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 ...

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.

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.

Time to end the much-told cover-up of UNSUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin and tell the untold tale of SUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin

Against about fifty previous books about wartime penicillin , I want my penicillin book to do something wildly different --- I want to celebrate success, not cover-up failure.

If the wartime deployment of penicillin was ultimately successful (and everybody seems to agree it was) what exactly did this successful  penicillin look like?

It turns out it actually was :

(a)  naturally made penicillin - not man made.

(b) and (via exports of massive amounts of American penicillin under Lend-Lease and other programs), it was made available to all in the wartime world dying from any and all diseases it could cure - not just reserved for a relatively small number of frontline Allied soldiers judged capable of returning to immediate combat, if given penicillin.

Ie , what successful wartime penicillin definitely was not, was synthesized and weaponized.

Oxford University Artificial Penicillin totally fails to deliver - morally as well as technically

It goes without saying that Oxford University's wartime chimera of totally synthesized artificial penicillin was an abject failure.

75 years on, we still start the production of all the penicillin and beta lactam antibiotics with natural fermentation.

So ---- just a minor technical failing ?

Few go on to consider the moral failings behind the Conservative Party-led British government's wartime penicillin decisions.

Oxford Artificial versus Manhattan Natural

Howard Florey (along with Alexander Fleming and Winston Churchill's government) spend ten years before during and after WWII pursuing the chimera of totally artificial (patentable) penicillin --- to no avail.

As did Florey's supporters in America - Merck, Squibb and Vannevar Bush's all-powerful OSRD.

Set against then, on the opposite side of the Hudson River , was Dr Martin Henry Dawson and John l Smith , chemist and boss of Pfizer.

They saw possibilities in the fermentation of the (public domain - free for all to grow) natural penicillium to produce antibiotics.

This was despite its current yields being admittedly low: they felt as it was a totally new way of doing medicine , it might well improve drastically with more practise.

(I should mention that two other strong skeptics of the whole idea of the commercial viability of total synthesis of penicillin were also practising chemists : Glaxo boss Harry Jepcott and the WPB's penicillin czar Larry Elder.

 It was chemist manques like Florey and the OSRD's Dr Richards who were the most likely to feel that of course man-made Chemistry was always bound to be superior to Mother Nature.)

Today of course, with penicillin being produced at 50,000 times the levels of Fleming for the same cost in time labour and materials, the case against oxford Artificial seems clear - but it wasn't so throughout the war and beyond.

Long Island scientist Miloslav Demerec deserves a lot more credit than he ever gets (which is none !) for his major role in making our wonderful world of relatively cheap abundant antibiotics ....

Defeating the PENICILLIN death panels

 Part One : the backstory

President Obama in 2009 had absolutely no intention of emulating Hitler's use of Aktion T4 death  panels,  but this does not mean that death panels were not in force under an earlier Democratic administration.


These death panels - common to all Allied nations during WWII - did not directly echo the German efforts, instead they and the German death panels were all part and parcel of a world wide ground swell among the well educated and the well off in support of 'eugenic' triage.

Starting at the very outbreak of the war in 1939, Hitler had authorized doctor-run death panels to met to decide which of the weak and elderly in Germany should be actively killed off.

He had wanted to do much earlier,  but judged it would be politically risky internally.

Now he could use the excuse of urgent war need as the reason to roll back the Weimar Republic's expansion of Social Medicine , supposedly in an effort to divert the freed up money towards War Medicine instead.

Sharing similar eugenic motives, the mostly eugenically-minded medical elite in Allied and in Neutral nations also used the urgent need for expanded War Medicine for the 1As, as an excuse to roll back Social Medicine for their society's 4Fs.

This roll back could lead  to patients dying - death by indirection rather than direct acts of murder, of course ,because these people prided themselves on not being Nazis .

(Vichy France, for example, so reduced funds to institutions for the chronically ill, that tens of thousands were "CODE SLOWED" to death due to inadequate food, heat and medical staff attention. Just as Britain had done similarly during the last years of WWI).

Asking, "how do we ration life-saving medical resources like the 1960s' supply of kidney dialysis machines ?",  is the totally wrong question 

What we first need to ask is , "why did the 1960s feel the need to ration life machines in the first place, when it didn't ration death machines ?"

Clearly the totally absence of any money isn't the real issue  but rather " how do we divide the very big but still limited bag of money that we do have"?

So hospital auxiliary bake sales did raise money for some kidney dialysis machines back then - but no bombers or nuclear weapons were ever fund-raised that way.

All politics is about rationing : 'the authoritative allocation of scarce resources' as the textbooks describe it .

The decision to allocate most of the available money to H-bombs and so to supply only a small amount for the supply of baby incubators and the such like was a human-made decision, not an Act of God or a Law of Nature.

Just as the President who intoned "bombs were dropped on Cambodia" in an academically-correct passive, nay wimpy, voice really meant that "men dropped bombs on Cambodian civilians and killed them, because I ordered it so."

