If you are Alexander Fleming you only have to make three big mistakes to win a Nobel prize and eternal acclaim.
Mistake one : insist that penicillin will never be a success unless man first synthesizes it.
(We're still waiting !)
Mistake two : insist that penicillin will never work if taken internally but will only work as a topical antiseptic.
(In fact, penicillin really only works when taken internally, as an antibiotic, to save lives while as an antiseptic it may actually impede healing of minor scrapes and cuts.)
Mistake three : go along with the Churchill government's decision to only make enough wartime penicillin to help frontline Allied forces with wounds moderate enough to be likely to quickly return to battle.
(When America's New Deal-oriented WPB (War Production Board) decided to mass produce wartime natural penicillin, American diplomats were soon using that bounty to save lives (and win hearts and minds) all over the Allied, Neutral and Occupied world.
Soon a Pax Americana (Pax Penicillia ?) was replacing a century-old Pax Britannica.)
Showing posts with label natural penicillin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label natural penicillin. Show all posts
Aug 28, 2014
Aug 24, 2014
Time to end the much-told cover-up of UNSUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin and tell the untold tale of SUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin
Against about fifty previous books about wartime penicillin , I want my penicillin book to do something wildly different --- I want to celebrate success, not cover-up failure.
If the wartime deployment of penicillin was ultimately successful (and everybody seems to agree it was) what exactly did this successful penicillin look like?
It turns out it actually was :
(a) naturally made penicillin - not man made.
(b) and (via exports of massive amounts of American penicillin under Lend-Lease and other programs), it was made available to all in the wartime world dying from any and all diseases it could cure - not just reserved for a relatively small number of frontline Allied soldiers judged capable of returning to immediate combat, if given penicillin.
Ie , what successful wartime penicillin definitely was not, was synthesized and weaponized.
If the wartime deployment of penicillin was ultimately successful (and everybody seems to agree it was) what exactly did this successful penicillin look like?
It turns out it actually was :
(a) naturally made penicillin - not man made.
(b) and (via exports of massive amounts of American penicillin under Lend-Lease and other programs), it was made available to all in the wartime world dying from any and all diseases it could cure - not just reserved for a relatively small number of frontline Allied soldiers judged capable of returning to immediate combat, if given penicillin.
Ie , what successful wartime penicillin definitely was not, was synthesized and weaponized.
Jul 28, 2014
Oxford University Artificial Penicillin totally fails to deliver - morally as well as technically
It goes without saying that Oxford University's wartime chimera of totally synthesized artificial penicillin was an abject failure.
75 years on, we still start the production of all the penicillin and beta lactam antibiotics with natural fermentation.
So ---- just a minor technical failing ?
Few go on to consider the moral failings behind the Conservative Party-led British government's wartime penicillin decisions.
75 years on, we still start the production of all the penicillin and beta lactam antibiotics with natural fermentation.
So ---- just a minor technical failing ?
Few go on to consider the moral failings behind the Conservative Party-led British government's wartime penicillin decisions.
Manhattan Natural : 'The other Manhattan Project', Manhattan natural penicillin renewing hope in a war world tired, huddled and wretched.
To dying patients in Columbia-Presbyterian's hospital , Gladys Hobby's arms daily held aloft a glowing green and gold petri dish of radiated Manhattan penicillin mold as a sort of monstrance of hope.
That image is a fitting and almost exact counterpoint to that other (rather more famous) Manhattan fungus .
That image is a fitting and almost exact counterpoint to that other (rather more famous) Manhattan fungus .
Jul 21, 2014
Manhattan gives world's first penicillin shots Oct 16 1940 : celebrating 75 years of natural penicillin live-saving !
Dr Dawson as "the Donald McKay of Medicine"
It all happened in a blindingly fast five weeks leading up to October 16th 1940.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson went from reading vague hints about the clinical possibilities of natural penicillium juice to find its spores to inventing ways to quickly grow and concentrate the substance.
He then gave a needle of it to himself , for signs of human toxicity - and survived.
The very next day, October 16th 1940, Manhattan was the site of the world's first penicillin shots - as Dr Dawson injected his team's 'crude' natural penicillin into two 4F patients (a black and a Jew).
On the very day the rest of America began its 75 year old practise of registering all their 1A males.
And 25 years to the day when New York and North America first heard of the execution of nurse Edith Cavell in Belgium.
This news had galvanized Dawson to drop university and join a hospital unit to help poor bleeding Belgium.
