If Vannevar Bush and Winston Churchill had had their way, penicillin would have become a secret and exclusive weapon of war, just as DDT and atomic energy became during WWII.
But penicillin escaped this fate, thanks to Dr Martin Henry Dawson's "Big Tent" Manhattan Project.
Dawson thought that natural penicillin - cheap abundant "PD" penicillin - should be made available to all in the world in need of its lifesaving properties.
Particularly during a total war against a evil Axis.
As a concrete example of how the Allies really were different from Hitler - and not just differing only in their high-sounding (but ultimately hollow) rhetoric.
Doctors without Frontiers didn't emerge formally for twenty five years after Dawson's premature death, but if he had lived, he would have cheered its birth to the rafters....
Showing posts with label winston churchill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label winston churchill. Show all posts
Friday, October 2, 2015
Monday, March 23, 2015
Eric Clapton, D-Day, Penicillin 'brewing' Churchill's defeat
In very early June 1944, just before he left for D-Day, a Canadian soldier named Eddie Fryer and a local Ripley Surrey lass named Patty Clapton made a little history of their own : Eric 'Slowhands' Clapton.
Yes, that Eric Clapton.
As this particular Boomer child is about to celebrate his 70th birthday this week, I thought I might inject a fascinating bit of medical and political trivia about his earliest days, to contrast with to all the media stories focusing on his later musical career.
Patty, together with her parents Rose and Jack, in the course of Patty's pregnancy and after baby Eric was born, had frequent cause to visit the community's best known pharmacist (chemist) Ken White.
White was at that time much in the news for his defiant production of his own home-brewed penicillin, which he then supplied to local GPs and their patients.
Word of all the massive supplies of penicillin now available to American civilian patients had caused much anguish among British voters, even among young potential Conservative voters, irate at their Churchill government for not supplying them likewise.
'After all, was it not we British who first discovered the stuff ?'
Now Ripley and Surrey generally were prime Conservative voter territory.
For a tired government about to face the voters for the first time in ten years, the wide newspaper support given to Ken White's protesting actions down in Surrey should have been - in retrospect- an ominous warning sign to Conservative Central Office officials.
Now the most remarkable thing about the 1945 General Election was not really the huge size of the Tory defeat and Labour win but rather that neither side, as well as no commentators, saw it coming.
There was little contemporary pre-ballot polling data to accounted for this unexpected sea change in british politics.
However, the general consensus among political scientists today is that voter concern about postwar unfairness in allocating scarce resources , particularly lifesaving medical resources, was what triggered the shift to the relatively uninspiring Labour Party campaign.
I believe that the most visible signs of unfairness in allocating lifesaving medical resources in the year before the June 1945 vote were over inadequate civilian penicillin supplies, of which stories about Ken White and others' alternative efforts were but one symbol.
It might all come down to a question of musical taste versus interest in politics, but I am inclined to think that the event in Ripley circa 1945 that is most worth celebrating seventy years later was not young Eric, but rather Ken White's election-changing home brewed penicillin ...
Yes, that Eric Clapton.
As this particular Boomer child is about to celebrate his 70th birthday this week, I thought I might inject a fascinating bit of medical and political trivia about his earliest days, to contrast with to all the media stories focusing on his later musical career.
Patty, together with her parents Rose and Jack, in the course of Patty's pregnancy and after baby Eric was born, had frequent cause to visit the community's best known pharmacist (chemist) Ken White.
White was at that time much in the news for his defiant production of his own home-brewed penicillin, which he then supplied to local GPs and their patients.
Word of all the massive supplies of penicillin now available to American civilian patients had caused much anguish among British voters, even among young potential Conservative voters, irate at their Churchill government for not supplying them likewise.
'After all, was it not we British who first discovered the stuff ?'
Trouble was - literally - 'brewing' for Winston Churchill in Surrey's stockbroker belt
Now Ripley and Surrey generally were prime Conservative voter territory.
For a tired government about to face the voters for the first time in ten years, the wide newspaper support given to Ken White's protesting actions down in Surrey should have been - in retrospect- an ominous warning sign to Conservative Central Office officials.
Now the most remarkable thing about the 1945 General Election was not really the huge size of the Tory defeat and Labour win but rather that neither side, as well as no commentators, saw it coming.
There was little contemporary pre-ballot polling data to accounted for this unexpected sea change in british politics.
However, the general consensus among political scientists today is that voter concern about postwar unfairness in allocating scarce resources , particularly lifesaving medical resources, was what triggered the shift to the relatively uninspiring Labour Party campaign.
I believe that the most visible signs of unfairness in allocating lifesaving medical resources in the year before the June 1945 vote were over inadequate civilian penicillin supplies, of which stories about Ken White and others' alternative efforts were but one symbol.
It might all come down to a question of musical taste versus interest in politics, but I am inclined to think that the event in Ripley circa 1945 that is most worth celebrating seventy years later was not young Eric, but rather Ken White's election-changing home brewed penicillin ...
Monday, July 28, 2014
Oxford University Artificial Penicillin totally fails to deliver - morally as well as technically
It goes without saying that Oxford University's wartime chimera of totally synthesized artificial penicillin was an abject failure.
75 years on, we still start the production of all the penicillin and beta lactam antibiotics with natural fermentation.
So ---- just a minor technical failing ?
Few go on to consider the moral failings behind the Conservative Party-led British government's wartime penicillin decisions.
The (New Deal-oriented) American WPB (War Production Board) had greatly upped the penicillin amounts originally proposed by Oxford's American ally , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
The WPB wanted not just enough penicillin produced to satisfy the life-saving demands of the American military, with some left for certain civilian conditions.
They wanted levels that meant all American lifesaving situations were met.
With plenty left over to fill all the unmet demands among the other Allies, with still more left for neutral nations, liberated Europe and even Axis POWs.
The WPB fulfilled Dr Martin Henry Dawson's dream of cheap abundant penicillin for all in the war world - in spades !
By contrast, Churchill's government was unwilling to divert enough resources away from yet more heavy bombers to cure all of Britain's military and civilian life-threatening bacterial infections - let alone to meet the needs of its own colonies.
And as for the rest of the world ? The could all whistle for their penicillin , as far as Churchill was concerned.
The prime minister of the nation that had given the world the discovery and early development of the world's first and best lifesaver thus threw all that global goodwill away - just for a handful of more bombs.
With that one - unbelievably heartless and stupid - decision , Churchill ensured that the Pax Britannica became the Pax Americana .....
75 years on, we still start the production of all the penicillin and beta lactam antibiotics with natural fermentation.
So ---- just a minor technical failing ?
Few go on to consider the moral failings behind the Conservative Party-led British government's wartime penicillin decisions.
The (New Deal-oriented) American WPB (War Production Board) had greatly upped the penicillin amounts originally proposed by Oxford's American ally , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
The WPB wanted not just enough penicillin produced to satisfy the life-saving demands of the American military, with some left for certain civilian conditions.