Stalin and Hitler forthrightly ordered millions to be murdered  - they did not artificially create a shortage by a human political decision and  then sit around piously in death panels trying to decide how to allocate patients to that shortage as 'fairly' as they could.

Bad Faith and Hypocrisy were not among their many sins of Hot and Cold.

But the sins of the lukewarm might well be dealt with even harsher on Judgement Day and it is the lukewarm sinners of wartime penicillin that we now turn to.

Britain's Conservative-dominated government said it would only make enough penicillin in wartime to handle the military cases it wanted penicillin to deal with.

And their Labour and Liberal partners went along with that.

So, no penicillin for penicillin for civilians in Britain or in her colonies, none to Allied POWS, none for British military casualties judged of no further military use.

Canada and Australia "me -too-ed" in agreement - one government liberal the other Labour.

America having a government of competing agencies, on the same Social Darwin model as Hitler's government , spoke with two main voices.

The scientific medical elite (OSRD and NAS) ,with some support from the military and industry , wanted only enough made to deal with priority military cases. Think of FDR as the "Doctor Win the War" of 1940 onwards.

But think also of an earlier FDR, "Doctor New Deal", and all his New Dealer supporters' high hopes.

Because what was now left of all these New Dealers were huddled in a stockade known as the WPB (War Production Board),  surrounded on all sides by the hostile Republicans that FDR had brought into his administration, as part of his willingness to lose the internal social war to win the external military war.

The WPB proposed that enough wartime penicillin be made in America to generously supply all the penicillin needs of  the military, the civilians and the overseas allies, neutrals and residents of enemy occupied lands.

The WPB won the argument -- when the new Army Surgeon General switched sides .

But until industry went along with the gag, America would still have not enough for anyone domestic , let alone everyone domestic and their foreign cousin.

The year long delay until one industrial firm really climbed on board with gusto allowed the OSRD-NAS to play God by convening penicillin death panels.

They might have operated unchallenged but for one man : Henry Dawson.

He fought them , won and so changed history ....

science LOST world war two...

'What ?! Don't be foolish : if historians of all stripes agree on one thing, it is that 'science' won WWII - the freedom-loving Allies simply had better 'science' then did the dictators of the Axis.'

I doubt that all historians think that way.

 I am fairly sure that British historian David Edgerton hardly agrees that mere science , rather than an extraordinary advantage held by the Allies in terms of population, territory and resources, 'won the day' (albeit six long years after the war began).

What I think best describes WWII is that all sides constantly expected one thing to happen, based on their scientific beliefs, and over and over another unexpected thing actually happened.

Let us look at the mid term American elections for what I mean : if ,when asked 'who won' I said 'the politicians' , you'd think me very rude indeed.

'Yes, yes, but who won :  Republicans or Democrats ?'

We expect conflicts , with winners and losers , in almost every aspect of human life - but not in science.

Everything that happened scientifically in the war is simply credited to 'science' , with no sense of the possibility of scientific winners and losers or of scientific conflicts.

1940's Allied plans for precision bombing with the Norden bombsight and the 1945 Allied atomic fire bombing all of civilian Hiroshima merely to burn down its naval base are in 100% opposition to each other - scientifically - but they get rolled up together as just two of the many scientific triumphs of WWII.

Wartime penicillin was delayed for decades by the Allied scientific elites' determination to first make it as highly profitable patentable synthetic penicillin.

But when this failed and the underdog natural penicillin proved the real winner, the academic history of penicillin elided synthetic penicillin from our memory banks, like a Stalinist commissar vanished from a group photo.

Reading the published histories of penicillin, one might think that the OSRD proponents of synthetic penicillin (and the steadfast opponents of the OPRD's natural crude penicillin) had been ardent champions of the natural method all along.

Here are two rival Washington bureaucracies , competing. No surprise surely, but because they are scientific bureaucrats , conflict is denied by science-cheerleading historians and the great triumph of the tiny OPRD is transferred to the mighty OSRD, by implication.

So if the story of wartime penicillin's fierce internecine war is ever to be told, a political scientist, not a medical scientist, is the best person for the job....

Wartime Penicillin intended to be secret and synthetic

It ended up public and 'public domain' natural, thanks to Henry Dawson and his supporters.

The British War Department and the American OSRD (run by Vannevar Bush) had expected to quickly, cheaply and, above all, secretively mass produce synthetic penicillin.

Enough artificial penicillin to supply the Allied front lines in the big pushback against Tojo and Hitler, while the enemy had to make do with the rapidly failing Sulfa drugs or try to produce tiny amounts of impure natural penicillin.

The whole project depended on keeping accounts of penicillin's miracle cures away from the Allied public.

That would only create a public sensation , as it had earlier for Sulfa's first miracle cures, which the Axis would soon learn about , thanks to newspaper articles in Neutral papers.

Once alerted, clever German and Japanese chemists would also soon synthesize penicillin and negate the temporary military advantage the Allies had gained via secrecy.