Social medicine - the type that helps the 4Fs of this world - was being dropped that Fall to focus on War medicine for the 1As of the world .
Dawson saw this 'eugenic triage' as the civilized world doing exactly what the Axis already advocated - when they should be instead opposing it with every breath and every bone in their bodies.
The world's 4Fs were now his new poor bleeding Belgium.
If the Allied world won't move - then he would. And he did - changing our world for the better forever - until his dying breath four and a half years later.
Dawson was a man with a prominent broad jaw - he simply looked like the sort of person who when he got a bone between his teeth won't let go and would really run with it.
That was a sight an earlier Nova Scotia immigrant to New York , Donald McKay, (who had also set records for speedy results as the builder of the world's fastest ever clipper ships) would know full well.
For when his clippers had a full head of sail they too moved really really fast , with 'a bone in their teeth' as the old salts used to say :
If you want something to really move , hire a Bluenoser !
May 6, 2013
WWII as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science....
The night 'the music died' began when the young pilot of the small plane that Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were in, misread an instrument and thought he was climbing above a storm when he was really going full blast down into the ground.
Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.
They mis-read the Atomic Energy fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap Natural Penicillin and Auschwitz's gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
The Americans had thought the future of aerial bombing was the Norden bombsight's ability to accurately drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet, not the ability of an atomic bomb to burn out an entire city, all in an effort to destroy that city's single navy arsenal.
The British had thought the best, cheapest, quickest way to provide penicillin was to have chemists synthesize it in big chemical factories - but they ended up waiting upon tiny fungal factories (in far off America, to boot ) to do it all by hand.
The Germans had hoped for more positive eugenic activities east of Germany : the Master Plan East talked of settling happy, hard-working, clean, pure German peasants-soldiers on the new eastern agrarian frontier , producing huge wheat crops and guarding the border.
But few German peasants actually wanted to move into an area contested by partisans and Soviet troops.
So as a result, Hitler quickly told his supporters that 'we actually went to war with Russia so we could totally eliminate (negative eugenics) all the Jews from Europe, once and for all'.
Plan Bs (nadir) glibly sold as Plan As (apogee) : I doubt if even used car salesmen could match the chutzpah of the scientists...
May 10 2013 POSTSCRIPT :
Re-reading this blog post, I realized that I hadn't specifically indicated that the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and the triumph of natural Penicillin occurred so close to the end of the war in 1945, that they share both a wartime and postwar time space.
The end of WWII also revealed another Plan B to to the Plan B (Auschwitz) of the wartime German genetic community.
Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist discovery that the chemical molecule DNA was the basis for all the genes (including the long reputed ones for alcoholism and criminality, etc, etc) had been mostly ignored.
But it was suddenly taken up with particular renewed intensity with the revelations that Auschwitz was the end result of all the prewar German genetic efforts.
Particularly by the many active Jewish geneticists : like all geneticists, they still held that Free Will barely existed, except among scientists, and that we were largely captives to our forebearers' genes.
But the word DNA seemed offer a way to carry on the good bits of the German prewar genetic program, but minus the gas chambers and under a new name.
Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.
They mis-read the Atomic Energy fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap Natural Penicillin and Auschwitz's gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.
The Americans had thought the future of aerial bombing was the Norden bombsight's ability to accurately drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet, not the ability of an atomic bomb to burn out an entire city, all in an effort to destroy that city's single navy arsenal.
The British had thought the best, cheapest, quickest way to provide penicillin was to have chemists synthesize it in big chemical factories - but they ended up waiting upon tiny fungal factories (in far off America, to boot ) to do it all by hand.
The Germans had hoped for more positive eugenic activities east of Germany : the Master Plan East talked of settling happy, hard-working, clean, pure German peasants-soldiers on the new eastern agrarian frontier , producing huge wheat crops and guarding the border.
But few German peasants actually wanted to move into an area contested by partisans and Soviet troops.
So as a result, Hitler quickly told his supporters that 'we actually went to war with Russia so we could totally eliminate (negative eugenics) all the Jews from Europe, once and for all'.
Plan Bs (nadir) glibly sold as Plan As (apogee) : I doubt if even used car salesmen could match the chutzpah of the scientists...
May 10 2013 POSTSCRIPT :
Re-reading this blog post, I realized that I hadn't specifically indicated that the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and the triumph of natural Penicillin occurred so close to the end of the war in 1945, that they share both a wartime and postwar time space.
