Dawson was, in fact, the THIRD (reluctant but duty bound) leader of the tiny Manhattan penicillin Project

In September 1940, fearing the internment of German Jewish refugee scientists - even possibly those with recent American citizenship - was bound to follow the panicky British Empire decision to most of its German refugees from Hitler, biochemist Dr Karl Meyer became the first leader of what was to become the four year long Manhattan penicillin Project.

Dr Meyer was determined to find some sort of way to prove to the American war machine that he was too valuable to intern.

And finally purifying a drug that could kill the few militarily important pathogen bacteria that the hot new Sulfa drugs could not, would do just that.

Purifying a natural substance is sometimes by far the most difficult step on the road to then synthetizing and patenting it.

Any clinical testing could wait until the substance was safely purified.

For now, what Meyer and his assistant Eleanor Chaffee needed most from their two microbiologists (doctors Dawson and Hobby) was their highly practised skills in growing microbes.

And then later, their other well honed skill in measuring the bacteria-killing powers of any substances Meyer's chemical skills threw up.

But all that changed in early October 1940, when new patient A. (Leroy) Alston heard of the project and in a very real sense, hijacked the leadership of the project.

Leroy was a young black man from Harlem, dying of then invariably fatal SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis) the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of young people until the 1960s.

Significantly most of those deaths occurred among the poor, immigrants and minorities.

And Leroy didn't like the idea of accepting a SBE death as inevitable, just the assigned fate for America's poor and minorities.

Didn't like it at all - not one bit.

And Leroy was just the sort of person - dying or not - to be able to make significant waves.

He was raised by a poor widow in Harlem who sometimes got waitressing work - but Leroy held down a middle class job at a white commercial insurance firm all through the Dirty Thirties.

A first class athlete in many different sports, he also founded and ran a pioneering track and field club made up of members from the Harlem's black working class.

That club, Harlem's Mercury Athletic Club, competed successfully, not just against the nation's top black (middle class) universities but also against the top white teams as well.

To Leroy, it was always much more than just athletic success - he self consciously sought out obstacles to the ability for blacks to compete on an equal terms with whites - and then challenged them.

In a word, Leroy was a fervent Civil Rights activist - from the Thirties era.

The reason for his unexpected success is best explained by going back to the High Schools that all of us have experienced.

The Jocks cum Preppies in my High School (and probably in your school as well) were indeed mostly made up of kids from the community's best off families - but by no means exclusively.

What they really held in common was not income or race but a winning combination of physical and social agility - they moved gracefully and persuaded gracefully.

By contrast I knew many kids in my high school, from the top families, with all the family resources in the world, were seemingly just born shy, awkward and socially inept.

Leroy was just one of High School Life's natural born leaders and orators.

And in this particular case, this natural born leader had an audience of just one person to persuade : Dr M (Henry) Dawson, senior of the two microbiologists on Meyer's tiny four person team.

Dawson was also the only member with clinical (ward) privileges - and at a relatively high level too.

He was the only one on the team with both the legal right and the practical ability within the hospital culture to inject new untested un-purified medicine to a patient without his superiors putting up (too) much of a fuss.

Even in the most research oriented teaching hospitals, the frontline ward doctor directing patient care stands far higher in the informal hierarchy than does the most senior of the supporting staff, such as the microbiologists and biochemists back in the labs.

And Dawson had just been elevated to associate attending physician status, with an entire admission ward under his direct control and yet he had never really exercised his new powers so far.

Leroy couldn't help noticing all the recent publicity and fundraising dollars devoted to Polio, which killed far less than did Rheumatic Fever/SBE, but affected predominantly white kids from the hyper-clean and spacious suburbs rather than ethnic minorities crowded into inner city tenements.

Rheumatic Fever, by contrast, by 1940 was getting far less attention and funding than had been traditionally the case.

This made him angry and as it happened, it made Dawson even angrier.

Dawson had long seen a long slow shift away from charity to self help cum narrow self interest in the world generally and his belief was well supported by the facts.

The case of polio was particularly instructive.

Usually the March of Dimes is seen as an example of progress in human affairs : the (usually middle class) families of patients with a particular disease banding together to act as a advocacy and fundraising group for their relatives's disease.

But in an earlier age, middle class people donated money freely to help people in need who they didn't even know - this sort of selfless (agape) giving is the true definition of charity - not something you do to help your nearest and dearest or to get a tax deduction.

Hospitals - like Columbia Presbyterian where Dawson worked - had once freely treated those in most need of help with the least funds to pay for it.

Now it only treated the poor if their cases were unique enough to teach the (mostly middle class) medical students well enough to ensure them of a lifetime high income and higher status.

Similarly nations had once went to war - heedless of the cost - to battle to defend the rights of the smallest,weakest nations like Belgium to survive.

Now nations stood silently, bystanders, as Belgium and other small nations got gobbled up, saying it wasn't in their nation's self interest to intervene.

And America's medical schools, like Columbia Presbyterian, in that Fall of 1940, were moving away from their increasingly weak efforts towards Social Medicine (medical research aiding the weakest members of society, regardless of their ability to pay).

Instead they were moving towards War Medicine (medical research oriented to aiding the most fit members in society - her soldiers.)

But Dawson's anger - though in keeping with his character he usually kept it carefully reined in and undercover - was also directed at his colleagues for dismissing his research into the ability of microbes to do many things that the most advanced human civilizations were incapable of.

Meyer in a sense was partially a mouthpiece for such conventional beliefs.

The idea that penicillin was not safe to inject into humans until it was purified by humans was hardly his alone - it was universal in the worldwide medical community since 1928.

But Dawson began to reason that the fungus had probably been making penicillin for hundreds of millions of years and had probably got it down to a science.

After all, he probably reminded Meyer, they already successfully made penicillin at normal atmospheric pressures and normal temperatures and without strong expensive toxic reagents - not something Meyer, even if he was to become totally successful, could ever likely claim.

Dawson had two hands - in his quiet passively aggressive way , on a day when no bosses were around - Draft Registration Day October 16 1940, he could give the world two fingers.

Reluctantly, quietly but firmly, Dawson became the third leader of the project.

On that day, Dawson would give the world's first ever penicillin injections, ushering the Age of Antibiotics.

And do so by using (a) a medicine made by conventional evolutionary biology's under-estimated underdogs (tiny penicillium cells) to aid (b) society's under-estimated underdogs - Jewish and black youths from NYC's working class ....

