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 pfizer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pfizer. Show all posts
Aug 28, 2014
Aug 26, 2014
Abundant Penicillin by 1942 - only if Howard Florey didn't come to America ?
When ,in April 1941, Howard Florey learned that his best shot at world acclaim (as the only begetter of systemic penicillin) was at risk because Henry Dawson had got there first, the old claim jumper boot scooted over to America to shake a little dust.
Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
God knows what Henry Dawson did - even if Stockholm didn't
Sometimes people ask me if I think Henry Dawson should have gotten a Nobel Prize for his successful pushing of the wartime mass production of natural penicillin.
As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to Howard Florey (and Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.
(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)
I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.
Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.
As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to Howard Florey (and Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.
(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)
I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.
Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.
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.
Aug 12, 2014
Synthetic Howard Florey vs Natural Martin Henry Dawson
The untold scandal of the Anglo-American pharmaceuticals "CODE SLOWING" natural penicillin production in the crucial months before D-Day
Howard Florey seems to have contacted every major pharmaceutical firm and governmental scientific organization in the UK , Canada and America but clicked with only a very few.
Martin Henry Dawson's project was known by most of the same organizations - but he clicked with even fewer.
But both men eventually found institutional supporters of the same like mind as themselves - so it probably didn't matter how many rejected them.
Both men were relatively inflexible as to their ultimate objectives.
Florey sought a perfect chemical synthetic solution, no matter how long it took and was unwilling to settle for anything less .
By contrast, Dawson wanted any sort of solution to the penicillin supply issue - as long as it happened now ! - and that it provided an abundance of inexpensive wartime penicillin.
Florey found similarly chemically minded executives at Merck, ICI and in A. N. Richards the head of the medical division of the American OSRD (where the ultimate boss, Vannevar Bush was notorious for never ever hiring biologists.)
Dawson found a kindred soul in John L Smith of Pfizer (albeit prodded by his wife Mae) who decided to risk all by going the all-natural route when the industry consensus was to "Code Slow" natural penicillin production until perfect synthetic penicillin was invented.
And like Dawson, Smith's vision was for lots and lots and lots of penicillin - now !
Suddenly - a crucial month before D-Day - the race between the two competing visions was all over.
Not a drop of synth pen in the pipeline to Kansas City Kansas and then onto the waiting military hospital units in the south of England - instead tens of billions of units of natural penicillin were in that pipeline , almost all from Pfizer.
Florey stormed and the dying Dawson permitted himself a rare - wall-to-wall - grin .....
Jul 27, 2014
Oxford Artificial versus Manhattan Natural
Howard Florey (along with Alexander Fleming and Winston Churchill's government) spend ten years before during and after WWII pursuing the chimera of totally artificial (patentable) penicillin --- to no avail.
As did Florey's supporters in America - Merck, Squibb and Vannevar Bush's all-powerful OSRD.
Set against then, on the opposite side of the Hudson River , was Dr Martin Henry Dawson and John l Smith , chemist and boss of Pfizer.
They saw possibilities in the fermentation of the (public domain - free for all to grow) natural penicillium to produce antibiotics.
This was despite its current yields being admittedly low: they felt as it was a totally new way of doing medicine , it might well improve drastically with more practise.
(I should mention that two other strong skeptics of the whole idea of the commercial viability of total synthesis of penicillin were also practising chemists : Glaxo boss Harry Jepcott and the WPB's penicillin czar Larry Elder.
It was chemist manques like Florey and the OSRD's Dr Richards who were the most likely to feel that of course man-made Chemistry was always bound to be superior to Mother Nature.)
Today of course, with penicillin being produced at 50,000 times the levels of Fleming for the same cost in time labour and materials, the case against oxford Artificial seems clear - but it wasn't so throughout the war and beyond.
Long Island scientist Miloslav Demerec deserves a lot more credit than he ever gets (which is none !) for his major role in making our wonderful world of relatively cheap abundant antibiotics ....
As did Florey's supporters in America - Merck, Squibb and Vannevar Bush's all-powerful OSRD.
Set against then, on the opposite side of the Hudson River , was Dr Martin Henry Dawson and John l Smith , chemist and boss of Pfizer.
They saw possibilities in the fermentation of the (public domain - free for all to grow) natural penicillium to produce antibiotics.
This was despite its current yields being admittedly low: they felt as it was a totally new way of doing medicine , it might well improve drastically with more practise.
(I should mention that two other strong skeptics of the whole idea of the commercial viability of total synthesis of penicillin were also practising chemists : Glaxo boss Harry Jepcott and the WPB's penicillin czar Larry Elder.
It was chemist manques like Florey and the OSRD's Dr Richards who were the most likely to feel that of course man-made Chemistry was always bound to be superior to Mother Nature.)
Today of course, with penicillin being produced at 50,000 times the levels of Fleming for the same cost in time labour and materials, the case against oxford Artificial seems clear - but it wasn't so throughout the war and beyond.
Long Island scientist Miloslav Demerec deserves a lot more credit than he ever gets (which is none !) for his major role in making our wonderful world of relatively cheap abundant antibiotics ....
The Stone the Builders Rejected : how New York saved natural penicillin antibiotics from the British
In London in 1928 , Sir Alexander Fleming discovered natural penicillin as a potential antibiotic but then rejected it - saying it would only be useful if chemically synthesized and even then only as a external antiseptic.
Sir Howard Florey at Oxford, together with chemist Sir Ernst Chain, took up Fleming's challenge to chemically synthesize penicillin and for a decade - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, his lab chased the chimera of totally synthesized commercial penicillin without any success.
All three men - and these three men alone - got the Nobel Prize for penicillin .
This despite the fact that the penicillin that actually saves lives is still natural in origin, not synthetic , and is a general antibiotic and not a external antiseptic --- never before or since has abject failure been so grandly rewarded !
That penicillin - the penicillin that saved millions of lives during and immediately after the war -is still the the basis of our huge family of related beta lactam antibiotics that remains our front line defence against bacterial death.
It was left to New York to pick up the stone the British builders rejected and make it into the cornerstone of our entire antibiotics industry.
New York (Manhattan) gave the first ever penicillin shots (October 16 1940) not Britain and the patient from Bronx , who was dying from then invariably fatal endocarditis , actually went home alive !
New York had the world's first pilot plant sized penicillin effort (Fall 1940).
New York gave the first ever shots of commercial penicillin
released for use on patients, made by Brooklyn-based Pfizer in March 1942 .
