Patents and profits (but not patients) need pure penicillin.
Patients and people never ever need to see life-sustaining vitamins, minerals, nutrients, medicines as 100% pure.
Consider that when we eat a big apple, if we are lucky its 100 grams will yield up 10 mg of pure Vitamin C, but the body will have no problem using that one part in ten thousand out of all the mushed apple and acid inside our stomachs.
Similarly when Dr Vincent Duhig injected penicillium liquids straight into his patients' blood stream, the pure penicillin went straight to work killing their life-threatening infection, untroubled it was only a few parts per million of those penicillium liquids.
But biochemists in the 1940s attempting to determine the structure of a biological molecule had only crude tools and they needed both basically pure biological materials and lots of them for it to be destroyed by their brute force techniques.
One can not describe the moral disaster this caused the whole wartime penicillin situation better than the fact that in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was the world's biggest producing of penicillin and yet no one drop went into a patient's bloodstream to save their life.
All that wonderful mass of Glaxo penicillin was destroyed by their biochemists trying (but failing) to make fat profits for Glaxo, in the middle of a total war, by synthesizing patentable penicillin.
And that meant the whole lot being destroyed in destructive analysis efforts.
Dawson (unwillingly) and Florey (willingly) had to ride our two horses and divide their raw penicillium juice two ways - at best or worst, that meant one half to the biochemists and one half to the patients.
On record are single destructive analysis experiments of 1.5 million pure units of penicillin - probably extracted (over and over and over, to up its purity) from ten million units (or more) of the raw stuff.
That raw penicillium juice would have saved hundreds of non-SBE type patients by Duhig's methods , and a handful of SBE patients by Dawson's methods.
Patients died by the millions worldwide, needlessly, during the twenty year multi-nation rush to produce patentable, profitable, pure synthetic penicillin - of course I (and Dr Dawson) are still morally outraged.
I'd hope I'd have said, let save lives - now ! - with the crude natural stuff and if and when Big Pharma makes it cheaper, better and easier via patented synthetic methods then I'll switch in a Manhattan Moment, but not until then...
Showing posts with label penicillin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label penicillin. Show all posts
Monday, September 28, 2015
Watching THE THIRD MAN as a small child
I actually think I was thirteen going on fourteen when I first saw THE THIRD MAN, as part of Halifax CJCH-TV's nightly series of movies in the early evening.
I had read plenty of media account of the horrors of the Holocaust by then but hadn't really see anything cinematic about it, nothing to hit me really hard emotionally.
But THE THIRD MAN, centred on the morality of mis-used penicillin, did indeed hit me really hard.
No wonder, for it was a film that remains (65 years later) on many critics' lists of the top ten movies of all time.
As a small child, I had always found the events of WWII and the ten years thereafter very exciting and had always regretted never been being there mentally at firsthand (I was born in late 1951).
And in particular, I became an aware young person too late in the antibiotics revolution to be able to imagine the intense impact of this first miracle medicine upon human thought.
But the events in this film set in postwar Vienna changed all that : I could now feel, in my bones, for the first time how it was for people of that period.
How, for moviegoers back then, the ultimate good must be in providing penicillin to dying little ones and so the ultimate evil was not yet Auschwitz but rather those who would deny lifesaving penicillin to dying little ones.
I think the emotional wallop of that old B&W movie set my current penicillin project in motion --- only this time substituting Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, Newton Richards and Winston Churchill for Harry Lime in the denying penicillin to dying children department ....
I had read plenty of media account of the horrors of the Holocaust by then but hadn't really see anything cinematic about it, nothing to hit me really hard emotionally.
But THE THIRD MAN, centred on the morality of mis-used penicillin, did indeed hit me really hard.
No wonder, for it was a film that remains (65 years later) on many critics' lists of the top ten movies of all time.
As a small child, I had always found the events of WWII and the ten years thereafter very exciting and had always regretted never been being there mentally at firsthand (I was born in late 1951).
And in particular, I became an aware young person too late in the antibiotics revolution to be able to imagine the intense impact of this first miracle medicine upon human thought.
But the events in this film set in postwar Vienna changed all that : I could now feel, in my bones, for the first time how it was for people of that period.
How, for moviegoers back then, the ultimate good must be in providing penicillin to dying little ones and so the ultimate evil was not yet Auschwitz but rather those who would deny lifesaving penicillin to dying little ones.
I think the emotional wallop of that old B&W movie set my current penicillin project in motion --- only this time substituting Alexander Fleming, Howard Florey, Newton Richards and Winston Churchill for Harry Lime in the denying penicillin to dying children department ....
Fundamentally, Henry Dawson did it all for 'the little ones'
Henry Dawson's other Manhattan Project wasn't really to advance the cause of penicillin, to aid the Allied military effort or even to save the SBEs : rather he did it all for 'the little ones', to persuade Humanity to build a "Big Tent" that included everyone.
For with rare exceptions (perhaps the early days of the Communist revolutions in some countries) a Big Tent doesn't need to invite the big and the powerful inside - for they are already there.
Instead a Big Tent always newly invites in the small, the weak, those traditionally judged unworthy and unfit.
Their ideas, emotions, fears, feelings, efforts are now considered to be as worthy as those of any other --- and worthy to be judged for their suitability to the collective task at hand.
Dawson felt his earlier scientific studies had revealed that a Big Tent approach (aka a tolerance for 'unfit' mutations and a global HGT system) had helped keep the microbes alive for four billion years.
Now it might just do the same for humanity : help keep human civilization alive for another four thousand years, if only given a chance to prove itself.
From tiny beginnings, his Big Tent Penicillin, produced by an unlikely 'coalition of all the talents' and given freely to all in need in a war-torn world, has since indirectly benefited ten billion of us (and counting) since 1940.
All through a form of herd immunity to formerly endemic deadly infectious diseases.
In doing so, I think he has successfully scaled up (and proven up) that this Big Tent concept also works for humanity !
For with rare exceptions (perhaps the early days of the Communist revolutions in some countries) a Big Tent doesn't need to invite the big and the powerful inside - for they are already there.
Instead a Big Tent always newly invites in the small, the weak, those traditionally judged unworthy and unfit.
Their ideas, emotions, fears, feelings, efforts are now considered to be as worthy as those of any other --- and worthy to be judged for their suitability to the collective task at hand.
Dawson felt his earlier scientific studies had revealed that a Big Tent approach (aka a tolerance for 'unfit' mutations and a global HGT system) had helped keep the microbes alive for four billion years.
Now it might just do the same for humanity : help keep human civilization alive for another four thousand years, if only given a chance to prove itself.
From tiny beginnings, his Big Tent Penicillin, produced by an unlikely 'coalition of all the talents' and given freely to all in need in a war-torn world, has since indirectly benefited ten billion of us (and counting) since 1940.
All through a form of herd immunity to formerly endemic deadly infectious diseases.
In doing so, I think he has successfully scaled up (and proven up) that this Big Tent concept also works for humanity !
Friday, September 25, 2015
What if sci fi pioneer George Pal had completed his proposed film on Penicillin ?
George Pal's pioneering sci fi films tended to exalt Big Science - so I have to wonder how he would have dealt with the classic example of small science - the DIY, tabletop,homegrown, artisan making of primitive penicillin.
For after all, this was the bigger and (dramatically as well as morally) better half of the wartime penicillin drama.
The side of the race to produce wartime penicillin that actually beat the long odds and won...
For after all, this was the bigger and (dramatically as well as morally) better half of the wartime penicillin drama.
The side of the race to produce wartime penicillin that actually beat the long odds and won...
Tuesday, September 22, 2015
Dr Dawson's project was a deliberate poetically inchoate protest
Dr Martin Henry Dawson clearly was not always a cautious person but he was always highly cautious in his public print and speech - a man more of concrete deeds than hollow words.
He didn't live into middle age, let alone live long enough to be safely retired (and with most of his senior colleagues safely dead) so he could at last write a rather frank account of the amazing events of forty years before.
One is left, therefore, to tease out for oneself what really lay behind Dawson's rather quixotic little alternative to the much bigger Manhattan Project.
And yet it may be all summed up right there - yes, there - did you not see it ? - there in that previous sentence.
Little versus Big.
It was an age, recall, of exalting all things Big - nothing more exciting for most people than to admire a new newspaper photo of a yet bigger or faster or heavier bridge, dam, warship, airplane, factory or what have you.
Big decisions (and total war decisions are always big decisions) were seen as best left to the Big people, in the Big Nations, who had the Big Corporations, the Big Universities and the Big Governments to best build the Big Factories needed to make the Big Machines that would win the war.
The rather better known Manhattan atomic Project is the perfect example, the example in spades.
But before the war, Dawson's entire career was all about exalting the small microbe's unexpectedly sophisticated abilities and all about exalting the worth of the much neglected institutionalized chronically ill.
So almost certainly in pointed contrast to the greater culture around him, Dawson's team was deliberately tiny,tiny,tiny.
Perhaps partly because he rightly feared the restraining strings that would come with any money, he never seemed to have sought out private foundation financial support, let alone government support.
(That kind of external 'institutional backstopping' would have meant his university and hospital would have had to match up with proper room for the cultured climate growing of 700 penicillium flasks.But then his school and hospital would also have the power to throttle his project at birth.)
Because he had not just one but two kinds of tenure, professor cum attending physician Dawson could remain small (but big enough to get the job done) while remaining fully independent.
But he could also make a subtle point - that great deeds could also come from the small, the poorly funded, the amateur, the DIY, the homemade and the artisan, the overlooked and the forgotten.
His team was only four (very busy) people in size - they alone grew the industrial pilot plant amounts of penicillium, extracted and semi-processed the penicillin, confirmed its potency and then injected it into Dawson's patients.
His proving up of this drug was a very far cry from the huge elaborate process, so dependent on the okays from many Big People, that even in 1940 shepherded a new drug from lab experiments into general clinical use.
And what a despicable drug too - the metabolical excrement from the much despised little fungoid growths so hated by everybody from Adolf Hitler to HP Lovecraft - a drug with a worldwide cultural taboo against it ever being injected into the holy temple of the human body.
Dawson's little team was about to inject this excrement from a little microbes into (wait for it !) some much despised little people - a Jew and a Black dying from SBE, a condition that was already on the Death Panel list of diseases to be denied scarce medicine in the event of a war.
Small,small,small -- tiny,tiny,tiny, tiny -- worthless,worthless,worthless -- dismissed,dismissed,dismissed.
It was as if Dawson lined up all the Big People and Big Institutions in the world, like they were puppies.
And then slowly and deliberately rubbed their noses in the tiny slimy worthlessness of his scheme....
He didn't live into middle age, let alone live long enough to be safely retired (and with most of his senior colleagues safely dead) so he could at last write a rather frank account of the amazing events of forty years before.
