Penicillin "J" , the OTHER Manhattan Project

What if Jesus came back during WWII, and no one even noticed ?

The twenty year old effort to 'civilize' penicillin was well funded, well studied, well honoured (and a big failure ...)

By contrast, the tiny and relatively brief (less than four years) effort to win (grudging) acceptance for 'primitive' penicillin was unfunded and unsupported, received no scholarly study or public honours ---- and was a huge, world-changing, success.

Seventy five years later, annually thousands of tons of 'Primitive' penicillin are still made the good old primeval way - by incredibly tiny fungal factories - and still form the basis for almost all of our life-saving antibiotics.

"Upending" - the blog, the musical and backstory non-fiction book - tries to make amends.

For "Upending" is based around the proposition that massive success usually deserves more attention than failure, even if (particularly if ?) that failure was supported by all the Smartest Men in the Universe...

Where and when was first ever intradermal penicillin sensitivity test given ?

At NYC's Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, on  October 16th 1940.

In fact it was the historical first ever antibiotic injection given to a patient (two patients actually) followed up a few hours later, after no reaction was observed, by a larger (and later still larger) doses given subcutaneously.

Amazingly, Dr Martin Henry Dawson's careful and cautious technique on that historical day are still followed to the letter by all well trained nurses and doctors....

Why the only real civil war has always been over healthcare : because the right to life is the ultimate civil right, above the right to vote or a right to apply for a job

Give Blacks and Jews the right to vote and the right to apply for jobs and education, if you must, but don't - for Jefferson Davis's sake ! - give them to right to be treated fairly when they turn up in a hospital ER.

Because DOAs can't vote or take jobs or occupy your stupid son's rightful seat at Yale.

Accept what I claim and you begin to see the real bite in the unholy but quiet battle between medical proponents of Social Medicine and War Medicine (Thomas Parran versus Lewis Weed), circa October 16th 1940.

On that day, Professor Martin Henry Dawson gave history' first ever injections of microbe-made penicillin to two 4Fs, a Jew and a Black, opening our Age of Antibiotics, on a day otherwise devoted to registering America's 1As in the first ever peacetime draft.

His impetus ?

Returning that Fall from vacation to learn that his medical school and hospital was downgrading any focus on social medicine, his area of interest, to up its preparation for war-oriented medicine.

His response ?

Parry, and then thrust, deep, with  .1 ml of Pen "G" in butyl alcohol.....

October 16 1940 : ending the era of human-only progress and ushering in our era of bio-diverse cleverness

Purifying and then synthesizing such a comparatively small molecule like penicillin (produced after all by the primitive and simple basement slime) couldn't take very long, said an entire generation of chemists.

And then, and only then, with plenty of pure man-made penicillin at hand, would it finally be safe for clinicians to inject the blessed stuff into a dying patient's bloodstream.

But by mid October 1940, one clinician (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) had had more than enough of waiting for human chemists to put their synthetic money where their hubristic mouth was.

for even his highly talented co-worker, biochemist Dr Karl Meyer, had also failed to make much initial progress on determining the structure of the penicillin molecule.

And Meyer was miles and miles away from attempting to synthesize the stuff.

Dawson had two dying patients before him, for whom he sincerely believed penicillin was their only possible lifeline.

He knew they would need a great deal of clinical penicillin to be saved, but only a little penicillin was at hand.

But a little was better than nothing --- and even a token injection might raise their morale higher even if it did little to lower the microbe count inside their damaged heart valves.

The relatively small amounts of native penicillin that the tiny team at NYC's Columbia Presbyterian medical complex had grown so far had all been divided between Dawson's co-worker Gladys Hobby's microbiological tests and Meyer's (and his assistant Eleanor Chaffee's) chemical tests.

But in 1940, Henry Dawson had a much greater faith in the ability of (raw - impure - natural - native - crude) fungus-made penicillin to cure patients than any other doctor in the world.

Like many other infection experts around the world, he had read of Howard Florey's Oxford team's success with raw penicillin injections in safely curing many experimental infections in many different animals.

But all the other infection experts had read and remained unmoved .

Unmoved to to attempt injecting raw penicillin into humans, whether healthy volunteers or dying patients.

Not so Dawson - he had already had over a dozen years experience confirming that the supposedly simple and primitive microbes had at least as much native chemical ability under their tiny belts as had enormous conference halls filled with chemical PhDs.

His own colleagues had long grown weary of his endless informal lectures on the ability of tiny microbes to practise genetic/chemical engineering (bacterial transformation - HGT) at a skill level that the best human geneticists could only dream of.

The man was not just a bore, he was also 'letting down the side', at least as the Era of Human-Only Progress saw it.

For he had long claimed that the tiny, ancient and simple microbes were much, much cleverer than they were ever given credit for - cleverer than the most civilized of humanity, in many ways.

But he was harmless enough - for all this had only been talk so far.

But on this day - October 16th 1940 - Dawson decidedly 'went off the reservation' and crossed a deep cultural Rubicon.

For on this day, Dr Dawson finally gave his tiny chemists 'a fair go' when he injected SBE patients Aaron Alston and Charles Aronson with fungus-made penicillin.

Thus ending The Era of Human-Only Progress ---- and ushering in our present Era of Bio-Diverse Cleverness...

Penicillin, as from the Old Testament : capricious to the greedy and the hubristic ; malleable to the righteous

Psalm 51:7 -----  Purge me with Hyssop

To the large (government and industry supported) research teams privately committed to turning natural penicillin into a highly profitable patented MAN-MADE drug with a long shelf life, crude penicillin was a capricious, labile substance with a habit of disappearing as soon as it was produced.

As both their contemporary scientific articles and their later memoirs and biographies made abundantly clear.
Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, for example, were for once fully in agreement on this accord.

But to the small unofficial clinically-oriented teams solely concerned with saving lives in the here and now, penicillin's reputation for instability was vastly overrated .

One even gets hints that they wondered if this well-publicized reputation of instability was a deliberate lie fostered by people like Florey, Fleming, Merck and the OSRD to keep later competing teams from seriously investigating the wonder drug.

The clinically-oriented teams' contemporary articles found first that the varying PH requirements of the rapidly growing and then hard starving penicillium fungus had to be well regulated, if the penicillin was not to be accidentally destroyed by the fungus itself, as fast as it was produced.

And then if the resulting crude penicillin liquid was kept very cold in a refrigerator, at the appropriate PH for penicillin, it would easily last the few days or weeks needed for it to be used externally or injected via IV/IM drip, on site at their hospital.

Any competent lab tech could handle the whole affair, is how one Australian team described what they felt was the largely routine growing, extraction and storing process.

Amazingly, both accounts of crude penicillin behavior are actually fully correct.