(Synthetic) Penicillin - (NOT) meeting the Challenge : by Gladys Hobby (co-worker Karl Meyer)

It is a real pity that biochemist Karl Meyer left the writing of a real insider's account of wartime penicillin to his microbiologist co-worker Gladys Hobby.

Because Hobby's book "Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge", one or two gentle digs aside, is decidedly all moral uplift and hands across the water, marking her as "The Pollyanna of Penicillin".

Hobby's book sometimes is more fascinating for what she chooses to leave out than what she puts in it --- and yet she added a great deal of rare, even unique, information.

Meyer only really made one "for publication" comment about his part in wartime penicillin but it was frank and astringent.

It makes a reader wish he had said more : much, much more.

The major reason he didn't was because Meyer knew his role in saving the lives of thousands of SBEs and jumpstarting the fabulous success of native penicillin was all very well, but he was a biochemist damn it and his original goal was to synthesize native penicillin and replace it - not guide it up to the winner's podium.

Meyer had failed, partly because all chemists in the world also failed at this synthesis task --- and partly because he was treated very unfairly by his more powerful scientific competitors - and who wants to research and write a long book about your successful life's one big failure ?

By the time Meyer felt free to make even those few comments, for a book published in 1981, he was over eighty and the key penicillin players had almost all died.

In particular, Ernst Chain had just died a few months earlier.

Inspired by the death of Chain's boss, Howard Florey, in 1968, the first truly multi-continent account of wartime penicillin had come out in 1973, researched and written by Australian journalist and author Leonard Bickel.

Bickel did enough interviewing of minor front line participants still alive to uncover many fascinating, important but unreported/un-Pollyanna aspects of the saga.

His "Rise up to Life" included information from Gladys Hobby that first brought to those interested in the history of penicillin the forgotten efforts of Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

She said Dawson had pushed the North American development of early penicillin in an ultimately successful attempt to cure then invariably fatal SBE , the endocarditis that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of school age kids for half a century, a disease she said he had long made his personal crusade.

None of this was true - and she half knew that to be so.

I have found no evidence what so ever that Dawson ever mentioned SBE at any of the many scientific meetings he attended or that he wrote articles on it or did research into it.

And Hobby was his closest co-worker for ten years : she too had said, written and done nothing on SBE.

So Dawson had done nothing on SBE --- least not before October 1940, when the penicillin project at his hospital had already been underway for 5 weeks.

Hobby freely admits that she herself was away on vacation when the project began and she returned after several hectic weeks into the effort - so she could only know of the project's origins from what Meyer, Chaffee and Dawson told her.

The agreed plan, by the time she arrived, was that the native penicillin would be grown mostly by Hobby.

Then after being purified and its chemical structure figured out, it would be synthesized artificially, all this mostly done by Meyer and Chaffee, tasks expected to be completed sometime early in the New Year.

Then, and only then, would clinician Henry Dawson reach centre stage - injecting the synthetic penicillin into patients whose care he controlled as the sole attending physician among the small four person team.

A few days before Draft Registration Day, October 16th 1940, Dawson suddenly decided to put a very little of the very weak and very impure native penicillin into two patients with SBE, a disease whose cure, virtually all doctors agreed, would require lots of medication every day for weeks and weeks on end.

Dawson's tiny injections might raise the dying pair's morale but could have had no direct physical impact on their disease.

And it rather upended the team's agreed upon project protocol.

As that chemically-oriented protocol suggests, Meyer the biochemist had actually started the project.

But he waited a half century, till just after the death of Ernst Chain, to say exactly why he had.

In 1980, Meyer was interviewed by a young endocarditis researcher, Australian born Dr David T Durack, who was writing an article on the early history of the conquest of endocarditis by antibiotics for a book, edited by Allan Bisno, on infective endocarditis.

Meyer told Durack that in the late summer of 1940 he was incensed by the assignment of priority given to Meyer's own pioneering work on lysozyme in articles by Ernst Chain.

(Meyer probably didn't mention it but he was possibly even more incensed by Chain jumping his priority on Meyer's much more exclusive pioneering work on hyaluronan.)

Chain had been a fellow biochemistry student with Meyer in Berlin and even more importantly, both were not-yet-established-German-Jewish-emigre-scientists in the wartime Anglo-American medical research world.

For either, scoring a significant scientific discovery might keep them out of an internment camp, while a rival stealing their credit might mean a hard bed in that same internment camp.

I think most biochemistry experts agree that Karl Meyer was a far, far better biochemist all his life than Chain.

So for whatever reason(s) , Meyer's pioneering work was always closely followed up by Chain.

Only this time, Meyer would turn the tables --- follow up on Chain's pioneering work for once.

Try to beat Chain to the goal of purifying native penicillin to the point when its structure could be determined and then it could made by artificial synthesis.

A great story --- but how true ?

Because Chain didn't even submit his co-authored articles on hyaluronan and lysozyme until late September 1940 and late October 1940 and they weren't even published in the UK till December 1940 and no one in America could have read them before January 1941.

Was Meyer clairvoyant then ?

No - and Professor Ronald Bentley provides the solution.

He got to know Professor Leslie (Epstein) Falk late in both their careers and learned that Epstein had not just done his PhD thesis on lysozyme under Chain's close supervision but had also informally helped Chain in the early Oxford work on penicillin.

The Fall of France had prompted the US & UK governments to agree to return all the American Rhode scholars posthaste, because America was still neutral.

So Epstein couldn't even stay long enough to dot the last "i"s on his thesis, but he was in Oxford when Florey first injected penicillin into mice and cured their fatal disease without harming the mice with side effects.

Epstein felt the sudden uprise of excitement in Florey's entire institute and the move to keep it all hush hush until it had secured a commercial sponsor and had been published.

Epstein was Jewish and a leftist - Florey didn't much like either.

Epstein probably felt he owed Florey no particular loyalty as a result.

So he spilt the beans on the penicillin project, including Chain's expected role, to Meyer while using Meyer's expertise in lysozyme together with Meyer's reagents and lab space to finish his PhD - sometime between June 10th and September 7th 1940.

Like Epstein (and Chain for that matter), Meyer was also Jewish and left-leaning.

I personally feel that Epstein really liked Chain and only inadvertently let slip Chain's 'off the cuff' dismissive comments about Meyer's work.

Probably while recounting some of the endless 'colourful stories' that Chain's very mercurial personality tended to throw up.

Because I see nothing too offensive in either of Chain's relatively cautious articles (on Lysozyme and Hyaluronan) and in any case, they came out months after Meyer began his penicillin project.