One is left, therefore, to tease out for oneself what really lay behind Dawson's rather quixotic little alternative to the much bigger Manhattan Project.
And yet it may be all summed up right there - yes, there - did you not see it ? - there in that previous sentence.
Little versus Big.
It was an age, recall, of exalting all things Big - nothing more exciting for most people than to admire a new newspaper photo of a yet bigger or faster or heavier bridge, dam, warship, airplane, factory or what have you.
Big decisions (and total war decisions are always big decisions) were seen as best left to the Big people, in the Big Nations, who had the Big Corporations, the Big Universities and the Big Governments to best build the Big Factories needed to make the Big Machines that would win the war.
The rather better known Manhattan atomic Project is the perfect example, the example in spades.
But before the war, Dawson's entire career was all about exalting the small microbe's unexpectedly sophisticated abilities and all about exalting the worth of the much neglected institutionalized chronically ill.
So almost certainly in pointed contrast to the greater culture around him, Dawson's team was deliberately tiny,tiny,tiny.
Perhaps partly because he rightly feared the restraining strings that would come with any money, he never seemed to have sought out private foundation financial support, let alone government support.
(That kind of external 'institutional backstopping' would have meant his university and hospital would have had to match up with proper room for the cultured climate growing of 700 penicillium flasks.But then his school and hospital would also have the power to throttle his project at birth.)
Because he had not just one but two kinds of tenure, professor cum attending physician Dawson could remain small (but big enough to get the job done) while remaining fully independent.
But he could also make a subtle point - that great deeds could also come from the small, the poorly funded, the amateur, the DIY, the homemade and the artisan, the overlooked and the forgotten.
"4Fs, Women and the Grace of God"
His team was only four (very busy) people in size - they alone grew the industrial pilot plant amounts of penicillium, extracted and semi-processed the penicillin, confirmed its potency and then injected it into Dawson's patients.
His proving up of this drug was a very far cry from the huge elaborate process, so dependent on the okays from many Big People, that even in 1940 shepherded a new drug from lab experiments into general clinical use.
And what a despicable drug too - the metabolical excrement from the much despised little fungoid growths so hated by everybody from Adolf Hitler to HP Lovecraft - a drug with a worldwide cultural taboo against it ever being injected into the holy temple of the human body.
Dawson's little team was about to inject this excrement from a little microbes into (wait for it !) some much despised little people - a Jew and a Black dying from SBE, a condition that was already on the Death Panel list of diseases to be denied scarce medicine in the event of a war.
Small,small,small -- tiny,tiny,tiny, tiny -- worthless,worthless,worthless -- dismissed,dismissed,dismissed.
It was as if Dawson lined up all the Big People and Big Institutions in the world, like they were puppies.
And then slowly and deliberately rubbed their noses in the tiny slimy worthlessness of his scheme....
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Obstetricians to post-Modernity : doctors Mengele & Dawson
In Robert Clyde Allen's "Speaking of Soap Opera", he quotes one study of Golden Age radio soap operas that found over one half of all adult males in the shows were medical doctors.
In medical science's own Golden Age, roughly one long generation from the mid 1870s to the mid 1960s (the era of Progress and Modernity), soap operas loved doctors because that single profession was freighted with all the expectations humanity had for its highest civilizations.
This fraternity, and this one alone, was expected to do the impossible : to bridge over the many contradictions inherent in the Modern concept of Progressive civilization.
On one hand, as laboratory medical scientists, they were expected to display an alpha-male sized commitment to "double blind randomized" rationality, objectivity and the pursuit of scientific progression regardless of what dark alleys it might lead humanity into.
On the other hand, as medical frontline clinicians, they were expected to act out a selflessness and empathy for the suffering of others at a level we had traditionally only expected from Saints.
Since double blind randomized objectivity and agape empathy are fundamentally opposed, the bridge was bound to fail, particularly in times of extreme stress.
Such as happened during WWII.
In 1939, Josef Mengele had earned both a PhD and a MD and had started his career as a scientific researcher in genetics.
The son of a wealthy industrialist, he had imbibed the best of German high culture since childhood.
So he greatly enjoyed playing the best of German classical music, a love of visual art and engaging in Nordic sports like skiing, as well as a drive to excel in science.
But then he was called up for wartime military service before the ambitious young scientist had done a large enough piece of research to earn his "Habilitation", the post-PhD certification required before he could be appointed to a prestigious academic research position.
Mengele worried he was not getting any younger as the war unexpectedly dragged on, but then fate intervened.
He was wounded, supposedly too bad an injury for further front line service, and got assigned to Auschwitz.
Most of the SS doctors there did the minimum required.
However, the intensely ambitious Mengele saw that if he ingratiated himself with the camp superiors by his high energy level and his total commitment to its racist brutality, he could then have free rein over any sets of twins among the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews shipped into Auschwitz to either be killed upon arrival or after a short period of brutally hard labour.
No previous student of twins science, a particular obsession with geneticists then as now, had been able to freely kill their subjects before.
This greatly expanded the invasiveness of the scientific questions that could be asked about twins.
What a splendid Habilitation Mengele could produce ! - his intellectual reputation made and a top research position secured --- this in a culture that put "Professor" above even General and only slightly below Fuhrer.
Mengele didn't stop with ingratiating himself with his SS bosses - he ntoably did the same with the young children twins in his study - until he cold-bloodedly disposed of them, like so much scientific rubbish left behind after a successful experiment.
Do anything, say anything, but get the badly-needed scientific evidence : the perpetually wonderful ends justify the short term pain of the means.
Medical scientists in Dawson's America were saying just this during the same period as Mengele was operating - but they always stopped short for directly murdering their charges as he did.
Slow quiet off-stage deaths by deliberate neglect was more their cuppa.
Not to say that Mengele wasn't a hypocrite, but somehow, his hypocrisy seemed at a lower level than their brand.
Nevertheless it was his hyped-up version of the then fully approved normal scientific mindset that has put Mengele (and not his American fellow colleagues in evil) into a very small community of celebrities that remain known all over the world with just a one word name : Beethoven, Hitler, Mengele, Bono, Elvis, Madonna.
Ego, ambition, fame, celebrity : it was these drives that lifted this rather typical example of SS member into the very top Parthenon of all time Evil.
By contrast, all these drives seemed lacking in Dr Henry Dawson.
Diffident, modest, caring, considerate instead.
But also quietly, determinately stubborn in seeing that the small and the overlooked got their propers.
In 1939, he was 15 years older than Mengele, already established as (and probably content to remain) a tenured middle level academic researcher and teaching hospital attending physician.
He had a good national (and even international reputation) in a tiny backwater of mid-century medical research : helping those chronically ill with arthritis.
If it was a backwater in peacetime, all the more in wartime.
A brave, decorated, twice wounded WWI military hero, he yearned to help fight Hitler but realistically what could a middle-aged man do in the frontlines of combat?
If not then in the sphere of military combat against the evil of Nazi values, then perhaps he could fight it in the moral sphere.
For Dawson saw that many medical researchers in the democratic West seemed to have drunk almost as much of the kool-aid of 'seeking scientific advance without moral restraints on the treatment of experiment subjects', as had scientists in Germany.
So Dawson decided to restore the dignity of the small and weak by deliberately contesting such values in America (and by implication in Germany as well).
He did so by (A) ignoring the scientific consensus and deliberately choosing to work with a much despised household pest, the primitive and small penicillium mold, rather than wait for commercial synthetic penicillin (which in fact never did come - not during the war or after.)
And rather than research the use of penicillium juice to cure unfaithful 1A servicemen of overseas-acquired VD, he sought instead to save the lives of a group of small and weak patients, the 4Fs of the 4Fs : working class youths dying of SBE, endocarditis caused by Rheumatic Fever.
The medical establishment were already writing off the poor SBEs as 'not a wartime priority' for scarce medical resources.
In fact, that elite was planning to keep all penicillin successes out of both the scientific and popular media, so it could be later unleashed as a secret military weapon of war, being produced (synthetically) in such small quantities that it could only aid the lightly wounded frontline Allied troops.
Dawson wanted primitive natural (un-patented) penicillin produced right now, in massive amounts, and given to anyone in a war-torn world who would have their lives saved by it.
The terminally ill Doctor Dawson (I did mention he was dying all through his project didn't I ?) successfully held off his own body and his own government just long enough to the Allied governments come around.
Just before he died, they did mass produce wartime natural penicillin and they did deliver it (by diverted-from-war bombers if need be) to save all those dying for lack of it.
This worldwide Penicillin "moral" Diplomacy did much to separate many Neutral nations from their fascination with fascism and thus helped secure and hold together 'the coalition of all the talents' needed to defeat the entrenched Axis powers.
But Dawson died as war's end and the Official Version of the wartime penicillin story (written by the losers who backed synthetic penicillin and restricted production and won the Nobel as a result) was able to keep him out of the re-telling.
But while sophisticated professionals fell then and still do fall for the Official Version, ordinary people (and little children) never did.
Behind all the Official Version's photographs of huge shiny penicillin-making machinery in oil refinery styled factories, the little people still correctly detected that tiny penicillin fungus factories were actually doing all the hard lifting.
And thus while the best in Civilization were busy bombing and burning as many ordinary people and little children as possible, some incredibly small and weak and supposedly 'simple' beings were saving more lives than even WWII could kill.
So it came to be that via popular public opinion rather than by scientific elite fiat, that Penicillin (and not the invisible Dawson,) joined the Parthenon of single-named worldwide celebrities.
And quite rightly, because Dawson's agape selflessness was the very opposite of Mengele's celebrity seeking.
Still, from opposing moral ends, Mengele's evil celebrity science and Dawson's selfless invisible science together put the fatal post into Modernity after 1945 and created our present age of cherishing diversity rather than cherishing eugenics....
In medical science's own Golden Age, roughly one long generation from the mid 1870s to the mid 1960s (the era of Progress and Modernity), soap operas loved doctors because that single profession was freighted with all the expectations humanity had for its highest civilizations.
This fraternity, and this one alone, was expected to do the impossible : to bridge over the many contradictions inherent in the Modern concept of Progressive civilization.
On one hand, as laboratory medical scientists, they were expected to display an alpha-male sized commitment to "double blind randomized" rationality, objectivity and the pursuit of scientific progression regardless of what dark alleys it might lead humanity into.
On the other hand, as medical frontline clinicians, they were expected to act out a selflessness and empathy for the suffering of others at a level we had traditionally only expected from Saints.
Since double blind randomized objectivity and agape empathy are fundamentally opposed, the bridge was bound to fail, particularly in times of extreme stress.
Such as happened during WWII.
In 1939, Josef Mengele had earned both a PhD and a MD and had started his career as a scientific researcher in genetics.
The son of a wealthy industrialist, he had imbibed the best of German high culture since childhood.
But then he was called up for wartime military service before the ambitious young scientist had done a large enough piece of research to earn his "Habilitation", the post-PhD certification required before he could be appointed to a prestigious academic research position.
