When ,in April 1941, Howard Florey learned that his best shot at world acclaim (as the only begetter of systemic penicillin) was at risk because Henry Dawson had got there first, the old claim jumper boot scooted over to America to shake a little dust.
Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
Showing posts with label synthetic penicillin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label synthetic penicillin. Show all posts
Aug 26, 2014
Wartime Oxford : the planned capital of a racially pure Nazi Britain ---- and of chemically pure penicillin
Hitler never seriously tried to bomb Oxford England , despite its very militarily important engineering works.
The often made claim that Howard Florey had to give penicillin away to America because he was bombed out of Oxford by the Blitz is made only by his American fans - even his most ardent British fans weren't ever that thick.
After all , they had survived life in British cities enduring the various Nazi bombing efforts and at the time had greatly envied Oxford's well known gilded wartime immunity.
The often made claim that Howard Florey had to give penicillin away to America because he was bombed out of Oxford by the Blitz is made only by his American fans - even his most ardent British fans weren't ever that thick.
After all , they had survived life in British cities enduring the various Nazi bombing efforts and at the time had greatly envied Oxford's well known gilded wartime immunity.
Connecting New York's PENICILLIN dots ...
Some authors are content to merely describe a long series of coincidental dots ---- other authors like to investigate to see if anything connects all those coincidental dots.
I am one of the latter : as many a TV police detective is fond of saying , my motto is "I don't believe in coincidences."
When I fell upon the story of Henry Dawson and wartime penicillin, I noticed that most of the twenty or so full length accounts of wartime penicillin always included the awkward fact that he (and not their hero Howard Florey) was the one to give history's first ever penicillin shots.
They briefly described that first needle in a sentence or paragraph or page or two --- and then always go on quickly to say that Dawson himself was dying of a terminal illness - 'so necessarily passes out of our story'.
The rest of their three hundred or page accounts have nothing further about Dawson's team.
Clearly they mentally needed a way to dispose of Dawson (his convenient terminal illness) without seriously engaging his team's more than five years of involvement with penicillin.
I am one of the latter : as many a TV police detective is fond of saying , my motto is "I don't believe in coincidences."
When I fell upon the story of Henry Dawson and wartime penicillin, I noticed that most of the twenty or so full length accounts of wartime penicillin always included the awkward fact that he (and not their hero Howard Florey) was the one to give history's first ever penicillin shots.
They briefly described that first needle in a sentence or paragraph or page or two --- and then always go on quickly to say that Dawson himself was dying of a terminal illness - 'so necessarily passes out of our story'.
The rest of their three hundred or page accounts have nothing further about Dawson's team.
Clearly they mentally needed a way to dispose of Dawson (his convenient terminal illness) without seriously engaging his team's more than five years of involvement with penicillin.
Aug 25, 2014
Chemistry PhD = Hubris ?
As penicillium mold spores drift about through the air, the fortunate ones land on a suitably moist food supply.
The spores almost need the moisture more than the food , as they can feed on almost any organic matter.
But when they get stressed, usually when the food supply runs low , they may respond by producing the antibiotics we rather loosely call by the single word 'penicillin' , to keep at bay bacterial competitors for that same food.
Note I said antibiotics in the plural, because, depending on the particular food source at hand, each penicillin produced might be in fact ever so slightly different.
The spores almost need the moisture more than the food , as they can feed on almost any organic matter.
But when they get stressed, usually when the food supply runs low , they may respond by producing the antibiotics we rather loosely call by the single word 'penicillin' , to keep at bay bacterial competitors for that same food.
Note I said antibiotics in the plural, because, depending on the particular food source at hand, each penicillin produced might be in fact ever so slightly different.
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 14, 2014
Penicillin for patients : stable ? pure ? or just 'safe enough' ? -- the essential disagreement between Fleming, Florey and Dawson
Alexander Fleming was famously known for his frugality : in speech, in the use of materials and in his physical exertions on his paid job.
Being too self confident in his own intellectual abilities (and perhaps also being too frugal cum lazy in the physical exertion department ?) fatally led him to avoid doing the needed series of experiments to prove up his claim that penicillin would never have time to do its work inside the body.
