Defeating WWII

By September 1945, the Axis had been decisively defeated.

End of story --- or was it?

Because defeating WWII itself, defeating the morally abysmal type of war it was (on all sides) took much longer and in fact is still ongoing.

Unsophisticated opinion in 1940 tended to emphasize how very different the western democracies, the axis and the communists were from each other.

Seventy five years on, we are likely to notice how much all groups back then held in common.

In particularly, they all held a quiet confidence that reducing human and biological diversity down to just "the winners" while "the losers" got binned was scientifically justified and hence morally justified.

Today, of course, we increasingly believe that the widest possible range in biological and human diversity is scientifically justified and hence once again morally justified.

"Biodiversity is a good thing" has become a politician's cliche.

There is ever growing support for the idea that the widest possible diversity in human types (signalled by support for civil rights for colored race individuals, Jews, aboriginals, women, gays, the handicapped,etc) is also best.

We have turned 180 degrees on this issue and it is the best single indicator of the difference between WWII's modern world and our present post-modern world.

How did it happen ?

How and when and where did scientific and popular opinion change on the virtues of including the small as well as the great into our charmed circle of life-worthy-of-life ?

I argue, in my book "the OTHER manhattan project", that it all began when wartime and postwar popular opinion ignored elite scientific opinion and focused on the ironic fact that it was a humble little household pest, the green blue slime, that had been busy saving their children during the war and afterwards.

While it as the best and the brightest in the biggest of human civilizations that were busy strafing, shooting, bombing and burning their kids during and after the war...

Young reader, responding badly : why my book is really about the 1950s, though set in the 1940s...

After the end of WWII, some Big People began to write a self-congratulatory and dishonest 'La historia oficial' of wartime penicillin.

Other Big People, in government, media and in universities, read it and got it, totally.

And why not ? It certainly reflected their take on Reality.

So they spread the official version ever outward, out to the very ordinary public and even out to little children.

But most of us know how any story we tell can get distorted in the understanding of some who hear it - no matter how short and simple the story.

Academics have developed some quite elaborate theories to account for this : reader response , they call it.

My book is about how the official version story of penicillin quickly got badly distorted among a key audience : the baby boomers.

The visual imagery of the story of wartime penicillin has never changed in the seventy years from 1945 till today.

Always the same steady progress from early photos of young women, dressed like nursemaids, tenderly attending small milk bottles of some foul green mess to the final photos of middle aged men in white coats pensively turning knobs while glancing at dials, before massive arrays of heavily built, gleaming stainless steel or white painted chemical towers.

Indeed the photos of the outside of some of the 1945 era penicillin plants are totally indistinguishable from the many small oil refineries of that era.

Visit me some time and I'll test you on whether or not you can tell a small capacity 1945 oil refinery photo from a large capacity 1945 penicillin plant.

My bet is you'll get it wrong.

In fact, the inconvenient truth all those photos of massive man-made opaque production towers was designed to deny, was that the actual production of penicillin remained - unexpectedly - the same from start to finish.

Despite a multi-nation effort almost as big as the Manhattan atomic project, the smartest chemists in the Universe failed to produce any commercial penicillin and so inside 1945's big steel tanks were the same small microbes making penicillin just as they had inside 1940's small flasks and milk bottles.

And somehow we little people got it.

Despite the official story.

We got that creatures as small and as powerless as us, the bog common ordinary kitchen molds, were making the stuff that was saving so many of us baby baby boomers from the premature deaths our parents and grandparents had faced.

And that WWII wasn't just about Big Bombs from Big Civilizations but also about small lifesavers from small nature.

Even at age seven and eight, we were buying into the nascent idea that diversifying humanity's portfolio to include as much human and biological diversity from the small and powerless side of the world as possible was a very good thing indeed...

Who wants to write something tiny - like the military history of WWII ?

Not when the wartime battle over penicillin offers up a macrocosm of the circumstances that led to the war and made it uniquely brutal...

To understand WWII penicillin is to understand WWII

We thought we knew the history of WWII, even as it was happening - a world neatly divided up into either very good guys or very bad guys.

But as the years go by and the silently guilty die off, more and more revelations emerge that make the whole thing much murkier than we expected.

I think telling the full story, the actual story, of  wartime penicillin is about the gentlest way to tell the true story of WWII.

Done by closely examining a small but representative fragment of it.

It is true that wartime penicillin had its own horrors, but I don't think recalling them will make readers toss the book aside in anger, shame and disgust, as is bound to happen when we use the various holocausts of WWII as a way into that war.