No, Meyer, forewarned by Epstein in person what journal would get the Florey,Chain et al penicillin article and what month it might come out, lay in wait for whatever tidbits of new information on penicillin's curative effects the article might have.

He needed that information to be good because he needed microbiologists (Hobby) and clinicians (Dawson) on side, if he was to pull off the synthesis of penicillin.

Because there was no chemical test to tell you that you have actually synthesized penicillin - that could only be established biologically by skilled workers.

Now Durack also interviewed Hobby and Dawson's last co-worker Thomas T Hunter for his article and told them they'd be in it and when and where it would come out.

Hobby read Durack's article when it came out in 1981, that I am sure , including Meyer's bombshell revelation, and went on to publish her own account of wartime penicillin in 1986.

But she choose not to alter in any way her earlier claim to Bickel that their pioneering penicillin effort was led from the start by Dawson and was set up to defeat SBE with penicillin.

Meyer's account rang true, but Hobby wanted nothing in her book to upset its thesis that good will and a lot of hard work among united allies gave us the miracle of wartime penicillin.

If her work sold far less copies than Watson's 1968 "The Double Helix" one need not search hard to find why.

Her account of the 'drama' of wartime penicillin left out all the drama .....

Bickel penicillin book vivid -- at cost in accuracy

Lennard Bickel's 1972 book, "Rise Up To Life", was the first book that covered the wartime saga of penicillin as it occurred around the entire world.

But it was also one of the first written by someone who was not an eyewitness to the actual events.

But Bickel, an Englishman who emigrated to Australia in mid life, was a very good journalist and interviewed all and everyone he could find from the wartime era and got lively quotes from all.

Unfortunately, as a journalist rather than a historian, he sometimes chose to sacrifice all the facts in order to keep things lively and vivid.

I believe that as a result, he chose to detail almost no pioneering penicillin patient -- unless they could be fully named in his account --- regardless how important they actually were in historical terms.

But even back in the more innocent era of the 1940s, peer reviewed medical articles tended to simply describe but not name patients -- or just given them unique numbers or initials.

Revealing full names was simply no indication of relative historic or scientific importance.

How this historical travesty all began :

Bickel, probably in 1971, interviewed American Gladys Hobby, who as a PhD in microbiology had personally witnessed many pioneering wartime penicillin events from late 1940 through to late 1945.

But she recalled them mostly from memory and a few personal papers.

In the early 1970s, she surely knew the birthdate, medical history and the initials (CA) for one patient from wartime's pioneering Patients Zero.

Because she had surely read - many times -  the medical article her friend and co-worker, the late Dr Martin Henry Dawson, had written in late 1944.

The Patients Zero were the first people ever in history to get injections of life saving antibiotics - doing so on October 16th 1940 from Doctor Dawson at New York's famous Columbia Presbyterian hospital.

But she had forgotten what name lay behind those initials CA.

Fatal SBE was their fate

For the first half of the 20th century, Rheumatic Fever was the leading killer of young people.

Most actually died a few years later, when their heart valves earlier damaged due to Rheumatic Fever, failed because of an attack by common and usually harmless mouth bacteria.

The dreaded SBE - then an invariably fatal form of endocarditis - was what was due to shortly kill this historic duo of patients.

Hobby remembered the other Patient Zero well enough.

Aaron Alston, a young black man from Harlem, had received quite extensive penicillin treatment from Hobby's teammates while Hobby was employed at the hospital but had still died in late January 1941, despite all her's and their best personal efforts.

Louise Good to the rescue

It wasn't till the 1980s, while writing her own book on wartime penicillin, that Hobby contacted a Columbia Presbyterian Hospital employee named Louise Good, who did have access to more detailed contemporary records.

Good revealed that CA was Charles Aronson and confirmed that Hobby was correct in believing that the other was Aaron Alston.

Charles Aronson was actually treated far more extensively with penicillin than Alston - but treated in 1944, when Hobby was then employed elsewhere.

Employed at Pfizer, which had earlier worked very closely with her and Dawson.

Still, she stayed in very close touch with Dawson's team and had certainly read the medical article describing CA's extensive second penicillin treatment.

But that wasn't the same as actually being there at his bedside, daily for months, to burn his real name permanently into her memory.

Bickel lays his thumb on the history balance

This was unfortunate, because Bickel - for reasons perhaps not altogether honourable - chose to focus only on Hobby's fully named patient, the one who died.

By not also including the patient with only initials, the one who survived his invariably fatal disease twice thanks to Dawson's penicillin, he tilted his account of Dawson's work to the side of failure.

Failure, rather than the actual facts - which was that five years of life-costing hard work by Dawson - and Dawson alone - had made an once common and then invariably fatal heart disease the most curable heart condition known.

Bickel's brief account of Alston's early death - followed by Dawson's 'early' death, became the gospel on the whole fascinating penicillin story at Columbia-Presbyterian and Pfizer to generations of writers.

I will satisfy the natural curiosity

I fully and truly understand the curiosity that drives people to inquire as to who is the real person behind mysterious initials .

That is why I have worked so hard to recover the lost story of CA - and of Alston and the handful of other patients of Dawson who were given full names names in Hobby's 1985 book, "Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge" ...

Anne Fulcher Hunter passes -- one of the last adult eyewitnesses to birth of penicillin

Mrs Hunter was born in Wisconsin in 1916 and died in Virginia in 2014, aged 98.

After she had raised her five children she resumed her career as a doctor, now in psychiatry rather than in pediatrics.

She is in my blog today because while a medical resident at Columbia Presbyterian she learned first hand of Drs Dawson, Hobby and Meyer's pioneering work in saving SBE patients with their own hospital-brewed penicillin.

She learned much more about them when she met and married Dr Thomas H Hunter, also a resident there, who from 1943-1946 became Dawson's lead co-worker in this work.

Hunter also became Dawson's personal doctor in Dawson's final months just before VE Day 1945.

Dawson had held off his case of (then almost always fatal) MG (Myasthenia Gravis) for four and a half years, until he had completed his penicillin-for-all project successfully and the Nazis had been defeated.

Mrs Hunter thus had a ringside seat in the most dramatic years of the entire wartime penicillin saga.

But the time I knew more about her, she was in her late nineties and I was not eager to try and get her permission to interview her.

The only other adult eyewitness to wartime penicillin that I know of that who is still alive is Dr H Boyd Woodruff of Watchung NJ, who is 97 and still actively writing scholarly articles !

Perhaps Anne Hunter and her husband told their children a little of those early penicillin days - I sort of hope so.