So he misled himself - and more importantly , the entire world, for 14 years that penicillin would only work on the body, never in the body - and tens of millions died premature deaths that could have/ should have been avoided.
Being too self confident in his own intellectual abilities (and perhaps also being too frugal cum lazy in the physical exertion department ?) fatally led him to avoid doing the needed series of experiments to prove up his claim that penicillin would never have time to do its work inside the body.
So he misled himself - and more importantly , the entire world, for 14 years that penicillin would only work on the body, never in the body - and tens of millions died premature deaths that could have/ should have been avoided.
Jul 28, 2014
Oxford University Artificial Penicillin totally fails to deliver - morally as well as technically
It goes without saying that Oxford University's wartime chimera of totally synthesized artificial penicillin was an abject failure.
75 years on, we still start the production of all the penicillin and beta lactam antibiotics with natural fermentation.
So ---- just a minor technical failing ?
Few go on to consider the moral failings behind the Conservative Party-led British government's wartime penicillin decisions.
75 years on, we still start the production of all the penicillin and beta lactam antibiotics with natural fermentation.
So ---- just a minor technical failing ?
Few go on to consider the moral failings behind the Conservative Party-led British government's wartime penicillin decisions.
Jan 21, 2013
Dawson's DIY penicillin a postmodernist "shot across the bow" of Modernist Big Pharma
Two hundred years from now, only the first of the Dawson team's many articles on wartime penicillin will still be cited and still considered seminal.
This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.
But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.
In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.
But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.
Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.
But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.
Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.
(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure : pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)
It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.
We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.
He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .
His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."
Today, in this postmodern age, this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.
At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.
Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....
This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.
But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.
In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.
But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.
Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.
But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.
Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.
(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure : pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)
It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.
We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.
He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .
His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."
"Living better chemically ?"
Today, in this postmodern age, this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.
At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.
Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....
Jan 18, 2013
Like Admiral Byng, but in reverse, AlexanderFleming was given a Nobel prize "pour encourager les autres"
Alexander Fleming pursued, preserved and publicized a foolish observation that turned out to be.... not so foolish after all.
His personal Nobel Prize was really to encourage other future scientists to also publicize their oddball observations because they too might be all important.
New scientific breakthroughs are often delayed because the scientifically powerful are older and no longer open to an new ideas any newer than the new breakthroughs of their youth.
A person bold enough to bring forth oddball ideas is likely to face a lot of bricks and catcalls from these powerful personages who control grants and tenure and publication in big journals. (Big shout out to Dr Milton Wainwright !)
So the thought that a possible future Nobel Prize might lay in the offing if one faces the bricks and the catcalls , does tend to give all of us a little dutch courage.
Fleming was badly wrong about penicillin on two key counts.
It did not need to be synthetic to be useful and it was not limited to only local antiseptic use, but he argued these points from a reasoned position and did not attempt to weasel away from these positions when he was proven badly wrong by the mid-1940s.
And when I say wrong, I mean being highly visible wrong (as Fleming had become the most famous single person on earth).
Wrong ,wrong, wrong before the eyes of every single scientist in the world.
That took more than a little courage --- it is a pity than none of the rest of the penicillin pioneers who also advocated synthetic penicillin research to well past its due date were not as open in admitting their similar error......
His personal Nobel Prize was really to encourage other future scientists to also publicize their oddball observations because they too might be all important.
New scientific breakthroughs are often delayed because the scientifically powerful are older and no longer open to an new ideas any newer than the new breakthroughs of their youth.
A person bold enough to bring forth oddball ideas is likely to face a lot of bricks and catcalls from these powerful personages who control grants and tenure and publication in big journals. (Big shout out to Dr Milton Wainwright !)
So the thought that a possible future Nobel Prize might lay in the offing if one faces the bricks and the catcalls , does tend to give all of us a little dutch courage.
Fleming was badly wrong about penicillin on two key counts.
