What would Alexander Fleming's historical report on penicillin have looked like if he had decided to see it published in LANCET, BMJ or the journal NATURE ?
My guess is that would only have happened if one of his junior team members - acting against Fleming's express orders - had injected a sick mouse with his penicillin juice and found that contrary to the boss's "opinion" , the mouse was cured.
Fleming would swallow his anger , and adopt a much more positive view of his new medicine and seek a more positive tone to describe it , in a much more important journal.
Instead he mentally damned its application as an internal (ie life saving ) medicine for all eternity , damned even its use as an antiseptic unless first synthesized and so decided to bury his report of a new discovery in a new - relatively obscure - Britain-circulating-only - journal ....
Aug 28, 2014
How New York rescued natural life-saving penicillin-for-all from Alexander Fleming
If you are Alexander Fleming you only have to make three big mistakes to win a Nobel prize and eternal acclaim.
Mistake one : insist that penicillin will never be a success unless man first synthesizes it.
(We're still waiting !)
Mistake two : insist that penicillin will never work if taken internally but will only work as a topical antiseptic.
(In fact, penicillin really only works when taken internally, as an antibiotic, to save lives while as an antiseptic it may actually impede healing of minor scrapes and cuts.)
Mistake three : go along with the Churchill government's decision to only make enough wartime penicillin to help frontline Allied forces with wounds moderate enough to be likely to quickly return to battle.
(When America's New Deal-oriented WPB (War Production Board) decided to mass produce wartime natural penicillin, American diplomats were soon using that bounty to save lives (and win hearts and minds) all over the Allied, Neutral and Occupied world.
Soon a Pax Americana (Pax Penicillia ?) was replacing a century-old Pax Britannica.)
Mistake one : insist that penicillin will never be a success unless man first synthesizes it.
(We're still waiting !)
Mistake two : insist that penicillin will never work if taken internally but will only work as a topical antiseptic.
(In fact, penicillin really only works when taken internally, as an antibiotic, to save lives while as an antiseptic it may actually impede healing of minor scrapes and cuts.)
Mistake three : go along with the Churchill government's decision to only make enough wartime penicillin to help frontline Allied forces with wounds moderate enough to be likely to quickly return to battle.
(When America's New Deal-oriented WPB (War Production Board) decided to mass produce wartime natural penicillin, American diplomats were soon using that bounty to save lives (and win hearts and minds) all over the Allied, Neutral and Occupied world.
Soon a Pax Americana (Pax Penicillia ?) was replacing a century-old Pax Britannica.)
Aug 27, 2014
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 ...
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 ...
Blog's background tiled image is of the oppressive walls of CUMC circa 1928
I am trying to think of visual ways to convey the sheer unexpectedness of the wartime triumph of Manhattan natural penicillin.
What tab-dropping novelist would ever dare suggest that the attempts to create artificial penicillin blossomed in Oxford University's leafy green setting while the successful effort to bring naturally grown penicillin to the world's dying would emerge from Gotham's concrete jungle ?
What tab-dropping novelist would ever dare suggest that the attempts to create artificial penicillin blossomed in Oxford University's leafy green setting while the successful effort to bring naturally grown penicillin to the world's dying would emerge from Gotham's concrete jungle ?
Aug 26, 2014
Abundant Penicillin by 1942 - only if Howard Florey didn't come to America ?
When ,in April 1941, Howard Florey learned that his best shot at world acclaim (as the only begetter of systemic penicillin) was at risk because Henry Dawson had got there first, the old claim jumper boot scooted over to America to shake a little dust.
Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
God knows what Henry Dawson did - even if Stockholm didn't
Sometimes people ask me if I think Henry Dawson should have gotten a Nobel Prize for his successful pushing of the wartime mass production of natural penicillin.
As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to Howard Florey (and Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.
(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)
I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.
Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.
As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to Howard Florey (and Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.
(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)
I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.
Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.
Wartime Oxford : the planned capital of a racially pure Nazi Britain ---- and of chemically pure penicillin
Hitler never seriously tried to bomb Oxford England , despite its very militarily important engineering works.
The often made claim that Howard Florey had to give penicillin away to America because he was bombed out of Oxford by the Blitz is made only by his American fans - even his most ardent British fans weren't ever that thick.
After all , they had survived life in British cities enduring the various Nazi bombing efforts and at the time had greatly envied Oxford's well known gilded wartime immunity.
The often made claim that Howard Florey had to give penicillin away to America because he was bombed out of Oxford by the Blitz is made only by his American fans - even his most ardent British fans weren't ever that thick.
After all , they had survived life in British cities enduring the various Nazi bombing efforts and at the time had greatly envied Oxford's well known gilded wartime immunity.
Connecting New York's PENICILLIN dots ...
Some authors are content to merely describe a long series of coincidental dots ---- other authors like to investigate to see if anything connects all those coincidental dots.
I am one of the latter : as many a TV police detective is fond of saying , my motto is "I don't believe in coincidences."
When I fell upon the story of Henry Dawson and wartime penicillin, I noticed that most of the twenty or so full length accounts of wartime penicillin always included the awkward fact that he (and not their hero Howard Florey) was the one to give history's first ever penicillin shots.
They briefly described that first needle in a sentence or paragraph or page or two --- and then always go on quickly to say that Dawson himself was dying of a terminal illness - 'so necessarily passes out of our story'.
The rest of their three hundred or page accounts have nothing further about Dawson's team.
Clearly they mentally needed a way to dispose of Dawson (his convenient terminal illness) without seriously engaging his team's more than five years of involvement with penicillin.
I am one of the latter : as many a TV police detective is fond of saying , my motto is "I don't believe in coincidences."
When I fell upon the story of Henry Dawson and wartime penicillin, I noticed that most of the twenty or so full length accounts of wartime penicillin always included the awkward fact that he (and not their hero Howard Florey) was the one to give history's first ever penicillin shots.
They briefly described that first needle in a sentence or paragraph or page or two --- and then always go on quickly to say that Dawson himself was dying of a terminal illness - 'so necessarily passes out of our story'.
The rest of their three hundred or page accounts have nothing further about Dawson's team.
Clearly they mentally needed a way to dispose of Dawson (his convenient terminal illness) without seriously engaging his team's more than five years of involvement with penicillin.
Penicillin Story's irony : the natural effort came from the concrete jungle while the artificial effort flourished amidst greenery
What acid-dropping fiction-writing fabulist would ever dare suggest that WWII's successful natural penicillin efforts would emerge from Manhattan's concrete jungle while the failed attempt to make artificial penicillin would flourish amidst Oxford University's greenery ?
As we fans of G K Chesterton are so fond of asserting : why write humdrum fiction , when ordinary life is so much more extraordinary ?
Fortunately for me , I've still got this story to myself , seventy five years after the event --- possibly because no previous writer on wartime penicillin had Chesterton's acute sense for sensing life's funny little ironies...
As we fans of G K Chesterton are so fond of asserting : why write humdrum fiction , when ordinary life is so much more extraordinary ?
Fortunately for me , I've still got this story to myself , seventy five years after the event --- possibly because no previous writer on wartime penicillin had Chesterton's acute sense for sensing life's funny little ironies...
Aug 25, 2014
Manhattan Natural : green Life-Saving , from the concrete jungle ...
The urban jungle that is Manhattan, with all its concrete skyscrapers, should be the very last place on earth where one might expect to see the start of a turning away from the Modern obsession with the artificial and the synthetic and a turn to the Postmodernity's renewed relationship with Nature.
But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .
But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .
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