The end of WWII also revealed another Plan B to to the Plan B (Auschwitz) of the wartime German genetic community.
Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist discovery that the chemical molecule DNA was the basis for all the genes (including the long reputed ones for alcoholism and criminality, etc, etc) had been mostly ignored.
But it was suddenly taken up with particular renewed intensity with the revelations that Auschwitz was the end result of all the prewar German genetic efforts.
Particularly by the many active Jewish geneticists : like all geneticists, they still held that Free Will barely existed, except among scientists, and that we were largely captives to our forebearers' genes.
But the word DNA seemed offer a way to carry on the good bits of the German prewar genetic program, but minus the gas chambers and under a new name.
Jan 21, 2013
Dawson's DIY penicillin a postmodernist "shot across the bow" of Modernist Big Pharma
Two hundred years from now, only the first of the Dawson team's many articles on wartime penicillin will still be cited and still considered seminal.
This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.
But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.
In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.
But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.
Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.
But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.
Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.
(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure : pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)
It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.
We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.
He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .
His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."
Today, in this postmodern age, this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.
At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.
Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....
This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.
But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.
In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.
But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.
Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.
But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.
Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.
(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure : pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)
It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.
We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.
He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .
His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."
"Living better chemically ?"
Today, in this postmodern age, this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.
At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.
Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....
Nov 17, 2012
How doctors rationalize "uncomfortable" successes : natural penicillin and others
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| Vaccines, Salvarsan, natural penicillin |
But if done right (injecting only a small number of bacteria, and using bacteria in a very weakened state) it leads to a powerful immune response.
And that prevents that person from catching the actual disease when the really large numbers of fully virulent bacteria drop by for a visit.
No mid-19th century doctor liked the thought of injecting hostile bacteria into a person's personal, private, bloodstream.
This was because the Modernist Era was also very much an aristocratic era, one that earnestly believed that one's precious genetic inheritance and the family's 'good name' was contained within the bloodstream.
However, because vaccination worked and saved lives, they had to accept it as a given but still find a way to rationalize its existence into a place in their Modernist mental universe.
They did so, I argue, by claiming the vaccine "merely" stimulated the human body's latent immune system, that marvelous marvel that God and/or Evolution had given to Man and Man alone.
All glory then to Man and precious little glory to those deadly bacteria in the vaccine.
When toxic dangerous Salvarsan came along , a compound of arsenic poison injected into straight into the bloodstream but able to cure syphilis , doctors had to accept its success.
But again, they still had to fit the idea of injecting of deadly chemicals into humans, somewhere in their Modernist mental universe.
It wasn't too hard : the drug was totally man-made, the invention of chemistry (then the Queen of the Sciences) --- in fact, invented by German chemists when German chemists were near the top of the intellectual food chain.
Again : all glory to man !
That made Salvarsan all right, and no one asked if the Salvarsan was free of dangerous chemical byproducts or anything probing like that : it was made in a chemical factory and that was all right, then.
(They'd all seen the medical journal ads with photos of gleaming white tile walls and grave men in white labcoats standing about and no one asked if this matched the reality of real chemistry labs and real chemistry plants. Watching real drugs being made back then was rather like watching real sausages being made : not for the faint of heart.)
So in 1941, doctors received the news that Sulfa drugs were being made in instantly converted paint factories with aplomb but balked at the idea of using natural penicillin, made in hospital labs.
Now recall Paul Ehrlich's justification for using toxic Salvarsan, which by extension applies to potentially dangerous vaccines as well.
He said it had registered a positive value on his Chemo-Therapeutic Index , which measured the minimum effective dose needed for a cure, versus the maximum dose tolerated by the patient before the drug killed them as well as - or instead of - the germ.
Penicillin is virtually unique in having no meaningful amount of toxicity ; it is practically more toxic to inject sterile water into the blood than it is to inject free acid penicillin into it.
Penicillin, the safest drug in the world, should be have been the easiest-ever medication for doctors to accept for injection purposes.
In fact it was one they opposed using - almost to a man - for 15 long, lost, years.
Why ?
Natural penicillin's biggest problem was that it was made by lowly basement slime - and by women
Hospital labs filled with young women, with high school diplomas, handling milk bottles of smellymold (for God's Sake !) , growing it like a crop, like down on the farm ; so rural, so old fashioned, so Victorian and so very yesterday.
Natural penicillin only became acceptable to most male doctors in early 1944, when popular magazines showed it being 'manufactured' in huge gleaming stainless steel tanks many stories high.