They wanted levels that meant all American lifesaving situations were met.
With plenty left over to fill all the unmet demands among the other Allies, with still more left for neutral nations, liberated Europe and even Axis POWs.
The WPB fulfilled Dr Martin Henry Dawson's dream of cheap abundant penicillin for all in the war world - in spades !
By contrast, Churchill's government was unwilling to divert enough resources away from yet more heavy bombers to cure all of Britain's military and civilian life-threatening bacterial infections - let alone to meet the needs of its own colonies.
And as for the rest of the world ? The could all whistle for their penicillin , as far as Churchill was concerned.
The prime minister of the nation that had given the world the discovery and early development of the world's first and best lifesaver thus threw all that global goodwill away - just for a handful of more bombs.
With that one - unbelievably heartless and stupid - decision , Churchill ensured that the Pax Britannica became the Pax Americana .....
Sunday, September 15, 2013
"Collar the Lot" : Churchill's callousness push-starts A-bomb and Penicillin development
I don't like Winston Churchill.
Granted he was a very complex man, much given to uttering extreme verbal outbursts on whatever position he held that moment, replaces a few hours or weeks later by an equally exaggerated outburst on the opposite view on that same issue.
So it is easy to find vivid quotes from him displaying both humanity and brutality towards the German Jews and Leftists who fled Hitler for Britain before 1939.
For brutal , see his comment 'collar the lot' as soon as he became PM in May 1940.
Until then, the UK had sensibly only interned ( interned gently) those it deemed as obviously pro-Nazi.
But as he threw pro Nazi Aryans and very anti Nazi Jews together in internment camps, those few (because judged potentially 'valuable' to the war effort) German Jews still free in the English-speaking democracies could see dire times ahead for them too.
If they didn't move from being potentially valuable to 'actually valuable' and soon, they and their families would be interned with all the rest.
Ironically, existing restrictions on their current activities actually helped many succeed in becoming valuable ( very,very,very valuable) to the Allied cause.
We already well know about all those Jewish physicists, denied the right to work on important war efforts like Radar, who fell back upon the then scientific backwater of a possible engine of atomic energy.
Their energetic development (hello Simon, Szilard and others) led directly to the idea of a possible A-Bomb becoming not the last but the first priority of the war.
It is not often thought of in the same way, but the Penicillin project (often twinned with the A-Bomb as one of the two big discoveries of the war) was push-started by two German Jewish emigres also facing possible internment for themselves and their families in the Spring and Summer of 1940, after Churchill's churlish actions.
Ernst Chain had to push and pull Howard Florey into realizing their peacetime, long term, basic research on microbe on microbe warfare could have huge wartime implications.
He probably pushed and pulled a little too hard in claiming credit on a back up project - this one on the chemical nature of the activity of the (mildly anti-bacterial) connective cellwall-destroying enzyme Lysozyme.
This had the effect of rousing the anger of , and the fear within, of another German Jewish emigre in America who had additional fears as he was also an WWI veteran of the Central Powers.
Karl Meyer had worked with (Martin) Henry Dawson among many others,to do the initial work on the chemical nature of Lysozyme and on some other important connective tissue destroying enzymes.
He saw himself as the pioneer in this small but valuable new field in bio-chemistry.
Meyer heard of Chain's forthcoming exaggerated claims for his Lysozyme efforts via the American-born Jew Leslie A Epstein (later Falk).
Like Meyer and Chain in those days, Epstein was a left-winger in politics and in medicine.
He got along with both of these two fellow Jews.
He had been forced, by general government order, to flee Oxford University and a Rhodes scholarship before his year and PhD was completed.
So he completed his work, begun under Chain in Oxford, with Meyer in New York, because he was the other recognized expert on the topic.
He there mentioned Chain's part in the recent successful demonstration (May 1940) that the twelve year old nigh-on useless penicillin actually could cure bacterial disease inside mice without harming them.
This meant it probably could do likewise inside humans - humans perhaps even with guns and helmets. There was a shooting war on , after all.
This work was to be published in late August 1940 in Lancet.
Chain was soon tasked to try and synthesize the natural active ingredient as fast as possible.
Meyer - I believe correctly - felt that Chain was a far better 'big ideas man' than a working bio-chemist and that Meyer could do the job far better than Chain or the fungi ever could .
He couldn't beat the fungi, as it turned out - no one could - no one ever has.
But Meyer's secret plan to repay Chain for stealing his Lysozyme credit AND secure his family from possible internment with Nazis by synthesizing penicillin was not without its own profound consequences.
Because he badly needed his friend Henry Dawson and his two skills , if his project was to succeed.
Dawson and his co-worker Gladys Hobby were expert micro-biologists.
They were highly skilled in growing large amount of microbes, like the penicillium.
Their skill was needed to provide the huge amounts of raw natural product Meyer had to destructively analyze, all to guide the process of synthesis of penicillin from pure chemical compounds.
Secondly, only Dawson the clinician had the licensed legal access to animal and human subjects to test the biological effectiveness of any new results at synthesis.
Then Dawson abruptly decided Meyer's penicillin might do a lot more than just be tested on human patients.
It might just cure patients otherwise doubly-fated to an inevitable death from the dreaded SBE.
Doubly fated to needlessly die, because in the Fall of 1940, it seemed the medical establishment was using the upcoming war effort as an excuse to treat research upon them as the very lowest priority.
In addition, American Big Pharma had shown no interest in providing any raw starting material of a potential - natural - drug they considered far tougher to work with than the still tractable and still profitable - chemically-oriented - sulfa family of drugs.
And they had no interest in developing a consultant-style relationship with a virtually unknown emigre Jewish biochemist, even with a growing reputation for the quality of his work.
(Meyer did have some sort of relationship with German-controlled Schering but they didn't see the potential - at least for their firm at this time - in the area of fungal-based antibiotics.)
Dawson saw this growing indifference to the sad fate of the poor SBE youths as part and parcel of the growing general meanness of the Modern Age itself, as exemplified by humanity's attitudes to small nations under attack from their big bullying neighbours.
This indifference to the fate of smaller 'others' started in Manchuria in 1931, then extended to Ethiopia and Spain in the mid 1930s and then Austria and Czechoslovakia at the end of the decade.
Now it was Poland, Finland, the three Balt states, Denmark, Norway and Belgium turn to be attacked and generally conquered by bully neighbours.
Still America's population and hence government remained firmly 'neutral' - as did the vast majority of the still sovereign nations of the world.
In hindsight, it is better to regard them all , us all , as being cold-hearted bystanders in the global schoolyard, watching indifferently as bullies beat up babies.
When Dawson decided to use Meyer's penicillin project to confront this indifference to the small of the world, starting with the specific case of the young people needlessly dying of SBE , he eventually set in motion a globe-wide reaction against Modernity's cult of callousness.
But let us never forget it was Winston Churchill's own particular callousness that first set it all in motion , back in May 1940 ....
