The re-invention of a military-only antiseptic into "bedside penicillin for all" creates a global beacon of hope for a world at war

the tiny stone the builders rejected

Despite the self-centred claims of physicists, the greatest benefits to humanity have generally been ardently pursued (invented), not accidentally stumbled upon (discovered).

DNA was discovered in 1860s by an Swiss doctor, but for most of us, it was really only discovered 125 years later in the late 1980s.

That was when it began to first be successfully used to solve unsolved criminal cases, when British researcher Alec Jeffries re-invented 'DNA' as a means to definitely identify biological evidence left at the scene of a crime.


The great medical pioneer Joseph Lister clearly re-invented carbolic acid, when he took it from just one of many industrial solvents and turning it into a global life-saver.

Paul Gelmo "invented" sulfa as man-made chemical in Vienna in 1908 and it was routinely patented in 1909 by Bayer the chemical giant hoping it might yet be a useful chemical intermediate reagent.

But not until Gerhard Domagk , also of Bayer, who systemically tested every one of his firm's new chemical creations for its medical potential, was its life-saving abilities "discovered".

But I still hold this to be a case of re-invention.

 It took an awful lot of grit and determination during the Great Depression to waste scarce company money by systemically and thoroughly testing every one of the thousands of chemicals Bayer made, on then very remote possibility one might have medical applications.

The Nobel committee obviously agreed with me - giving Domagk the inventor and not Gelmo the discoverer the Nobel Prize for sulfa.

Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in1928 and "discovered" it was only useful as a military-style antiseptic.

In 1940, Florey and Chain accidentally discovered that penicillin also might work as a systemic.

But like Fleming (by 1940) ,they still choose to emphasize its rather limited application against combat wounds infected by staph bacteria : a tiny, tiny, TINY proportion of all the deaths caused by WWII.

They were hardly alone : I was amazed to discover in my research that I could find no penicillin-making researcher between 1928 and 1945 who first put their penicillin to work as a human systemic life-saver, before they also tried it on localized wounds.

With one crucial exception: Henry Dawson.

In October 1940, months ahead of the schedule that he and his three fellow researchers had already worked out, he choose to inject systemic penicillin into two young men suffering from invariably fatal endocarditis.

At least one of the men - unexpectedly - lived.

It wasn't because of Dawson's penicillin : at an estimated 8 units per mg, it was about .56% pure.

Useless Junk ? Or Love, Hope and Charity ?

The rest (99.44%) was junk - or as I like to emphasis : "99 and 44 100ths percent pure love....hope... and charity" -- bedside penicillin.

A good bedside manner has probably saved more lives throughout history than all but a tiny handful of medications.

I contend that Dawson deliberately used his tiny amounts of home-made penicillin as part of his traditional clinician's bedside manner, to rally his patients' own body defences against their disease.

As prove, I offer up Gladys Hobby, a fellow member of his tiny team, who said she daily walked through Henry Dawson's wards, showing the patients the growing penicillium in flasks, hoping their rising interests in their treatment might rally their psychic resources.

Dawson was not content to reserve his invention of "bedside penicillin" to the handful of endocarditis patients that his small home-made supply could hope to treat.

So Dawson quickly told a convention of his colleagues (the world's top clinical researchers) that natural penicillin had "unlimited possibilities", thousands times stronger than the then acclaimed synthetic sulfas, but without their toxic side effects and inability to work well in blood and pus.

These researchers took his claims home to their labs all over the world.

Meanwhile popular media, like the New York Times , Newsweek and the wire services, spread his gospel throughout North America.

He tried to get the American government - in 1941 -(and by extension all Allied governments) to take over the production of penicillin form Big Pharma and mass produce it themselves in quantity.

Instead, wartime government bureaucrats, who were themselves paid consultants to Big Pharma , censored Dawson's conventional scientific methods to spread his good news - by restricting his access to scientific journals and restricting what he could say at scientific conferences.

But in wartime, person-to-person gossip becomes the new telegraph.

So Dawson was able to keep on spreading the word until most all of the doctors in metropolitan New York and beyond had heard of his unexpected successes with systemic natural penicillin, curing incurable endocarditis , the "Gold Standard" of infectious diseases.

Penicillin , he said, didn't have only a limited wartime role, limited to just being applied to local staph infections in combat wounds or to cure self-inflicted military VD cases.