In August 1943, a dying baby from Queens got life-saving penicillin only after the flagship New York newspaper of the Hearst newspaper chain intervened - the story went world-wide and Doctor Mom for the first time started demanding penicillin from government and industry.
More importantly, her story morally inspired the boss of Pfizer to build the world's first serious penicillin plant - posthaste plus plus plus.
Fifteen years after natural penicillin was discovered and rejected , the world's public suddenly wanted tons of it - yesterday .
But virtually all of Big Pharma worldwide - like Fleming and Florey - still preferred to wait for (patentable) synthetic penicillin because natural penicillin could be produced by anyone and what industry really wants free enterprise if it means a lots of new competitors?
In the Fall of 1943, penicillin really got a boost when a Staten Island doctor announced that contrary to the medical consensus , it could cure syphilis quickly and safely.
A much-feared world-wide scourge for 500 years , far bigger than AIDS, suddenly almost a thing of the past - thanks to penicillin !
But natural penicillin was still costly to produce , in terms of units produced per dollar of feedstock , machinery and labour.
Then a scientist in Cold Spring Harbour Long Island was finally listened to - for years he had an idea to make the penicillium produce a lot more penicillin per dollar of effort.
Soon a hundred times as much penicillin was coming out for the same dollar of effort - using his technology today we get 50,000 times (no that is not a typo) per dollar of effort as the world got in the early 1940s.
As a result of inaction by the rest of Big Pharma , New York (read : Pfizer) was left to produce 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - and for the rest of the war, the biggest chunk of the entire world's penicillin came from its Marcy Avenue plant.
Even if Sweden's Nobel Committee didn't know all that New York did - and all that Fleming and Florey didn't do - I firmly believe that God only knows what New York had done and He is pleased ....
Sir Howard Florey at Oxford, together with chemist Sir Ernst Chain, took up Fleming's challenge to chemically synthesize penicillin and for a decade - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, his lab chased the chimera of totally synthesized commercial penicillin without any success.
All three men - and these three men alone - got the Nobel Prize for penicillin .
This despite the fact that the penicillin that actually saves lives is still natural in origin, not synthetic , and is a general antibiotic and not a external antiseptic --- never before or since has abject failure been so grandly rewarded !
That penicillin - the penicillin that saved millions of lives during and immediately after the war -is still the the basis of our huge family of related beta lactam antibiotics that remains our front line defence against bacterial death.
It was left to New York to pick up the stone the British builders rejected and make it into the cornerstone of our entire antibiotics industry.
New York (Manhattan) gave the first ever penicillin shots (October 16 1940) not Britain and the patient from Bronx , who was dying from then invariably fatal endocarditis , actually went home alive !
New York had the world's first pilot plant sized penicillin effort (Fall 1940).
New York gave the first ever shots of commercial penicillin
released for use on patients, made by Brooklyn-based Pfizer in March 1942 .
In August 1943, a dying baby from Queens got life-saving penicillin only after the flagship New York newspaper of the Hearst newspaper chain intervened - the story went world-wide and Doctor Mom for the first time started demanding penicillin from government and industry.
More importantly, her story morally inspired the boss of Pfizer to build the world's first serious penicillin plant - posthaste plus plus plus.
Fifteen years after natural penicillin was discovered and rejected , the world's public suddenly wanted tons of it - yesterday .
But virtually all of Big Pharma worldwide - like Fleming and Florey - still preferred to wait for (patentable) synthetic penicillin because natural penicillin could be produced by anyone and what industry really wants free enterprise if it means a lots of new competitors?
In the Fall of 1943, penicillin really got a boost when a Staten Island doctor announced that contrary to the medical consensus , it could cure syphilis quickly and safely.
A much-feared world-wide scourge for 500 years , far bigger than AIDS, suddenly almost a thing of the past - thanks to penicillin !
But natural penicillin was still costly to produce , in terms of units produced per dollar of feedstock , machinery and labour.
Then a scientist in Cold Spring Harbour Long Island was finally listened to - for years he had an idea to make the penicillium produce a lot more penicillin per dollar of effort.
Soon a hundred times as much penicillin was coming out for the same dollar of effort - using his technology today we get 50,000 times (no that is not a typo) per dollar of effort as the world got in the early 1940s.
As a result of inaction by the rest of Big Pharma , New York (read : Pfizer) was left to produce 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - and for the rest of the war, the biggest chunk of the entire world's penicillin came from its Marcy Avenue plant.
Even if Sweden's Nobel Committee didn't know all that New York did - and all that Fleming and Florey didn't do - I firmly believe that God only knows what New York had done and He is pleased ....
Jul 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 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....
Jun 28, 2014
Manhattan's OTHER project : how seven lives 'unworthy of life' improved the lives of seven billion of us ...
WWII as a triumph of small science
Conventional accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project and of the development of wartime penicillin strongly emphasize that they were the first of what has come to be called Big Science --- something that is taken as the norm for today's science.
But in fact much of the science of the atomic bomb and atomic energy was actually done by very small teams working with very little money and home made equipment - it was the engineering aspects that were the truly massive part of that particular project.
With regards to wartime penicillin it was much the same : small science , not Big Science.
One must remember that wartime penicillin's powerful impact came not merely from its unique scientific characteristics --- ie that it was first (and to some extent, the last) broad spectrum but non-toxic bacterial killer.
Its biggest impact really came from the fact that wartime penicillin G was unexpectedly inexpensive and and unexpectedly widely available for such a potent lifesaver.
This is because a very cheap and abundant (because it was non-patented) lifesaver could save far more lives than any very expensive patent-limited lifesaver could ever do.
And then we all benefit.
Because by a sort of a global herd immunity when even the poorest people living in the most remote places on Earth are cured of killer strains of disease, we in wealthier places tend also to never see those diseases again.
This is because such diseases have been around seemingly for ever as endemic diseases --- all by surviving in geographic cum cultural pockets, among those considered too poor or too worthless to treat properly medically.
So the true miracle of wartime penicillin was more moral than scientific in nature.
Its miracle lay in the unexpected success of a small band of seven physically challenged individuals in convincing the American public that penicillin should be made available to all Americans who need it to survive.
Convincing them that their Allied leaders should not just producing a small amount of penicillin as secretively as possible, just so they could use it as a weapon of war to give D-Day's front line Allied commanders an advantage over their Nazi counterparts.
The Allies had - because of dysgenic fears - far too few infantrymen to really defeat the Nazis or the Japanese in a hard fight.