So : the potentially morally shabby story of wartime penicillin : medicine as a weapon.

But when the normally-stodgy Henry Dawson actually dared to steal government-sanctioned war penicillin to successfully save some young 4F kids banefully abandoned by their government as just 'useless mouths' , word spread rapidly in the gossip-driven circles of wartime medical New York.

A young doctor with his own burden of prejudice from the anglo protestant medical elite to rouse his ire, Dante Colitti,  got the newspaper chain that invented yellow journalism (Hearst) to come to the defence of the yellow magic and no sooner than you could say 'that darling little Patty Malone', the jig was up for the OSRD and War Department.....

Aktion 4F : something done to 4Fs, rather than something done for 4Fs ?

For years, I have thought and written of Dr Henry Dawson's efforts to try and save the lives of young SBE patients ,"The 4Fs of the 4Fs" , as if it was a sort of counterpoint to Nazi Germany's efforts to kill similar chronically ill people, the infamous Aktion T4 campaign.

His own Aktion 4F as a sort of counterblast to their Aktion T4.

But Dawson wasn't actually directly opposing the German Nazis' murderously utilitarian disposal of humans judged useless consumers of badly needed resources in a Total War.

He was combating similar notions held by the powerful in the Anglo-American medical establishment.

The OSRD , the NAS and the MRC all judged SBE to be a "militarily unimportant disease" and refused to allow any penicillin be diverted to saving its patients.

This despite Dawson demonstrating over and over that penicillin was the only thing that could cure this hitherto invariably fatal disease dubbed "the Polio of the Poor".

So in a way, the Allied treatment of the SBE 4Fs , along with their diverting penicillin away from badly wounded frontline troops in the Mediterranean towards otherwise fit soldiers who had deliberately contracted VD to avoid combat , could be see as exact counterparts to how the Nazis behaved in similar medical situations.

(For example, secretly killing Eastern Front soldiers rendered permanently mentally ill in combat to free up medical beds and supplies for soldiers judged able to return to battle eventually.)

In which case, the co-ordinated campaign , around the Allied world , from the US to Canada to Britain to Australia , to deny penicillin to SBE cases, can be seen as being the true Aktion 4F.

Food for thought....

"Pax Penicillia" : how Churchill's Britain won the war and lost the peace

The decision by Winston Churchill's (Tory) Minister of Supply (MoS) not to divert the money for one additional Lancaster squadron, used to bomb civilians in Europe, towards providing enough penicillin for British (and European) civilians resulted in Churchill's Tories winning the war for Britain --- but at the cost of losing the peace.

By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral  authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.

Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.

And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...

Penicillin's "Bengali Famine Years" : 1943-1944

It was not America and Britain, it was not even the British and American governments ,that made the momentous decision, between late 1942 and early 1943, not to divert tax money just a little away from bombs and towards penicillin production instead.

This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944,  to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.

It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.

But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.

Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.

By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.

Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.

These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.

As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.

And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.

FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.

But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.

That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .

Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.

If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .

If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.

My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.

 Just as in the UK,  Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.

And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.

For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....

The first - and internally fatal - Tory response to the Beveridge Report : the Ministry of Supply takes over Penicillin ...

To make sense of this claim, we need to clear as to what the role of Britain's powerful wartime Ministry of Supply actually was.

The Ministry of Supply (the MoS) was never the British equivalent of the American War Production Board (WPB), no matter how many times this claim is offered up.

In fact, it was very much closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development (the OSRD) per the role set out for both under statute , than it was to the statutory role set out for the WPB.

Britain's Ministry of Supply strived to supply the military's needs - period. Unlike the WPB, it did not try to arbitrate between the conflicting demands of civilian and military claims upon scarce material and manpower.

Equally, the OSRD did  NOT deal with all of America's wartime science and research efforts , a point that no doubt Jesus Christ himself will have to repeat again and again to academics on Judgement Day and on into all Eternity.

It only dealt with that amount of science and research that involved the designing of  (but not the production of)  new weapons that could come into use, during the current war.

Bush was very very careful to sharply limit the parameters of his organization, all to make it more dominant within its narrow but vital sphere.

So when Howard Florey went to both the OSRD and to the Ministry of Supply to help in the production of penicillin - rather than going instead to ask help from the American Public Health Service and the British Ministry of Health, he had already made it very clear where his penicillin priority lay.

He wanted additional penicillin production yes --- but only sufficient to supply the armed forces, period.

Florey was strongly conservative, as were all the key individuals within the Minister of Supply and the OSRD : Big Government to them was abhorrent.

Thus the sudden willingness, eagerness even, of the Ministry of Supply in the Fall of 1942 to go all out and seize control of all of the British commercial penicillin production has to be seen as ideologically surprising.

Unless it can (and should) be seen as the opening conservative counter-attack against the rumoured radical notions of the Beveridge Report.

