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.
Showing posts with label howard florey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label howard florey. Show all posts
Aug 26, 2014
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.
Aug 14, 2014
Penicillin for patients : stable ? pure ? or just 'safe enough' ? -- the essential disagreement between Fleming, Florey and Dawson
Alexander Fleming was famously known for his frugality : in speech, in the use of materials and in his physical exertions on his paid job.
Being too self confident in his own intellectual abilities (and perhaps also being too frugal cum lazy in the physical exertion department ?) fatally led him to avoid doing the needed series of experiments to prove up his claim that penicillin would never have time to do its work inside the body.
So he misled himself - and more importantly , the entire world, for 14 years that penicillin would only work on the body, never in the body - and tens of millions died premature deaths that could have/ should have been avoided.
Being too self confident in his own intellectual abilities (and perhaps also being too frugal cum lazy in the physical exertion department ?) fatally led him to avoid doing the needed series of experiments to prove up his claim that penicillin would never have time to do its work inside the body.
So he misled himself - and more importantly , the entire world, for 14 years that penicillin would only work on the body, never in the body - and tens of millions died premature deaths that could have/ should have been avoided.
Wartime Penicillin Drama : 3 non-chemists promote chemical penicillin while 3 working chemists promote natural penicillin ...
Three middle-aged chemist manques who disgracefully put youthful dreams before the public good - at the height of a total war
Three of wartime penicillin's chief protagonists were men who, as youths, had hoped to become hands-on lab research chemists but whom necessity had pushed them instead into becoming medical science desk administrators.
Their names ?
Howard Florey, director of Oxford University's Dunn Path Institute , A. Newton Richards, head of the Medical Division of Vannevar Bush's famous OSRD war-science agency and George W. Merck , head of Merck.
All three greatly respected each other and worked as closely together as the American and British governments (nominally allies) allowed.
Wartime penicillin gave all three a second childhood as chemist manques and disgracefully, they ran with it* .
Even as a world at war panted instead for lots of disease-fighting drugs in any form , as long as they worked , were safe and were available NOW .
Aug 12, 2014
Indie Pen versus Trolling for Grants
Trolling for Grants
Would Nobel Prize winner Sir Howard Florey have ever even gotten involved with penicillin if he hadn't first won grants to do so from the UK's MRC and America's Rockefeller Foundation along with a book contract on the subject from Oxford University Press ?
It wasn't just their promise of money either - Florey was the type that never ventured forth unless he was assured of the stamp of approval from the powerful - and grants and book contracts from such as these were definitely that.
He was made the chaired professor (director) of a large institution within Oxford University (with a main building about the size of his rival Martin Henry Dawson 's entire alma mater -Dalhousie University - circa 1914).
But no operating budget to speak of to run it.
To keep the lights on , he needed many make work projects to operate within it - what subject areas they covered it didn't really matter to Florey- just as long as they brought in many grants for many years to many busy researchers.
Not too small a project - that gave no certainty that any grant agency would be interested. Too big and too popular meant too many potential rivals worldwide.
He sought a medium sized but worthy project that someone should really have looked into years before - but no one had.
If he got in early enough and got in big enough, he'd have a head start in so many aspects of the subject that no serious rival would find enough virgin territory to want to stake a rival claim --- he'd rule that entire important albeit medium sized research area forever.
The study of microbe to microbe offensive and defensive tactics (antibiosis) seemed just such an untapped area - and Florey had indeed guessed right and he was given grants to secure his institution for years to come.
But he himself had no real interest in that area - he was a Sherrington styled old fashioned physiologist , one who experimented on healthy animals to learn about the normal functions of healthy human beings.
He was in no way a microbiologist , clinician or pathologist - he had no interest in curing human disease caused by external microbes.
Only upon the Fall of France did Florey realize that Ernst Chain's project - penicillin - might yield useful materials to heal war wound infection caused by the one big family of bacteria the existing sulfas could not attack - the staph bacteria.
This basic science project of Chain's might yet make Florey a wartime medical hero - and win him anything and everything - even a much desired baronetcy .
His main rival (at least as Florey saw it) was in fact content with his lot in life but burned with the ardour of a medical crusader - he sought to make life better for the weak and the small.
Indie Pen
He was quiet, modest , diffident.
And in his quiet way, also extremely stubborn and brave.
Throughout the race, Dawson was always so far behind as to be almost out of the race.
He was also dying.
It therefore becomes a very exciting story then for me to unfold.
How on earth did this (dying) tortoise managed in the last minutes before D-Day to suddenly pulled far ahead of his British hare rival ?
Aug 5, 2014
When Manhattan gives world's first penicillin shot : mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow
In May 1941, Dr Martin Henry Dawson told an international gathering of medical scientists that he had treated 4 cases of endocarditis with systemic penicillin and 8 cases of blepharitis with topical penicillin, both with hopeful results.
These results - widely reported by the New York Times, Newsweek, the wire services , even in South Africa's medical journal - first alerted the world to the fact that a half forgotten antiseptic from a dozen years earlier might have actually have wide promise as a life-saving antibiotic.
That was good enough to attract to Dawson's side a citric acid supplier to the soda pop trade, Brooklyn's then moderately sized Charles Pfizer & Co.
These results - widely reported by the New York Times, Newsweek, the wire services , even in South Africa's medical journal - first alerted the world to the fact that a half forgotten antiseptic from a dozen years earlier might have actually have wide promise as a life-saving antibiotic.
That was good enough to attract to Dawson's side a citric acid supplier to the soda pop trade, Brooklyn's then moderately sized Charles Pfizer & Co.
Jul 27, 2014
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 ....
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 ....
The Stone the Builders Rejected : how New York saved natural penicillin antibiotics from the British
In London in 1928 , Sir Alexander Fleming discovered natural penicillin as a potential antibiotic but then rejected it - saying it would only be useful if chemically synthesized and even then only as a external antiseptic.
Sir Howard Florey at Oxford, together with chemist Sir Ernst Chain, took up Fleming's challenge to chemically synthesize penicillin and for a decade - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, his lab chased the chimera of totally synthesized commercial penicillin without any success.
All three men - and these three men alone - got the Nobel Prize for penicillin .
This despite the fact that the penicillin that actually saves lives is still natural in origin, not synthetic , and is a general antibiotic and not a external antiseptic --- never before or since has abject failure been so grandly rewarded !
That penicillin - the penicillin that saved millions of lives during and immediately after the war -is still the the basis of our huge family of related beta lactam antibiotics that remains our front line defence against bacterial death.
It was left to New York to pick up the stone the British builders rejected and make it into the cornerstone of our entire antibiotics industry.
New York (Manhattan) gave the first ever penicillin shots (October 16 1940) not Britain and the patient from Bronx , who was dying from then invariably fatal endocarditis , actually went home alive !
New York had the world's first pilot plant sized penicillin effort (Fall 1940).
New York gave the first ever shots of commercial penicillin
released for use on patients, made by Brooklyn-based Pfizer in March 1942 .
In August 1943, a dying baby from Queens got life-saving penicillin only after the flagship New York newspaper of the Hearst newspaper chain intervened - the story went world-wide and Doctor Mom for the first time started demanding penicillin from government and industry.
More importantly, her story morally inspired the boss of Pfizer to build the world's first serious penicillin plant - posthaste plus plus plus.
Fifteen years after natural penicillin was discovered and rejected , the world's public suddenly wanted tons of it - yesterday .
But virtually all of Big Pharma worldwide - like Fleming and Florey - still preferred to wait for (patentable) synthetic penicillin because natural penicillin could be produced by anyone and what industry really wants free enterprise if it means a lots of new competitors?
