Re-reading Hotchkiss and Dubos's various 1940 era papers on their quick "small science" success at extracting, crystallizing and analyzing high yields of gramicidin, an early (unfortunately deadly) antibiotic exuded by microbes, one is struck by the apparent ease of the whole project.
By contrast, penicillin, another antibiotic exuded by another microbe, was extremely difficult to successfully handle - in every single aspect of it --- from growing the microbe to the ultimate failure to commercially synthesize penicillin itself.
This despite a multi-nation effort that eventually rivalled the Manhattan atomic Project for "Big Science" funding and skilled manpower levels.
But biochemist Dr Karl Meyer was not to know this in September 1940 when he recruited his co-worker, bacteriologist Dr Martin Henry Dawson, to "just" grow a little bit of the fungus microbe, for a "little while".
A seemingly small request, for a short period of time, that cost Dawson his life but also ended up changing our entire world, for the better, forever.
Dawson then only needed to test tiny amounts of its raw penicillin (and the breakdown products and synthesis attempts from Dr Meyer) for their anti-bacterial effects on a few bacteria isolated upon small microscope slides.
A Piece of Cake, I promise !
Like all other would be penicillin synthesizers, Meyer had absolutely no plans to develop a simultaneous clinical program of treating patients with his naturally grown penicillin.
Not only would that would require producing vastly bigger amounts of penicillin and delivered on a reliable timetable, it would also absorb scarce penicillin that he really needed to destroy, as part of his destructive analysis process.
Meyer had a long and close relationship with Schering, a big (chemically sophisticated) drug company, and if he had any success at all in penicillin synthesis, they would quickly take over the process.
Schering would then mass synthesis the drug from off the shelf standard chemical reagents, in quantities at least large enough for a large collective clinical effort to test it out on first animals and then various human patients suffering different diseases.
I hope the impression I have given you of Meyer's initial project was how small it was and how leisurely it could proceed.
This is perhaps the total opposite to the set of conditions that Dawson's fellow Canadian Dr Banting imposed upon himself.
Banting's small team are busy trying to learn how to extract large amounts of fairly pure (natural) insulin consistently, while scores of dying children awaited that insulin in the hospital next door as the eyes of the entire world are rapt upon their heroic efforts.
No pressure !
I have written many times before how Dawson decided to aid the war effort not by attacking the bully Hitler but rather to attack Allied bystander hypocrisy, in the difference between the Allies' public war aims of helping the small and their actual inactions (or worse) on that front.
So he decided, in late September, to irk the Allied medical authorities the most offensive way he could think of, by deliberating inviting two of the Allied cultures' most worthless beings into his wartime Big Tent of all possible talents.
Patients with invariably fatal SBE had already been written off as "life unworthy of scarce wartime medicine" and were 'the 4Fs of the 4Fs' on the bottom scale of wartime medical priority.
That the first two patients invited to introduce the new Age of Antibiotic were a working class Black and a Jew added an extra frisson to his lateral move.
Next, he decided to buck a twelve year long world wide medical taboo against injecting fungoid growth metabolical waste (aka natural penicillin) directly into the temple of the human blood stream.
The medical consensus was that it was better to let patients die than inject patients with this highly effective and totally non-toxic lifesaver, before 'the chemists' synthesized it as totally artificial and totally pure, to paraphrase Alexander Fleming.
Along with all the doctors, many others among the educated, among them A Hitler and HP Lovecraft, shared this characteristically Modern irrational fear of fungoid growths.
Dawson would attempt to save the lives of the worthless '4Fs of the 4Fs' with the yellow poop/pee of the worthless fungoid slime !
Immediately, Dawson was into 'Doing a Banting', hijacking Meyer's tiny leisurely project, but doing a worse Banting, if that could be possible.
It was.
Few places feared fungus molds more than 1940s hospitals, home to the excessively house proud nursing fraternity, in an age when their excessive cleanliness was almost the only defence against hospital-spread infection.
Dawson would have to grow his penicillium in a very busy hospital itself, unlike Hotchkiss or Banting and resistance to his efforts from his bosses could be expected to be fierce.
Particularly as he would be growing 700 two litre flasks of the stuff on a regular two week turn cycle !
That amount, 50 US gallons of extraction liquid every two weeks, was the amount engineers mean when they talk about industrial 'pilot plant' levels.
This would have been a big undertaking for any drug company in 1940, let alone for a tiny team of four part time staffers, working in a hostile hospital, trying to keep up with their busy fulltime day jobs.
This was because the yield of penicillin, in 1940, from penicillium was incredibly low - one part in a million extracted as final 'medicine' output from one million parts of 'food' input.
And even in treating ordinary patients, penicillin presented unique difficulties that made its clinical use require larger than expected amounts of this miracle drug.
This despite the fact that tiny amounts of penicillin were highly effective bacteria killers - that is worked in tiny amounts was one of the many reasons why penicillin was so extraordinarily non toxic in the human body.
Just as well - because another reason it was so non-toxic was that it didn't get to hang about inside us - the kidneys excreted it all in a very rapid manner - as fast as in one half hour.
Frequent new injections were needed to maintain it at an effective germ killing level in the blood serum.
Wait !
it gets worse, much much worse.
SBE was - and is - considered the Mount Everest of all infectious diseases for any number of reasons.
This disease of the vital and very delicate heart valves is one that usually returns again and again, each time further weakening the valve while also providing a better place (a sturdy biofilm then know as vegetations) for the infectious bacteria to hide and survive drug attacks, until the patient dies.
But the real difficulty is the fact that the valves are literally a case of "blood, blood everywhere but not a drop to drink" - though all of the blood inside us flows through them repeatedly, ironically they themselves are basically not supplied with any tiny blood capillaries and hence no blood.
Drugs that arrive via the traditional capillary route trickle in slowly and leave slowly, making a little drug go a long way.
Instead the drug that could impact heart valves had to fill the entire blood system at a clinically effective level and yet only brush by the valves for a fraction of a second as the blood supply is at its very fastest being pumped through the valves.
Dawson's history-making first ever injections of an antibiotic into a patient, technically were fully internal systemic in nature but then acted rather like an internal antiseptic being dabbed on the outside of a cut !
The only good news was that penicillin readily killed the particular bacteria of SBE infections and because it was so non-toxic, the entire body could be safely filled with the drug to kill an infection in only a tiny part of the body.