A preemptive move to ensure that the Ministry of Health (also run by a Tory minister but with wider than just military responsibilities) didn't dominate penicillin production.

If is often claimed that the Ministry of Supply took over all of penicillin production because the Scottish-born minister was an old pal of fellow Scot, Alec Fleming, who asked him to do so.

Politicians -  grant us at least this - do not spontaneously fall upon old friends and their requests with open arms --- not  unless it suits us.

In September and October 1942, Fleming's request much suited Duncan and the British Tories.

In late September and October 1942, the tenor of the Beveridge report, though as yet unreleased, was well known within the top officials of Whitehall.

It called for a placing the values of equality and egalitarianism at the core of the British government - a notion intensely hostile to Tory values.

For penicillin, all this Beveridge "equality" talk could only mean one of two things.

It might mean divvying inadequate amounts of penicillin equally between dying civilians and dying soldiers - when Tories felt the most vital hope of penicillin was that it would help maintain current front line troop levels without the need to "call up" middle class men (their voters) now at home engaged in war work.

Or it might mean diverting the cost of one additional Lancaster squadron (three million pounds) away from the all-out bombing of civilian Germany , towards creating more penicillin factories on the successful Glaxo model.

Glaxo had taken up space in bits of idle factories and by using local cheap and plentiful unskilled labour,( aka women) , had cheaply but efficiently produced a lot of penicillin with current low technology methods and equipment.

(Basically making penicillin as if it was a milk product , using the very abundant modern dairy equipment existing everywhere thanks to the 1920s civilized world's mania over pure milk.)

A lot of similar factories could be quickly brought up to speed, supplying a good deal of penicillin, without requiring too much vital material like stainless steel, already in desperately short supply.

If all this sounds very familiar, that is because this solution is what Britain in the end was forced to do -  but very late and only under intense public pressure.

If it had been done wholeheartedly in the Fall of 1942, there would have been no highly public late 1944 civilian penicillin famine crisis.

But the Conservative bits and bob of the Coalition Government wanted no part of equality and penicillin was just the first of many counterattacks against the threat of Beveridge.

They were unsuccessful in the extreme, blowing what had to seem to them (and to Labour !), a sure electoral victory at war's end.

"Unfair distribution of a vital commodity in short supply" , to quote The Times (of all people !) referencing an earlier debate over Hugh Dalton's fuel rationing proposals , was totally anathema to the British public.

In June 1945, what little polling type information we have suggests it was the unfair rationing of medical services that moved people to Labour .

The most current example of that unfair medical rationing had to be rationing difficulties with life saving penicillin.

Let me repeat that : "life saving". This was not just temporary unfairness in allocating housing or clothing : this was the unfair allocation of life itself.

You can't get a more "vital commodity" than life itself : to switch from the specialized language of the economist to that of the political scientist trying to account for a surprise pattern of vote changing, "life" is a very salient issue.

If so, the unexpected and total defeat of Churchill's Tories in June 1945 can be seen as having its origins in the Fall of 1942, when the Ministry of Supply (and Howard Florey) successfully re-defined the shortage of penicillin (contra Beveridge),  as a shortage of military penicillin, civilians be damned.....

Howard Florey saw potential enemies everywhere, but with "friends" like A N Richards and Robert Coghill, he hardly need bother looking any further

Howard Florey's correspondence twice notes that he has just received a higher yielding strain of penicillium from America.

The first, in November 1941 ,was obtained from Dr Rake at Squibb - a higher producing mutant from Fleming's original strain.

The second time in November 1943, some un-named strains were obtained from Robert Coghill of the NRRL , while he was visiting Oxford .

But in the two crucial years in between ?

I see bugger all evidence that Florey got the latest improvements in penicillium strains as they emerged at Peoria. (Prove me wrong, please) .

The mycologists at the NRRL research centre in Peoria had steadily improved and improved and improved again Rake's variant and their final version, NRRL 1249.B21 produced - via surface cultivation - most of the world's wartime penicillin until quite late in the war.

At that point, submerged strain NRRL 832, from a non-Fleming strain first found in Belgium, took over.

I believe that Merck's chief consultant and OSRD medical chief ( giant conflict of interest alert !) A N Richards, supposedly Florey's second closest American friend, using as an excuse that America was now at war, deliberately held back the giving these improved strains to Florey.

All to further America's ( sorry ! Merck's) post-war commercial opportunities.

Nicolas Rasmussen, in his article "Of  'Small Men', Big Science and Bigger Business", looks much closer than most historians at the day to day workings of the medical wing of the famous OSRD.

 He points to several examples where Richards authorizes the further spending of taxpayers' money, supposedly only for war weapons, on drug research that no longer had an obvious military use, because he claimed that keeping  American's edge in their development would definitely benefit the nation.

If not in this war, or any war, how would the drug's successful development benefit a nation at war - supposedly the sole purpose of the OSRD, whose mandate was set up to expire the moment peace was declared ?

Richards doesn't say.

So let me suggest a more sinister purpose , because Rasmussen does not.