He said it  had unlimited possibilities and could cure many of the diseases that plague a peacetime nation or a multi-million man wartime military --- if only government bureaucrats opened their eyes, their hearts and their pockets and gave it a "fair go" .

When the world's general populace, after the story of Baby Patricia broke worldwide, catch Dawson's "vision thing" , governments were forced to play catch up in the production of actual penicillin.

Meanwhile, they too caught Dawson's "vision thing" and governments all over the world turned their propaganda machine full blast to tout penicillin as a beacon of future health and hope for all , if only the Allies win this war.

The key change in the Allied governments' approach was that "for all" as it became clear that the voters did not agree with an Allied war effort that deliberately limited the supply of life-saving medicine and then triaged the world into the people worth saving and those not worth saving.

That - they said - sounded awfully familiar : wasn't that also Hitler's line ?

Well it was certainly Modernity's line : the  methods of instrumental rationality ruled all the modern nations from America to Germany.

By contrast, Dawson's general systemic was 'general' in the widest sense of that word.

 He thought it was particularly important in a Total War against Absolute Evil to give - and be seen giving - life-saving health care and food & shelter to all : it  was the best single reason why people should be willing to fight and die for the Allies' cause.

And seventy five odd years later, was he not right ?

Penicillin has a powerful mystique that tens of thousands of other useful medications ,combined, can't hope to match.

Dawson's crusade to make his inexpensive, abundant, safe "bedside penicillin" a commonplace at hospital beds the world over , in war and in peace , is the major reason we grant penicillin that mystique....

Dr Martin Henry Dawson and the MORAL INVENTION of 4F penicillin ---- during a 1A war (PART 1)

Thalidomide has had 9 lives...

Is it truly unfair that only Paul Gelmo initially invented Sulfa-the-(useless)-chemical, but is was Gerhard Domagk , 25 years later, who won the Nobel prize for Sulfa?


Not in the eyes of  99.9999999% of contemporary (and very grateful) observers.  Because what Domagk invented was something called Sulfa-the-lifesaving-miracle.

Though you'd never notice from our "initial discovery" obsessed journalists, many, many important things were invented several times over.

Thalidomide is a particularly spectacular example : it had already had several medical applications ( with good successes but also very severe side effects that were kept secret) before it was promoted to cure morning sickness.

We all know the results that that particular application caused.

But, believe it or not, it is still in use - for forms of leprosy in particular, - and still being investigated for its ability to inhibit some tumours: new uses still being invented for an old "initial invention" .

AZT and carbolic acid were both much later "re-invented" when they were dragged out of the medical gutter and first used for the uses we best know them for today.

We don't - but we should - most highly honor those people who first put a product to its highest use, rather than merely honoring those who first invent or discover it as a mere substance.

Those who only honor  those who initially discover or invent something are unconscious devote disciples of Auguste Comte and his dogma of Positivism.

That school of thought, if it can be called that, sometimes assumes that the mere act of discovering or inventing something will also instantly inform that inventor/discoverer as to its many self-evident uses and to its self-evident highest possible use.

Anyone else who later does put it to such uses, in this view, was merely taking advantage of information that is open to all that gaze up the substance---- and hence not worthy of any honor.

Put like that, Positivism use in this case does seem childishly ridiculous - as many unstated assumptions often are - when they are more closely examined.

Most re-inventions are of a technological nature : something long thought capable of merely reducing the pain of leprosy turns out to actually - and unexpectedly - reduce the advance of the disease. ( In this case, the drug in question is thalidomide.)

But probably the most famous medicine and science story of all time also saw a substance re-evaluated for a new use , but for moral reasons.

A doctor's moral anger drove him to break a whole bunch of rules and norms to stick the first ever needle of (dirty) penicillin in a dying patient's arm : and the patient lived.

There had never been any technological barriers to putting Alexander Fleming's penicillium juice in a needle and sticking it in a patient's arm to save their life.

Not even to sticking penicillin into someone's arm to save them from invariably fatal Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis (the dreaded SBE).

Doctors and Scientists' objections to natural (impure) systemic penicillin were only ones of an aesthetic nature

The objections had only been quasi-aesthetic : in a modern scientific age, was it worth the risk to the dignity of the medical profession, to be seen sticking something seen as mostly dirt into the human bloodstream, even if it was in a worthy attempt to save the life of someone otherwise facing immediate death?

