but useful work they did on the production side - for by statute this was their job, just as the OSRD's job was not production but research - but by also doing the OSRD's job , in an area of research that the OSRD choose to seriously neglect.

 That was the OSRD-neglected research in studying ways to up the very front end of the penicillin process  : upping the initial biological yield of penicillin.

Biology : horrors !  Just saying that word in front of Bush and the OSRD was like waving a garlic-infused cross at a vampire.

So we must credit the left wing OPRD with starting the research that resulted in that biological yield ( ie , yield before extraction) now being 2500 times as productive as it was in 1943 when the OSRD threw up its hands at the problem.

Just as the quarrelling Japanese Army and Navy did on radar, the two warring branches of Bush's "the government" , the OSRD and OPRD , came to a fork in the road on penicillin and instead of uniting to find a way to use the least resources to solve the problem, they disagreed and pursued independent courses.

Bush's Orwellian use of words like "the government" or "the nation" or "the Allies" ,to explain who won the war , allows him to dissolve any internal conflicts those huge collectivities might have encountered in very slowly moving their overwhelming larger populations into defeating much smaller and very resource-strapped enemies.

So historians mustn't simply accept Bush's Orwellian arguments on blind faith but instead carefully ask , if the nation or government "did" this or that , did that mean that all the nation/government do this or that or did just parts of it do while other parts disagreed, stood around doing nothing or even held things up ?

After all, on the evidence of their own internal memos, the OSRD not merely failed to produce the penicillin that saved our "grievously wounded", they also had no intention of wasting penicillin on anyone who couldn't aid the war effort on recovery, if they didn't have to.

That meant no wasting penicillin, if they had to choose, on those so severely wounded that if they did make a recovery, it would be to discharge and a permanent disability pension.

 And it meant, that if they had to chose between saving a boy dying of endocarditis and instantly curing a boy GI of VD so he could quickly return (to perhaps die) on the Italian frontlines, they'd won't help the endocarditis case, because his disease-weakened heart would not let him do much for the war effort, even if he did recover.

So, if the only thing I ever do in my life is to destroy the OSRD's reputation for furthering penicillin when what they actually did was hold it up and then conspire to use it for truly wicked eugenic ends, I will consider my life well lived....

James Baxter's Pulitzer Prize winning nonsense about wartime penicillin

As part of OSRD's campaign to spin its considerable successes and many failures, William College president and historian  James Phinney Baxter III was hired in mid war (1943) to assemble a bewitching mixture of hitherto-secret facts and sheer blarney, called "Scientists Against Time".

It sure fooled the 1947 Pulitzer Committee, but it shouldn't continue to fool us.

In mid 1943, reports of the consistent creation of crystal pure penicillin began to came in from various laboratories - the final necessary difficult perquisite to beginning the 'easy' chemical synthesis of penicillin.

In what appeared to be a very astute move (at the time!), the OSRD moved to hand off the Congressional blame for the wasting tens of millions of 1940s taxpayers dollars on a failed expansion of biological penicillin production to an inferior Washington bureaucratical competitor (the War Production Board's OPRD).

The OSRD wanted to focus on garnering in all the certain glory coming to the Washington agency that was seen as funding and running the program that led to the synthesis of cheap and abundant artificial penicillin.

But the OSRD lost its gamble.

Instead it was the lowly OPRD that won, in a highly dramatic and timely fashion just in time for D-Day, while high-and-mighty OSRD had to eat millions of taxpayers' dollars spent generating not one nickel of therapeutic synthetic penicillin.

Baxter's job, in the chapter devoted to the OSRD's penicillin efforts, was to spin these awkward facts otherwise.

He was helped by the failure of the underfunded OPRD not to have the money needed to pay for its own tame house historian.

Baxter's job was to convert the biological success of the latecomers OPRD into being just a minor part of the final success of the long time efforts of OSRD-funded chemists to "purify" penicillin.