Mengele worried he was not getting any younger as the war unexpectedly dragged on, but then fate intervened.
He was wounded, supposedly too bad an injury for further front line service, and got assigned to Auschwitz.
Most of the SS doctors there did the minimum required.
However, the intensely ambitious Mengele saw that if he ingratiated himself with the camp superiors by his high energy level and his total commitment to its racist brutality, he could then have free rein over any sets of twins among the hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews shipped into Auschwitz to either be killed upon arrival or after a short period of brutally hard labour.
No previous student of twins science, a particular obsession with geneticists then as now, had been able to freely kill their subjects before.
This greatly expanded the invasiveness of the scientific questions that could be asked about twins.
What a splendid Habilitation Mengele could produce ! - his intellectual reputation made and a top research position secured --- this in a culture that put "Professor" above even General and only slightly below Fuhrer.
Mengele didn't stop with ingratiating himself with his SS bosses - he ntoably did the same with the young children twins in his study - until he cold-bloodedly disposed of them, like so much scientific rubbish left behind after a successful experiment.
Do anything, say anything, but get the badly-needed scientific evidence : the perpetually wonderful ends justify the short term pain of the means.
Medical scientists in Dawson's America were saying just this during the same period as Mengele was operating - but they always stopped short for directly murdering their charges as he did.
Slow quiet off-stage deaths by deliberate neglect was more their cuppa.
Not to say that Mengele wasn't a hypocrite, but somehow, his hypocrisy seemed at a lower level than their brand.
Nevertheless it was his hyped-up version of the then fully approved normal scientific mindset that has put Mengele (and not his American fellow colleagues in evil) into a very small community of celebrities that remain known all over the world with just a one word name : Beethoven, Hitler, Mengele, Bono, Elvis, Madonna.
Ego, ambition, fame, celebrity : it was these drives that lifted this rather typical example of SS member into the very top Parthenon of all time Evil.
By contrast, all these drives seemed lacking in Dr Henry Dawson.
Diffident, modest, caring, considerate instead.
But also quietly, determinately stubborn in seeing that the small and the overlooked got their propers.
In 1939, he was 15 years older than Mengele, already established as (and probably content to remain) a tenured middle level academic researcher and teaching hospital attending physician.
He had a good national (and even international reputation) in a tiny backwater of mid-century medical research : helping those chronically ill with arthritis.
If it was a backwater in peacetime, all the more in wartime.
A brave, decorated, twice wounded WWI military hero, he yearned to help fight Hitler but realistically what could a middle-aged man do in the frontlines of combat?
If not then in the sphere of military combat against the evil of Nazi values, then perhaps he could fight it in the moral sphere.
For Dawson saw that many medical researchers in the democratic West seemed to have drunk almost as much of the kool-aid of 'seeking scientific advance without moral restraints on the treatment of experiment subjects', as had scientists in Germany.
So Dawson decided to restore the dignity of the small and weak by deliberately contesting such values in America (and by implication in Germany as well).
He did so by (A) ignoring the scientific consensus and deliberately choosing to work with a much despised household pest, the primitive and small penicillium mold, rather than wait for commercial synthetic penicillin (which in fact never did come - not during the war or after.)
And rather than research the use of penicillium juice to cure unfaithful 1A servicemen of overseas-acquired VD, he sought instead to save the lives of a group of small and weak patients, the 4Fs of the 4Fs : working class youths dying of SBE, endocarditis caused by Rheumatic Fever.
The medical establishment were already writing off the poor SBEs as 'not a wartime priority' for scarce medical resources.
In fact, that elite was planning to keep all penicillin successes out of both the scientific and popular media, so it could be later unleashed as a secret military weapon of war, being produced (synthetically) in such small quantities that it could only aid the lightly wounded frontline Allied troops.
Dawson wanted primitive natural (un-patented) penicillin produced right now, in massive amounts, and given to anyone in a war-torn world who would have their lives saved by it.
The terminally ill Doctor Dawson (I did mention he was dying all through his project didn't I ?) successfully held off his own body and his own government just long enough to the Allied governments come around.
Just before he died, they did mass produce wartime natural penicillin and they did deliver it (by diverted-from-war bombers if need be) to save all those dying for lack of it.
This worldwide Penicillin "moral" Diplomacy did much to separate many Neutral nations from their fascination with fascism and thus helped secure and hold together 'the coalition of all the talents' needed to defeat the entrenched Axis powers.
But Dawson died as war's end and the Official Version of the wartime penicillin story (written by the losers who backed synthetic penicillin and restricted production and won the Nobel as a result) was able to keep him out of the re-telling.
But while sophisticated professionals fell then and still do fall for the Official Version, ordinary people (and little children) never did.
Behind all the Official Version's photographs of huge shiny penicillin-making machinery in oil refinery styled factories, the little people still correctly detected that tiny penicillin fungus factories were actually doing all the hard lifting.
And thus while the best in Civilization were busy bombing and burning as many ordinary people and little children as possible, some incredibly small and weak and supposedly 'simple' beings were saving more lives than even WWII could kill.
So it came to be that via popular public opinion rather than by scientific elite fiat, that Penicillin (and not the invisible Dawson,) joined the Parthenon of single-named worldwide celebrities.
And quite rightly, because Dawson's agape selflessness was the very opposite of Mengele's celebrity seeking.
Still, from opposing moral ends, Mengele's evil celebrity science and Dawson's selfless invisible science together put the fatal post into Modernity after 1945 and created our present age of cherishing diversity rather than cherishing eugenics....
Monday, September 14, 2015
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.
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.....
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.....
Friday, September 11, 2015
Yesterday's lie: all wealth created by the rich ; today's lie: all created by the middle class
The truth is, at least in today's ideological culture, it takes big people's wealth and decisions, the middle people's managing the carrying out of these decisions and the back breaking labour of the smallest people, all to create new wealth.
(And I say all this as a left-leaning Green.)
The fact is that successful wealth creation, like everything else truly successful on Earth, requires a 'coalition of all talents' to come about, has always been true.
But today, all but the very richest and the very poorest claim to be middle class and as such, to be 'creating' all the wealth.
But when everybody is middle, nobody is middle - for what we would actually have then would be a single "uni-class", rather than a three class system.
Part of today's problem is a great reluctance to define the middle more accurately than a bit of vague hand waving, a la Mr Trudeau and his Liberal candidates, as I recently witnessed myself at a Halifax all-candidates debate.
One way, I suggest, to nail down the elusive jello that is the definition of "the middle class" would be to take a nation's median income (the income that one half of all tax-reporters earns more than and the other half earns less than) and combine the bottom 16.7% of those earning more that that median with the top 16.7% of those earning less than the median.
We would, I believe, then have the middle class defined simply as the middle third of all family income earners --- not whether they went to university and held a white collar job.
This doesn't deny the fact that well to do young black men in fancy cars will still be stopped and hassled by policemen in a way that extremely poor old white women riding the bus never would be.
Or deal with the reality that few women will ever end up being invited onto the boards of the Big Banks, even if they are extremely rich.
But income and such seemingly non-income related issues are truly united.
For possessing high income is a very good place to see the financial advantages of being part or all of a country's majority race, ethnicity, religion, marital status and political ideology groupings.
Just as low income usually reveals the disadvantages of not being part of some or all of these popular 'tokens' for obtaining really good education, housing, health care, police protection and jobs.
Now you might understand that when I say that Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project was made up of "small" patients, I don't mean "small" as in terms of age or size, but rather as small in terms of income and social status : power basically.
As in being basically powerless because they lacked it all : wrong race and religion and education level and income level and physical fitness level.
In the "military preparedness" world of medical America in the Fall of 1940, to be working class and black or Jewish and to be a SBE patient was to be about as powerless and worthless as one could be.
Partly because of their lack of income and because they lacked the right skin tone and religious faith.
But mostly because SBE was seen an invariably fatal, re-occurring, expensively chronic illness. Even if one SBE hospital patient was cured of one bout of the disease, it kept coming back until the patient died.
But it was the faint hope clause of the very occasional cure that kept patients and their families to keep coming to the top research hospitals, filling expensive beds instead of dying quietly and cheaply at home.
Because no doctor really believed the hospital had anything to do with the cure, SBE cures were like terminal cancer cures, an Act of God even to the non-believer.
And while most SBEs died of a a stroke caused by an embolism in another part of the body than the heart, the infection also slowly but surely and permanently reduce the effectiveness of the already damaged heart valve.
So even if Dawson did cure the SBEs, even permanently, the valve damage wouldn't allow them to fight as infantry.
This is why many in the medical elite were for denying any penicillin to the SBEs, even though it was the only thing that could cure this fatal disease, reserving scarce penicillin instead to errant husbands and boyfriends who had picked up a non-fatal dose of the clap overseas.
But Dawson felt that in a total war, virtually all work was useful war work and even those with damaged valves can still do lots of useful work.
Besides, if only wartime penicillin was as mass produced as Dawson had long argued for, it could be given in advance, in small amounts, to prevent those with damaged valves from every getting a serious bout of SBE (which usually ended requiring more penicillin than even a lifetime of preventive shots).
Then the SBEs, a plurality who were draft age young men as it happens, could go from being the most worthless in society, the 4Fs of the 4Fs, to potentially becoming prime 1A cannon fodder.
(A mixed blessing for sure !)
One wonders what would have happened if penicillin had turned out to be a cure for Polio, a disease particularly of the white middle class suburbs, rather than a cure for SBE and Rheumatic Fever, diseases of the inner city poor , minorities and immigrants ?
I doubt then it would have been denied the Polio sufferers, war or no war and I think Dawson figured this to be so as well.
SBE was medical Universes away from Dawson's area of medical expertise, but he decided to cure the SBEs because he wanted to make a moral and scientific case for widening 1940's narrow concepts of just who could be inside the human portfolio.
The trend was to reduce the portfolio only down to only the financially, socially and physically fit, but Dawson wanted the portfolio to be widely diverse as possible.
Just as he thought the small in the biological world - like the penicillin-producing penicillium, had much to offer Humanity, if we only but let them.
These ideas were seen as absurd then but are commonplace today.
We changed obviously and totally.
And it all had to start somewhere, sometime, with someone ....
(And I say all this as a left-leaning Green.)
The fact is that successful wealth creation, like everything else truly successful on Earth, requires a 'coalition of all talents' to come about, has always been true.
But today, all but the very richest and the very poorest claim to be middle class and as such, to be 'creating' all the wealth.
But when everybody is middle, nobody is middle - for what we would actually have then would be a single "uni-class", rather than a three class system.
Part of today's problem is a great reluctance to define the middle more accurately than a bit of vague hand waving, a la Mr Trudeau and his Liberal candidates, as I recently witnessed myself at a Halifax all-candidates debate.