But I think the original Allied intentions for penicillin sprang from the same deep impulses as did Aktion T4 and the Final Solution.

But penicillin's death-by-denial effort emerged in a very muted fashion (without those programs' direct violence) ----  openly condemning unknown numbers of people to death by benign neglect as regretful but necessary.

All because they said that the penicillium itself was being so uncooperative towards the war effort.

This was all hooey - they knew it and God knows it.

After my book is done, I hope we all know it....

Modern penicillin made by the powerful, for the powerful - Ancient penicillin, made by the humble, for the humble

Sometimes I am at one with all those TV detectives whose constant riposte is "I don't believe in coincidences".

Perhaps it all was a big coincidence that the same people who were so insistent that penicillin had first to be made in the big companies' chemical plants before it could begin saving lives, were equally insistent that wartime penicillin be preserved solely for saving the lives of the fittest 1A troops.

But I don't think so.

Just as I don't think it is a coincidence that the people who were perfectly content to use penicillin as made by the humble microbes were equally determined to see that wartime penicillin was distributed to all - particularly to the humble and to Life's 4Fs, the weak and vulnerable.

But don't you dare call these differing opinions on how to make and distribute wartime penicillin just a 'moral' battle for the soul of WWII .

Because it was much scientific as it was moral : almost all these people based their moral beliefs upon their scientific beliefs.

So that being unwilling to go to the aid of small countries unable to fight off the bigger, stronger German military was as much an erroneous science based decision ("Progress sees the bigger best the smaller") as it was an erroneous moral decision....

The inevitable dislike of science theorists for naturalists

A compelling scientific theory cum law is simple and consistent : all carbon atoms throughout the universe have six - and six only, no more or less - protons.

But in reality, there are very few science theories or laws that are that simple and consistent.

Exceptions always abound and become a nightmare for science theorists - their brain structure is not set up to easily handle uncertainties and probable possibilities and unknowabilities.

(I include experimentalists among the theorists because experiments are specifically designed to greatly simplify the reality found outside the laboratory --- many sciences have fierce internal conflicts between those big on lab work versus those pro field work.)

Theorists' brain = Conservatives' brain is a good rule of thumb (again, only a probability, not a dead certainty.)

If theorists make a living, win fame and fortune, by creating laws that simplify reality, naturalists do the exact reverse.

They win special fame and fortune by discovering the single one species in a vast genus that does not reproduce sexually.

Exceptions to the rule are their coin of fortune -- they seek out and see things that most of the rest of us either don't see or don't want to see.

Henry Dawson was a naturalist ---- but the kings of the science world, back in 1940 as today, were the theorists , the terrible simplifiers.

Wartime Penicillin, the conflict-driven drama between naturalists and progress-oriented theorists, was thus born to happen.....

E M Forster on Merck's mis-use of scientific writing

E M Forster is a name you pretty well have to come across  if you have ever been formally taught how to write better sentences, paragraphs and articles ---- and today that includes virtually all of us with a high school education or better.

Even senior scientists and academics. When those two deliberately ignore what they've been taught for decades, you should always expect foul play is afoot.

If we recall Forster at all,  is is mostly because in his classic 1927 university don-oriented work, Aspects of the Novel, Forster gave such a simple but apt example of the difference between most students' initial writings and how they really should write that writing teachers everywhere seized upon it and most of us writing students can still recognize his phrases decades later.

"The Queen dies and the King dies" is not even good enough to be called a story, Forster points out --- it is simply misleading, because in point of fact, the King died first.

Give it an "F" for failure.

In the correct chronological order, "the King dies and then the Queen dies", is at least what we might call a story.

Give it a passing "C".

But if we write "the King dies and then the Queen dies of grief ", we have a full blown plot.

Give it at least a "B-".

Or to use a phrase that even scientists might recognize - now we have determinacy - cause and effect.

Every time I try to read the text of a 1980 scientific article called  "Wartime Industrial Development of Penicillin in the United States" while also trying to connect that text to the chronology of the footnotes below, I get a massively painful headache.

Because all I get is a huge jumble of unconnected facts presented out of correct chronological order- just one dam thing after another.

If I was a writing teacher, I would be forced give scientists cum academics WH Helfand, HB Woodruff, KMH Coleman and DL Cowan a big fat collective "F".

That's a pity, because this is a truly invaluable article, just full of earnestly documented dates,places, people and events from the early days of the American development of wartime penicillin - stuff  that one can't find gathered together anywhere else.