I note that the two examples that Rasmussen gives where the OSRD spends taxpayers money on projects that no longer seemed to have a military need were pet projects of Merck, the firm that Richards advised.

The first was the chemical synthesis work on penicillin , carried on well past the point (say June 1944)  when biological penicillin was being produced en masse and cheaply.

The other was after mid 1943, when it was clear that cortisone would not help pilots fly higher longer - an important advantage for any nation's air force if proven so.

Merck got nothing for all the money it spent on synthetic penicillin but its finally successful efforts on cortisone was and is one of its biggest successes for both its scientific reputation and its pocketbook (the two of course being closely related).

First success with Cortisone would be an advantage to America as well as Merck, over European (Swiss) competitors --- but synthetic penicillin's success could only have come by crushing fellow American firm Pfizer and given the field to Merck.

How then would that serve America's interests, rather than merely Merck's?

Because Europe wasn't even in the running on biological penicillin in 1944.

Perhaps Richards, already a pensioner when he took on the job of heading the OSRD medical wing and with the rigidity of old age, still believed synthetic penicillin would better Pfizer's penicillin in price and yield.

Then Merck would beat their only European synthetic penicillin rival : Florey !

Normally, Vannevar Bush's OSRD - as in denying the British to atomic energy research - did a better job of using taxpayers' military-assigned money to screw America's European Allies' commercial chances after the war , without favouring any one American firm.

Richard's willingness to screw Pfizer and even his friend Florey, shows just how much further he was prepared to go to aid Merck.

But he needed pliant helpers  to succeed.

Luckily for him, the  NRRL's Robert Coghill seemed to have had a hard time accepting that research paid for by his employer , the US Department of Agriculture and ultimately the American public, belonged to the USDA.

And that this research shouldn't only go where a different agency's chief bureaucrat, A N Richards, wanted it to go - though he hadn't paid for it and had no statutory (legal) control over it.

However , I see Coghill, a misplaced chemist running a biological program, wanted in so badly on a "technically sweet" chemical problem (the synthesis of penicillin) that he sold out the farmers he had sworn to help.

Synthetic penicillin would only negate the ready market for  hundreds of thousands of tons of farm waste corn steep liquor, farm waste whey and farm waste crude brown sugar, all used in the natural fermentation of penicillin and other antibiotics coming along in the pipeline.

Coghill did publicly announce that he was giving the top two commercial strains of penicillium (presumably NRRL 1249.B21 and 832) to the entire world in November 1943, about the same time as Florey first mentions having them.

Why ?

I can only suspect because they were about to become obsolete, as synthetic penicillin seemed only months away.

By April 1944, that no longer seemed so and Coghill was back on the side of the biological angels, publicly praising Pfizer's biological penicillin and modestly claiming a role in their success.

Coghill's talents seemed rather wasted in democratic America - I can see him as the ultimate bureaucratic survivor in Stalin's Russia, adroitly changing sides as the situation shifted, moment by moment.....

two is a coincidence, three is a pattern : the OSRD on the weak and the strong

It is a commonplace to note that Vannevar Bush's wartime agency the OSRD, the biggest of Washington's many wartime scientific bureaucracies, favoured the strongest companies and the strongest universities.

Coincidence, say many.

But the fact that the OSRD, the strongest companies and the strongest universities all ganged up together to deny penicillin to America's weakest of the weakest seems more than a long stream of coincidences : it betrays a pattern......

OSRD /1942: did Manhattan Project type thinking bleed over and obstruct the Penicillin Project as well ?

It is crystal clear that Merck's top scientific advisor A N Richards was never a strong advocate for fast-paced penicillin development within Merck, as that drug company casually messed about with penicillin, from November 1939 till August 1941.

That is, Merck had 18 months of some sort of commercial and scientific activity around penicillin , before Howard Florey actually arrived on the scene.

But Florey eventually made Richards a strong convert to the idea of having Richards' military medical weapon oriented agency , the famous OSRD , use penicillin for secret military advantage over the Axis.

It is not clear that this would have extended - in practise - to denying penicillin to dying Axis POWs.

 But keeping penicillin a secret from the Axis definitely would have denied penicillin to dying Allied POWs behind Axis lines : something that all of Florey's, Richards' and Fleming's present day defenders universally ignore.

Very much to his credit then that WWI vet and WWII military officer and doctor Robert Pulvertaft did dis-obey orders and shared the secrets of penicillin production with Axis-friendly Turkish doctors.

But imagining a Canadian dying of sulfa-resistant blood poisoning in a German POW camp and the Canadian POWs being told by the German doctor, 'we could save him , if only we had a bit of this Allied-invented penicillin that we've been hearing rumours of'.

When the Canadians ask why doesn't the doctor get some, the doctor says that if the Allies won't even share penicillin with their own dying civilians, how can they be expected to share it with the enemy ?

But could penicillin have really ever have been a potentially secret and successful medical weapon ?