(And the few infantrymen they did have were more 4F than 1A, in comparison to the average military serviceman !)
The Allies instead hoped to quickly re-use most of their relatively small forces of infantry when they got moderately severely wounded - by employing advanced medical efforts - so their frontline rifleman could get a second and third crack at being killed in combat.
(As a member member of an reserve infantry unit, may I quickly say ---- "Oh joy !!")
If these medical efforts failed , it meant many more 'decent, middle class, white, Protestant men' would end up dying in the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) and this was seen as an eugenic mistake that the Allied cultural elite was not about to repeat from WWI.
If their scheme worked, they would keep the best of their breed safe from the trenches and still have a big advantage over the enemy.
Because , by contrast, they figured the average German infantry, when moderately severely wounded , was out for half a year - while the average Japanese under such circumstances simply died of their wounds.
Their thinking was that that much bigger Axis armies, with much of their troops in hospital beds, couldn't defeat assaults from much smaller Allied Corps , if the Corps had most of their troops in fighting trim.
Because the medically convincing details of the lifesaving results of penicillin were only known by the Allied medical establishment , the hard pressed Nazis and Japanese hadn't given the development of penicillin (which they had read about in the public scientific literature) much of a priority.
If these lifesaving successes could continue to be kept out of the medical and public media until D-Day , only the Allies would have abundant patented (secret) penicillin to return their wounded to combat much quickly than had traditionally been the case.
D-Day would spill the beans soon enough , but long before the Germans and Japanese chemists had broken the penicillin patent and gone into mass production, the war would be over.
The Seven Crips
The seven argued - by contrast - that the war to defeat Hitler was as much moral as military.
Germany was the moderately big schoolyard bully and Poland was the moderately small schoolyard victim.
Hitler had gotten away with his bullying because the rest of the world - which vastly out-numbered and out-gunned him, had not intervened against his bullying but instead talked up the virtues of non-intervention in European 'schoolyard squabbles'.
Not my words - rather the shameful words of endless newspaper editorials and 'statesmen' the world over in the early 1940s.
The seven said we must not just talk The Atlantic Charter talk (the Allied declaration that said all - even the smallest and weakest and most valueless - had an absolute right to life and security).
The seven said we must make sure our own Allied actions don't echo the Nazi's counterclaims.
(That the strongest are morally justified in denying the weakest and smallest the right of life and succour.)
But instead the Allies were actually and openly "Code Slowing" tens of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor and minority people.
People with the SBE version of endocarditis - SBE being the final - hitherto terminal - disease that made childhood Rheumatic Fever such a terror.
The SBEs were considered to be so useless that they couldn't even be recruited to work in the war industries , let alone be in the military.
So no wartime penicillin was to be wasted on them and they were to be left to die --- for two reasons.
The unimportant reason was that currently penicillin was still in limited supply and the SBE were below the lowest in priority, particularly as some cases of SBE did consume extremely large amounts of that limited penicillin.
The important reason was that SBE was regarded as the "Gold Standard" of intractable infections.
Any evidence that this new fangled 'penicillin' stuff could actually cure this famously most incurable of infectious diseases would tend to break the whole story of wartime penicillin wide open in the American news media.
And nothing (to paraphrase an old old adage of the pop music business) only 'breaks local' in America .
A big news story in America becomes a big news story worldwide - including in Japan and Germany, via friendly neutral diplomats in Washington.
The seven may have realized that while the Allied medical establishment won't easily bend on the issue of SBE and penicillin, it was also a hard position for the Allied elite to sustain publicly.
Letting young kids die needlessly merely on account of being judged 'life unworthy of life' would be a hard moral sell for the Allies warring against evil governments that basically did exactly the same thing.
Dr Dawson, the leader of the seven , decided to liberate ie 'steal' government controlled penicillin to successfully save five young women dying of SBE but his success was written out of the official report indicated penicillin test results.
And there it might of ended.
But for the fact that his successes and how this most unlikely of heroes was driven to steal to save lives had become the stuff of legend in New York's wartime-strengthened gossip grapevine among it tens of thousands of medical staffers.
A former patient of his, a fellow crip and fellow doctor named Dante Colitti , decided to emulate Dawson and saw to it that the fount of Yellow Journalism, Citizen Hearst's newspaper empire , covered his efforts from gavel to gavel.
The story - involving a terminally ill and terminally cute two year old toddler named Patty Malone - broke wide , broke stateside, broke worldwide.
Soon defeated in the court of public opinion by the formidable Doctor Mom, the Allies really opened the penicillin floodgates wide when Dawson's friend among Big Pharma , John L Smith of Pfizer , took up his cause and started producing it at levels a million times higher than Pfizer had done earlier.
Small science ?
Well the seven cripples had no government grants, had strong enemies rather than warm friends in high places and were - obviously - in poor physical vigour.
That they nevertheless brought the massed Allied governments - during a Total War - to their knees shows us all what sheer raw moral courage can do.
And that when we see those physically and mentally challenged as 'lives useless of life', they are anything but ....
Nov 19, 2013
WWII : the dogma of pure simplicity confounded by reality's mixed complexity
Llewellyn Park Refined versus Brooklyn Crude ...
Llewellyn Park New Jersey, home to Merck's CEO, George W Merck, along with many other rich people, was democratic America's first gated community, designed pure and simple to keep Reality out.
Unsurprisingly then that six foot four George Merck spent all of WWII failing to make pure simple synthetic penicillin --- despite mounting scientific evidence suggested it couldn't be done even at a financial loss.
By contrast, John l Smith, the five foot nothing tall vice president of operations at Pfizer, lived in the polyglot capital of the world, Brooklyn NYC, and spent his war quietly accepting that the only penicillin landing on the D-Day beaches and filling grateful civilian and soldiers' veins would be his firm's complexly impure natural penicillin.
Just two of the world's two billion people in the early 1940s, all who had to decide for themselves what to do and what to think when the reality of the war situation conflicted with their pre-1939 dogma about the nature of reality......
Jul 30, 2013
"Penicillin : Just in Time" , a movie just waiting to be made
Too bad so many books, movies and TV shows force us to remember how WWII ended with a bang over a city in Japan, with tens of thousands of young mothers and babies burning to death in the streets below.
Because WWII also ended with a whimper, in a city in the Netherlands, and this time with a young mother snatched from death , just in time, and her new baby happily and noisily whimpering at her breast.