'Manufactured' in factories that looked like small oil refineries, with lots of knobs, dials and grave men (men - thank God !) standing about in white lab coats.
I use scare quotes on the manufactured because behind those opaque metal walls, it was still the incredibly tiny, invisible, fungus factories that were doing the real chemical heavy lifting, not Man-the-Chemist.
Penicillin was a molecule that all the world's best chemists, working in tandem, with unlimited funds, had failed to synthesize , but the tiny weak fungus could do it in their sleep.
The fungus could do it as easy as they could make beer.
And that is just what Jim Duhig and the fungus did in Brisbane in the Fall of 1943, making penicillin as easily as one makes homemade beer.
He then injected it straight into his patients as is, totally unprocessed any further.
And it worked - using technology cruder than what Fleming had in 1928, 15 years earlier. It saved Duhig's patients from certain death.
It was a job so easy that Duhig said any general hospital with a lab could do it, just using a technician.
He didn't say the lab tech would probably be a young girl with a high school diploma but you got his drift.
And you caught his contempt for his fellow Aussie scientist , Howard Florey.
Florey's 1941 paper on producing penicillin had made it seem an extremely difficult activity, somewhere between between rocket science and brain surgery, with a good doze of elaborate Heath Robinson and Rube Goldberg technology thrown in.
(Florey, who tended to put efforts to re-burnish his family's tarnished name even above aiding the war effort and above saving the lives of other doctors' dying patients, deliberately tried to scare off competitors by this method on many occasions.)
Nevertheless, those huge gleaming steel tanks made producing natural penicillin a sort of honorary chemical activity, a sort of pseudo human-synthesized drug and made a lot of Modernist doctors a lot more comfortable about using it systemically.
But after 1945 and their failure to 'make' penicillin, I think it is fair to say that modernity and chemistry started a slow sad decline into
the back pages of life....
Oct 4, 2012
"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944
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| How Omaha got its "P" |
But as usual Bullshit talks and Reality walks as the two "S"s both failed spectacularly to deliver.
So it was then that early in the morning of June 6th 1944, a hundred thousand shivering infantry with low-tech rifles and a hundred thousand doses of low tech natural penicillin were bobbing about off the beaches of Normandy, about to do the job right.
Once again at the last minute , to snatch low tech victory from the jaws of high tech defeat, the wise and the mighty were reduced to "sending in the shovels".
Shades of the supposed "high tech" led victory of Vimy Ridge...
This may not the history of WWII that you are used to hearing - because it is not really true that only the victors write history : in reality it is often powerful victors with something to hide, with something to spin, that end up writing the big histories: Whig History.
A special kind of Whig History, history re-written with an unique type of hindsight, so that it appears that all events on the victor's side of the war worked together to bring the war to the conclusion that actually happened.
D-Day then not just happened (hard to deny something as big as that anyway !) but was always planned to have happened, and happen when it did and as it did.
But while WWII was Modernity's very own war , at last, it turned out to be the Nadir of Modernity as well.
Because D-Day and the infantry-led conquest of Hitler's Germany, like the mass production of cheap natural penicillin , like the "non-precision" bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , weren't supposed to happen.
They were , all three , low tech "Plan B"s ,to cover-up the failure of three of the Allies' high tech "Plan A"s.......
Sep 25, 2012
Needed : a MORAL history of Wartime Penicillin
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| SBE fatal to heart valves |
Not impossible to write such histories - dozens of historians have already done so.
Just not possible to do the job --- with any faithfulness to the actual contemporary record --- through those prisms.
Penicillin History has been Whig History....
By artfully cutting and pasting bits of the contemporary primary record it is possible to recast everything, even from that day in September 1928 when Fleming first saw that funny mold in his petri dish, as moving steadily and inevitably forward to the time when billions of units of natural produced systemic penicillin daily rolled off the line at Pfizer in the early Spring of 1944 - with natural (microbe produced) antibiotics being the norm to this day.
But in fact, most of the early1940s scientific, medical and commercial establishment was stunned into silence when penicillin ended up (a) suddenly proven up as the world's best-ever systemic life-saver and (b) being produced cheaply, abundantly and reliably - and produced only thanks to microbes to boot.
The 15 years up to 1944 had seen no new scientific advances or new commercial reasons to suddenly turn to penicillin as a systemic/lifesaver or to favour its production by natural (microbial) means ---- over the situation as Alexander Fleming had described it in his first paper of June 1929.
