What would Alexander Fleming's historical report on penicillin have looked like if he had decided to see it published in LANCET, BMJ or the journal NATURE ?
My guess is that would only have happened if one of his junior team members - acting against Fleming's express orders - had injected a sick mouse with his penicillin juice and found that contrary to the boss's "opinion" , the mouse was cured.
Fleming would swallow his anger , and adopt a much more positive view of his new medicine and seek a more positive tone to describe it , in a much more important journal.
Instead he mentally damned its application as an internal (ie life saving ) medicine for all eternity , damned even its use as an antiseptic unless first synthesized and so decided to bury his report of a new discovery in a new - relatively obscure - Britain-circulating-only - journal ....
Showing posts with label penicillin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label penicillin. Show all posts
Aug 27, 2014
Manhattan Natural : wartime Gotham's un-super heroes ...
At a time (WWII) when comic book superheroes , usually operating in a make-believe Manhattan, were saving the world every day and enthralling North American children and youth , lesser known but equally larger-than-life actual heroics were taking place in a real Manhattan.
But these valiants bringing natural penicillin lifesaving to the world against government blowback were hardly Superman or indeed any sort of superheroes .
If by the term 'superhero' we mean someone strong in body as well as mind.
They were un-super heroes if ever than phrase had meaning.
They were more like a badly aged Clark Kent , still mild and meek but now weak and crippled .
They never numbered more than a handful : misfits , unfits and just plain rebels.
They were aptly described by the official historian of their arch enemy , Vannevar Bush's OSRD , as "4Fs, women and the Grace of God".
Henry and Marjorie Dawson, Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Thomas Hunter, Charlie and Miss H --- they hardly had more than a handful of really good limbs between the seven of them.
'Unfits' the whole lot of them - the very 4Fs of the 4Fs - yet real life heroes despite all that .
Perhaps we could still make use of their story - as a sort of role model - by making a series of comic books or graphic novels about their wartime exploits ...
But these valiants bringing natural penicillin lifesaving to the world against government blowback were hardly Superman or indeed any sort of superheroes .
If by the term 'superhero' we mean someone strong in body as well as mind.
They were un-super heroes if ever than phrase had meaning.
They were more like a badly aged Clark Kent , still mild and meek but now weak and crippled .
They never numbered more than a handful : misfits , unfits and just plain rebels.
They were aptly described by the official historian of their arch enemy , Vannevar Bush's OSRD , as "4Fs, women and the Grace of God".
Henry and Marjorie Dawson, Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Thomas Hunter, Charlie and Miss H --- they hardly had more than a handful of really good limbs between the seven of them.
'Unfits' the whole lot of them - the very 4Fs of the 4Fs - yet real life heroes despite all that .
Perhaps we could still make use of their story - as a sort of role model - by making a series of comic books or graphic novels about their wartime exploits ...
Aug 25, 2014
Manhattan Natural : green Life-Saving , from the concrete jungle ...
The urban jungle that is Manhattan, with all its concrete skyscrapers, should be the very last place on earth where one might expect to see the start of a turning away from the Modern obsession with the artificial and the synthetic and a turn to the Postmodernity's renewed relationship with Nature.
But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .
But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .
Aug 16, 2014
Manhattan Indie PEN : penicillin misfits, unfits & rebels fermenting a revolution and renewing hope to a world tired, huddled and wretched
Today, words and phrases like "all-natural", "green" , "locally grown" and "no added chemicals" are such advertising cliches that it hard to believe there was a time , up to the end of WWII, when such phrases were totally anathema.
Back in that era , advertising cliches were more likely to invoke being chemically pure and to see being 100% synthetic , plastic and man-made as virtues to seek out.
But after Hiroshima , Auschwitz , Napalm and other WWII 'man-made wonders', these concepts very gradually fell out of vogue.
Back in that era , advertising cliches were more likely to invoke being chemically pure and to see being 100% synthetic , plastic and man-made as virtues to seek out.
But after Hiroshima , Auschwitz , Napalm and other WWII 'man-made wonders', these concepts very gradually fell out of vogue.
Aug 13, 2014
Holocaust Studies (and Jewish genealogy) ignoring the Jews saved from 'death by deliberate neglect' planned for them by hostile ALLIED medical establishments ?
"Code Slowing" New York Jews to a certain death during height of Holocaust - and the dying Gentile who saved them
During the darkest days of WWII - at the height of the Holocaust - Charles Aronson , Miriam Laskowitz, Penny Mehler and Otto Morowitz all faced a death sentence as sure as any issued by the Nazis.
They were children of immigrants growing up in crowded homes in the NYC area during the late 1910s and 1920s , at the height of the deadliest phase of acute Rheumatic Fever.
As a result all had badly damaged heart valves and now as young adults during the war years, faced certain death from the uniformly fatal SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis).
Taking a page out of the Nazi handbook , Anglo-American medical elites were using the excuse of 'war necessity' to deny them the medicine that could save these Jewish lives.
Yet as other Jews around the the world were dying from battlefield bullets or in secret gas chambers , these New York City Jews (and ultimately tens of thousands of other Jews worldwide very like them) , were plucked from death and given a new life.
As the result of a selfless act of agape from a dying Gentile doctor.
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 7, 2014
A. Leroy Alston , noted New York black athlete , was first person in history to get a shot of penicillin - Oct 16 1940 Manhattan
Penicillin histories record the first person ever to receive an antibiotics shot only as Aaron Alston and that is about it.
Aaron himself (along with his family and friends) called himself Leroy.
He signed himself A. Leroy Alston whenever he appeared in the newspapers (which he did fairly frequently) in his role as an outstanding amateur athlete and athletic coach.
His parents Louise (Glaze) Alston and William (known as Stock) Alston came from Georgia and arrived in Harlem in 1923 , with their only child Leroy actually being born in South Carolina in 1910.
His family ran a restaurant on 8th Avenue in Harlem and lived in the Sugar Hill district of Harlem.
He finished high school and worked as a file clerk in a fire insurance company.
On the 1930 census he was married to Charlotte L Alston , about his same age, but she had died by time of the 1940 census - as had his father.
Leroy's real passion was for athletics - a winning runner at major matches and great in baseball, he was best known for coaching a girls' track and field team ,the Mercury ACs - in fact he fundraised for them and promoted them non stop.
No wonder his doctor Martin Henry Dawson described him to Ernst Chain, as a patient "in whom he was particularly interested "...
Aaron himself (along with his family and friends) called himself Leroy.
He signed himself A. Leroy Alston whenever he appeared in the newspapers (which he did fairly frequently) in his role as an outstanding amateur athlete and athletic coach.
His parents Louise (Glaze) Alston and William (known as Stock) Alston came from Georgia and arrived in Harlem in 1923 , with their only child Leroy actually being born in South Carolina in 1910.
His family ran a restaurant on 8th Avenue in Harlem and lived in the Sugar Hill district of Harlem.
He finished high school and worked as a file clerk in a fire insurance company.
On the 1930 census he was married to Charlotte L Alston , about his same age, but she had died by time of the 1940 census - as had his father.
