In the darkest weeks of the war, a quixotic project is launched in Manhattan, directed not against the wars' bullies, but against its bystanders...

On Saturday September 7th seventy five years ago, church bells rang out all over Eastern England, signalling both the start of both the softening-up Blitz and the expected Nazi sea invasion of Britain.

It was a bit of a false alarm, but everybody in the know realized that the invasion would have to begin in the next few weeks, before the start of the annual (and terrible) English Channel storms of late September.

With the expected fall of the aircraft carrier Britain, now all alone against the might of a loose coalition of Germany, Russia, Italy and Japan, these remain the darkest two weeks of the entire war for the cause of freedom and peace.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson had spent time, during his military service in WWI, hiking along the very short route the German tanks would take from Kent's sandy beaches to the southern suburbs of London.

He knew how it could be all over in a day or two's fighting.

Dawson was now too old to be effective at the fighting end of this war but his fighting spirit still hadn't left him.

Bu what on earth could a middle aged top notch medical researcher, albeit in the non-military area of chronic arthritis, actually do now to help the cause ?


As it happened, he had arrived back at his medical school the previous week to discover that the start of the new school year would see a shift out of resources for social medicine - helping the small and the weak 4Fs - to war medicine, to aiding the 1A military recruits.

It all was really just an excuse by those who had always opposed helping the needy of the small occupied countries of war torn Europe, to use 'war preparation' to also cut aid to America's needy.

Dawson was so worked up by both this homegrown hypocrisy and the evil efforts of Hitler abroad, that as often happens in cases of severe stress, he apparently made himself ill with an auto immune disease, then then usually fatal Myasthenia Gravis.

Dawson wasn't to realize this for a few more months. For now all he felt was very wan and very tired, which he put down to worry and lack of a good night's rest.

As it just happened, a German-born Jewish biochemist, Dr Karl Meyer, who Dawson was currently doing research with on the flesh eating powers of strep bacteria, had just proposed that Dawson help his efforts to synthesize an improved artificial version of a natural fungus mold extract.

Synthesizing this valuable medicine would be Meyer's contribution to the war effort.

Meyer wanted Dawson to grow industrial pilot plant levels (runs of 50 US gallons a time of liquid extract) of the fungus and by then test both the older natural and new artificial chemical to compare their anti-germ activity.

Dawson was very good at growing lab research levels of strep bacteria but regularly producing pilot plant levels of a common household mold inside a cleanliness-obsessed hospital was entire scientific and engineering universes away from his normal area of expertise !

But over the weekend, Dawson seemed to have read deeply into what little was known about this stuff, penicillin.

He saw that the natural penicillin already possessed an unique trio of characteristics that might allow him to finally conquer the Mount Everest of infectious diseases, SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis, the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of school age children.

Again, SBE was worlds away from his area of assigned expertise and in the protocol rigid confines of a world class hospital and medical school, filled with highly ambitious alpha male researchers, that really mattered.

Dawson had never shown any visible signs of interest in SBE, as a disease, to judge from the published records of him in journals and the minutes of medical conferences.

But the expected non-treatment of wartime SBEs, as a symbol of all that was wrong with the war against social medicine, their fate suddenly interested him muchly.

SBEs were seen as extremely costly in terms of hospital resources by those in the medical community long opposed to any form of social medicine and in a wartime resource crunch they were already arguing the SBEs should simply be abandoned to their dire fate.

It didn't help that, unlike Polio that mostly hit the white suburbs, Rheumatic Fever and SBE were mostly diseases of inner city kids - minorities, the poor, immigrants.

Dawson's brainwave was to put the biologically small (the penicillium) to work to save the lives of the human small down at the very bottom of the current human pecking order (the SBE patients).

His real target, beyond saving the lives of a handful of SBEs (all that was likely to come his way to treat) was people of good will and high morality, who were nevertheless sitting on their hands during the current moral crisis in Europe.

