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.

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.

NATURAL vs SYNTHETIC ---- what war time audiences were really talking about when they talked about penicillin

My book "MANHATTAN NATURAL" isn't really a book about wartime penicillin --- there have already been dozens of those , all claiming they've covered the waterfront thoroughly.

Instead it is a book about the deep emotional wellsprings wartime audiences were inadvertently revealing as they debated whether or not "crude natural penicillin, now !" was preferable to "pure synthetic penicillin (maybe) sometime in the future".

So I have drawn great inspiration from Klaus Theweleit's classic "MALE FANTASIES".

The rise of post-modern NATURAL penicillin and the fall of modern synthetic penicillin

I like writers who take chances. 

Writers like Aaron Bobrow-Strain (White Bread) and Christina Cogdell (Eugenic Design) and Jeffrey Meikle (American Plastic).

All three did the long hard work to tease out the incredibly subtle and unconscious ways that very powerful (and powerfully weird) intellectual memes became incorporated into the ways our grandparents thought about seemingly ordinary things like bread , dinner plates and the design of toilets.

A-Bomb and Penicillin secrets 'Hidden in Plain Sight' : un-redacting wartime Manhattan's two "Projects"

The structure of my drama in five acts, "Manhattan Natural" (the other Manhattan Project) , has one obvious influence --- the efforts of science historian Robert S Norris to destroy the oldest and biggest myth of wartime's Atomic Bomb.

Norris , in "The Manhattan Project" (published by Black Dog and Leventhal) , first recounts the usual version of this pernicious myth.

We all know - vaguely - how it goes.

Manhattan Indie PEN : penicillin misfits, unfits & rebels fermenting a revolution and renewing hope to a world tired, huddled and wretched

Today, words and phrases like "all-natural", "green" , "locally grown" and "no added chemicals" are such advertising cliches that it hard to believe there was a time , up to the end of WWII, when such phrases were totally anathema.

Back in that era , advertising cliches were more likely to invoke being chemically pure and to see being 100% synthetic , plastic and man-made as virtues to seek out.

But after Hiroshima , Auschwitz , Napalm and other WWII 'man-made wonders', these concepts very gradually fell out of vogue.

1940s medical reformers' views on Indie PEN ("crude" penicillin) : 'about as safe as mother's milk ---- and equally unfashionable'

The aesthetic objections to live-saving Indie PEN

The medical reformers controlling the (glacial) pace of the mass introduction of penicillin (from 1928 to 1944) viewed the idea of saving the lives of dying patients with crude (Indie PEN) penicillin with the same sort of distaste they held towards mothers who still breastfed.

They all wanted penicillin that was first of all was pure and stable.

Some further wanted to wait until it was chemically synthesized (patentable) and many others wanted to keep it secret and limit it only for Allied wounded soldiers while the war raged.

And if countless patients died needlessly while they polished the turd - so be it .

Wartime Penicillin, told as sharp clash of vivid personalities and philosophies -- not as a dry scientific treatise or as cheerleading fantasy of selfless wartime cooperation

If you have never read a book about the exciting saga of wartime penicillin that is hardly because of a lack of choice.

Dozens and dozens of authors have written well researched (and well regarded) renderings of the dramatic story, even if we discount the mass of uniformly dreadful books directed at children.

But despite a potential reading audience  that since 1944 that must number in the billions, none of these books can be said to be a national - let alone international - best seller.

Even more unexpectedly, there has never been any Hollywood movie about the wartime penicillin saga, let alone any successful one.

All these penicillin books to date suffer from one honest, sincere but erroneous assumption.

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.

Wartime Penicillin Drama : 3 non-chemists promote chemical penicillin while 3 working chemists promote natural penicillin ...

Three middle-aged chemist manques who disgracefully put youthful dreams before the public good - at the height of a total war

Three of wartime penicillin's chief protagonists were men who, as youths, had hoped to become hands-on lab research chemists but whom necessity had pushed them instead into becoming medical science desk administrators.

Their names ?

 Howard Florey, director of Oxford University's Dunn Path Institute , A. Newton Richards, head of the Medical Division of Vannevar Bush's famous OSRD war-science agency and George W. Merck , head of Merck.

All three greatly respected each other and worked as closely together as the American and British governments (nominally allies) allowed.

Wartime penicillin gave all three a second childhood as chemist manques and disgracefully, they ran with it* .

Even as a world at war panted instead for lots of disease-fighting drugs in any form , as long as they worked , were safe and were available NOW .