In addition, Dawson noted that the drug seemed readily diffusible - meaning it could better penetrate deep into the SBE vegetations than most other drugs.
The problem for the highly moral upright Dawson, was that once he committed to trying to save SBEs when they came forth in the new admissions mix to the single ward he effectively controlled, he would have to keep producing the penicillin until the current patient died or was cured.
And then the same for the next SBE patient and so on.
Until penicillin was (a) mass produced and (b) authorized to be given to the written-off SBEs.
This didn't happen for four more years.
Dawson created for himself a moral and physical treadmill he couldn't climb off of.
The initial stress quickly gave him a case of MG, a dangerous auto immune disease, and the continuing stress finally made it fatal four years later.
No wonder that most in the medical world considered him a crackpot.
But I consider him a cracked pot ---- in the full biblical sense of that term....
Showing posts with label synthetic penicillin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label synthetic penicillin. Show all posts
Saturday, September 26, 2015
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
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).
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.....
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.....
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, July 18, 2015
The twenty year old effort to 'civilize' penicillin was well funded, well studied, well honoured (and a big failure ...)
By contrast, the tiny and relatively brief (less than four years) effort to win (grudging) acceptance for 'primitive' penicillin was unfunded and unsupported, received no scholarly study or public honours ---- and was a huge, world-changing, success.
Seventy five years later, annually thousands of tons of 'Primitive' penicillin are still made the good old primeval way - by incredibly tiny fungal factories - and still form the basis for almost all of our life-saving antibiotics.
"Upending" - the blog, the musical and backstory non-fiction book - tries to make amends.
For "Upending" is based around the proposition that massive success usually deserves more attention than failure, even if (particularly if ?) that failure was supported by all the Smartest Men in the Universe...
Seventy five years later, annually thousands of tons of 'Primitive' penicillin are still made the good old primeval way - by incredibly tiny fungal factories - and still form the basis for almost all of our life-saving antibiotics.
"Upending" - the blog, the musical and backstory non-fiction book - tries to make amends.
For "Upending" is based around the proposition that massive success usually deserves more attention than failure, even if (particularly if ?) that failure was supported by all the Smartest Men in the Universe...
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Dawsonian Revolution's twin triumphs : primitive penicillin and its 'primitive' distribution
The man at the top of the Anglo-American civilization (Winston Churchill) fully backed the Allied medical-scientific experts who insisted upon first civilizing and synthesizing (and patentizing) primitive penicillin before considering its civilized (hierarchical/restricted) distribution during WWII.
By contrast, Dr Martin Henry Dawson insisted from the start (October 1940) that primitive (fungus-made) penicillin was safe enough and efficiently enough produced to enable the world to start right now - today ! - saving those people dying of diseases penicillin could cure.
And he also demanded that his primitive made penicillin be distributed as a primitive society would distribute it - equally to all those in need, war or no war.
We really shouldn't be surprised by all this.
An essential characteristic of all 'civilizations', experts insist, is that it has a high measure of both social and geographic stratification - a hierarchy of inequality.
Those same experts say that 'primitive' and barbaric societies share a common egalitarian spirit of sharing equally.
True, in politicians' rhetoric, 'the civilized' show a great egalitarian spirit while 'the barbaric' have a hierarchy of cruel rulers and enslaved subjects.
Of course remember that $6 and politicians' rhetoric will get you a small cup of Starbucks, with any luck ....
By contrast, Dr Martin Henry Dawson insisted from the start (October 1940) that primitive (fungus-made) penicillin was safe enough and efficiently enough produced to enable the world to start right now - today ! - saving those people dying of diseases penicillin could cure.
And he also demanded that his primitive made penicillin be distributed as a primitive society would distribute it - equally to all those in need, war or no war.
We really shouldn't be surprised by all this.
An essential characteristic of all 'civilizations', experts insist, is that it has a high measure of both social and geographic stratification - a hierarchy of inequality.
Those same experts say that 'primitive' and barbaric societies share a common egalitarian spirit of sharing equally.
True, in politicians' rhetoric, 'the civilized' show a great egalitarian spirit while 'the barbaric' have a hierarchy of cruel rulers and enslaved subjects.
Of course remember that $6 and politicians' rhetoric will get you a small cup of Starbucks, with any luck ....
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
If we never longer think the Sun revolves around us, we still think it shines out our ass...
Life in the Universe apparently could occur on any one about 100 billion other planets that have the exact complex mix of conditions needed.
This is called the Mediocrity Principle and it has wider application in helping reduce our ever present human hubris.
Now as it happened, Life did occur on Earth and four billion years later it is still around, for now.
But with a slight shift in the conditions here on Earth it might never have happened - or not have happened for very long.
All down to chance, luck,buddy --- what have you.
Ditto for us humans generally.
God, having an inordinate fondness for beetles, has given Earth 150,000 species and trillions of individual members.
We humans are now down to one species and 70,000 or so years ago were down to perhaps a thousand breeding couples.
Humanity as an endangered species --- like Whooping Crane.
A slight change of conditions 4 million years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, tomorrow - and we'd disappear --- maybe with nothing remotely like us ever re-emerging again.
So, a fragile and near run thing, this human civilization.
Not at all like the bacteria - there at the birth of Life and still ruling the Earth , four billion years later.
If humanity is like big hunky Sumo Wrestlers with a bad news cancer checkup ever just around the corner, bacteria seem to be like small jockeys that repeatedly break bones falling off mounts and yet keep on ticking.
Meek and small and weak, they definitely seem destined to inherit the Earth ---- as humans exist stage left a few thousand or million years from now.
If we humanoids persist in thinking that we have ascended far far above our early days as apes (or more accurately as bacteria), it should be shattering to accept that we still share almost all our DNA with the chimps and our most vital and fundamental genes with the earliest bacteria.
But our egos remain shatter proof--- the Dawsonian Revolution still seems something most of us slept right through.
And as a result, anthropocentric progress is still killing this planet with the Sixth Extinction.
Hence this book ...
This is called the Mediocrity Principle and it has wider application in helping reduce our ever present human hubris.
Now as it happened, Life did occur on Earth and four billion years later it is still around, for now.
But with a slight shift in the conditions here on Earth it might never have happened - or not have happened for very long.
All down to chance, luck,buddy --- what have you.
Ditto for us humans generally.
God, having an inordinate fondness for beetles, has given Earth 150,000 species and trillions of individual members.