Traditional appeals to our moral obligation to help the weak and the small, the sort that had drawn in Dawson himself in WWI to help the suffering little Belgians, were clearly no longer working and hadn't worked since 1931 when the Japanese invaded Manchuria.

People of good will still sighed and worried as much as ever over the fate of the small suffering overseas.

But they did nothing - became mere bystanders, watching Axis bullies beat up the hapless.

Almost all felt hopeless to intervene, given the scant scientific understanding they had gained a half century earlier in public school.

Back then it seemed clear that Progress was directly aimed at evolving into the biggest, the strongest, might is right, bigger is better, God and Evolution is on the side of the biggest battalions etc.

One could wish it was different but the sad fate of the small is inevitable - it was natural.

But to Dawson, this "Appeal to Nature" fallacy was never more false.

Life is on the side of the small battalions

The current evidence, circa 1940, actually shown that the progress of both the Universe and the Earth was generally oriented, if oriented they be, to the small and the non-solid.

If he could but show the bystanders of good will that their outdated scientific understanding was totally wrong, that the small in biology and humanity still had useful roles to play, then perhaps the Bystanders' traditional feelings of empathy and charity could flow freely once again.

Of course, Dawson wanted to save all the lives he could, in the war zones and among the SBEs.

But I believe he was certain that his all-out efforts to save the SBEs, in a time of war priorities, would ultimately rouse such fierce opposition that there then would be a very public and heated debate over the true war aims of the Allies.

One set of war aims, Churchill's throughout the war, was to almost match the Nazis on a slippery moral slope ever downwards in order to 'quickly' defeat them, because this need for a speedy end justified using almost any means.

This approach focused on a military route to defeating Hitler, without altering in anyway the existing social system in the West.

The other - FDR's initially, though he later adopted Churchill's approach - was to defeat Hitler morally as well as militarily.

FDR and his team of advisors publicly proposed a new set of rules for humanity to live by (the Four Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter) that contrasted much more strongly with Hitler's ideology than did the existing practises of the western nations.

This second approach was exactly what Dawson was aiming at -- though he felt it had to move beyond high sounding rhetoric to real life practise.

For, despite FDR's soaring rhetoric of 1940-1941, the American medical elite's attitude to the SBEs in 1942-1945 was actually a slightly milder variant of Hitler's Aktion T4 : only here their death was to be by neglect, rather than death by needle or gas.

Thanks to Dawson, around the September 1943 very public life and death of young SBE Marie Barker of Chicago, the ordinary people of the western world finally had that serious conversation over the Allies' true war aims.....

Despite Eric Lax, Howard Florey is still "Box Office Poison" to women readers

And as every book editor well knows , most readers of narrative fiction/non-fiction  are women.

But in the Lax take on the wartime penicillin saga, the hero offered up is a man who leaves his deaf middle class wife to ride around on her bike in the rain collecting urine from penicillin patients while he 'has it off' with his aristocratic mistress in the luxurious bath and bedroom suite he had at his office in (never-Blitzed) Oxford England .

And this at a time when millions of Britons in the rest of the UK were being bombed out their homes by the Blitz and (barely) living in makeshift shelters.

Charming, really charming !

Just of the sort of hero women readers want to cuddle up to - Not.

The character - or lack of it - of Howard Florey  is what made Eric Lax's recent biography such a flop among ordinary readers.

So, despite the fact that a survey of thousands of American women found they considered penicillin the most important news story of the entire 20th century , we still have never had a successful popular book or movie about the dramatic wartime history of penicillin.

What is missing in all past efforts is a focus on the one classical hero in the whole saga : the dying Dr Dawson and his unrelenting efforts to make penicillin inclusive not exclusive.

That and a too trusting reliance by previous writers upon the official histories rather than digging deeper into the primary records.

Because the people in Washington and London who wrote the official histories determined, above all, to cover up their very expensive and very time-wasting wartime flop : the synthetic penicillin project led by Florey and George Merck and paid for mostly by the taxpayers - as always.