One way, I suggest, to nail down the elusive jello that is the definition of "the middle class" would be to take a nation's median income (the income that one half of all tax-reporters earns more than and the other half earns less than) and combine the bottom 16.7% of those earning more that that median with the top 16.7% of those earning less than the median.
We would, I believe, then have the middle class defined simply as the middle third of all family income earners --- not whether they went to university and held a white collar job.
This doesn't deny the fact that well to do young black men in fancy cars will still be stopped and hassled by policemen in a way that extremely poor old white women riding the bus never would be.
Or deal with the reality that few women will ever end up being invited onto the boards of the Big Banks, even if they are extremely rich.
But income and such seemingly non-income related issues are truly united.
For possessing high income is a very good place to see the financial advantages of being part or all of a country's majority race, ethnicity, religion, marital status and political ideology groupings.
Just as low income usually reveals the disadvantages of not being part of some or all of these popular 'tokens' for obtaining really good education, housing, health care, police protection and jobs.
"small" patients defined
Now you might understand that when I say that Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project was made up of "small" patients, I don't mean "small" as in terms of age or size, but rather as small in terms of income and social status : power basically.
As in being basically powerless because they lacked it all : wrong race and religion and education level and income level and physical fitness level.
In the "military preparedness" world of medical America in the Fall of 1940, to be working class and black or Jewish and to be a SBE patient was to be about as powerless and worthless as one could be.
Partly because of their lack of income and because they lacked the right skin tone and religious faith.
But mostly because SBE was seen an invariably fatal, re-occurring, expensively chronic illness. Even if one SBE hospital patient was cured of one bout of the disease, it kept coming back until the patient died.
But it was the faint hope clause of the very occasional cure that kept patients and their families to keep coming to the top research hospitals, filling expensive beds instead of dying quietly and cheaply at home.
Because no doctor really believed the hospital had anything to do with the cure, SBE cures were like terminal cancer cures, an Act of God even to the non-believer.
And while most SBEs died of a a stroke caused by an embolism in another part of the body than the heart, the infection also slowly but surely and permanently reduce the effectiveness of the already damaged heart valve.
So even if Dawson did cure the SBEs, even permanently, the valve damage wouldn't allow them to fight as infantry.
This is why many in the medical elite were for denying any penicillin to the SBEs, even though it was the only thing that could cure this fatal disease, reserving scarce penicillin instead to errant husbands and boyfriends who had picked up a non-fatal dose of the clap overseas.
But Dawson felt that in a total war, virtually all work was useful war work and even those with damaged valves can still do lots of useful work.
Besides, if only wartime penicillin was as mass produced as Dawson had long argued for, it could be given in advance, in small amounts, to prevent those with damaged valves from every getting a serious bout of SBE (which usually ended requiring more penicillin than even a lifetime of preventive shots).
Then the SBEs, a plurality who were draft age young men as it happens, could go from being the most worthless in society, the 4Fs of the 4Fs, to potentially becoming prime 1A cannon fodder.
(A mixed blessing for sure !)
One wonders what would have happened if penicillin had turned out to be a cure for Polio, a disease particularly of the white middle class suburbs, rather than a cure for SBE and Rheumatic Fever, diseases of the inner city poor , minorities and immigrants ?
I doubt then it would have been denied the Polio sufferers, war or no war and I think Dawson figured this to be so as well.
SBE was medical Universes away from Dawson's area of medical expertise, but he decided to cure the SBEs because he wanted to make a moral and scientific case for widening 1940's narrow concepts of just who could be inside the human portfolio.
The trend was to reduce the portfolio only down to only the financially, socially and physically fit, but Dawson wanted the portfolio to be widely diverse as possible.
Just as he thought the small in the biological world - like the penicillin-producing penicillium, had much to offer Humanity, if we only but let them.
These ideas were seen as absurd then but are commonplace today.
We changed obviously and totally.
And it all had to start somewhere, sometime, with someone ....
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
Harry Lime : the man who watered the babies' "P"
The Third Man is a very well made, very well cast and very well acted movie.
But that alone is not enough to put it into everybody's top ten movies of all time.
For it also has gravitas, in spades.
It deals, quite seriously, with possibly the ultimate form of evil in our post-Auschwitz world : cold-bloodedly killing innocent little children.
In the movie, character Harry Lime deliberately waters down his already highly profitable black market penicillin ("P" in hospital shorthand) that he is peddling under the table to civilian hospitals in postwar joint powers occupied Vienna.
Even when he knows that watering down the penicillin ensures that babies will die painful deaths from meningitis, when that is actually the easiest of all diseases for penicillin to cure.
That the elusive Harry is so suave and charming, in his few on-camera appearances, only makes the viewers' horror more morally acute.
That 'fungoid growths' could go from the epitome of absolute evil (here reference Hitler,A and Lovecraft,HP) to the epitome of absolute good in only a few short years would certainly make the ghost of Henry Dawson astonished, proud and very happy...
But that alone is not enough to put it into everybody's top ten movies of all time.
For it also has gravitas, in spades.
It deals, quite seriously, with possibly the ultimate form of evil in our post-Auschwitz world : cold-bloodedly killing innocent little children.
In the movie, character Harry Lime deliberately waters down his already highly profitable black market penicillin ("P" in hospital shorthand) that he is peddling under the table to civilian hospitals in postwar joint powers occupied Vienna.
Even when he knows that watering down the penicillin ensures that babies will die painful deaths from meningitis, when that is actually the easiest of all diseases for penicillin to cure.
That the elusive Harry is so suave and charming, in his few on-camera appearances, only makes the viewers' horror more morally acute.
That 'fungoid growths' could go from the epitome of absolute evil (here reference Hitler,A and Lovecraft,HP) to the epitome of absolute good in only a few short years would certainly make the ghost of Henry Dawson astonished, proud and very happy...
Saturday, September 5, 2015
Aug '43 photo of 3 year old changes the whole world
Her name was Patty Malone, not Aylan Kurdi, but ultimately she also died way too young at age three.
But four months before her quiet death off stage, a single photograph of Patty in her hospital hugging her stuffie captured the hearts of most mothers (and some fathers) all around a war-weary world and literally changed the course of history.
Before Patty and the photograph, wartime penicillin was succeeding as a weapon crafted solely for war - a secret medicine, produced in strictly limited quantities - to be unleashed only when the Allies invaded Europe.
All to get the Allied lightly wounded back into the killing fields before the Axis wounded could, to provide a little manpower advantage to the Allies.
The dying civilians and soldiers of the world were not to get a look see until the war's end.
Canadian-born Dr Henry Dawson opposed that idea from the beginning.
With penicillin his tiny team had made themselves, he acted out his belief that, in a war that was as much moral as material, the Allies had to better the Nazis in the treatment of the weakest members of society at war, not match the Nazis morally on their slide down to Hell.
His ideas were shut out, censored in wartime's published media but even totalitarian regimes could not stop gossip - if fact war censorship makes it flourish all the more.
Dr Dawson was working in Manhattan and soon the entire tight-knit NYC metro area medical gossip mill was rife with talk of Dawson's miraculous success with penicillin in saving the un-saveable.
It quickly spread from doctor and nurse to patient and family - quickly reaching Dr Dante Colitti, an Italian Catholic New Yorker in a hospital only a mile away from Dawson's.
Dante had been viewed as almost un-saveable as a child himself and no New York hospital would hire after his graduation ---- until war staff shortages made it necessary.
So he had no love - to put it mildly ! - for the American medical elite's wartime dictates demanding public silence about penicillin's miracle cures.
He decided to phone America's biggest daily and Heart's flagship, The New York American Journal, begging them to get Washington to release penicillin for one of his hospital's tiny patients dying from a disease penicillin could cure.
Interestingly (and paralleling Dawson's decision to help save SBE patients) Colitti had no business what so ever involving himself with this type of patient - he was a surgeon (and a mere resident) and this was a matter for other types of doctors all together.
His was simply a heartfelt concern for a fellow being, made by a guy about to get married and start having three olds himself.
Think of Dawson and Colitti as being the exact opposite to Canadian PM Stephen Harper, who would shove his own children under the campaign bus, if he calculated it would help him to win re-election.
The Hearst organization really knew how to run an all out newspaper crusade and with days of the photo of Patti in that hospital bed hitting newspaper readers in America, the governments of the whole world knew about the miracle of penicillin and wanted lots of it, yesterday.
Despite wartime censorship, Neutral countries' diplomats in Washington even quickly got the news out to all the Axis countries
as well.
As Dawson had always wanted, wartime penicillin suddenly was produced in mass quantities during the war, to help all the dying soldiers and civilians of Allied nations, the Neutral nations, the Liberated lands and finally the Axis countries as well.
Penicillin remains the best known, best loved medicine in the world.
All because of one photograph of one little three year old.
I hope and pray Aylan Kurdi does the same today for the refugee crisis .....
But four months before her quiet death off stage, a single photograph of Patty in her hospital hugging her stuffie captured the hearts of most mothers (and some fathers) all around a war-weary world and literally changed the course of history.
Before Patty and the photograph, wartime penicillin was succeeding as a weapon crafted solely for war - a secret medicine, produced in strictly limited quantities - to be unleashed only when the Allies invaded Europe.
All to get the Allied lightly wounded back into the killing fields before the Axis wounded could, to provide a little manpower advantage to the Allies.
The dying civilians and soldiers of the world were not to get a look see until the war's end.
Canadian-born Dr Henry Dawson opposed that idea from the beginning.
With penicillin his tiny team had made themselves, he acted out his belief that, in a war that was as much moral as material, the Allies had to better the Nazis in the treatment of the weakest members of society at war, not match the Nazis morally on their slide down to Hell.
His ideas were shut out, censored in wartime's published media but even totalitarian regimes could not stop gossip - if fact war censorship makes it flourish all the more.
Dr Dawson was working in Manhattan and soon the entire tight-knit NYC metro area medical gossip mill was rife with talk of Dawson's miraculous success with penicillin in saving the un-saveable.
It quickly spread from doctor and nurse to patient and family - quickly reaching Dr Dante Colitti, an Italian Catholic New Yorker in a hospital only a mile away from Dawson's.
Dante had been viewed as almost un-saveable as a child himself and no New York hospital would hire after his graduation ---- until war staff shortages made it necessary.
So he had no love - to put it mildly ! - for the American medical elite's wartime dictates demanding public silence about penicillin's miracle cures.
He decided to phone America's biggest daily and Heart's flagship, The New York American Journal, begging them to get Washington to release penicillin for one of his hospital's tiny patients dying from a disease penicillin could cure.
Interestingly (and paralleling Dawson's decision to help save SBE patients) Colitti had no business what so ever involving himself with this type of patient - he was a surgeon (and a mere resident) and this was a matter for other types of doctors all together.
His was simply a heartfelt concern for a fellow being, made by a guy about to get married and start having three olds himself.