Only the moral situation had changed.
All the scientific, medical and commercial reasons were still valid against Henry Dawson for staking his life to cure invariably fatal SBE with natural systemic penicillin and against "John L" Smith of Pfizer for staking his company to help him.
But their personal moral reasons for doing so were overwhelming to these two men and so they attempted and achieved the impossible.
Sep 10, 2012
Nova Scotian-born Dr Henry Dawson and the "Invention" of systemic - natural - penicillin
The "Invention" of systemic - natural - penicillin
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| Discovery vs Invention |
It is only since Aug 1945 (and the ascendancy of Physics over Chemistry as the Queen of Science) that we have devoted all our adulation to "discovery" , rather than "invention" in medicine.
Carbolic acid and sulfa's both had early dates of discovery (versus their much later first medical use) .
Alexander Fleming is - wrongly - credited with discovering the penicillin we have used since 1940 - but what did he actually do ?
Fleming in fact thought his penicillin would be useful as a sort of "Plan B" antiseptic -- and only if pure and synthetic.
Howard Florey - ten years later - thought his penicillin would be a useful "Plan B" back-up systemic to Sulfa -- but again, only if pure and synthetic.
By contrast, right from the start and until his death, Martin Henry Dawson thought that natural (even if impure) systemic penicillin would be the "Plan A" choice to cure the incurable, to save the unsavable --- starting with those dying of invariable fatal SBE.
Only two people in New York worked with penicillin in 1940, despite a war (with millions soon to be dying of infections) raging the world over.
One doctor published a conventional article in JBC, reminding bacteriologists how useful crude penicillin could be as an agent to clear common throat bacteria from suspected specimens of influenza bacteria.
That was about all that penicillin was in (semi-) common use for, in 1940. Just as carbolic acid had its various non-clinical uses in the days before Lister "re-invented" it as a life-saver.
The other doctor, Dawson, saw crude penicillin as the most likely cure for SBE.
NOT because it was a super-killer of bacteria, but for some less sexy but rather more "useful" characteristics: it combined nearly-limitless non-toxicity with an extraordinary diffusion ability.
NOT because it was a super-killer of bacteria, but for some less sexy but rather more "useful" characteristics: it combined nearly-limitless non-toxicity with an extraordinary diffusion ability.
He could thickly saturate the blood stream with penicillin without killing the patient, and hope some would still diffuse in past the thick vegetations (bio-films) of SBE, as that saturated blood rushed past the diseased heart valves at breakneck speed.
Some modern SBE patients have needed as much as a kilo of pure penicillin over many months - that's 1.67 BILLION units of penicillin - but have beaten the disease.
Still while penicillin - and only penicillin - could save an SBE in the 1940s, SBE was a prodigious user of then very scarce penicillin, so Dawson also had to morally kick start ("invent") an entire "natural penicillin" industry into existence, to deliver the amount of penicillin needed for his SBE patients.
(As a by-product, the rest of the world soon got as much penicillin as anyone could need - so much so it was soon feed to cattle as a growth stimulator, partly to absorb some of the production.)
I say his "invention" was by moral argument, because the scientific and commercial consensus then was that only synthetic (patentable) penicillin could do the trick.
But only when Dawson morally convinced the head of Pfizer, John l Smith, to take a very great financial risk and go against the consensus of his industry, did the miracle of penicillin really begin to happen....
Sep 8, 2012
The triumph of natural penicillin : Uncle Tom's Cabin, Mark II
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| MkII : WWII moral battle over penicillin |
110 years before "The Locomotion" , Little Eva Mk I, caused a commotion
Think of it as a new version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, updated 100 years, with Henry Dawson's dying efforts (like that of Little Eva) moving the unregenerate heart* of Topsy ("John L" Smith) to finally do the world-saving good that only he could do , against the pressures of the Simon Legree-like evil figure of Howard Florey.....
* Hat tip to Jane Tompkins (in her book Sensational Designs) for indirectly suggesting the role of Little Eva for Doctor Dawson.
Mar 12, 2012
Thumbing their nose at MODERNITY.....
During WWII (the very apogee of MODERNITY) in New York City (the very epicenter of Modernity) , a dying doctor and his few square feet of Mother Nature quietly thumbed their nose at MODERNITY...
.... and changed our whole world, for the better, for ever.
Homegrown, natural , systemic penicillin is Dr Martin Henry Dawson's practical legacy, leading on from his insights into the commensal nature of Life that is his scientific legacy.