In the Fall of 1943, penicillin really got a boost when a Staten Island doctor announced that contrary to the medical consensus , it could cure syphilis quickly and safely.
A much-feared world-wide scourge for 500 years , far bigger than AIDS, suddenly almost a thing of the past - thanks to penicillin !
But natural penicillin was still costly to produce , in terms of units produced per dollar of feedstock , machinery and labour.
Then a scientist in Cold Spring Harbour Long Island was finally listened to - for years he had an idea to make the penicillium produce a lot more penicillin per dollar of effort.
Soon a hundred times as much penicillin was coming out for the same dollar of effort - using his technology today we get 50,000 times (no that is not a typo) per dollar of effort as the world got in the early 1940s.
As a result of inaction by the rest of Big Pharma , New York (read : Pfizer) was left to produce 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - and for the rest of the war, the biggest chunk of the entire world's penicillin came from its Marcy Avenue plant.
Even if Sweden's Nobel Committee didn't know all that New York did - and all that Fleming and Florey didn't do - I firmly believe that God only knows what New York had done and He is pleased ....
Sir Howard Florey at Oxford, together with chemist Sir Ernst Chain, took up Fleming's challenge to chemically synthesize penicillin and for a decade - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, his lab chased the chimera of totally synthesized commercial penicillin without any success.
All three men - and these three men alone - got the Nobel Prize for penicillin .
This despite the fact that the penicillin that actually saves lives is still natural in origin, not synthetic , and is a general antibiotic and not a external antiseptic --- never before or since has abject failure been so grandly rewarded !
That penicillin - the penicillin that saved millions of lives during and immediately after the war -is still the the basis of our huge family of related beta lactam antibiotics that remains our front line defence against bacterial death.
It was left to New York to pick up the stone the British builders rejected and make it into the cornerstone of our entire antibiotics industry.
New York (Manhattan) gave the first ever penicillin shots (October 16 1940) not Britain and the patient from Bronx , who was dying from then invariably fatal endocarditis , actually went home alive !
New York had the world's first pilot plant sized penicillin effort (Fall 1940).
New York gave the first ever shots of commercial penicillin
released for use on patients, made by Brooklyn-based Pfizer in March 1942 .
In August 1943, a dying baby from Queens got life-saving penicillin only after the flagship New York newspaper of the Hearst newspaper chain intervened - the story went world-wide and Doctor Mom for the first time started demanding penicillin from government and industry.
More importantly, her story morally inspired the boss of Pfizer to build the world's first serious penicillin plant - posthaste plus plus plus.
Fifteen years after natural penicillin was discovered and rejected , the world's public suddenly wanted tons of it - yesterday .
But virtually all of Big Pharma worldwide - like Fleming and Florey - still preferred to wait for (patentable) synthetic penicillin because natural penicillin could be produced by anyone and what industry really wants free enterprise if it means a lots of new competitors?
In the Fall of 1943, penicillin really got a boost when a Staten Island doctor announced that contrary to the medical consensus , it could cure syphilis quickly and safely.
A much-feared world-wide scourge for 500 years , far bigger than AIDS, suddenly almost a thing of the past - thanks to penicillin !
But natural penicillin was still costly to produce , in terms of units produced per dollar of feedstock , machinery and labour.
Then a scientist in Cold Spring Harbour Long Island was finally listened to - for years he had an idea to make the penicillium produce a lot more penicillin per dollar of effort.
Soon a hundred times as much penicillin was coming out for the same dollar of effort - using his technology today we get 50,000 times (no that is not a typo) per dollar of effort as the world got in the early 1940s.
As a result of inaction by the rest of Big Pharma , New York (read : Pfizer) was left to produce 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - and for the rest of the war, the biggest chunk of the entire world's penicillin came from its Marcy Avenue plant.
Even if Sweden's Nobel Committee didn't know all that New York did - and all that Fleming and Florey didn't do - I firmly believe that God only knows what New York had done and He is pleased ....
Jul 24, 2014
Manhattan gave the world the first life-saving penicillin shot - as well as the first death-dealing A-Bomb
Don't let terrorists like Ramzi Yousef limit Manhattan's wartime role to killing (and here I quote his justification for blowing up the twin towers of the World Trade Centre) "250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki".
Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.
New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.
It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.
Alexander Fleming in London had discovered penicillin 12 years earlier but had decided it would only be useful if made as a patentable man-made economical synthetic and even then only useful as a surface antiseptic - not in an internally-oriented pill or needle.
Howard Florey in Oxford had taken up Fleming's challenge and for a decade his team chased the chimera of man-made patentable economical man-made penicillin - but they never succeeded and no one else ever has.
New York went back to Fleming's original semi-purified natural penicillin and ran with it - in five short weeks Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team had obtained spores, grown it , concentrated it and tested it for toxicity (on Dawson himself).
Now the team was ready to give it to patients dying of then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) for lack of it - a young black man from Sugar Hill, Harlem named Aaron Alston and a young Jewish man named Charles Aronson from the Bronx.
SBE patients were then considered the 4Fs of the 4Fs and not a priority to an Anglo-American medical establishment using the excuse of war preparation to curtail social medicine (medicine directed at the poor and minorities).
So the day Dawson picked for history's first penicillin shots couldn't have been more freighted in symbolism.
It was October 16th 1940 - the historic first day of America's draft registration process - a process still going strong 75 years later.
So on a day when all the minds of America and of the Allied and Axis world were focussed on whether or not the hardships of the Great Depression had reduced America's numbers of 1A fit-for-combat youth , a 4F black man and Jew got to make their own history in a quiet corner of upper Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Centre...
Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.
New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.
It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.
Alexander Fleming in London had discovered penicillin 12 years earlier but had decided it would only be useful if made as a patentable man-made economical synthetic and even then only useful as a surface antiseptic - not in an internally-oriented pill or needle.
Howard Florey in Oxford had taken up Fleming's challenge and for a decade his team chased the chimera of man-made patentable economical man-made penicillin - but they never succeeded and no one else ever has.
New York went back to Fleming's original semi-purified natural penicillin and ran with it - in five short weeks Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team had obtained spores, grown it , concentrated it and tested it for toxicity (on Dawson himself).
Now the team was ready to give it to patients dying of then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) for lack of it - a young black man from Sugar Hill, Harlem named Aaron Alston and a young Jewish man named Charles Aronson from the Bronx.
SBE patients were then considered the 4Fs of the 4Fs and not a priority to an Anglo-American medical establishment using the excuse of war preparation to curtail social medicine (medicine directed at the poor and minorities).
So the day Dawson picked for history's first penicillin shots couldn't have been more freighted in symbolism.
It was October 16th 1940 - the historic first day of America's draft registration process - a process still going strong 75 years later.
So on a day when all the minds of America and of the Allied and Axis world were focussed on whether or not the hardships of the Great Depression had reduced America's numbers of 1A fit-for-combat youth , a 4F black man and Jew got to make their own history in a quiet corner of upper Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Centre...
Jul 23, 2014
Emma Lazarus's message to immigrants : America , if it is about anything , is ALL about second acts ...
F Scott Fitzgerald got it wrong. Not about everything , of course. But the bit about there being 'no second acts in American lives' - that 24/7 bromide of the modern news and entertainment biz.
As Emma Lazarus's own legacy demonstrates , there is plenty of room in America for second and even third acts.
Not really a surprise to readers of the New Testament I suppose.
Or to tens of millions of born again Americans (or to the many fans of Richard M Nixon) .
Emma was actually quite an internationally prominent poet and social activist in her day.
Her poem written to raise funds for the pedestal of the French-donated Statue of Liberty was the definite hit of the fund-raising effort.
But then she took seriously ill with a terminal cancer and so became inactive in America's literary cum social action circles.