If not, maybe my book will tell the Hunter grandkids and kids  just what their grand/parents and great/uncle were up to during the war years....

First injection of penicillin into patients : October 16th 1940 New York

The first penicillin needle into a patient, ushering in our present Era of Antibiotics, was one of the most signal events in all medical history and it happened exactly 75 years ago this Fall.

Yet, until this present article, even the barest of its bare facts have never been publicly reported accurately - not even by the three key team leaders that first performed them !

Here is how it went, based on cross-checking the various published report by the three team leaders against public records and newspaper accounts:

On October 15th 1940, after a hectic six weeks learning from scratch just where to find the right strain of penicillium and then how to coax the temperamental  fungus to produce raw penicillin juice, the three key members of the tiny team at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Medical Centre were finally ready.

The team leader (Nova Scotia born and raised Dr Martin Henry Dawson) would inject the penicillin into himself, a healthy volunteer, to test whether the never-before injected drug was dangerous to human life once in the bloodstream.

If he survived unharmed, the team planned to use the free time provided the next day by the university's registration of students and young staff in America's very first peacetime Draft to inject some penicillin into two young male patients dying of then invariably fatal SBE.

More formally known as subacute bacterial endocarditis, SBE was the then common disease that made Rheumatic Fever the leading killer of the young.

So only October 16th (in between the two dying boys being registered for the Draft) and once again on October 17th 1940, Dr Dawson injected some of the team's hospital brewed penicillin into the two young men.

One was a young black star athlete , Aaron Leroy Alston born 1910 and residing on St Nicholas Avenue in Harlem and the other was a deathly-sick-all-his-life young Jewish man, Charles Aronson, born 1913 and residing on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx.

Next, the two young men got a much longer and and a much larger regime of oral Sulfa drugs.

Unexpectedly, the Sulfa worked on the sickly Aronson and he went home apparently cured, on a maintenance dose of Sulfa, in late December.

His cure held and he survived alright for three and a half years until another bout of SBE brought him back to Dawson.

This time Dawson had plenty of penicillin to cure SBE reliably and he did so again with Aronson.

Unfortunately, star athlete Alston did not respond to Sulfa drugs (more accurately his particular strain of SBE-causing Viridans Strep didn't respond) and Dawson started him again on a larger and longer regime of stronger injected penicillin on December 31st 1940.

He died mid-treatment in mid January 1941 and his tragically short sports career was celebrated and mourned by many sports fans across the city.

The penicillin brewed for him but not used was given to a third patient, a young middle class salesman in his thirties from upstate New York - Middletown to be precise ; his name George Milton Conant.

He got at least one course of Dawson's penicillin in late January.

He died on May 31st 1941 -nearly a month after Dawson gave a cautious report May 5th on his treatment of four SBE patients with penicillin , delivered before a huge convention of medical researchers at Atlantic City and given extraordinary wide coverage in the news media.

I (and even the team itself) know nothing of the fourth patient - but Dawson's May 5th report specifically says four were treated ( thus treated between between October 16th 1940 and late April 1941).

(It is is worth remarking, given the canonical status and wide circulation of this newspaper, that The New York Times' science correspondent William L Laurence (who wrote the famous eye-witness account of the first atomic explosion ,"Dawn Over Zero") reported the next day that he had heard  Dawson saying that he had treated 4 patients suffering from SBE with his penicillin.)

As of the May 5th date, we know for sure that only one patient had definitely died but Dawson refused to crow about his small successes ---- or give specifics of just when the first injections were given and to how many patients.

Dawson later referred , in his 1944 JAMA article, to treating five SBE patients with early hospital brewed penicillin, of a potency not stated.

This allows us to assume that the fifth patient was probably treated very early in the Fall of 1941.

Because that was before Dawson had been introduced, after a visit from Norman Heatley, to the idea of calibrating the biological activity of penicillin by using Oxford units - as we still do to this day.

(The team seems to have stopped making penicillin during the high summer months because the temperature in the hospital, anywhere than in a bottom basement room, was far too high to successfully grow penicillium that would give off penicillin juice.)

Later he and his fellow team mates bacteriologist Dr Gladys Hobby and chemist Dr Karl Meyer would all give partially accurate and incomplete public accounts of those early (clearly non-dramatic) days - so who could blame the lay press or science historians for repeating their errors and adding some of their own ?

Aaron Alston , penicillin's first SBE patient but second to get the historical injection

The known published facts are few

All the contemporary (1945 era) newspaper and book accounts - written by (or coming second hand from) participant eyewitnesses to the events themselves - make it clear that Martin Henry Dawson's first SBE/penicillin patient was a "negro" "man".

And that his name was"Aaron Alston" and that he subsequently "died".

The available record of the amounts and dates that Aaron received Dawson's penicillin - as published by key Dawson team member Dr Gladys L Hobby in her 1985 book on penicillin , Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge , ceases near the end of January 1941.

And that is all the published accounts show.

But now for new research and reasoned suppositions...

We can say that 1940s medical statistics indicate that Alston was a more likely than not a young adult when he entered the hospital with SBE .

It is clear from the census that the names Aaron and Alston is a combination found in a fair number of men in America in the first half century of the 29th century.

However , the censuses generally indicates they are usually negro and that their residences seem centred in the South - from rural Carolina into urban black centres like Washington and Baltimore.

But in the critical 1940 census , there is no Aaron Alston recorded in New York City or in nearby New Jersey and Connecticut.

Now the first SBE patients that Dawson dealt with in the public wards of his upper Manhattan Columbia University Presbyterian Hospital were simply there because they were poor and his hospital happened to be close to where their family lived or close to where they lived when they took ill.

They were not drawn there from great distances because Dawson was then a famous and successful expert in this nearly 100% invariably fatal disease.

Far from it , he hadn't in fact handled any SBE cases up to then as the lead doctor.

Alston almost certainly had to be residing within a three or four miles circle of the Presbyterian hospital, at most , at the time he took ill. But the census does not show this.

He may have moved to New York City after April 1940 and before September 1940 : because southern blacks were still coming north to the unofficial American black capital of Harlem , though there was rarely gold for them at the end of its tattered rainbow.

Harlem is well within the catchment area for the Presbyterian's public wards.

We seemed to have failed to find out anything more about Mr Alston.

But as it happens, the New York City individual death records up to 1948 have been hand indexed on computer by many volunteers and made available via Ancestry.com.

They show an Aaron Alston , born about 1911 , (that is about age 29 on date of his admission to the hospital in September-October 1940) has having died on Jan 25th 1941 in Manhattan.