He sought to tie together the "chemical" ( his words - page 342 of his book) success of in natural penicillin production) as somehow coming out of the 16 years wasted on the "chemical" synthesis of the antibiotic.

The chemical "Purification" of the "crude" mixture of biological penicillin and its biological impurities was to provide that intellectual bridge.

But in fact, the body could care less about purification - it does worry about toxicity, but regards neutral fillers and water as largely irrelevant.

Quite rightly, it only regards the absolute amounts of biological activity (measured in "Units") of soluble penicillin as being important to cure an infection.

It cares not at all about their original relative degree of dryness (concentration), the amount of neutral bulk filler that comes bundled with them, or the amount of water that penicillin comes dissolved in.

After all, the human body is between 50% to 75% water and it quickly dilutes all drugs to incredibly small concentrations.

Now just to remind readers, one gram of water (mass) is one cc (cm3) of water (cubic area) is one ml (volume) --- and a gram of penicillium juice holding 3% of dissolved solids isn't going to fundamentally change this formula much.

James Duhig got 400 to 800 units of biological activity from each one litre flask (containing 200 grams of penicillin liquid) that he grew in his Brisbane lab in 1943-1944, using the exact same strain of penicillium and the exact same low level of technology that Alexander Fleming had in 1928.

That is he got 2 to 4 units per ml/cc/ gm of penicillium medium, the exact same as Fleming got way back in the Fall of 1928.

Basically Duhig and Fleming got about one microgram of active penicillin per gram of water : one part per million, one ppm.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that is not much of a ratio of useful to useless !

But even when Fleming diluted that 1 ppm in a lot more sterile water - down to the level of  one part per billion -, a tiny drop of extremely diluted stuff could still kill deadly bacteria.

But Duhig didn't dilute his stuff any further. Instead he chilled his penicillin liquid, only running it through a filter to remove solid solids.

It still contained its 3% of soluble solids "impurities", along with its  97% pure water. It was still as 'crude' as the day it was born.

Then Dr Duhig injected that liquid straight into a woman's blood stream in 300 to 600 gram amounts (aka 300 to 600 ml/cc of solution). (A thousand or two units of biological activity per injection.)

And incredibly (considering that today we would use millions not thousands of units per injection) Duhig's crude penicillin pulled a dying woman almost literally out of her grave.

He finally did in remote Queensland Australia in 1943 what Alexander Fleming  in 1928 London - and every single doctor in the world  after him - criminally failed to do : use the original penicillin , entirely untouched by the hands of the chemists, to save lives.

But it is another Australian-born doctor, Howard Florey (originally from Adelaide) now operating out of Oxford University, who scientists and historians (including our Dr Baxter) give all the credit for making Fleming's crude "novelty-only" penicillin into a refined/purified life saver, in a famous experiment in May 1940.

But does he - and this famous "mouse" experiment - deserve that credit?

By Florey's own words, he doesn't think so.

And incredibly,  Baxter had Florey's actual words in front of him, when he wrote his own account just after the war's end.

Its all there in Florey's second penicillin article, "Further Observations on Penicillin" ,LANCET, August 1941.

(This incredibly detailed article should have been sufficient, in and of itself, for any competent hospital or multinational drug company anywhere in the world of WWII to make life saving penicillin  --- provided they could get their hands on Fleming's strain of penicillium, or one like it.)

In this article, Florey does indicate that his March 1941 human therapeutic penicillin has 40 units per mg of powder (page 178).

But on the next page (page 179) he clearly indicates that the powder used in the May 1940 mouse experiment probably had less than 1/10 the biological activity of the current human therapeutic penicillin.

So that powder had 2 to 4 units per mg , compared to the 2 to 4 units per gram of original crude fluid.

That is , we have gone from having penicillin consisting of about one part per million of liquid to consisting one part per thousand of dry powder.