Here I , following closely on Henry Dawson's thinking,  definitely part company with Florey and his friend Richards.

Henry Dawson demonstrated - in just five weeks - and under conditions as fully primitive as Fleming's, that one could quickly make a lot of crude penicillin that was non-toxic when injected into humans.

If Fleming and Dawson could do so, (quickly, easily and cheaply, ) so too could the fired up Nazi war machine.

Not so, said Florey -and his side kick Richards.

The scientific characteristics of penicillin haven't changed at all since September 1928, but now , thanks to Florey, the scientific rhetoric totally had.

Florey tells his readers and listeners, to ignore completely what Fleming-the-author says is "penicillin".

To wit, 'a mixture of about two dozen unknown compounds in a slurry of water that is non-toxic even if injected in very large volumes internally, and yet has marked anti-bacterial affects'.

In my revision of the facts, says Florey in his first August 1940 article, "penicillin" is now actually just one of those compounds.

All the rest and all that water are just dirty, dank and dangerous.

Only if penicillin is first pure, dry and stable is it any good.

Because where it is really good , is in the front lines as a local antiseptic for open war wounds (here I do still agree with Fleming) ---- and that idea won't work if crude liquid penicillin must kept viable in portable electric refrigerators.

Who ever has heard of such things ?

But as Florey tells Richards how complex and difficult the purification process is, Richards grows despondent again, but never the less this information does go into the back of Richards brain.

Only to re-emerge in early 1942, when the forces of war censorship and secrecy can be employed in full bloom.

Because complex and expensive separation and purification processes had become very much a two-edged sword for American military science and industry.

Artificial rubber was vital to the war effort - it was easy to make but a real bugger to separate the good rubber from the bad.

Dried blood products held real promise at the front lines - but only if their separation wasn't so complex.

And the Atomic Bomb - a piece of cake to make it work - if only we could get enough pure U-235 separated.

At some point early in 1942, these problems suddenly became military and commercial opportunities in the minds of the OSRD's highest officers.

If only rich, un-bombed America could solve these complex purification problems - and then keep the details secret - this would give them a big military advantage over their poorer enemy opponents.

And give America a post-war commercial advantage as well over its smaller poorer Allied friends like Britain.

So just as we see an abrupt turn around , in mid 1942 , from the OSRD re sharing much atomic information with the British, we start to see the British also get less information from the OSRD about penicillin research as well.

Like synthetic rubber, synthetic quinine, dried blood products and U-235, the very expensive complexity of pure penicillin suddenly made it more, not less ,of an attraction to the military weapon-oriented OSRD.

The key was to keep secret from the American voters and taxpayers just how many miracle cures were happening with the current - relatively impure -penicillin.

Because if they knew that, the newspapers would be filled with it and the Germans and Japanese would hear about it via Neutral nation reporting.

They they too would also start curing their base hospital wounded with crude semi-purified penicillin ,largely negating the military advantage of fully dry stable pure penicillin.

But was there really ever an absolute need for dry stable penicillin to use it in the front lines ?

Poppycock !

Because it turned out that good old crude liquid blood was actually much better than the complex dried stuff at saving soldiers' lives and could just as easily be used even in combat : good old fashioned low tech American ingenuity (not from the OSRD high tech boys of course) came to the rescue.

Cheap, rugged, disposable,  parachute-portable plywood ice boxes kept blood and penicillin cold, with refills of ice every couple of days........

Penicillin in wartime: an alphabet soup of organizations passing the buck then hogging the credit

I am still not fully recovered from the disaster of my first public talk on wartime penicillin before Dalhousie University's  Medical History Society.

I was given a very generous amount of time by the Society's Jock Murray and Allan Marble to state my case but it didn't help : my choice for a title slide in my powerpoint presentation simply covered far too big a subject and left me no 'on the spot' wiggle room.

" Wartime Penicillin : from secret 'war weapon' to widely publicized 'beacon of hope' " is not a topic line easy to compress.

 (Though last night's blog entry on the Janus Month of March 1943 would have been a good attempt at compression.)

Within a minute or two into the talk, I felt like crawling into a hole  and disappearing forever --- I could see by the faces of the audience that I was giving far too much unknown information far too quickly.

Any two or three of my powerpoint slides, from the forty two I had actually come with, could have formed the basis of an interesting talk and a lively amount of discussion afterwards.

Eight and a half years of research has finally made me more or less comfortable with the vast array of sound-alike organizations involved in wartime penicillin,  and their activities are just as important as the individual stories of individuals like  Fleming, Florey and Dawson.

But trying to establish what the OSRD and OPRD were in the first place, even before trying to show how much at odds these two similar sounding government agencies really were on penicillin is a month's work - not a small part of a 40 minute talk.

It is entirely my fault - because the night before the lecture I had noticed that even a well known expert on the history of wartime penicillin (name omitted !) still managed to badly confuse the two in an major article in a digitalized book I found on the internet.