So they tried to pretend that the stone these builders rejected had really been their idea all along. With Dawson prematurely dead at war's end and unable to set the record straight , it was - literally - dead simple.

Women, around the world , will buy a popular history about wartime penicillin by the tens of millions of copies - with the right set of heroes and villains laid out before them.

"The smallest Manhattan Project : the unexpected triumph of inclusive penicillin" will do just that .....

"The Blitz dog ate my homework" and other tired penicillin-related excuses from UK historians

David Edgerton excepted of course -- he hasn't really written on Britain's deliberately pathetic production of penicillin during the war years but he is unlikely to blame it on the Warfare State's "abject poverty" and "The Blitz".

Let's look at "The Blitz" first.

The German bombing of Britain went on for six years, went on all over Britain,  killed 60,000, wounded hundreds of thousands, damaged or destroyed hundreds of thousands of buildings but in all this, actually varied greatly in its specific intensity in time, geography and effort.

The actual Blitz, from September 1940 to May 1941, was in all three senses, intense : it went on steadily for nine months and involved the bulk of the German Air Force, and ranged widely over all of Great Britain.

But until the V-1 and V-2 attacks over south east England from June 1944 till the end of the war in May 1945, subsequent raids (ie from May 1941 till  June 1944, also the critical period for developing wartime penicillin) were very much smaller in intensity by number of bombers and tons of bombs.

Most consisted of  'tip and run' raids made by single fighter bombers coming in under the radar and bombing ports on the south coast of England.

A commenter on a blog said it perhaps best when he frankly admitted,that while yes he was a kid in Glasgow during the war,  he actually didn't really remember the Glasgow Blitz , because it only happened once and it happened many miles away in a working class/industrial part of that large city.

A child in Belfast might have had the same reaction - it had one big heavy raid on one part of the city, albeit with an extraordinary number of casualties because no one really expected the Germans to bother Northern Ireland.

And Oxford was never bombed.

Though it was basically an outer suburb of metropolitan London (and so very close to German airbases in France), with a large car industry and so surely should have been a suitable target on two counts.

Bombing Britain into defeat was really going to be virtually impossible - like Germany and America it simply had too many alternative metropolitan industrial centres, many with large port facilities, and all well connected to each other by an extensive road and rail network.

Thus the very determined effort to squash the huge port of  Liverpool into dust was a wasted German effort : Greenock, Cardiff and Belfast , to name but a few west coast ports in Britain , would have quickly taken up the slack in the receiving of vital convoys from North America.

A pre-war decision to build a number of duplicate shadow assembly plants a maximum distance of about a half hour rail, canal or truck trip from the original centre of a critical war industry helped a lot to reduce the impact of even a direct hit on that vital British 'choke point'.

The Germans knew precisely where all the pre-1939 vital factories were and often hit and badly damaged them - but the shadow plants near by were unknown to them and took up the slack.

In addition , ensuring that sub contractors were neither right next to the original plant nor 500 kilometres away but within that convenient half hour circle of travel led to a virtually bomb-proof but economical dispersal of vital war industries.

The chances of anything, anything but a twenty megaton thermo-nuclear bomb, destroying such a sprawling industrial metropolitan area a hundred kilometres by a hundred kilometres square rendered such British efforts Blitz-proof.

The Germans duplicated these dispersement efforts equally successfully, if much too late in the game --- by pointed contrast the Russians and Americans kept with single huge production 'n' assembly plants : but at inland sites they felt safe from WWII's longest ranging bombers.

ICBMs and nuclear bombs rendered all that moot : goodbye Kansas City as a safe place to build bombers in WWIII.

True, the massive size and complexity of shipyards capable of building battleships and aircraft carriers are not so easily moved about and in addition were so expensive that they could only be a few in number --- even for super-rich nations like America.

But when the non-shipbuilding nation of Canada decided to quickly build a whole lot of ships and yet be safe from any bombing raid, it did so by going down-market in technological complexity.