But the exciting and conflict-filled cause and effect of the actual wartime penicillin 'plot', apparent if the fulsome footnotes are separated and re-assembled in their correct chronology , is totally obscured in this peer-reviewed scientific article's text.

I am left feeling that this was quite deliberate : 75 years later, we still can't admit that wartime penicillin wasn't all 'hands across the water' lovey-dovey allies working in full cooperation.

In this case, the article was also designed to better conceal Merck science advisor A N Richards' curt decision to abandon Merck's pioneering natural penicillin efforts and then to gild Richard's later career as the head of America's wartime medical science efforts, when he supposedly championed natural penicillin to the hilt.

In fact, Richards and Merck-the-company were always chemistry obsessed and always chasing the profitable, exclusive patents that come from the manmade chemical synthesis of natural products.

So in reality, they left effective, available natural penicillin to fallow - at the height of wartime's millions of dying and wounded - to chase the profitable mirage of synthetic penicillin.

They never got commercial synthetic penicillin - 75 years later no one else ever has either - and a much smaller and much less respected company called Pfizer made almost all of WWII's penicillin by natural means.

Pfizer got all the money and all the glory and Merck has been smarting ever since and is still ever intent to re-write penicillin history to minimize their errors and gild their few successes.

This parson's egg of an article is just part of that eternal effort ....

A Complicated Triumph

The terrible simplicities of scientific reductionism was the very mother's milk of  all the horrible 'terrible simplifiers' of High Modernity (1875-1965): starting with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and crossing the water to their gentler and kinder Anglo-American opponents.

For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.

One Manhattan Project - the nuclear one - was very much of this ilk --- barefacedly claiming we'd soon see atomic electricity too cheap to meter and atomic planes and cars filling our skies and streets.

We're still waiting, because all three claims were based on a Big Lie (or two or three) and deep down these nuclear complexity over-simplifiers knew it .

WWII's Terrible Simplifiers rebuked by the Terrible Complicatedness of Reality

By contrast, the other Manhattan Project - the one based on natural penicillin for the wartime all - rejected the scientific simplicity that spoke of a single trajectory of life.

A simple single inclined pole of progress, with the smallest and oldest at the bottom left always the stupidest while the newest and the biggest life forms -  scientists from the biggest civilizations - invariably the smartest at the top right.

Instead Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his team suggested, that depending on the capability being measured, all life forms variously fell at the top, bottom and middle of literally hundreds of scales.

Theories of simplicity had to give way - once again - to the strong evidence of the sheer confounded complicatedness of reality.

So - and unexpectedly - when it came to making pure, cheap, abundant penicillin, the tiny slime fungi did a far better job than assembled thousands of the world's best synthetic chemists.

And if the microbial smallest and weakest showed such unexpected abilities, Dawson argued maybe, too, the smallest and weakest among humanity were also smarter and stronger than the best educated and healthiest of humanity - at least on some unexpected measures.

And so modernity shouldn't be so quick to write off either the fungal slime or the wartime 4Fs.

In a surprise reversal, one branch of the highly competitive Washington DC wartime bureaucracy (the New Dealish WPB) bought Dawson's arguments and bested another branch in Washington (the Republican-dominated OSRD/NAS) who fiercely opposed giving any wartime penicillin to the 'unfit' of the world.

And like Washington, neither the Axis or Allied worlds were in fact as single-minded as wartime Home Front bompf and piddle would have you believe.

And as a result, any accurate account of almost any WWII event need be a very complicated one.

So the tale of the unexpected wartime triumph of natural penicillin-for-all is a complicated one - with many an unexpected twist and turn.

But then so is Reality itself - reductionist claims to the contrary...

"A Small Triumph" --- wartime's natural penicillin-for-all a triumph FOR the small, BY the small

During the Error-of-Modernity (circa about 1875-1965), most educated humans sincerely believed that "Evolutionary Progress" had only one possible pole of measurement : basically, it boiled down to the number of peer-reviewed scientific articles published annually.

Naturally that meant that the oldest, smallest and least apparently complicated beings, like the microbes, were at the very bottom left of this "45 degrees to the right" Pole of Progress.

It was the era of 'Might is Right', 'Biggest is Best' and 'God and Evolution is on the side of the Biggest Battalions'.

And so at the top right were the newest, biggest and most complex human civilizations like those of the Germans, British, Americans, Russians, French and Japanese.