I am not sure that the original  death record will reveal more more - but perhaps a last address in New York and the name of next of kin and their home town , but I feel 100% certain this is our Mr Alston.

All we have really confirmed so far is that he was indeed a young man at time of his admission , as expected.

Why first patient but second to get the historic penicillin injection

Now while I am certain that Mr Alston was first SBE patient Dawson intended to treat with penicillin, I think he got it moments after Charles Aronson , the other SBE patient to get the historic penicillin injections on October 16th 1940.

Dawson's first major paper on penicillin and SBE was significantly the first penicillin paper not written by him with the help of the very reticent (as he himself was !) Dr Gladys Hobby, his lab chief.

Co-written instead with young Dr Thomas H Hunter, it positively gushes - for Dawson anyway - in giving forth the ages, initials of their name, gender, ethnicity,  dates of treatment, medical condition etc of all the SBE patients that Dawson had treated.

This was a style that Dawson had never shown before in 20 years of writing many, many medical articles.

Some doctors ("clinicians") simply tend to write articles that minutely detail the very 'grain' of  one (person's) case - while others ("researchers") prefer to report on the general conclusions drawn from treating one hundred similar cases.

(Both are valuable to doctors and scientists - but biographers won't be human if they didn't prefer the intimate details of the first type of articles !)

Dawson gets a chance in mid April 1944 to treat Charles Aronson a second time with penicillin for SBE .

This was because the little penicillin Charles had gotten in October 1940 had helped him survive his first bout of SBE.

He thus became that rare successful SBE case (about one in a hundred) that did so , back then.

Dawson indicates  in 1945 , that Charles had first entered the Presbyterian three and a half years earlier - ie mid October 1940 , confirming the common assumption that he was a very late addition to Dawson's Penicillin SBE program.

(Dawson knew he had too little penicillin to even treat Alston adequately, but he kind-heartedly treated both.

He was hoping perhaps that any small sign of a clinical response from either one of them might move Big Pharma to step up to the plate and mass produce the stuff --- for Aaron, Charlie and everyone else.)

Literally : the last shall be first 

But did Dawson really add Charlie at the last minute out of kind-heartedness alone ?

I believe the real reason was because Charlie was such a late addition to his ward's SBE patients.

When a new patient arrived with suspected SBE - a relatively slow killer, first a number of blood tests over a number of days must show the continued and not merely transitory presence of green strep in the blood stream to match all the other classic clinical signs of SBE,.

Then the ethical response is to immediately start treatment with the newest miracle drug , sulfa, and pray.

This is what happened to Aaron, who had been in the ward about a month when he first got his penicillin.

But because Charlie was such a late addition, there hadn't been time to start treatment with sulfa drugs .

So if Charles was treated with penicillin alone and did show a clinical improvement, Dawson's sulfa worshipping naysayers (and their lineup began around the block) could not say it was all due to their established sulfa , not his new penicillin.

(Remember that a lot of middle-aged doctors , the same age as Dawson , had first made their mark as early sulfa drug pioneers - any new miracle drug meant their acclaim was over. )

Behind the polite rancour of academic/scientific 'critiques' is often a lot of half-hidden ego and income concerns.

Dawson recalled, in his 1945 article , that the 1940 Charles was treated with penicillin on October 16 and 17th and then immediately (first) "started" on sulfa on October 22 and that he responded so well that he was released in December and was illness free for three plus years.

Ethically, Dawson would never have wasted half of his tiny amount of penicillin he intended for Aaron on Charles --- if he was already responding well to sulfa.

I think the reason it became so urgent to treat Aaron in mid-October (well in advance of the Dawson team's own original timetable for starting clinical trials) was because he had already been treated with sulfa and it had failed.

And maybe even made him extremely sick  because allergies to sulfa are common and serious.

But treating Aaron alone risked having any penicillin success disputed by the pro-sulfa lobby and this would only forestall drug company involvement - hurting Aaron as well as all others.

Hence Charlie not only getting treatment but getting treated ahead of Aaron , if only by moments.

Ask anyone : nothing starts off a (soon to be citation classic) medical article quite like an opening sentence like this one ---

"The first patient  ever treated with systemic penicillin had (then invariably fatal) SBE , but had not yet had time to start a sulfa treatment, however he responded so well to the penicillin that he has now been home fully recovered for over six months months."

In fact Dawson saw no clinical response at all between cases of endocarditis and penicillin for one and a half long years and he didn't save anyone with the disease purely on penicillin alone until two years later.

But Charles's recovery might have been helped by the morale uplifting affect of simply knowing that he was Patient One of a touted new Miracle drug .

I can only hope that my research efforts eventually help Aaron Alston's relatives to gain some comfort from his short life.

They will learn that he helped bring penicillin into this world and that while it didn't help him personally, it has directly and indirectly helped ten billion of us in the seventy five years since he first received it.....

God's mysterious - not to say even humorous - ways ...

A Presbyterian with a Monstrance of Penicillium Mold

Devout Presbyterian layperson and wartime penicillin researcher Gladys Hobby recounts in her book "Penicillin : Meeting The Challenge" of  her rounds carrying a petri dish containing a big circular 'wedged' penicillium mold, every day through the wards at Presbyterian-Columbia Hospital.

This daily pilgrimage served no medical or scientific purpose, but it did serve the moral purpose of helping to sustain the spirits of the young SBE patients there.

They all knew that they faced imminent and inevitable death from their disease, unless the tiny team of which she was a part of could produce in time enough of the natural penicillin to save their lives.

Anyone who has even seen an artistic rendering of  such 'wedged' penicillium mold and an artistic rendering of a Monstrance is immediately struck, as I was, that the two paintings are very hard to tell apart.

As a Catholic, I particularly relish the image of a Calvinist Protestant dutifully carrying a monstrance, so alien to her religious traditions ( and albeit a monstrance of penicillin-hope), daily through those pain-filled wards.

Truly, God works in mysterious ways ....

Henry Dawson as the Margaret Atwood of medicine : heterogeneous survival

Margaret Atwood made famous the old quip that  Americans want to leave the wilderness a success, while Canadians are merely grateful to leave it a survivor.

Henry Dawson, a Canadian doctor, encountered this for real when he went to New York to work among American medical scientists who expected him to focus on virulence in bacteria.

These are incredibly tiny , often immobile, beings who yet are successful in attacking their human hosts and frequently even kill them , despite the army of human medical opponents ranged against them.

In the alpha male world of medicine circa 1940 , virulence = success.