For example, by at least keeping their impure penicillin free of any external chemical reagents, the clinically oriented teams ensured their patients didn't suffer from the many man-made chemical impurities so commonly found in the supposedly purer commercial penicillin !

And they certainly didn't routinely lose most of the crude penicillin - and consume much scarce people-power - trying to extracting all of the harmless water in crude penicillin, merely to later add it all back in again as part of the injection process.

Because one can't inject dry penicillin ----- or dry anything.

Injections need plenty of fluids - basically water dressed up in a fancy name.

And in particular, penicillin works best if very very slowly dripped into a person's blood stream --- that means that crude penicillin is itself already at the right proportions of medicine and water to work well as a slow drip IV or IM.

Impure penicillin is a lot like the impure orange juice that traditionally supplied us with our Vitamin C needs - that tasty fruit juice works at least as well as today's little white synthetic Vitamin C pills do --- and has done so for millions of years.

So what was the reason for the endless mantra (cum lame excuse) of the Allied medical world needing pure penicillin and needing dry penicillin before it could begin to save the dying ?

G R E E D  &  H U B R I S   ---- impure and un-simple.

The only reason why 'pure' penicillin was needed was that pure penicillin is the only form of penicillin that can then be successfully broken down into its constituent parts - and only its constituent parts.

With all - and only all - of its parts known, chemists then thought they could quickly make a patented highly profitable analogue of natural penicillin, much much cheaper than the fungus could.

Americans and the English would hold those patents and then hold the rest of the world to ransom after the war.

But vast amounts of crude penicillin were accidentally destroyed in the processing along the way to yield up a gram or two of nearly 100% pure penicillin.

Then the chemists deliberately destroyed all that pure penicillin, to then look at the resulting constituent sub-parts.

Every one of their many experiments, from start in processing to finishing in destruction, wasted much clinically useful penicillin that could have saved many many precious lives.

Again, for example, briefly in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was the world's leading penicillin producer - but almost all of that penicillin was then deliberately destroyed in the chemists' fruitless efforts to do something better than stupid little fungus.

Because, yes, old men in white lab coats and sporting PhDs from the best universities, in the middle of a deadly war, are just as capable of indulging in a useless pissing contest as a bunch of teenage louts.

All because they were determined not to let 'stupid' 'simple' fungus (their words) best 'the smartest chemists in the universe'.

Rather than simply buckling down to work with the fungus, as chemists, in an all out effort to make as much natural penicillin as possible - right now ! - to save all the war's dying.

For twenty long wasted years (1928-1948) the world of chemists tried to do something better that the tiny penicillium was already doing perfectly well, before finally publicly admitting defeat.

And the obsession with dry penicillin ?

Well, perfectly dry and hence perfectly stable penicillin was essential if a few huge drug factories were to supply all the vast world's continuing penicillin needs.

Most of the world's penicillin would have to remain viable for months or even years, as it waited to be transported around the world and then sit on warehouse shelfs until needed.

The same reason why most of our food is stuffed with preservative chemicals and shipped in, using much fossil
fuel, from warehouses a world away ----- the greed for seeing all the profits of the food business sit in fewer and fewer hands.

As a Christian, I like to think God took an early private revenge on all these greedy and hubris souls, before a second and more final round at Judgement Day.

Because Man has never been able to commercially best the humble fungus in making penicillin and crude penicillin is still the substrate for 90% of all of today's antibiotics .....

The pure penicillin acid in 1930's crude penicillium juice vs impure penicillin salts in 2010 penicillin pills

In crude penicillium juice, as exuded (pooped) straight from the mold, penicillin exists as the 100% free pure acid, swimming about in a lot of murky water.

An old rural uneducated woman living alone (the sort we used to burn as witches) can make this stuff.

By no coincidence, most of us would describe this penicillin (inaccurately) as highly impure.

But when we take a penicillin pill , it consists of lots of buffers and fillers and a little of that free penicillin acid now chemically bound to a metal in the form of a salt.

It takes a village of highly educated men (and about a billion dollars in equipment) to raise this child.

Again by no coincidence, most of us would (inaccurately) call this pill 100% pure penicillin.

The terms of pure and impure are really nothing but scientific rhetoric , as devoid of any fixed precise meaning as every term is in scientific rhetoric...

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 .

The medical phobia against fresh bread

It was an age when all the best educated (with urban medical researchers often in the vanguard) sincerely believed that mothers who made biscuits on the kitchen stove right before her waiting children and then immediately fed it to them were endangering their health.

Much better to feed them factory made biscuits made two thousand miles away and stored for weeks in a warehouse, smothered in chemical preservatives.

For only the old fashioned rural poor still made 'fresh from the oven' home made bread and biscuits.

And all the best educated used baby formula - only country yokels would be so gauche as to breastfed a baby in public.

The less you needed to buy artificial vitamins , the more you bought of them

The best fed and best educated  - who could actually easily afford fresh oranges even when they were most expensive - prided themselves on not getting their daily vitamin C from impure fruit.

For mixed in with the pure vitamin C (that they preferred to get from synthetic pills) natural fruits contained all sorts of impurities.

(Impurities such as tasty juicy fruit sugar water, fibre and  traces of minerals and other vitamins.)

We today who are well educated - we who pride ourselves on our 'advanced thinking' - should view this all as a cautionary tale against the hubris of the well educated who don't realize the sharp limits to their very expensive educations.

But it does help explain the irrational phobias held by well educated doctors had so hampered the mass production of wartime's 'safe enough' penicillin .

Because even in 1944 and the introduction of mass penicillin - high quality commercial penicillin was still at best 85% dross and 15% pure penicillin.

Vincent Duhig, unsung hero of Indie PEN movement

Again, as late as 1944, Vincent Duhig , one of the least known heroes of the Indie PEN movement, was still saving lives with injections of penicillin that were 99.99% dross and one part in a ten thousand pure penicillin.

That is food grade medicine - some cooked fruits and vegetables deliver vitamin C in those same (extraordinarily low) ratios.

But we don't inject those foods directly into a patient's bloodstream via an IV drip.

But that is what Duhig dared to do - plucking a dozen lives back from the grave - patients considered so far gone that all the other doctors permitted Duhig's 'mad' scheme , as a sort of a patient's faint hope clause.

"Heroic medicine" they call it.

But heroic or merely canny ?

Because while Duhig used techniques more primitive than those that Alexander Fleming had rejected 15 years earlier in 1928, he judged them safe enough to use to save the dying who had no other hope and he was proved right, over and over.

Like Martin Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft and some pioneering Russian penicillin doctors, Duhig was near enough to the hospital ward floor and far enough away from the ivory towers of basic research labs to recognize some obvious medical facts of life.