It did not need to be synthetic to be useful and it was not limited to only local antiseptic use, but he argued these points from a reasoned position and did not attempt to weasel away from these positions when he was proven badly wrong by the mid-1940s.
And when I say wrong, I mean being highly visible wrong (as Fleming had become the most famous single person on earth).
Wrong ,wrong, wrong before the eyes of every single scientist in the world.
Fleming accepted he had been wrong and didn't fudge it
That took more than a little courage --- it is a pity than none of the rest of the penicillin pioneers who also advocated synthetic penicillin research to well past its due date were not as open in admitting their similar error......
Jan 13, 2013
Most of the penicillin grown in its first 15 years, was wasted on useless attempts at synthesis, not used to save the dying
If my claim be wrong : show me the money !
Open all the archives on university, hospital and corporate penicillin files.
Show us the size and number of penicillin production runs, month by month, from September 1928 to September 1943 ( ie including the first four years of the war).
Then shows us the amount of penicillin units actually released for therapeutic use on human patients suffering from infections suspected of being defeatable by penicillin, during that same time period.
I have never seen any published accounts where the responsible authorities complained about all the precious potentially life-saving penicillin that was being wasted ---- during an all-out Total War ! ----on a futile 20 year long effort to synthesize patentable profitable penicillin from PD (public domain) natural penicillin.
But there are plenty of complaints from the higher-ups about all the penicillin being wasted on saving the lives of ("useless feeders") young people dying from hitherto invariably fatal SBE (endocarditis)......
Open all the archives on university, hospital and corporate penicillin files.
Show us the size and number of penicillin production runs, month by month, from September 1928 to September 1943 ( ie including the first four years of the war).
Then shows us the amount of penicillin units actually released for therapeutic use on human patients suffering from infections suspected of being defeatable by penicillin, during that same time period.
Patents, Profits and Patriotism : pick two out of the three...
I have never seen any published accounts where the responsible authorities complained about all the precious potentially life-saving penicillin that was being wasted ---- during an all-out Total War ! ----on a futile 20 year long effort to synthesize patentable profitable penicillin from PD (public domain) natural penicillin.
But there are plenty of complaints from the higher-ups about all the penicillin being wasted on saving the lives of ("useless feeders") young people dying from hitherto invariably fatal SBE (endocarditis)......
"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....
Jan 4, 2013
Penicillin : a bunch of biologists who put all their faith in chemistry vs two chemists who put all their faith in biology
In the Alice Through the Looking Glass world of wartime penicillin it should hardly be surprising that about the only strong supporters of natural ,biological, penicillin in the upper echelons of the overall enterprise were two professional chemists : Larry Elder of the American Office for Production Research and Development (the OPRD) and Harry Jephcott of the British drug company, Glaxo.
Or that the group most strongly bewitched by the thought of synthetic penicillin were a bunch of medical doctors with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming leading the charge (with the OSRD and MRC close behind): the sort of scientists who might have been thought would normally occupy a place at the biological end of hard science.....
Or that the group most strongly bewitched by the thought of synthetic penicillin were a bunch of medical doctors with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming leading the charge (with the OSRD and MRC close behind): the sort of scientists who might have been thought would normally occupy a place at the biological end of hard science.....
Jan 3, 2013
Penicillin an excellent war weapon because it was so hard to synth, not in spite of that
An excellent antiseptic like synthetic gramicidin was cheap to make, fast acting, stable and a very effective bacterial killer.
But as a weapon of war, it lacked the ability to remain secret for very long .
For if one American chemist could quickly synthesize this product of nature, the massed forces of German Chemistry, widely recognized as the best in the world, would make even shorter work of the same task.
By pointed contrast, despite its relatively small molecular weight, a dozen years of dilatory chemistry efforts by some very good biochemists and some big drug companies had failed to crack penicillin's structure.
It thus promised to be something that even the Germans might take a year to synthesize and get into mass production.
And if both the existence of synth penicillin and the success natural penicillin already had had in curing serious domestic infections could remain a secret until the Second Front opened up on the Germans, that year delay would be a fatal delay.