Thus, in the lead up to the actual ceremony mounting the statue in New York harbour neither she or her poem was mentioned.
(Again , re-affirming a cliche of the modern news and celebrity biz - you have to be out there all the time self-promoting or you're yesterday's news.)
The poem was also almost totally absent from the many tributes to her on her death in 1887.
No artistic figure , no matter how prominent or how big a seller while alive , remains so unless they created a historically important institution, school of thought or work of art.
That is to say no one remains prominent unless they are taught about in school or college.
One sixty word poem tossed off in an hour, but considered highly suitable for a students' anthology, can easily out-weigh a lifetime spent writing three million profitable words , in this fame game.
Seemingly , Emma lacked that 'hit' .
But in 1903 , a friend of Ms Lazarus , Georgina Schuyler , re-discovered the poem about the statue (The New Colossus) in an used book store.
She succeeded , after a great deal of resistance from Emma's family, in having the last few lines of it engraved on a modest bronze plaque in a corner of the statue.
There it remained un-noticed for another thirty years until a Slovene immigrant and social activist , Louis Adamic , campaigned tirelessly for decades , until his death in 1951 , to turn the poem and the statue into a symbol of how America should still welcome immigrants.
(In 1924, America had closed its doors to all but a handful of immigrants from a handful of nordic protestant countries.)
By 1936, at the fifty year celebration of the statue, FDR's carefully eloquent speech had to take in this new sense of the statue taking in (all) refugees who thereby got a second chance at life in America --- because, in FDR's equally careful bow to the right - America offered expanded liberties (to all those who qualified as good enough to become Americans) - the original meaning of the statue.
Gradually , though still contested today by many on the right, Lazarus's hijacking of the Statue of Liberty's original meaning has won the day.
And what person worldwide would be considered truly educated by others if they instantly failed to know what the words tired, huddled and wretched refer to ?
I have written and spoken before (on my local CBC) about how fragile the early existence of today's universally understood myths often were.
My starting point was simply a passing reference in George F Williston's Saints and Strangers of how during the Revolutionary War , the British took the crucial manuscripts of Governor Bradford, the only real chronicler of the early Plymouth Colony , from out of a Boston church steeple and behind the counter of a humble Halifax grocery store.
There the sheets of paper manuscript detailing the tale of the First Thanksgiving Dinner almost got consumed itself --- as wrappers for greasy pieces of cheese on their way home to hungry post-revolutionary Nova Scotian diners !
This led me to discover the long and windy path to today's universally known account of that first dinner.
So today's story of the first thanksgiving dinner actually is fully faithful to the original event.
However , for most of the 19th century, the story was re-cast as the Indians sending hostile arrows and tomahawks, not peaceful food, to the gathering !
Now I am trying to revive a symbolic tale for Manhattan and America.
True but nevertheless forgotten : Martin Henry Dawson and penicillin-for-all.
His hugely significant role was well noted in the first detailed newspaper and book accounts about wartime penicillin - which coincided with his premature death.
But Dawson had four problems if he wished to have a 'hit' .
He was extremely modest about his role while alive.
He was dead. ( And had no kin or friend who felt like working hard to keep his story alive.)
Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey were alive.
They were total failures in terms of totally failing to do what they intended to do with penicillin versus what America had done so successfully with penicillin.
They were pushy self-promoters. And all of Britain backed them fully in this need to re-cast the history of wartime penicillin as a British triumph.
Academic historians have fully bought into either the Fleming or Florey version .
Though I find it rather noteworthy that generations of Hollywood producers (armed only with cigars rather than doctorates) consider both men's story to be box office poison and have failed to make a movie out of the dramatic events of wartime penicillin.
My efforts might thus seem totally hopeless but for one more bromide from the North American newsroom.
Those heartless bastards in the news and entertainment biz who give you your fleeting 15 minutes of fame and then toss you out like a used condom ?
They love - simply love - a comeback story - clawing your way back out of the grave like a 'where are they now' lazarus.
The latest example - timely this - is Weird Al Yankovic , who write , sings and performs musical video parodies of well known pop songs while sending up pop culture.
The very physically unattractive and supernerdy Yankovic was supposed to remain a one hit wonder from almost 40 years ago - a weird guy playing accordion at a time of heavy metal and punk.
But he hung on in and gradually getting him to parody you
became as crucial to an superstar's ego as dipping your feet in cement in Hollywood or seeing yourself in wax at Madame Tussauds .
This week his latest album debuted at number one in America and the press went crazy --- this just seemed the-paint-by-numbers kit of all comeback stories - even if Weird Al never really left.
Dawson's no prettier than Al - his biting wit not as potent - but morally , his story really can't be beat.
There's hope yet ...
As Emma Lazarus's own legacy demonstrates , there is plenty of room in America for second and even third acts.
Not really a surprise to readers of the New Testament I suppose.
Or to tens of millions of born again Americans (or to the many fans of Richard M Nixon) .
Lazarus arising
Emma was actually quite an internationally prominent poet and social activist in her day.
Her poem written to raise funds for the pedestal of the French-donated Statue of Liberty was the definite hit of the fund-raising effort.
But then she took seriously ill with a terminal cancer and so became inactive in America's literary cum social action circles.
Thus, in the lead up to the actual ceremony mounting the statue in New York harbour neither she or her poem was mentioned.
(Again , re-affirming a cliche of the modern news and celebrity biz - you have to be out there all the time self-promoting or you're yesterday's news.)
The poem was also almost totally absent from the many tributes to her on her death in 1887.
No artistic figure , no matter how prominent or how big a seller while alive , remains so unless they created a historically important institution, school of thought or work of art.
That is to say no one remains prominent unless they are taught about in school or college.
One sixty word poem tossed off in an hour, but considered highly suitable for a students' anthology, can easily out-weigh a lifetime spent writing three million profitable words , in this fame game.
Seemingly , Emma lacked that 'hit' .
But in 1903 , a friend of Ms Lazarus , Georgina Schuyler , re-discovered the poem about the statue (The New Colossus) in an used book store.
She succeeded , after a great deal of resistance from Emma's family, in having the last few lines of it engraved on a modest bronze plaque in a corner of the statue.
There it remained un-noticed for another thirty years until a Slovene immigrant and social activist , Louis Adamic , campaigned tirelessly for decades , until his death in 1951 , to turn the poem and the statue into a symbol of how America should still welcome immigrants.
(In 1924, America had closed its doors to all but a handful of immigrants from a handful of nordic protestant countries.)
By 1936, at the fifty year celebration of the statue, FDR's carefully eloquent speech had to take in this new sense of the statue taking in (all) refugees who thereby got a second chance at life in America --- because, in FDR's equally careful bow to the right - America offered expanded liberties (to all those who qualified as good enough to become Americans) - the original meaning of the statue.
Gradually , though still contested today by many on the right, Lazarus's hijacking of the Statue of Liberty's original meaning has won the day.
And what person worldwide would be considered truly educated by others if they instantly failed to know what the words tired, huddled and wretched refer to ?
I have written and spoken before (on my local CBC) about how fragile the early existence of today's universally understood myths often were.
My starting point was simply a passing reference in George F Williston's Saints and Strangers of how during the Revolutionary War , the British took the crucial manuscripts of Governor Bradford, the only real chronicler of the early Plymouth Colony , from out of a Boston church steeple and behind the counter of a humble Halifax grocery store.
There the sheets of paper manuscript detailing the tale of the First Thanksgiving Dinner almost got consumed itself --- as wrappers for greasy pieces of cheese on their way home to hungry post-revolutionary Nova Scotian diners !
This led me to discover the long and windy path to today's universally known account of that first dinner.
So today's story of the first thanksgiving dinner actually is fully faithful to the original event.