He knew penicillin itself was the most non toxic lifesaver even seen (still true today) and that by great good luck, the impurities in crude natural penicillin juice (like the impurities in crude orange juice) were 'safe enough'.

By contrast, the conventional treatment for most deadly bacterial infections were the all new , all dancing , all synthetic sulfa drugs - the darlings of that era's chemistry-mad medical reformers.

They were cheap, plentiful and often worked without incident.

But for a growing percentage of patients - a figure that rose rapidly as bacterial resistance grew to the sulfas and doses had to get dangerously high to remain effective - sulfas could make the patient painfully sick or damage their kidneys permanently - sometimes even kill them.

Doctors used them because the alternative often was an equally painful death.

The crude compromises of the busy hospital ward

Life on the busy ward floor - unlike inside the lab's pristine porcelain white walls - is always full of tricky compromises.

After all , ultimately doctors gets paid the big bucks above all for their skill in juggling between a drug's dosage being too safe to be effective and a drug's dosage being so high as to kill patient as well as germ.

As it happened, the crude penicillin of Duhig - being totally untreated by any chemical solvents etc - was probably less toxic to patients than the so called purified penicillins were .

That is because all the chemicals used in the purification process often added new impurities in the mix !

Yes ,wartime indie PEN , like wartime breast milk, was crude and impure - but unlike most wartime medical researchers, it was never brain-dead stupid....

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.

Howard Florey's fatal flaw

However, because Fleming saw penicillin as only working outside the body he had no need for Howard Florey's delusions about penicillin having to be highly purified to work safely inside the body.

Fleming merely want the chemists to make penicillin as a stable powder in a bottle any doctor could readily buy from a near by druggist, store on an unrefrigerated shelf for years and still expect to work as an external antiseptic at 100% efficiency when needed.

Call this 'lazy man medicine'  or call it normalcy.

Because only one doctor in ten thousand world wide ever tried making homemade penicillin even after it was proclaimed a life-saving miracle.

They all preferred to simply patiently wait until this miracle came to them as a stable and certified safe powder in a bottle from Big Pharma.

(I am not sure all their dying patients were as patient.)

Florey's great insight

Howard Florey - to his credit - seemed to have never bought Fleming's tale that penicillin would never work inside the body - as had every other medical scientist in the world .

But because he thought it had to be purified first and that purification would be very difficult , if not impossible , he did nothing until he got a competent full time chemist on staff together with a large long term grant to sustain the effort.

Meanwhile ten wasted years (1929-1939) went by.

Clearly Florey was no medical crusader, burning to save lives NOW!

And he , too , had too much faith in his own intellectual powers.

In 1939 he requested grant money for his co-worker Ernst Chain's work on three bacteria-killing chemicals produced by living microbes against other living microbes (what scientists call antibiosis).

One was penicillin and one key phrase in the grant request reveals his thinking and his fatal flaw.

He believed that penicillin , if it can be purified, will prove safe and effective inside the body (eventually and hopeful inside the bodies of infected human patients).

But he just assumes this , again just like Fleming .

Without actually doing any of the needed experiments to prove his contention, one simply can not say that penicillin is non toxic inside the body and it is the impurities that will be unsafe inside the body.

Actually there are always - in advance of the actual experiments - a range of possibilities sliding between three poles (that represent absolutes rather than real world situations.)

The three poles are (a) only the main product is toxic (b) only the impurities are toxic (c) both are equally toxic or equally non toxic.

Let us get concrete with a few examples.

You are a chemical firm making the poison prussic acid. You discover impurities in the resulting mix (impurities being anything that isn't prussic acid).

Prussic acid is almost uniquely toxic and it is the main product - any impurities thrown up may or maybe not toxic but are unlikely to be anywhere as toxic as prussic acid.

But in this case, you are seeking pure toxicity - impure non-toxicity is the problem , not the solution.

Grapefruit are 99.99% impure of vitamin C - thanks be to God

Grapefruit are a so so source of pure vitamin C . A 500 gram fruit might hold only 50 mg of vitamin C - one bit in 10,000 is pure vitamin C and the rest is - technically - impurities.

So why do we bother ?

Well they are very tasty , providing lots of water, fibre, sugar and various other minerals and vitamins - as well as some of the tasteless vitamin C we could get from a pill.

(And surprise surprise, that pill , when taken with the needed glass of water, is also mostly dross and a tiny amount, often only 100 mg, of vitamin C !)

And all those grapefruit 'impurities 'are safe - we eat them without any danger and in fact with a great deal of enjoyment.

All our food mostly consists of a vast bulk of relatively safe impurities and tiny amounts of pure vitamins and minerals.

But some foods - some very tasty mushrooms - consist of mostly nice food and tiny amounts of impurities called toxins that kill us.

So it all depends.

First we must define what is the main product we want from a mixture before we can define its 'impurities'.

Do grapefruits consist of 90% food (discarding only the skin and seeds) or do they consist of .001 % vitamin C and 99.99% dross ?

Then we need to do the experiments before drawing any conclusions.

Because sometimes , as with weak impure penicillin juice versus pure strong penicillin powder , it turns out that penicillin allergy deaths only began with massive amounts of the 100% pure stuff !

By sheer good luck, in this particular mushroom (this strain of the sometimes dangerous penicillium mold), the impurities were non-toxic as was the penicillin .

But for a relatively large percent of people, if given large amounts of pure penicillin direct into a vein by careless doctors, it can kill on the spot in a severe allergy reaction.

The safe solution is to go on using pure penicillin but to test new patients with tiny amounts - just beneath the skin - first.

Florey spent more than ten years - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s seeking ever purer penicillin to increase the safety of this injectable drug.

His obsession was scientifically wrong, logically deluded and it delayed the wartime introduction of mass produced penicillin for years.

Florey was a racist

Florey was an eugenicist and a racist from his youth and I believe this sort of racial purity thinking leaked over into the science side of his brain - he saw penicillin as the Anglo Saxons and the impurities as the Blacks.

Blood that was 99% Anglo Saxon and 1% Black was impure and defiled - and much the same applied to pure versus impure penicillin.

In Florey's twisted mind.

Ward doctors are like shop floor chemists - they hold few illusions 

Another problem was that both Fleming and Florey were far more lab doctors than ward doctors - while Martin Henry Dawson divided his time equally between both.

Sheltered university chemists quickly lose their delusions about the academic awards for obtaining 100% total synthesis ,regardless of expense or yield, once on the factory floor of a profit-seeking chemical firm.

So too with busy ward doctors balancing a dying patient versus a very dangerous drug that might injure them as well as save their life.

My mother would have backed Martin Henry Dawson 110%

My mother , in her early thirties, was saved from certain infectious death by a single course of streptomycin .