Granted he was a very complex man, much given to uttering extreme verbal outbursts on whatever position he held that moment, replaces a few hours or weeks later by an equally exaggerated outburst on the opposite view on that same issue.
So it is easy to find vivid quotes from him displaying both humanity and brutality towards the German Jews and Leftists who fled Hitler for Britain before 1939.
For brutal , see his comment 'collar the lot' as soon as he became PM in May 1940.
Until then, the UK had sensibly only interned ( interned gently) those it deemed as obviously pro-Nazi.
But as he threw pro Nazi Aryans and very anti Nazi Jews together in internment camps, those few (because judged potentially 'valuable' to the war effort) German Jews still free in the English-speaking democracies could see dire times ahead for them too.
If they didn't move from being potentially valuable to 'actually valuable' and soon, they and their families would be interned with all the rest.
Ironically, existing restrictions on their current activities actually helped many succeed in becoming valuable ( very,very,very valuable) to the Allied cause.
We already well know about all those Jewish physicists, denied the right to work on important war efforts like Radar, who fell back upon the then scientific backwater of a possible engine of atomic energy.
Their energetic development (hello Simon, Szilard and others) led directly to the idea of a possible A-Bomb becoming not the last but the first priority of the war.
It is not often thought of in the same way, but the Penicillin project (often twinned with the A-Bomb as one of the two big discoveries of the war) was push-started by two German Jewish emigres also facing possible internment for themselves and their families in the Spring and Summer of 1940, after Churchill's churlish actions.
Ernst Chain had to push and pull Howard Florey into realizing their peacetime, long term, basic research on microbe on microbe warfare could have huge wartime implications.
He probably pushed and pulled a little too hard in claiming credit on a back up project - this one on the chemical nature of the activity of the (mildly anti-bacterial) connective cellwall-destroying enzyme Lysozyme.
This had the effect of rousing the anger of , and the fear within, of another German Jewish emigre in America who had additional fears as he was also an WWI veteran of the Central Powers.
Karl Meyer had worked with (Martin) Henry Dawson among many others,to do the initial work on the chemical nature of Lysozyme and on some other important connective tissue destroying enzymes.
He saw himself as the pioneer in this small but valuable new field in bio-chemistry.
Meyer heard of Chain's forthcoming exaggerated claims for his Lysozyme efforts via the American-born Jew Leslie A Epstein (later Falk).
Like Meyer and Chain in those days, Epstein was a left-winger in politics and in medicine.
He got along with both of these two fellow Jews.
He had been forced, by general government order, to flee Oxford University and a Rhodes scholarship before his year and PhD was completed.
So he completed his work, begun under Chain in Oxford, with Meyer in New York, because he was the other recognized expert on the topic.
He there mentioned Chain's part in the recent successful demonstration (May 1940) that the twelve year old nigh-on useless penicillin actually could cure bacterial disease inside mice without harming them.
This meant it probably could do likewise inside humans - humans perhaps even with guns and helmets. There was a shooting war on , after all.
This work was to be published in late August 1940 in Lancet.
Chain was soon tasked to try and synthesize the natural active ingredient as fast as possible.
Meyer - I believe correctly - felt that Chain was a far better 'big ideas man' than a working bio-chemist and that Meyer could do the job far better than Chain or the fungi ever could .
He couldn't beat the fungi, as it turned out - no one could - no one ever has.
But Meyer's secret plan to repay Chain for stealing his Lysozyme credit AND secure his family from possible internment with Nazis by synthesizing penicillin was not without its own profound consequences.
Because he badly needed his friend Henry Dawson and his two skills , if his project was to succeed.
Dawson and his co-worker Gladys Hobby were expert micro-biologists.
They were highly skilled in growing large amount of microbes, like the penicillium.
Their skill was needed to provide the huge amounts of raw natural product Meyer had to destructively analyze, all to guide the process of synthesis of penicillin from pure chemical compounds.
Secondly, only Dawson the clinician had the licensed legal access to animal and human subjects to test the biological effectiveness of any new results at synthesis.
Then Dawson abruptly decided Meyer's penicillin might do a lot more than just be tested on human patients.
It might just cure patients otherwise doubly-fated to an inevitable death from the dreaded SBE.
Doubly fated to needlessly die, because in the Fall of 1940, it seemed the medical establishment was using the upcoming war effort as an excuse to treat research upon them as the very lowest priority.
In addition, American Big Pharma had shown no interest in providing any raw starting material of a potential - natural - drug they considered far tougher to work with than the still tractable and still profitable - chemically-oriented - sulfa family of drugs.
And they had no interest in developing a consultant-style relationship with a virtually unknown emigre Jewish biochemist, even with a growing reputation for the quality of his work.
(Meyer did have some sort of relationship with German-controlled Schering but they didn't see the potential - at least for their firm at this time - in the area of fungal-based antibiotics.)
Dawson saw this growing indifference to the sad fate of the poor SBE youths as part and parcel of the growing general meanness of the Modern Age itself, as exemplified by humanity's attitudes to small nations under attack from their big bullying neighbours.
This indifference to the fate of smaller 'others' started in Manchuria in 1931, then extended to Ethiopia and Spain in the mid 1930s and then Austria and Czechoslovakia at the end of the decade.
Now it was Poland, Finland, the three Balt states, Denmark, Norway and Belgium turn to be attacked and generally conquered by bully neighbours.
Still America's population and hence government remained firmly 'neutral' - as did the vast majority of the still sovereign nations of the world.
In hindsight, it is better to regard them all , us all , as being cold-hearted bystanders in the global schoolyard, watching indifferently as bullies beat up babies.
When Dawson decided to use Meyer's penicillin project to confront this indifference to the small of the world, starting with the specific case of the young people needlessly dying of SBE , he eventually set in motion a globe-wide reaction against Modernity's cult of callousness.
But let us never forget it was Winston Churchill's own particular callousness that first set it all in motion , back in May 1940 ....
Saturday, June 8, 2013
Between PROGRESS and PROTONS : "The Missing Middle" , where we actually live
Thirties Reductionism said that once scientists knew the behavior of one of the Protons that made up Winston Churchill's body (and multiplied it by a trillion trillion trillion identical protons), they could then predict Churchill's behavior over the 1936 Abdication Crisis.
Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.
But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.
The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of a heterogeneous aggregate.
Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.
And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.
What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.
However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....
Thirties Reification said that Human Progress is real and concrete and since it was so clearly evident that Human Progress 'wants to get ever bigger and bigger',then dividing Human Progress up into the two billion individual people that existed in the world in 1939, would allow us to predict that particular individual Scott Nearing would also approve of things getting ever bigger.
But in fact he became famous for disagreeing bigger is better.
The average behavior of heterogeneous aggregates does not let us predict the behavior of an individual human being , anymore than than the behavior of individual proton helps us predict the average behavior of a heterogeneous aggregate.