Leroy's real passion was for athletics - a winning runner at major matches and great in baseball, he was best known for coaching a girls' track and field team ,the Mercury ACs - in fact he fundraised for them and promoted them non stop.
No wonder his doctor Martin Henry Dawson described him to Ernst Chain, as a patient "in whom he was particularly interested "...
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 ....
Jul 26, 2014
Seemingly, educated white Allied males would prefer to lose to white educated Nazi males - rather than see war won thanks to darkies , women, the small and the weak
Britons - to this day - never tire of telling us that the British Empire troops couldn't contest German troops on German soil till January 1945 because the empire could never come close to matching the manpower of the Third Reich .
Particularly as a successful offensive effort usually needs to outnumber the defenders three to one.
And if you only count the white population of the British Empire that is true (but even there, only narrowly so.)
But India alone - despite feeling badly mistreated by Britain - raised a volunteer army of six million.
And if Britain had resorted to the use of conscription in India , as did all the war's big armies, it could have raised 15 million just here - easily.
Add the colored residents of the rest of the British Empire and the British Empire Army alone could have successfully invaded Nazi Germany even without the Russians , Americans and French.
Not that those three didn't hamper their own war efforts by also distrusting and under-using their colored citizens.
America had a wonderful three-branched armed forces - except for the vital pointy end of the stick - its woefully undermanned infantry.
Blacks were willing to fight - just as women (white, black and latino) were willing to take up more of the work at home to free up men for the infantry - but white American men would have none of it.
France's men also resented the fact that its only well trained forces were its colored North African troops and that they were getting all the glory in liberating (white) France - so they were pulled out of the line in France and poorly trained white French went in - and the effort to defeat Hitler suffered.
Great Russia was even more extreme - it harshly deported its border-living colored minorities that it distrusted , deep into the eastern interior - at the cost in lives of untold thousands of babies, grandmothers --- as well as of young males of fighting age.
On the medical front, the Allied medical community also objected to saving lives if the only way was by injecting the excrement of basement slime mold (aka crude natural penicillin) into them.
They preferred to wait (even if their dying patients didn't) until "Man" had invented artificial penicillin - assumed to be inevitably better, safer , cheaper - as they were sure 'He' soon would.
Afterall, this was an age that actually thought and taught that mother's breast milk and mother's homemade bread was unsafe !
An age that sought to re-make all of Mother Nature in new artificial Man-made versions : artificial wool, silk, bone, etc - via the new plastics and polymers.
Artificial food - food in a pill - artificial test tube babies - men trying to take even that role away from mothers and Mother Nature.
Unconsciously then, educated men of the 1940 era deeply resented the way the popular press always said that 'common bread mold' had saved lives when the best of the laboratory science (the man-made Sulfas) of the educated man had failed.
An implied criticism of one group of educated men - like a single isolated criticism of one white man by some colonial native - was seen as an attack on all educated white males.
And so they weren't about to let the (small weak slimy) darkies-of-medicine get all the medical glory.....
Particularly as a successful offensive effort usually needs to outnumber the defenders three to one.
And if you only count the white population of the British Empire that is true (but even there, only narrowly so.)
But India alone - despite feeling badly mistreated by Britain - raised a volunteer army of six million.
And if Britain had resorted to the use of conscription in India , as did all the war's big armies, it could have raised 15 million just here - easily.
Add the colored residents of the rest of the British Empire and the British Empire Army alone could have successfully invaded Nazi Germany even without the Russians , Americans and French.
Not that those three didn't hamper their own war efforts by also distrusting and under-using their colored citizens.
America had a wonderful three-branched armed forces - except for the vital pointy end of the stick - its woefully undermanned infantry.
Blacks were willing to fight - just as women (white, black and latino) were willing to take up more of the work at home to free up men for the infantry - but white American men would have none of it.
France's men also resented the fact that its only well trained forces were its colored North African troops and that they were getting all the glory in liberating (white) France - so they were pulled out of the line in France and poorly trained white French went in - and the effort to defeat Hitler suffered.
Great Russia was even more extreme - it harshly deported its border-living colored minorities that it distrusted , deep into the eastern interior - at the cost in lives of untold thousands of babies, grandmothers --- as well as of young males of fighting age.
On the medical front, the Allied medical community also objected to saving lives if the only way was by injecting the excrement of basement slime mold (aka crude natural penicillin) into them.
They preferred to wait (even if their dying patients didn't) until "Man" had invented artificial penicillin - assumed to be inevitably better, safer , cheaper - as they were sure 'He' soon would.
Afterall, this was an age that actually thought and taught that mother's breast milk and mother's homemade bread was unsafe !
An age that sought to re-make all of Mother Nature in new artificial Man-made versions : artificial wool, silk, bone, etc - via the new plastics and polymers.
Artificial food - food in a pill - artificial test tube babies - men trying to take even that role away from mothers and Mother Nature.
Unconsciously then, educated men of the 1940 era deeply resented the way the popular press always said that 'common bread mold' had saved lives when the best of the laboratory science (the man-made Sulfas) of the educated man had failed.
An implied criticism of one group of educated men - like a single isolated criticism of one white man by some colonial native - was seen as an attack on all educated white males.
And so they weren't about to let the (small weak slimy) darkies-of-medicine get all the medical glory.....
Jul 23, 2014
Memo to RAMZI YOUSEF : Wartime Manhattan gave the world's first penicillin shots --- as well as the world's first A-bomb
Manhattan's first ever penicillin shots (75 years ago next October 16th 2015) were a deliberate act of provocation by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.
Penicillin shots across the bow against the Allied medical establishment for using the excuse of war medicine preparation to dismiss efforts of social medicine directed at the poor and minorities.
He felt that penicillin should be deliberately given a high enough wartime production priority to be able to give penicillin to all those in wartime dying from lack of it .
This would serve as a very public rebuttal to the Axis who felt only the 'fit' from the 'fittest' nations deserved medicine, food and indeed life itself.
Wartime penicillin for all the Allied armed forces and civilians , as well as for Allied and enemy POWs, and the people in Neutral lands , even via the Red Cross into the occupied lands and eventually used to save the lives of former enemies.
The aftershock from Manhattan's first penicillin shots radiated out in ever-widening circles.
The then modest biological firm of Pfizer , from Brooklyn , was quickly recruited by news of those historical first shots and began helping out Dawson.
But first Dawson had to demonstrate success against a hitherto invariable fatal disease (SBE) to really suggest what penicillin might do if it was mass produced.
He did so, starting in November 1942, by 'going off the reservation' and used some OSRD controlled penicillin to save a group of women dying of SBE - something the OSRD strictly forbade - which meant abandoning them to a certain death.
But the astounding success he had with SBE was enough evidence for Dawson's former patient , industrialist Floyd Odlum , to suggest to his boss at the powerful (the New Deal-oriented) War Production Board (WPB) that it greatly up the original production proposed by its rival Vannevar Bush's OSRD .
But Big Pharma sat on its hands, convinced it could make much more money for a much smaller investment (and without a need to learn new skills) when it had synthetic (aka patentable) penicillin instead of this dangerous natural penicillin - which could be made by any competitor.