Her salvation was stolen from Allied government stores and wafted gently down to her, strictly on the QT, via a RAF issued handkerchief used as a makeshift parachute, from a bomber riding shotgun above her nation.
Life-saving Natural Penicillin , the only truly Good News story of WWII, just won't have happened during WWII, if not for a few brave souls.
A few with the moral courage and the intellectual courage (and in one case, the physical courage) to stand up to doubting colleagues and censuring government bureaucrats and who were willing to break laws and steal penicillin, to do what was right and to try and save lives while there was still time to do so.
A few brave souls can indeed change our whole world, for the better, forever....
Because WWII also ended with a whimper, in a city in the Netherlands, and this time with a young mother snatched from death , just in time, and her new baby happily and noisily whimpering at her breast.
Her salvation was stolen from Allied government stores and wafted gently down to her, strictly on the QT, via a RAF issued handkerchief used as a makeshift parachute, from a bomber riding shotgun above her nation.
Life-saving Natural Penicillin , the only truly Good News story of WWII, just won't have happened during WWII, if not for a few brave souls.
A few with the moral courage and the intellectual courage (and in one case, the physical courage) to stand up to doubting colleagues and censuring government bureaucrats and who were willing to break laws and steal penicillin, to do what was right and to try and save lives while there was still time to do so.
A few brave souls can indeed change our whole world, for the better, forever....
Feb 12, 2013
Patient ONE of the Antibiotics Era : how the saving of Charlie Aronson changed our world
During his lifetime, Dr Henry Dawson only gave penicillin to several dozen endocarditis patients, Charlie Aronson first among them ; only saved several dozen lives, Charlie among them.
Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.
But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.
If only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.
Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.
Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.
It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.
Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.
The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.
There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.
Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.
Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.
This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.
They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.
Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.
A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).
This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.
Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.
We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.
Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.
America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana, again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".
Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.
But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.
Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.
Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.
But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.
Dante Colitti forced their hand.
In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital, was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.
But he did.
He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.
And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.
Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.
The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.
Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/ needed penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?
Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.
The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone: John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944, is clear enough .
Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....
Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.
But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.
If only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.
Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.
Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.
It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.
Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.
The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.
There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.
Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.
Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.
This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.
They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.
Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.
A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).
This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.
Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.
We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.
Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.
America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana, again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".
Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.
But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.
Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.
Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.
But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.
Dante Colitti forced their hand.
In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital, was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.
But he did.
He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.
And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.
Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.
The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.
Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/ needed penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?
Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.
The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone: John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944, is clear enough .
Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....
Feb 10, 2013
Howard Florey saw potential enemies everywhere, but with "friends" like A N Richards and Robert Coghill, he hardly need bother looking any further
Howard Florey's correspondence twice notes that he has just received a higher yielding strain of penicillium from America.
The first, in November 1941 ,was obtained from Dr Rake at Squibb - a higher producing mutant from Fleming's original strain.
The second time in November 1943, some un-named strains were obtained from Robert Coghill of the NRRL , while he was visiting Oxford .
But in the two crucial years in between ?
I see bugger all evidence that Florey got the latest improvements in penicillium strains as they emerged at Peoria. (Prove me wrong, please) .
The mycologists at the NRRL research centre in Peoria had steadily improved and improved and improved again Rake's variant and their final version, NRRL 1249.B21 produced - via surface cultivation - most of the world's wartime penicillin until quite late in the war.
At that point, submerged strain NRRL 832, from a non-Fleming strain first found in Belgium, took over.
I believe that Merck's chief consultant and OSRD medical chief ( giant conflict of interest alert !) A N Richards, supposedly Florey's second closest American friend, using as an excuse that America was now at war, deliberately held back the giving these improved strains to Florey.
All to further America's ( sorry ! Merck's) post-war commercial opportunities.
Nicolas Rasmussen, in his article "Of 'Small Men', Big Science and Bigger Business", looks much closer than most historians at the day to day workings of the medical wing of the famous OSRD.
He points to several examples where Richards authorizes the further spending of taxpayers' money, supposedly only for war weapons, on drug research that no longer had an obvious military use, because he claimed that keeping American's edge in their development would definitely benefit the nation.
If not in this war, or any war, how would the drug's successful development benefit a nation at war - supposedly the sole purpose of the OSRD, whose mandate was set up to expire the moment peace was declared ?
Richards doesn't say.
So let me suggest a more sinister purpose , because Rasmussen does not.
I note that the two examples that Rasmussen gives where the OSRD spends taxpayers money on projects that no longer seemed to have a military need were pet projects of Merck, the firm that Richards advised.
The first was the chemical synthesis work on penicillin , carried on well past the point (say June 1944) when biological penicillin was being produced en masse and cheaply.
The other was after mid 1943, when it was clear that cortisone would not help pilots fly higher longer - an important advantage for any nation's air force if proven so.
Merck got nothing for all the money it spent on synthetic penicillin but its finally successful efforts on cortisone was and is one of its biggest successes for both its scientific reputation and its pocketbook (the two of course being closely related).
First success with Cortisone would be an advantage to America as well as Merck, over European (Swiss) competitors --- but synthetic penicillin's success could only have come by crushing fellow American firm Pfizer and given the field to Merck.
How then would that serve America's interests, rather than merely Merck's?
Because Europe wasn't even in the running on biological penicillin in 1944.
Perhaps Richards, already a pensioner when he took on the job of heading the OSRD medical wing and with the rigidity of old age, still believed synthetic penicillin would better Pfizer's penicillin in price and yield.
Then Merck would beat their only European synthetic penicillin rival : Florey !
Normally, Vannevar Bush's OSRD - as in denying the British to atomic energy research - did a better job of using taxpayers' military-assigned money to screw America's European Allies' commercial chances after the war , without favouring any one American firm.
Richard's willingness to screw Pfizer and even his friend Florey, shows just how much further he was prepared to go to aid Merck.
But he needed pliant helpers to succeed.
Luckily for him, the NRRL's Robert Coghill seemed to have had a hard time accepting that research paid for by his employer , the US Department of Agriculture and ultimately the American public, belonged to the USDA.
And that this research shouldn't only go where a different agency's chief bureaucrat, A N Richards, wanted it to go - though he hadn't paid for it and had no statutory (legal) control over it.
However , I see Coghill, a misplaced chemist running a biological program, wanted in so badly on a "technically sweet" chemical problem (the synthesis of penicillin) that he sold out the farmers he had sworn to help.
Synthetic penicillin would only negate the ready market for hundreds of thousands of tons of farm waste corn steep liquor, farm waste whey and farm waste crude brown sugar, all used in the natural fermentation of penicillin and other antibiotics coming along in the pipeline.
