Dawson's Smalls

A small team of just four, working with small penicillium fungoid growths helpers, all to heal some small patients, working class SBE youths, the very "4Fs of the 4Fs".

Dr Henry Dawson seemed to have kept his team deliberately small, not just to maximize his freedom from the people and institutions who wanted to financially shut him down, but also to make a point of the continuing abilities of small science and small science teams to still do major work.

Again, he deliberately chose to rub the fur of Allied medical science the wrong way when he decided to break a worldwide medical taboo, and after only all five weeks into his project, inject the raw penicillin made from the dismissed-as-too-primitive penicillium mold into his patients' blood stream.

This, rather than wait years or decades for Big Pharma and Big Medicine to painstakingly and slowly bring mass clinically tested synthetic penicillin to market.

Finally of course, Dawson seemed to doom his 'penicillin project' to years of failure by picking by far the hardest disease on the books to try and cure with the limited amounts he could make or obtain.

But of course his project was never about penicillin and he deliberately picked the SBEs because they were 'the least of these' on everyone else's medical priority list, if a shooting war broke out.

Dawson's small team picked the small penicillium mold and the small SBEs out of the dustbin of history, where they had been both dismissively tossed, and then made out of them something truly wondrous and globe-changing to behold....

Snot, vomit , excrement, spit , semen : physical monsters vs moral monsters

We've all seen enough films and TV to be wrongly confident of what a typical lifelong serial contract killer looks like.

They are ultra normal looking .

Even good looking.

Oh so symmetrical in features and body shape, modest in speech, polite, neat , always tipping the waitress well, always picking up a fluffy animal 'for the daughter' on these infrequent way-from-home business trips.

But their quick, clean, cold hits include a lady doctor who advises on abortions, an investigative journalist and a small time drug dealer who ran short on his returns to his supplier, Mr Big.

They are , in a word, a moral monster : with our fascination for them entirely wrapped around how such seemingly normal people can be so evil.

Now physical monsters are not merely scaled up ten feet tall versions of Ms Right, the serial killer, a monster who can now kill with her bare hands instead of with a high powered sniper rifle.

Instead these monsters are always disgusting and repulsive , as well as being cold blooded determined to kill on sight.

Why ?

Tall and powerful these monsters might be but the very opposite of handsome --- an asymmetrical body shape is always a given with them.

And the edges of that misshaped body are not neat and tidy and sweet smelling - oh no, never.

Instead a ten foot tall blob of evil jelly-like snot - albeit a big piece of snot with huge arms with razors for fingers.

Or a rancid ten foot tall used condom ...with huge arms topped by razors.

Maybe a ten foot tall blob of foul smelling vomit ..with long arms ending in razors.

A ten foot tall mouth ,who kills by projecting a lethal, foul-smelling and tasting spit from that huge misshaped mouths onto our faces.

A really disgusting ten foot tall feces, again with huge arms lanced with murderous razors.

Or - to neatly segue into the theme of this blog - a ten foot tall slippery , slimy smelly basement fungal mold ( penicillin-producing penicillium anyone ?) ...with long arms topped with murderous razor blade hands.

One can't help but note that physical (or old fashioned) book, movie and TV monsters all seem connected in some way to the body functions that entail slippery excretions .

Urine is noticeably absent from this list - it is a clearly liquid body excretion - but these others are in the littoral zone between dry solid solids and wet fluid liquids - not being one or the either but dynamically being a sticky slimy bit of both.

Our body excretions cross boundaries we very much like to keep distinct - not just across the boundary between our bowels and the toilet bowl , but the that all important mental and emotional barrier between the solid/fixed and the wet/fluid.

In other words, we'd still fear these physical slime monsters ---- even if they did not try to kill us....

Merck's conflict of interest : planning to use molds as poisons of war makes it hard to see molds as lifesavers...

George W Merck (with big cigar) with Chemical Warfare officer at a drug trade conference (!)

George W Merck spent most of WWII dividing his time between heading the biological weapons effort of the US government (which including researching molds as deadly poisons) and trying to create a synthetic version of the lifesaving penicillium mold.

Mentally that must have made it hard for Merck, head of Merck Drugs, to give a fair hearing to the possibility that the penicillium mold - all by itself, 'as is' - might be able to save lives...

A Presbyterian with a Monstrance of Penicillium Mold

Devout Presbyterian layperson and wartime penicillin researcher Gladys Hobby recounts in her book "Penicillin : Meeting The Challenge" of  her rounds carrying a petri dish containing a big circular 'wedged' penicillium mold, every day through the wards at Presbyterian-Columbia Hospital.