Such as Dawson - whose modest hospital pilot plant was for several months , the world's "biggest" penicillin producer !
Dawson had certainly convinced a fellow colleague and fellow WWI vet, Dr Rudolph (Rudy) N Schullinger in the Surgical Service of his hospital.
Rudy went overseas in mid 1942 with the CUMC's wartime Second General Hospital unit to Oxford England. Dawson had full-blown Myasthenia Gravis (MG) by that date or he would have been the Lab Chief for that military hospital.
Rudy Schullinger tried very hard to get some of the OSRD's penicillin sent into the European Theatre of War so he could both treat wounded American troops in wartime and contribute the results to the ongoing research pool.
Despite repeated entreaties the OSRD would have done of it !
Thankfully Schullinger's protests finally did pull some some penicillin out of the hands of stay-at-home civilian researchers and into the frontlines (before the war ended).
Though it was only to be used to treat american troops , he broke Regulations and used a good deal of it to save the life of a British soldier dying of the same disease Dawson was trying to cure - endocarditis !
(Dawson's "Acting Up" was infectious .)
Then another former patient , med resident Dr Dante Colitti , threw an emotional spanner in the works - suggesting to the parents of a dying two year old girl from Queens called Patty Malone that they call up Citizen Hearst's biggest paper and beg them to get penicillin the OSRD was denying her.
The Hearst media empire's emotional accounts of rushing the penicillin to the little girl with "just seven hours to spare" gripped first a nation and then a world.
It gripped - in particular - the hearts of Mr and Mrs John L Smith . They had lost a young girl to meningitis that mass produced penicillin - as Dr Dawson always insisted - could easily have cured.
The normally hyper-cautious Smith - the boss of Pfizer - now threw all caution to the wind - ordering his firm to build the world's first really big penicillin plant in as few months as a 24/7 schedule could produce.
Bolder yet - he decided to use the penicillin allocated to his firm to do synthetic studies (to secure a share of the future patents) to save the lives of people in New York with SBE that his government was refusing to save.
A mysterious woman (probably the otherwise very upright Gladys Hobby) would arriving offering bottles of penicillin without labels to doctors like Ward J MacNeal and Leo Loewe with the oblique suggestion it might just help their SBE patients - and then disappear.
At the time it seemed clear to people inside Big Pharma that Smith had recklessly threw away a certainty of big future profits for Pfizer, just to help save the lives of a few worthless nobodies.
But his - and our - salvation lay in the most unlikeliest of all places : the former eugenic laboratories at Cold Spring Harbour in Long Island , once one of the intellectual godfathers to the Nazi holocausts agains Jews, Slavs and the 'unfit'.
For several years, its new (non-eugenically oriented) director Milislav Demerec had pleaded in vain with Vannevar Bush's OSRD to let him help develop more productive natural strains of penicillin-producing penicillium.
But the OSRD - like Florey and Fleming in England - had its heart set on a man-made synthetic triumph with penicillin - they had no intention to share the glory with anyone small and weak - let alone microbes.
Once again , the WPB saved the day. Its Office for Production Research and Development (OPRD) had about one hundredth the budget and influence of Vannevar Bush's better known Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).
But the OPRD had street smarts in spades and it wisely gave a tiny amount of money and a lot of morale-boosting support to Demerec's and the spectacular results has repaid that debt a million fold and more ever since.
Demerec gave the penicillium spores a nasty sunburn under an ordinary tanning lamp - most died from the radiation.
But a few survived and were soon producing ten - then one hundred and today 50,000 times as much penicillin from the same amount of feedstock as Fleming's original strain (and Fleming's was an extraordinarily good natural producer !)
Yet Demerec remains the most unsung among all the unsung true heroes of the wartime penicillin story : a case once again where the moral scum - not the moral cream - rises to the top of the fame charts.
Now Dawson's team wasn't the only team in New York thumbing their nose at Big Pharma and Big Medicine by starting a penicillin grow-op.
A doubting doctor John Mahoney out on Staten Island Marine Hospital questioned the OSRD's claim that penicillin couldn't cure syphilis .
With unofficial help from Dawson's team they started growing their own and tested their theory on "Easter" Bunnies (as they told their innocent children) that they kept in their home garages over the Easter holidays !
The public clamour from Doctor Mom for "more penicillin now !" that had started with the story of Patty Malone really took off with the thought that with penicillin families need no longer be threatened with VD from errant husbands.
We can't negate the atomic Manhattan Project and Hiroshima.
But Manhattan Penicillin ,the other Manhattan Project , can point with pride to the fact that 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day (in its first ever mass clinical trial) came from Pfizer's Marcy Avenue Brooklyn plant and that plant went on to supply the biggest chunk of the world's penicillin for the rest of the war.
So much penicillin that America - not the Britain of Nobel prize winners Florey and Fleming ( who were still chasing the decade old chimera of synthetic penicillin and only then mass production) - supplying most of the penicillin for the Allied, Neutral, occupied and Enemy lands.
And that in turn ushered in a Pax Americana based on diplomatic gifting of abundant New York penicillin.
Dawson's dream of abundant - non-patented - penicillin cheap enough to help all has come true - it is life-saving too cheap to meter, lifesaving far cheaper than bottled water.
It has beaten back age old diseases kept endemic by residing among remote and poor people not reached by clean water, adequate food and proper health care.
As a result a sort of herd immunity has occurred as ten billion of us since 1940 have indirectly had better health from seeing diseases like Rheumatic Fever fade from sight.
No, the 250,000 lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki can never be re-gained by actions in other areas - but I think I have offered up evidence to terrorists like Ramzi Yousef and others that wartime Manhattan was at least as much from Venus as it was from Mars.
And if Manhattan citizens are too modest to blow their own horn about its decisive role in making cheap abundant penicillin available to ALL in a world tired, huddled and wretched - then the rest of us should do it for them.
We can't continue to let a terrorist like Ramzi Yousef be the last word on Manhattan's wartime role ....
Penicillin shots across the bow against the Allied medical establishment for using the excuse of war medicine preparation to dismiss efforts of social medicine directed at the poor and minorities.
He felt that penicillin should be deliberately given a high enough wartime production priority to be able to give penicillin to all those in wartime dying from lack of it .
This would serve as a very public rebuttal to the Axis who felt only the 'fit' from the 'fittest' nations deserved medicine, food and indeed life itself.
Wartime penicillin for all the Allied armed forces and civilians , as well as for Allied and enemy POWs, and the people in Neutral lands , even via the Red Cross into the occupied lands and eventually used to save the lives of former enemies.
The aftershock from Manhattan's first penicillin shots radiated out in ever-widening circles.
The then modest biological firm of Pfizer , from Brooklyn , was quickly recruited by news of those historical first shots and began helping out Dawson.
But first Dawson had to demonstrate success against a hitherto invariable fatal disease (SBE) to really suggest what penicillin might do if it was mass produced.
