Meet the "GOTHAM SEVEN"

Their leader, Dr Henry Dawson, dying of Myasthenia Gravis (MG) with deadly bulbar nerve involvement.

By the end , his MG crisis were ever more frequent and he was reduced to working out of a wheelchair, with oxygen assist.

WWI poison gas and too much time in damp trenches hadn't helped his lungs now threatened by bulbar nerve failings.

His foot and shoulder had also been severely wounded in the war, resulting in months spent in hospitals recovering.

His wife and helpmate, Marjorie Granger Dawson, had been born with congenital hip problems and no amount of operations had helped - she walked , but with a cane.

His clinical assistant , Thomas H Hunter. Polio had left him with two legs paralyzed so he got about with two crutches.

Former Dawson patient (and Dawson's great behind-the-scenes influence within the powerful WPB ) , financier Floyd Odlum.

The Warren Buffett of his age, he was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis while stressing about American unpreparedness for total war.

He was wracked with pain for the rest of his life and only really comfortable submersed in a warm water swimming pool.

Another former Dawson patient, Dr Dante Colitti

Years spent in hospital while doctors struggled to save his life from TB of the spine left him determined to become a surgeon despite his arthritis of the spine.

A condition which left him a hunchback and required him to use crutches.

The medical establishment rejected his services - partly because he was also catholic and Italian-American.

When he saw his chance he delighted in emulating Dawson , by tweaking the noses of the medically powerfuls by getting scarce penicillin for a dying baby via an appeal to the Hearst newspaper empire.

Miss H : Dawson's first SBE patient in which is can be said for sure that his penicillin alone saved her life.

But SBE casts its net wide and with her , it also damaged her uterus so badly she couldn't have children and left her blind in one eye. But she hung on, despite all the new operations and hospital stays, and thrived.

Her continued survival was crucial to answering the many doubters of Dawson's use of precious penicillin on the useless SBE patients, in the critical period between the Fall of 1942 and the Fall of 1945.

Charlie Aronson, along with Aaron Alston, was the first person to ever get a penicillin shot. Dawson's historical injections couldn't have hurt, because Charlie amazingly survived the then almost invariably fatal SBE.

He got a second bout of SBE and more Dawson penicillin again saved his life - but SBE also gave him a life threatening major stroke that left him permanently paralyzed in speech and body and in a wheelchair.

He survived and thrived - it was but the latest in a life long battle with a half dozen diseases that should have killed him.

As far as we know , he survived SBE - thanks in part to his historic first ever penicillin injection - from October 1940 till at least the end of December 1948.

(My current best guess is that he lived at least until 1955.)

His continued survival again stifled the many doubters to Dawson's SBE efforts.

In the parlance of the day, all seven were 4F --- in fact, the 4F of the 4F , useless, unfit, useless mouths.

But these seven , the Gotham Seven, were the ones who fought off their own Allied government and their own physical weaknesses to rescue natural lifesaving penicillin and set it free for all.

Honour their names : un-super heroes indeed....

Manhattan Natural : wartime Gotham's un-super heroes ...

At a time (WWII) when comic book superheroes , usually operating in a make-believe Manhattan, were saving the world every day and enthralling North American children and youth , lesser known but equally larger-than-life actual heroics were taking place in a real Manhattan.

But these valiants bringing natural penicillin lifesaving to the world against government blowback were hardly Superman or indeed any sort of superheroes .

If by the term 'superhero' we mean someone strong in body as well as mind.

They were un-super heroes if ever than phrase had meaning.

They were more like a badly aged Clark Kent , still mild and meek  but now weak and crippled .

They never numbered more than a handful :  misfits , unfits and just plain rebels.

They were aptly described by the official historian of their arch enemy  , Vannevar Bush's OSRD , as "4Fs, women and the Grace of God".

Henry and Marjorie Dawson, Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Thomas Hunter, Charlie and Miss H --- they hardly had more than a handful of really good limbs between the seven of them.

'Unfits' the whole lot of them - the very 4Fs of the 4Fs - yet real life heroes despite all that .

Perhaps we could still make use of their story - as a sort of role model - by making a series of comic books or graphic novels about their wartime exploits ...

"Triumph of the Unfit" : a WWII book whose heroes are women, Jews, blacks, cripples and immigrants

There are plenty of WWII books and sometimes even documentaries about the WWII experiences of minorities and the unfit.

Just not popular ones - not the ones promoted by the Big Six , Five , Four book publishers and the Big Six, Five, Four, Three TV networks with lots of gloss and big bucks for publicity.

The biggest readers of the glossy books and high-budget TV shows about WWII (War porn) are basically the same people who are big viewers of Fox News and big listeners of Talk Radio and big supporters of the Tea Party.

You know who I mean : all those middle aged, middle class, white men who can't get enough of the last period in history (Modernity) when their kind ruled the roost unchallenged.

If any of them chance to fall upon my book about the heroic unfits whose efforts have helped saved their lives, or the lives of someone they know with cheap abundant antibiotics - I sure hope the shock doesn't kill them ....

"Unfit valour" : They defied Allied & Axis eugenics (and their own physical failings) to bring us "Penicillin-for-All"

What would penicillin look like today if Hitler, Stalin or Churchill had delivered it - instead of Dawson ?

In 1943 , Hitler, Stalin or Anglo-American Big Pharma could have delivered penicillin to us - delivered us penicillin either as expensive as Avastin or only to be given to the truly deserving Proletarian or Aryan.

But against the eugenic-mad world of 1943 , perhaps only a bunch of misfits and unfits could have delivered us inexpensive, abundant ,un-patented, un-encumbered Penicillin-for-All...