That same university on Manhattan Island ( Columbia) that Dawson worked at all during those war years, was also home to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb.
Columbia University thus was home to the Twentieth Century's biggest high tech disaster and its smallest low tech triumph : home to the stories of the Little Boy Bomb and the Baby Girl Patty Malone: the nadir and the apogee of Twentieth Century Humanity.
Sometimes Fact truly is stranger than Fiction ever could be...
.... and changed our whole world, for the better, for ever.
Homegrown, natural , systemic penicillin is Dr Martin Henry Dawson's practical legacy, leading on from his insights into the commensal nature of Life that is his scientific legacy.
That same university on Manhattan Island ( Columbia) that Dawson worked at all during those war years, was also home to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb.
Columbia University thus was home to the Twentieth Century's biggest high tech disaster and its smallest low tech triumph : home to the stories of the Little Boy Bomb and the Baby Girl Patty Malone: the nadir and the apogee of Twentieth Century Humanity.
Sometimes Fact truly is stranger than Fiction ever could be...
Feb 27, 2012
1939-1945: the promise of SYNTHETIC penicillin and the reality of NATURAL penicillin
Another failed promise from the mouths of Blowhard Modernistic Science.....
Oct 29, 2010
AGAPE penicillin: Nature Won; Modernity Zero
Sixty five years later is Einstein's famous formula still the one that best describes 1945 ?
ie E=MC2
Or was the most lasting impact of 1939-1945's MODERN-WORLD war the fact that yesterday's Big MO (Modernity) lost.
And that Nature won.
And that in 1945, out of the resulting wreckage crawled PostModernity, aka us PO folk (the baby boom generation and our children and children's children ) ?
(Sadly resigned godparents: Adorno and Horkheimer.)
IE, is "WWII=MOgoesPO" today's best short, short,
short but correct formulaic answer to the exam request to sum up mankind's biggest, bloodiest war ever ?
ie E=MC2
Or was the most lasting impact of 1939-1945's MODERN-WORLD war the fact that yesterday's Big MO (Modernity) lost.
And that Nature won.
And that in 1945, out of the resulting wreckage crawled PostModernity, aka us PO folk (the baby boom generation and our children and children's children ) ?
(Sadly resigned godparents: Adorno and Horkheimer.)
IE, is "WWII=MOgoesPO" today's best short, short,
short but correct formulaic answer to the exam request to sum up mankind's biggest, bloodiest war ever ?
Oct 18, 2010
Laconia: DELIBERATE friendly fire is modernist utilitarianism
I do not find it at all impossible to comprend why so many Germans found it easy to cold-bloodedly murder millions of 'useless' outsiders, whom they hated and feared, after learning that they first killed hundreds of thousands of their 'own kind of people', kinfolk that they regarded as 'useless mouths' impeding an all-out total war effort.
While these numbers killed dwarf any other killings during the last War, they do not seem to me to plump the depths of the evil that modernist utilitarianism proved capable of during Modernism's big war.
As just one example,German soldiers east of Berlin, near the end of the war, followed orders to blow up a river bridge to stop the Russians coming over it, despite the fact that the bridge was loaded with hundreds of German civilians.
I call this 'deliberate friendly fire' (and I do not consider fragging as friendly fire at all).
My definition of deliberate friendly fire : "you know there are people from your side - soldiers or civilians - in the very small area you are accurately aiming your weapons at, and you fire away anyway and kill many of your own side while attempting to kill the enemy".
It is fairly well known that naval escorts were routinely under orders to never stop to pick up convoy survivors in the freezing North Atlantic waters but rather to abandon them (to likely die), while they chased subs instead.
Sometimes they had to be even more brutal - dropping depth charges in among survivors ,knowing many would die from the blast.
In September 1942, the converted Cunard liner LACONIA, which had frequently docked in Halifax during the war,
was sunk by a U-boat off Africa.
She was an armed warship, so this was fully allowed under the rules of war, though the U boat thought she was a troop carrier, not an armed naval vessel.
The U boat captain got a shock when he heard the survivors in the water speak Italian and learned that there were 1500 Italian POWs on board, along with Allied women and children.
He told Berlin he was going to signal his position in clear language and try and arrange a rescue trip, under the flag of the Red Cross, to a neutral (Vichy) port.
The British ,suspecting a trap, didn't fully inform a near by
American fighter bomber base, who decided to bomb the U-boat, even though it would mean the death of many near-by allied sailors and families - as it did.
