The Florey Archives at London's Royal Society has a Florey letter (HF/1/3/2/1/19 )(previously 98HF.35.1.19) that didn't get shredded but probably was intended to be.
Dated December 4th 1941, it is addressed to Doctor "Cameron" at "Porton" and mentions scientists "Courtice" and "Gaddum".
Florey says ICI penicillin is at Porton and he is glad that Gaddum wants lots and lots of penicillin.
In December 1941, no one had much penicillin - certainly no patients in UK got any - and only Dawson's patients in the USA.
This must be some of the very first ICI penicillin ever produced - not for patients - but for 'Porton' .
One of Florey's very closest of his (very few) friends was Paul Fildes, very near the top of Britain's WWII Germ Warfare effort, which was centred at Porton Down.
That place has been for a century Britain's leading gas and germ warfare centre - in fact one of the top centres in the world for this highly secret activity.
Florey's first biographer, Bickel, indicated that in 1939, Florey had been asked by the War Office if he would be a consultant in 'poison gas research' (probably because of his proven skill in doing lethal experiments on small animals and his middle-aged chickenhawk attitude to the upcoming war.)
Florey had agreed.
I have always wonder if Florey's mystery month , mid July-mid August 1941, was somehow connected with him having informal talks on germ and gas warfare with various American researchers.
Certainly, Florey go top clearance for his trip to America from US and British officials - penicillin ,alone, seemed too unproven to warrant this kind of assistance.
Now Penicillin and Porton is like Jeckyll and Hyde to British audiences - no wonder this letter has never been mentioned in all the hagiography on penicillin and Florey.....
GR - Gordon Roy- Cameron *
FC -Frederick Colin- Courtice *
JH -John Henry- Gaddum
* Part of Florey's power was his cultivation of a network among the sizable Aussie contingent working in the UK - these two are but a tiny part of this group. Florey also cultivated ex pat britons who had taught in Australia.
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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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