Manhattan's OTHER Project : Gotham's penicillin un-superheroes (and why they are ignored by academics)

If another secretive, undemocratic, big science Manhattan Project is more likely to cause a global environmental disaster (think nuclear winter or geo-engineering) than prevent it - then does the experiences of wartime Gotham have anything at all to still teach us, as we face global climate meltdown ?

Well, unbeknownst to virtually all, Manhattan actually had another ( far different) wartime project that still has lessons for today.

Its global effect were almost as big as that of the much better known atomic Manhattan Project, but by pointed contrast to it, it was near universally always warmly received worldwide.

Because Manhattan's real enduring gift to humanity during and after the war years was not The Bomb (or the infamous Norden Bombsight) but rather bog-ordinary cheap available-to-all public domain natural penicillin. You know - the stuff the academics are always telling us that the British gave us.

Now I sometimes joke that the only reasons the Scandinavians didn't give a joint Nobel Peace Prize to Stalin and Hitler was because the Nordics ran out of time - the guys died first.

But joking aside, the Nobel prize choices have rarely stood up well to the test of time.

Admittedly, Mr Nobel's naive requirements that everything significant that is discovered or invented was brought to mass use or mass knowledge by no more than three (still living) individuals does force the Nobel prize selection committees into mindless contortions.

Still - what of earth were the Nordics thinking - or not thinking - when the medicine committee gave the 1945 Nobel prize for penicillin to Fleming and Florey ?

After his 1928 discovery, Alec Fleming's main contribution was to tell everybody within earshot (for 15 wasted years) that penicillin would only work if used as a topical antiseptic (it doesn't work well there) and would NEVER work if taken internally (when in fact it works miraculously well there.)

Moreover he said it would never be useful for patients until artificially synthesized when in fact it never has : all clinical penicillin and the bulk of all of today's antibiotics (yes even today !) are still derived from natural penicillin made by fungus.

In this particularly obtuse claim, he was more than fully supported by chemist manque Howard Florey.

In fact Florey led the Allies' wartime charge to repeatedly try and to repeatedly fail to make penicillin by artificial (patentable) methods, rather than to simply produce enough natural (public domain) penicillin to meet current desperate wartime needs.

And Florey and Fleming, both strong supporters of the Conservative Party, fully backed the Conservative politicians in Britain's wartime coalition government who wanted to limit wartime penicillin production to only lightly wounded front line troops.

None for severely wounded troops or any home front civilians in Allied nations and colonies; none for civilians in Neutral, Occupied or Enemy countries - none for Allied POWs, let alone for enemy POWs !

All this because it had been determined that diverting British resources to set up enough British natural penicillin bottle plants in unused buildings to supply all military and civilian needs for the world (and thus to secure a postwar Pax Britannica based on this wartime humanitarian effort) would cost about ten million pounds.

And that was also enough for at least one or two more additions to Bomber Command's already many heavy bomber squadrons.

Since 1932 and Prime Minister Baldwin's famous speech, it had been become the 40th Article of the Conservative Party faith that 'the bomber always gets through' and that destroying people and not saving them was the Conservative way to the moral high ground and winning any war.

But what really made wartime penicillin the world's best known/best loved medicine is that as the last dying act of the New Deal, a new Pax Americana had suddenly made cheap non-patented (natural) penicillin abundantly available to all - wartime friend and foe alike.

But none of these good guys , none of the Americans (and a Canadian) centred in NYC who were mostly responsible for this boon to humanity, ever received a Nobel Prize or public acclaim for the miracle of cheap-penicillin-for-all : only the bad guys.

Because the good guys' approach couldn't have been more different than the atomic Manhattan project.

They were open about their intentions and pragmatically and morally committed to saving the little guy. They wasted little taxpayer money and resources and instead combined a 'little science' approach with a ruggedly low tech engineering style.

All of this was anathema to academics (including non scientists like historians) who wanted to ballyhoo the supposed wartime triumphs of heavily taxpayer funded basic science-big science as a way to getting the taxpayer to permanently fund their postwar hobbyhorses.

So - in a brazen conflict of interest and in violence to the known facts - academics have tended to give all the penicillin acclaim to the big science advocates (cum penicillin bad guys).

To those who were actually most dedicated to keeping wartime penicillin a much delayed, scarce and patented exclusive drug.

So Drs Florey and Fleming in Britain , along with Drs A N Richards and Chester Keefer in the States , got all the acclaim.

Logrolling is what they call this sort of stuff it in politics - I don't know what they call it inside the ivory tower bunker : false weighting of the scales of evidence maybe ?

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.

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 ...

"Pax Penicillia" : how Churchill's Britain won the war and lost the peace

The decision by Winston Churchill's (Tory) Minister of Supply (MoS) not to divert the money for one additional Lancaster squadron, used to bomb civilians in Europe, towards providing enough penicillin for British (and European) civilians resulted in Churchill's Tories winning the war for Britain --- but at the cost of losing the peace.

By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral  authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.

Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.

And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...

Very last files UK National Archives plans to digitalize : FO 370/926, futile appeals from abroad for British penicillin

The very last files that the UK National Archives plans to digitalize and put on line won't be the ultra-secret Ultra files . Trust me : Ultra was a success.

No the very last files, if ever, to be digitalized and put on line will be the series FO (Foreign Office) 370/926 : requests from aboard , 1944-1945, for that wonderful British invention , penicillin.

That's because what should have been the greatest success for the UK in WWII turned out to be their worst total balls-up disaster.


The British didn't have any penicillin : not really enough for their own troops and civilians, let alone to address distressing appeals coming from the dying all over the world.

What should have been a signal triumph as Britons freely gave to the word the greatest medical boon it had ever known - would ever know - instead became an opportunity for America to practise "penicillin diplomacy" and replace Pax Britannia with Pax Americana.

The British Empire actually fell, not in early 1942 with "The Fall of Singapore" , but in early 1944, with "The Penicillin Shortfall Crisis".

The cause of the failure was the usual one : leaving policy in the hands of scientists, instead of the politicians.

Stupid and venal as the politicians often are, they know a political  minefield when they see one - but by the time they saw this one, it was just too late.

Just as the families overseas were forced to bury their dead when the British failed to help - so too, the PRO and UK archivists will bury these embarrassing files : but good....