It left her deaf in one ear - by that time, in 1962 , this was a well known risk of high doses of that drug.

She didn't complain then and she never ever did .

She told how grateful she was to lose her hearing to gain her life just three days before she suffered her fatal stroke - when she was in her eighties, a half century later.

So call me prejudiced - I like doctors who take chances to save patients' lives.

I like Martin Henry Dawson.

He saw two patients about to die from invariably fatal endocarditis.

All other known medical solutions had failed.

He knew penicillin seemed non toxic in various animals and in human blood - from his own research and that of Fleming and Florey.

He tested a small amount of penicillin  that he suspected to be probably very weak , on himself, injected just under his skin.

No toxic results.

He did the same on the two patients - not toxic.

He gradually and slowly upped the amounts and also moving gradually to injection methods that introduced the penicillin far quicker into the blood and hence was far more potentially dangerous.

Only local pain at the injection site and a temporary fever and shakes was noted - routine for most injected drugs then.

All Dawson sought from penicillin was that it was relatively safe - and effective.

He used the penicillin he made himself with hours or days - he wasn't afraid of hard work, unlike Fleming - so stability was an non-issue to him.

Like the food that Dawson ate and enjoyed, his crude penicillin was hardly pure - but so what - it was basically safe.

Safer in fact - even in crude form - than the 100% pure sulfa drugs that were then routinely saving many lives while also making many people very very sick in the process.

Like a chemist on the shop floor ( think Smith, Elder and Jephcott ) Dawson saw life as full of compromises and the job was determining what was really Job One.

For all of them , it was saving as many patients as they could - NOW !

And God Bless 'Em for that...

1943 : Africa's poorest get penicillin BEFORE well-to-do in America and England

Not, admittedly , a headline you're ever likely to see soon above mainstream (ie , American and British) penicillin histories , but that doesn't make it any less true.

George Marshall Findlay (1893-1952) , together with Kenneth R Hill and A MacPherson, brewed up his own crude penicillin in 1943 to apply upon the open ulcers of the dreaded disease Yaws on West African sufferers and got great results.

He had to do it all himself because Britain and America were too busy fighting over how to divided the world into two big markets after they had synthesized penicillin to actually make any serious amounts of (natural) penicillin to save lives in the here and now*.

*here and now : aka WWII.

America ,as is well known, has a pathological resistance to ever signing international treaties but there it was , in the middle of an all out war, negotiating a international treaty with Britain on the post war market division for their shared patented synthetic penicillin.

The two planned an exclusive on the lifesaver even tighter than they planned to have on the A-bomb.

That meant no encouragement of natural penicillin plants in Africa, South America, India and East Asia .

The Anglo-American fear was that in these places ready access to very cheap labour and even readier access to cheap sugar cane waste (as a carbon source feedstock) would permit the local crude penicillin to undercut the price of profit-inflated synthetic penicillin shipped in from thousands of miles away.

But penicillium spores are like the A-bomb's radioactive fallout clouds : no respecter of national borders and international commercial treaties.

They drifted in and out of Britain and its distant colonies alike and that meant crude penicillin could be made everywhere under cottage industry conditions.

(Even at the battlefront in Italy by barely trained Canadian medics using potato washings as a feedstock !)

"All Life is Family" Pt 1. (1939-1945: a cure for science) , will detail all the world-wide WWII efforts to make crude penicillin that it can find.

All this in an effort to combat the Whig history of wartime penicillin that strongly suggests that the actual end result - cheap abundant natural penicillin - was what the Anglo-American governments and their medical cum scientific cum commercial elites wanted all along.

It intends to bring the dreaded "C" word into science talk : conflict , as in conflict between scientists working on the same wartime "side".

And it will detail scientific winners and losers , again both working on the same wartime side.

A welcome change from the zillions of WWII science stories that always seem to show Allied scientists beating Axis scientists in a dramatic race against time - when in fact, the evidence is much more mixed as to who did what first -- and whether coming first ever really mattered.

Yes, the Axis lost the war, but no , it wasn't at all due to their low quality of science.

Seventy five years after the war, can't we stop re-fighting WWII based on propaganda lies ...

"Irish Jimmy" Duhig and his Uisce Beatha : Penicillin as Orange Juice

I woke up the middle of last night to find I had a bad cold and so naturally got to thinking about its prevention and cure.

Its natural and unnatural cure and what all this had to do with the unknown history of wartime's crude penicillin.

Naturally, one avoids respiratory colds and worse by eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables , drinking lots of liquids, getting plenty of rest, and living a secure existence in a well ventilated sizeable home.

One gets more and deadlier respiratory diseases living stressed lives in cramped, il-ventilated homes without adequate fresh fruit and vegetables.

The other way to avoid colds and such is to daily pop a lot of synthetic vitamin pills for your entire life.

You will then have become that most sought after client of Big Pharma : someone from (A) a sizeable group of people who have a (B) 'chronic' 'disease' and (C)  who can afford to buy the moderately expensive solution to the disease, daily, from a drug company for the rest of their lives.

Insulin for middle class diabetics was a big money spinner for Big Pharma , starting in the 1920s, for just those reasons ---- just as the mania for vitamin pills for the middle class was in the 1930s.

No mind that the middle class were hardly needing any vitamins, based on their adequate and varied diets based on the more expensive fresh products of Nature.

They may not have needed any tiny white synthetic vitamin pills .

But they did have enough money to buy them and they did have the necessary ingrained faith in "Science" that helped them swallow Big Pharma's claims regarding the need for daily synthetic vitamin supplements to succeed in this "busy, complex, Modern Age."

Now adequate Vitamin C is regarded as vital to prevent and limit colds.

We can get enough simply eating enough fresh vegetables but most  of us like to supplement this with a tasty morning glass of golden orange juice rather than dash down a tasteless dry little white pill of 100% pure synthetic Vitamin C.

Horrors ! said 1930s Big Pharma and its tame pill-pushing scientific "consultants".

That glass of orange juice or the even more basic orange or lime itself is so impure - containing merely a tiny fraction of one percent pure Vitamin C.

Who knows what bad toxins lurk within it ?

Well we now agree that the orange or lime holds only other goodnesses - like soluble and insoluble fibre.

Scientists knew this even back in the 1930s, but the majority had tagged along on a culture-wide Modernist mania for purity - racial and chemical - and couldn't see the fibre benefits for all their dark fears of possible unknown impurities in the innocent orange.

Nasty Reds lurking under "only innocent-looking" orange beds or groves.

Jimmy Duhig, along with Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft and a very few others didn't buy all this : they thought that the golden solution of crude penicillin was the literal Water of Life, Aqua Vitae or Uisce Beatha , for their dying patients.