As a Law Of Nature and as a Fact Of Biology, this was a doozy.

Even Darwin had tended to restrict evolutionary success to reproductive success, rather than to a nation's citation index in the journal Nature.

Darwin's measure needs a bit of further defining.

After all, it would seem that the ultimate in evolutionary success is best measured by finding the beings with the most offspring that survive, in the most habitats and for the longest period of time.

In which case, Biology borrows from the Bible to proclaim that the Last indeed are First, as by this definition the microbes sweep all before them in an Alberta Orange-Crush-like manner.

But still, why judge Evolutionary Progress by only one pole anyway, particularly when only one group gets to pick the pole and does so in a manner to suit their particular talents and hide their many biological weaknesses ?

One particular measure that then force all other biological talents to be judged defectives and so worthy of being eliminated ?

In a multi-poled world of Evolutionary Progress, one can imagine hundreds of different poles.

Some assessing all life on its ability to swim faster or fly longer.

Or on its ability to burrow quicker or live under great pressures or flourish in acidic conditions or reproduce under conditions of great cold, heat or drought.

On and on and on.

In this multi-pole world, sometimes the First (biggest,strongest, most seemingly most complex) would indeed be first, but sometimes they might finish in the middle or even foot the tail of the race.

And the Last (the smallest and weakest, seeming the simplest) might finish in the middle or even first.

It would  all depend.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson, building upon his school day phenology studies that revealed the infinite variety of life, found that the supposedly stupid simple bacteria actually bested the smartest human scientists in the universe in an interwar period area of hot scientific interest --- directed genetics.

His 1920s-1930s pioneering studies of what was then called bacterial variation - HGT, quorum sensing, molecular mimicking, biofilms - had already suggested to him that the small and the weak weren't as useless or as uncomplicated as then generally viewed.

In 1940, this led him to two then highly controversial conclusions : that the human small and the weak weren't as useless as both the Allies and the Axis blandly assumed AND that the small and weak fungus currently producing all the world's penicillin might actually do a better job at it than all the smartest human chemists in the universe.

Against his own dying body and the Allies' fiercely resisting medical establishment, he held on long enough to see naturally penicillin succeed when human synthetic penicillin efforts failed AND to see the medical establishment reluctantly bow to public pressure and make wartime penicillin available to all, on all sides, whose lives would be saved by it.

A small triumph maybe - unless it was your kid or spouse that was saved - but also a triumph for the small , by the small ...

a Noirish account of wartime penicillin : un-superheroes

With Un-superheroes, I hope to offer up a bit of astringent reality, after years of  nothing but the Breen Office version of wartime penicillin -- with all its 'hands across the water' and Allied buddy bonding...

Mostly poor people ALL OVER THE WORLD denied life --- by wartime's Republican-dominated NAS death panel

American doctor-run death panels did exist and they did sentence people to an inevitable death based on mostly eugenic driven considerations.

It happened during WWII.

The patients denied access to penicillin (that was the only thing that could save their lives) were all suffering from subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) that was then a leading cause of death for poor, minority and immigrant youths - the final deadly stage of childhood attacks of rheumatic fever.

Actually the entire spectrum of possible ways to die from rheumatic fever (known as Rheumatic Heart Disease or RHD) was the leading cause of death for school age children and youths in all of the industrialized world - far far more than polio for example - and would remain so till the 1960s.

But you won't know this unless you were very poor ; it wasn't a middle class disease.

Now this story of the wartime bureaucratic denial of penicillin to SBE patients isn't totally unknown to students of the history of wartime penicillin - but most think that this diktat was limited to American patients only.

But I have been tracing how the same American-originated list of diseases to be treated (or not) by GPs using this new penicillin kept re-appearing world wide, always with virtually the same wording.

So far I have traced the publication of this diktat (intended to apply to all GPs) in journals or newspapers in Canada, Britain, Australia , and now New Zealand.

The New Zealand newspaper report in June 1944 was franker than most - the nation wasn't making its own penicillin but was wholly dependent on penicillin given to it (via Australia) by America.

But the report indicated that the penicillin gift came with strings - the Kiwis had to agree to refrain from using the medication on diseases that were being ignored in America and in all the other Allied nations.

The disease the Kiwis and all the others were specifically told to ignore was SBE.

The NAS panel headed up by Dr Chester Keefer - himself an expert on SBE - was in a dispute with Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his supporters who was insistent their numerous patient cures indicated that penicillin and only penicillin could cure SBE and do so completely.