But Dawson was more interested in how these tiny beings persisted in surviving with, on and in us  , despite our bodies' best efforts to detect and kill them.

Because virulence is very much a two edged sword for bacteria : it may kill the host and then where do the successful bacteria live ? 

Or it might provoke a counterattack on the virulent bacteria that kills all of them but ignores their non-virulent kin.

Dawson seems to have been agnostic on the whole division between virulent and avirulent : merely seeing endless varieties of sub-strains among his chosen area of focus : oral commensal strep bacteria.

His team (as well as others) gave the different appearing sub strain bacteria colonies letter descriptions : R , S , L , M.

His team members later went on to study others that have been given names instead, such as vegetative/biofilm, dormants and persisters.

R were rough in colony appearance and didn't seem virulent in many species - unlike the smooth looking  S colonies, while the mucoid M were very virulent in some species.

R had normal bacterial walls, but S and M also had extra jelly-like capsules that made them harder to eat by our white blood cells, if they got in our blood system.

To over-simplify , R forms, because they lack a thick jelly cover , do much better at clinging to our throats and surviving long term by being low key and avoiding entering our blood streams.

L forms ,named after the Lister Foundation in London where they were first discovered, are wall-less. 

The strong but flexible wall of a bacteria (a wall beyond the sack like skin that all cells must have to be a cell ) is usually considered the secret to the bacteria world's successful survival as Life's oldest and most widespread form.

So a bacteria without a wall is a real curiosity - it seems to survive in places of calm where the water around it doesn't suddenly get very salty or very un-salty (to describe vital things osmotic as simple as possible ).

Its lack of bacterial wall even fools the human immune system into considering it not a harmful microbe but rather a part of us.

That film of bacteria we can easily feel on our unbrushed teeth is a biofilm .

When it lands on our previously slightly damaged heart valves, it becomes bigger and harder (literally heart valve calculus) often called a vegetative form and in both cases, provides a safe home for various types of bacteria and their sub strains.

We could call them B or V type bacteria.

Dawson started studying them when he started his pioneering use of penicillin to cure vegetative type endocarditis.

Some sub strains, his team members were the very first to discover in 1942, are naturally slow growing and survive antibiotics because they normally only hit bacteria that are actively growing.

These P types are called now called persisters and they make both teeth bacteria type endocarditis and TB truly awful diseases to fully conquer.

Others deep inside the biofilms don't grow at all normally and are called dormant (D type).

They will happily grow when the normal bacteria population closer to the surface of the biofilm have all been killed by antibiotics , leaving more food for the dormants to eat.

Wow : R,S,M.L,V,P,D forms --- where will it all end ?

Who knows?

The point Dawson was trying to make was that bacteria weren't really invaders, seeking only to enter Man to kill him, but extremely tiny creatures to whom a human adult body was literally the same size to them that the Earth is to us.

They saw us merely as home - just as we regard the Earth .

Yes a sometimes comfortable and sometimes hostile home - just as Earth often is to us - and seemingly they survived life's ups and downs by being 'careless' in their eugenic practises, as least as seen by eugenically-minded humans in the 1930s.

There were, in fact, no perfect pure bacteria clones ---- nothing an Aryan superman would recognize as perfection --- instead they shockingly seemed to tolerate all kinds of cripples and defectives in their population.

Because as the environment varied, what was a defect one day (slow growing or no growing, no capsule, no wall) was a means of survival the next day as the formerly virulent fell like ten pins all around them.

Dawson didn't dismiss the 4Fs of the bacteria world as "useless mouths and life unworthy of life" anymore than he later didn't dismiss the 4Fs of the human world either.

Dawson's close examination of how messily but effectively Reality really works proved much more accurate than all the armchair theories of the purist scientists, like Hitler or Einstein....

"Agape's Penicillin : Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project"

Only six words this time : title and sub-title.

I should remind readers that the cover image for all my various book title and sub-titles remains the same.

It is a painting of a stylized pair of unnaturally thin and curving arms and hands lifting up a glowing petri dish of radiated* penicillium mold as if it was a monstrance* , the whole effect at a casual glance looking exactly like a stylized atomic mushroom cloud.

(Hopefully !)

(*Penicillium mold is extremely variable genetically and will usually mutate a few variants, even during the course of growing for a only few days on the petri dish, even if grown from a single spore - these variants are visible as the slightly different pie shaped wedges radiating outwards from the centre of the penicillium mold.

*Monstrances are that glowing sun-like thingy that the priests hold the communion host aloft in, on certain joyous occasions.)

The visual connection to an artist's painting of an upheld monstrance is immediately apparent if one has seen both.

Gladys Hobby, of Dawson's team, records in her book that she daily held up the mold on petri dishes ,in just such a manner, to lift up the spirits of the dying SBE patients.

So it is non-negotiable for me -- I must see the words "Manhattan Project" somewhere in title or sub-title.

I want to play off the idea that this tiny life-oriented Manhattan project, occurring in the same university campus and at the same time as as the atomic Manhattan project, was in every way its antithesis.

But I don't really care if title becomes sub-title etc - its all of one piece in the end.

The idea of someone no one has ever heard of, Henry Dawson, having something equal in importance to the very ultimate in Big Science/Big Government/Big Money/Big War hopefully will intrigue the potential customer enough to look inside the book.

             "Agape's Penicillin" 
The Manhattan Project of Henry Dawson 

is a slightly more academic a sub-title - but longer-winded and windier too....

Janus Manhattan : "destroyer of worlds" or "provider of life-affirming balm" or both ?

Penicillium Monstrance

When native Manhattanite Robert J Oppenheimer proclaimed - portentously - "Now I am become DEATH , the destroyer of worlds" after the Manhattan Project's first atomic explosion , he seems to set Manhattan's wartime image in concrete for all time.

It was this existing image of Manhattan that the 911 bombers relied upon to soften the outrage against their mass killings.

But the real Manhattan is far too complex and dynamic to ever present just one face to the world --- and so it was with its activities between 1939 and 1945.

For Manhattan ,Janus-like , had another (almost unknown and largely mis-understood) Project during WWII.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson the medical scientist had a very simple thesis : that Life inevitably 'Comes in All Sizes'.

As a result, 'global commensality' (all life dines at a common table) is a necessity forced upon all of us living beings and we might as well learn to accept it.

But the tenet of his age, The Age of High Modernity (1875 -1965), was that Bigger was Better, in fact the inevitable path of progress.

So small life would have to give way and disappear before the forces of the giants of life.

Dawson believed that WWII would end quicker, with fewer deaths, if the Allies set out to defeat Hitler morally, as well as just militarily.