Even after 100% pure natural penicillin was available after the war, Dawson's co-worker Gladys Hobby, now a key employee of Big Pharma, was allowed to publish a scientific article seeking to demonstrate that crude penicillin was ,in some way, more effective than the pure stuff !

But back to our trios of modern-day James Linds.

Instead of waiting - perhaps centuries - for a patently-profitable synthetic penicillin pill , they did a James Lind and starting saving lives - right now ! - with the penicillium equivalent of Lind's natural lime juice for scurvied sailors : natural crude penicillium juice.

The fact that these still-unknowns saved many lives while the now-famous Howard Florey merely fiddled about trying fruitlessly to make synthetic penicillin merely reminds of the power of Big Pharma and their many scientific sycophants on Nobel Prize committees.....

It was the smallest of the wartime Manhattan Projects, but it had the biggest impact on making our world a kinder gentler place

Has the Manhattan-based Atomic Bomb and nuclear reactors really made our world a kinder healthier place ?

Was the Manhattan-based Norden bombsight and its delusion of mass bombing of civilians as way to end all future wars really the way to a kinder gentler world ?

Was Manhattan-based Dr Foster Kennedy's wartime project to propose the gassing of all the retarded children ,in emulation of Hitler's Aktion T4 project, really going to make us a better people ?

But Henry Dawson's tiny project was completely different : it was to see that abundant cheap natural penicillin was made available to all, without exception, at the height of a total war.

 Even those judged medically in the Allied nations as being ' life unworthy of wartime medical care' .

Dawson wanted them saved not in spite of it being wartime, but rather precisely because it was wartime, because morally this was the best single way to combat Hitler's deadly yet globally popular eugenic ideology .

The legacy of the belief in life's 100% inclusivity, born from his tiny Manhattan-based project , lives on more than a half century after he's been gone.....

High tech drugs uphold White Man's Burden (1940)

It is still not often recognized that by the late 1930s, particularly after the huge success of the totally-not-from-nature Sulfa drugs (because they were 100% artificial) , high tech pharmaceuticals had became the key pillar upholding "The White Man's Burden".

Firstly - but still relatively unimportant compared to today - the biggest high tech pharmaceutical nations intended to earn lots of  of export revenues, via exclusive sales of high tech drugs to their informal (Germany and America) or formal (Britain and France) empires.

To do so, they had to strongly imply that that the only really safe and effective drugs were made of pure chemical synthetics produced in the leading medical research and chemical industry nations - conveniently , themselves and themselves only.

But this claim has much bigger 'legs' .

Because high tech drugs could also be used as the best single way to defend an old and failing hegemonic trope : the so called "White Man's Burden".

In the recent past, Europeans and European Americans had justified invading and ruthlessly exploiting others' societies as part of a holy missionary drive to bring Christianity, peace and democracy to primitive or despotic cultures.

Doctors and nurses had always been a big part of that mission effort but only as clinicians : hands-on, bedside doctors and nurses.

This hands-on help was all part of the (now-fading) 19th century belief in empathy, charity and humanitarianism.

In the sparkling brand new Twentieth Century, cold hard rational Science was the new God.

Pharmaceutical research could be used to hold off the many new opponents Civilized European Man faced by the time of the Great Depression.

Let us imagine a drug company ad's illustration from circa 1940.

In one corner of the illustration : a white European-origined  man , well educated and upper middle class,  stern-faced  in a white lab coat in a gleaming porcelain white laboratory located in a big country's biggest city, staring thoughtfully at the synthetic contents of a beaker.

In the other corner : a dark-faced peasant woman, poor and uneducated, cooking up some foul-smelling 'healing' Nature-based brew in her rural hovel, somewhere in the dank Tropics.

Implied strongly in the text copy below was the claim that her mishmash of a folk remedy would only harm rather than help, while his 100% pure synthetic drug cured - completely, cheaply and safely.

No Oxford-educated-darkie  was going to be able to "outside agitate" his way around that winsome storyline.

Obviously ,no one expected an "inside agitator" would come along and betray both his race and his profession.

But that is exactly what New York's Columbia University based Henry Dawson did.

In 1941, in the august pages of the New York Times itself, house organ of modernity , he gave a loud defence of his life-saving "crude penicillin" as  home-brewed himself from foul-smelling natural mold slime.

No wonder his ultimately hugely successful efforts were so resisted while he was alive and so buried with him after his premature death......

" Crude is more than 'good enough' ...

... if it can save lives right now ! "

Lifesaving's perpetual understudy , Penicillin, unexpectedly made her long overdue debut in a medical theatre in uptown Manhattan on October 16th 1940 .

Albeit more than a dozen years after the best lifesaver ever known was first discovered.

It all happened when Dr Henry Dawson suddenly broke his understanding with biochemist Karl Meyer that penicillin would not be used systemically (given to save a life), until she had been synthesized or at least very highly refined.

It had been assumed that this happy event would probably occur sometime early in the new university term starting in January 1941.

But it had all changed now.

For Dawson was facing not just one but two young patients dying on his ward of the invariably fatal untreatable disease SBE that he was convinced penicillin could finally cure.

SBE usually hit the poor, immigrants and minorities.

Naturally enough, on the very first day of the new draft, they were judged by the eugenically-minded medical elite as being the 4Fs of the 4Fs,  life unworthy of wasting too much expensive and scarce medical attention upon in a time of war.

Dawson felt passionately different - he felt that saving the 4Fs of the 4Fs in a time of war was the best possible riposte to Hitler and his values : because not a military victory but a moral victory for the Allies was what was really needed to fire the world up to tackle the Nazis with serious energy.

'If crude penicillin can start saving lives now, it is more than refined enough' was Dawson's new mantra , as he introduced this neologism into the medical-chemical vernacular.

To a chemistry-besotted medical fraternity, wedded to ever greater purity and refinement , this deliberate use of the term crude tied together with their main job, lifesaving, was like a red flag.

Crude penicillin for crude patients was their unspoken sentiment.

It didn't make Dawson popular then or now with the medical and chemical communities..... or their historians.

Because it reminds us all, that as Hippocrates looked on in horror, for 15 wasted years the world medical community choose to put refinement before life-saving.

But what ordinary patients thought of Dawson's notions has hardly ever been asked.

I am a patient who has received cheap, abundant , natural , non-synthetic, non-patented, "inclusive" penicillin of the Henry Dawson variety and I am grateful to him : eternally grateful.

I don't think I am alone.

"Hyssop in a time of Cedar" then is a 'patient's eye view' of Henry Dawson's impact on the genesis of wartime penicillin : from exclusive, secret, patented and militarized to inclusive, public, public domain and de-militarized.