He did so, starting in November 1942, by 'going off the reservation' and used some OSRD controlled penicillin to save a group of women dying of SBE - something the OSRD strictly forbade - which meant abandoning them to a certain death.
But the astounding success he had with SBE was enough evidence for Dawson's former patient , industrialist Floyd Odlum , to suggest to his boss at the powerful (the New Deal-oriented) War Production Board (WPB) that it greatly up the original production proposed by its rival Vannevar Bush's OSRD .
But Big Pharma sat on its hands, convinced it could make much more money for a much smaller investment (and without a need to learn new skills) when it had synthetic (aka patentable) penicillin instead of this dangerous natural penicillin - which could be made by any competitor.
Such as Dawson - whose modest hospital pilot plant was for several months , the world's "biggest" penicillin producer !
Dawson had certainly convinced a fellow colleague and fellow WWI vet, Dr Rudolph (Rudy) N Schullinger in the Surgical Service of his hospital.
Rudy went overseas in mid 1942 with the CUMC's wartime Second General Hospital unit to Oxford England. Dawson had full-blown Myasthenia Gravis (MG) by that date or he would have been the Lab Chief for that military hospital.
Rudy Schullinger tried very hard to get some of the OSRD's penicillin sent into the European Theatre of War so he could both treat wounded American troops in wartime and contribute the results to the ongoing research pool.
Despite repeated entreaties the OSRD would have done of it !
Thankfully Schullinger's protests finally did pull some some penicillin out of the hands of stay-at-home civilian researchers and into the frontlines (before the war ended).
Though it was only to be used to treat american troops , he broke Regulations and used a good deal of it to save the life of a British soldier dying of the same disease Dawson was trying to cure - endocarditis !
(Dawson's "Acting Up" was infectious .)
Then another former patient , med resident Dr Dante Colitti , threw an emotional spanner in the works - suggesting to the parents of a dying two year old girl from Queens called Patty Malone that they call up Citizen Hearst's biggest paper and beg them to get penicillin the OSRD was denying her.
The Hearst media empire's emotional accounts of rushing the penicillin to the little girl with "just seven hours to spare" gripped first a nation and then a world.
It gripped - in particular - the hearts of Mr and Mrs John L Smith . They had lost a young girl to meningitis that mass produced penicillin - as Dr Dawson always insisted - could easily have cured.
The normally hyper-cautious Smith - the boss of Pfizer - now threw all caution to the wind - ordering his firm to build the world's first really big penicillin plant in as few months as a 24/7 schedule could produce.
Bolder yet - he decided to use the penicillin allocated to his firm to do synthetic studies (to secure a share of the future patents) to save the lives of people in New York with SBE that his government was refusing to save.
A mysterious woman (probably the otherwise very upright Gladys Hobby) would arriving offering bottles of penicillin without labels to doctors like Ward J MacNeal and Leo Loewe with the oblique suggestion it might just help their SBE patients - and then disappear.
At the time it seemed clear to people inside Big Pharma that Smith had recklessly threw away a certainty of big future profits for Pfizer, just to help save the lives of a few worthless nobodies.
But his - and our - salvation lay in the most unlikeliest of all places : the former eugenic laboratories at Cold Spring Harbour in Long Island , once one of the intellectual godfathers to the Nazi holocausts agains Jews, Slavs and the 'unfit'.
For several years, its new (non-eugenically oriented) director Milislav Demerec had pleaded in vain with Vannevar Bush's OSRD to let him help develop more productive natural strains of penicillin-producing penicillium.
But the OSRD - like Florey and Fleming in England - had its heart set on a man-made synthetic triumph with penicillin - they had no intention to share the glory with anyone small and weak - let alone microbes.
Once again , the WPB saved the day. Its Office for Production Research and Development (OPRD) had about one hundredth the budget and influence of Vannevar Bush's better known Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).
But the OPRD had street smarts in spades and it wisely gave a tiny amount of money and a lot of morale-boosting support to Demerec's and the spectacular results has repaid that debt a million fold and more ever since.
Demerec gave the penicillium spores a nasty sunburn under an ordinary tanning lamp - most died from the radiation.
But a few survived and were soon producing ten - then one hundred and today 50,000 times as much penicillin from the same amount of feedstock as Fleming's original strain (and Fleming's was an extraordinarily good natural producer !)
Yet Demerec remains the most unsung among all the unsung true heroes of the wartime penicillin story : a case once again where the moral scum - not the moral cream - rises to the top of the fame charts.
Now Dawson's team wasn't the only team in New York thumbing their nose at Big Pharma and Big Medicine by starting a penicillin grow-op.
A doubting doctor John Mahoney out on Staten Island Marine Hospital questioned the OSRD's claim that penicillin couldn't cure syphilis .
With unofficial help from Dawson's team they started growing their own and tested their theory on "Easter" Bunnies (as they told their innocent children) that they kept in their home garages over the Easter holidays !
The public clamour from Doctor Mom for "more penicillin now !" that had started with the story of Patty Malone really took off with the thought that with penicillin families need no longer be threatened with VD from errant husbands.
We can't negate the atomic Manhattan Project and Hiroshima.
But Manhattan Penicillin ,the other Manhattan Project , can point with pride to the fact that 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day (in its first ever mass clinical trial) came from Pfizer's Marcy Avenue Brooklyn plant and that plant went on to supply the biggest chunk of the world's penicillin for the rest of the war.
So much penicillin that America - not the Britain of Nobel prize winners Florey and Fleming ( who were still chasing the decade old chimera of synthetic penicillin and only then mass production) - supplying most of the penicillin for the Allied, Neutral, occupied and Enemy lands.
And that in turn ushered in a Pax Americana based on diplomatic gifting of abundant New York penicillin.
Dawson's dream of abundant - non-patented - penicillin cheap enough to help all has come true - it is life-saving too cheap to meter, lifesaving far cheaper than bottled water.
It has beaten back age old diseases kept endemic by residing among remote and poor people not reached by clean water, adequate food and proper health care.
As a result a sort of herd immunity has occurred as ten billion of us since 1940 have indirectly had better health from seeing diseases like Rheumatic Fever fade from sight.
No, the 250,000 lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki can never be re-gained by actions in other areas - but I think I have offered up evidence to terrorists like Ramzi Yousef and others that wartime Manhattan was at least as much from Venus as it was from Mars.
And if Manhattan citizens are too modest to blow their own horn about its decisive role in making cheap abundant penicillin available to ALL in a world tired, huddled and wretched - then the rest of us should do it for them.
We can't continue to let a terrorist like Ramzi Yousef be the last word on Manhattan's wartime role ....
Jul 22, 2014
Charlie and Miss "H" : these Lazruses of Manhattan defied the odds time and again to offer hope to a war-weary world
"Dead Men Waiting" or "Dead Women Waiting" is the way most staff in hospital regarded the the patients in the Green Wards where earlier Rheumatic Fever sufferers with green strep in their heart valves waited out their turn to die.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was determined that his hand-grown penicillin could help them to beat those odds and return these lazaruses to health , to give them a fair crack at enjoying their three score and ten here on Earth.