Think of Dawson and Colitti as being the exact opposite to Canadian PM Stephen Harper, who would shove his own children under the campaign bus, if he calculated it would help him to win re-election.
The Hearst organization really knew how to run an all out newspaper crusade and with days of the photo of Patti in that hospital bed hitting newspaper readers in America, the governments of the whole world knew about the miracle of penicillin and wanted lots of it, yesterday.
Despite wartime censorship, Neutral countries' diplomats in Washington even quickly got the news out to all the Axis countries
as well.
As Dawson had always wanted, wartime penicillin suddenly was produced in mass quantities during the war, to help all the dying soldiers and civilians of Allied nations, the Neutral nations, the Liberated lands and finally the Axis countries as well.
Penicillin remains the best known, best loved medicine in the world.
All because of one photograph of one little three year old.
I hope and pray Aylan Kurdi does the same today for the refugee crisis .....
Tuesday, September 1, 2015
unpredictable small atoms, small microbes... and small children
'Pop' reductionism was the real (underlying) ideology of the Era of Progress.
There was a confident expectation among almost all people in the West during that era - particularly among those with a little secondary school science under their belt - that the small were inherently 'simple', almost inert, and hence could be controlled, transformed and scaled infinitely upwards.
Simple meant stable and predictable, definitely either this or that.
Reductionism, the reducing of reality down to a few simple stable rules and categories, is a boon comfort, in any age, to a significant fraction of us.
All of us who are basically born with (or develop from early family circumstance) the psychological propensity to be very uncomfortable and frightful of any sort of significant ambiguity.
But reductionism was never more of a comfort historically then when the Era of Progress's process of modernization presented some unique mental conflicts to the people living in the western civilizations that created it.
If people in what we today call the Third World resented many many of the things that late nineteenth century modernization suddenly introduced into their culture and economy, they at least knew who to blame --- the West.
They had plenty of conflicts with the West but were untroubled by internal mental conflicts as to where to direct the blame and their anger.
But almost all the people in the West, while they loved much what modernization had brought them, were at least as overwhelmed by the plentitude of new objects, new experiences, new ideas, new people as were the peoples of the Third World.
But they couldn't dare directly blame Progress, their own fabulous creation.
Even though they feared the overwhelming amount of fluidity, change and transforming of traditional category barriers that their own efforts had thrown up.
Their response was to create a very manichean concept of modernity.
Within it, the whole world was divided into two simple small and absolute categories of worthiness.
In category A at the top was the modern, the normal and the civil.
In category B at the bottom was the primitive, the abnormal, and the savage.
This schema allowed Moderns to combat overwhelming feelings of too much ambiguity in day to day life, by finding powerless (aka 'small') scapegoats they could put in category B and then safely blame them for most everything.
Without fear the small could effectively fight back.
The Mods soon found plenty of scapegoats.
Were our kids different today ? Just blame it on Negro jungle music.
Were big chain stores replacing the stores of local small business elites ? Just re-conceive chain stores as the secret fungoid growth of cosmopolitan Jewish banksters plotting to sap the national economies of the civilizations.
Were taxes too high and incomes too low ? It was all because we were spending way too much taxpayers' hard earned money on useless mouths : way too much on adult mental (and physical) defectives with a mental age of about two.
Some medical scientists around the world openly advocated killing them at birth - many more said nothing publicly but quietly tried to kill them at birth if opportunities arose.
But when we look at actual small objects we don't necessarily find them to be at all simple, controllable inert and and reliably transformable by us.
For instance, the poster child of the small and the predictable, the atom, actually haa a habit of becoming naturally radioactive --- but we can't predict where or when.
Wait a minute, you say, what about the half lives of isotopes ? They're highly predictable.
They sure are - but the much quoted half life guesstimate is the product of the very antithesis of reductionism - they are predictable only thanks to reductionism's arch enemy holism.
So yes, over an entire holistic system of trillions upon trillions of atoms we can indeed reliably predict the average time of when half of them will have gone radioactive.
But each of those small supposed stable entities 'the atom' self transform at their own pace and in their own fashion.
This is one of the reasons why heavily overbuilt nuclear power plants must still be decommissioned after a relatively short time.
All because the free-willed atomic bits and bob fleeing the heart of the process eventually render the entire structure unsafely radioactive.
Similarly, those supposedly simplest possible bits of life, the microbes, amazingly turned out to be highly unpredictable in character and distinctly capable of doing sophisticated chemical and biological activities that human civilizations still can't do.
Microbes proved capable of unpredictably self-transforming themselves by way of HGT (horizontal gene transfer) and of self-transforming unwanted agricultural waste into the world's best antibiotics.
Finally any observant person should notice that two year olds can be surprisingly worldly and yet display such a innocent zest for life and exploring and learning that they quite wear their elders out !
Parents and grandparents of former two year olds often wish the kids could have remained that age forever.
And like the small atom and the small microbe, two year olds definitely have a mind of their own and a determination to do things at their own pace.
Parents of these little ones, and one can resume some of these medical scientists had to have been parents, know well that they are very far from being reduced to inert lumps that are easily malleable by adults.....
There was a confident expectation among almost all people in the West during that era - particularly among those with a little secondary school science under their belt - that the small were inherently 'simple', almost inert, and hence could be controlled, transformed and scaled infinitely upwards.
Simple meant stable and predictable, definitely either this or that.
Reductionism, the reducing of reality down to a few simple stable rules and categories, is a boon comfort, in any age, to a significant fraction of us.
All of us who are basically born with (or develop from early family circumstance) the psychological propensity to be very uncomfortable and frightful of any sort of significant ambiguity.
But reductionism was never more of a comfort historically then when the Era of Progress's process of modernization presented some unique mental conflicts to the people living in the western civilizations that created it.
If people in what we today call the Third World resented many many of the things that late nineteenth century modernization suddenly introduced into their culture and economy, they at least knew who to blame --- the West.
They had plenty of conflicts with the West but were untroubled by internal mental conflicts as to where to direct the blame and their anger.
But almost all the people in the West, while they loved much what modernization had brought them, were at least as overwhelmed by the plentitude of new objects, new experiences, new ideas, new people as were the peoples of the Third World.
But they couldn't dare directly blame Progress, their own fabulous creation.
Even though they feared the overwhelming amount of fluidity, change and transforming of traditional category barriers that their own efforts had thrown up.
Their response was to create a very manichean concept of modernity.
Within it, the whole world was divided into two simple small and absolute categories of worthiness.
In category A at the top was the modern, the normal and the civil.
In category B at the bottom was the primitive, the abnormal, and the savage.
This schema allowed Moderns to combat overwhelming feelings of too much ambiguity in day to day life, by finding powerless (aka 'small') scapegoats they could put in category B and then safely blame them for most everything.
Without fear the small could effectively fight back.
The Mods soon found plenty of scapegoats.
Were our kids different today ? Just blame it on Negro jungle music.
Were big chain stores replacing the stores of local small business elites ? Just re-conceive chain stores as the secret fungoid growth of cosmopolitan Jewish banksters plotting to sap the national economies of the civilizations.
Were taxes too high and incomes too low ? It was all because we were spending way too much taxpayers' hard earned money on useless mouths : way too much on adult mental (and physical) defectives with a mental age of about two.
Some medical scientists around the world openly advocated killing them at birth - many more said nothing publicly but quietly tried to kill them at birth if opportunities arose.
But when we look at actual small objects we don't necessarily find them to be at all simple, controllable inert and and reliably transformable by us.
For instance, the poster child of the small and the predictable, the atom, actually haa a habit of becoming naturally radioactive --- but we can't predict where or when.
Wait a minute, you say, what about the half lives of isotopes ? They're highly predictable.
They sure are - but the much quoted half life guesstimate is the product of the very antithesis of reductionism - they are predictable only thanks to reductionism's arch enemy holism.
So yes, over an entire holistic system of trillions upon trillions of atoms we can indeed reliably predict the average time of when half of them will have gone radioactive.
But each of those small supposed stable entities 'the atom' self transform at their own pace and in their own fashion.
This is one of the reasons why heavily overbuilt nuclear power plants must still be decommissioned after a relatively short time.
All because the free-willed atomic bits and bob fleeing the heart of the process eventually render the entire structure unsafely radioactive.
Similarly, those supposedly simplest possible bits of life, the microbes, amazingly turned out to be highly unpredictable in character and distinctly capable of doing sophisticated chemical and biological activities that human civilizations still can't do.
Microbes proved capable of unpredictably self-transforming themselves by way of HGT (horizontal gene transfer) and of self-transforming unwanted agricultural waste into the world's best antibiotics.
Finally any observant person should notice that two year olds can be surprisingly worldly and yet display such a innocent zest for life and exploring and learning that they quite wear their elders out !
Parents and grandparents of former two year olds often wish the kids could have remained that age forever.
And like the small atom and the small microbe, two year olds definitely have a mind of their own and a determination to do things at their own pace.
Parents of these little ones, and one can resume some of these medical scientists had to have been parents, know well that they are very far from being reduced to inert lumps that are easily malleable by adults.....
Monday, August 31, 2015
The course of WWII : from fungophobia to fungomania ?
Hitler's Nazis described all the Jews as being a fungoid growth, a poisoned mushroom, and said the next war would see either the death of all the Jews or the death of all human civilization.
And Zyklon B was to be their fungicide of choice.
The Nazi's use of metaphors about fungoid growths spreading their invisible threads through national bodies, of slimy smelly molds found only in dark dank decaying places, and evil and deadly 'devil's fruit' mushrooming up everywhere overnight was not at all unusual for that inter-war era.
HP Lovecraft, as well as a host of otherwise ordinary writers, easily outdid the Nazis in their vivid descriptions of the ultimate evil as being fungoid in character.
And in 1945, when atomic bomb explosion clouds first emerged looking at least as much like cauliflowers as mushrooms - guess what species got overwhelmingly picked to describe this horrible new weapon of war ?
There was no doubt that fungophobia was the in-house mental illness for of all western civilization, be it Allied, Axis or Neutral.
All the more paradoxical then --- in the full G K Chesterton sense of that term --- that WWII also ended with much of the world in the throes of fungomania.
All over a small, smelly, slimy, blue green smear, a common household pest, that gave suffering humanity its best ever lifesaver : penicillin.
Ironic, isn't it ?
And Zyklon B was to be their fungicide of choice.
The Nazi's use of metaphors about fungoid growths spreading their invisible threads through national bodies, of slimy smelly molds found only in dark dank decaying places, and evil and deadly 'devil's fruit' mushrooming up everywhere overnight was not at all unusual for that inter-war era.
HP Lovecraft, as well as a host of otherwise ordinary writers, easily outdid the Nazis in their vivid descriptions of the ultimate evil as being fungoid in character.