Coghill did publicly announce that he was giving the top two commercial strains of penicillium (presumably NRRL 1249.B21 and 832) to the entire world in November 1943, about the same time as Florey first mentions having them.
Why ?
I can only suspect because they were about to become obsolete, as synthetic penicillin seemed only months away.
By April 1944, that no longer seemed so and Coghill was back on the side of the biological angels, publicly praising Pfizer's biological penicillin and modestly claiming a role in their success.
Coghill's talents seemed rather wasted in democratic America - I can see him as the ultimate bureaucratic survivor in Stalin's Russia, adroitly changing sides as the situation shifted, moment by moment.....
The first, in November 1941 ,was obtained from Dr Rake at Squibb - a higher producing mutant from Fleming's original strain.
The second time in November 1943, some un-named strains were obtained from Robert Coghill of the NRRL , while he was visiting Oxford .
But in the two crucial years in between ?
I see bugger all evidence that Florey got the latest improvements in penicillium strains as they emerged at Peoria. (Prove me wrong, please) .
The mycologists at the NRRL research centre in Peoria had steadily improved and improved and improved again Rake's variant and their final version, NRRL 1249.B21 produced - via surface cultivation - most of the world's wartime penicillin until quite late in the war.
At that point, submerged strain NRRL 832, from a non-Fleming strain first found in Belgium, took over.
I believe that Merck's chief consultant and OSRD medical chief ( giant conflict of interest alert !) A N Richards, supposedly Florey's second closest American friend, using as an excuse that America was now at war, deliberately held back the giving these improved strains to Florey.
All to further America's ( sorry ! Merck's) post-war commercial opportunities.
Nicolas Rasmussen, in his article "Of 'Small Men', Big Science and Bigger Business", looks much closer than most historians at the day to day workings of the medical wing of the famous OSRD.
He points to several examples where Richards authorizes the further spending of taxpayers' money, supposedly only for war weapons, on drug research that no longer had an obvious military use, because he claimed that keeping American's edge in their development would definitely benefit the nation.
If not in this war, or any war, how would the drug's successful development benefit a nation at war - supposedly the sole purpose of the OSRD, whose mandate was set up to expire the moment peace was declared ?
Richards doesn't say.
So let me suggest a more sinister purpose , because Rasmussen does not.
I note that the two examples that Rasmussen gives where the OSRD spends taxpayers money on projects that no longer seemed to have a military need were pet projects of Merck, the firm that Richards advised.
The first was the chemical synthesis work on penicillin , carried on well past the point (say June 1944) when biological penicillin was being produced en masse and cheaply.
The other was after mid 1943, when it was clear that cortisone would not help pilots fly higher longer - an important advantage for any nation's air force if proven so.
Merck got nothing for all the money it spent on synthetic penicillin but its finally successful efforts on cortisone was and is one of its biggest successes for both its scientific reputation and its pocketbook (the two of course being closely related).
First success with Cortisone would be an advantage to America as well as Merck, over European (Swiss) competitors --- but synthetic penicillin's success could only have come by crushing fellow American firm Pfizer and given the field to Merck.
How then would that serve America's interests, rather than merely Merck's?
Because Europe wasn't even in the running on biological penicillin in 1944.
Perhaps Richards, already a pensioner when he took on the job of heading the OSRD medical wing and with the rigidity of old age, still believed synthetic penicillin would better Pfizer's penicillin in price and yield.
Then Merck would beat their only European synthetic penicillin rival : Florey !
Normally, Vannevar Bush's OSRD - as in denying the British to atomic energy research - did a better job of using taxpayers' military-assigned money to screw America's European Allies' commercial chances after the war , without favouring any one American firm.
Richard's willingness to screw Pfizer and even his friend Florey, shows just how much further he was prepared to go to aid Merck.
But he needed pliant helpers to succeed.
Luckily for him, the NRRL's Robert Coghill seemed to have had a hard time accepting that research paid for by his employer , the US Department of Agriculture and ultimately the American public, belonged to the USDA.
And that this research shouldn't only go where a different agency's chief bureaucrat, A N Richards, wanted it to go - though he hadn't paid for it and had no statutory (legal) control over it.
However , I see Coghill, a misplaced chemist running a biological program, wanted in so badly on a "technically sweet" chemical problem (the synthesis of penicillin) that he sold out the farmers he had sworn to help.
Synthetic penicillin would only negate the ready market for hundreds of thousands of tons of farm waste corn steep liquor, farm waste whey and farm waste crude brown sugar, all used in the natural fermentation of penicillin and other antibiotics coming along in the pipeline.
Coghill did publicly announce that he was giving the top two commercial strains of penicillium (presumably NRRL 1249.B21 and 832) to the entire world in November 1943, about the same time as Florey first mentions having them.
Why ?
I can only suspect because they were about to become obsolete, as synthetic penicillin seemed only months away.
By April 1944, that no longer seemed so and Coghill was back on the side of the biological angels, publicly praising Pfizer's biological penicillin and modestly claiming a role in their success.
Coghill's talents seemed rather wasted in democratic America - I can see him as the ultimate bureaucratic survivor in Stalin's Russia, adroitly changing sides as the situation shifted, moment by moment.....
Jan 30, 2013
Fleming never saved Churchill, but Gladys Hobby saved Florey's sister when his own penicillin couldn't !
Howard Florey was never more sleazy than in his dealings with Henry Dawson's team, as he desperately fought to restore the family name that his father dis-honored, by trying to remain the sole "hero" of wartime penicillin.
Just try to imagine what an university ethics committee today might say about a professor using his main rival's unpublished paper, sent to him in secret by his close friend (the same government official who censored his rival's paper and forbade its release) to improve his own work that is about to be allowed to be freely published !
That is what full Professor Howard Florey and university vice president and full Professor A N Richards actually did to associate professor chemist Professor Karl Meyer of Dawson's team , in mid 1942.
(As they say, tenure is 'red in tooth and claw'.)
The multi-hatted Professor A Newton Richards was a Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the medical wing of the OSRD , chief consultant to Merck and one of Howard Florey's best friends.
Like Mayor Rob Ford, he also never met a conflict of interest he could resist.
(By contrast, when Norman Heatley met Meyer in January 1942, Heatley recorded that Meyer was willing to send his data to Florey, but Heatley boldly told his boss (Florey) he (Heatley) won't because it didn't seem right, not if Florey was about to publish and Meyer was forbidden to.)