His struggle - partly against the disease , mostly against his own colleagues and wartime government - cost him his own life , but in the end he succeeded against all measure of imagining , improving not just the future of the SBEs but of the entire world itself ....
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was determined that his hand-grown penicillin could help them to beat those odds and return these lazaruses to health , to give them a fair crack at enjoying their three score and ten here on Earth.
His struggle - partly against the disease , mostly against his own colleagues and wartime government - cost him his own life , but in the end he succeeded against all measure of imagining , improving not just the future of the SBEs but of the entire world itself ....
Charlie and Miss "H" : The lazarus SBE patients of New York who beat the odds time and again to go on surviving
"Dead Men Waiting" or "Dead Women Waiting" is the way most staff in hospital regarded the the patients in the Green Wards where earlier Rheumatic Fever sufferers with green strep in their heart valves waited out their turn to die.
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was determined that his hand-grown penicillin could help them to beat those odds and return these lazaruses to health , to give them a fair crack at enjoying their three score and ten here on Earth.
His struggle - partly against the disease , mostly against his own colleagues and wartime government - cost him his own life , but in the end he succeeded against all measure of imagining , improving not just the future of the SBEs but of the entire world itself ....
Dr Martin Henry Dawson was determined that his hand-grown penicillin could help them to beat those odds and return these lazaruses to health , to give them a fair crack at enjoying their three score and ten here on Earth.
His struggle - partly against the disease , mostly against his own colleagues and wartime government - cost him his own life , but in the end he succeeded against all measure of imagining , improving not just the future of the SBEs but of the entire world itself ....
Jul 20, 2014
Ramzi Yousef - and the British - mustn't be allowed to forge the last word on Manhattan's wartime role
Yes, a thousand times yes, many of the events that birthed the Atomic Bomb that killed 250,000 did in fact occur on Manhattan and in the surrounding Greater New York City area.
But there was another wartime Manhattan project which has saved far far far more lives than the A-Bomb ever took : a wartime project a lot more from Venus than from Mars, a project more Emma Lazarus than Gordon Gekko.
Manhattan began by birthing the first ever use of antibiotics on October 16th 1940.
Columbia University Medical Centre associate professor and medical doctor Martin Henry Dawson aimed to see the wartime development of "Penicillin-for-All" : for friend, enemy and neutral alike.
Yes, even in -- especially in -- a Total War against an opponent who thought only the 'fit' of the 'fittest races' deserved medicine , food and life.
The Anglo American scientific-medical establishment hotly opposed Dawson but his tiny team of misfits and unfits persisted.
Dawson told the world of his first ever use of penicillin as an antibiotic in February 1941 and again in May of that year.
The second one caught the attention of the American media and through a big story in the New York Times , the eye of a then small citric acid producer in Brooklyn called Pfizer who soon began a prolonged engagement with Dawson's project.
Then thanks to Dawson's former patient (and Manhattan resident) Floyd Odlum , one agency (the War Production Board (WPB) -- out of many for the Allies -- caught his vision too.
They ordered that enough American wartime penicillin to be be produced to save all those dying in the Allied civilian and military worlds , with enough left over to save many of those dying in the rest of the world as well.
But Big Pharma sat on its hands, hoping public domain natural penicillin might soon be replaced by high profit patented synthetic penicillin.
But when another former patient of Dr Dawson, Dr Dante Colitti from the Bronx , broke the embargo on going to the popular press to plead for government penicillin for dying baby Patty Malone of Queens.
Soon a local Manhattan news story broke big - first going stateside (thanks to the newspaper chain of Citizen Hearst) and then going international , despite the war censorship.
(Good News travels fast --- never faster than in the middle of a Bad News War.)
Pfizer boss John L Smith was moved because the plight of the little Patty because it reminded him so much of the unhappy circumstances surrounding the un-necessary meningitis death of his daughter Mary Louise. (Penicillin usually quickly cures cases of frequently fatal meningitis.)
She had died basically because the (healthy) Alexander Fleming couldn't get off his fanny in the early 1930s to make penicillin in the same way that the (terminally ill) Dawson had done in the 1940s.
John L and his wife must have had a serious heart to heart pillow talk about this one night because soon the normally extremely cautious Smith had thrown off all traces.
'Damn the rest of Big Pharma, and damn petty government regulations forbidding Pfizer and Smith from giving away secret penicillin to keep people alive.'
He ordered in Klieg Lights and put the firm on a 24/7 mad rush to complete the world's first really big penicillin plant.
He was moved as well by all the successes Dawson was having in curing endless kinds of diseases with penicillin - and by the unexpected discovery made in a Staten Island hospital that penicillin quickly and safely cured the age old scourge of syphilis.
John L was big Dodgers fan - he owned part of the club - and in the early summer of 1944 the baseball team stiffed.
Despite this , Brooklyn still scored big on an extended road trip : Omaha, Utah, Juno , Gold and Silver.
For 80% of the penicillin that landed on D-Day came from Pfizer's converted ice-cube plant on Marcy Avenue in "The-Borough-That-Builds" -- and for the rest of the war Pfizer supplied by far the biggest portion of the world's penicillin.
Obviously more than just a tree grew green in Brooklyn that summer.
Britain had discovered penicillin and done almost all the work on it until Dawson's first ever injections of penicillin-the-antibiotic on October 16th 1940.
But the attitude of the leading British researcher, Oxford's Dr Howard Florey , was directly opposed to Dawson's humanitarian values.
He wanted penicillin kept secret and used only as a weaponized medicine , something that would give Allied troops a surprise advantage over the Germans.
Allied civilians and POWs , along with the dying in the occupied countries, the neutrals and the enemy would just have to wait at the back of the bus.
In addition, Florey (and Fleming) banked all his hopes on the chimera of cheap synthetic penicillin - something still not achieved - or ever likely to be!
So as American natural penicillin (and not British synthetic penicillin) flew by plane all over the the world, very highly publicized in the global media, to save dying children in Allied and Neutral countries (some like Australia a former close ally of Britain and ironically , the home of Florey !) , something very important for our post-war world happened.
Pax Britannica , sustained up to now by collective memories the British bravery under the Blitz, faded and was replaced by the new Pax Americana.
Or perhaps Pax Penicillia ? Pax Manhattana ? Pax New York ?
When Dawson died of his terminal disease in the spring of 1945 , just after the death of FDR and just before those of Mussolini and Hitler, his passing got a moment of respectful recognition for all he wrought.
But Dawson safely dead, Fleming and Florey got all the credit ever since though they had signally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for either the war effort or for the world's dying.
The were aided by Britons , all of them - from top to bottom , unconsciously determined to recover something from a costly war they supposedly won.
Ever since then, the British have rivalled the Russians in the number of important wartime inventions and discoveries that only they supposed did the fundamental work in --- even though the hard evidence says many people in many nations made important contributions over many decades.
Penicillin , along with radar and the jet , occupies the very Parthenon of this false-memory syndrome.
If left to British science - and left to Churchill's Conservative British government - the war or the postwar would never have seen cheap abundant penicillin produced all over the planet.
Endless endemic diseases would not have been knocked back - millions would have died - with billions suffering ill health.