Since all the water is gone, what is in the other 999 parts of that milligram ? Yep, its the same 3% of soluble biological impurities that were in the original crude watery mixture of Fleming.

Florey has not purified his penicillin at all, merely concentrated it  (that is merely removed its water ; we make orange or milk powder from their watery originals in the same way, by evaporation).

My essential point is that Fleming's 1928 mixture of natural penicillin and biological impurities was safe to inject, with or without its sterile water being removed.

(And remember, Florey had to put water back into his powder to get it into his patients ; if it was to go in as a slow IV drip, it could be as diluted as it was in the original brew, before all that expensive concentrating.)

That concentration process took not just an awful lot of human energy to perform ; it also destroyed two thirds of the available penicillin.

Concentrated penicillin didn't save more patients ; criminally it actually saved two thirds less.

By late 1942 - early 1943, biological improvements in growing penicillin now gave us raw penicillin brew that gave 40 units per cc of liquid.

The Russians, logically enough, felt there was no need to waste human energy and expensive scarce equipment merely to destroy two thirds of this life-saving liquid, just so they could falsely claim to "purify" it, aka 'concentrate' it.

The other Allies might well have followed their example and then we would have had no mid-war penicillin famine.

Life saving did not require purified penicillin - in fact, the wartime  purification of penicillin tended to reduce the amount of penicillin of penicillin available for the dying in figures varying from two thirds to infinity.

Yes infinity : in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was - briefly - the world's largest penicillin producer.

Incredibly, in the middle of a bloody war, none of that penicillin went to save human lives. It all went to the Glaxo chemists to destroy, trying to get it to go into crystal so they could synthesis it, analogue it and profitably patent it.

Purification, inessential to life-saving, was crucial to the efforts to synthesis penicillin.

Enough penicillin to save millions would have come years earlier if universities and drug companies had released their chemists to the Draft Boards and hired mycologists instead.

But Baxter doesn't play it that way.

Florey had merely evaporated Fleming's penicillin and had thus obtained penicillin that was relatively 1000 times stronger than Fleming.

However, in absolute terms of therapeutic penicillin per flask of penicillin brew, it was actually three times less strong (and remember our bodies and their germs only care about absolute amounts, not relative amounts.)

But Baxter (who wasn't at the experiment) deliberately ignores Florey's own words (and Florey was at the experiment) to confidently and falsely claim that the mouse experiment penicillin was 3% pure.

Actually it was .3% pure , as Florey himself admitted in 1941,the same as Fleming's 1928 crude mixture.

Fleming deserves a lot of credit for making penicillin available - but also a lot of blame as well, when he failed to confirm his failed micro experiment on the possible systemic use of his crude penicillin - by trying it again on a variety of animals and humans.

Florey, similarly, deserved much credit for pushing penicillin to the front of scientific attention - but also a lot of blame for his obsessive  need to put make purified crystal penicillin for chemical synthesis.

Worse, he mis-used his scientific authority to actively brow-beated many other decent doctors into stopping their production of "good enough" penicillin, merely to try to save lives in the middle of a savage war.

If they saved lives with crude penicillin, he saw his sole claim to scientific fame disappearing.

Florey readily admitted that he wasn't the first to discover penicillin (Fleming) and tried not to admit that he was not the first to put it into a patient (Dawson) ,but he wanted very much to claim that he was the first to purify it, so it could be injected into humans.

Duhig would dismiss that claim.

As would Dawson, who was at great pains (in his May 1941 article on penicillin) to publicly emphasize that his first human injections were taken from crude, concentrated "not purified, yet non-toxic" penicillin.

And so should have Dr Baxter......

Penicillin : a bunch of biologists who put all their faith in chemistry vs two chemists who put all their faith in biology

In the Alice Through the Looking Glass world of wartime penicillin it should hardly be surprising that about the only strong supporters of natural ,biological, penicillin in the upper echelons of the overall enterprise were two professional chemists : Larry Elder of the American Office for Production Research and Development (the OPRD) and Harry Jephcott of the British drug company, Glaxo.