We humans are now down to one species and 70,000 or so years ago were down to perhaps a thousand breeding couples.
Humanity as an endangered species --- like Whooping Crane.
A slight change of conditions 4 million years ago, 400,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, tomorrow - and we'd disappear --- maybe with nothing remotely like us ever re-emerging again.
So, a fragile and near run thing, this human civilization.
Not at all like the bacteria - there at the birth of Life and still ruling the Earth , four billion years later.
If humanity is like big hunky Sumo Wrestlers with a bad news cancer checkup ever just around the corner, bacteria seem to be like small jockeys that repeatedly break bones falling off mounts and yet keep on ticking.
Meek and small and weak, they definitely seem destined to inherit the Earth ---- as humans exist stage left a few thousand or million years from now.
If we humanoids persist in thinking that we have ascended far far above our early days as apes (or more accurately as bacteria), it should be shattering to accept that we still share almost all our DNA with the chimps and our most vital and fundamental genes with the earliest bacteria.
But our egos remain shatter proof--- the Dawsonian Revolution still seems something most of us slept right through.
And as a result, anthropocentric progress is still killing this planet with the Sixth Extinction.
Hence this book ...
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 ...
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
October 16 1940 : ending the era of human-only progress and ushering in our era of bio-diverse cleverness
Purifying and then synthesizing such a comparatively small molecule like penicillin (produced after all by the primitive and simple basement slime) couldn't take very long, said an entire generation of chemists.
And then, and only then, with plenty of pure man-made penicillin at hand, would it finally be safe for clinicians to inject the blessed stuff into a dying patient's bloodstream.
But by mid October 1940, one clinician (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) had had more than enough of waiting for human chemists to put their synthetic money where their hubristic mouth was.
for even his highly talented co-worker, biochemist Dr Karl Meyer, had also failed to make much initial progress on determining the structure of the penicillin molecule.
And Meyer was miles and miles away from attempting to synthesize the stuff.
Dawson had two dying patients before him, for whom he sincerely believed penicillin was their only possible lifeline.
He knew they would need a great deal of clinical penicillin to be saved, but only a little penicillin was at hand.
But a little was better than nothing --- and even a token injection might raise their morale higher even if it did little to lower the microbe count inside their damaged heart valves.
The relatively small amounts of native penicillin that the tiny team at NYC's Columbia Presbyterian medical complex had grown so far had all been divided between Dawson's co-worker Gladys Hobby's microbiological tests and Meyer's (and his assistant Eleanor Chaffee's) chemical tests.
But in 1940, Henry Dawson had a much greater faith in the ability of (raw - impure - natural - native - crude) fungus-made penicillin to cure patients than any other doctor in the world.
Like many other infection experts around the world, he had read of Howard Florey's Oxford team's success with raw penicillin injections in safely curing many experimental infections in many different animals.
But all the other infection experts had read and remained unmoved .
Unmoved to to attempt injecting raw penicillin into humans, whether healthy volunteers or dying patients.
Not so Dawson - he had already had over a dozen years experience confirming that the supposedly simple and primitive microbes had at least as much native chemical ability under their tiny belts as had enormous conference halls filled with chemical PhDs.
His own colleagues had long grown weary of his endless informal lectures on the ability of tiny microbes to practise genetic/chemical engineering (bacterial transformation - HGT) at a skill level that the best human geneticists could only dream of.
The man was not just a bore, he was also 'letting down the side', at least as the Era of Human-Only Progress saw it.
For he had long claimed that the tiny, ancient and simple microbes were much, much cleverer than they were ever given credit for - cleverer than the most civilized of humanity, in many ways.
But he was harmless enough - for all this had only been talk so far.
But on this day - October 16th 1940 - Dawson decidedly 'went off the reservation' and crossed a deep cultural Rubicon.
For on this day, Dr Dawson finally gave his tiny chemists 'a fair go' when he injected SBE patients Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson with fungus-made penicillin.
Thus ending The Era of Human-Only Progress ---- and ushering in our present Era of Bio-Diverse Cleverness...
And then, and only then, with plenty of pure man-made penicillin at hand, would it finally be safe for clinicians to inject the blessed stuff into a dying patient's bloodstream.
But by mid October 1940, one clinician (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) had had more than enough of waiting for human chemists to put their synthetic money where their hubristic mouth was.
for even his highly talented co-worker, biochemist Dr Karl Meyer, had also failed to make much initial progress on determining the structure of the penicillin molecule.
And Meyer was miles and miles away from attempting to synthesize the stuff.
Dawson had two dying patients before him, for whom he sincerely believed penicillin was their only possible lifeline.
He knew they would need a great deal of clinical penicillin to be saved, but only a little penicillin was at hand.
But a little was better than nothing --- and even a token injection might raise their morale higher even if it did little to lower the microbe count inside their damaged heart valves.
The relatively small amounts of native penicillin that the tiny team at NYC's Columbia Presbyterian medical complex had grown so far had all been divided between Dawson's co-worker Gladys Hobby's microbiological tests and Meyer's (and his assistant Eleanor Chaffee's) chemical tests.
But in 1940, Henry Dawson had a much greater faith in the ability of (raw - impure - natural - native - crude) fungus-made penicillin to cure patients than any other doctor in the world.
Like many other infection experts around the world, he had read of Howard Florey's Oxford team's success with raw penicillin injections in safely curing many experimental infections in many different animals.
But all the other infection experts had read and remained unmoved .
Unmoved to to attempt injecting raw penicillin into humans, whether healthy volunteers or dying patients.
Not so Dawson - he had already had over a dozen years experience confirming that the supposedly simple and primitive microbes had at least as much native chemical ability under their tiny belts as had enormous conference halls filled with chemical PhDs.
His own colleagues had long grown weary of his endless informal lectures on the ability of tiny microbes to practise genetic/chemical engineering (bacterial transformation - HGT) at a skill level that the best human geneticists could only dream of.
The man was not just a bore, he was also 'letting down the side', at least as the Era of Human-Only Progress saw it.
For he had long claimed that the tiny, ancient and simple microbes were much, much cleverer than they were ever given credit for - cleverer than the most civilized of humanity, in many ways.
But he was harmless enough - for all this had only been talk so far.
But on this day - October 16th 1940 - Dawson decidedly 'went off the reservation' and crossed a deep cultural Rubicon.