(Dawson and his supporters were 100% right by the way !)

If news came to American SBE patient families that in New Zealand SBEs were being treated and cured by penicillin, Dawson would have a further ammunition to inadvertently embarrass Keefer.

Inadvertent because while Dawson was a rank amateur on SBE until he started in with penicillin (and was anyone never one to be mean to fellow scientists),  Keefer had made SBE's cure his life's work.

But Keefer had backed the wrong horse as to the best drug to cure SBE and wasn't willingly to publicly back down and grant that Dawson was right.

Keefer had other more public excuses for his denying penicillin to SBEs , but this was the real reason ...

John Dominic Crossan and yellow MAGIC penicillin

The idea that Jesus scholar Crossan has anything substantive to say about wartime penicillin would come as a surprise to most people , John Dominic Crossan most prominent among them.


But if one regards the sheer amount of resistance medical orthodoxy put up (for twenty wasted years) against the idea of injecting native penicillin into dying patients , one can see the application of Crossan's concept of 'magician healing' : which he regards as all healing that lies outside outside the orthodoxies of the day, medical or otherwise.

Jesus's healing being his prime but by no means only example.

We never did get commercial white man-made penicillin : all the penicillin during WWII and ever since has been grown naturally , natively, by tiny yeast like beings.

Virtually all of our antibiotics are still mere modified versions of WWII's original native penicillin.

Medical orthodoxy today swears by native penicillin and all its life saving derivatives.

Mea culpa is more a word Jesus would use than one many MDs are comfortable using --- but would it really hurt - just this once - to admit that the elders of their profession got it 180 degrees wrong back then in the darkest days for humanity, infected or otherwise .....

Citation on Military Cross reveals the essential Martin Henry Dawson

Martin Henry Dawson , enroute to battlefields of WWI

Henry Dawson went to WWI as a private and came back an officer and a decorated war hero (MC with citation for bravery and leadership in the field).

He also had two grave war wounds which left him permanently partially disabled.

Time spent recovering from those wounds and the resulting infections, together with a year overseas as an orderly in Dalhousie's Number Seven Base Hospital, meant he had spent almost half of his war in hospitals or recovering in convalescent homes.

Perhaps as a result, he had decided to change his career plans and become a medical doctor.

Unfortunately,some highly ambitious medical students who successfully avoided war service ( such as Howard Florey and Chester Keefer) had a vital four year start on him in his new profession.

Despite all this, I argue that the war did not fundamentally change his personality.

His parents raised him right - and to do right.

Always a serious studious both as a schoolboy and as a young university student , he merely shifted his lifelong love of learning to medicine - becoming a research doctor rather than some kind of university professor in the humanities.

His parents had instilled in him and his brothers a Christian concern for helping others less fortunate and if he later fell away from a formal affiliation with the church , some of that upbringing clearly never left him.

It is that upbringing that earned him his MC .

He won it for his efforts during his first ever time in combat.

Partly it was won for his considerable physical triumph in rising up after being wounded in the big toe to lead repeated charges against the enemy through the heavy mud.

And for his efforts later that day re-organizing a badly disorganized general front line from counterattacks, after more senior officers failed.

A wounded big toe is a total game changer for combat activity - which is why so many soldiers deliberately shoot out their own big toe through a sand bag  to get out of war service.

Without two working big toes, we can't really run or walk , let alone while carrying heavy back packs through heavy mud.

It is our unique big toes, not our primate-shared and relatively common set of opposing thumbs, that truly marks out the humans from the rest of the lifeforms.

 But what really secured his MC was what he did when he was finally ordered off the field to hospital.

He gave up his place in a stretcher and instead walked through miles of mud to the rear hospital, at the cost of great physical pain and adding further damage to his wounded foot.

He gave up that seat he said so that a severely wounded ordinary soldier, who had been triaged to die out in the front line mud with a blanket as his only solace in his final hours, could exercise his 'faint hope clause' for a further lease on life.

Dawson's concern that all humanity should have a fighting chance ("a fair go") to enjoy a normal full lifespan was never more revealed than in this small wartime incident.

This same concern later made him notable for being the first doctor to use penicillin as an antibiotic.

A pioneering effort he did all because he hoped to save some patients he felt the wartime medical establishment were deliberately triaging to die by neglect.

His efforts (again achieved at a great physical cost because this time he was dying of a painful terminal disease) directly saved a few dozen of these patients.

But indirectly , his efforts have benefitted ten billion of us - so far since 1940 - all living longer healthier lives as the result of his initially small efforts.