However, Professor Richards was of a very different moral character and saw nothing wrong in sending Professor Meyer's embargoed chemical work on the structure of penicillin to his main academic rival, Professor Florey.
By contrast, Dawson bent over backwards to try and find a source of penicillin for Florey (even at places like Pfizer - a place Florey determinedly didn't want to visit), totally unaware of Florey's well known reputation in the UK for being an academic bush whacker and a magpie of other people's hard work.
Florey's real (if totally private) reason to come to America in 1941, was mainly to establish that he and Merck, not Dawson and Pfizer, was the real leader in the hunt for viable penicillin.
By late 1942, Florey felt sure that the dying Dawson and Pfizer (having joined Merck's cartel) was out of the race.
Sweet indeed then, when in August 1944, a sullen Howard Florey had to stand politely beside Dawson team member Gladys Hobby as she showed him the natural penicillin poring off the Pfizer lines, while Merck and Florey's team at Oxford had totally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for the D Day beaches.
Florey had spurned both Pfizer and Glaxo, yet it was they who delivered most of the penicillin that landed on the Normandy beaches that day --- "the stone the builders rejected" indeed.
Asa series of letters in the Royal Society Archive reveal, in December 1952, Florey had to eat yet more humble pie, first begging and then thanking Hobby for sending her own latest antibiotic off to save the life of his sister (Hilda Gardner) in Australia when his own penicillin wouldn't work....
Just try to imagine what an university ethics committee today might say about a professor using his main rival's unpublished paper, sent to him in secret by his close friend (the same government official who censored his rival's paper and forbade its release) to improve his own work that is about to be allowed to be freely published !
That is what full Professor Howard Florey and university vice president and full Professor A N Richards actually did to associate professor chemist Professor Karl Meyer of Dawson's team , in mid 1942.
(As they say, tenure is 'red in tooth and claw'.)
The multi-hatted Professor A Newton Richards was a Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the medical wing of the OSRD , chief consultant to Merck and one of Howard Florey's best friends.
Like Mayor Rob Ford, he also never met a conflict of interest he could resist.
(By contrast, when Norman Heatley met Meyer in January 1942, Heatley recorded that Meyer was willing to send his data to Florey, but Heatley boldly told his boss (Florey) he (Heatley) won't because it didn't seem right, not if Florey was about to publish and Meyer was forbidden to.)
However, Professor Richards was of a very different moral character and saw nothing wrong in sending Professor Meyer's embargoed chemical work on the structure of penicillin to his main academic rival, Professor Florey.
By contrast, Dawson bent over backwards to try and find a source of penicillin for Florey (even at places like Pfizer - a place Florey determinedly didn't want to visit), totally unaware of Florey's well known reputation in the UK for being an academic bush whacker and a magpie of other people's hard work.
Florey's real (if totally private) reason to come to America in 1941, was mainly to establish that he and Merck, not Dawson and Pfizer, was the real leader in the hunt for viable penicillin.
By late 1942, Florey felt sure that the dying Dawson and Pfizer (having joined Merck's cartel) was out of the race.
Sweet indeed then, when in August 1944, a sullen Howard Florey had to stand politely beside Dawson team member Gladys Hobby as she showed him the natural penicillin poring off the Pfizer lines, while Merck and Florey's team at Oxford had totally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for the D Day beaches.
Florey had spurned both Pfizer and Glaxo, yet it was they who delivered most of the penicillin that landed on the Normandy beaches that day --- "the stone the builders rejected" indeed.
Gladys Hobby saves Howard Florey's own sister -- when he couldn't
Asa series of letters in the Royal Society Archive reveal, in December 1952, Florey had to eat yet more humble pie, first begging and then thanking Hobby for sending her own latest antibiotic off to save the life of his sister (Hilda Gardner) in Australia when his own penicillin wouldn't work....
Jan 18, 2013
Merck has credible excuses for being beaten on D-Day penicillin by Pfizer - but none whatsoever for being crushed by Commercial Solvent
Merck, the OSRD, Florey's Oxford team (all part of the synthetic penicillin obsession) continue to have many defenders among academia.
Yes, one academic excuse goes, yes Merck failed to deliver much penicillin to the D-Day beaches - that was left to Pfizer, which had been a major partner of Merck and Squibb in the three year long effort to produce commercial amounts of penicillin.
But, the excuse went, Pfizer had 20 years of highly successful fermentation experience before late 1941and the commercial penicillin project's beginnings.
But how then to explain the huge success of Commercial Solvents in producing medical grade penicillin from a cold start in January 1944 to levels twice that of Merck in just four months and then levels six or seven times higher than Merck in just three more months after that?
True, Commercial Solvent had 30 years of success in industrial grade fermentation in making bulk acetone but had never done anything even remote to pharmaceutical levels of purity and cleanliness.
But there it was - passing an increasingly demanding FDA testing requirements with its tens of billions of units of injectable penicillin.
Clearly, the supposedly-arcane craft could be learned fairly quickly, if a corporate culture demanded it.
Even Squibb redeemed itself by well beating Merck's output, by late 1944 .
Merck lost the race for one reason only : hubris.
It thought that since it had synthesized a few 300 molecular weight molecules that all 300 weight biological molecules were a piece of cake.
Tell that to penicillin with a weight of 334 and still not commercially synthesized.
Or tell it to quinine , molecular weight 324, and 200 years after Man-The-Almighty first started to synthesize it, still without a commercially viable synthesis technique at hand....
Yes, one academic excuse goes, yes Merck failed to deliver much penicillin to the D-Day beaches - that was left to Pfizer, which had been a major partner of Merck and Squibb in the three year long effort to produce commercial amounts of penicillin.
But, the excuse went, Pfizer had 20 years of highly successful fermentation experience before late 1941and the commercial penicillin project's beginnings.
But how then to explain the huge success of Commercial Solvents in producing medical grade penicillin from a cold start in January 1944 to levels twice that of Merck in just four months and then levels six or seven times higher than Merck in just three more months after that?
True, Commercial Solvent had 30 years of success in industrial grade fermentation in making bulk acetone but had never done anything even remote to pharmaceutical levels of purity and cleanliness.
But there it was - passing an increasingly demanding FDA testing requirements with its tens of billions of units of injectable penicillin.
Clearly, the supposedly-arcane craft could be learned fairly quickly, if a corporate culture demanded it.
Even Squibb redeemed itself by well beating Merck's output, by late 1944 .