The ultimate decision was apparently made by one plane's bomb sighter's adamant eagerness to drop bombs on civilians, if needed to record a u-boat kill.
His personal decision led first the Germans and then the US to create a formal and public "sink everything without warning or rescue" submarine policy worldwide - leading to hundreds of thousands of extra civilian deaths - many of them being innocent people 'from their own side'.
My partner Rebecca, without giving it much thought, said things like this happen - 'sometimes you must kill a few to save the many' .
I told her I rejected utilitarianism absolutely and decided to write this blog entry to try and explain why to her.
World War Two was many kinds of war.
After all, it was the same war that saw Americans unwilling to send healthy young fathers off to fight till forced to in late 1943.
They also rejected using the one in ten Americans who were black in combat roles and they rejected a wider use of women to replace men to go off and fight.
They objected to almost every rationing rule with real bite.
This unwillingness to fully engage their national resources, if doing so led to inconveniencing civilian lifestyles and upsetting prewar civilian norms, meant that America couldn't put up enough military resources to stop the relatively small number of U boats wrecking havoc all over the Atlantic.
This, in turn, led to these brutal 'kill our own side if need be to kill the enemy' orders as Allied commanders tried everything to try and keep the U boats from winning the war on their own.
Everything? Did I say that ?
I didn't mean that Allied commanders were willing to put a serious number of their longest range bombers on U-boat patrol - the one thing needed to stop the U boats cold.
No, those were saved for the glamorous (but mostly useless) high tech bomber war against Germany itself - not the boring but useful patrols over the Atlantic.
I say that utilitarianism is never moral - even if we ( literally all of we - from child to grandmom) all agreed to draw straws.
Straws to see who goes off to die in the infantry and who gets to stay home.
This total utilitarianism without limits would end up consuming itself until we, on all sides, would literally fight to the last person.
But we haven't seen - Thank God ! - this kind of utilitarianism - yet.
What we got in World War Two was selective use of total utilitarianism, almost always invoked by the higher-ups and almost always inflicted upon those lower down.
In 1942-1943,during the same time as the Laconia Incident, thsat same US government also decided to deny penicillin to the SBEs that Dawson championed.
The small supply of penicillin would go instead to quickly cure GIs in Italy who had deliberately incurred cases of VD to get out of the constant killing zone that was the American front line.
Once quickly cured in a day or two by penicillin, (the old protocol took months to get a full cure), they could be ordered back to fight - to fight until they died thanks to the American 'no rotation' rule'.
This was all decided so that American civilians back home won't have to be called up to fill out their depleted ranks.
This penicillin decision likely meant death for both SBE and GI.
A selective, lethal, slice of 'total war' was applied there, on these few people, so that a less lethal slice of total war did not have to be applied here, among many people.
I find it a horrifically cynical policy but it has its defenders, even today.
The right policy would have been to issue the threat of a government factory to supply this miracle drug, if the private drug companies proved too slow.
The fear that a Democrat government factory would have ended up getting the credit for "supplying the miracle", rather than private enterprise, would have lit a fire under the backside of Republicans like George W Merck as nothing else could.....
While these numbers killed dwarf any other killings during the last War, they do not seem to me to plump the depths of the evil that modernist utilitarianism proved capable of during Modernism's big war.
As just one example,German soldiers east of Berlin, near the end of the war, followed orders to blow up a river bridge to stop the Russians coming over it, despite the fact that the bridge was loaded with hundreds of German civilians.
I call this 'deliberate friendly fire' (and I do not consider fragging as friendly fire at all).
My definition of deliberate friendly fire : "you know there are people from your side - soldiers or civilians - in the very small area you are accurately aiming your weapons at, and you fire away anyway and kill many of your own side while attempting to kill the enemy".
It is fairly well known that naval escorts were routinely under orders to never stop to pick up convoy survivors in the freezing North Atlantic waters but rather to abandon them (to likely die), while they chased subs instead.
Sometimes they had to be even more brutal - dropping depth charges in among survivors ,knowing many would die from the blast.
In September 1942, the converted Cunard liner LACONIA, which had frequently docked in Halifax during the war,
was sunk by a U-boat off Africa.
She was an armed warship, so this was fully allowed under the rules of war, though the U boat thought she was a troop carrier, not an armed naval vessel.
The U boat captain got a shock when he heard the survivors in the water speak Italian and learned that there were 1500 Italian POWs on board, along with Allied women and children.