Because the first the German High Command would have heard of penicillin was the explanation that it was the new secret Allied weapon that by returning more of their troops (and returning them much quicker) to the front was handily winning the manpower war against the Axis.
The only fly in this happy ointment ?
Man never did succeed, not even 75 years later, in making penicillin as cheaply and as productively as the penicillium's tiny slime factories did.
(Given that Henry Dawson had spent his whole life demonstrating how smart even the smallest of non-pathogenic bacteria could be, I doubt that he would be surprised !)
Unlike the production of nuclear weapons, the production of penicillin remains as it began, something relatively easy to make in any hospital lab and hardly something that can remain 'secret' forever simply due to its overwhelming expense and complexity.....
But as a weapon of war, it lacked the ability to remain secret for very long .
For if one American chemist could quickly synthesize this product of nature, the massed forces of German Chemistry, widely recognized as the best in the world, would make even shorter work of the same task.
By pointed contrast, despite its relatively small molecular weight, a dozen years of dilatory chemistry efforts by some very good biochemists and some big drug companies had failed to crack penicillin's structure.
It thus promised to be something that even the Germans might take a year to synthesize and get into mass production.
And if both the existence of synth penicillin and the success natural penicillin already had had in curing serious domestic infections could remain a secret until the Second Front opened up on the Germans, that year delay would be a fatal delay.
Because the first the German High Command would have heard of penicillin was the explanation that it was the new secret Allied weapon that by returning more of their troops (and returning them much quicker) to the front was handily winning the manpower war against the Axis.
The only fly in this happy ointment ?
Man never did succeed, not even 75 years later, in making penicillin as cheaply and as productively as the penicillium's tiny slime factories did.
(Given that Henry Dawson had spent his whole life demonstrating how smart even the smallest of non-pathogenic bacteria could be, I doubt that he would be surprised !)
Unlike the production of nuclear weapons, the production of penicillin remains as it began, something relatively easy to make in any hospital lab and hardly something that can remain 'secret' forever simply due to its overwhelming expense and complexity.....
Oct 4, 2012
"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944
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| How Omaha got its "P" |
But as usual Bullshit talks and Reality walks as the two "S"s both failed spectacularly to deliver.
So it was then that early in the morning of June 6th 1944, a hundred thousand shivering infantry with low-tech rifles and a hundred thousand doses of low tech natural penicillin were bobbing about off the beaches of Normandy, about to do the job right.
Once again at the last minute , to snatch low tech victory from the jaws of high tech defeat, the wise and the mighty were reduced to "sending in the shovels".
Shades of the supposed "high tech" led victory of Vimy Ridge...
This may not the history of WWII that you are used to hearing - because it is not really true that only the victors write history : in reality it is often powerful victors with something to hide, with something to spin, that end up writing the big histories: Whig History.
A special kind of Whig History, history re-written with an unique type of hindsight, so that it appears that all events on the victor's side of the war worked together to bring the war to the conclusion that actually happened.
D-Day then not just happened (hard to deny something as big as that anyway !) but was always planned to have happened, and happen when it did and as it did.
But while WWII was Modernity's very own war , at last, it turned out to be the Nadir of Modernity as well.
Because D-Day and the infantry-led conquest of Hitler's Germany, like the mass production of cheap natural penicillin , like the "non-precision" bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , weren't supposed to happen.
They were , all three , low tech "Plan B"s ,to cover-up the failure of three of the Allies' high tech "Plan A"s.......
Sep 25, 2012
Needed : a MORAL history of Wartime Penicillin
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| SBE fatal to heart valves |
Not impossible to write such histories - dozens of historians have already done so.
Just not possible to do the job --- with any faithfulness to the actual contemporary record --- through those prisms.
Penicillin History has been Whig History....
By artfully cutting and pasting bits of the contemporary primary record it is possible to recast everything, even from that day in September 1928 when Fleming first saw that funny mold in his petri dish, as moving steadily and inevitably forward to the time when billions of units of natural produced systemic penicillin daily rolled off the line at Pfizer in the early Spring of 1944 - with natural (microbe produced) antibiotics being the norm to this day.