And in 1945, when atomic bomb explosion clouds first emerged looking at least as much like cauliflowers as mushrooms - guess what species got overwhelmingly picked to describe this horrible new weapon of war ?
There was no doubt that fungophobia was the in-house mental illness for of all western civilization, be it Allied, Axis or Neutral.
All the more paradoxical then --- in the full G K Chesterton sense of that term --- that WWII also ended with much of the world in the throes of fungomania.
All over a small, smelly, slimy, blue green smear, a common household pest, that gave suffering humanity its best ever lifesaver : penicillin.
Ironic, isn't it ?
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Way out of his comfort zone
I was not truly 'surprised' that the normally highly diffident Dr Martin Henry Dawson broke his own team protocol and became the first person in history to inject an antibiotic (dirty natural penicillin) into a patient, 75 years ago this October 16th.
For the diffident Dawson had done something similar at least once before, pushing on with his equally pioneering research into the horizontal transfer of DNA between microbes, against the express orders of his boss at NYC's Rockefeller Institute.
That totally ruined his career prospects at the world's most attractive centre for doing medical research --- so this new decision to merely jump his own tiny team's protocol would have far less dire career consequences.
But what did surprise me - and did so for a very long time (years and years and years in fact) - was his twin decisions made the month earlier.
First was his decision to grow massive amounts of the fungus mold, penicillium n.
Massive as in obtaining 50 US gallons of penicillium liquid per run - the very size of a typical drug industry pilot plant project.
Like most ambitious bacteriologists, Dawson was extremely narrowly focused on learning all he could about just one tiny segment of the bacteria world and so he gave only a glance at all the other bacteria - and tried to ignore viruses and fungus, etc,etc completely.
In his case, he had focused on the then deadliest of all microbe families - the streps (which included the s. pneumococcus).
He had grown massive amounts of the various streps successfully and routinely but massive fungus growing for clinical not lab work would be much different.
Firstly, it would all have to be done with an eye to making penicillin economically on a long term basis, particularly when set against penicillin's cheap and abundant competitors, the sulfa drug family.
Occasionally growing small amounts of pathogens like pneumococcus for some personal science experiments is one thing - 'costs versus sale returns' don't really come into it.
It is far different when one grows de-natured pathogens to supply a huge public market demanding equal and cheap access to vaccines, as Alexander Fleming well knew, because he ran such a business in his London hospital.
His hard earned knowledge of costs versus profits may have lessened the willingness of Fleming and his huge drug company partner (Parke Davis) to grow large amounts of 'his' penicillium, considering how small the amounts of penicillin produced as a result.
Unlike his naturally made - and very profitable - vaccines, Fleming always insisted his penicillin would only come into clinical use when it was made artificially by chemists.
Secondly, Dawson would be growing massive amounts of penicillium fungus to an effort to scale up tiny amounts of an infrequently produced and highly fragile distinctly second rate secondary metabolite.
Why is that so noteworthy ?
Because all bacteriologists, like all farmers, work to make as much biomass as possible, as cheaply, quickly and easily as possible.
As many big viable bacteria/apples/pigs as quickly, cheaply and routinely as possible.
It was a piece of cake to get the penicillium n. to bulk up quickly and cheaply but when they did so, they produced no penicillin at all !
It seemed to everyone that penicillin was sort of like green poop in humans - a rare waste product produced when a body ate a food it didn't like and got very sick as a result .
Learning to grow penicillium n. so as to make lots of penicillin routinely and economically went on after the war as well as during it and it involved at least as much scientific manpower hours as did the entire nuclear Manhattan Project.
And - a distinct rarity - most scientists thought this might be the case, right from the start, and this is why Fleming and Howard Florey and almost all the others differed from Dawson and focused totally on man-made synthetic penicillin making efforts.
I can't really explain Dawson's decision to get involved in mass fungus making except to say that his career had been devoted to demonstrating how smart the supposedly stupid microbe really was.
He certainly thought the penicillium might be damed good at making penicillin, merely by dint of hundreds of millions of years of trying.
Perhaps then it was the overweening hubris of the 'synthetic penicillin' crowd that might have perversely pushed him much further into mass making of fungus than his own personal inclinations would have done.
For the diffident Dawson had done something similar at least once before, pushing on with his equally pioneering research into the horizontal transfer of DNA between microbes, against the express orders of his boss at NYC's Rockefeller Institute.
That totally ruined his career prospects at the world's most attractive centre for doing medical research --- so this new decision to merely jump his own tiny team's protocol would have far less dire career consequences.
But what did surprise me - and did so for a very long time (years and years and years in fact) - was his twin decisions made the month earlier.
Fungus growing - and starving - on a massive scale
First was his decision to grow massive amounts of the fungus mold, penicillium n.
Massive as in obtaining 50 US gallons of penicillium liquid per run - the very size of a typical drug industry pilot plant project.
Like most ambitious bacteriologists, Dawson was extremely narrowly focused on learning all he could about just one tiny segment of the bacteria world and so he gave only a glance at all the other bacteria - and tried to ignore viruses and fungus, etc,etc completely.
In his case, he had focused on the then deadliest of all microbe families - the streps (which included the s. pneumococcus).
He had grown massive amounts of the various streps successfully and routinely but massive fungus growing for clinical not lab work would be much different.
Firstly, it would all have to be done with an eye to making penicillin economically on a long term basis, particularly when set against penicillin's cheap and abundant competitors, the sulfa drug family.
Occasionally growing small amounts of pathogens like pneumococcus for some personal science experiments is one thing - 'costs versus sale returns' don't really come into it.
It is far different when one grows de-natured pathogens to supply a huge public market demanding equal and cheap access to vaccines, as Alexander Fleming well knew, because he ran such a business in his London hospital.
His hard earned knowledge of costs versus profits may have lessened the willingness of Fleming and his huge drug company partner (Parke Davis) to grow large amounts of 'his' penicillium, considering how small the amounts of penicillin produced as a result.
Unlike his naturally made - and very profitable - vaccines, Fleming always insisted his penicillin would only come into clinical use when it was made artificially by chemists.
Secondly, Dawson would be growing massive amounts of penicillium fungus to an effort to scale up tiny amounts of an infrequently produced and highly fragile distinctly second rate secondary metabolite.
Why is that so noteworthy ?
Because all bacteriologists, like all farmers, work to make as much biomass as possible, as cheaply, quickly and easily as possible.
As many big viable bacteria/apples/pigs as quickly, cheaply and routinely as possible.
It was a piece of cake to get the penicillium n. to bulk up quickly and cheaply but when they did so, they produced no penicillin at all !
It seemed to everyone that penicillin was sort of like green poop in humans - a rare waste product produced when a body ate a food it didn't like and got very sick as a result .
Learning to grow penicillium n. so as to make lots of penicillin routinely and economically went on after the war as well as during it and it involved at least as much scientific manpower hours as did the entire nuclear Manhattan Project.
And - a distinct rarity - most scientists thought this might be the case, right from the start, and this is why Fleming and Howard Florey and almost all the others differed from Dawson and focused totally on man-made synthetic penicillin making efforts.
I can't really explain Dawson's decision to get involved in mass fungus making except to say that his career had been devoted to demonstrating how smart the supposedly stupid microbe really was.
He certainly thought the penicillium might be damed good at making penicillin, merely by dint of hundreds of millions of years of trying.
Perhaps then it was the overweening hubris of the 'synthetic penicillin' crowd that might have perversely pushed him much further into mass making of fungus than his own personal inclinations would have done.
SBE rather than septic arthritis
Dawson ran a day clinic for chronic arthritic patients, people who normally who returned to their home and daily work afterwards.
About as low on the totem pole in status at a world famous research-oriented teaching hospital as one can go.
About as low on the totem pole in status at a world famous research-oriented teaching hospital as one can go.
SBE, sub-acute bacterial endocarditis, is today seen as a dire medical emergency disease, likely to be fatal even with the best and extremely extensive treatment, and something managed by the top heart specialists and heart surgeons.
A disease near the top of the status world of big hospitals.
A disease near the top of the status world of big hospitals.
Not to be handled by the guy in the basement running a day clinic for little old ladies with badly bent fingers.
If it was an impossibly long stretch for Dawson to focus on SBE we must ask why he did not focus on septic arthritis instead.
This (surgically oriented) disease of dangerously infected joints was still a bit of a stretch for a day clinic director but it was a form of arthritis, his speciality after all, and like SBE it also a disease likely to prove fatal and one that would only be cured by penicillin.
Now, Dawson certainly did deal with septic arthritis cases in his wartime penicillin work but he didn't really focus on them.
As a result of his wondering off his own arthritis estate onto the faraway property of the SBE experts, Dawson greatly aroused a lot of anger from his colleagues.
He may have intended just that.
I have found no indication that the efforts by medical conservatives to use "war preparation" as an excuse to roll back Social Medicine ever evoked septic arthritis as a disease and patient type to be abandoned and left to die.
But that definitely turned out to be the case with SBE - I suspect Dawson saw this plan coming early on and for this reason, and this reason alone, he focused on the SBE patient rather than the septic arthritic patients....
Tuesday, August 25, 2015
Penicillium mold upends our notions of Science and Progress says 1952 medical editorial
— Editorial , American Journal of Public Health, March, 1952.
Is there a stranger chapter than this in the
whole history of scientific progress?
Ten years ago, "mold" was a faintly repulsive fungoid growth which sometimes caused the spoilage of food products.
The very word "moldy” implies something “musty,
fusty, and stale.”
Today, the blue mold is recognized
as a synthetic chemist of the first order— a
friend and benefactor of the human race.
I just discovered this editorial in an old copy of a county medical society journal but it said then what I have always thought about the wartime penicillin drama....
Monday, August 24, 2015
October 1940 : purifying or preserving the Gene Pool of 'useless' penicillium & SBE genes
Is the world safer by minimizing or maximizing the Gene Pool ?
In the Fall of 1940, American Science renewed its century long efforts at triaging and then discarding much of the world's gene pool; this time under the new guise of a sudden need for "American Military Medicine Preparedness".
It was a movement, ironically enough, that was mostly led by conservative Isolationists among the scientists, men who had long opposed military intervention to help the little peoples of Europe from the evil axis of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.
These conservative Isolationists had long opposed intervening to help the little peoples of America as well (opposing Social Medicine for example) so they could not be accused of inconsistency, merely of heartlessness.
That Fall, they gave off plenty of indications that the stripping down for military preparedness meant the final death of Social Medicine.
No good news for the young patients suffering from then invariably fatal SBE.
The conservative isolationists considered that even if the SBEs survived one bout, eventually another would certainly kill them.
Meanwhile the SBEs just consumed lots of scarce medical resources without any prospects they would recover enough to become useful servicemen or do productive work in war industries.
With many conservative doctors believing that SBE, along with most diseases afflicting the poor and minorities, were highly genetically based, it could even be asked why even bother keeping them alive long enough for them to breed and pass on their defective genes to another generation of the collective human gene pool ?