For on this day, Dr Dawson finally gave his tiny chemists 'a fair go' when he injected SBE patients Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson with fungus-made penicillin.
Thus ending The Era of Human-Only Progress ---- and ushering in our present Era of Bio-Diverse Cleverness...
Saturday, June 20, 2015
Synthetic penicillin could heal WWII's bodies, but only natural penicillin could heal its soul as well
Determined not to 'lose face' and let down their side by being upstaged by native life-saving penicillin, for twenty long years (1928-1948) imperial Anglo-European medical science chased the mirage of synthetic (civilized-man-made) penicillin.
In fact, put this quest well above their real task - of saving lives.
Even during WWII.
A fracking disgrace.
But they never could make commercial synthetic penicillin (we still can't) and so almost all our antibiotics still begin with fungus-grown native penicillin.
Imagine that : the smallest and stupidest beings could make a miraculous lifesaving balm, when the smartest beings in the universe couldn't.
This surprising turn of events helped upend all our long cherished delusions about the natural order of progress and intelligence.
This held that intelligence, however defined, rose inevitably from virtually none at all among the oldest, smallest and stupidest right up to the newest, biggest and smartest beings in the universe : the civilized scientists who gave us Napalm, Plutonium and Zyklon-B.
And speaking of Zyklon-B, these same globally held views on a vertical ladder of intelligence and worthiness rising from the small to the great, is what justified (in their minds) the killings of all those with 'lives unworthy of life' by the Nazis.
No wonder then that ours, today, is a post-Modern, post-Progress age ...
In fact, put this quest well above their real task - of saving lives.
Even during WWII.
A fracking disgrace.
But they never could make commercial synthetic penicillin (we still can't) and so almost all our antibiotics still begin with fungus-grown native penicillin.
Imagine that : the smallest and stupidest beings could make a miraculous lifesaving balm, when the smartest beings in the universe couldn't.
This surprising turn of events helped upend all our long cherished delusions about the natural order of progress and intelligence.
This held that intelligence, however defined, rose inevitably from virtually none at all among the oldest, smallest and stupidest right up to the newest, biggest and smartest beings in the universe : the civilized scientists who gave us Napalm, Plutonium and Zyklon-B.
And speaking of Zyklon-B, these same globally held views on a vertical ladder of intelligence and worthiness rising from the small to the great, is what justified (in their minds) the killings of all those with 'lives unworthy of life' by the Nazis.
No wonder then that ours, today, is a post-Modern, post-Progress age ...
1940 : native penicillin, Deus Ex Machina, arrives to 'smite the arrogant' as much as to 'succour the humble'
If the only earthly job for native penicillin, ancient beyond time, was to succour the humble and to comfort the weak and afflicted, it could have crossed the human consciousness at any time throughout human history.
But if native - natural - humbly made - penicillin's main purpose here was really to smite the arrogant, its arrival in 1940, at the very height of a war to the finish between the world's most 'modern', most 'progressive' civilizations, it couldn't have come at a more appropriate time.
For it's defeat of modern synthetic penicillin confounded the whole notion of 'biological evolutionary progress' so decisively that the Era of Progress came to an abrupt end in 1945 ---- and our current post-Modern, post-Progress era began .
That Dr Henry Dawson fully intended to use penicillin to succour the humble and save the lives of young people dying from SBE endocarditis caused by Rheumatic Fever there can be no doubt.
Still one can ask, why then did he jump the gun in that effort, and start the process three months early (on October 16th 1940) with clearly inadequate amounts of very crude 'native' penicillin, if saving lives was his only aim ?
Could it just be that his history-making injections to two '4Fs of the 4Fs', on a day otherwise devoted to honouring the worth of America's 1As and dismissing the worth of her 4Fs, was designed as much to smite the arrogant, as it was to succour the humble ?
But if native - natural - humbly made - penicillin's main purpose here was really to smite the arrogant, its arrival in 1940, at the very height of a war to the finish between the world's most 'modern', most 'progressive' civilizations, it couldn't have come at a more appropriate time.
For it's defeat of modern synthetic penicillin confounded the whole notion of 'biological evolutionary progress' so decisively that the Era of Progress came to an abrupt end in 1945 ---- and our current post-Modern, post-Progress era began .
That Dr Henry Dawson fully intended to use penicillin to succour the humble and save the lives of young people dying from SBE endocarditis caused by Rheumatic Fever there can be no doubt.
Still one can ask, why then did he jump the gun in that effort, and start the process three months early (on October 16th 1940) with clearly inadequate amounts of very crude 'native' penicillin, if saving lives was his only aim ?
Could it just be that his history-making injections to two '4Fs of the 4Fs', on a day otherwise devoted to honouring the worth of America's 1As and dismissing the worth of her 4Fs, was designed as much to smite the arrogant, as it was to succour the humble ?
Friday, June 19, 2015
Native penicillin versus Modern penicillin in the run up to Indian Independence
The mere thought of putting native penicillin (basically mold slime excrement) into the human bloodstream just to save a life was anathema to most European and North American doctors in the years between 1928 and 1943.
They preferred to wait, wait until (or if) modern synthetic European-made penicillin was available.
And any European or American doctor that dared to inject native penicillin into white veins, was seen as letting down the side ------ going native.
Losing face.
They couldn't be publicly seen as de facto admitting that the smartest, whitest, most European chemists in the universe can't do what the simple little fungus tossed off so nonchalantly - make this new miracle life saver, penicillin.
Not in front of the women, or the darkies, or the dock labourers.
Won't do, old boy, just won't do.
You'd be blackballed down at the Club.
So native penicillin was not allowed to be made in 1944 era India, from its abundant agricultural waste and very cheap hand labour.
Perhaps that is why today native penicillin is mostly made by the darkies, in places like newly independent India - and then sold at a good profit to the white European and American chemists, all who make none of their own.
Native revenge is sweet - or if not sweet, at least a slightly off-white, slightly bitter, naturally-grown powder....
They preferred to wait, wait until (or if) modern synthetic European-made penicillin was available.
Too bad about your mother, though.
And any European or American doctor that dared to inject native penicillin into white veins, was seen as letting down the side ------ going native.
Losing face.
They couldn't be publicly seen as de facto admitting that the smartest, whitest, most European chemists in the universe can't do what the simple little fungus tossed off so nonchalantly - make this new miracle life saver, penicillin.
Not in front of the women, or the darkies, or the dock labourers.