Merck lost the race for one reason only : hubris.
It thought that since it had synthesized a few 300 molecular weight molecules that all 300 weight biological molecules were a piece of cake.
Tell that to penicillin with a weight of 334 and still not commercially synthesized.
Or tell it to quinine , molecular weight 324, and 200 years after Man-The-Almighty first started to synthesize it, still without a commercially viable synthesis technique at hand....
Jan 17, 2013
Howard Florey, Henry Dawson,Penicillin and the NEW YORK TIMES : how then-tiny Pfizer became the biggest drug company in the world
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| "Giant Germicide" article changed history ... |
Since publicity and top secret war weapons don't mix , this explains why when the New York Times sought to interview him upon his arrival on July 3rd 1941, fresh off the Pan Am Clipper, he curtly declined their kind offer and said nothing at all.
(Imagine : the most influential newspaper in the world offering to be your conduit for telling all of America's political and business leaders about penicillin's potential and you toss it aside like an used condom ! )
Perhaps as a result of his playing hard to get, Florey never did get the kilogram of pure penicillin that he sought so hard on this trip, because he had no public pressure backing his private appeal.
By way of contrast, Dr Henry Dawson did take his belief in penicillin's "unlimited potential" (his words) to a huge public medical conflab, attended by many of the world's science and health journalists, and got lots of publicity (as far away as South Africa) about his expansive belief in penicillin.
The New York Times article that changed history ...
Among the media who reported Dawson's comments was the New York Times , which splashed his optimistic views ("Giant Germicide") near the business section of the paper.
Next morning, some busy-- important---executive at then-tiny Pfizer chanced to read about a potential drug he had never heard of over his breakfast table ..... and the rest is history.
That same history reminds us that 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches in the first crucial mass clinical trial of penicillin came from Pfizer and Pfizer alone.
The one drug company in America that Florey had NOT visited on his search for his kilo.
The one drug company that Dawson did approach, ironically because he was merely seeking to help the churlish Florey.
So : "the stone the builder rejected", redeemed by an article in the New York Times.
That is the power of journalism, of publicity and of the New York Times.....
Jan 16, 2013
Roy S Koch "shows me the money" on wartime penicillin
Then , overnight in August 1943, penicillin became one of those parenterally delivered biologicals and nothing was ever quite the same.
One of Koch's jobs was tallying the actual amounts, month by month, firm by firm, of medical grade penicillin that passed from the FDA's approval into the military or civilian supply chain.
In those excited anxious days with American families's sons, brothers and fathers dying left (Pacific) and right (Atlantic) in record numbers, all eyes and ears were on the progress reports on penicillin production.
Everyone, in their own way, was pitching in to help American industry finally deliver the goods, 15 years later but better late than never.
Above all the American taxpayer was working overtime to pay for that promise of expanded production.
Paying for the government building of private-firm-run buildings, paying through extra personal taxes for the shortfall caused by the writing off of excess corporate taxes, paying for military and civilian expeditors, paying to aid to university researchers who were in turn aiding corporate coffers - on and on and on.
So a corporate failure to make good on a public promise to deliver a lot of penicillin, with the help of lots of taxpayers' money, was going to seem tantamount to committing an act of treason.
Hence Koch's carefully collected figures had to remain a closely guarded secret : American corporations may fail to deliver all the time, but the American public is never ever to know.
But in 1958, about 55 years ago and almost 15 years after the figures were first collected, a muckraking US government inquiry into price-fixing in the antibiotic business did reveal the figures --- even put it in a public domain documents so all the world could quote them freely.
But I have never seen anyone do so and I have read an awful lot on wartime penicillin : so if I am wrong, please email me at my email on this blog.
Anyway, the figures are posted above and you can access the report ("Economic Report on Antibiotics Manufacture" ) online --- this chart is from the appendix, page 331.
In January 1944, the Hare side of the race to make - and define - wartime penicillin was feeling pretty good : Merck had produced some actual therapeutically-effective penicillin by human synthesis (take that you nasty mold !), a result soon confirmed by the Oxford Hares and by other American Hares.
Yields were much lower than the mold-made penicillin and the impurities both more abundant and much more lethal than in the naturally-made penicillin , but the chemists (hundreds of the best chemists in the world) were working on it.
Soon the pesky Tortoises of wartime penicillin, mostly obscure johnnies come lately, could be kissed off - their brand new plants just so yesterday, so very obsolete : growing mold like some rural farmer and then making things by fermentation.
In this Modern Age !
Really, the nerve !
Still, in January 1944, some of the leaders in the secret effort to make penicillin by synthesis are still putting up a good front in aiding the build-up of penicillin supplies for the widely expected opening of the Second Front (D-day) in the late spring or early summer.
Their production of natural penicillin was quite good - compared to even a few months earlier.
The all-mighty Merck (leader, along with Howard Florey in Oxford England, of the penicillin Hares) delivered 3.1 billion units that month, about as much as some obscure mushroom farmer (Reichel) did , buried somewhere out in the backwoods of rural Pennsylvania.
Merck wasn't going to really go all out to produce a lot of natural penicillin for the boys overseas, not when they were about to blow the world away with their very own "technically sweet" synthetic penicillin.
But the boss, George W Merck, was still determined to be patriotic none the less, "do his bit".
Pfizer, another part of the New York area Hare triad, led the production, just barely, with 3.98 billion units.
Squibb ,the third of that triad, was not pulling its weight - even the War Production Board could barely contain their anger , as the folks at Squibb laying back on the oars --- producing just .61 billion units.
The Mid-West group of Hares hadn't done as well, but they hadn't been at it as long : Abbott did .71 billion, Lilly .43 , Upjohn .07 , Parke Davis .03.
Let us jump to April 1944.
Synthetic penicillin yields are still so low that they were a joke - making even Fleming's small amounts that he produced in 1928 look enormous in comparison.
But almost everyone's natural penicillin output has improved --- it was getting close, after all, to make the deadline to get into the pipeline to Kansas City's big depot and then out again to Southern England for the D-Day medical supply loadings.
Every drug CEO wanted to boast later in ads that it was his firm's penicillin that had won the day in the invasion of Nazi Europe.
Reichel had fallen way back below its January output and Merck hadn't even doubled its output.
But Squibb had increased its supply by 10 times , albeit from a low base and Abbott had done almost as well.
(Commercial Solvents had increased its output by 300 times, from a very low base - but it was a real newcomer.)