It beat the Germans (and any possible bombing raids) by focusing instead on building very large numbers of a few very simple merchant ship and escort vessel types.

Thus they could be built at any of about five dozen new shipyards all over Canada --- even in Thunder Bay, a few thousand kilometres from the open sea: redundancy safety plus !

The Russians would understand that sort of thinking --- lots of simple weapons win wars just as well as a few ,very sophisticated, weapons do.

My point is that the Blitz, even if it had gotten much worse, could only be an moderate not fundamental restraint on British war efforts.

Britain during WII was a heavily industrialized nation with the vastest empire even seen to supply the raw resources and manpower to back up that industrial power.

If civilian paper was in short supply during the war (and it definitely was), it wasn't because Britain was poor -- it was because all of its pre-war paper supply was still coming in, but was now diverted to supplying all the bumpf an officious war nation's government could churn out !

Britain was a rich enough nation during WWII to divert the cost of building and maintaining of just one extra squadron of Lancaster bombers to the building instead of several more bottle penicillin plants in early 1943 --- but deliberately chose not to.

If one of the Four Freedoms that Churchill's Conservative party was forced to pretend to publicly accept included the freedom from want of life-saving drugs , a point hit home in the Fall of 1942 by the Beveridge Report, his party chose to deny it in practise.

With existing sulfa drugs failing by the minute (due to bacterial resistance) and with a scientific consensus building by the Fall of 1942 that new anti-bacteria sulfas were unlikely to come along, penicillin was becoming the only , the only , hope for civilians or servicemen dying of blood poisoning.

Surely the most vital of all possible freedoms is the freedom from premature death, but the Churchill government cocked its nose at Beveridge and said 'only enough resources will be diverted from bombers to save just our servicemen with bottle penicillin'.

A-Ha, says the UK historian, says he : a-ha !

Bottle penicillin - we had that and the Yanks had deep tank penicillin - that is why we couldn't match the rich, Blitz-less Americans in penicillin production.

Awkward facts intrude - the British did build a pilot deep tank design very early on  - with the Americans also willing to license their deep tank technology at firesale prices - but it was Churchill's Conservative minister in charge of the all-powerful MoS, the Ministry of Supply (to the army), that said no.

And deep tank efforts hardly explain the very much better penicillin records of both Canada and Australia - because these two nations, definitely not scientific or industrial powers in the early 1940s, also used only bottle plants and yet did far better in penicillin production than Britain, per capita.

(In population Britain was about 1/3 the GDP and population of America and about about 7x the GDP and population of Australia and 5x the population and GDP of Canada.)

True, that on one hand these Dominions weren't Blitzed like the British.

But on the other hand they had hardly gained their current wealth from homegrown science or industry, unlike Britain.

I count their wartime technical and financial difficulties in producing bottle penicillin as about equal to that of the UK.

What was really lacking in the whole penicillin shortfall crisis, was the moral will to correct it among the one nation in the four led by a Conservative party during WWII.

So, in mid 1945, the UK was producing 30 billion units of penicillin a month, Australia 10 billion, Canada 20 billion and America 600 billion.

To match the Australians per capita, the UK should of been producing 70 billion units a month, to match Canada a 100 billion units and America 200 billion units.

In addition, Britain had not permitted its many colonies to start their own penicillin plants, so the actual shortfall in its ability to save the lives of its civilians and soldiers from the UK and all its colonies was much much bigger than even this stark contrast in effort among the Allies.

By 1946, the penicillin shortfall crisis in Britain was over and it was producing more than enough penicillin for everyone at home and in the colonies and was eager to start exporting to foreign lands.

But that was way too late for Churchill's Conservative party who had been fragged-in-the-back by voter concern over unequal access to necessary medical care and voted for Labour in the July 1945 General Election.

Hitler couldn't defeat Churchill but penicillin (the unequal lack of access to it)  had ...