Come on up Manhattan and New York - on October 16th 2015 take a deep bow for your role in wartime's humanitarian "Penicillin-for-All" - you fully deserve it !
And Ramzi Yousef and all your terrorist ilk - Manhattan penicillin has saved far more of your kinfolk than your bombs will ever kill - at least try and show a hint of respect.
Don't be like the ungrateful British....
But there was another wartime Manhattan project which has saved far far far more lives than the A-Bomb ever took : a wartime project a lot more from Venus than from Mars, a project more Emma Lazarus than Gordon Gekko.
Manhattan began by birthing the first ever use of antibiotics on October 16th 1940.
Columbia University Medical Centre associate professor and medical doctor Martin Henry Dawson aimed to see the wartime development of "Penicillin-for-All" : for friend, enemy and neutral alike.
Yes, even in -- especially in -- a Total War against an opponent who thought only the 'fit' of the 'fittest races' deserved medicine , food and life.
The Anglo American scientific-medical establishment hotly opposed Dawson but his tiny team of misfits and unfits persisted.
Dawson told the world of his first ever use of penicillin as an antibiotic in February 1941 and again in May of that year.
The second one caught the attention of the American media and through a big story in the New York Times , the eye of a then small citric acid producer in Brooklyn called Pfizer who soon began a prolonged engagement with Dawson's project.
Then thanks to Dawson's former patient (and Manhattan resident) Floyd Odlum , one agency (the War Production Board (WPB) -- out of many for the Allies -- caught his vision too.
They ordered that enough American wartime penicillin to be be produced to save all those dying in the Allied civilian and military worlds , with enough left over to save many of those dying in the rest of the world as well.
But Big Pharma sat on its hands, hoping public domain natural penicillin might soon be replaced by high profit patented synthetic penicillin.
But when another former patient of Dr Dawson, Dr Dante Colitti from the Bronx , broke the embargo on going to the popular press to plead for government penicillin for dying baby Patty Malone of Queens.
Soon a local Manhattan news story broke big - first going stateside (thanks to the newspaper chain of Citizen Hearst) and then going international , despite the war censorship.
(Good News travels fast --- never faster than in the middle of a Bad News War.)
Pfizer boss John L Smith was moved because the plight of the little Patty because it reminded him so much of the unhappy circumstances surrounding the un-necessary meningitis death of his daughter Mary Louise. (Penicillin usually quickly cures cases of frequently fatal meningitis.)
She had died basically because the (healthy) Alexander Fleming couldn't get off his fanny in the early 1930s to make penicillin in the same way that the (terminally ill) Dawson had done in the 1940s.
John L and his wife must have had a serious heart to heart pillow talk about this one night because soon the normally extremely cautious Smith had thrown off all traces.
'Damn the rest of Big Pharma, and damn petty government regulations forbidding Pfizer and Smith from giving away secret penicillin to keep people alive.'
He ordered in Klieg Lights and put the firm on a 24/7 mad rush to complete the world's first really big penicillin plant.
He was moved as well by all the successes Dawson was having in curing endless kinds of diseases with penicillin - and by the unexpected discovery made in a Staten Island hospital that penicillin quickly and safely cured the age old scourge of syphilis.
John L was big Dodgers fan - he owned part of the club - and in the early summer of 1944 the baseball team stiffed.
Despite this , Brooklyn still scored big on an extended road trip : Omaha, Utah, Juno , Gold and Silver.
For 80% of the penicillin that landed on D-Day came from Pfizer's converted ice-cube plant on Marcy Avenue in "The-Borough-That-Builds" -- and for the rest of the war Pfizer supplied by far the biggest portion of the world's penicillin.
Obviously more than just a tree grew green in Brooklyn that summer.
Britain had discovered penicillin and done almost all the work on it until Dawson's first ever injections of penicillin-the-antibiotic on October 16th 1940.
But the attitude of the leading British researcher, Oxford's Dr Howard Florey , was directly opposed to Dawson's humanitarian values.
He wanted penicillin kept secret and used only as a weaponized medicine , something that would give Allied troops a surprise advantage over the Germans.
Allied civilians and POWs , along with the dying in the occupied countries, the neutrals and the enemy would just have to wait at the back of the bus.
In addition, Florey (and Fleming) banked all his hopes on the chimera of cheap synthetic penicillin - something still not achieved - or ever likely to be!
So as American natural penicillin (and not British synthetic penicillin) flew by plane all over the the world, very highly publicized in the global media, to save dying children in Allied and Neutral countries (some like Australia a former close ally of Britain and ironically , the home of Florey !) , something very important for our post-war world happened.
Pax Britannica , sustained up to now by collective memories the British bravery under the Blitz, faded and was replaced by the new Pax Americana.
Or perhaps Pax Penicillia ? Pax Manhattana ? Pax New York ?
When Dawson died of his terminal disease in the spring of 1945 , just after the death of FDR and just before those of Mussolini and Hitler, his passing got a moment of respectful recognition for all he wrought.
But Dawson safely dead, Fleming and Florey got all the credit ever since though they had signally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for either the war effort or for the world's dying.
The were aided by Britons , all of them - from top to bottom , unconsciously determined to recover something from a costly war they supposedly won.
Ever since then, the British have rivalled the Russians in the number of important wartime inventions and discoveries that only they supposed did the fundamental work in --- even though the hard evidence says many people in many nations made important contributions over many decades.
Penicillin , along with radar and the jet , occupies the very Parthenon of this false-memory syndrome.
If left to British science - and left to Churchill's Conservative British government - the war or the postwar would never have seen cheap abundant penicillin produced all over the planet.
Endless endemic diseases would not have been knocked back - millions would have died - with billions suffering ill health.
Come on up Manhattan and New York - on October 16th 2015 take a deep bow for your role in wartime's humanitarian "Penicillin-for-All" - you fully deserve it !
And Ramzi Yousef and all your terrorist ilk - Manhattan penicillin has saved far more of your kinfolk than your bombs will ever kill - at least try and show a hint of respect.
Don't be like the ungrateful British....
Jul 17, 2014
Specialist - in depth - beat reporters - or just cheerleaders, captured by their sources ?
In August 1941, Howard Florey published a gripping human interest drama in the pages of the world's leading medical journal, THE LANCET, complete with dramatic before and after photos of little kiddies rescued from certain death.
Yet no reporter in Great Britain's highly competitive newspaper world ever published a single word about it !
Why not ?
I think it is because the general reporters who would have published such a gripping human interest story in a shot never heard of it from their "filtering" colleagues, the beat specialists.
Otherwise, general reporters only write such stories if they had had a personal approach - say by the parents of one of the boys in question.
But general reporters do not generally scan endless numbers of highly specialist publications like THE LANCET looking for likely stories and exclusives - that "filtering" job is the role of their papers' specialist or beat reporters.
These beat specialists cover only Parliament, or only The City.
(Or perhaps only the labour scene, or medicine and science , or the police courts, sports etc.)
During WWII , effective if informal censorship existed for all the Allies' scientific and technical publications.