However , for most of the 19th century, the story was re-cast as the Indians sending hostile arrows and tomahawks, not peaceful food, to the gathering !
Now I am trying to revive a symbolic tale for Manhattan and America.
True but nevertheless forgotten : Martin Henry Dawson and penicillin-for-all.
His hugely significant role was well noted in the first detailed newspaper and book accounts about wartime penicillin - which coincided with his premature death.
But Dawson had four problems if he wished to have a 'hit' .
He was extremely modest about his role while alive.
He was dead. ( And had no kin or friend who felt like working hard to keep his story alive.)
Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey were alive.
They were total failures in terms of totally failing to do what they intended to do with penicillin versus what America had done so successfully with penicillin.
They were pushy self-promoters. And all of Britain backed them fully in this need to re-cast the history of wartime penicillin as a British triumph.
Academic historians have fully bought into either the Fleming or Florey version .
Though I find it rather noteworthy that generations of Hollywood producers (armed only with cigars rather than doctorates) consider both men's story to be box office poison and have failed to make a movie out of the dramatic events of wartime penicillin.
My efforts might thus seem totally hopeless but for one more bromide from the North American newsroom.
Those heartless bastards in the news and entertainment biz who give you your fleeting 15 minutes of fame and then toss you out like a used condom ?
They love - simply love - a comeback story - clawing your way back out of the grave like a 'where are they now' lazarus.
The latest example - timely this - is Weird Al Yankovic , who write , sings and performs musical video parodies of well known pop songs while sending up pop culture.
The very physically unattractive and supernerdy Yankovic was supposed to remain a one hit wonder from almost 40 years ago - a weird guy playing accordion at a time of heavy metal and punk.
But he hung on in and gradually getting him to parody you
became as crucial to an superstar's ego as dipping your feet in cement in Hollywood or seeing yourself in wax at Madame Tussauds .
This week his latest album debuted at number one in America and the press went crazy --- this just seemed the-paint-by-numbers kit of all comeback stories - even if Weird Al never really left.
Dawson's no prettier than Al - his biting wit not as potent - but morally , his story really can't be beat.
There's hope yet ...
Nov 11, 2013
Finally, a penicillin hero who is NOT "Box Office Poison"
Hollywood has never done a film about the exciting wartime history of the world's best known medicine, penicillin, because the character of two best known protagonists, Alexander Fleming and Howard Fleming - on closer examination - proved 100% pure Box Office poison, particularly to women who are the main customers for medically-oriented dramas.
What exactly Henry Dawson contributed to the success of penicillin has never been in doubt, but what has frustrated American, British and Australian writers on penicillin has been determining just why this normally non-assertive, and now dying, doctor did what he did .
Why exactly did he push so hard and so long to save the "4Fs of the 4Fs" , against the full force of wartime bureaucracy and at the cost of his own life ?
Here indeed was a hero on the Hollywood scale , if only it was clear why he did what he did .
I think the answer as to why he did what he did, is to consider the character-building events in his life, before he settled permanently in New York and ultimately took out American citizenship.
After all, he spent the first two thirds of his relatively short life in Canada , in Nova Scotia ,where he was born and raised, in particular.
An instinctive feel for the uniqueness of Nova Scotia's history and culture in the tremulous period just after the turn of the last century is what all these foreign writers, fine as their other talents are, simply lack.
The story of Henry Dawson's quixotic-seeming but ultimately world-shaking Manhattan Project, his drive to see penicillin provided for ALL humanity, is as much character-driven as it is events-driven.
It is his quietly heroic character that will bring customers to buy the book, see the movie, attend the play and musical, above all to bring out those three hankies.
Any history of wartime penicillin seems like a chaotic jumble of events, one damn thing after another ,with no overarching theme to tie them all together.
But now wartime penicillin will be recast as the leading part of a globe wide conflict, taking place underneath the military events of WWII, between two very different ways of treating our fellow human beings .
And the clashing personalities of Henry Dawson and Howard Florey will aptly represent both sides.
But it is Henry Dawson's noble, selfless character, revealed for the first time, that will finally make the story of wartime penicillin the feel-good movie of the year it has always deserved to be....
What exactly Henry Dawson contributed to the success of penicillin has never been in doubt, but what has frustrated American, British and Australian writers on penicillin has been determining just why this normally non-assertive, and now dying, doctor did what he did .
Why exactly did he push so hard and so long to save the "4Fs of the 4Fs" , against the full force of wartime bureaucracy and at the cost of his own life ?
Here indeed was a hero on the Hollywood scale , if only it was clear why he did what he did .
I think the answer as to why he did what he did, is to consider the character-building events in his life, before he settled permanently in New York and ultimately took out American citizenship.
After all, he spent the first two thirds of his relatively short life in Canada , in Nova Scotia ,where he was born and raised, in particular.
An instinctive feel for the uniqueness of Nova Scotia's history and culture in the tremulous period just after the turn of the last century is what all these foreign writers, fine as their other talents are, simply lack.
The story of Henry Dawson's quixotic-seeming but ultimately world-shaking Manhattan Project, his drive to see penicillin provided for ALL humanity, is as much character-driven as it is events-driven.
It is his quietly heroic character that will bring customers to buy the book, see the movie, attend the play and musical, above all to bring out those three hankies.
Any history of wartime penicillin seems like a chaotic jumble of events, one damn thing after another ,with no overarching theme to tie them all together.
But now wartime penicillin will be recast as the leading part of a globe wide conflict, taking place underneath the military events of WWII, between two very different ways of treating our fellow human beings .
And the clashing personalities of Henry Dawson and Howard Florey will aptly represent both sides.
But it is Henry Dawson's noble, selfless character, revealed for the first time, that will finally make the story of wartime penicillin the feel-good movie of the year it has always deserved to be....
Sep 11, 2013
WWII was all about who we include , who we exclude ...
When we say that Henry Dawson's vision of wartime penicillin was 'inclusive', while that of Howard Florey was 'exclusive' , we are really getting at the key issue that divided all the world during, before and after WWII.
" Just who do we include in ; just who do we exclude out of our civil society's blessings ?"
Florey never called his vision for wartime penicillin 'exclusive' , but he did much use another term that means the same thing and in any case , his definite actions spoke much louder than his unspoken assumptions.
The word he always used to describe his goals for penicillin was 'pure' , chemically pure.
A dose of penicillin that excludes everything else in the original penicillin juice, whether that be helpful, neutral or harmful.
A 100 gram Vitamin C rich orange not merely concentrated into Vitamin C rich orange juice but further purified until it is a mere 100 mg of 100% chemically pure Vitamin C powder ... with all that impure orange taste and texture safely removed.
If Calvinists ever become our leading chefs, this is what our food will look like : pure carbohydrate, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals in enormous pill form and worked down with many cups of sterile water.
Hitler wanted to exclude Jews, Romas, Queers, the chronically ill and the handicapped , socialists, Blacks - you name it - to make Germany one big pure homogeneous Aryan nation and race.
Left-leaning Social Medicine, of which Dawson was a proponent , wanted to see that Medicine helped all those sick : it was inclusive.
And not just by helping those American blacks, aboriginals and immigrants usually neglected under 'for-profit' medicine either.
Its proponents also wanted to intervene (medically and otherwise), overseas ,to help those under attack by Hitler, Stalin and Tojo.
By contrast, the conservatives behind the idea of "War Medicine" wanted to use the defence of America as an excuse to roll back the New Deal emphasis on Social Medicine by claiming that in a Total War lead-up, all precious resources had to shift away from the (generally poorer) 4Fs to the (generally better off) 1A citizens.
Just because they talked war did not mean they were pro intervention overseas, just the opposite.