Small bread cast on big waters....

Nazis manning 88mm gun might be eugenic but its shells were not - democratically wounding 1A soldier and 4F civilian alike

Deadly group A strep bacteria (GAS) will tolerantly and democratically carry off all sorts of injured and wounded individuals : Aryan, Jewish, 4F ,1A , fit, unfit , warrior or civilian.

It knows and accepts no hierarchy of worthiness but like any incoming artillery shell it kills and maims in perfect equal opportunity randomness.

Remember all this when the true wartime story of penicillin-for-all is made into a typical Hollywood fantasy.

Under Hollywood's blinkered gaze, wartime penicillin would have to have been manufactured by 1A handsome , virile/virulent , WASP military doctors with chiseled chins.

Their moral conflict driving the plot would be this : should they interrupt their vital violent combat work , just to rescue some weedy swarthy 4F civilians on the Home front who are once again revealed as too inept to resist fatal bacterial infections like GAS on their own ?

In reality , it was of course totally all the other way around.

In fact it was weedy 4F stay-at-home unfits who created the wartime penicillin that saved the lives of hunky virile 1As dying helplessly from bacteria-infected wounds from random 88mm shell fragments.

A plot so subversive of the established American literary cultural and political order that Jesus and the Gospel authors could probably write it in their sleep.

But equally so it is a plot that would be far beyond what the most supposedly 'radical' graphic novelist or Indie film director could ever write.

They - to date - have only unconsciously reproduced the traditional authoritarian rejections of democratic debate over values.

They have only unconsciously continued to hype the ageless American monomyth of regenerative violence that by-passes democratic debate ,compromise and tolerance , albeit a monomyth now cloaked in the hippest of counterculture colours...

Updating J D Ratcliff's wartime penicillin classic, YELLOW MAGIC

I like to think that my "UN-SUPER HEROES" is an 21st century updating of JD (John Drury) Ratcliff's written-to-order 1945 popular science classic "YELLOW MAGIC" .

Ratcliff wrote the facts as truthfully he knew them in 1945 (or was told about them by the few penicillin participants he was able to contact firsthand).

Since late 1941, Penicillin had been surrounded by an ever more effective wall of wartime censorship all over the Allied world.

This allowed anyone involved in wartime penicillin's development to spin their own take to Ratcliff, without fear Ratcliff would have any access to paper documents to query their oral account.

Since 1945 , many of the paper documents have been archived or made public via scholarly articles and books.

But no one has since tried to do with the dramatic tale of wartime penicillin what Ratcliff ( following somewhat upon Paul de Kruif's style) did so well in his little volume.

JD could make any Science story come alive simply by re-telling it in a series of dramatic scenes.

And by freely adding his purple imaginings whenever his participants' eye witness accounts of specific incidents failed to actually recall much color or specifics.

Remember - unlike with the contemporary workings out of atomic energy and atomic bombs - no participants in this particular medical story had any sense - until mid 1943 - that they were making world-shaking history instead of just making penicillin.

So the drama and the little personal details were generally liberally 'recalled' later - after penicillin had become world famous - rather than being accurately recorded at the time.

So we only know the distinctive smell of wartime (crude) penicillin because an otherwise ordinary 1945 war nurse recounts the smell , in passing , in her much later memoir of combat hospital experiences.

Like all writers and historians, JD had to first hear all and read all of the varying accounts about wartime penicillin and then insert his reasoned opinion as to which composite account was mostly likely to be correct.

I can't tell you what SBE patients Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson felt like on October 16 1940 - but I can and will tell you how SBE patients their age tended to act at that stage in their disease.

The same with the smell of Dawson's crude penicillin as that first historic ampoule was broken ---- I'll have to use that wartime combat nurse's description - his penicillin , being much cruder, could only have smelt worse.

 I do not know how the specific ward nurses looking after Aronson and Alston on October 16th 1940 felt about a new medicine that smelt like a return to dirty dank moldy old basements.

But we do know lots about the house-proud nurses of the 1940s , in the days before handling high tech machines replaced pails and mops in the priority list of nurse training !

I won't invent speech inside quote marks - if it is inside quote marks, it will only be there because it is a direct quote from a contemporary document.

Instead I will use a lot of an old fashioned form of free indirect speech - something quite common until the 20th century , when authors were strongly discouraged from commenting inside their own works .

I will freely intermingle my comments (my opinions) in a sound alike version of those particular participants' voice, as I try to imagine what typical participants of their age, nationality, class, gender etc would likely say at that place and point in time.