Weren't the SBEs' genes something rather to purify and discard out of the human gene pool ,by a strict policy of deliberate government neglect, and wasn't the excuse of a planning for a Total War the best time to start doing so ?
Even lower on the conservatives' scale of genes worth retaining than those of the SBEs were the genes of that common household pest, the blue green penicillium mold.
If obtaining adequate amounts of lifesaving penicillin meant keeping the genes alive of the slimey mold that originally made penicillin, many were against it.
Better that human chemists, the smartest in the universe, quickly bested the slimey little chemists and made better penicillin cheaper and faster and far more predictably.
Synthetic man-made penicillin in this war or no penicillin, said Howard Florey, while Alexander Fleming and the Allied medical establishment cheered assent.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson strongly disagreed.
He felt the world would be better off, enriched even, if SBE patients like Bobby Darin was allowed to live, perhaps even to sing, dance and act, rather than to squalidly die from deliberate government neglect.
And his entire scientific career had been devoted to proving up his belief that the small and the weak and the useless 'gene carriers' all had something to bring to the commensal table of global Life.
Dawson had demonstrated more than enough examples showing that the microbe chemists were far far smarter than anyone had ever imagined.
He was not at all sure that the penicillium chemists hadn't polished the production of penicillin to a fine velvet sheen over hundreds of millions of years of trying -- and that the smartest chemists in the universe mightn't be able to beat them in a few frantic months of trying.
No matter how much money and labs and bombast was thrown at the problem.
So on October 16th 1940, a day the nation specifically set aside to triage all the 1A young men in America, Dr Dawson injected natural, freshly squeezed, orange colored penicillium juice into two 4Fs of the 4Fs patients, SBE sufferers Negro Aaron Leroy Alston and Jew Charles Aronson.
A product from rejected microbe genes injected to save some rejected human genes, as Dawson sought (against the grain of 1940s thinking on the topic) to preserve and protest the existing gene pool, not purify it and shrink it.
So began our present Age of Antibiotics - in a wartime scientific dispute over whether it was better to reduce or preserve the world's gene pool.
Dawson and Florey certainly weren't the only ones to dispute this issue : on the wider stage, Hitler certainly had his own take, as did Europe's Jews.
But, as is well known, the Dawson-Florey dispute was the only one that ended happily for humanity ....
Saturday, August 22, 2015
Late night war movies and little children : a cautionary tale
My parents always liked to put us small ones to bed at an ungodly early hour, right up into High School age.
One exception, for no reason I could ever discern, was when I was a small child (between the age of six to almost ten) when our family was living in 1950s Victoria and Vancouver and owning a reliable TV.
I was the eldest child, but obviously still not very old, when my parents made me sit up late with them and watch late night TV, ie the TV movies presented between 9pm and midnight.
(Made me , I repeat, because as a life long scaredy cat, I was not begging to watch scary war movies, believe you me.)
My takeaway lesson, as a wee child, was that WWII consisted mostly of armed uniformed men strafing civilian refugees on the road, bombing civilian homes, torturing civilians in POW concentration camps, torpedoing without warning civilian liners or blockading and starving civilian cities.
That is when they weren't putting hapless civilian hostages up against walls to shoot as reprisals for civilian resistance action.
I wasn't just a tiny child, I was tiny even for a six year old child and as a constant newcomer to my schools was often the bullies' target.
I saw WWII as a lot like elementary school, but with guns; big guys beating up little people.
Natural penicillin, made by the sort of tiny slimey no counts you might see on dank basement walls, was the only hero this tiny child could see in these war movies, saving kids like me here there and anywhere from deadly infections, be they from bombing injuries or simply brought on by hunger and fatigue.
If my book on WWII (Upending) sounds more than a little familiar to this tale from almost sixty years ago, blame it on my parents....
One exception, for no reason I could ever discern, was when I was a small child (between the age of six to almost ten) when our family was living in 1950s Victoria and Vancouver and owning a reliable TV.
I was the eldest child, but obviously still not very old, when my parents made me sit up late with them and watch late night TV, ie the TV movies presented between 9pm and midnight.
(Made me , I repeat, because as a life long scaredy cat, I was not begging to watch scary war movies, believe you me.)
My takeaway lesson, as a wee child, was that WWII consisted mostly of armed uniformed men strafing civilian refugees on the road, bombing civilian homes, torturing civilians in POW concentration camps, torpedoing without warning civilian liners or blockading and starving civilian cities.
That is when they weren't putting hapless civilian hostages up against walls to shoot as reprisals for civilian resistance action.
I wasn't just a tiny child, I was tiny even for a six year old child and as a constant newcomer to my schools was often the bullies' target.
I saw WWII as a lot like elementary school, but with guns; big guys beating up little people.
Natural penicillin, made by the sort of tiny slimey no counts you might see on dank basement walls, was the only hero this tiny child could see in these war movies, saving kids like me here there and anywhere from deadly infections, be they from bombing injuries or simply brought on by hunger and fatigue.
If my book on WWII (Upending) sounds more than a little familiar to this tale from almost sixty years ago, blame it on my parents....
Thursday, August 20, 2015
Zyklon B and Penicillium C : as Auschwitz tries to eradicate one 'Fungoid Growth', Brooklyn's Pfizer bring another to worldwide prominence
Why 'Jewish Penicillin' in the world's largest Jewish city actually is penicillin !
Hitler fiercely believed the world's Jews were all evil agents bent on ceaseless cosmic dissolution, with their chief targets the world's most organic civilizations - above all the Aryan Race.
So when he hurtled the abusive term 'fungoid growths' at the Jews in one of the most famous passages from his autobiography, Mein Kampf, it had an almost literal rather than figurative meaning.
That is because it is indeed the fungus molds who are Nature's prime agents at dissolving organic material.
(Dissolving their tough chemical bonds and thus releasing their building blocks to rejoin the earth's greatest resource cycles involving elements like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur etc.)
The Nazis and their intellectual fellow travellers around the world were, above all, fixated on maintaining rigid social, ethnic, gender boundaries at a time of great social fluidity.
So it is not at all surprising that proto-Nazi HP Lovecraft saw the world's greatest evils as looking like shapeless, boundary-less, oozing fungal slime.
He (and the Nazis) all failed to see that their hoped-for world of total stability and non-decay/non-renewal would be lifeless in its lack of variety and so fragile that it would be likely to fail to surmount any sudden small change from outside.
So, in Nazi controlled Europe, synthetic Zyklon B gas was used to take the lives of over a million of the Jewish 'fungoid growths'.
But in the largest Jewish city of New York, in those same years, other nature-made fungoid growths were blessing the world with the life-giving gift of penicillin.
Now that's something that is almost poetic in this symmetry .....
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Bakhtin's Carnivalesque : 'Slime Piss' still saving more kiddies annually than Advanced Civilization ever killed
Without today's antibiotics, the dangerous bacterial infections that currently afflict only a child here and a child there would rage freely as epidemics or pandemics, killing millions upon millions of kids.
And when we say 'antibiotics' we basically mean the beta lactams antibiotics - the huge and highly effective family of the penicillin-like antibiotics.
The human use of penicillin (Penicillin G) to save lives is almost ninety years old and yet it is still in every hospital's pharmacy, albeit relatively rarely used.
However, as the starting base to make most all of our other antibiotics, penicillin g is still produced in the tens of thousands of tons.
And still made as it always was - made in incredibly tiny ---natural--- fungus factories invisible to the naked eye.
It is a mere 'secondary' metabolite of the penicillium slime - and for long time the secondary metabolites were considered to be just 'metabolic waste', a fancy grown-up's word for poo and pee.
Considering its liquid nature and its bright yellow color (leaving aside its strong acrid smell for a moment) , the scientists of yesteryear considered it to be nothing more than 'slime piss'.
It took a brave doctor indeed (Martin Henry Dawson) to first inject that foul stuff - raw - into a the bloodstream of a young male, in an attempt to save his life.
But the patient (Charles Aronson) lived and so our Age of Antibiotics began, on Ward G-East, at NYC's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre ----- seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015.
In WWII's brutal war of high tech science, this was low tech life saving at its very finest.
A stinging rebuke then, to Scientism at its very apogee of hubris, delivered by the lowest of the low, delivered by slime piss.
So be sure to tell Mikhail Bakhtin (wherever he might be) that it just can't get anymore carnivalesque than that...
And when we say 'antibiotics' we basically mean the beta lactams antibiotics - the huge and highly effective family of the penicillin-like antibiotics.
The human use of penicillin (Penicillin G) to save lives is almost ninety years old and yet it is still in every hospital's pharmacy, albeit relatively rarely used.
However, as the starting base to make most all of our other antibiotics, penicillin g is still produced in the tens of thousands of tons.
And still made as it always was - made in incredibly tiny ---natural--- fungus factories invisible to the naked eye.
It is a mere 'secondary' metabolite of the penicillium slime - and for long time the secondary metabolites were considered to be just 'metabolic waste', a fancy grown-up's word for poo and pee.
Considering its liquid nature and its bright yellow color (leaving aside its strong acrid smell for a moment) , the scientists of yesteryear considered it to be nothing more than 'slime piss'.
It took a brave doctor indeed (Martin Henry Dawson) to first inject that foul stuff - raw - into a the bloodstream of a young male, in an attempt to save his life.
But the patient (Charles Aronson) lived and so our Age of Antibiotics began, on Ward G-East, at NYC's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre ----- seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015.
In WWII's brutal war of high tech science, this was low tech life saving at its very finest.
A stinging rebuke then, to Scientism at its very apogee of hubris, delivered by the lowest of the low, delivered by slime piss.
So be sure to tell Mikhail Bakhtin (wherever he might be) that it just can't get anymore carnivalesque than that...
Monday, August 3, 2015
October 16 1940 : upending the team's protocol
To put it bluntly, twice-wounded Lieutenant Dr Martin Henry Dawson (MC with citation for bravery) was very far from being given to routinely performing bold, brave and lonely gestures.
This despite the fact that he performed some very brave actions indeed on at least a half dozen times during his shortened life.
Beside his wartime actions, those brave acts include his June 1928 sacrificing of the start of a wonderful research career at the then citadel of medical research - the Rockefeller Institute.
All to stand up for what this very junior pro tem researcher believed in scientifically, against his all powerful and very senior lab chief (and fellow Nova Scotian) Oswald Avery on the matter of the importance of bacteria transformed with DNA.
Or consider his December 1940 decision to sacrifice his own life, if need be, (against the wishes of his wife and doctors) to try and save the lives of others (the world's patients with deadly SBE) with his pioneering penicillin.
And his well known November 1942 decision to 'steal' (according to his hostile opponents) scarce government penicillin - during wartime ! - all to further his success in finally saving SBEs with penicillin, set against deliberate government 'indifference' to their dire fate - success with penicillin or not.