Their vision not just excluded helping sick 4F Americans at home, it also excluded helping sick 4Fs overseas as well.
Florey and Fleming both wanted penicillin to be chemically 100% pure and synthetic before it was produced in big volumes.
They were also both in intimate lockstep with the War Medicine proponents at Britain's Ministry of Supply and America's OSRD who wanted to restrict civilian access to (and knowledge of) the miracle cure , all the better to make penicillin a weapon of war.
If it could be kept exclusively as a secret weapon of war, the Allies could return wounded troops to combat quicker than the Germans or Japanese could.
By contrast, Dawson felt that doctors should help the sick and wounded soldiers of both sides (including Allied POWS !) and help the civilians of all sides : Neutral , Axis and Allied.
And he wanted penicillin - whether synthetically pure or naturally impure* he didn't care - produced in mass levels now , not after the war was over.
(* His team never let the impurity of their self-proclaimed "crude penicillin" stop them from being the first in history to give it systemically, via needle, to save a life.
They later even published a journal article speculating crude penicillin had additional beneficial substances that made it a better medication than just pure penicillin itself...)
Dawson definitely did not want to see the medicine produced in tiny levels so as to render acceptable the rationing of it, to justify giving it only to those civilians who were useful because of their involvement in the war effort.
He felt even a person incapable of almost any work still deserved penicillin, a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile.
Dawson felt this sort of American medical establishment thinking was far too close to that of Hitler's Aktion T4 projects - where people judged non-useful were starved, denied warm shelter and medicine or killed outright.
He believed if the Allies were seen saving the lives of people most of the educated world saw as 'useless' - even during an all-out Total War - this would help defeat Hitler morally in the many many Neutral countries and also strengthen the resolve of those Allied frontline troops facing death to defeat him militarily.
If the OSRD and Florey used penicillin as a weapon, we need ask did Dawson use it as a weapon, as well ?
Yes he certainly did.
As a weapon in a moral battle.
Dawson's touting of the inclusive use of wartime medicine definitely did have a moral cum political/diplomatic impact, in addition to the extra patients it medically admitted to be saved.......
" Just who do we include in ; just who do we exclude out of our civil society's blessings ?"
Florey never called his vision for wartime penicillin 'exclusive' , but he did much use another term that means the same thing and in any case , his definite actions spoke much louder than his unspoken assumptions.
The word he always used to describe his goals for penicillin was 'pure' , chemically pure.
A dose of penicillin that excludes everything else in the original penicillin juice, whether that be helpful, neutral or harmful.
A 100 gram Vitamin C rich orange not merely concentrated into Vitamin C rich orange juice but further purified until it is a mere 100 mg of 100% chemically pure Vitamin C powder ... with all that impure orange taste and texture safely removed.
If Calvinists ever become our leading chefs, this is what our food will look like : pure carbohydrate, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals in enormous pill form and worked down with many cups of sterile water.
Hitler wanted to exclude Jews, Romas, Queers, the chronically ill and the handicapped , socialists, Blacks - you name it - to make Germany one big pure homogeneous Aryan nation and race.
Left-leaning Social Medicine, of which Dawson was a proponent , wanted to see that Medicine helped all those sick : it was inclusive.
And not just by helping those American blacks, aboriginals and immigrants usually neglected under 'for-profit' medicine either.
Its proponents also wanted to intervene (medically and otherwise), overseas ,to help those under attack by Hitler, Stalin and Tojo.
By contrast, the conservatives behind the idea of "War Medicine" wanted to use the defence of America as an excuse to roll back the New Deal emphasis on Social Medicine by claiming that in a Total War lead-up, all precious resources had to shift away from the (generally poorer) 4Fs to the (generally better off) 1A citizens.
Just because they talked war did not mean they were pro intervention overseas, just the opposite.
Their vision not just excluded helping sick 4F Americans at home, it also excluded helping sick 4Fs overseas as well.
Florey and Fleming both wanted penicillin to be chemically 100% pure and synthetic before it was produced in big volumes.
They were also both in intimate lockstep with the War Medicine proponents at Britain's Ministry of Supply and America's OSRD who wanted to restrict civilian access to (and knowledge of) the miracle cure , all the better to make penicillin a weapon of war.
If it could be kept exclusively as a secret weapon of war, the Allies could return wounded troops to combat quicker than the Germans or Japanese could.
By contrast, Dawson felt that doctors should help the sick and wounded soldiers of both sides (including Allied POWS !) and help the civilians of all sides : Neutral , Axis and Allied.
And he wanted penicillin - whether synthetically pure or naturally impure* he didn't care - produced in mass levels now , not after the war was over.
(* His team never let the impurity of their self-proclaimed "crude penicillin" stop them from being the first in history to give it systemically, via needle, to save a life.
They later even published a journal article speculating crude penicillin had additional beneficial substances that made it a better medication than just pure penicillin itself...)
Dawson definitely did not want to see the medicine produced in tiny levels so as to render acceptable the rationing of it, to justify giving it only to those civilians who were useful because of their involvement in the war effort.
He felt even a person incapable of almost any work still deserved penicillin, a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile.
Dawson felt this sort of American medical establishment thinking was far too close to that of Hitler's Aktion T4 projects - where people judged non-useful were starved, denied warm shelter and medicine or killed outright.
He believed if the Allies were seen saving the lives of people most of the educated world saw as 'useless' - even during an all-out Total War - this would help defeat Hitler morally in the many many Neutral countries and also strengthen the resolve of those Allied frontline troops facing death to defeat him militarily.
If the OSRD and Florey used penicillin as a weapon, we need ask did Dawson use it as a weapon, as well ?
Yes he certainly did.
As a weapon in a moral battle.
Dawson's touting of the inclusive use of wartime medicine definitely did have a moral cum political/diplomatic impact, in addition to the extra patients it medically admitted to be saved.......
Sep 10, 2013
Despite Eric Lax, Howard Florey is still "Box Office Poison" to women readers
And as every book editor well knows , most readers of narrative fiction/non-fiction are women.
But in the Lax take on the wartime penicillin saga, the hero offered up is a man who leaves his deaf middle class wife to ride around on her bike in the rain collecting urine from penicillin patients while he 'has it off' with his aristocratic mistress in the luxurious bath and bedroom suite he had at his office in (never-Blitzed) Oxford England .
And this at a time when millions of Britons in the rest of the UK were being bombed out their homes by the Blitz and (barely) living in makeshift shelters.
Charming, really charming !
Just of the sort of hero women readers want to cuddle up to - Not.
The character - or lack of it - of Howard Florey is what made Eric Lax's recent biography such a flop among ordinary readers.
So, despite the fact that a survey of thousands of American women found they considered penicillin the most important news story of the entire 20th century , we still have never had a successful popular book or movie about the dramatic wartime history of penicillin.
What is missing in all past efforts is a focus on the one classical hero in the whole saga : the dying Dr Dawson and his unrelenting efforts to make penicillin inclusive not exclusive.
That and a too trusting reliance by previous writers upon the official histories rather than digging deeper into the primary records.
Because the people in Washington and London who wrote the official histories determined, above all, to cover up their very expensive and very time-wasting wartime flop : the synthetic penicillin project led by Florey and George Merck and paid for mostly by the taxpayers - as always.
So they tried to pretend that the stone these builders rejected had really been their idea all along. With Dawson prematurely dead at war's end and unable to set the record straight , it was - literally - dead simple.
Women, around the world , will buy a popular history about wartime penicillin by the tens of millions of copies - with the right set of heroes and villains laid out before them.
"The smallest Manhattan Project : the unexpected triumph of inclusive penicillin" will do just that .....