Won't do, old boy, just won't do.
You'd be blackballed down at the Club.
So native penicillin was not allowed to be made in 1944 era India, from its abundant agricultural waste and very cheap hand labour.
Perhaps that is why today native penicillin is mostly made by the darkies, in places like newly independent India - and then sold at a good profit to the white European and American chemists, all who make none of their own.
Native revenge is sweet - or if not sweet, at least a slightly off-white, slightly bitter, naturally-grown powder....
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Confounded Progress : a book about "Penicillins, Ancient and Modern"
A book about WWII's warring penicillins, Ancient and Modern
The genes that make penicillin reside today inside members of the comparatively recent fungus family, but these genes actually began their existence inside bacteria, those tiny creatures ancient beyond all time.
Ancient they might well be and simple too, but these microbes somehow do a very, very, very efficient job as chemists.
Again and again they are found to be very rapidly making complicated molecules, in the correct stereo image, and without impurities, at normal temperatures and pressures, without need for heavily built reactor vessels or expensive reagents.
All this not unnaturally makes human chemists jealous and resentful - never more than in the late unlamented Era of Progress, when human chemists were at the very top of the food chain and small stupid microbes were supposed to foot the very bottom.
Together, top chemists and bottom microbes were to support the whole Progressive Era 'scientific/natural' hierarchy that allowed whites to repress blacks, adults children, men women, the healthy the cripples.
All predicated on the claim that Life formed one seamless and vertical 'Great Ladder of Progress'.
A ladder stretching from the stupidest,oldest and smallest to the newest, biggest, smartest white human civilizations at the very top.
So the news that such a very great boon to humanity like penicillin could only be made by the stupidest and couldn't be made at all by the very smartest, threatened this whole tissue of lies.
Which is why that for twenty years (1928-1948) the 'smartest chemists in the universe' sought, in war as in peace, to make an improved modern version of the fungus's ancient penicillin.
They even placed their psychological need to shore up the idea of Progress before the medical needs of millions of dying patients, crying out in vain for any sort of penicillin --- be it ancient or modern .
So much so that when the last projects to try and produce man-made synthetic penicillin finally failed, so, to a large extent, did the very idea of Progress...
Penicillin, as from the Old Testament : capricious to the greedy and the hubristic ; malleable to the righteous
Psalm 51:7 ----- Purge me with Hyssop
To the large (government and industry supported) research teams privately committed to turning natural penicillin into a highly profitable patented MAN-MADE drug with a long shelf life, crude penicillin was a capricious, labile substance with a habit of disappearing as soon as it was produced.
As both their contemporary scientific articles and their later memoirs and biographies made abundantly clear.
Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, for example, were for once fully in agreement on this accord.
But to the small unofficial clinically-oriented teams solely concerned with saving lives in the here and now, penicillin's reputation for instability was vastly overrated .
One even gets hints that they wondered if this well-publicized reputation of instability was a deliberate lie fostered by people like Florey, Fleming, Merck and the OSRD to keep later competing teams from seriously investigating the wonder drug.
The clinically-oriented teams' contemporary articles found first that the varying PH requirements of the rapidly growing and then hard starving penicillium fungus had to be well regulated, if the penicillin was not to be accidentally destroyed by the fungus itself, as fast as it was produced.
And then if the resulting crude penicillin liquid was kept very cold in a refrigerator, at the appropriate PH for penicillin, it would easily last the few days or weeks needed for it to be used externally or injected via IV/IM drip, on site at their hospital.
Any competent lab tech could handle the whole affair, is how one Australian team described what they felt was the largely routine growing, extraction and storing process.
Amazingly, both accounts of crude penicillin behavior are actually fully correct.
For example, by at least keeping their impure penicillin free of any external chemical reagents, the clinically oriented teams ensured their patients didn't suffer from the many man-made chemical impurities so commonly found in the supposedly purer commercial penicillin !
And they certainly didn't routinely lose most of the crude penicillin - and consume much scarce people-power - trying to extracting all of the harmless water in crude penicillin, merely to later add it all back in again as part of the injection process.
Because one can't inject dry penicillin ----- or dry anything.
Injections need plenty of fluids - basically water dressed up in a fancy name.
And in particular, penicillin works best if very very slowly dripped into a person's blood stream --- that means that crude penicillin is itself already at the right proportions of medicine and water to work well as a slow drip IV or IM.
Impure penicillin is a lot like the impure orange juice that traditionally supplied us with our Vitamin C needs - that tasty fruit juice works at least as well as today's little white synthetic Vitamin C pills do --- and has done so for millions of years.
So what was the reason for the endless mantra (cum lame excuse) of the Allied medical world needing pure penicillin and needing dry penicillin before it could begin to save the dying ?
G R E E D & H U B R I S ---- impure and un-simple.
The only reason why 'pure' penicillin was needed was that pure penicillin is the only form of penicillin that can then be successfully broken down into its constituent parts - and only its constituent parts.
With all - and only all - of its parts known, chemists then thought they could quickly make a patented highly profitable analogue of natural penicillin, much much cheaper than the fungus could.
Americans and the English would hold those patents and then hold the rest of the world to ransom after the war.
But vast amounts of crude penicillin were accidentally destroyed in the processing along the way to yield up a gram or two of nearly 100% pure penicillin.
Then the chemists deliberately destroyed all that pure penicillin, to then look at the resulting constituent sub-parts.
Every one of their many experiments, from start in processing to finishing in destruction, wasted much clinically useful penicillin that could have saved many many precious lives.
Again, for example, briefly in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was the world's leading penicillin producer - but almost all of that penicillin was then deliberately destroyed in the chemists' fruitless efforts to do something better than stupid little fungus.
Because, yes, old men in white lab coats and sporting PhDs from the best universities, in the middle of a deadly war, are just as capable of indulging in a useless pissing contest as a bunch of teenage louts.
All because they were determined not to let 'stupid' 'simple' fungus (their words) best 'the smartest chemists in the universe'.
Rather than simply buckling down to work with the fungus, as chemists, in an all out effort to make as much natural penicillin as possible - right now ! - to save all the war's dying.
For twenty long wasted years (1928-1948) the world of chemists tried to do something better that the tiny penicillium was already doing perfectly well, before finally publicly admitting defeat.
And the obsession with dry penicillin ?
Well, perfectly dry and hence perfectly stable penicillin was essential if a few huge drug factories were to supply all the vast world's continuing penicillin needs.