Because the knowledge that cheap, abundant penicillin was being made available - now - to dying people of all classes, colours and genders around the world was more than just WWII's equivalent of WWI's promise of a return to "a land fit for heroes" : it was the Word made visible.

It was not just the fact that penicillin , like the sulfa drugs before it, saved lives - that was not enough.

It more in the way news reports revealed that it was carried  literally around the world, by bombers diverted from their normal killing work, during the Total War to end All Wars, to save the lives of dying babies.

This - the promise of returning home to a world 'healthy enough for heroes' - finally seemed an Allied cause worth dying for.

This sentiment was best expressed, not by a British Prime Minister in a barnburner of a open air speech, but by the phrase-makers of an new age : an anonymous copywriter slaving away for a booze baron from somewhere out in the American Mid West.

Over a painting of a severely wounded American GI getting  penicillin in a vividly colourful jungle battlefield, were the evocative words , "Thanks to PENICILLIN - he will come home! "

And thanks too, to the bog-ordinary mold that created this miracle this ad reminded its viewers.

That something ordinarily so small and despised could wrought such miracles - that too put paid to Hitler and Tojo's claim that Might made right and Bigger was always better.

If inclusivity , rather than unitary exclusivity, is the hallmark of our post-modern era, then Henry Dawson's crude penicillin for crude patients was one of the physical first artifacts of postmodernity...

Crude Penicillin and Bacterial Transformation : two neologisms of Henry Dawson

Henry Dawson was far from a wordsmith but he did coin two neologisms that have survived in today's scientific and historical lexicon.

One was "bacterial transformation" (a form of HGT, horizontal gene transfer -- basically non-Darwinian inheritance) and the other was "crude penicillin".

To explain this latter term is is best to recognize it is really a term of scientific and political polemics.

Let us imagine a British Empire in the early 1940s, badly hurting a time of war because it had refused to accept a fact known for at least two centuries.

That fact was that the most natural , most versatile and cheapest way to solve the naval and merchant ship scurvy crisis was with a good supply of citrus fruit kept on board.

Marshalled against this fact discovered by James Lind was an array of louder, better educated and greedier voices.

What they were telling the government and the media and future historians was that Britain's dying sailors must simply be patient.

In its own sweet time an expensive synthetic vitamin C was sure to emerge, fully patented, from one of the nation's chemical firms.

One expensively patented , tasteless , pill would solve the human daily needs for vitamin C - as would other patented pills for all our daily food intake.

We needn't waste time away from our desks on meals when a glass of water and a big handful or two of pills would solve the problem.

Against this chemical boasting would be an array of people saying that they looked forward to meals - perhaps even more than sex and certainly far more than they looked forward to work.

Others would point out that citrus fruit and vitamin C rich vegetables are found world wide - are both cheap and abundant - a security of supply issue.

They would further point out that the deadly delay in solving this sea-going crisis for the Empire was simply down to greed and ambition.

The delay was down to some ambitious scientists seeking the glory for having synthesized something Mother Nature already provided and to some greedy chemical companies wanting a profitable patent to exploit.

These claims against patented vitamin C pills are so damning  a master scientific polemist would be called upon to defend Chemistry.

A scientific polemist like Howard Florey because he, too, was a bit of a neologism creator : he was the first person to talk about impure and pure penicillin, for example.

An orange ,he could point out, could potentially be a dangerous source of vitamin C because it was an impure  source of the needed vitamin (in the sense that vitamin C only made up a tiny fraction of one percent of the orange by weight).

In a 1940s culture where the middle class had more education than common sense, this would be effective arguing : everyone wanted cleanliness and purity.

Henry Dawson immediately caught onto this "Only I know how to make pure safe penicillin" line of attack from Florey's very first article on penicillin and quickly mounted a rebuttal.

And he did so in the august pages of the New York Times on May 6th 1941.

In effect, he said an orange can be one of four things, as regards to being an safe source of vitamin C.

It could be unsafe because both the orange and its vitamin C are potentially dangerous.

It could be safe because both the orange and its vitamin C are harmless to consume.

It could be unsafe because vitamin C is potentially dangerous, perhaps in larger quantities.

It could be unsafe because the orange itself was potentially toxic.

The only thing to do , as always , was less talk and more experiments.

He tested impure penicillin (penicillium juice) upon himself and upon some human patients and found it perfectly safe.

He boldly called his successful medicine "crude penicillin" --- naturally made penicillin happily bathing its its naturally produced impure bath.

it was a medicine made by microbes and offered up to all, free in the Public Domain : thus meeting Florey's subtle corporate agenda head-on.

Ironically, years later, it was revealed that pure penicillin itself  was potentially unsafe (unlike the rest of the harmless penicillium juice) because when pure it can be given in large enough amounts to result in sudden penicillin allergy deaths !

Pure members of the aryan races might still believe they can only survive on pure penicillin and pure vitamin C but the rest of this polyglot world still likes to take its daily nourishment 'crude' , dining around the table with family and friends.

It hasn't seemed to harm the seven billions of us so far....

Majority of Americans remain silent as Woodrow Wilson's legacy is brutally destroyed : 1938-1941

Thank God Almighty that Adolf Hitler declared war on America, because without it, would America have ever gone to war against the greatest evil the world has ever known ?

The fact remains that between September 1938 and December 1941, the majority of Americans had stood silent as the legacy of their own president Woodrow Wilson was brutally dismembered by the twin 'evil empires' of Hitler and Stalin.

Czechoslovakia, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Yugoslavia were all creations of Wilson's direct efforts at Versailles.

The larger spirit of Wilson's efforts : that small nations should be allowed to live without being swallowing up by their larger neighbour's brutal might  had , until 1938-1941, kept countries like Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Albania, Norway, Holland and Greece independent.

Now that too was all gone.

Still the majority of Americans kept silent and indifferent ; they wanted to keep out of the "conflict between the nations" of Europe.

Conflict between nations ???!!!

When I learn that a high school senior and football star has walloped the hell out of a primary toddler his girlfriend was supposed to be minding, I do not call it a "conflict between school students" though that is technically and legalistically correct.

I call it child abuse and deadly assault : the 5 year old didn't start this "conflict" , the 17 year old went to war on it.

So it was when Russia invaded Estonia or Germany invaded Denmark , without any cause besides sheer evil greed.

Morally the excuses most Americans gave then for not going to the defence of the weak against the strong would not stand up in a court today, if they were accused of just standing by while a 17 year old football star beat the crap out of a 5 year old child.

And in a higher - moral - court , they did not stand up then.

This was the sort of moral cesspool that Henry Dawson was swimming against when he defiantly decided to introduce the Age of Antibiotics by treating the "weakest of the weak", the "4Fs of the 4Fs" with his crude penicillin, on the very day America choose to celebrate its "1As of the 1As" : Draft Registration day, October 16th 1940...