But in the Lax take on the wartime penicillin saga, the hero offered up is a man who leaves his deaf middle class wife to ride around on her bike in the rain collecting urine from penicillin patients while he 'has it off' with his aristocratic mistress in the luxurious bath and bedroom suite he had at his office in (never-Blitzed) Oxford England .
And this at a time when millions of Britons in the rest of the UK were being bombed out their homes by the Blitz and (barely) living in makeshift shelters.
Charming, really charming !
Just of the sort of hero women readers want to cuddle up to - Not.
The character - or lack of it - of Howard Florey is what made Eric Lax's recent biography such a flop among ordinary readers.
So, despite the fact that a survey of thousands of American women found they considered penicillin the most important news story of the entire 20th century , we still have never had a successful popular book or movie about the dramatic wartime history of penicillin.
What is missing in all past efforts is a focus on the one classical hero in the whole saga : the dying Dr Dawson and his unrelenting efforts to make penicillin inclusive not exclusive.
That and a too trusting reliance by previous writers upon the official histories rather than digging deeper into the primary records.
Because the people in Washington and London who wrote the official histories determined, above all, to cover up their very expensive and very time-wasting wartime flop : the synthetic penicillin project led by Florey and George Merck and paid for mostly by the taxpayers - as always.
So they tried to pretend that the stone these builders rejected had really been their idea all along. With Dawson prematurely dead at war's end and unable to set the record straight , it was - literally - dead simple.
Women, around the world , will buy a popular history about wartime penicillin by the tens of millions of copies - with the right set of heroes and villains laid out before them.
"The smallest Manhattan Project : the unexpected triumph of inclusive penicillin" will do just that .....
Aug 25, 2013
Dawson's penicillin 1940-1945 : made in the Public Domain , FOR the Public Domain
Howard Florey's penicillin 1940-1945, by way of pointed contrast, was Pure penicillin for Purely military use only.
He believed that penicillium were tiny ancient life and so , by definition , linear progressive Evolution's "Yesterday's Men" .
He was sure civilized scientific Man was bound to make penicillin better and cheaper than some slimy mold in a sort of witch's caldron .
But, in fact , chemists actually needed hundreds of millions of dollars - in 1940s dollars - together with tens of thousands of tons of structural and stainless steel to make a whole series of chemical factories, just to get started on making penicillin.
All those big plants, together with lots of staff, a whole lot of energy and many corrosive solvents were Man's way of making penicillin.
They needed to be build expensively strong in order to safely apply high pressure and high & cold temperature over and over in many steps.
All this to replicate what a incredibly tiny fungus cell (sixty pico grams in mass) could produce at ordinary temperatures and ordinary pressures out of a little dirty water and a bit of decaying organic material.
That tiny fungus factory weighed about one billion trillion times less than all of the factories needed to make the basic chemicals that went into the final penicillin synthetic factory.
So if you thought that perhaps the tiny fungus could do the job better and cheaper, then you were with Dawson.
Now, just as how you viewed the possibility of the continuing viability of small beings coloured the type of penicillin factory you preferred, it seemed to also colour who you thought the penicillin should help.
So, Florey: big factory penicillin for big armies only ; Dawson : small factory penicillin for small people everywhere.....
He believed that penicillium were tiny ancient life and so , by definition , linear progressive Evolution's "Yesterday's Men" .
He was sure civilized scientific Man was bound to make penicillin better and cheaper than some slimy mold in a sort of witch's caldron .
But, in fact , chemists actually needed hundreds of millions of dollars - in 1940s dollars - together with tens of thousands of tons of structural and stainless steel to make a whole series of chemical factories, just to get started on making penicillin.
All those big plants, together with lots of staff, a whole lot of energy and many corrosive solvents were Man's way of making penicillin.
They needed to be build expensively strong in order to safely apply high pressure and high & cold temperature over and over in many steps.
All this to replicate what a incredibly tiny fungus cell (sixty pico grams in mass) could produce at ordinary temperatures and ordinary pressures out of a little dirty water and a bit of decaying organic material.
That tiny fungus factory weighed about one billion trillion times less than all of the factories needed to make the basic chemicals that went into the final penicillin synthetic factory.
So if you thought that perhaps the tiny fungus could do the job better and cheaper, then you were with Dawson.
Now, just as how you viewed the possibility of the continuing viability of small beings coloured the type of penicillin factory you preferred, it seemed to also colour who you thought the penicillin should help.
So, Florey: big factory penicillin for big armies only ; Dawson : small factory penicillin for small people everywhere.....
Crude Penicillin and Bacterial Transformation : two neologisms of Henry Dawson
Henry Dawson was far from a wordsmith but he did coin two neologisms that have survived in today's scientific and historical lexicon.
One was "bacterial transformation" (a form of HGT, horizontal gene transfer -- basically non-Darwinian inheritance) and the other was "crude penicillin".
To explain this latter term is is best to recognize it is really a term of scientific and political polemics.
Let us imagine a British Empire in the early 1940s, badly hurting a time of war because it had refused to accept a fact known for at least two centuries.
That fact was that the most natural , most versatile and cheapest way to solve the naval and merchant ship scurvy crisis was with a good supply of citrus fruit kept on board.
Marshalled against this fact discovered by James Lind was an array of louder, better educated and greedier voices.
What they were telling the government and the media and future historians was that Britain's dying sailors must simply be patient.
In its own sweet time an expensive synthetic vitamin C was sure to emerge, fully patented, from one of the nation's chemical firms.
One expensively patented , tasteless , pill would solve the human daily needs for vitamin C - as would other patented pills for all our daily food intake.
We needn't waste time away from our desks on meals when a glass of water and a big handful or two of pills would solve the problem.
Against this chemical boasting would be an array of people saying that they looked forward to meals - perhaps even more than sex and certainly far more than they looked forward to work.
Others would point out that citrus fruit and vitamin C rich vegetables are found world wide - are both cheap and abundant - a security of supply issue.
They would further point out that the deadly delay in solving this sea-going crisis for the Empire was simply down to greed and ambition.
The delay was down to some ambitious scientists seeking the glory for having synthesized something Mother Nature already provided and to some greedy chemical companies wanting a profitable patent to exploit.
These claims against patented vitamin C pills are so damning a master scientific polemist would be called upon to defend Chemistry.
A scientific polemist like Howard Florey because he, too, was a bit of a neologism creator : he was the first person to talk about impure and pure penicillin, for example.
An orange ,he could point out, could potentially be a dangerous source of vitamin C because it was an impure source of the needed vitamin (in the sense that vitamin C only made up a tiny fraction of one percent of the orange by weight).
In a 1940s culture where the middle class had more education than common sense, this would be effective arguing : everyone wanted cleanliness and purity.
Henry Dawson immediately caught onto this "Only I know how to make pure safe penicillin" line of attack from Florey's very first article on penicillin and quickly mounted a rebuttal.
And he did so in the august pages of the New York Times on May 6th 1941.
In effect, he said an orange can be one of four things, as regards to being an safe source of vitamin C.
It could be unsafe because both the orange and its vitamin C are potentially dangerous.
It could be safe because both the orange and its vitamin C are harmless to consume.
It could be unsafe because vitamin C is potentially dangerous, perhaps in larger quantities.
It could be unsafe because the orange itself was potentially toxic.
The only thing to do , as always , was less talk and more experiments.
He tested impure penicillin (penicillium juice) upon himself and upon some human patients and found it perfectly safe.
He boldly called his successful medicine "crude penicillin" --- naturally made penicillin happily bathing its its naturally produced impure bath.
it was a medicine made by microbes and offered up to all, free in the Public Domain : thus meeting Florey's subtle corporate agenda head-on.
Ironically, years later, it was revealed that pure penicillin itself was potentially unsafe (unlike the rest of the harmless penicillium juice) because when pure it can be given in large enough amounts to result in sudden penicillin allergy deaths !