A word to the wise to a few key technical-scientific editors about subjects to be low-balled generally worked better than a legal (and hence highly public) censorship notice detailing all the subjects these publications could not talk about.
For that method had the paradoxical effect that it only alerted everybody on the specific scientific areas the military was most concerned about !
I think that almost* all the beat reporters covering medicine and science for the general media during WWII got too close to their sources and too far away from the readers who paid their wages .
They thus failed - for but one example - to ask why such a good news story - already published globally, during a world war, in THE LANCET - couldn't also be read by the millions of downmarket readers of the UK's DAILY MIRROR ?
William L Laurence - the New York Times science reporter who shilled under the table for the Manhattan Project - is the best known example of this process of being morally captured by the sources you are supposed to cover objectively for readers outside that field.
But surely , he can't be the only one....
* One key exception : James McKeen Cattell , publisher of the giant scientific journal SCIENCE, who went to bat with great courage in the darkest days of early 1942 , against censoring Dawson and his Penicillin-for-All proposal.
Yet no reporter in Great Britain's highly competitive newspaper world ever published a single word about it !
Why not ?
I think it is because the general reporters who would have published such a gripping human interest story in a shot never heard of it from their "filtering" colleagues, the beat specialists.
Otherwise, general reporters only write such stories if they had had a personal approach - say by the parents of one of the boys in question.
But general reporters do not generally scan endless numbers of highly specialist publications like THE LANCET looking for likely stories and exclusives - that "filtering" job is the role of their papers' specialist or beat reporters.
These beat specialists cover only Parliament, or only The City.
(Or perhaps only the labour scene, or medicine and science , or the police courts, sports etc.)
During WWII , effective if informal censorship existed for all the Allies' scientific and technical publications.
A word to the wise to a few key technical-scientific editors about subjects to be low-balled generally worked better than a legal (and hence highly public) censorship notice detailing all the subjects these publications could not talk about.
For that method had the paradoxical effect that it only alerted everybody on the specific scientific areas the military was most concerned about !
I think that almost* all the beat reporters covering medicine and science for the general media during WWII got too close to their sources and too far away from the readers who paid their wages .
They thus failed - for but one example - to ask why such a good news story - already published globally, during a world war, in THE LANCET - couldn't also be read by the millions of downmarket readers of the UK's DAILY MIRROR ?
William L Laurence - the New York Times science reporter who shilled under the table for the Manhattan Project - is the best known example of this process of being morally captured by the sources you are supposed to cover objectively for readers outside that field.
But surely , he can't be the only one....
* One key exception : James McKeen Cattell , publisher of the giant scientific journal SCIENCE, who went to bat with great courage in the darkest days of early 1942 , against censoring Dawson and his Penicillin-for-All proposal.
Jul 13, 2014
Why Charlie ? Why Miss "H" ?
Between September 1940 and April 1945, pioneering penicillin doctor Martin Henry Dawson treated about three dozen patients with subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) or acute bacterial endocarditis (ABE).
So out of those three dozen patients , why on earth did I decide to focus on just two - one young man (Charles Aronson) and one young woman (Miss H H) ?
One reason was to simply add continuity and coherence to my narrative, particularly my libretto narrative.
Charlie was there, on-site, in Dawson's ward at the very beginning and at the very end of the narrative arc - something you just invent in a work of fiction but something you rarely find in real life.
(Charlie had the extremely rare good luck to survive his first bout of SBE and the extremely bad luck to get a second bout of SBE and then to survive a severe stroke while recovering from that second bout .)
The arrival of Miss "H" provoked the crucial turning point in the narrative arc and her prolonged recovery from the side effects of her SBE ensured she was in many scenes - including the climatic one , along with Charlie.
Again a real life boon rarely granted the author of narrative non-fiction !
But my main reason for including these two in Dawson's team of seven key 'unfits' is because I sense these two , out of all the three dozen patients, were more 'actors' than 'acted upon' (which is the normal role for patients in such doctor-oriented stories).
The first period of extensive penicillium growing and penicillin extraction was originally planned to occur at the end of the first term (December) at Dawson and co-team leader Meyer's medical school.
But Dawson suddenly decided to give the first (tiny) historic injections of penicillin just 5 weeks into the 16 week process - seemingly right after Charlie unexpectedly joined the team's first SBE patient, Aaron Alston.
Dawson did write Ernst Chain at that time that he had a patient of whom he was unusually interested in - and admittedly that could have been either Aaron or Charlie.
But Charlie, he later noted, had an unusually complicated medical history - all revolving around surviving repeated brushes of death with oral commensal strep.
And nothing in life - nothing - interested Dawson more than oral commensal strep .
And Charlie was a repeated 'survivor' , probably with the characteristic survivor's buoyancy.
This alone might have inspired Dawson onward to also do his very best.
Much the same for Miss "H" - after all, for her, the very honest and modest Dawson 'stole' incredibly scarce government-controlled penicillin in the middle of an all-out Total War !
Her earlier medical history indicated she had survived a life-threatening bout of Rheumatic Fever with 'endocarditis' involvement (probably actually severe pancarditis) .
She went on to survive her SBE thanks to Dawson's penicillin (the first case in history ever cured by penicillin) and then to endure years of serious infections caused by infected matter from her damaged heart valve infecting other parts of her body - she lost one eye and her womb in the process.
But like Charlie, she survived them all - she was a born survivor , probably with a similar characteristic buoyancy.
So : two real-life 'larger-than-life' characters just crying out to be portrayed on stage by first class actors yearning to stretch their craft .
What's there not to like ???!!!!
So out of those three dozen patients , why on earth did I decide to focus on just two - one young man (Charles Aronson) and one young woman (Miss H H) ?
One reason was to simply add continuity and coherence to my narrative, particularly my libretto narrative.
Charlie was there, on-site, in Dawson's ward at the very beginning and at the very end of the narrative arc - something you just invent in a work of fiction but something you rarely find in real life.
(Charlie had the extremely rare good luck to survive his first bout of SBE and the extremely bad luck to get a second bout of SBE and then to survive a severe stroke while recovering from that second bout .)
The arrival of Miss "H" provoked the crucial turning point in the narrative arc and her prolonged recovery from the side effects of her SBE ensured she was in many scenes - including the climatic one , along with Charlie.
Again a real life boon rarely granted the author of narrative non-fiction !
But my main reason for including these two in Dawson's team of seven key 'unfits' is because I sense these two , out of all the three dozen patients, were more 'actors' than 'acted upon' (which is the normal role for patients in such doctor-oriented stories).
The first period of extensive penicillium growing and penicillin extraction was originally planned to occur at the end of the first term (December) at Dawson and co-team leader Meyer's medical school.
But Dawson suddenly decided to give the first (tiny) historic injections of penicillin just 5 weeks into the 16 week process - seemingly right after Charlie unexpectedly joined the team's first SBE patient, Aaron Alston.
Dawson did write Ernst Chain at that time that he had a patient of whom he was unusually interested in - and admittedly that could have been either Aaron or Charlie.