Most of the world's penicillin would have to remain viable for months or even years, as it waited to be transported around the world and then sit on warehouse shelfs until needed.
The same reason why most of our food is stuffed with preservative chemicals and shipped in, using much fossil
fuel, from warehouses a world away ----- the greed for seeing all the profits of the food business sit in fewer and fewer hands.
As a Christian, I like to think God took an early private revenge on all these greedy and hubris souls, before a second and more final round at Judgement Day.
Because Man has never been able to commercially best the humble fungus in making penicillin and crude penicillin is still the substrate for 90% of all of today's antibiotics .....
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Social Penicillin : the story of 'Penicillin-For-All'
Was October 16th 1940 the date of the world's first ever injections of social penicillin ?
Well, first, let us consider this question :
Can a hospital system actually make citizens feel sick or feel well, even if they never ever visit in their entire lives ?
On the surface, that seems a very ridiculous question - what earthly good are hospitals if they don't actively try to make sick people better?
But I argue to the contrary.
That, perhaps, over all people and over all their lifetimes, a hospital's greatest value or damage is the sort of moral values it radiates forth, on behalf of the society around it.
If it has a great reputation for serving all equally, regardless of their income, ethnicity, gender or age, if it says 'everyone is valued' - it raises everyone's self esteem.
And it is medical fact that high self esteem, all by itself, is a powerful, cheap and non-toxic preventive and curative medicine.
Or perhaps the hospital is best known for first testing your financial worth before it even tests your blood pressure and is also well known for ill-treating patients, even if they have sufficient income, if they are of the wrong ethnicity, gender or age group.
That sentiment is damaging to the self esteem of the people in those unfortunate groups.
Again, it is a medical fact that the stress of lifelong low self esteem acts to lower our immune response --- indirectly making us, if not actually 'sick', a whole lot 'sicker' whenever we do fall ill.
I believe that History's first ever injections of penicillin, ushering in the Age of Antibiotics, offered no drug-induced clinical value whatsoever to the patients receiving them and that the doctor giving those injections (Henry Dawson) well knew that.
These injections then were not of penicillin-the-chemical-drug but rather shots of 'social penicillin', a phrase I have coined in homage to 'social medicine' .
The very real clinical value these injections represented was in the uplift in spirits it gave to these two young patients and to all others suffering from their disease.
For SBE (heart valve endocarditis caused by Rheumatic Fever) - was a disease their families were always being told was invariably fatal.
And totally resistant to all known treatments, in fact the very Mount Everest or Gold Standard of resistant infectious disease.
Abandon hope, all ye that enter here.
But Dr Dawson believed that three combined characteristics of penicillin ( with only the last being totally unique) would beat the unique set of difficulties presented by this dreaded disease and finally conquer infection's Mount Everest.
That is he knew that (a) penicillin killed strep bacteria readily(b) was small & highly diffusible and (c) was totally non-toxic, even if given in enormous amounts.
Only a recently acquired medical community revulsion against injected crude fungus slime into the human bloodstream had denied this lifesaver to tens of millions of dying patients over the previous twelve years.
Dawson resolved to break that medical taboo, a taboo perhaps even held by the other members in the tiny four person team working with penicillin at his hospital.
Dawson, as a busy ward clinician, was actually the junior member of the team, at least in the beginning.
Karl Meyer, gifted biochemist, together with his chemist assistant Evelyn Chaffee, would destructively analyze the fungus penicillin grown mostly by microbiologist Gladys Hobby and then chemically synthesize artificial penicillin.
Hobby would confirm that both the natural and artificial penicillin indeed had biological activity - testing it on killing microbes.
In the beginning, Dawson would mostly run interference with the hospital authorities, above all in securing rare permission to deliberately grow gallons of fungus, with all their highly mobile spores, in a normally highly antiseptic hospital setting.
Only a planned four months after the beginnings of the project would Dawson take centre stage, when he injected synthetic penicillin into actual patients assigned to 'his' ward.
Now Dawson knew that chemically either natural or synthetic penicillin were equally good at defeating SBE.
But defeating SBE required more than just an effective bug-killing medication ---- SBE uniquely needed simply enormous amounts of medicine, particularly to kill such relatively small amounts of a very fragile bacteria.
SBE bacteria live on the heart's Rheumatic Fever damaged valves, sheltered behind a tough but semi-porous barrier of biofilm (then known as vegetation).
Normally medications diffuse gently and slowly into and around the individual cells of an organ via the incredibly tiny blood capillaries.
And like a lobster trap, once in around the cells it is not that easy for the medication to leave, and the molecules of the drug have a long time to work their magic.
But like ear lobes, the valves of the heart have virtually no capillaries. Yes, they are literally bathed in blood all the time, but the blood surges by them at an incredibly fast pace, as measured in terms of the motion of molecules.
The chances of a molecule successfully diffusing (aka moving via random thermal motion) its way over to the biofilm and finding its way in by the rare small opening in the biofilm, in the millisecond it pulses over the valve surfaces, is near zero.
About as likely as U235 separating from U238 simply by their varying rate of diffusion through tiny holes.
And we all know the trillions it has cost the world to make that diffusion technology work !
But in both cases, brute force technology will indeed slowly win through.
For penicillin, that meant about a thousand steady hours of the constant pulsings of trillions of tiny penicillin molecules a second bouncing their way past the biofilm surface.
The laws of probability would eventually ensure enough made their way into the biofilm's rare tiny holes to kill the bacteria within and end the infection.
In plain english, while a single unit of penicillin might cure an infant from lifelong blindness caused by a meningitis eye infection, easily over a billion units of penicillin today might be needed to cure a particularly stubborn case of SBE.
That a seriously ill patient can receive that much of any medication without any ill effects is why doctors still call penicillin magic.
In October 1940, Dawson could only guess at the ultimate amount of the SBE medication needed for a permanent cure.
But he did know the small amount of penicillin the team had grown in the five weeks since they started the project and its relative strength, by weight, against number of bacteria per a unit of mouse body weight.
He could even compare his figures against similar calculations performed by Howard Florey's team in Oxford a few months earlier.
And as a very experienced bacteriologist and clinician, Dawson was particularly good at converting lab mouse cures rates per weight of medicine into their effective impact on adult sick humans weighing two thousand times as much.
But that was actually for infections by highly virulent bacteria, but in readily accessible organs.