Pure members of the aryan races might still believe they can only survive on pure penicillin and pure vitamin C but the rest of this polyglot world still likes to take its daily nourishment 'crude' , dining around the table with family and friends.
It hasn't seemed to harm the seven billions of us so far....
One was "bacterial transformation" (a form of HGT, horizontal gene transfer -- basically non-Darwinian inheritance) and the other was "crude penicillin".
To explain this latter term is is best to recognize it is really a term of scientific and political polemics.
Let us imagine a British Empire in the early 1940s, badly hurting a time of war because it had refused to accept a fact known for at least two centuries.
That fact was that the most natural , most versatile and cheapest way to solve the naval and merchant ship scurvy crisis was with a good supply of citrus fruit kept on board.
Marshalled against this fact discovered by James Lind was an array of louder, better educated and greedier voices.
What they were telling the government and the media and future historians was that Britain's dying sailors must simply be patient.
In its own sweet time an expensive synthetic vitamin C was sure to emerge, fully patented, from one of the nation's chemical firms.
One expensively patented , tasteless , pill would solve the human daily needs for vitamin C - as would other patented pills for all our daily food intake.
We needn't waste time away from our desks on meals when a glass of water and a big handful or two of pills would solve the problem.
Against this chemical boasting would be an array of people saying that they looked forward to meals - perhaps even more than sex and certainly far more than they looked forward to work.
Others would point out that citrus fruit and vitamin C rich vegetables are found world wide - are both cheap and abundant - a security of supply issue.
They would further point out that the deadly delay in solving this sea-going crisis for the Empire was simply down to greed and ambition.
The delay was down to some ambitious scientists seeking the glory for having synthesized something Mother Nature already provided and to some greedy chemical companies wanting a profitable patent to exploit.
These claims against patented vitamin C pills are so damning a master scientific polemist would be called upon to defend Chemistry.
A scientific polemist like Howard Florey because he, too, was a bit of a neologism creator : he was the first person to talk about impure and pure penicillin, for example.
An orange ,he could point out, could potentially be a dangerous source of vitamin C because it was an impure source of the needed vitamin (in the sense that vitamin C only made up a tiny fraction of one percent of the orange by weight).
In a 1940s culture where the middle class had more education than common sense, this would be effective arguing : everyone wanted cleanliness and purity.
Henry Dawson immediately caught onto this "Only I know how to make pure safe penicillin" line of attack from Florey's very first article on penicillin and quickly mounted a rebuttal.
And he did so in the august pages of the New York Times on May 6th 1941.
In effect, he said an orange can be one of four things, as regards to being an safe source of vitamin C.
It could be unsafe because both the orange and its vitamin C are potentially dangerous.
It could be safe because both the orange and its vitamin C are harmless to consume.
It could be unsafe because vitamin C is potentially dangerous, perhaps in larger quantities.
It could be unsafe because the orange itself was potentially toxic.
The only thing to do , as always , was less talk and more experiments.
He tested impure penicillin (penicillium juice) upon himself and upon some human patients and found it perfectly safe.
He boldly called his successful medicine "crude penicillin" --- naturally made penicillin happily bathing its its naturally produced impure bath.
it was a medicine made by microbes and offered up to all, free in the Public Domain : thus meeting Florey's subtle corporate agenda head-on.
Ironically, years later, it was revealed that pure penicillin itself was potentially unsafe (unlike the rest of the harmless penicillium juice) because when pure it can be given in large enough amounts to result in sudden penicillin allergy deaths !
Pure members of the aryan races might still believe they can only survive on pure penicillin and pure vitamin C but the rest of this polyglot world still likes to take its daily nourishment 'crude' , dining around the table with family and friends.
It hasn't seemed to harm the seven billions of us so far....
Jul 30, 2013
The world in September '39 : as divided as it had ever been, as divided as it had always been, as divided as it always would be
Seventy five years on, we still can see the differing value systems that divided modern liberal and conservative capitalist from modern communist and socialist from modern fascist and nazi.
But we now see something that they themselves could not see : just how united ,in so many ways, that these variants of High Modernity actually all were with each other.
If we want truly fundamental divisions, I am afraid that historians are daily revealing that we won't find it in what the socialists and nazis and capitalists of 1939 actually did , in practise, as opposed to what their high blown rhetoric claimed they believed they would do.
But a deep and enduring division did divide the world in 1939, as it does in 2013 and did in 1739 and will continue to do so till the End of Time.
The percentages of individuals on each side of this division probably remains roughly the same in each new generation.
But, more profoundly, the cumulative, collective, effects of the current strength of each individual's conviction does vary widely, depending on times and places and even upon immediate circumstances.
This varying strength gives rise to our habit of naming contrasting eras of human history to mark the varying strength on both sides of this Great Divide.
Age of Plato versus Age of Aristotle, Classicism versus Romanticism, High Modernity versus Post-Modernity.
Underlying each different era, I wish to argue, we can see the varying strength of the convictions held by collective humanity, each member holding one of two simple but profound assumptions.
Half of us believe that deep down, physical reality is much simpler and much more predictable than it currently appears to be.
The other half of us believes that deep down, physical reality is much more complex and dynamically unpredictable than it currently appears to be.
Now if I wanted to appear academic, I would at this point hasten to say that these two positions are but idealized extremes on a wide and subtly changing continuum of what real people actually believe.
But I won't say that because I don't believe it.
I believe that these two are the only positions held on this issue given that people hold them as deep, unconscious, 'gut' reactions rather than as something carefully and consciously thought out.
And what really matters is the intensity with which they hold one of these two positions at any particular time and place and on particular issues.
I believe that Henry Dawson always held that reality was more complex than it appeared, just as Howard Florey almost certainly believed that reality was much simpler than at first appeared.
The pair's different deep assumptions surfaced most famously in their fiercely held wartime support for either naturally-made penicillin or man-made penicillin.....
But we now see something that they themselves could not see : just how united ,in so many ways, that these variants of High Modernity actually all were with each other.
If we want truly fundamental divisions, I am afraid that historians are daily revealing that we won't find it in what the socialists and nazis and capitalists of 1939 actually did , in practise, as opposed to what their high blown rhetoric claimed they believed they would do.
But a deep and enduring division did divide the world in 1939, as it does in 2013 and did in 1739 and will continue to do so till the End of Time.
The percentages of individuals on each side of this division probably remains roughly the same in each new generation.
But, more profoundly, the cumulative, collective, effects of the current strength of each individual's conviction does vary widely, depending on times and places and even upon immediate circumstances.
This varying strength gives rise to our habit of naming contrasting eras of human history to mark the varying strength on both sides of this Great Divide.
Age of Plato versus Age of Aristotle, Classicism versus Romanticism, High Modernity versus Post-Modernity.
Underlying each different era, I wish to argue, we can see the varying strength of the convictions held by collective humanity, each member holding one of two simple but profound assumptions.
Half of us believe that deep down, physical reality is much simpler and much more predictable than it currently appears to be.
The other half of us believes that deep down, physical reality is much more complex and dynamically unpredictable than it currently appears to be.
Now if I wanted to appear academic, I would at this point hasten to say that these two positions are but idealized extremes on a wide and subtly changing continuum of what real people actually believe.
But I won't say that because I don't believe it.
I believe that these two are the only positions held on this issue given that people hold them as deep, unconscious, 'gut' reactions rather than as something carefully and consciously thought out.
And what really matters is the intensity with which they hold one of these two positions at any particular time and place and on particular issues.
I believe that Henry Dawson always held that reality was more complex than it appeared, just as Howard Florey almost certainly believed that reality was much simpler than at first appeared.