Pfizer switches sides and kills Modernity ...
But Pfizer wasn't playing fair, for it had turned from being a Hare into a Tortoise : it had increased its natural penicillin output by 10 times, from a very high base and doubled it again in May : producing more than the entire world's penicillin plants combined.
By July, Merck was almost producing less than it had in January, while Pfizer was producing 25 times as much as it had in January.
Still no early sign of synthetic penicillin production and Pfizer was on its way to producing enough penicillin for the entire world,naturally, with or without Merck's 'technically sweet" synthetic stuff .
Modernity had just taken a fatal shot to the base of the neck and deep down, everyone knew it....
Jan 13, 2013
The elevator pitch for "By stubborn, Stars we steer"
Some people call it the takeaway sentence while others call it the elevator pitch : that line that tags a movie's every radio/TV spot and poster, the same line that got the movie green-lighted (financed) in the first place.
Ten seconds long ; one longish sentence .
My takeaway line , as you leave the elevator where you have been helplessly trapped with me as as I relentlessly tell you about Henry Dawson's own personal Manhattan Project :
Ten seconds long ; one longish sentence .
My takeaway line , as you leave the elevator where you have been helplessly trapped with me as as I relentlessly tell you about Henry Dawson's own personal Manhattan Project :
"Its a parable about Jesus and the Devil arm-wrestling over the soul of a pedestrian 'everyman' called John L Smith, who also happens to be the real life wartime head of Pfizer Drugs......"
"A Rare Breed Indeed" : US wartime Int'l treaties on the A-Bomb, Lend-Lease, Bases for Destroyers ... and synthetic penicillin
Most of the antibiotics we use today (beta-lactams) are still the close relatives of the first and best-ever antibiotic, Penicillin G.
They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.
They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.
But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.
Instead another - exceedingly rare - international treaty was negotiated by the wartime American government --- a nation historically very loath to sign any sort of international treaty.
It focused exclusively on the post-war perfection of what had been - at one time - intended to be a timely wartime secret weapon of war : that elusive and illusionary phantom known as synthetic penicillin.
So it was that if between 1943 and 1946, a individual scientist had increased the amount of penicillin retained from the initial crude penicillin medium from 50% to 100% on first purification run through, she or he would have been classed be a war-hero and covered under this Acheson-Halifax Treaty, via its clause on the purification of penicillin.
(Even if success in this case might merely mean that the scientist retained 2 units of semi-purified penicillin per 2 units of initial crude penicillin rather than just the normal 1unit semi-refined from 2 units of initial crude penicillin.)
But if a scientist or firm increased the production of crude penicillin from the 2 crude units per ml of starting medium (as was common in the first 14 years of penicillin production) to 80,000 units of crude penicillin per ml of starting medium (as is common today) , they won't be considered important enough to be covered under this treaty !
It was this loophole that allowed a small soda pop supplier to become, in time, the biggest drug company in the world.
This was when Pfizer incredibly rapidly increased its production of natural penicillin from 2 units over 14 days to 2000 units over 4 days, per ml of starting medium ---- down right under the noses of the treaty negotiators.
As a result, 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches came from this one firm alone - making its world wide reputation over night.
That was because Pfizer's John L Smith, alone among his industry's CEOs, decided to make upping the production levels of natural penicillin his Job One, rather than going full out on synthesizing artificial penicillin and giving just lip service to public claims to be making more natural penicillin for the dying.
When a CUPE local for mental health orderlies and support staff went on strike here in Nova Scotia, I was no longer a mental health employee or union local member but I did devise the winning strike slogan : "Ten Percent of Nothing is Still Nothing !".
The government had told the public these ungrateful employees were getting a hefty 10% pay raise out of your tax dollars : but we came back with the fact some of the employees were earning less than the government's own, mandated by law, legal minimum wage !
Two units of penicillin per ml of starting medium is nothing, for such a lot of time, care and expense. Retaining 100% of it , instead of 50% of it , is still nothing.
The penicillin we use today is exceedingly cheap and abundant : because even if retaining only 50% of the 80,000 units per ml yield it is indeed still a very, very, very, big something....
They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.
They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.
But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.
Instead another - exceedingly rare - international treaty was negotiated by the wartime American government --- a nation historically very loath to sign any sort of international treaty.
It focused exclusively on the post-war perfection of what had been - at one time - intended to be a timely wartime secret weapon of war : that elusive and illusionary phantom known as synthetic penicillin.
So it was that if between 1943 and 1946, a individual scientist had increased the amount of penicillin retained from the initial crude penicillin medium from 50% to 100% on first purification run through, she or he would have been classed be a war-hero and covered under this Acheson-Halifax Treaty, via its clause on the purification of penicillin.
(Even if success in this case might merely mean that the scientist retained 2 units of semi-purified penicillin per 2 units of initial crude penicillin rather than just the normal 1unit semi-refined from 2 units of initial crude penicillin.)
But if a scientist or firm increased the production of crude penicillin from the 2 crude units per ml of starting medium (as was common in the first 14 years of penicillin production) to 80,000 units of crude penicillin per ml of starting medium (as is common today) , they won't be considered important enough to be covered under this treaty !
It was this loophole that allowed a small soda pop supplier to become, in time, the biggest drug company in the world.
This was when Pfizer incredibly rapidly increased its production of natural penicillin from 2 units over 14 days to 2000 units over 4 days, per ml of starting medium ---- down right under the noses of the treaty negotiators.
As a result, 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches came from this one firm alone - making its world wide reputation over night.
That was because Pfizer's John L Smith, alone among his industry's CEOs, decided to make upping the production levels of natural penicillin his Job One, rather than going full out on synthesizing artificial penicillin and giving just lip service to public claims to be making more natural penicillin for the dying.
10% of nothing is ..... still nothing !!
When a CUPE local for mental health orderlies and support staff went on strike here in Nova Scotia, I was no longer a mental health employee or union local member but I did devise the winning strike slogan : "Ten Percent of Nothing is Still Nothing !".
The government had told the public these ungrateful employees were getting a hefty 10% pay raise out of your tax dollars : but we came back with the fact some of the employees were earning less than the government's own, mandated by law, legal minimum wage !
Two units of penicillin per ml of starting medium is nothing, for such a lot of time, care and expense. Retaining 100% of it , instead of 50% of it , is still nothing.
The penicillin we use today is exceedingly cheap and abundant : because even if retaining only 50% of the 80,000 units per ml yield it is indeed still a very, very, very, big something....
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