But my vote for his bravest, his boldest, his most lonely gesture was that which occurred on October 16th 1940.
For his solo determination to inject 'dangerously primitive' penicillin - right now ! - into a young black man and a young Jewish man in an attempt to save them from an inevitable death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis) was not like his usual conflicts with higher authorities.
The people opposing his sudden decision were his own friends, down at his own level, on his own tiny team of researchers.
The protocol he was suddenly abruptly 'upending' was one he himself had helped create and agreed to adhere to.
The plan was to allocate five months (September 11th 1940 - January 11th 1941) to 'safely' purifying primitive penicillin - if not to actually totally synthesis it - before it would be clinically tested with internal - systemic - injections.
Tested upon Dawson's SBEs, if he insisted - though SBE was universally seen as the very Mount Everest of infectious disease and thus hardly a first choice for a team intent on getting those vital convincing early successes out of an untried drug.
It was always clear that Dawson wanted very much to save the lives of SBE patients.
But if he felt a drug was more likely to kill than to save - as he had earlier worried about massive doses of some new sulfa drugs - he would have been characteristically cautious rather than uncharacteristically bold.
No doctor in the world (most much bolder than Dawson), in the twelve years since penicillin was discovered, had dared to risk injecting it into the human circulation system.
This despite the fact that there were very few drugs effective against any of the deadly infectious diseases back then.
And despite the fact that in repeated internal animal testing and in repeated external testing with human blood, the primitive penicillin was very effective against the worst of the deadly bacteria cells and yet didn't harm human or animal cells, even when given in far larger doses than needed to kill the bacteria.
And despite the fact that man-made drugs with far less effect against deadly bacteria and far far worse toxicity issues had been quickly injected into test patients and brought to market.
With hindsight, what was going on here was a worldwide, profession-wide and prolonged case of collective cognitive dissonance.
But not all nations and not all doctors back then did any bold research into the unknown and untried --- only a few pacemaking nations and institutions led the way, for all the others to follow.
So it was actually the collective unwillingness of a small subset of the world's doctors that we must really lay blame.
Upon a few thousand upper middle class white, mostly Protestant, males from the largest medical research facilities of the most civilized nations on earth.
The Big Dogs, the Alpha Dogs, of the human medical food chain.
(Dawson's own institution, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Complex in NYC, was in the top twenty five of such institutions world wide.)
They semi-consciously simply refused to accept that possibly the world's best and safest antibacterial agent could ever come from the sort of smelly fungal slime that covered their basement walls and not from the civilized world's best clinicians and chemists.
Even when the evidence lay in the published test results before their very eyes : classic cognitive dissonance.
(Feel free to substitute negro or gypsy traveller or New Guinea 'savage' for fungal slime to better understand the popular (semi-digested) social darwinism that lay behind their attitudes.)
For fifteen years, his entire career as a medical researcher, Dawson had been proving up his point that the small, tiny, weak, simple, primitive microbes were far far smarter than we give them credit for - sometimes capable of doing things we humans are not able to do, even badly.
If penicillin was as old as the intermittent competition between soil fungus and soil bacteria over dwindling foodstuffs (at least hundreds of millions of years old) then perhaps the slime chemists had polished penicillin's abilities --- and their skill at making it --- into a fine art.
Why not 'give them a fair go' ?
So, seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015, the Age of Antibiotics finally began - and with it - our current Postmodern Age as well.
For what all the variants of postmodernity (the word 'variants' itself being a characteristic postmodern concept !) have in common is a commitment to welcoming the mixing of High and low.
Not just in Art and Architecture either --- almost all of our antibiotics today, seventy five years later, are still based upon the lowest of medicines - based upon primitive penicillin made by the slime, not synthesized by Man - the same sort that Dawson injected that day.
And when sold to doctors by the slick ad efforts of some of the world's largest and most technically advanced corporations - those antibiotics can seem to be very High medicine indeed.
But penicillin is really penicillium excrement - fungus turds.
And no matter how much High science polishes it, a turd is still a turd - even if here a lifesaving turd .
Two hundred years of a smug world of linear and hierarchical progress leading up to Civilized European Man at the very top ------ permanently upended in a New York Minute.
The lowest of the low, the slime of the slime, medical missionaries daily saving the precious children of the uncivilized world, because The Smartest Chemists In The Civilized Universe couldn't ...
This despite the fact that he performed some very brave actions indeed on at least a half dozen times during his shortened life.
Beside his wartime actions, those brave acts include his June 1928 sacrificing of the start of a wonderful research career at the then citadel of medical research - the Rockefeller Institute.
All to stand up for what this very junior pro tem researcher believed in scientifically, against his all powerful and very senior lab chief (and fellow Nova Scotian) Oswald Avery on the matter of the importance of bacteria transformed with DNA.
Or consider his December 1940 decision to sacrifice his own life, if need be, (against the wishes of his wife and doctors) to try and save the lives of others (the world's patients with deadly SBE) with his pioneering penicillin.
And his well known November 1942 decision to 'steal' (according to his hostile opponents) scarce government penicillin - during wartime ! - all to further his success in finally saving SBEs with penicillin, set against deliberate government 'indifference' to their dire fate - success with penicillin or not.
But my vote for his bravest, his boldest, his most lonely gesture was that which occurred on October 16th 1940.
For his solo determination to inject 'dangerously primitive' penicillin - right now ! - into a young black man and a young Jewish man in an attempt to save them from an inevitable death from SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis) was not like his usual conflicts with higher authorities.
The people opposing his sudden decision were his own friends, down at his own level, on his own tiny team of researchers.
The protocol he was suddenly abruptly 'upending' was one he himself had helped create and agreed to adhere to.
The plan was to allocate five months (September 11th 1940 - January 11th 1941) to 'safely' purifying primitive penicillin - if not to actually totally synthesis it - before it would be clinically tested with internal - systemic - injections.
Tested upon Dawson's SBEs, if he insisted - though SBE was universally seen as the very Mount Everest of infectious disease and thus hardly a first choice for a team intent on getting those vital convincing early successes out of an untried drug.
It was always clear that Dawson wanted very much to save the lives of SBE patients.
But if he felt a drug was more likely to kill than to save - as he had earlier worried about massive doses of some new sulfa drugs - he would have been characteristically cautious rather than uncharacteristically bold.
No doctor in the world (most much bolder than Dawson), in the twelve years since penicillin was discovered, had dared to risk injecting it into the human circulation system.
This despite the fact that there were very few drugs effective against any of the deadly infectious diseases back then.
And despite the fact that in repeated internal animal testing and in repeated external testing with human blood, the primitive penicillin was very effective against the worst of the deadly bacteria cells and yet didn't harm human or animal cells, even when given in far larger doses than needed to kill the bacteria.
And despite the fact that man-made drugs with far less effect against deadly bacteria and far far worse toxicity issues had been quickly injected into test patients and brought to market.
Collective Cognitive Dissonance
With hindsight, what was going on here was a worldwide, profession-wide and prolonged case of collective cognitive dissonance.
But not all nations and not all doctors back then did any bold research into the unknown and untried --- only a few pacemaking nations and institutions led the way, for all the others to follow.
So it was actually the collective unwillingness of a small subset of the world's doctors that we must really lay blame.
Upon a few thousand upper middle class white, mostly Protestant, males from the largest medical research facilities of the most civilized nations on earth.
The Big Dogs, the Alpha Dogs, of the human medical food chain.
(Dawson's own institution, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Complex in NYC, was in the top twenty five of such institutions world wide.)
They semi-consciously simply refused to accept that possibly the world's best and safest antibacterial agent could ever come from the sort of smelly fungal slime that covered their basement walls and not from the civilized world's best clinicians and chemists.
Even when the evidence lay in the published test results before their very eyes : classic cognitive dissonance.
(Feel free to substitute negro or gypsy traveller or New Guinea 'savage' for fungal slime to better understand the popular (semi-digested) social darwinism that lay behind their attitudes.)
For fifteen years, his entire career as a medical researcher, Dawson had been proving up his point that the small, tiny, weak, simple, primitive microbes were far far smarter than we give them credit for - sometimes capable of doing things we humans are not able to do, even badly.
If penicillin was as old as the intermittent competition between soil fungus and soil bacteria over dwindling foodstuffs (at least hundreds of millions of years old) then perhaps the slime chemists had polished penicillin's abilities --- and their skill at making it --- into a fine art.
Why not 'give them a fair go' ?
The injecting only took a New York Minute - but it changed everything
So, seventy five years ago this October 16th 2015, the Age of Antibiotics finally began - and with it - our current Postmodern Age as well.
For what all the variants of postmodernity (the word 'variants' itself being a characteristic postmodern concept !) have in common is a commitment to welcoming the mixing of High and low.
Not just in Art and Architecture either --- almost all of our antibiotics today, seventy five years later, are still based upon the lowest of medicines - based upon primitive penicillin made by the slime, not synthesized by Man - the same sort that Dawson injected that day.
And when sold to doctors by the slick ad efforts of some of the world's largest and most technically advanced corporations - those antibiotics can seem to be very High medicine indeed.
But penicillin is really penicillium excrement - fungus turds.
And no matter how much High science polishes it, a turd is still a turd - even if here a lifesaving turd .
Two hundred years of a smug world of linear and hierarchical progress leading up to Civilized European Man at the very top ------ permanently upended in a New York Minute.
The lowest of the low, the slime of the slime, medical missionaries daily saving the precious children of the uncivilized world, because The Smartest Chemists In The Civilized Universe couldn't ...
Saturday, August 1, 2015
Ending the Enlightenment Project with deeds, not words
There are two academic puzzles in dating the ending of the Enlightenment Project precisely to 1945.
One was that 1945 was supposed to be year of the Enlightenment's greatest success, not failure --- you remember, beating back the Nazi forces of darkness and barbarism etc.
The other was that 1945 had no great book and no great thinker proclaiming the end of one intellectual age and the birth of another.
No opus from no new Hume, Kant, Hegel or Newton, Galileo and Darwin.
Instead we had doctors Mengele and Dawson, operating from the opposite ends of the moral spectrum, putting the post into modernity.
Both men of deeds, not of words.
Doers - not thinkers - doing in the thinkers' Enlightenment Project : I kinda like that....
One was that 1945 was supposed to be year of the Enlightenment's greatest success, not failure --- you remember, beating back the Nazi forces of darkness and barbarism etc.
The other was that 1945 had no great book and no great thinker proclaiming the end of one intellectual age and the birth of another.
No opus from no new Hume, Kant, Hegel or Newton, Galileo and Darwin.
Instead we had doctors Mengele and Dawson, operating from the opposite ends of the moral spectrum, putting the post into modernity.
Both men of deeds, not of words.
Doers - not thinkers - doing in the thinkers' Enlightenment Project : I kinda like that....
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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...