Heterogeneous , because Churchill was not a vast crystal of trillions upon trillions of undifferentiated protons but rather a very stratified collection of protons in a great variety of differently-sized and differently-arranged components that led each component to very unexpectedly different behavior.
And Human Progress had no protons, or even human individuals, within it, because it was simply an abstract idea rather a concrete physical object.
What most Thirties intellectual thought was desperately missing was in giving adequate attention to the vast "Missing Middle" between Protons and Progress, because inside that "Missing Middle" lies the life we actually live, including our twin delusions of reductionism and reification.
However, I believe that the prism of Commensality does allow us to re-capture that "Missing Middle" , and thus allows us to better understand Thirties intellectual thought's sad grandchild, WWII .....
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Needed: a political - not Technological/Whig - history of wartime penicillin
Almost all histories of penicillin have but one plot : the dramatic, last minute come-from-behind victory of the little guy, HIGH TECH MAN, over the vast evil forces of Nature and fungi spores.
In pointed fact, the technical problems of producing life-saving penicillin was solved very quickly, basically done by one or two individuals with remarkably low level technology, by the Fall of 1941.
But even the most affluent members of the world could not reliably access life-saving penicillin for another five years and it still remains important to discover why.
And most of the world's poor couldn't access it for many more years after that ---- and in fact millions still die worldwide every year because properly prescribed antibiotics are beyond their economic reach.
The delays in delivering life-saving medicine were not technological in nature (the technological difficulties dog ate my penicillin homework) but rather political --- and ultimately moral.
It is not a coincidence that the only one of the four English speaking countries ( the four that produced 99% of WWII's penicillin) that was dominated by a Conservative Party also did by far the worst wartime job in getting penicillin to their dying civilians --- for whom penicillin was their only hope of survival.
I refer to Winston Churchill's UK government.
Penicillin rationing from 1942 onward, in all the Allied nations, was a deliberate choice made by government bureaucrats and politicians and company CEOs - not something imposed upon them from without by sheer technological necessity.
To still deny that - 75 years after the events and in light of all our archival knowledge - is to exhibit academic bad faith.
In 1943 that cosy consensus, about rationing penicillin and news about penicillin cures, broke up as some bureaucrats, politicians and CEOs in some countries decided to go all out to produce enough penicillin for everyone - in their own nation and beyond.
Others still much preferred that any spare national cash go to extra weapons and not into building extra penicillin plants.
They did not want to admit the absolute need for a medicine to save the lives of their own civilians , now needlessly dying of infections that the sulfa drugs had once cured.
Today, we have dozens and dozens of alternative antibiotics to suit almost any imaginable life-threatening infection.
But each of the half dozen successful sulfa drugs were best over a different narrow array of diseases - so if a patient had a strain resistant to the sulfa drug best suited to their disease, they generally had nothing left between them and death.
Except penicillin - effective against most all gram positive bacteria and much slower to gain strains resistance to it.
Simply put, diverting money that could have gone to building more penicillin bottle plants into building yet more military weapons instead, meant that Allied civilians died needlessly so more Axis civilians could die from Allied bombs.
Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, but thanks to a deliberate decision made by Winston Churchill, British soldiers were not fighting German soldiers on German soil till 1945 - and if he had had his way, British troops would never have set foot on German soil till after the German surrender.
The lives of Axis and Allied soldiers were spared, the lives of Axis and Allied citizens condemned, by this Churchillian decision.
However, his bomber-led vision for winning the war was probably not the main reason his government rejected building enough bottle penicillin plants in 1943 to supply soldier and citizen alike.
After the release of Beveridge Report in the Fall of 1942 - a report he didn't want his government to publicly release - the idea of his government facilitating the means to give life-saving penicillin to all that needed it seemed to smack of approving of the Beveridge Report.
Penicillin for all civilians needing it seemed the thin edge of a socialist edge.
America's equivalent of the Beveridge Report happened in the mid 1930s under the rubric of calls for more Social Medicine.
That report's main thrust was calling upon governments to actively commit to freeing citizens from freedom of want , particular freedom from want of life-saving medical care.
To Churchill's Conservatives, a government seeing to it that all dying citizens got penicillin would have been as repugnant in peacetime as it was in wartime.
It couldn't politically survive publicly advocating the denial of needed medicine to poorer dying civilians in peacetime, but under the spurious blanket claim of 'military necessity', a government could get away with it in wartime - as the American Republicans and Hitler both found out.
(Hitler only nerved himself to start killing Germany's 'useless mouths' after the war was underway and even appeared to back off as news got out and citizens protested.)
(During WWII, the dominant Republic core of the American medical establishment long denied life-saving penicillin to the mostly poor (aka Democrats) citizens dying of subacute bacterial endocarditis.)
I happen to think that telling the story of the ultimate abundance of wartime penicillin not as a victory over technological challenges but as a battle between different political ideologies is not only truer, but it is almost much more dramatic : a page-turner and good history.....
In pointed fact, the technical problems of producing life-saving penicillin was solved very quickly, basically done by one or two individuals with remarkably low level technology, by the Fall of 1941.
But even the most affluent members of the world could not reliably access life-saving penicillin for another five years and it still remains important to discover why.
And most of the world's poor couldn't access it for many more years after that ---- and in fact millions still die worldwide every year because properly prescribed antibiotics are beyond their economic reach.
The delays in delivering life-saving medicine were not technological in nature (the technological difficulties dog ate my penicillin homework) but rather political --- and ultimately moral.
Conservatives, Republicans & Nazis - and penicillin
It is not a coincidence that the only one of the four English speaking countries ( the four that produced 99% of WWII's penicillin) that was dominated by a Conservative Party also did by far the worst wartime job in getting penicillin to their dying civilians --- for whom penicillin was their only hope of survival.
I refer to Winston Churchill's UK government.
Penicillin rationing from 1942 onward, in all the Allied nations, was a deliberate choice made by government bureaucrats and politicians and company CEOs - not something imposed upon them from without by sheer technological necessity.
Academic 'Bad Faith'
To still deny that - 75 years after the events and in light of all our archival knowledge - is to exhibit academic bad faith.
In 1943 that cosy consensus, about rationing penicillin and news about penicillin cures, broke up as some bureaucrats, politicians and CEOs in some countries decided to go all out to produce enough penicillin for everyone - in their own nation and beyond.
Others still much preferred that any spare national cash go to extra weapons and not into building extra penicillin plants.
They did not want to admit the absolute need for a medicine to save the lives of their own civilians , now needlessly dying of infections that the sulfa drugs had once cured.
Today, we have dozens and dozens of alternative antibiotics to suit almost any imaginable life-threatening infection.
Unheard amid the din of war , the Sulfas started failing bad
But each of the half dozen successful sulfa drugs were best over a different narrow array of diseases - so if a patient had a strain resistant to the sulfa drug best suited to their disease, they generally had nothing left between them and death.
Except penicillin - effective against most all gram positive bacteria and much slower to gain strains resistance to it.