I call my book a drama in five acts - so dramatizing each scene really isn't much of a stretch  ....

Un-Super Heroes : a biography of NEW DEAL penicillin ...

The post-modern NEW DEAL extrusion onto the landscape of the Modern Age

British Conservative wartime penicillin or American Republican wartime penicillin , if they had succeeded, would have totally altered the generally favourable image we have today of penicillin.

It would have been regarded as needlessly expensive and originally available - by design -  to only the richest and whitest classes.

By contrast the wartime penicillin we actually got in the end  - NEW DEAL penicillin - is probably the world's best known medicine almost entirely because it is also the most beloved of lifesaver.

It remains non-patented ( in the public domain) and naturally made and hence both cheap and available to all nations to make.

During the war this non-patented natural penicillin was made available to all those in the world dying from lack of it only because the New Deal oriented super agency known as the WPB (War Production Board) willed it to be so.

In many accounts, the New Deal was definitely on its way out in Washington and America by 1945 and the gift of cheap natural penicillin for all was merely its final, departing, gift.

But in my view, the informally postmodern New Deal morphed seamlessly into formal post-Modernity in late 1945 and the gift of  cheap natural penicillin for all became merely postmodernity's opening gambit...

How big is the metropolitan New York City area ?

For people like newspaper reporters, sales reps and professionals delivering a lecture or paper, the furthest extent of metro NYC is pretty easy to measure.

If you can get into work early, check in and then take a car or train to the location, do some useful business and then return late to the office, and then still later home to sleep in one's own bed, it's still metro.

Rising early and home late may be hellish and the checkins at the office bookending your work day may be mere tokens but it avoids that expensive hotel room and best of two days (or more) away from family and office.

The time of day for your key business is paramount - an evening lecture or presentation makes the circle of distances evoke by words 'metro NYC 'very much much smaller.

Measuring the extent of metro NYC is important in the tale of the Gotham Eight because metro residents shared a lot in common with Dr Dawson and his team.

Metro residents all heard NYC radio, possibly watched - even then - NYC TV , read the big NYC papers , understood all the local NYC area references , took in big NYC movies and musicals and sports events.

You were among your own kind, sharing a common metro culture - even in fairly frequent (because it was relatively inexpensive) all important 'personal' contact.

By contrast, Dawson's infrequent but extended wartime trips ( all prior to his late 1942 success with SBE) to such places as Baltimore, Washington DC, St Louis , Louisville, California , even his native Nova Scotia took him into fairly alien terrain.

In wartime conditions of restricted travel and censorship, and given his rapidly declining health, Dawson's post November 1942 success with penicillin for SBE was not known beyond metro NYC's medical and research community.

But a community he had been very active in , for almost twenty years.

And fortunately for all of us , the small wartime fish bowl he was stuck in (metro NYC) was a community with more people than most 1940 nations, living in close proximity with good intersecting communications and was home to much of the regional, national and global media.

So while it is true that word of his SBE successes spread only locally inside the fish bowl via local medical gossip (noting that in wartime gossip becomes much more important and much more believed) , only London could really equal metro NYC as a fortunate and powerful fish bowl to be stuck in....

Wartime Penicillin, told as sharp clash of vivid personalities and philosophies -- not as a dry scientific treatise or as cheerleading fantasy of selfless wartime cooperation

If you have never read a book about the exciting saga of wartime penicillin that is hardly because of a lack of choice.

Dozens and dozens of authors have written well researched (and well regarded) renderings of the dramatic story, even if we discount the mass of uniformly dreadful books directed at children.

But despite a potential reading audience  that since 1944 that must number in the billions, none of these books can be said to be a national - let alone international - best seller.

Even more unexpectedly, there has never been any Hollywood movie about the wartime penicillin saga, let alone any successful one.

All these penicillin books to date suffer from one honest, sincere but erroneous assumption.

All their authors are united in seeing a single reason for the 15 years of delay between fleming's discovery of penicillin and when we in the rest of the world first heard about.

The same explanation is also used to account for the 25 year delay between the 1928 discovery and when it became readily available to almost all of the world's dying (regardless of income or location) during the 1950s.

Technical Flaws ?

They believe that all the delays in bringing penicillin to a world that badly needed it can  blamed on technical flaws in our sincere efforts to purify and preserve penicillin.

These steps were judged essential before it could be safely injected into the dying and cast as not really not surprising delays ---- once the reader is shown the complex nature of the penicillin molecule .

