Was WWII's battle over Penicillin a microcosm or a macrocosm of that horrific war ?

WWII was far too big for one mind to encompass and far too horrific for one stomach to handle.

The even longer but much smaller battle over penicillin production and delivery seems easier to handle and to stomach.

But just like the war itself, many, many people died because of decisions taken over the course of the twenty year long battle over just how penicillin should be made and to whom it should be given to.

True : all these people were deadly ill, by definition.

So possibly many would died anyway, with or without penicillin, though probability suggests that in fact most would have lived, if given enough penicillin early enough.

Unfair premature death is still unfair premature death, but their slow deaths from disease, caused by not so benign neglect, lacks the visceral horror of thinking about mothers and babies being murdered in a field with a bullet to the face, Einsatzgruppen style.

Preventable death due to lack of should-have-been-readily-available penicillin was still death on a massive scale.

But it remains deniable because it is only viewable, faintly and through the softest of gauze*.

Guilty

So yes, I plead guilty - I want to have it both ways.

I want to discuss the biggest, most horrific, issues of the war but also to sugar coat them.

To reduce them to closeups of the lives of a mere handful of individuals, most who don't die and even of those few who did die, didn't die violently.

But I also want readers to think back, back behind these few representatives.

To think of the literally tens of millions of people, unnamed and un-described, who died needlessly throughout the world because cheap abundant penicillin-for-all was delayed so long.

(Delayed for up to fifteen years for a few lucky ones and up to twenty five years for many, depending on your class, race, gender and where you lived.)

That is a death toll that approaches that of WWII itself.

So it really should never have been so casually dismissed, as it has been, all these years....

* I know of only one death among those tens of millions - that of Marie Barker of Chicago in September 1943 - that happened with enough detail provided day by relentless day to the reading public as to still bruise our collective conscience.

How wartime penicillin's American miracle cures were censored - and why

From early in 1942, American medical journal editors and authors joined scientific journal editors and authors already being "self censored".

Like them, they were asked (virtually required) to submit all articles they were uncertain about, to a NAS/NRC advisory for vetting before printing or submitting.

Supposedly the NAS medical sub-committee was only censored the chemistry of penicillin , but in fact this wasn't consistently imposed until March 1943,when it fell in line with the UK's more legally formal move in this direction.

Between January 1942 till late in 1943, this system's real ambition was to successfully keep every "miracle cure" by penicillin out of medical and scientific  media - and thus, by reverse osmosis, out of the daily press.

If the American public didn't hear about this miracle drug, then the chemistry-savvy Germans won't either ---- at least not before D-Day, or so the thought went.

I think the key for this method's success was that the OSRD/CMR/COC controlled (a) all the significant new strains and all the new information on how to make penicillin in mass qualities, (b) controlled all supplies of the resulting therapeutic penicillin (c) and as well was busy dangling $500 million in high-overhead contracts to cash and equipment starved university administrators.

So it could successfully tell the university researchers, commercial penicillin firms and the medical accredited investigators, peep one word and no more penicillin/ penicillin information/ cash.

Informally, the OSRD/CMR/COC tried to fend off all requests for stories on this rumoured new wonder drug from non-science journalists, who they had no hold over.

Science journalists - hello William l Laurence ! - were already totally self-embedded in this self censorship. (Color me surprised ...)

General reporters also read popular science stories for possible leads, so with none coming forth on penicillin, they actually made very few such requests.

Of course when a *Hearst* *city desk editor*  got a *Pulitzer* for *spot news reporting*  for saving the life of a baby with the miracle cure penicillin (and modestly reporting the story as well) , all that changed.

(I always thought the real miracle was the Pulitzer Committee giving a prize to a Hearst paper, the arch enemy of George Pulitzer. That and a city desk editor breaking a Pulitzer-worthy foot leather news story without ever leaving his desk (or phone.)

But what I am not sure of , was Byron Price ever asked by the OSRD/CMR's Dr A.N. Richards to amend his codebooks to ask editors to avoid any any mention of penicillin.

I have a request on this out to a real expert on the American experience with self censorship in WWII....

January 1943 : that penicillin cured the incurable SBE is a military secret, but penicillin's chemical formula is not !

The American scientific journal "The Journal of Bacteriology" is a top journal in its field, read - at least in peacetime - by workers in that field the world over.

Yet in January 1943, it is revealing that one of the earliest and most persistent researchers as to the chemical structure of penicillin , Karl Meyer, is still free to publish his informed opinion on the formula for penicillin : C14H19NO6 or C14H17NO5 + H2O.

His co-author, clinician Henry Dawson, by way of contrast, is NOT free to reveal that he has achieved a truly spectacular medical event : curing the incurable, invariably fatal SBE with penicillin , still the acid test of all infectious diseases.

His first penicillin success with this disease, a young woman known to us only as Miss HH , had just gone home cured - in time for Christmas - just days before Dawson team member Gladys Hobby was due to deliver this paper in Columbus Ohio in late December 1942.

Few members of the January 1943 public, falling by chance upon this journal were likely to care about the chemical formula of a largely unknown new drug - but curing SBE - Oh My, oh my !

Now that was a good news story, with legs.

The OSRD hated good news not of their own making ...

Which is precisely why it was banned  ---- and the chemical formula was not.

The very last way the OSRD wanted the public to first hear about penicillin a full year and a half before D-Day, was in the context of a widely publicized civilian miracle cure.

Dropping the miracle-work of D-Day penicillin on a surprised German Army medical corps was not going to work, if the Germans had first heard rumours of miracle cures with penicillin coming from every local American newspaper some two years earlier and had time to grow their own penicillin.

If the price for Dawson continuing to receive penicillin, once his hitherto semi-independent supplier Pfizer joined the OSRD cartel in the Fall of 1942, was to became a OSRD "principal investigator" (aka COC "accredited investigator") then he had to take an extraordinary oath not to reveal anything to anyone, without full OSRD approval.

So nothing public on the success penicillin was having in pulling bodies back from the grave : but if the Germans wished to make penicillin ; well then here is the formula.......