SBE involved very weak bacteria but in very inaccessible locations - perhaps the two conditions could thus be crudely equated.
Still no matter how he sliced it, the penicillin at hand was far far too small an amount and far too weak in strength to really combat SBE.
But on this day, it wasn't really the SBE bugs that Dawson was seeking to combat - but rather it was the moral values of the society around him.
He didn't like the values his hospital and his society was radiating to a world at war - and he sought to change it.....
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Progress = Plenticide
In our grandparents' time (the Era of Progress), believe it or not, 'increasing biodiversity' was seen as the problem not the solution!
And their solution to this 'problem' was wholesale plenticide of all this unneeded and hence unwanted biological plentitude ------ via the chemists' synthetic autarky.
Man-made food pills would replace all the plants and animals we used to eat but now would no longer would need.
They'd all become "useless mouths" and "life unworthy of life".
And artificial wool and other synthetic fibres (remember artificial leather shoes ?!) would replace all those now useless sheep and cotton plants etc that we used to need hanging around.
Fossil fuels - and ultimately atomic fuels - would replace our need to burn trees and crop residue.
No longer would we need wind, water and sun to make mill wheels turn or to dry hay (what was hay mommy ?) - we could all move permanently indoors under plastic domes - atomic energy would split water held in rocks to provide us with oxygen and hydrogen fuel.
Progress was taught to all of us in the form of a metaphor -- viewed as a sort of arrowhead, moving forward and upward through evolutionary time and space.
This arrowhead was very wide, back in the distant past when there were lots of species hanging about but as time moved forward, evolutionary progress ensured that were fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger species - ending at the pointy end of the arrowhead with just one big - dead clever - species remaining : us.
Evolution's progress all made it inevitable --- but still it never hurt for the fit among us to 'speed the plow' by tugging gently at the ankles of the 'unfit' at the end of their rope.
Here cue Eugenics, Euthanasia, Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan Est and the Holocaust.
Progress consisted in draining much of the gene pool as possible, as fast as possible, by dividing the world into normal and deviant or into successful 'progressive' species and living fossils.
Deviant homosexual Romas would be converted to normality - or jailed.
Other Romas - a sort of living fossil among humanity - would fade away in time, it was certain.
Though some, like the Nazis, very much wanted to 'gas up' the process .
It was a great tale, a Man-flattering tale, but was any of it true ?
Nope !
The fossil record instead showed that the arrowhead was totally the wrong scientific metaphor (and trust me - truly successful scientists don't need to be good accountants but they all need to be great poets.)
The more accurate metaphor to express the movement of Life through Time from its tiny beginnings was a radiation outwards.
Still the arrowhead shape, yes, but with the tiny pointy end now at the beginning of Life on Earth with one tiny microbe, The Mother of Us All, and the broad end of the arrowhead at our present day - with our millions of discovered and undiscovered separate unique species.
Within that broad width of Life, species constantly came and went and some new species were bigger and more complex than their forebears while others were smaller and less complex than their forebears.
Biodiversity was abundant in all directions but there was no trend to a linear progress in any direction forward or backwards.
Worse ---- the whole social value theory of evolutionary linear Progress actually hung on a fragile intellectual claim.
For it wasn't enough for the proponents of Progress to show the original many many small species gradually reducing over time to a few big species, not if they were very big but not really any smarter than their tiny forebears.
Ever upward evolutionary Progress had to be ever upward progress in intelligence, however difficult it was to define intelligence across the species.
Ever upward linear Progress required that the tiny, ancient, simple microbes to be very stupid in intelligence - just as it required the newest species at the pointy end of Progress (Civilized Man) to be very smart in intelligence.
In 1945, two Manhattan-based scientific events (science being seen as the top intellectual activity) hit this theory so hard that it never really recovered.
Progress then quietly died away, circa 1965.
In August 1945, a whole bunch of the good guys of science dropped a bomb that they had just invented, a bomb that was seen as capable of destroying all human life on Earth.
That alone made it awfully hard to square this sort of high scientific intelligence with the other meaning of intelligence that we are always lecturing our errant teenagers about - intelligence as the ability to recognize the right choice and then to do it.
The other Manhattan based scientific event was actually a non-event : the failure of the the smartest (human) chemists in the universe , centred at Cornell University's Manhattan medical campus, to make commercial synthetic penicillin.
Far too difficult a scientific feat for the smartest beings in the universe to pull off - but something tossed off easily by some of the oldest, simplest , stupidest beings around --- tiny penicillium cells.
Progress's solar plexus : meet the fatal punch ......
And their solution to this 'problem' was wholesale plenticide of all this unneeded and hence unwanted biological plentitude ------ via the chemists' synthetic autarky.
Man-made food pills would replace all the plants and animals we used to eat but now would no longer would need.
They'd all become "useless mouths" and "life unworthy of life".
And artificial wool and other synthetic fibres (remember artificial leather shoes ?!) would replace all those now useless sheep and cotton plants etc that we used to need hanging around.
Fossil fuels - and ultimately atomic fuels - would replace our need to burn trees and crop residue.
No longer would we need wind, water and sun to make mill wheels turn or to dry hay (what was hay mommy ?) - we could all move permanently indoors under plastic domes - atomic energy would split water held in rocks to provide us with oxygen and hydrogen fuel.
Progress was taught to all of us in the form of a metaphor -- viewed as a sort of arrowhead, moving forward and upward through evolutionary time and space.
This arrowhead was very wide, back in the distant past when there were lots of species hanging about but as time moved forward, evolutionary progress ensured that were fewer and fewer, bigger and bigger species - ending at the pointy end of the arrowhead with just one big - dead clever - species remaining : us.
Evolution's progress all made it inevitable --- but still it never hurt for the fit among us to 'speed the plow' by tugging gently at the ankles of the 'unfit' at the end of their rope.
Here cue Eugenics, Euthanasia, Aktion T4, the Hunger Plan Est and the Holocaust.
Progress consisted in draining much of the gene pool as possible, as fast as possible, by dividing the world into normal and deviant or into successful 'progressive' species and living fossils.
Deviant homosexual Romas would be converted to normality - or jailed.
Other Romas - a sort of living fossil among humanity - would fade away in time, it was certain.
Though some, like the Nazis, very much wanted to 'gas up' the process .
It was a great tale, a Man-flattering tale, but was any of it true ?
