When your life hangs in the balance because of bacterial infection and all else has failed, hospitals reach for Plan G - a needleful of Penicillin G - 87 years old and still our most potent , safest and yet by far the cheapest lifesaver.
Big Pharma practically giving away its most potent and yet safest lifesaver - that hardly sounds like the Big Pharma you and I know --- and hate !
Penicillin still remains un-patentable - still remains made naturally by tiny bugs in a bottle , not by human chemists in a factory.
It still finds its main use as an internal lifesaver not as an external antiseptic for cuts and scrapes.
And it still is a widely available lifesaver - regardless of skin color or lack of income .
Partly because it is cheap because it is un-patentable so no one firm or nation can control its production but mostly because making it available for all is a longstanding tradition since the last year of WWII.
But if Alexander Fleming , that Presbyterian-raised Scot from Old Scotland had had his will, none of this good news would have happened.
Thankfully, another Presbyterian-raised Scot , but this time from New Scotland (Henry Dawson), was there to thwart his will ...
Showing posts with label patents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label patents. Show all posts
Friday, September 5, 2014
Sunday, January 13, 2013
Most of the penicillin grown in its first 15 years, was wasted on useless attempts at synthesis, not used to save the dying
If my claim be wrong : show me the money !
Open all the archives on university, hospital and corporate penicillin files.
Show us the size and number of penicillin production runs, month by month, from September 1928 to September 1943 ( ie including the first four years of the war).
Then shows us the amount of penicillin units actually released for therapeutic use on human patients suffering from infections suspected of being defeatable by penicillin, during that same time period.
I have never seen any published accounts where the responsible authorities complained about all the precious potentially life-saving penicillin that was being wasted ---- during an all-out Total War ! ----on a futile 20 year long effort to synthesize patentable profitable penicillin from PD (public domain) natural penicillin.
But there are plenty of complaints from the higher-ups about all the penicillin being wasted on saving the lives of ("useless feeders") young people dying from hitherto invariably fatal SBE (endocarditis)......
Open all the archives on university, hospital and corporate penicillin files.
Show us the size and number of penicillin production runs, month by month, from September 1928 to September 1943 ( ie including the first four years of the war).
Then shows us the amount of penicillin units actually released for therapeutic use on human patients suffering from infections suspected of being defeatable by penicillin, during that same time period.
Patents, Profits and Patriotism : pick two out of the three...
I have never seen any published accounts where the responsible authorities complained about all the precious potentially life-saving penicillin that was being wasted ---- during an all-out Total War ! ----on a futile 20 year long effort to synthesize patentable profitable penicillin from PD (public domain) natural penicillin.
But there are plenty of complaints from the higher-ups about all the penicillin being wasted on saving the lives of ("useless feeders") young people dying from hitherto invariably fatal SBE (endocarditis)......
Saturday, September 25, 2010
Florey family and PATENTS :ducks and water
In the reverential biographies of Howard Florey ( he has never had a critical biography - I hope to inspire one of them though), he is always played as the anti-patent guy on penicillin.
By contrast, Ernst Chain is always played as the greedy pro-patent guy.
Well, he is Jewish after all - he would be the greedy money-grubbing one, won't he ?
Edward Abraham, who was there at the time, says that both were pro-patent to a degree - seeking Oxford University to control it ,(as the University of Toronto did insulin).
I agree.
The assumption was made that because Chain's father was in some sort of chemistry business in Germany Chain the PhD chemist would know all about the importance of patents.
(But we don't actually know if his father was involved in patents.)
But Florey ,the MD, would not anything about patents - against MD ethics in the UK at the time. Etc.
Bull dung !
Florey-the-son had wanted to be a chemist and was only nominally a MD in reality anyway.
His father had made his fortune by being the first into a new cutting edge technology, the first into high tech chemistry and trade marks, and by being the first in his state to obtain exclusive geographic rights to new processes.
Joseph Florey even tried to obtain at least one patent himself - for improvements in pneumatic tyres - applied for in Western Australia on May 16 1996, according to the local daily paper.
Leather making technology hadn't changed in around 10,000 years - so when it did, many in the industry refused to take the first leap.
Beyond how technically challenging the new ways of tanning leather were, was the fact that they were not public domain and free, as the tannin way of leather-making had been for centuries.
Florey took both risks and fell into a hot area of patents and licenses and paying high fees - or ignoring patents and fees and focussing on trade marks instead.
His many ads never claimed he had a patent for his chromella leather or even a patent license with a registered number - merely that he was the exclusive South Australia agent for it and held control of it as a trademark.
I haven't been able to find the original owner of chromella leather, but I believe very much they existed.
Here is why:
Florey's very first time he is mentioned in any newspaper seems to have been the month (October 1894) - even the day - he got that exclusive agency for chromella and he took out ads proclaiming that fact.
The word chromella almost never left the Australian papers, in some form or other, until well after his death.
His wealth seemed to have started around 1894 as well.
Having that chromella agency really seemed to have mattered.
But Joseph Florey having interests in tyres and patents of his own was news to me.
Patent talk would have been mother's milk to his son, Howard.
And I think we all owe Chain a heartfelt apology....
By contrast, Ernst Chain is always played as the greedy pro-patent guy.
Well, he is Jewish after all - he would be the greedy money-grubbing one, won't he ?
Edward Abraham, who was there at the time, says that both were pro-patent to a degree - seeking Oxford University to control it ,(as the University of Toronto did insulin).
I agree.
The assumption was made that because Chain's father was in some sort of chemistry business in Germany Chain the PhD chemist would know all about the importance of patents.
(But we don't actually know if his father was involved in patents.)
But Florey ,the MD, would not anything about patents - against MD ethics in the UK at the time. Etc.
Bull dung !
Florey-the-son had wanted to be a chemist and was only nominally a MD in reality anyway.
His father had made his fortune by being the first into a new cutting edge technology, the first into high tech chemistry and trade marks, and by being the first in his state to obtain exclusive geographic rights to new processes.
Joseph Florey even tried to obtain at least one patent himself - for improvements in pneumatic tyres - applied for in Western Australia on May 16 1996, according to the local daily paper.
Leather making technology hadn't changed in around 10,000 years - so when it did, many in the industry refused to take the first leap.
Beyond how technically challenging the new ways of tanning leather were, was the fact that they were not public domain and free, as the tannin way of leather-making had been for centuries.
Florey took both risks and fell into a hot area of patents and licenses and paying high fees - or ignoring patents and fees and focussing on trade marks instead.
His many ads never claimed he had a patent for his chromella leather or even a patent license with a registered number - merely that he was the exclusive South Australia agent for it and held control of it as a trademark.
I haven't been able to find the original owner of chromella leather, but I believe very much they existed.
Here is why:
Florey's very first time he is mentioned in any newspaper seems to have been the month (October 1894) - even the day - he got that exclusive agency for chromella and he took out ads proclaiming that fact.
The word chromella almost never left the Australian papers, in some form or other, until well after his death.
His wealth seemed to have started around 1894 as well.
Having that chromella agency really seemed to have mattered.
But Joseph Florey having interests in tyres and patents of his own was news to me.
Patent talk would have been mother's milk to his son, Howard.
And I think we all owe Chain a heartfelt apology....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
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...