And when a printed work is digitalized and put on the internet, an error is forever and eternity --- and visible to all, worldwide.

That is why my penicillin work  will remain electronically fluid on this blog and in website e-books.

 My errors of fact and interpretation (and I expect and even hope to make many) will be instantly correctable as new information comes to light or savvy readers spot errors and typos.)

And another thing about individuals and institutions when Cinderella unexpectedly turns into the Queen of the Ball.

 After passing the buck for years, they now suddenly tack hard right and start clawing each other to take all the credit .

Sorting who actually did what when, not what they claimed ,after the war ,in expensive official histories, that they did, is  itself a work of many lifetimes...

America LOSES WWII : because of quarrels between government agencies, such as over Penicillin

The above headline sounds bizarre to our ears, because we are  used to only hearing it being used as the standard explanation given as to why Japan and Germany lost the (largely technical and scientific) world war against the Allies.

After all, both of these nations had talented and committed cadres of scientists and engineers but endless feuding between various sub sections of the government seriously diluted the impact they might have had on the war, if only they had worked together.

In Japan the Army and Navy Departments frequently seemed more at war with each other, than with America.

In the case of Germany, each of the senior figures in the Nazi hierarchy commanded a lot of semi-independent resources and each Nazi war lord seemed to spend as much time trying to grow at the expense of their political bureaucratic rivals, as in uniting against the common enemy.

But Vannevar Bush chooses, in the foreword to his famous "ENDLESS FRONTIER",  not to see any serious conflicts in the American and Allied scientific and technical effort.

And we believe him - the historians (grateful for the steady diet of research grants to peacetime academics that he is credited with having created) above all .

And after all his side won ----- shouldn't that alone silence all potential criticism ?

Still, in this particular foreword, he chooses to blow his particular agency's horn very very carefully indeed,  when it comes to penicillin.

So for once, it is not his own OSRD that he credits with seeing that "our grievously wounded men" got penicillin in time : he says  it was "the government"  that did the bang up job of co-ordinating the research and development that speeded penicillin up to the front.

For a very conservative Republican ,like Bush, to be praising "the government" is truly a startling sight. He more usually carefully distinguishes agencies like his own highly conservative OSRD from the left wing agencies filled with New Dealers, such as the WPB's own OPRD.

But what could he do ?

For his own right wing OSRD agency chose to take the totally wrong turn on the way to moving penicillin to the D-Day beaches and delivered not one tiny sliver of its vaunted synthetic penicillin to our troops or anyone else : not on June 6th 1944 and in fact, not ever.

It was left to the left wingers in the OPRD to get literally tons of penicillin to the Allied side, between the time they first took up the cause in September 1943 and the end of the war.

They did this not merely by the unimportant but useful work they did on the production side - for by statute this was their job, just as the OSRD's job was not production but research - but by also doing the OSRD's job , in an area of research that the OSRD choose to seriously neglect.

 That was the OSRD-neglected research in studying ways to up the very front end of the penicillin process  : upping the initial biological yield of penicillin.

Biology : horrors !  Just saying that word in front of Bush and the OSRD was like waving a garlic-infused cross at a vampire.

So we must credit the left wing OPRD with starting the research that resulted in that biological yield ( ie , yield before extraction) now being 2500 times as productive as it was in 1943 when the OSRD threw up its hands at the problem.

Just as the quarrelling Japanese Army and Navy did on radar, the two warring branches of Bush's "the government" , the OSRD and OPRD , came to a fork in the road on penicillin and instead of uniting to find a way to use the least resources to solve the problem, they disagreed and pursued independent courses.

Bush's Orwellian use of words like "the government" or "the nation" or "the Allies" ,to explain who won the war , allows him to dissolve any internal conflicts those huge collectivities might have encountered in very slowly moving their overwhelming larger populations into defeating much smaller and very resource-strapped enemies.

So historians mustn't simply accept Bush's Orwellian arguments on blind faith but instead carefully ask , if the nation or government "did" this or that , did that mean that all the nation/government do this or that or did just parts of it do while other parts disagreed, stood around doing nothing or even held things up ?

After all, on the evidence of their own internal memos, the OSRD not merely failed to produce the penicillin that saved our "grievously wounded", they also had no intention of wasting penicillin on anyone who couldn't aid the war effort on recovery, if they didn't have to.

That meant no wasting penicillin, if they had to choose, on those so severely wounded that if they did make a recovery, it would be to discharge and a permanent disability pension.

 And it meant, that if they had to chose between saving a boy dying of endocarditis and instantly curing a boy GI of VD so he could quickly return (to perhaps die) on the Italian frontlines, they'd won't help the endocarditis case, because his disease-weakened heart would not let him do much for the war effort, even if he did recover.

So, if the only thing I ever do in my life is to destroy the OSRD's reputation for furthering penicillin when what they actually did was hold it up and then conspire to use it for truly wicked eugenic ends, I will consider my life well lived....