The Cure for Auschwitz Disease : "Dawson's Crude" : .56% penicillin ...and 99 and 44/100ths pure love

Pray there comes a day when most premature deaths really are 'Acts of God', when even the best of money and the best of medical care could not result in a happy ending.

But until that happier day, most premature deaths in the world - in peace as in war - are 'Acts of Humanity' , or rather 'Acts of Lack of Humanity'.

Sins of Omission : premature death caused because the people dying are not judged (by others more fortunate) as worthy of devoting much money or effort towards saving.

In war, comparatively few people die as soldiers dying of mortal wounds gained in combat.

The Nazis' behavior provides a particularly clear example of this.

They fed and cared for  the captured POWs and enemy civilians of some nations (the Dutch for example) but for other (Russians and Poles for example) many or most of these people were shot after battle or left to starve and die of disease from lack of food, medical care and shelter.

The food and fuel saved as a result meant that no German citizen went hungry or cold.

The right kind of German civilian anyway.

Using the war as excuse, the Nazis killed many German civilians, those judged 'life unworthy of life' , to free up food and hospitals for other Germans.

In another well known example of  WWII's Sins of Omission, Winston Churchill ignored the pleas of his top British officials in India and let four million poor Bengali civilians needlessly starve to death in 1943-1944 ,rather than divert some food and some shipping from  Allied peoples he judged more worthy of receiving them.

Even the different death rates from wounds gained in combat  , among the so called "modern" nations engaged in World War Two is revealing.

The Americans and British generally devoted more resources to saving their wounded compared to the Germans, Japanese, Russians and Italians.

 As a result,more western Allied troops survived the same severity of wound as experienced by troops of these other nations.

'Of course', I hear you say, 'they were richer nations, it was easy for them !'

But no : they had a choice, because the extra money devoted to this extraordinary care of the wounded could have been allocated elsewhere: to more and better anti-tank artillery, for example.

An extraordinary effort to produce the best anti-tank artillery ever made was , in fact, probably the cheapest way for the Western Allies to have ended the war against Germany at least a year earlier than it did, saving millions of lives all around.

I raise the genuine issue of better earlier anti-tank artillery versus the best possible military health care to remind us that even total war still leaves us with genuine moral choices.

More Lancaster bombers versus more 17 pounder anti-tank guns versus raising everyone's morale by generously providing penicillin enough for all people were some of the choices - part political, part moral, part economical - that leaders had to make in WWII.

Making the wrong ones meant the war dragged on longer than it had to, costing more lives lost.

It is not enough to say Churchill won the war in 1945 ; better to ask, could he have won the war in 1943 ?

In 1940, Henry Dawson was battling a near universal mindset among the world's research-oriented doctors of that time : that a medical researcher's only task was to determine that disease A was caused by bug B and that bug B was killed by compound C.

Then, like sleeping under a bridge, the researchers considered that the cure for disease A was open to rich and poor alike : pay for three weeks of needles at $10 a shot: together with doctors fees, say $250 in total.

When the annual wages of the working poor, if they found work, was very lucky to be $750 in 1940, that was a cure well beyond their reach.

Besides the fact that their disease might be far harder to cure than that of someone well off, due to the cumulative affect of their lack of good nutritious food for years and years.

Or that fact that living, as they did, in poor and crowded housing, disease A was more likely to come back again, even after an impossibly expensive cure.

Now what if disease A is something one gets from having open wounds - such as the open wounds all civilian mothers have after childbirth, or the open wounds that soldiers get after exposure to shell fire in battle.

How do we judge western Allied governments unwilling to provide the only life saver for disease A , either to any civilian moms (except those personally known to lead disease A researchers) or to any soldiers with wounds so severe they will be discharged and pensioned off, if they live ?

And how do we judge these governments when at the same time, they are gladly willing to provide live-saving compound C  (totally free !) to men who had either very high and very low peacetime incomes, just as long as their war wounds (by sheer luck) are only moderately severe and they can be expected to return soon to combat duty ?

Is this attitude not different in kind from that of the Nazis, but merely different in degree ?

Dawson had no realistic expectations that a few small injections of a very crude penicillin powder, hastily made in a few weeks, would cure such an incurable invariably fatal disease as subacute bacterial endocarditis, (SBE), then as now the acid test of all infectious diseases.

His powder had only about 8 to 9 units of penicillin per mg in it ; ie it was only about .56% pure.

The rest (the remaining 99 and 44/100ths worth),was in many researchers' minds, "junk".

Rather as they later described most of our DNA : "junk".

I believe Dawson considered his little bit of brown powder to be .56% penicillin and 99.44% pure love.

99.44% pure care, concern, caring.

For Dawson was judging his attempt to save Aaron Alston and Charlie Aronson by a much different - and much more moral - acid test.

To Dawson, SBE in the Fall of 1940 was not the acid test of infectious disease, but rather the acid test of pernicious morality.

These SBE patients were be judged to be 1940 America's "4Fs of the 4Fs", suffering from the militarily most useless disease on earth and not worthy of wasting any precious medical resources upon.

Now a doctor named Francis Peabody that Dawson had hoped to train with (but who died of cancer before that could occur) had earlier and famously said that the care of the patient begins (only begins in fact ) if the doctor first cares about the patient.

A single doctor can't hope to directly save everyone dying in a big war.

But by setting a very public example about caring for the least of these, those judged "unworthy of life", even in the midst of a war , they can hope to begin to still the trigger fingers of those all too willing to kill prisoners  just because 'it is too much bother to bring them back to our own lines'.

Only when the world is willing to care about "useless" others, even in the midst of wars, can we expect to begin to see war deaths reduced to combat mortal wounds, and then to ultimately see lesser and shorter and less brutal wars.

Only in a world where ordinary people care about others judged "useless", can we expect to still the hand that dropped the pellets at Auschwitz .

Which is why I earnestly claim that Dawson's Crude was the best and only cure for the Auschwitz Disease ....

OSRD /1942: did Manhattan Project type thinking bleed over and obstruct the Penicillin Project as well ?

It is crystal clear that Merck's top scientific advisor A N Richards was never a strong advocate for fast-paced penicillin development within Merck, as that drug company casually messed about with penicillin, from November 1939 till August 1941.

That is, Merck had 18 months of some sort of commercial and scientific activity around penicillin , before Howard Florey actually arrived on the scene.

But Florey eventually made Richards a strong convert to the idea of having Richards' military medical weapon oriented agency , the famous OSRD , use penicillin for secret military advantage over the Axis.

It is not clear that this would have extended - in practise - to denying penicillin to dying Axis POWs.