Or that the group most strongly bewitched by the thought of synthetic penicillin were a bunch of medical doctors with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming leading the charge (with the OSRD and MRC close behind): the sort of scientists who might have been thought would normally occupy a place at the biological end of  hard science.....

OPRD and Dawson vs OSRD and Florey : social or war penicillin ?

If America was to win the war for the Allies by being becoming a ponderous and relentlessly-slow grinding mill of the gods ( a veritable "Arsenal of Democracy" as President Roosevelt proclaimed) than sometimes Vannevar Bush's OSRD (Office of Scientific Research and Development) worked hard against that objective, never more so than with Penicillin (and DDT).

In Total War, attrition (greater weight of arms and men) rather than generalship (the better use of the elements of secrecy and surprise) is felt to be - in the long run - the truly dominant factor.

The OSRD obviously disagreed, as did Hitler's High Command and the Japanese War Cabinet.

These three agreed amongst themselves that it didn't really matter that both sides shared the same 105mm howitzer and that so the side with the best rate of production of that artillery piece and its ammunition would win in the long run.

That was so old-school, so World War One style thinking.

No, the OSRD would win a quick clean war, by speed and secrecy of new weapon invention and by taking the offensive role at every turn in the war of new weapon invention : as the British would say, WWII was to be a war between sciences : a Boffin's war, not a foot soldier's war like WWI.

But you could also see this as classic "chicken hawk" style thinking  : stoutly favouring bold offensive operations, albeit from the cosy safety of an comfy armchair.

Because seemingly the only requirement for rising in the OSRD hierarchy was that you had successfully avoided combat when you were young and fit enough to do so, but now that you were now old and fat and balding and safely beyond the age of conscription your bellicosity had returned full on.

The German, Japanese and British military agreed with the OSRD - preferring to invent more truly new and superior - secret- weapons even when they knew this meant that fewer units of existing conventional weapons would be produced.

(By contrast, the Russians tended to want to produce greater numbers of a far fewer and far less technically sophisticated range of weapons - working in some minor incremental improvements over long, long production runs.)

So if the OSRD "took up" the development of Penicillin and DDT it would come with some heavy and hidden costs : for these two would now be developed strictly be for use as  secret and new "instruments of war" (weapons).

How we "almost lost penicillin" : it got captured by the OSRD

Penicillin being "captured" by the OSRD in the summer of 1941 when Howard Florey took it to his old pal ( OSRD heavyweight Dr A N Richards) wasn't as bad as being captured by the Gestapo , but it was a close run thing.

By contrast, the War Production Board (WPB) and its OPRD (Office of Production Research and Development) took a more sophisticated view of war work in a Total War situation : understanding completely that if civilians don't eat or are home sick, both old-fashioned howitzers and new-fashioned atomic bombs don't get built.

So if the epidemic of lung infections in America in the winter of 1944 among war workers had become a pandemic and shell production had been cut in half, just when the Battle of the Bulge needed more 105 mmm shells not less, the OPRD would have been ready, with massive amounts of civilian penicillin for ailing war plant workers.

But the OSRD would be left touting its claim that fewer of our wounded men in the Ardennes were languishing in hospital beds than in the case of the Germans, thanks to our Allied frontline military hospitals having most of the world's scarce supply of natural penicillin.

Artificially scarce , by government fiat, only because the OSRD and its British counterpart were STILL working on trying to make top secret synthetic penicillin and didn't want to warn the Germans of penicillin's potential by letting civilian doctors use it and then talk up miracle cures.

Dawson's unexpected SBE cures with stolen government penicillin leading to dying Baby Patricia Malone's widely publicized 'stealing' of penicillin beyond the OSRD's direct jurisdiction, brought the public and the OPRD into the picture and finally got us wartime penicillin en masse : for frontline Ardennes soldier and home front civilian alike .....