But Charlie, he later noted, had an unusually complicated medical history - all revolving around surviving repeated brushes of death with oral commensal strep.
And nothing in life - nothing - interested Dawson more than oral commensal strep .
And Charlie was a repeated 'survivor' , probably with the characteristic survivor's buoyancy.
This alone might have inspired Dawson onward to also do his very best.
Much the same for Miss "H" - after all, for her, the very honest and modest Dawson 'stole' incredibly scarce government-controlled penicillin in the middle of an all-out Total War !
Her earlier medical history indicated she had survived a life-threatening bout of Rheumatic Fever with 'endocarditis' involvement (probably actually severe pancarditis) .
She went on to survive her SBE thanks to Dawson's penicillin (the first case in history ever cured by penicillin) and then to endure years of serious infections caused by infected matter from her damaged heart valve infecting other parts of her body - she lost one eye and her womb in the process.
But like Charlie, she survived them all - she was a born survivor , probably with a similar characteristic buoyancy.
So : two real-life 'larger-than-life' characters just crying out to be portrayed on stage by first class actors yearning to stretch their craft .
What's there not to like ???!!!!
Jul 11, 2014
Morally and metaphorically, my book is about the 97 pound weakling who sticks a needle into the guy who once kicked sand in his face - saving his life !
In every book I have ever read about WWII , the small (4F)(unfit) (weak) get deadly sand kicked in their face by big bullies --- at home* as well as abroad --- for six long years.
Cumulatively, it makes for truly depressing reading.
(*Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files describes just a few of the unspeakably evil medical experiments that American wartime researchers practised on their own unwitting "useless mouths" and "unfits".)
But I think there is one exception:
All : Alpha-Betas as well as Nerds.
It is that distinct rarity in WWII literature ------- an inspiring Good News Story from the bad news war .
Cumulatively, it makes for truly depressing reading.
(*Eileen Welsome's book The Plutonium Files describes just a few of the unspeakably evil medical experiments that American wartime researchers practised on their own unwitting "useless mouths" and "unfits".)
But I think there is one exception:
The unlikely triumph of a small group of American 'unfits' who defied both Allied and Axis Eugenicists (and their own physical failings) to bring us the blessings of cheap, abundant Penicillin-for-All .
All : Alpha-Betas as well as Nerds.
It is that distinct rarity in WWII literature ------- an inspiring Good News Story from the bad news war .
Jul 7, 2014
Big Pharma -Kos : sacrificing WWII's bumpy SBE patients as scapegoats to restore a streamlined conscience
Pharmakos were those unfortunates in Ancient Greece who happened to be poor and crippled and without any local, prosperous, relatives to succour them, who were thus forced into slavery, begging or petty criminality.
When a crisis arose and the normally smoothly streamlined social sphere developed strains and cracks, the Pharmakos were scapegoated restored it.
Social 'bumps' (the Pharmakos) were beaten out - metaphorically as well as in actuality - to return streamlining and normalcy.
This was done by a sacred solemn ritual of executing, expelling or beating a physically, mentally or culturally deformed (misfitting) individual , preferably one without any powerful relatives close by to exact possible vengeance.
I have always wondered why the wartime American NAS felt it was so very very important to strenuously deny penicillin to the very small number of SBE patients asking for it between the summer of 1942 and the summer of 1943.
They were the only patients denied lifesaving penicillin for a condition where penicillin was not just a cure but the only cure.
(I have absolutely no qualms about denying penicillin (limited or not) to dying patients against which penicillin had no possible effect - viral diseases for one.)
One of the biggest social strains a war produces on the home front is the inequality of individual and family sacrifice - who goes to war and gets shot - who stays home and gets promoted ever upwards into the slots of those away fighting overseas.
I believe that the upwardly mobile chicken hawks on the NAS Death Panels turning down these SBE requests (and thus sentencing innocents to a quasi-judicial death) may have unconsciously felt they were thus 'dealing death' just like those of their age group who had been or were in combat zones - salving in a complex way their own internal social strain and bumpiness.
Who can tell ...?
When a crisis arose and the normally smoothly streamlined social sphere developed strains and cracks, the Pharmakos were scapegoated restored it.
Social 'bumps' (the Pharmakos) were beaten out - metaphorically as well as in actuality - to return streamlining and normalcy.
This was done by a sacred solemn ritual of executing, expelling or beating a physically, mentally or culturally deformed (misfitting) individual , preferably one without any powerful relatives close by to exact possible vengeance.
I have always wondered why the wartime American NAS felt it was so very very important to strenuously deny penicillin to the very small number of SBE patients asking for it between the summer of 1942 and the summer of 1943.
They were the only patients denied lifesaving penicillin for a condition where penicillin was not just a cure but the only cure.
(I have absolutely no qualms about denying penicillin (limited or not) to dying patients against which penicillin had no possible effect - viral diseases for one.)
One of the biggest social strains a war produces on the home front is the inequality of individual and family sacrifice - who goes to war and gets shot - who stays home and gets promoted ever upwards into the slots of those away fighting overseas.
I believe that the upwardly mobile chicken hawks on the NAS Death Panels turning down these SBE requests (and thus sentencing innocents to a quasi-judicial death) may have unconsciously felt they were thus 'dealing death' just like those of their age group who had been or were in combat zones - salving in a complex way their own internal social strain and bumpiness.
Who can tell ...?
Jul 5, 2014
"Unfit valour" : They defied Allied & Axis eugenics (and their own physical failings) to bring us "Penicillin-for-All"
What would penicillin look like today if Hitler, Stalin or Churchill had delivered it - instead of Dawson ?
In 1943 , Hitler, Stalin or Anglo-American Big Pharma could have delivered penicillin to us - delivered us penicillin either as expensive as Avastin or only to be given to the truly deserving Proletarian or Aryan.
But against the eugenic-mad world of 1943 , perhaps only a bunch of misfits and unfits could have delivered us inexpensive, abundant ,un-patented, un-encumbered Penicillin-for-All...
Jul 4, 2014
Misfittin' : despite the Allies, delivering Penicillin-for-All
Without unfits and misfits, what you end up with is a group or society that fits together only all too well and that produces nothing but 100% group think and 100% group agreement : led by alpha male bosses and seconded sotto voce by timid yes-men.
Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.
WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.
Even more unlikely would we have ever got the world's best, safest lifesaver at prices too cheap to meter but for The Seven's sturdy principle of Penicillin-for-All , even in , particularly in ,a Total War supposedly fought to the death against the ultimate evil which had divided the world into a few people worthy and most people unworthy of life ....
Which in turn leads to such well known dangers such as the lemming or bandwagon effect, herd behavior, mob or crowd rule , right down into mindless conformity , cults and dictatorships.
WWII's dying were unlikely to ever get penicillin in the quantities needed but for the efforts of The Seven (misfits), led by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.
Even more unlikely would we have ever got the world's best, safest lifesaver at prices too cheap to meter but for The Seven's sturdy principle of Penicillin-for-All , even in , particularly in ,a Total War supposedly fought to the death against the ultimate evil which had divided the world into a few people worthy and most people unworthy of life ....
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