This daily pilgrimage served no medical or scientific purpose, but it did serve the moral purpose of helping to sustain the spirits of the young SBE patients there.

They all knew that faced imminent and inevitable death from their disease, unless the tiny team of which she was a part of could produce in time enough of the natural penicillin to save their lives.

Anyone who has even seen an artistic rendering of  such 'wedged' penicillium mold and an artistic rendering of a Monstrance is immediately struck, as I was, that the two paintings are very hard to tell apart.

As a Catholic, I particularly relish the image of a Calvinist Protestant dutifully carrying a monstrance, so alien to her religious traditions ( and albeit a monstrance of penicillin-hope), daily through the pain-filled wards.

Truly, God works in mysterious ways ....

ROP on this penicillin milch cow is beyond astounding : and it is all down to lactose intolerance !

Ironic isn't it ? Hundreds of millions of people have enjoyed longer lives thanks to the lactose intolerance of some slimy little mold.


That mold makes penicillin : in the beginning, very little,  only converting about one millionth of the war-rationed sugar that was so lovingly fed into penicillin.

Turns out that was the biggest part of our problem : we were feeding it far too well, on easy-to-digest sugars and so it failed to produce any penicillin.

But as soon as we learned to starve it slowly, by giving it milk sugar, (lactose) a sugar it didn't exactly live to eat , it started into giving us tons of penicillin.

Lactose stresses the diets of molds something wicked and when they get food-stressed, but not to the point of actual starvation, they play defence .

The penicillin they start making kills and keeps at bay possible bacteria competitors for what little suitable food the mold can lay its threads upon.

But actually starve a mold (and early researchers often accidentally did that), and they started to rapidly self-suicide themselves in despair.

But feed it lousy lactose, just at the right time, just after its had a day or two of easy living on some nice sugar and protein, and it will produce tons of penicillin.

Literally : annual penicillin product induced by human industry is now at least 20,000 metric tonnes a year.

In 1928, it was about one micro-gram. That's about what Fleming saw in the bottom of his petri dish and it was about as much penicillin as was used in its first cure : curing a newborn baby of a lifetime of blindness , in 1930.

A micro gram is 1 millionth of a gram , so there are a billion of these tiny micro grams in a kilogram of penicillin ( ie about 2 pounds of penicillin). And a trillion of them in a metric tonne of penicillin ( ie about 2000 pounds of penicillin if you are old school.)

So we now produce 20,000 thousand trillion times as much penicillin today as we did 85 years ago.

Fleming's particular penicillium mold was actually very good producer - seemingly the best in the world for 15 years, but only produced one micro gram of penicillin in every gram of liquid medium.

That is a million parts junk to one part money ratio, unbelievably dismal in comparison to every other fermentation process in commercial use at the time.

Today, we get 50 milligrams of penicillin per gram of medium : that is 50,000 times better.

That is a 5,000,000 percent improvement in about 50 years.

Think your grandfather's prize milk cow had an outstanding ROP improvement ?

Try this rapid a percentage improvement on for size !

The main reason why we didn't see this sort of improvement for almost 20 years after Fleming found his mold is because we let chemistry guide our thinking ; trying hard to extract ever more of the penicillin we did manage to produce.

But as I used to say to the CUPE picketeers whenever the Gerry Regan government boasted of the size of its final, final, contract offer : " ten percent of nothing is .... still nothing" .

Only by learning to starve penicillium molds, which we had done by late 1944, did we begin to see enough penicillin to make the stuff a paying proposition , not a charity case, for Big Pharma.

But you can read all the best known books on war time penicillin - and I believe I have - and yet never read one word said about starvation of the molds.

The same goes for present day articles from historians and social scientist about wartime penicillin.

Only articles and books from physical scientists actually working in the fermentation industries routinely mention starvation stress in regards to being essential to penicillin production but even they seem to quote articles from the early 1950s as being the first to signal this fact.

But what then to make of little gem from July 26th 1941 from a letter from Norman Heatley to Howard Florey, just three weeks into Florey's effort to get American Big Pharma to make penicillin on at least a pilot plant scale?

Heatley is at a spanking brand new research facility in Peoria, set up by the US Department of Agriculture to find new uses for farm surpluses - particularly surpluses of low value farm wastes.

He is working with Andrew Moyer : one part mold genius to two parts paranoid nutter.

Already, just ten days after looking at penicillin for the first time, Moyer hazards a guess that penicillin production might be dependent on a starvation metabolism.

If Moyer had only been listened to - and there is no sign that any scientist or bureaucrat then - or historian since - ever did, we might have had commercial penicillin flowing by the Fall of 1941 not the Fall of 1944.....