Fleming never saved Churchill, but Gladys Hobby saved Florey's sister when his own penicillin couldn't !

Howard Florey was never more sleazy than in his dealings with Henry Dawson's team, as he desperately fought to restore the family name that his father dis-honored, by trying to remain the sole "hero" of wartime penicillin.

Just try to imagine what an university ethics committee today might say about a professor using his main rival's unpublished paper, sent to him in secret by his close friend (the same government official who censored his rival's paper and forbade its release) to improve his own work that is about to be allowed to be freely published !

That is what full Professor Howard Florey and university vice president and full Professor A N Richards actually did to associate professor chemist Professor Karl Meyer of Dawson's team , in mid 1942.

(As they say, tenure is 'red in tooth and claw'.)

The multi-hatted Professor A Newton Richards was a Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the medical wing of the OSRD , chief consultant to Merck and one of Howard Florey's best friends.

Like Mayor Rob Ford, he also never met a conflict of interest he could resist.

(By contrast, when Norman Heatley met Meyer in January 1942, Heatley recorded that Meyer was willing to send his data to Florey, but Heatley boldly told his boss (Florey) he (Heatley) won't because it didn't seem right, not if Florey was about to publish and Meyer was forbidden to.)

However, Professor Richards was of a very different moral character and saw nothing wrong in sending Professor Meyer's embargoed chemical work on the structure of penicillin to his main academic rival, Professor Florey.

By contrast, Dawson bent over backwards to try and find a source of penicillin for Florey (even at places like Pfizer - a place Florey determinedly didn't want to visit), totally unaware of Florey's well known reputation in the UK for being an academic bush whacker and a magpie of other people's hard work.

Florey's real (if totally private) reason to come to America in 1941, was mainly to establish that he and Merck, not Dawson and Pfizer, was the real leader in the hunt for viable penicillin.

By late 1942, Florey felt sure that the dying Dawson and Pfizer (having joined Merck's cartel) was out of the race.

Sweet indeed then, when in August 1944, a sullen Howard Florey had to stand politely beside Dawson team member Gladys Hobby as she showed him the natural penicillin poring off the Pfizer lines, while Merck and Florey's team at Oxford had totally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for the D Day beaches.

Florey had spurned both Pfizer and Glaxo, yet it was they who delivered most of the penicillin that landed on the Normandy beaches that day  --- "the stone the builders rejected" indeed.

Gladys Hobby saves Howard Florey's own sister  -- when he couldn't

Asa series of letters in the Royal Society Archive reveal, in  December 1952, Florey had to eat yet more humble pie, first begging and then thanking Hobby for sending her own latest antibiotic off to save the life of his sister (Hilda Gardner) in Australia when his own penicillin wouldn't work....

How wartime penicillin's American miracle cures were censored - and why

From early in 1942, American medical journal editors and authors joined scientific journal editors and authors already being "self censored".

Like them, they were asked (virtually required) to submit all articles they were uncertain about, to a NAS/NRC advisory for vetting before printing or submitting.

Supposedly the NAS medical sub-committee was only censored the chemistry of penicillin , but in fact this wasn't consistently imposed until March 1943,when it fell in line with the UK's more legally formal move in this direction.

Between January 1942 till late in 1943, this system's real ambition was to successfully keep every "miracle cure" by penicillin out of medical and scientific  media - and thus, by reverse osmosis, out of the daily press.

If the American public didn't hear about this miracle drug, then the chemistry-savvy Germans won't either ---- at least not before D-Day, or so the thought went.

I think the key for this method's success was that the OSRD/CMR/COC controlled (a) all the significant new strains and all the new information on how to make penicillin in mass qualities, (b) controlled all supplies of the resulting therapeutic penicillin (c) and as well was busy dangling $500 million in high-overhead contracts to cash and equipment starved university administrators.

So it could successfully tell the university researchers, commercial penicillin firms and the medical accredited investigators, peep one word and no more penicillin/ penicillin information/ cash.

Informally, the OSRD/CMR/COC tried to fend off all requests for stories on this rumoured new wonder drug from non-science journalists, who they had no hold over.

Science journalists - hello William l Laurence ! - were already totally self-embedded in this self censorship. (Color me surprised ...)

General reporters also read popular science stories for possible leads, so with none coming forth on penicillin, they actually made very few such requests.

Of course when a *Hearst* *city desk editor*  got a *Pulitzer* for *spot news reporting*  for saving the life of a baby with the miracle cure penicillin (and modestly reporting the story as well) , all that changed.

(I always thought the real miracle was the Pulitzer Committee giving a prize to a Hearst paper, the arch enemy of George Pulitzer. That and a city desk editor breaking a Pulitzer-worthy foot leather news story without ever leaving his desk (or phone.)

But what I am not sure of , was Byron Price ever asked by the OSRD/CMR's Dr A.N. Richards to amend his codebooks to ask editors to avoid any any mention of penicillin.

I have a request on this out to a real expert on the American experience with self censorship in WWII....