"Save the Poles, Save the Poles !!"

In early 1940, German propaganda films about their brutal invasion of Poland were still freely making the rounds of the cinemas of Neutral America.

Poet W.H. Auden, an Englishman Overseas at a time his home was at war, had ventured in one New York movie theatre to see the blond beast close up and personal.

But what really struck him was not the film itself but how the audience - mostly German-Americans - spontaneously began shouting out "Kill the Poles, Kill the Poles !!".

What might have been truly remarkable though would have been to hear ordinary Americans (fore-bearers from any country of origin) spontaneously shout out "Save the Poles, Save the Poles !!".

This was because forty years into the new Century, Victorian notions of charity, sympathy, empathy, chivalry and gallantry were pretty well gone, save only for employing vicariously at fictional films in the cinema.

In 1940 America, cheering the fictional underdog was alright ; fighting overseas to save real life underdogs was decidedly not.

Walter Mitty, I think it is only fair to say, was an avid Isolationist in his public politics, a brave Interventionist only in his wildest daydreams....

Spores and Wartime Secrecy : can they actually co-exist ?

You might think I am going to talk about Anthrax spores and asymmetrical terrorist germ warfare.

But you are wrong, wrong, wrong.

I want to talk instead about wartime penicillin, and a part of it that is never ever discussed.

Its inherently asymmetrical medical nature.

Which appropriately enough, then  "drifts over" into its inherently asymmetrical military potential.

So lets start.

And lets start talking about just how the intellectually mis-guided (as well as seriously morally misguided) were the prolonged attempts by the medical establishment in both America and Britain to regard penicillium spores as something  that really could remain Top Secret medical military weapons.

And not just the wartime medical establishment, for recently author Eric Lax and his publishers felt they had a real winner in an exciting clock and dagger title for their book on wartime penicillin : "The Mould in Doctor Florey's Coat".

There was always something faintly Walter Mittyesque about Florey anyway - never more so than in the incident that gave this book its title.

Dunkirk was underway just as Florey at long last accepted that ole Flem's penicillin just might be priceless after all.

But how to save penicillin for the rest of the Allied cause, if Britain fell to the Germans ?

'Let's all rub penicillium spores in the inner seams of our clothing - so even if only one of us gets away, the precious fire of penicillin research can still be re-lit elsewhere'.

But none of these Oxford naifs seemed to have dared ask the boss (Florey) just how they came to possess these incredible spores in the first place.

Henry Dawson's first big scientific effort was in promoting the concept of HGT (Horizontal Gene Transfer) ,the instant transfer of genes between different species and even different families of Life, when its initial discoverer seemed reluctant to even publish his work.

Today it is believed that soil bacteria created the first beta lactam antibiotics about ten million years ago and  - via HGT - gave it to soil molds who modified it slightly and made it penicillin.

So, sometime in 1928, a particularly productive penicillin producer strain of penicillium mold blow into a fancy home in London.

Alexander Fleming's colleague John Freeman was an expert on allergies,  with many rich and powerful patients.

In 1928, Freeman heard a Dutch specialist claim that basement mold spores were the cause of many allergies.

 Freeman got his rich London patients (or more likely their scullery maids) to scrape molds off their basement walls to be tested by his most recent hire, Irish-born mycologist Charles La Touche, towards seeking  ways to gradually desensitize the patients against their particular household mold allergens.

La Touche had no high tech ways to keep spores inside his lab alone - not that I think in the long run a spore or two doesn't get out of the most secure modern facility.

There are many more fungus than us and they have and will be on the Earth a lot longer than us primarily because of their spores.

Their spores are incredibly tiny examples of temporarily suspended Life - Dried-up Life - inside a very hardy and bumpy package.

Tiny is the key here - so tiny they float anywhere and everywhere on the gentlest of breezes - down the hall and around the world.

Being bumpy but tiny and light doesn't hurt either - they can cling to almost any surface - like a human and its luggage bound for Australia, for example.

However if that surface is the tiniest bit damp and the tiniest bit tasty (they seem willing to eat almost anything faintly organic), they spring back into active slimey life.

One of La Touche's spores drifted out of his room and along the stairs to Fleming open Petri dish.

The rest actually wouldn't have been "legend", if Fleming hadn't promptly taken a sub culture of the resulting "spoiled" petri dish, and carefully and correctly preserved it.

Fleming did little to promote the medical use of penicillin in curing disease but he did vigerously promote it as a useful way for busy hospital labs to easily isolate the so called flu bacteria (sic) .

Dozens of labs world wide got a sample from him - they then gave samples of their samples to at least dozens of others.

That is how Florey got his penicillium spores he was so busy stuffing down his coat - from a sub culture Fleming had sent to the previous director of Florey's Dunn Institute.

The Free World beyond Britain had lots of  sub cultures of penicillium spores of the rare - right - type, even without Florey's belated act of charity.

In theory they didn't really need Fleming's spores, only his public article - but in practise, until 1943, they really did need his spores.

Examples of Fleming's spores were actually everywhere - some even better penicillium producers than his original un-mutated version as well.

But they could only be found by teams of researchers seeking hundreds of the right looking blue-green mold on walls and spoiled fruit, and then testing all for their possible anti-bacterial qualities.

Until miracle cures got rumoured about, no one in the world was willing to go to that much effort , just to test a troublesome possible antiseptic.

But by 1943, the miracle cure stories were out amongst the clinical doctors everywhere - and I do really mean everywhere.

Everywhere that Florey went, Egypt, Iran, Russia he had to endure local doctors thrusting excellent producing strains of penicillin molds in his face that they had found locally !

The Axis were just as quick off the mark - Japan got its strain by merely looking about locally.