Many doctors, faced with lots of patients dying of an invariably fatal disease, will indeed throw a kitchen sink of oddball medical treatments at them, in the hope one will stick. SBE saw many such attempts.

But from September 1928 till October 1940, no doctor in the world ever stuck penicillin in someone's arm, to see if it might save their life --- for any disease. Amazing but true.

Since 2004, I have lived and breathed and dreamt why this might be so - and why the unlikely doctor who finally did so , Martin Henry Dawson, chose to break that mental barrier.

It matters because it is only his Penicillin (Penicillin-the-natural-systemic) that the world has used since 1940 - not Alexander Fleming's Penicillin-the-synthetic-antispetic or Howard Florey's Penicillin-the-synthetic-systemic.

It is his penicillin - and his penicillin only - that we use, but it was those two who got the Nobel Prizes for penicillin.

Dawson probably backed his way into penicillin - driven by his anger over the way that the "4F" in society were so quickly abandoned at the first opportunity --- in this case, in preparing to fight a war using the best "1As" in society.

His special area of interest - Rheumatic Fever (RF) - was mostly a disease of the poor, so the well-off donors to the cause of RF were largely motivated by pure altruism.

But it had been recently replaced (by the Fall of 1940) by Polio as the number one child health "Cause" for America's well off .

Polio deaths were far ,far outnumbered by RF deaths, but polio was a disease of the well off mainly, and this was the first evidence of a now common organization : the patients (families) self-help group : mothers going to door to door to find a cure for a disease that might hit their own children.

We generally think this is a good thing, but it is also another example of a society of individuals increasingly looking out for Number One.

In 1940,mighty  America collectively looked out for itself as Number One and did not come to the aid of about a dozen of Europe's small weak nations : Czechs, Poles, Danes , Belgians etc etc.

Dawson who had gone to war to help the people of little Belgium in 1915, was in agony - too old to fight, but also too principled to just sit back.

When he arrived in the Fall of 1940 back at his employer (Columbia University Medical School), he found that the research and teaching efforts were to be dialled back in social medicine (medicine to help the poor) and put into war medicine (making the armed forces better fighters).

By sheer coincidence, his fellow researcher, German Jewish refuge (and potential internment camp alien) Dr Karl Meyer, wanted to revenge himself upon another biochemist who he felt had downplayed Meyer's successes. This biochemist was also a German Jewish refuge and potential alien in an internment camp), Ernst Chain.

Both men were not evil or naive : they simply knew the best way to be kept out of a miserable internment camp in the event of war, was to be judged very useful by their anti-semitic hosts. So they were holding nothing back to avoid an internment camp for themselves and their families.

Meyer thought he was a far better biochemist than Chain (very true !) and could more quickly and easily synthesize penicillin  than Chain (very untrue !)

Would his friend, Dawson the bacteriologist and clinician, help out by testing the resulting product ?

Dawson read up on what little there was on penicillin and noticed its unique combination of extreme non-toxicity and extreme diffusiveness could possibly be the best shot in a long time to cure SBE.

Now SBE was usually a matter for the heart specialists (an elite in every hospital) and Dawson's main job was in an arthritis out-patient clinic (at the low end of  any hospital's pecking order).

Moreover, some people had made SBE their primary lifelong research and clinical interest and Dawson had never - as far as I can tell - written or spoken on SBE.

To barge into their area of expertise would be a disaster.

I can only presume that Dawson first suggested his idea to SBE and heart experts and then to his contacts at the big Drug Companies.

Only when none responded positively and he had two dying SBE patients in front of him, did he act.

Because he felt that penicillin might save their lives, he pulled out all stops and broke all the rules and norms, to try and save their lives --- with this urgency additionally fueled by his anger at how the 4Fs of society were now being treated.

SBEs, in a month of the first ever peacetime Draft registration ( an entire nation trying to find all the 1As in society), were everyone's 4Fs of the 4Fs : about the most useless to the war effort young males imaginable.

Many medical staff felt they'd only consume precious medical attention for months and then invariably die anyway.

So, when Dawson stuck that first ever penicillin needle into an SBE's arm on that first ever peacetime Draft Registration Day, I feel sure his first finger was cocked in the air while the other four were wrapped around the needle.

"Down goes the needle - and 'up yours' !!!!! " .....