But in fact, most of the early1940s scientific, medical and commercial establishment was stunned into silence when penicillin ended up (a) suddenly proven up as the world's best-ever systemic life-saver and (b) being produced cheaply, abundantly and reliably - and produced only thanks to microbes to boot.
The 15 years up to 1944 had seen no new scientific advances or new commercial reasons to suddenly turn to penicillin as a systemic/lifesaver or to favour its production by natural (microbial) means ---- over the situation as Alexander Fleming had described it in his first paper of June 1929.
Only the moral situation had changed.
All the scientific, medical and commercial reasons were still valid against Henry Dawson for staking his life to cure invariably fatal SBE with natural systemic penicillin and against "John L" Smith of Pfizer for staking his company to help him.
But their personal moral reasons for doing so were overwhelming to these two men and so they attempted and achieved the impossible.
Sep 10, 2012
Nova Scotian-born Dr Henry Dawson and the "Invention" of systemic - natural - penicillin
The "Invention" of systemic - natural - penicillin
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| Discovery vs Invention |
It is only since Aug 1945 (and the ascendancy of Physics over Chemistry as the Queen of Science) that we have devoted all our adulation to "discovery" , rather than "invention" in medicine.
Carbolic acid and sulfa's both had early dates of discovery (versus their much later first medical use) .
Alexander Fleming is - wrongly - credited with discovering the penicillin we have used since 1940 - but what did he actually do ?
Fleming in fact thought his penicillin would be useful as a sort of "Plan B" antiseptic -- and only if pure and synthetic.
Howard Florey - ten years later - thought his penicillin would be a useful "Plan B" back-up systemic to Sulfa -- but again, only if pure and synthetic.
By contrast, right from the start and until his death, Martin Henry Dawson thought that natural (even if impure) systemic penicillin would be the "Plan A" choice to cure the incurable, to save the unsavable --- starting with those dying of invariable fatal SBE.
Only two people in New York worked with penicillin in 1940, despite a war (with millions soon to be dying of infections) raging the world over.
One doctor published a conventional article in JBC, reminding bacteriologists how useful crude penicillin could be as an agent to clear common throat bacteria from suspected specimens of influenza bacteria.
That was about all that penicillin was in (semi-) common use for, in 1940. Just as carbolic acid had its various non-clinical uses in the days before Lister "re-invented" it as a life-saver.
The other doctor, Dawson, saw crude penicillin as the most likely cure for SBE.
NOT because it was a super-killer of bacteria, but for some less sexy but rather more "useful" characteristics: it combined nearly-limitless non-toxicity with an extraordinary diffusion ability.
NOT because it was a super-killer of bacteria, but for some less sexy but rather more "useful" characteristics: it combined nearly-limitless non-toxicity with an extraordinary diffusion ability.
He could thickly saturate the blood stream with penicillin without killing the patient, and hope some would still diffuse in past the thick vegetations (bio-films) of SBE, as that saturated blood rushed past the diseased heart valves at breakneck speed.
Some modern SBE patients have needed as much as a kilo of pure penicillin over many months - that's 1.67 BILLION units of penicillin - but have beaten the disease.
Still while penicillin - and only penicillin - could save an SBE in the 1940s, SBE was a prodigious user of then very scarce penicillin, so Dawson also had to morally kick start ("invent") an entire "natural penicillin" industry into existence, to deliver the amount of penicillin needed for his SBE patients.
(As a by-product, the rest of the world soon got as much penicillin as anyone could need - so much so it was soon feed to cattle as a growth stimulator, partly to absorb some of the production.)
I say his "invention" was by moral argument, because the scientific and commercial consensus then was that only synthetic (patentable) penicillin could do the trick.
But only when Dawson morally convinced the head of Pfizer, John l Smith, to take a very great financial risk and go against the consensus of his industry, did the miracle of penicillin really begin to happen....
Feb 27, 2012
1939-1945: the promise of SYNTHETIC penicillin and the reality of NATURAL penicillin
Another failed promise from the mouths of Blowhard Modernistic Science.....
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