Simply put, diverting money that could have gone to building more penicillin bottle plants into building yet more military weapons instead, meant that Allied civilians died needlessly so more Axis civilians could die from Allied bombs.
Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, but thanks to a deliberate decision made by Winston Churchill, British soldiers were not fighting German soldiers on German soil till 1945 - and if he had had his way, British troops would never have set foot on German soil till after the German surrender.
The lives of Axis and Allied soldiers were spared, the lives of Axis and Allied citizens condemned, by this Churchillian decision.
However, his bomber-led vision for winning the war was probably not the main reason his government rejected building enough bottle penicillin plants in 1943 to supply soldier and citizen alike.
The Beveridge Report and Penicillin
After the release of Beveridge Report in the Fall of 1942 - a report he didn't want his government to publicly release - the idea of his government facilitating the means to give life-saving penicillin to all that needed it seemed to smack of approving of the Beveridge Report.
Penicillin for all civilians needing it seemed the thin edge of a socialist edge.
America's equivalent of the Beveridge Report happened in the mid 1930s under the rubric of calls for more Social Medicine.
That report's main thrust was calling upon governments to actively commit to freeing citizens from freedom of want , particular freedom from want of life-saving medical care.
To Churchill's Conservatives, a government seeing to it that all dying citizens got penicillin would have been as repugnant in peacetime as it was in wartime.
It couldn't politically survive publicly advocating the denial of needed medicine to poorer dying civilians in peacetime, but under the spurious blanket claim of 'military necessity', a government could get away with it in wartime - as the American Republicans and Hitler both found out.
(Hitler only nerved himself to start killing Germany's 'useless mouths' after the war was underway and even appeared to back off as news got out and citizens protested.)
(During WWII, the dominant Republic core of the American medical establishment long denied life-saving penicillin to the mostly poor (aka Democrats) citizens dying of subacute bacterial endocarditis.)
I happen to think that telling the story of the ultimate abundance of wartime penicillin not as a victory over technological challenges but as a battle between different political ideologies is not only truer, but it is almost much more dramatic : a page-turner and good history.....
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
"Pax Penicillia" : how Churchill's Britain won the war and lost the peace
The decision by Winston Churchill's (Tory) Minister of Supply (MoS) not to divert the money for one additional Lancaster squadron, used to bomb civilians in Europe, towards providing enough penicillin for British (and European) civilians resulted in Churchill's Tories winning the war for Britain --- but at the cost of losing the peace.
By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.
Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.
And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...
By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.
Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.
And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Penicillin's "Bengali Famine Years" : 1943-1944
It was not America and Britain, it was not even the British and American governments ,that made the momentous decision, between late 1942 and early 1943, not to divert tax money just a little away from bombs and towards penicillin production instead.
This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944, to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.
It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.
But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.
Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.
By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.
Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.
These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.
As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.
And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.
FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.
But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.
That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .
Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.
If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .
If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.
My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.
Just as in the UK, Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.
And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.
For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....
This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944, to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.
It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.
But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.
Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.
By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.
Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.
These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.
As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.
And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.
FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.
But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.
That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .
Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.
If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .
If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.
My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.
Just as in the UK, Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.
And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.
For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
The first - and internally fatal - Tory response to the Beveridge Report : the Ministry of Supply takes over Penicillin ...
To make sense of this claim, we need to clear as to what the role of Britain's powerful wartime Ministry of Supply actually was.
The Ministry of Supply (the MoS) was never the British equivalent of the American War Production Board (WPB), no matter how many times this claim is offered up.
In fact, it was very much closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development (the OSRD) per the role set out for both under statute , than it was to the statutory role set out for the WPB.
Britain's Ministry of Supply strived to supply the military's needs - period. Unlike the WPB, it did not try to arbitrate between the conflicting demands of civilian and military claims upon scarce material and manpower.
Equally, the OSRD did NOT deal with all of America's wartime science and research efforts , a point that no doubt Jesus Christ himself will have to repeat again and again to academics on Judgement Day and on into all Eternity.
It only dealt with that amount of science and research that involved the designing of (but not the production of) new weapons that could come into use, during the current war.
Bush was very very careful to sharply limit the parameters of his organization, all to make it more dominant within its narrow but vital sphere.
So when Howard Florey went to both the OSRD and to the Ministry of Supply to help in the production of penicillin - rather than going instead to ask help from the American Public Health Service and the British Ministry of Health, he had already made it very clear where his penicillin priority lay.
He wanted additional penicillin production yes --- but only sufficient to supply the armed forces, period.
Florey was strongly conservative, as were all the key individuals within the Minister of Supply and the OSRD : Big Government to them was abhorrent.
Thus the sudden willingness, eagerness even, of the Ministry of Supply in the Fall of 1942 to go all out and seize control of all of the British commercial penicillin production has to be seen as ideologically surprising.
Unless it can (and should) be seen as the opening conservative counter-attack against the rumoured radical notions of the Beveridge Report.
A preemptive move to ensure that the Ministry of Health (also run by a Tory minister but with wider than just military responsibilities) didn't dominate penicillin production.
If is often claimed that the Ministry of Supply took over all of penicillin production because the Scottish-born minister was an old pal of fellow Scot, Alec Fleming, who asked him to do so.
Politicians - grant us at least this - do not spontaneously fall upon old friends and their requests with open arms --- not unless it suits us.
In September and October 1942, Fleming's request much suited Duncan and the British Tories.
In late September and October 1942, the tenor of the Beveridge report, though as yet unreleased, was well known within the top officials of Whitehall.
It called for a placing the values of equality and egalitarianism at the core of the British government - a notion intensely hostile to Tory values.
For penicillin, all this Beveridge "equality" talk could only mean one of two things.
It might mean divvying inadequate amounts of penicillin equally between dying civilians and dying soldiers - when Tories felt the most vital hope of penicillin was that it would help maintain current front line troop levels without the need to "call up" middle class men (their voters) now at home engaged in war work.
Or it might mean diverting the cost of one additional Lancaster squadron (three million pounds) away from the all-out bombing of civilian Germany , towards creating more penicillin factories on the successful Glaxo model.
Glaxo had taken up space in bits of idle factories and by using local cheap and plentiful unskilled labour,( aka women) , had cheaply but efficiently produced a lot of penicillin with current low technology methods and equipment.
(Basically making penicillin as if it was a milk product , using the very abundant modern dairy equipment existing everywhere thanks to the 1920s civilized world's mania over pure milk.)
A lot of similar factories could be quickly brought up to speed, supplying a good deal of penicillin, without requiring too much vital material like stainless steel, already in desperately short supply.
If all this sounds very familiar, that is because this solution is what Britain in the end was forced to do - but very late and only under intense public pressure.
If it had been done wholeheartedly in the Fall of 1942, there would have been no highly public late 1944 civilian penicillin famine crisis.
But the Conservative bits and bob of the Coalition Government wanted no part of equality and penicillin was just the first of many counterattacks against the threat of Beveridge.