 But keeping penicillin a secret from the Axis definitely would have denied penicillin to dying Allied POWs behind Axis lines : something that all of Florey's, Richards' and Fleming's present day defenders universally ignore.

Very much to his credit then that WWI vet and WWII military officer and doctor Robert Pulvertaft did dis-obey orders and shared the secrets of penicillin production with Axis-friendly Turkish doctors.

But imagining a Canadian dying of sulfa-resistant blood poisoning in a German POW camp and the Canadian POWs being told by the German doctor, 'we could save him , if only we had a bit of this Allied-invented penicillin that we've been hearing rumours of'.

When the Canadians ask why doesn't the doctor get some, the doctor says that if the Allies won't even share penicillin with their own dying civilians, how can they be expected to share it with the enemy ?

But could penicillin have really ever have been a potentially secret and successful medical weapon ?

Here I , following closely on Henry Dawson's thinking,  definitely part company with Florey and his friend Richards.

Henry Dawson demonstrated - in just five weeks - and under conditions as fully primitive as Fleming's, that one could quickly make a lot of crude penicillin that was non-toxic when injected into humans.

If Fleming and Dawson could do so, (quickly, easily and cheaply, ) so too could the fired up Nazi war machine.

Not so, said Florey -and his side kick Richards.

The scientific characteristics of penicillin haven't changed at all since September 1928, but now , thanks to Florey, the scientific rhetoric totally had.

Florey tells his readers and listeners, to ignore completely what Fleming-the-author says is "penicillin".

To wit, 'a mixture of about two dozen unknown compounds in a slurry of water that is non-toxic even if injected in very large volumes internally, and yet has marked anti-bacterial affects'.

In my revision of the facts, says Florey in his first August 1940 article, "penicillin" is now actually just one of those compounds.

All the rest and all that water are just dirty, dank and dangerous.

Only if penicillin is first pure, dry and stable is it any good.

Because where it is really good , is in the front lines as a local antiseptic for open war wounds (here I do still agree with Fleming) ---- and that idea won't work if crude liquid penicillin must kept viable in portable electric refrigerators.

Who ever has heard of such things ?

But as Florey tells Richards how complex and difficult the purification process is, Richards grows despondent again, but never the less this information does go into the back of Richards brain.

Only to re-emerge in early 1942, when the forces of war censorship and secrecy can be employed in full bloom.

Because complex and expensive separation and purification processes had become very much a two-edged sword for American military science and industry.

Artificial rubber was vital to the war effort - it was easy to make but a real bugger to separate the good rubber from the bad.

Dried blood products held real promise at the front lines - but only if their separation wasn't so complex.

And the Atomic Bomb - a piece of cake to make it work - if only we could get enough pure U-235 separated.

At some point early in 1942, these problems suddenly became military and commercial opportunities in the minds of the OSRD's highest officers.

If only rich, un-bombed America could solve these complex purification problems - and then keep the details secret - this would give them a big military advantage over their poorer enemy opponents.

And give America a post-war commercial advantage as well over its smaller poorer Allied friends like Britain.

So just as we see an abrupt turn around , in mid 1942 , from the OSRD re sharing much atomic information with the British, we start to see the British also get less information from the OSRD about penicillin research as well.

Like synthetic rubber, synthetic quinine, dried blood products and U-235, the very expensive complexity of pure penicillin suddenly made it more, not less ,of an attraction to the military weapon-oriented OSRD.

The key was to keep secret from the American voters and taxpayers just how many miracle cures were happening with the current - relatively impure -penicillin.

Because if they knew that, the newspapers would be filled with it and the Germans and Japanese would hear about it via Neutral nation reporting.

They they too would also start curing their base hospital wounded with crude semi-purified penicillin ,largely negating the military advantage of fully dry stable pure penicillin.

But was there really ever an absolute need for dry stable penicillin to use it in the front lines ?

Poppycock !

Because it turned out that good old crude liquid blood was actually much better than the complex dried stuff at saving soldiers' lives and could just as easily be used even in combat : good old fashioned low tech American ingenuity (not from the OSRD high tech boys of course) came to the rescue.

Cheap, rugged, disposable,  parachute-portable plywood ice boxes kept blood and penicillin cold, with refills of ice every couple of days........

Aside from VEGEMITE, what did Aussies Gray & Duhig have that Alexander Fleming totally lacked ? (Moral Fervour)

6 million might have lived

In the Fall of 1943, fifteen years after Nobel Prize winner Alexander Fleming proved that penicillin - at least his method of making penicillin - could NOT save lives, two intrepid Aussies using his very same penicillin strain and his very same methods (right down to the use of Seitz asbestos filter pads) plucked a half dozen patients from the jaws of certain death.
  Aussie "Men at Work" , under tough wartime conditions

"They came from a land down under" - working in fact in then remote Brisbane Australia , under severe wartime shortage of staff and materials, their methods displayed NO technical improvements over what Fleming and his two young assistants had managed 15 years earlier.

Unfortunately, Altruism was never Alexander Fleming's long suit...

The key difference was that they had the moral fervour ( that Fleming totally lacked) to try almost anything to save people who were certain to die in days if not hours , by pumping extraordinary amounts of impure ("crude") penicillin water into their bodies.

Even at that late stage in penicillin's development, when the whole middle class world was talking up the miracle of penicillin, most doctors would rather see a patient die, than publicly admit that they injected an impure natural substance into a human being's bloodstream.

(It, after all, was an age of eugenics, and pure breeds, families of good blood and evil half bloods , pure-blooded Indians, when 1/32 or even one drop of black blood made you legally black and when the American Red Cross would not allow the mixing of black and white blood in transfusions : pureness and blood had a quasi-scientific, almost mystical , quality in those years .)

 Nothing impure went into such a symbol of purity as human blood.

So even in late 1943, only a few doctors let the two pioneers, Duhig and Gray, inject raw penicillin juice into their patients - and even they, only when their patient seemed at death's door.

So these were not average very sick patients - they were gravely weakened patients given up for dead - so their recovery was all the more remarkable.

Penicillin's Holocaust

If Fleming had displayed any of their moral fervour in the 12 peacetime years when he had penicillin virtually to himself, an estimated six millions lives might have been saved.

Including - tragically - his own favourite brother  John in 1937 - whose pneumonia case was easily curable by even modest amounts of crude penicillin water - if only Alexander Fleming  had tried.

Instead it was left to the moral fervour of another Scot, Nova Scotian born  Martin Henry Dawson, to first put impure penicillin into a patient's bloodstream, in 1940.

Fewer doctors than you can count on your hands followed Dawson's moral fervour when it came to fighting for the right of impure - natural - penicillin's  to save lives,  in those all important  years between October 1940 and May 1944....

* They used Vegemite in the making of their penicillin juice , as a growth stimulant