Good things happen when you quit the shilly-shalling and "do the clinical" - ie 'stick the needle in and see what happens'.
I have said before that it was in October 1940 - the same month that Martin Henry Dawson jabbed the very first needle of antibiotics in a patient - that the American Drug Companies and the American medico-scientific establishment (NAS-NRC) finally woke up and started smelling the coffee on penicillin.
Example ?
That very month, Squibb asked for a sample of Fleming's penicillin mold from the culture collection in Peoria.
They did the smartest thing that Squibb ever did in the entire Penicillin Saga - they threw the chemists out of the building and let the mycologists get down and into it.
Don't you wish all the other labs had done ditto?
Alexander Fleming, unfortunately, seemed to really hate mycologists - and he rarely - in public anyway - disliked anyone
Thankfully, the result was a much improved strain from Fleming's original and it was eventually called NRRL 1249. (January 1942)
All praise to Dr Geoffrey Rake and his co-workers at Squibb who never get any thanks for giving us life-saving penicillin in time for D-Day.
Instead the big losers in the penicillin affair, the chemists, have written all the official histories, blowing smoke rings so we won't see how they failed to deliver on their promises.
Other claims to the contrary,history is usually written by the losers - at least "the losers with l'argent..." *
Mycologists take a bow : thanks to you , it was natural NRRL 1249 and its offspring , 1249.B21, (December 1942) that delivered most of the penicillin produced in World War II.
The chemists just delivered papers and articles instead....
* Canadian-anglophone-only joke --- Yanks and Brits/Anzacs etc can safely ignore it
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Why My Urgency ?
- Michael Marshall
- Nova Scotia
- Histories of WWII all start with the presumption that it was a war raged between humans and human ideologies, with Nature’s climate and geography as side issues easily surmounted.My blog, on the contrary will only accept that it was conflict between humans and their ideology that STARTED the war but that it was the barriers thrown up by Mother Nature (geography & climate) that turned it into a war that lasted between 6 to 15 years and expanded to thoroughly involve all the world’s oceans and continents. High Modernity may have started the war convinced that Nature had been conquered and was about to be soon replaced by human Synthetic Autarky and that only human Tiger tanks and human Typhoon planes were to be feared. But by the end, more and more people had lost their naive faith in Scientism and were beginning to accept that humanity was thoroughly entangled with both the Nature of plants, animals & microbes as well as the Nature of so called “lesser” humanity. By 1965, the world was definitely entering the Age of Entanglement. Billions still believed - at least in part -with the promises of High Modernity but intellectually & emotionally, it was no longer dominant...
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