Instead they were seeming intent on matching Hitler's evil doctrines, albeit in a muted fashion, cut for cut.

Killing American patients like Charles Aronson by passive neglect was hardly morally different than killing German patients like Martin Bader by active injection.

In an era that exalted the Big, Dawson dared to defend the small : small patients like Charlie and small cures, like natural penicillin from mold slime.

Another native Manhattanite , Gladys Hobby, was the most religious devout on Dawson's tiny team.

Instead of a text from Hindu religion, we might choose to see a quasi-Christian symbol in her practise of daily carrying petri dishes of sectoring penicillium mold to the wards holding the dying patients like Charlie.

She did it, she says,  to sustain their morale so they might live long enough for enough penicillin to be produced by her team to save their lives.

Anyone who as ever seen a photograph of sectored penicillium mold on a flat petri dish can not help but think it reminded them of something , but just what ?

Spikes of blue with golden droplets on top radiate in all directions, ending in a circle of white mold growth.

It is a radiant, jewel like  image - rather like a stylized sun.

Like a - that's it - a monstrance : that sun-like object that contains the sacred Host and is held aloft by the priest and minister on special occasions.

A stylized sun, radiating in all directions, warming all, was always an universal symbol of life and hope, even before Christianity.

The Host in a monstrance - Jesus's body for real or as a symbol - is the unifying symbol of the Christian tradition : offering up the hope of (eternal) life , particularly as it is often exposed before those facing death.

But sometimes Jesus offered an earthly life as well as an eternal heavenly life.

So even Lazarus died, physically, in the end, as would patients like Charlie : but even so , every additional day on earth seemed a precious boom and balm to the troubled patient and their families.

Eventually a nearby doctor , Dante Colitti, was inspired to emulate Dr Dawson's government-bucking actions to obtain illicit penicillin supplies for discarded Americans.

He got the masters of Yellow Journalism , the Hearst papers, to go to bat on behalf of the Yellow Magic and a beautiful thing soon happened.

For when a two year baby named Patricia Malone got snatched back from death , around the world 'Doctor Mom' soon was demanding that the men get their butts off the couch and start seriously producing penicillin, now !  ----- fifteen long years after it was first discovered.

Dawson was only a part of the long story of penicillin and antibiotics but he is the whole story of wartime penicillin.

Without his moral drive, the medical cum scientific cum commercial powers-to-be would have still been trying to make highly profitable , patent-able ,synthetic penicillin years after the war ended, instead of mass producing life-saving natural ( public domain) penicillin during the war that so badly needed it.

Dawson's moral urgency personally moved the family of the Pfizer boss and moved that boss to mass produce natural penicillin as soon as possible - and it was Brooklyn based Pfizer that made the vast bulk of the wartime penicillin., let us never forget.

My book about Dawson's Manhattan Project is written as a deliberate rebuttal to the story the 911 bombers told against Manhattan, to try and justify their mass killings.

What they said about Manhattan wasn't totally untrue but it told only part of her story.

Because, like Life itself, Manhattan 'Comes in All Sizes' : she has been the home to unbelievably good things as well as bad things.

I would so much like to ask the 911 bombing planners and their supporters if they or their loved ones had ever been saved by cheap abundant penicillin and do they know that the effort to de-militarize penicillin and make it available to all was spawned in the same Manhattan they love so much to hate ?

Hopefully this book will be the start of that conversation we need to have with the Manhattan-haters.....

"Patricia Malone","Anne Shirley Carter", "Marie Barker" : penicillin heroines, but only for two months and long long ago ...

Marie Barker, dying, refused penicillin 1943

For two months during a six year long war, North America (at least its parental and grandparental half) temporarily turned away from looking at the front page pictures of healthy young sons and grandsons in uniform in their local newspaper.

Instead, from mid August 1943 till mid October 1943, their eyes were caught by the unlikely front page pictures (unlikely for newspapers at peace as well as at war ) of very sick young females, ranging from ages of two to their early twenties.

Daughters and granddaughters very much like their own.

All were either being saved from death because they had pried a little penicillin from the hard-faced men in the medical-pharmaceutical establishment --- or were dying because they had failed to move these men.

For two months these young women - some just babies themselves and some new mothers with new babies - were featured almost daily in most of the North American dailies and weeklies, usually with a photo prominent in the story.

It is the female-ness of these pictures, particularly set against the then steady front page diet of butch men with guns, that intrigues me.

The photos feature sick young women surrounded by other women : men are a comparative rarity.

Mothers and nieces comfort daughter and aunt, as in the above photo of Marie Barker. A baby is comforted by a mother (Katherine M Malone), a female nurse, or a female baby doll - as in the case of Patricia Malone.

(Though we do  also see photos of her comforted by the doctor (Dante Colitti) and father (Lawrence J Malone) who pushed to get her life saving penicillin.)

Doctor Mom was sending a message : to Congress, to the feckless AMA , NAS and OSRD and above all to the patent-obsessed Pharmaceutical industry.

One pharmaceutical leader, John L Smith, was pushed and prodded by his wife Mae to remember that penicillin, discovered in 1928, could have saved their precious daughter Mary Louise ---- if only some people had got off their fannies and thought about the children.

He responded by pushing his small firm to go all out to produce penicillin in world-saving amounts and by the Spring of the next year , the penicillin famine was well on to its way to being solved.

Patty, Anne and Marie all faded out of the story - their part in forcing men to finally make penicillin - 15 years late - for children was all conveniently underplayed by the men who wrote most subsequent penicillin histories.

But a penicillin history from a woman who was in the front lines of penicillin from its North American beginnings and knew John L Smith well (Gladys Hobby), never let her readers forget that it was those pictures of dying daughters that finally moved the men from killing to life-saving.

If only for a few months ....

A Presbyterian with a Monstrance of Penicillium Mold

Devout Presbyterian layperson and wartime penicillin researcher Gladys Hobby recounts in her book "Penicillin : Meeting The Challenge" of  her rounds carrying a petri dish containing a big circular 'wedged' penicillium mold, every day through the wards at Presbyterian-Columbia Hospital.

This daily pilgrimage served no medical or scientific purpose, but it did serve the moral purpose of helping to sustain the spirits of the young SBE patients there.

They all knew that faced imminent and inevitable death from their disease, unless the tiny team of which she was a part of could produce in time enough of the natural penicillin to save their lives.

Anyone who has even seen an artistic rendering of  such 'wedged' penicillium mold and an artistic rendering of a Monstrance is immediately struck, as I was, that the two paintings are very hard to tell apart.

