PEN ,"G" Floor, Oct 16 1940

PEN ,"G" Floor, Oct 16 1940

The very first natural systemic penicillin ever made came out of  a small lab in the Physicians & Surgeons Medical School (P & S) Building of Columbia University in Upper Harlem, New York.

In just five weeks, start to finish, it was ready to be injected by team leader Dr Martin Henry Dawson into a young man named Charlie Aronson on October 16 1940.

It was the first ever day of America's peacetime Selective Service (a system still with us 75 years later).

A day for America to separate (and celebrate) its 1A men and to dismiss and ignore its 4F men - like Charlie.

 For Dawson, it was 25 years to the day when the news of the execution of nurse Edith Cavell first reached North America - 25 years to the day when he, along with tens of thousands of others world wide, resolved to join up to fight the wicked Huns who killed Cavell.

In Dawson's case, he first joined up as a medical orderly - so today marked his 25th year in the world of medicine.

Despite Charlie being diagnosed with a then invariably fatal disease called SBE , the semi-purified penicillin didn't seem to hurt Charlie at all.

Instead - and unexpectedly - he survived and became the presumably   ever-grateful PATIENT ONE of the Antibiotics Revolution.

The penicillin for the very first life-saving use of the 75 year old gold standard of antibiotics (injectable penicillin) was labelled PEN "G".

This was not because "G" stands for G-old Standard, or because the original penicillin was a G-olden Yellow in color or because "G" denotes Benzyl (injectable) Penicillin or because some drug company thought PEN "G" would make a catchy brand name for the horsey set.

All these things are true - completely true --- but they are all pretty latecomers to this particular party.

That very first life-saving penicillin was called PEN "G" for one very simple reason: the labs of Dr Dawson and his co-workers on his tiny team ( Karl Meyer ,Gladys Hobby and Eleanor Chaffee) were on Floor"G" of that building.

Their doubting colleagues at P&S Columbia regarded this 'pen.. (what ever) stuff' as something pretty crackpotty ; something being brewed up by that free spirit Dawson and his motley crew back in the remote North West corner of Floor "G" .

Being the first ever in the world - hell in the entire universe - to use systemic natural penicillin to save lives gives Dawson's team bragging rights to call their homebrew penicillin whatever they wanted to:

Their brew was penicillin  from "G" Floor  of  P & S : and hence familiarly know as PEN "G" , for short...