They were unsuccessful in the extreme, blowing what had to seem to them (and to Labour !), a sure electoral victory at war's end.
"Unfair distribution of a vital commodity in short supply" , to quote The Times (of all people !) referencing an earlier debate over Hugh Dalton's fuel rationing proposals , was totally anathema to the British public.
In June 1945, what little polling type information we have suggests it was the unfair rationing of medical services that moved people to Labour .
The most current example of that unfair medical rationing had to be rationing difficulties with life saving penicillin.
Let me repeat that : "life saving". This was not just temporary unfairness in allocating housing or clothing : this was the unfair allocation of life itself.
You can't get a more "vital commodity" than life itself : to switch from the specialized language of the economist to that of the political scientist trying to account for a surprise pattern of vote changing, "life" is a very salient issue.
If so, the unexpected and total defeat of Churchill's Tories in June 1945 can be seen as having its origins in the Fall of 1942, when the Ministry of Supply (and Howard Florey) successfully re-defined the shortage of penicillin (contra Beveridge), as a shortage of military penicillin, civilians be damned.....
The Ministry of Supply (the MoS) was never the British equivalent of the American War Production Board (WPB), no matter how many times this claim is offered up.
In fact, it was very much closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development (the OSRD) per the role set out for both under statute , than it was to the statutory role set out for the WPB.
Britain's Ministry of Supply strived to supply the military's needs - period. Unlike the WPB, it did not try to arbitrate between the conflicting demands of civilian and military claims upon scarce material and manpower.
Equally, the OSRD did NOT deal with all of America's wartime science and research efforts , a point that no doubt Jesus Christ himself will have to repeat again and again to academics on Judgement Day and on into all Eternity.
It only dealt with that amount of science and research that involved the designing of (but not the production of) new weapons that could come into use, during the current war.
Bush was very very careful to sharply limit the parameters of his organization, all to make it more dominant within its narrow but vital sphere.
So when Howard Florey went to both the OSRD and to the Ministry of Supply to help in the production of penicillin - rather than going instead to ask help from the American Public Health Service and the British Ministry of Health, he had already made it very clear where his penicillin priority lay.
He wanted additional penicillin production yes --- but only sufficient to supply the armed forces, period.
Florey was strongly conservative, as were all the key individuals within the Minister of Supply and the OSRD : Big Government to them was abhorrent.
Thus the sudden willingness, eagerness even, of the Ministry of Supply in the Fall of 1942 to go all out and seize control of all of the British commercial penicillin production has to be seen as ideologically surprising.
Unless it can (and should) be seen as the opening conservative counter-attack against the rumoured radical notions of the Beveridge Report.
A preemptive move to ensure that the Ministry of Health (also run by a Tory minister but with wider than just military responsibilities) didn't dominate penicillin production.
If is often claimed that the Ministry of Supply took over all of penicillin production because the Scottish-born minister was an old pal of fellow Scot, Alec Fleming, who asked him to do so.
Politicians - grant us at least this - do not spontaneously fall upon old friends and their requests with open arms --- not unless it suits us.
In September and October 1942, Fleming's request much suited Duncan and the British Tories.
In late September and October 1942, the tenor of the Beveridge report, though as yet unreleased, was well known within the top officials of Whitehall.
It called for a placing the values of equality and egalitarianism at the core of the British government - a notion intensely hostile to Tory values.
For penicillin, all this Beveridge "equality" talk could only mean one of two things.
It might mean divvying inadequate amounts of penicillin equally between dying civilians and dying soldiers - when Tories felt the most vital hope of penicillin was that it would help maintain current front line troop levels without the need to "call up" middle class men (their voters) now at home engaged in war work.
Or it might mean diverting the cost of one additional Lancaster squadron (three million pounds) away from the all-out bombing of civilian Germany , towards creating more penicillin factories on the successful Glaxo model.
Glaxo had taken up space in bits of idle factories and by using local cheap and plentiful unskilled labour,( aka women) , had cheaply but efficiently produced a lot of penicillin with current low technology methods and equipment.
(Basically making penicillin as if it was a milk product , using the very abundant modern dairy equipment existing everywhere thanks to the 1920s civilized world's mania over pure milk.)
A lot of similar factories could be quickly brought up to speed, supplying a good deal of penicillin, without requiring too much vital material like stainless steel, already in desperately short supply.
If all this sounds very familiar, that is because this solution is what Britain in the end was forced to do - but very late and only under intense public pressure.
If it had been done wholeheartedly in the Fall of 1942, there would have been no highly public late 1944 civilian penicillin famine crisis.
But the Conservative bits and bob of the Coalition Government wanted no part of equality and penicillin was just the first of many counterattacks against the threat of Beveridge.
They were unsuccessful in the extreme, blowing what had to seem to them (and to Labour !), a sure electoral victory at war's end.
"Unfair distribution of a vital commodity in short supply" , to quote The Times (of all people !) referencing an earlier debate over Hugh Dalton's fuel rationing proposals , was totally anathema to the British public.
In June 1945, what little polling type information we have suggests it was the unfair rationing of medical services that moved people to Labour .
The most current example of that unfair medical rationing had to be rationing difficulties with life saving penicillin.
Let me repeat that : "life saving". This was not just temporary unfairness in allocating housing or clothing : this was the unfair allocation of life itself.
You can't get a more "vital commodity" than life itself : to switch from the specialized language of the economist to that of the political scientist trying to account for a surprise pattern of vote changing, "life" is a very salient issue.
If so, the unexpected and total defeat of Churchill's Tories in June 1945 can be seen as having its origins in the Fall of 1942, when the Ministry of Supply (and Howard Florey) successfully re-defined the shortage of penicillin (contra Beveridge), as a shortage of military penicillin, civilians be damned.....
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Patient ONE of the Antibiotics Era : how the saving of Charlie Aronson changed our world
During his lifetime, Dr Henry Dawson only gave penicillin to several dozen endocarditis patients, Charlie Aronson first among them ; only saved several dozen lives, Charlie among them.
Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.
But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.
If only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.
Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.
Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.
It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.
Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.
The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.
There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.
Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.
Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.
This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.
They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.
Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.
A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).
This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.
Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.
We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.
Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.
America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana, again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".
Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.
But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.
Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.
Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.
But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.
Dante Colitti forced their hand.
In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital, was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.
But he did.
He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.
And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.
Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.
The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.
Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/ needed penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?
Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.
The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone: John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944, is clear enough .
Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....
Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.
But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.
If only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.
Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.
Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.
It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.
Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.
The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.
There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.
Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.
Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.
This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.
They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.
Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.
A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).
This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.
Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.
We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.
Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.
America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana, again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".
Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.
But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.
Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.
Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.
But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.
Dante Colitti forced their hand.
In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital, was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.
But he did.
He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.
And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.
Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.
The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.
Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/ needed penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?
Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.
The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone: John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944, is clear enough .
Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Nova Scotia-born Dr Henry Dawson and the wartime re-invention of a military secret weapon into a widely publicized beacon of hope
I am talking about penicillin of course.