And the clever Japanese correctly guessed - from one badly reproduced photo in an Egyptian picture magazine - just how best to produce the stuff !

The atomic bomb was effectively secret even if the US had proclaimed it was making one from the rooftops in 1942.

Uranium was everywhere - like penicillium spores - but a bomb from it takes the world's largest, most expensive, building ever built merely to get started on separating pure U-235 from the more abundant U-238.

And without 90% pure U-235,  no working bomb. No nothing.

Tons and tons of scarce money, time and effort kept the A-Bomb an American secret, even from the British and Canadians , let alone the Axis and Neutrals.

But by late 1943, popular magazine articles cheekily showed how one could make penicillin at home, on a kitchen top, for about $5 in equipment and growth mediums.

One didn't even need to go out searching for those semi-rare penicillin-producing strains by then.

In a surprising - even shocking - total volt face, the NRRL's Coghill and Raper had released the top two strains of penicillium.

 That's right, the top two strains that were then producing most of the Allies' military-bound penicillin - to the public American mold type collection in Washington where, as they told the readers of  JAMA worldwide, "anyone" can get some at a "nominal charge".

!!!!!!!!

Didn't they know there was a war on ?

No word if Argentina's Washington DC based scientific attache quickly took a cab over, got some samples and sent them off to his friends in Germany.

Clearly, penicillin was never a viable secret military medical weapon - Florey and Richards were both , to put it kindly, completely deluded to ever think so.

Deluded by utopian visions of near-total purity.

Because unlike the Atomic Bomb and U-235, penicillin's starting material (the spores) were both common worldwide AND its production fully successful even in a highly impure (aka low tech) state.

This was what Fleming had discovered in 1928 but never acted upon - this was the key insight that Henry Dawson brought to the penicillin story, starting on October 16th 1940....

Climate DENIERS as latter-day Alexander Flemings

      If you are a very attentive reader of SVE - and I have good reason to doubt that you are - you will have noticed I took down my first few names from my  ENEMIES  list and added a few unsuspected ones.
     I had started with the usual suspects - the ones you see and laugh at on every denier-watcher blog.
      But I quickly saw they were in fact contrary to my position on the whole 'Deny-Me-Not Movement'.
    The usual climate deniers are almost ridiculously easy to mock - but they are also, in my view, just stalking horses, a false front for the more serious and subtle backroom climate denying activities, performed by the sort of names I put up to replace them.

    More about those new names, in a later post.
    But right now, what insights does my current research on wartime penicillin bring to bear upon these pathetic stalking horses of climate denial ,these Walter Mittys of Science, circa 2012 ?
   Easy to see the pattern: these deniers are almost always elderly male 'applied science' type scientists, who had at best modest careers in scientific terms and are now retired.
   All too soon, they will be dead and forgotten.
   Most people have a realistic sense of their modest talents and are gratefully for whatever life dealt them.
    But a sizeable percentage have always had an ego and an estimation of their own talents out of all proportion to how others regard them. This inconvenient truth rankled them while in employment and it burns now with a new intensity, upon retirement.
   But, now at least they are free as well as forgotten : freed at last of the restraints of peer-reviews, tenure committees and funding committees .
    Now they can say whatever they want, without doing any of that complicated  scientific fact-checking-stuff , while still coasting on the claim that they are (were) scientists, (all bow down).
   Admittedly, they pay a high price by exposing themselves to endless ridicule from many in the media/public and from other (more prominent) scientists, all for just being so willing to say in public what about 10%-20% of the population daily say so freely in private.
   But there are many compensations.
   They are keynote speakers at conferences organized by the rich and nearly famous - who hang on their every word, never belittle them (at last) and cheer them to the rafters. It is totally addictive to receive fame - unexpected fame - so late in life.
   Their speeches are uncritically reported in conservative national and international media, media of the sort that they themselves have read and admired all their lives.
   They travel the world, best hotels and food, press interviews, limos, handlers smoothing the way at their elbow.
   Getting paid for all this seems unnecessary - but some do take money , but only for offering "scientific advice" of course.
   In other words, they experience what I call "The Sir Alexander Fleming Effect".
    I am totally certain that if others hadn't done the hard work of developing penicillin to save lives, and thus accidentally made Fleming very famous, he would have retired virtually unnoticed, despite his own very high opinion of himself.
   And that Fleming would have then developed some 'out-there' scientific hobby horse and devoted the remainder of his life to it.
   It might end up helping or hurting Humanity, but most importantly it would finally give him the press and public attention he had always craved.
    When WWII ended in September 1945 and travel between nations could resume, Fleming was six months away from retirement.
     Unexpectedly, he could instead spend the rest of his life travelling the world on someone else's dime, being feted, awarded, giving interviews, all while being cheered by adoring audiences of kings and peasants.
   Fleming knew he had actually done only a little to bring penicillin to the dying millions, but what little he had done was critical, so he took all this fame as his birthright and decided to make his peace with the Devil in the Afterlife.
    I would highly recommend Robert Gwyn Macfarlane's Alexander Fleming, the Man and the Myth to anyone and everyone seeking to understand the mind of the public denier scientists.
  There are at least two other excellent biographies of Fleming, by admirers, rather than by a critic like Macfarlane, (Kevin Brown's Penicillin Man and Andre Maurois's Life of Sir Alexander Fleming ), but I have found all three end up supporting my thesis.
   Rather it isn't my thesis - I think it was first expounded by Henry Harris, Sir Howard Florey's replacement at Oxford University, who said something like ' the first life that Florey ever saved with penicillin was Alexander Fleming's ' . Perhaps Ronald Bentley said it.
    But in either case, wickedly funny - but bang on.
    Public Climate Change Denial may be having the same life-saving properties as wartime penicillin - for hundreds of has-beens and never-was-es ....