He told Berlin he was going to signal his position in clear language and try and arrange a rescue trip, under the flag of the Red Cross, to a neutral (Vichy) port.
The British ,suspecting a trap, didn't fully inform a near by
American fighter bomber base, who decided to bomb the U-boat, even though it would mean the death of many near-by allied sailors and families - as it did.
The ultimate decision was apparently made by one plane's bomb sighter's adamant eagerness to drop bombs on civilians, if needed to record a u-boat kill.
His personal decision led first the Germans and then the US to create a formal and public "sink everything without warning or rescue" submarine policy worldwide - leading to hundreds of thousands of extra civilian deaths - many of them being innocent people 'from their own side'.
My partner Rebecca, without giving it much thought, said things like this happen - 'sometimes you must kill a few to save the many' .
I told her I rejected utilitarianism absolutely and decided to write this blog entry to try and explain why to her.
World War Two was many kinds of war.
After all, it was the same war that saw Americans unwilling to send healthy young fathers off to fight till forced to in late 1943.
They also rejected using the one in ten Americans who were black in combat roles and they rejected a wider use of women to replace men to go off and fight.
They objected to almost every rationing rule with real bite.
This unwillingness to fully engage their national resources, if doing so led to inconveniencing civilian lifestyles and upsetting prewar civilian norms, meant that America couldn't put up enough military resources to stop the relatively small number of U boats wrecking havoc all over the Atlantic.
This, in turn, led to these brutal 'kill our own side if need be to kill the enemy' orders as Allied commanders tried everything to try and keep the U boats from winning the war on their own.
Everything? Did I say that ?
I didn't mean that Allied commanders were willing to put a serious number of their longest range bombers on U-boat patrol - the one thing needed to stop the U boats cold.
No, those were saved for the glamorous (but mostly useless) high tech bomber war against Germany itself - not the boring but useful patrols over the Atlantic.
I say that utilitarianism is never moral - even if we ( literally all of we - from child to grandmom) all agreed to draw straws.
Straws to see who goes off to die in the infantry and who gets to stay home.
This total utilitarianism without limits would end up consuming itself until we, on all sides, would literally fight to the last person.
But we haven't seen - Thank God ! - this kind of utilitarianism - yet.
What we got in World War Two was selective use of total utilitarianism, almost always invoked by the higher-ups and almost always inflicted upon those lower down.
In 1942-1943,during the same time as the Laconia Incident, thsat same US government also decided to deny penicillin to the SBEs that Dawson championed.
The small supply of penicillin would go instead to quickly cure GIs in Italy who had deliberately incurred cases of VD to get out of the constant killing zone that was the American front line.
Once quickly cured in a day or two by penicillin, (the old protocol took months to get a full cure), they could be ordered back to fight - to fight until they died thanks to the American 'no rotation' rule'.
This was all decided so that American civilians back home won't have to be called up to fill out their depleted ranks.
This penicillin decision likely meant death for both SBE and GI.
A selective, lethal, slice of 'total war' was applied there, on these few people, so that a less lethal slice of total war did not have to be applied here, among many people.
I find it a horrifically cynical policy but it has its defenders, even today.
The right policy would have been to issue the threat of a government factory to supply this miracle drug, if the private drug companies proved too slow.
The fear that a Democrat government factory would have ended up getting the credit for "supplying the miracle", rather than private enterprise, would have lit a fire under the backside of Republicans like George W Merck as nothing else could.....
Aug 14, 2010
Biggest disease that penicillin conquered
....was not SBE, Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis, as important as it was and as important as it was to Martin Henry Dawson.
I am not writing my account of the Penicillin Saga because it conquered SBE.
I am going after much bigger game.
The dreadful disease I think NATURAL penicillin conquered in 1944 was Modernity.
I think today's GREEN movement can trace some of its beginnings to that blue green penicillium mold's triumph against the best efforts of man to recreate everything natural in an artificial form, merely because they could.
Defeating Modernity was the best thing natural penicillin ever did.
That's why I am writing this work - that's why I do what I do....
I am not writing my account of the Penicillin Saga because it conquered SBE.
I am going after much bigger game.
The dreadful disease I think NATURAL penicillin conquered in 1944 was Modernity.
I think today's GREEN movement can trace some of its beginnings to that blue green penicillium mold's triumph against the best efforts of man to recreate everything natural in an artificial form, merely because they could.
Defeating Modernity was the best thing natural penicillin ever did.
That's why I am writing this work - that's why I do what I do....
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