What other artifact of war has so abruptly and so totally changed its character over the course of a war ?
In 1941, the British and American medical and military elites were in agreement that the new penicillin's best use in wartime was as a weapon - and that its success as a weapon of war depended on it remaining 'new' and hence relatively secret.
The Allies would gain an absolute advantage over the Axis only if they alone had a cheap, abundant, stable, pure , potent (secret) version of penicillin.
This could only happen if the Axis had to make do with only the increasingly ineffective sulfa drugs or the expensive, scarce, unstable, weak Public Domain (natural) version of penicillin, readily obtainable by consulting the already existing published medical literature on penicillin.
So penicillin had to remain secret in two senses.
First, penicillin had to be synthesized secretly.
This is because the old cliche of the formula stolen out of a safe in the Golden Age of Mystery books really works as a realistic plot device.
Almost all readers were aware that in the real world, without at least a fleeting glance at the synthesis formula for a process, it was almost impossible to begin to make a stab at a rival method for re-creating a man-made chemical.
Nobody steals scientific formulas used in physics, geology, astronomy or biology now do they ?
Secondly, penicillin's unique life-saving abilities had to be kept secret from the world's general public or they would demand it be made in quality for them.
Technically, the synthesizing method would still remain a secret, but alerted by the resulting public clamour, the enemy would try all the harder to match the Allied synthetic penicillin ---- and neither the Germans or the Japanese were slouches in the synthetic department.
And penicillin's actual medical use was also to reveal a distinctly war-like character : it was to be triaged, military style.
That is to say, it was not to be "wasted" (to use Winston Churchill's infamous "green-inked" phrase).
There was simply no military point trying to save the lives of dying ex-combat soldiers who would be of no further military use if they did survive, not when penicillin could be better used to quickly return lightly wounded or infected combat soldiers into battle, so they could get a second crack at dying for their country.
Battles were won or lost by the side that could muster a greater number of their units' total complement into battle.
Penicillin used under such inhuman terms certainly approached the most war-like of war medicines.
War medicines like the amphetamines, ("The Ecstasy of the Einsatzgruppen") , which unlike penicillin was never in short supply on any military front.
Not once the Axis and the Allies alike discovered that like booze, it made combat soldiers more aggressive , more willing to kill or be killed.
Germ, chemical and radiation warfare were other areas where medical expertise helped make war and killing more effective.
By contrast, social medicine can actually exist in wartime : it tries to lessen the number of non-combat deaths in war and it does so not merely by pouring penicillin powder into combat wounds to reduce the chance of infection.
It says instead that all life is worthy of life, regardless of an individual life's current utility to the war effort.
Because most deaths in war occurs not in combat between troops, but when captured troops , enemy civilians and your own civilians are triaged into two piles : those worthy of decent food, shelter, and health care and those deemed unworthy.
Nazis let millions of Soviet POWS starve to death or to die of disease to free up food supplies for the German civilians back home ; they also shot to death millions of Jews for the same reason.
In India, British authorities, not caring greatly about the Bengali poor, also let millions starve to death or die of hunger related disease, in a time and place with plenty of food.
In America, medical authorities considered people with endocarditis to be a burden on scarce medical resources, who even if they did live, could never contribute much to the military or the civilian war effort - best deny them life-saving penicillin and let them die.
By contrast, Dawson and his supporters said make lots of penicillin and give it freely to our soldiers ( useless or useful) , to all our civilians at home, to civilians in neutral and occupied countries and even to enemy POWs and civilians.
And then suggest that such a coalition of nations willing to do that is really a coalition worth fighting or dying for, and a coalition worth surrendering to, because you know you will be treated fairly.
Social medicine, said Dawson, was actually the most effective war medicine of them all : and in the end, even Churchill was probably forced to reluctantly agreed, once he got the time to pause and reflect.
And he certainly got plenty of time to reflect, after his surprising post-war election defeat ---- caused in part, I believe, by his government's unwillingness to provide civilian penicillin during the war : his green-inked words had definitely come back to haunt him.....
What other artifact of war has so abruptly and so totally changed its character over the course of a war ?
In 1941, the British and American medical and military elites were in agreement that the new penicillin's best use in wartime was as a weapon - and that its success as a weapon of war depended on it remaining 'new' and hence relatively secret.
The Allies would gain an absolute advantage over the Axis only if they alone had a cheap, abundant, stable, pure , potent (secret) version of penicillin.
This could only happen if the Axis had to make do with only the increasingly ineffective sulfa drugs or the expensive, scarce, unstable, weak Public Domain (natural) version of penicillin, readily obtainable by consulting the already existing published medical literature on penicillin.
Why was penicillin so secret one moment and then the hero of newsreels the next ?
So penicillin had to remain secret in two senses.
First, penicillin had to be synthesized secretly.
This is because the old cliche of the formula stolen out of a safe in the Golden Age of Mystery books really works as a realistic plot device.
Almost all readers were aware that in the real world, without at least a fleeting glance at the synthesis formula for a process, it was almost impossible to begin to make a stab at a rival method for re-creating a man-made chemical.
Nobody steals scientific formulas used in physics, geology, astronomy or biology now do they ?
Secondly, penicillin's unique life-saving abilities had to be kept secret from the world's general public or they would demand it be made in quality for them.
Technically, the synthesizing method would still remain a secret, but alerted by the resulting public clamour, the enemy would try all the harder to match the Allied synthetic penicillin ---- and neither the Germans or the Japanese were slouches in the synthetic department.
And penicillin's actual medical use was also to reveal a distinctly war-like character : it was to be triaged, military style.
That is to say, it was not to be "wasted" (to use Winston Churchill's infamous "green-inked" phrase).
There was simply no military point trying to save the lives of dying ex-combat soldiers who would be of no further military use if they did survive, not when penicillin could be better used to quickly return lightly wounded or infected combat soldiers into battle, so they could get a second crack at dying for their country.
Battles were won or lost by the side that could muster a greater number of their units' total complement into battle.
Penicillin used under such inhuman terms certainly approached the most war-like of war medicines.
War medicines like the amphetamines, ("The Ecstasy of the Einsatzgruppen") , which unlike penicillin was never in short supply on any military front.
Not once the Axis and the Allies alike discovered that like booze, it made combat soldiers more aggressive , more willing to kill or be killed.
Germ, chemical and radiation warfare were other areas where medical expertise helped make war and killing more effective.
By contrast, social medicine can actually exist in wartime : it tries to lessen the number of non-combat deaths in war and it does so not merely by pouring penicillin powder into combat wounds to reduce the chance of infection.
It says instead that all life is worthy of life, regardless of an individual life's current utility to the war effort.
Because most deaths in war occurs not in combat between troops, but when captured troops , enemy civilians and your own civilians are triaged into two piles : those worthy of decent food, shelter, and health care and those deemed unworthy.
Nazis let millions of Soviet POWS starve to death or to die of disease to free up food supplies for the German civilians back home ; they also shot to death millions of Jews for the same reason.