The pair's different deep assumptions surfaced most famously in their fiercely held wartime support for either naturally-made penicillin or man-made penicillin.....
Mar 25, 2013
1940 Penicillin : localized Gas Gangrene or systemic SBE ?
Within days of reading war-dodger Howard Florey's published conclusion that the as-yet-unproven penicillin was particularly suited to the military's most feared infection, gas gangrene, war-hero Henry Dawson defiantly decided - by pointed contrast - that penicillin was particularly well suited to defeat the ultimate in non-military infections, deadly subacute bacterial endocarditis, SBE.
The timing of Dawson's decision - during the most critical days of the expected Invasion of Britain - only heighten this highly unusual contrast between how we expect war-heroes and war-dodgers to behave and how these two examples actually did behave.
Florey had declined to serve his country when he was young but now was very eager to aid it (as a draft-proof middle ager) by steering the new penicillin towards use as as a local antiseptic for gas gangrene infections in frontline casualty tents.
For centuries, gas gangrene infections were the most dreaded and also the most uniquely wartime forms of death (rarely causing death in peacetime).
Any talk of the possibility of finally ending gas gangrene's terrors was acutely pitched to catch the ears of war's political, military and medical leadership.
By contrast, when on the day of America's first peacetime Draft Registration, a day dedicated to locating all of America's 1A youth, Dawson choose to instead try and save the lives of two SBE sufferers, one Black and one Jewish, he was focused on the most 4F imaginable of the unwanted 4Fs.
For no nation's military , no matter how hard pressed for manpower, was likely to regard SBEs as more than just a particularly costly burden for a wartime economy to bear.
It usually hit young adults , the prime category for draft boards and munition factories, but no matter what modern medicine threw at it, it always ended after months of expensive effort with the inevitable death of the patient.
In that Fall of 1940, the Medical School at Columbia University, which employed Dawson, had moved to reduce its offerings in Social medicine and up its offerings in War medicine, in response to the battle for civilization not taking place over the skies of Britain.
It certainly had no cause to expect any complaints from professor Dawson, he of all its employees.
He was, after all, from a Canadian family of five brothers, all who volunteered to fight in WWI, all who were wounded in the front lines - one who had paid the ultimate price and others who got medals for bravery and leadership under fire.
Dawson likely had more front line experience - in the medical corp, the infantry and in artillery - than any one else in the Medical School.
When he wasn't serving in hospitals dealing with wounded soldiers, he was in military hospitals himself as a patient - fighting off life-threatening infected war wounds he himself received.
Surely such a patriot and such a veteran of battlefront infections saw the sense on Howard Florey's proposal to focus penicillin research on battlefront wound infections and to agree with his university's decision to focus on war related medical research ?
But clearly he did not - and the mystery is to account for why he did not - but instead, precisely and perversely, did exactly the opposite.
Penicillin did not, in the end, reduce deaths due to gas gangrene - in fact penicillin pioneer ( and WWI veteran) RJV Pulvertaft found that the evidence suggested that the percentage of gas gangrene sufferers who died actually went up in WWII , compared to the results obtained in the last years of the previous war !
By contrast, in the end, penicillin proved to be the best medicine ever seen to stop deadly systemic (body-wide) infections like SBE and blood-poisoning.
Based on just the evidence, part of the mystery might therefore seemed to solve itself: the modest Dawson was simply a far better scientist than the very pushy and ambitious, but ultimately plodding, Florey.
But Dawson was also extremely patriotic in ways that Florey couldn't begin to imagine and we still must explain why he felt that his best way to personally aid the war effort was to come to the aid of Life's weakest members.
Saint Peter had only denied Christ's pleas three times, but between 1931 and 1941, America had denied pleas for help from smaller, weaker countries under attack over two dozen times, only deciding
to put the Greatest Generation Ever to work fighting the only Good War, after it itself was attacked.
Helping Life's weakest members is all very nice in theory said America - but what in the hell does it have to do with fighting WWII - which was all about one's own naked self interest ?
Perhaps Dawson was merely confused - was still fighting WWI - was still fighting for poor bleeding little Belgium.
Perhaps....
The timing of Dawson's decision - during the most critical days of the expected Invasion of Britain - only heighten this highly unusual contrast between how we expect war-heroes and war-dodgers to behave and how these two examples actually did behave.
Florey had declined to serve his country when he was young but now was very eager to aid it (as a draft-proof middle ager) by steering the new penicillin towards use as as a local antiseptic for gas gangrene infections in frontline casualty tents.
For centuries, gas gangrene infections were the most dreaded and also the most uniquely wartime forms of death (rarely causing death in peacetime).
Any talk of the possibility of finally ending gas gangrene's terrors was acutely pitched to catch the ears of war's political, military and medical leadership.
By contrast, when on the day of America's first peacetime Draft Registration, a day dedicated to locating all of America's 1A youth, Dawson choose to instead try and save the lives of two SBE sufferers, one Black and one Jewish, he was focused on the most 4F imaginable of the unwanted 4Fs.
The most 4F of all the 4Fs : the SBEs
For no nation's military , no matter how hard pressed for manpower, was likely to regard SBEs as more than just a particularly costly burden for a wartime economy to bear.
It usually hit young adults , the prime category for draft boards and munition factories, but no matter what modern medicine threw at it, it always ended after months of expensive effort with the inevitable death of the patient.
In that Fall of 1940, the Medical School at Columbia University, which employed Dawson, had moved to reduce its offerings in Social medicine and up its offerings in War medicine, in response to the battle for civilization not taking place over the skies of Britain.
It certainly had no cause to expect any complaints from professor Dawson, he of all its employees.
He was, after all, from a Canadian family of five brothers, all who volunteered to fight in WWI, all who were wounded in the front lines - one who had paid the ultimate price and others who got medals for bravery and leadership under fire.
Dawson likely had more front line experience - in the medical corp, the infantry and in artillery - than any one else in the Medical School.
When he wasn't serving in hospitals dealing with wounded soldiers, he was in military hospitals himself as a patient - fighting off life-threatening infected war wounds he himself received.
Surely such a patriot and such a veteran of battlefront infections saw the sense on Howard Florey's proposal to focus penicillin research on battlefront wound infections and to agree with his university's decision to focus on war related medical research ?
But clearly he did not - and the mystery is to account for why he did not - but instead, precisely and perversely, did exactly the opposite.
Penicillin did not, in the end, reduce deaths due to gas gangrene - in fact penicillin pioneer ( and WWI veteran) RJV Pulvertaft found that the evidence suggested that the percentage of gas gangrene sufferers who died actually went up in WWII , compared to the results obtained in the last years of the previous war !
By contrast, in the end, penicillin proved to be the best medicine ever seen to stop deadly systemic (body-wide) infections like SBE and blood-poisoning.
Explaining the mystery and the paradox
Based on just the evidence, part of the mystery might therefore seemed to solve itself: the modest Dawson was simply a far better scientist than the very pushy and ambitious, but ultimately plodding, Florey.
But Dawson was also extremely patriotic in ways that Florey couldn't begin to imagine and we still must explain why he felt that his best way to personally aid the war effort was to come to the aid of Life's weakest members.
Saint Peter had only denied Christ's pleas three times, but between 1931 and 1941, America had denied pleas for help from smaller, weaker countries under attack over two dozen times, only deciding
to put the Greatest Generation Ever to work fighting the only Good War, after it itself was attacked.
Helping Life's weakest members is all very nice in theory said America - but what in the hell does it have to do with fighting WWII - which was all about one's own naked self interest ?
Perhaps Dawson was merely confused - was still fighting WWI - was still fighting for poor bleeding little Belgium.
Perhaps....
Feb 16, 2013
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.....
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.....
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