Sometimes people ask me if I think Henry Dawson should have gotten a Nobel Prize for his successful pushing of the wartime mass production of natural penicillin.
As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to
Howard Florey (and
Ernst Chain and
Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.
(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)
I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.
Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.
The UK was depressed after winning a war but then being forced to see massive amounts of Manhattan Natural penicillin liberally used by American diplomats to save the lives of countless people in Neutral and Liberated countries overseas.
Because, at the time, Britain (the discoverer but not the developer of penicillin) didn't really have enough penicillin for its own Commonwealth troops - let alone to give to British civilians at home or for foreigners abroad.
Churchill's moral failure over penicillin
This was solely a
moral failure - not a technical failure - of the Churchill-led government.
Because America had just as many Big Pharma firms , scientists and government bureaucrats as the UK equally convinced that it was better (a) to wait for synthetic penicillin and (b) to restrict production to immediate military use only.
And both nations basically had access to the same advanced level of penicillin technology or could easily afford to license it - if they choose.
But fortunately for wartime humanity , a few - a very few - American firms, scientists and bureaucrats felt differently from the majority of their Allied comrades.
Thanks to Henry Dawson's constant prodding , the top man at both the New Dealerish WPB (
War Production Board) and
Pfizer saw the need for the production of enough penicillin - now ! - to heal all those in a world at war who were dying for lack of it.
As Pfizer's natural penicillin took off on countless overseas mercy missions it slowly but surely produced a new Pax Americana that gradually drove out the century old Pax Britannica.
All the global goodwill towards Britain built up while The Few held off the Nazi bombers alone was thus lost in an diplomatic instant.
All because Churchill's government was unwilling to see any more badly needed penicillin plants built -- not if it meant even as few as one less heavy bomber squadron was commissioned.
Penicillin was a total disaster for the British Tories - it might have even cost them the 1945 General Election - but it was also a disaster solely of their own making ...