Nope !
The fossil record instead showed that the arrowhead was totally the wrong scientific metaphor (and trust me - truly successful scientists don't need to be good accountants but they all need to be great poets.)
The more accurate metaphor to express the movement of Life through Time from its tiny beginnings was a radiation outwards.
Still the arrowhead shape, yes, but with the tiny pointy end now at the beginning of Life on Earth with one tiny microbe, The Mother of Us All, and the broad end of the arrowhead at our present day - with our millions of discovered and undiscovered separate unique species.
Within that broad width of Life, species constantly came and went and some new species were bigger and more complex than their forebears while others were smaller and less complex than their forebears.
Biodiversity was abundant in all directions but there was no trend to a linear progress in any direction forward or backwards.
Worse ---- the whole social value theory of evolutionary linear Progress actually hung on a fragile intellectual claim.
For it wasn't enough for the proponents of Progress to show the original many many small species gradually reducing over time to a few big species, not if they were very big but not really any smarter than their tiny forebears.
Ever upward evolutionary Progress had to be ever upward progress in intelligence, however difficult it was to define intelligence across the species.
Ever upward linear Progress required that the tiny, ancient, simple microbes to be very stupid in intelligence - just as it required the newest species at the pointy end of Progress (Civilized Man) to be very smart in intelligence.
In 1945, two Manhattan-based scientific events (science being seen as the top intellectual activity) hit this theory so hard that it never really recovered.
Progress then quietly died away, circa 1965.
In August 1945, a whole bunch of the good guys of science dropped a bomb that they had just invented, a bomb that was seen as capable of destroying all human life on Earth.
That alone made it awfully hard to square this sort of high scientific intelligence with the other meaning of intelligence that we are always lecturing our errant teenagers about - intelligence as the ability to recognize the right choice and then to do it.
The other Manhattan based scientific event was actually a non-event : the failure of the the smartest (human) chemists in the universe , centred at Cornell University's Manhattan medical campus, to make commercial synthetic penicillin.
Far too difficult a scientific feat for the smartest beings in the universe to pull off - but something tossed off easily by some of the oldest, simplest , stupidest beings around --- tiny penicillium cells.
Progress's solar plexus : meet the fatal punch ......
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 ....
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
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 ....
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 ....
Friday, May 29, 2015
History's first ever antibiotics injections were expected to be of pure synthetic penicillin
Back at the start of the 1940s, two highly skilled biochemists (Karl Meyer and Ernst Chain) both confidently expected to quickly synthesize artificial penicillin, as they knew natural penicillin was a relatively small biological molecule of only about 350 Daltons.
After 100 weeks of hearing this reoccurring promise of quick results from Chain, his imperious boss, Howard Florey, reluctantly decided to inject his first human patients in February 12th 1941 with still-impure natural penicillin.
Henry Dawson, normally the most diffident of men, changed his mind about waiting till co-worker Meyer's synthetic penicillin arrived in January 1941, and after only five weeks into their joint penicillin efforts and without so much as a backward glance, injected his first patients with impure natural penicillin on October 16th 1940.
Why did Dawson uncharacteristically proceed to Plan B so very much quicker than Florey?
Partially it was because Dawson was so angry on his return to his medicine school from his vacation in September 1940 to discover that all American medicine was using the excuse of preparing for war medicine to drop their feeble efforts at social medicine aimed at improving the health care of the poor and the weak.
But it also seems from Dawson's own words that it was a civil rights activist and dying SBE patient, Aaron Leroy Alston from Harlem, whose angry eloquence on this neglect of the poor and minorities that so moved Dawson.
Moved him to defiantly thumb his nose at an uncharitable world by deliberately treating two 4F SBE patients with this historical first ever injected antibiotics, on the very day when all of the rest of America was focused only upon its 1A population ...
After 100 weeks of hearing this reoccurring promise of quick results from Chain, his imperious boss, Howard Florey, reluctantly decided to inject his first human patients in February 12th 1941 with still-impure natural penicillin.
Henry Dawson, normally the most diffident of men, changed his mind about waiting till co-worker Meyer's synthetic penicillin arrived in January 1941, and after only five weeks into their joint penicillin efforts and without so much as a backward glance, injected his first patients with impure natural penicillin on October 16th 1940.
Why did Dawson uncharacteristically proceed to Plan B so very much quicker than Florey?
Partially it was because Dawson was so angry on his return to his medicine school from his vacation in September 1940 to discover that all American medicine was using the excuse of preparing for war medicine to drop their feeble efforts at social medicine aimed at improving the health care of the poor and the weak.
But it also seems from Dawson's own words that it was a civil rights activist and dying SBE patient, Aaron Leroy Alston from Harlem, whose angry eloquence on this neglect of the poor and minorities that so moved Dawson.
Moved him to defiantly thumb his nose at an uncharitable world by deliberately treating two 4F SBE patients with this historical first ever injected antibiotics, on the very day when all of the rest of America was focused only upon its 1A population ...
Thursday, February 26, 2015
1945: 380 years of the Synthetic Autarky Project vs 3.8 billion years of the microbial synthesis project...
In 1945, Modern Scientism (1875-1965 , long may it rest in peace) was always convinced it was the smartest bunch of guys in the universe : it could do anything and everything Mother Nature could do, only better, faster, cheaper, cleaner.
After all, it had 380 years of experience behind it in the science of chemical synthesis - and almost 50 years experience in atomic synthesis.
It was certain it could make wartime penicillin purer, cheaper, quicker, above all cleaner than the tiny, primitive, slimy basement molds making it now.
But it couldn't----- and it still hasn't.
It has only had 380 years at the task ---- but the tiny, primitive and above all ancient microbes had had 3.8 billion years at their craft.
If my hasty arithmetic is accurate (I'm being called to stop blogging and take baby Samantha to daycare) that's a billion percent longer...
After all, it had 380 years of experience behind it in the science of chemical synthesis - and almost 50 years experience in atomic synthesis.
It was certain it could make wartime penicillin purer, cheaper, quicker, above all cleaner than the tiny, primitive, slimy basement molds making it now.
But it couldn't----- and it still hasn't.
It has only had 380 years at the task ---- but the tiny, primitive and above all ancient microbes had had 3.8 billion years at their craft.
If my hasty arithmetic is accurate (I'm being called to stop blogging and take baby Samantha to daycare) that's a billion percent longer...
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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...