 These  authors consider briefly and then quickly dismiss the idea that the delays were really the result of character cum intellectual flaws ... in the complex natures of those we initially allowed to lead the penicillin effort.

These authors can hardly be accused of sugarcoating the personality clashes among the best known of the penicillin leaders or of denying differences between the various international organizations involved .

But neither do they portray these clashes as lying at the very heart of the causes for the years of delays.

Big Pharma - Big Science - Big Government vs Indie PEN

Powerful individuals and organizations holding widely popular views lay behind the delay to bring penicillin to the whole world.

In the beginning only a handful of individuals with few resources refused to accept the validity of these excuses for the delay in penicillin's mass introduction.

I call them , collectively, the Indie PEN movement.

Against overwhelming odds, this handful took on Big Pharma, Big Science , Big Government at the height of a Total War - and then, quite unexpectedly, totally triumphed at the very end.

A classic tortoise and hare story.

These personality (cum intellectual) flaws were not merely of a petty pattern or whimsically inconsistent .

Character/Intellectual Flaws ?

They are seriously held, consistently represented and strongly sustained .

The conflicting intellectual arguments and those who made them were internally consistent.

That is , the differing intellectual positions were held by individuals whose personalities were of those people who generally held those particular intellectual viewpoints.

This is why I say it is hard to separate out character flaws from intellectual flaws.

Those differences ran deep - deep as can be.

They reflected deeply held personal or institutional philosophies ("Weltanschauung") that differed in almost every way possible.

Some of those philosophies that lay behind the delays to bring penicillin to the masses would be regarded as deeply repugnant today.

 I certain think that way about them - I am not shy in saying that I see more than a whiff of the clash between absolute good and absolute evil buried deep inside the wartime penicillin saga.

 And I also see those ignoble philosophies as the main reason for all the delays.

 They lay behind the secret drive to weaponize penicillin and to deny it to most of the wartime world.

So we have before us a number of vivid , strongly etched characters (with strongly held and violently different worldviews ) clashing repeatedly .

I  don't think I am wrong in thinking that this will all make for a truly propulsive page turner --- one that also happens to better represent the reality of the war years.

Seventy five years on, its finally time that we dropped all remnants of the wartime Pollyanna rah rah cheerleading.

Let's let the story of wartime penicillin finally unfold as it truly happened , ignoble warts and selfless heroics and all ....

Wartime penicillin only cures one NEW disease , until the Allied medical elite put a stop to its efforts...

Allied doctors "Code Slow" minorities, immigrants and poor to certain death 

Sometimes true facts are far stranger than anything that bad acid and bad Hollywood writing could dream up.

Fact is, wartime penicillin's so called 'miracles' usually consisted in curing many diseases than earlier medicines also cured --- albeit very fitfully.

This earlier medications - basically the various biological serums , heavy metal based drugs and the sulfa pills - had dangerous side effects, took a lot longer, were more painful , cost more , required more skill.

Above all, their cure rates were much lower than early penicillin - of the total number of patients both type of medicines treated, penicillin saw far more lives saved.

Only one new disease - SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis ( the disease that made Rheumatic Fever (RF) so terrifying) was converted from nearly 100% fatal to nearly 100% curable , by penicillin and penicillin alone.

(Thank you Dr Dawson on behalf of my brother Bruce, who got heart valve damage from RF but never got SBE.)

Unbelievably , the Anglo-American medical establishment, taking a page from Hitler's eugenic playbook , used 'military necessity' as an excuse not to give life-saving penicillin to militarily-useless SBE patients.

Unlike Polio research - which was never curtailed during the war and mostly afflicted the middle class (can you say 'doctors', boy and girls ?) , SBE mostly afflicted the minorities, immigrants and the poor.

But perhaps I am telling you something you may have already suspected, bless your cynical little souls ...

Tortoise and Hare : the race between indies and suits for wartime penicillin

Indie Pen

The Tortoise was 'indie' penicillin , New York City penicillin , Emma Lazarus penicillin - humanized and naturalized. It had none of the innings for nine tenths of the game but pulled way ahead at the end.

The Hare was 'suits' penicillin : weaponized , synthesized , eugenicized , profitably-patentable, 'I am a Republican in a Democratic administration and I am here to help you 'penicillin.

It was supported by  the Anglo-American scientific-medical establishment ,  by Big Pharma and by the British Conservative-dominated government and some all-powerful agencies of the wartime American government.