Penicillin the life-saving antibiotic ( Penicillin-the-systemic) was more of a threat than an opportunity to Alexander Fleming's main activity, which was making money from dodgy vaccines not making new science , which is why he always preferred to promote penicillin (weakly) as an antiseptic and (strongly) as an aid to vaccine production.
He did consciously (briefly) study penicillin as a possible systemic life saver and threat to replace his profitable vaccine business, but I argue that subconsciously, his heart really wasn't into a through attempt to make penicillin work as a systemic.
Fleming hardly had a personal lab , because he was hardly ever there : spending his days running a large medical business , just as his other brothers did.
His brothers' eye glass business is more a model to his behavior than the Lives of the Saints, despite the best efforts of the Jim-Savile loving British Establishment to turn Fleming into a saint.
Fleming's saving grace was that he carefully saved and stored his accidental penicillin visitor (as well as investigating it to a certain extent and published that work) giving it out freely to all who asked.
Because some who asked for his unique fungus, had more of a heart of the dying and for systemic medicines than Fleming and they brought it into general use as the world's best known, best loved, medication - ever.
If his attitude had been more like the evil (I use the word carefully) penicillin czar Dr Richards in the USA, penicillin would have died on the vine : so we still have a lot to thank him for....
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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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