In India, British authorities, not caring greatly about the Bengali poor, also let millions starve to death or die of hunger related disease, in a time and place with plenty of food.
In America, medical authorities considered people with endocarditis to be a burden on scarce medical resources, who even if they did live, could never contribute much to the military or the civilian war effort - best deny them life-saving penicillin and let them die.
By contrast, Dawson and his supporters said make lots of penicillin and give it freely to our soldiers ( useless or useful) , to all our civilians at home, to civilians in neutral and occupied countries and even to enemy POWs and civilians.
And then suggest that such a coalition of nations willing to do that is really a coalition worth fighting or dying for, and a coalition worth surrendering to, because you know you will be treated fairly.
Social medicine, said Dawson, was actually the most effective war medicine of them all : and in the end, even Churchill was probably forced to reluctantly agreed, once he got the time to pause and reflect.
And he certainly got plenty of time to reflect, after his surprising post-war election defeat ---- caused in part, I believe, by his government's unwillingness to provide civilian penicillin during the war : his green-inked words had definitely come back to haunt him.....
Thursday, December 27, 2012
America sure loves its minutemen and riflemen - except during wartime
 |
| MOS 745 (circa 1780) |
Do you think that wartime penicillin should just be for healthy young scallywags who cheat on their wives but are still fully combat-ready or do you think it should be "wasted" on the dying of all nations, races and creeds ?
Some things never change and the skygods and earthlings still mix it up to oppose each other as much today on gun control and climate change as they did back almost 75 years ago on the best uses for wartime penicillin.
Skygods sure love their guns and sure believe in an America where every man had a gun handy, to defend his family or his nation at a minute's notice.
One can't see much American culture without noticing the omnipresence of two very old symbols from yesterday in this land of tomorrow : the Revolutionary Era Minuteman and the post-Civil War Western rifleman.
It was much the same during WWII, where ads and movie iconography always focused on the modern day minuteman cum rifleman : the Army MOS 745 , the infantry trade of rifleman.
But reality spoke quite differently.
Any one moment in time, only about one American in one thousand (that's about 150,000 people) were actually up in the combat lines, fighting, as MOS 745s.
A few more were in the pipeline waiting their turn, while the vast bulk of America was - in the most profound sense - merely holding the rifleman's cloak.
Nobody much , in reality, actually wanted to be a real life rifleman or minuteman in good old WWII.
Dressing up and playing a Minuteman was lots of fun
As a result, the few MOS 745s America could obtain were almost all conscripts : generally those who were the poorest in life skills and formal education and often (a real shocker !) smaller and thinner than the non-combat boys in the rear echelons of the war.
This is why so much of the Allied debate over wartime penicillin involved these MOS 745s : they were so very few in number.
And so if the one-in-a-thousand American who was a MOS 745 was out of combat-readiness only temporarily because of something that penicillin could quickly fix, then the other 999 out of a 1000 Americans who weren't riflemen and didn't want to be riflemen, were much in favour of giving him scarce penicillin.
That was much better than "wasting it" (to use Winston Churchill's own infamous words) on some gravely wounded MOS 475 who was never was going to be able to fight again - even if he did survive his infection.
They call that rational instrumentality, and it was the hallmark of the Age of Modernity :' use 'em and then toss 'em aside like a used condom, the minute they are of no further use to you'.
Pretty sickening isn't , what granddad and grandma were up to (morally speaking) back between 1939 and 1945: doesn't it make you want to just go off somewhere and wash your hands till they bleed with some good strong soap ?
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Politics as the authoritative "prioritizing" of values
 |
| A Canadian (but not Canada) morally defines wartime penicillin |
That consensus says that "prices" are used to come to an informal economic agreement as to the allocating of scarce resources between alternative uses.
But politics authoritatively allocates (rations/triages) scarce resources between alternative uses.
Politics does formally what economics does informally : it passes a laws that directs that the allocating will be done by fiat and force, if need be.
But this consensus explanation merely says how the two different forms of allocation will be done.
(Either by voluntary agreement as to how one chooses to spend one's own money, or by resources being allocated at the point of a government gun if need be.)
If does not say why the government has made its allocation decisions it has made.
(We already know that Economics has made its bargains based on the differing economic values the various differing players assign to various differing goods and services.)
So normally, the consensus view has to add that politics has made its decisions and bargains based on values.
This hardly settles much : I believe it needs to be said that the political values in question are ALL moral values - albeit often expressed in terms of economic values.
And it almost goes without saying that in the political bargaining process, various bodies of political players place differing weight on different moral values and that these bodies of political players have quite different political bargaining power.
Some are large in number but have little wealth, valuable skills or organizing cohesion.
Others are very small in number, but are very wealthy, articulate, skilled in influencing governments/public opinion, and are very united in their position vis vis certain valued vales.
Most bodies of political voters fall somewhere in the middle of these positions and in fact their political bargaining strength varies widely over time and over various issues.
In addition, all these bodies agree - albeit reluctantly - they they need the others, if society and the economy are going to keep on working : thus their bargaining positions are not absolute but will settle - if need be - for half a loaf.
This is why I say the real hard bargaining in politics occurs over the priority we as collections of political bodies give to different moral values.
Politics is always and only about winning over 'Hearts and Minds'.
And in an earlier post, I suggested why such hard political bargaining gets more - not less - intense during times of Total War.
So, to recap that earlier blog post, some of us value very highly the giving of scarce penicillin to paratroopers with a case of the Clap, so they can go back 'on strength' in two days and possibly die in the next big battle, so our own son won't have to be 'called up' in their place.
Others of us feel that a severely wounded and infected soldier who has already fought bravely in battle is more worthy of the scarce penicillin than some paratrooper deliberately cheating on his wife without a condom in some Naples brothel, hoping thus to avoid dying in an upcoming battle by being in hospital for two months with the traditional VD treatment.
We value this severely wounded hero's contribution greatly and admit we had made a tacit bargain with him to say we stay-at-homes would give him the best possible medical care if he should be wounded while defending us stay-at-homes somewhere overseas.
So we feel we must honour that bargain, despite the fact that even if our severely wounded hero is cured of his infection and lives, he will be quickly released from the army and given a small pension for life (paid for by us staying safely at home), as he will remain too permanently injured to be a good soldier or even a good factory worker.
This in a nutshell and without a lick of exaggeration , was the moral values that the Allied world debated over in the summer of 1943 - at first, solely among the well-to-do fat old men running the war and then later - post Baby Patricia - among the entire Allied population.
As the moral value of wartime penicillin went, so went Modernity - and post Modernity
In the end, it was Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft, Rudy Schullinger and Dante Colitti 's chivalrous values that were prioritized, not the modern values of Winston Churchill, Howard Florey, Alfred Richards and Lewis Weeds.
And in doing so, our world quietly slipped out of the Age of Modernity and into the post Modernity Age....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
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...