As a Catholic, I particularly relish the image of a Calvinist Protestant dutifully carrying a monstrance, so alien to her religious traditions ( and albeit a monstrance of penicillin-hope), daily through the pain-filled wards.

Truly, God works in mysterious ways ....

Fleming never saved Churchill, but Gladys Hobby saved Florey's sister when his own penicillin couldn't !

Howard Florey was never more sleazy than in his dealings with Henry Dawson's team, as he desperately fought to restore the family name that his father dis-honored, by trying to remain the sole "hero" of wartime penicillin.

Just try to imagine what an university ethics committee today might say about a professor using his main rival's unpublished paper, sent to him in secret by his close friend (the same government official who censored his rival's paper and forbade its release) to improve his own work that is about to be allowed to be freely published !

That is what full Professor Howard Florey and university vice president and full Professor A N Richards actually did to associate professor chemist Professor Karl Meyer of Dawson's team , in mid 1942.

(As they say, tenure is 'red in tooth and claw'.)

The multi-hatted Professor A Newton Richards was a Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the medical wing of the OSRD , chief consultant to Merck and one of Howard Florey's best friends.

Like Mayor Rob Ford, he also never met a conflict of interest he could resist.

(By contrast, when Norman Heatley met Meyer in January 1942, Heatley recorded that Meyer was willing to send his data to Florey, but Heatley boldly told his boss (Florey) he (Heatley) won't because it didn't seem right, not if Florey was about to publish and Meyer was forbidden to.)

However, Professor Richards was of a very different moral character and saw nothing wrong in sending Professor Meyer's embargoed chemical work on the structure of penicillin to his main academic rival, Professor Florey.

By contrast, Dawson bent over backwards to try and find a source of penicillin for Florey (even at places like Pfizer - a place Florey determinedly didn't want to visit), totally unaware of Florey's well known reputation in the UK for being an academic bush whacker and a magpie of other people's hard work.

Florey's real (if totally private) reason to come to America in 1941, was mainly to establish that he and Merck, not Dawson and Pfizer, was the real leader in the hunt for viable penicillin.

By late 1942, Florey felt sure that the dying Dawson and Pfizer (having joined Merck's cartel) was out of the race.

Sweet indeed then, when in August 1944, a sullen Howard Florey had to stand politely beside Dawson team member Gladys Hobby as she showed him the natural penicillin poring off the Pfizer lines, while Merck and Florey's team at Oxford had totally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for the D Day beaches.

Florey had spurned both Pfizer and Glaxo, yet it was they who delivered most of the penicillin that landed on the Normandy beaches that day  --- "the stone the builders rejected" indeed.

Gladys Hobby saves Howard Florey's own sister  -- when he couldn't

Asa series of letters in the Royal Society Archive reveal, in  December 1952, Florey had to eat yet more humble pie, first begging and then thanking Hobby for sending her own latest antibiotic off to save the life of his sister (Hilda Gardner) in Australia when his own penicillin wouldn't work....

Henry Dawson "jump-started" The Age of Antibiotics because, almost alone in the medical world, he wasn't obsessed with 'purity' but rather with 'charity'

We have the records of only a few contemporary reactions to Henry Dawson's surprise decision to dramatically kick-start The Age of Antibiotics, 12 years after it should have begun but three months before it was scheduled to begin , but they are suggestive.

Gladys Hobby, his assistant, entered the Meyer-Hobby penicillin project a few weeks into it, after taking a late summer vacation.

She returned, she told penicillin author Leonard Bickel just 20 years later, to "an air of excitement filling the Dawson-Meyer lab" , Dawson had "immediately begun to work on this new project" and she "was at once caught up in his eager search".

Dawson was willing to wait "only eight days" after Meyer began purifying his first ever brew of penicillin before, "full of excitement" he injected this just-begun-being-purified material into two dying patients .

One patient died, one went home cured - Dawson refused to credit his small amount of "extremely low potency" penicillin with this cure, but he was "heartened" by the "low toxicity" of this "extremely crude" preparation. "No serious toxic effects observed."

Hobby later wrote in her own book on penicillin, that Dawson had "recognized immediately that penicillin .... might be effective in the treatment of ...subacute bacterial endocarditis in particular". The product used on October 16th 1940, she admits, was "crude" , "slightly purified (concentrated)" , even "extremely crude" .

At first, only the "low toxicity" of the "crude and impure" penicillin was noteworthy , not its curing ability.

On May 5th 1941, Dawson addressed hundreds of the world's top research doctors in Atlantic City, an event traditionally well covered by the popular media.

So we learn - via the New York Time's famous Atomic Bill Lawrence that Dawson admitted to the audience that despite his "crude" penicillin not being "pure", "no serious toxic effects were observed."

Via science journalist Steven Spencer, writing in America's largest evening paper, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, we learn that Dawson said that his penicillin was not toxic even when given in doses far beyond those dosages needed to clear up infections -- a distinct advantage over the sulfas, which are toxic to some people."

He said, reports Spencer, that penicillin had "unlimited possibilities."

Finally, an opponent of Dawson, Stanhope Bayne-Jones tells Howard Florey in strict confidence in July 1941, that Dawson is "quite honest" but "uncritically enthusiastic" .

I think I have demonstrated what was Dawson's key insight into penicillin, the insight that drove his excitement and his passion.

It was that he realized that  even a crude mix of hospital-made natural penicillin with all its natural impurities still in it was both potent AND non toxic  (in fact more potent and much less toxic than drug-company-made PURE sulfa drugs).

So morally, a doctor could not wait for 100% pure natural penicillin or for 100% pure synthetic penicillin, before starting to use penicillin to save the dying by systemic injections.

He had discovered unrefined natural penicillin's big secret....

For female pioneers of wartime penicillin, 1910 was a very good year ...

Dorothy Crowfoot , Gladys Hobby and Nancy Atkinson were about the only women who played an independent role in the development of wartime penicillin.

Many, many, other women were involved in the production of penicillin : in fact biological (natural) penicillin production and testing was often seen as women's work par excellent : but none played an important independent scientific role that I am aware of, beyond these three women.

(I do however believe that Eleanor Chaffee, Patty Malone, Anne Shirley Carter, Marie Barker, Eleanor Roosevelt and above all Mae Smith played crucial roles in turning "penicillin the war weapon" into "the penicillin of hope.")

1910 : annus mirabilis 

Interestingly, all members of our tiny trio shared another thing in common : all three were born in the same year, 1910.....

Dawson long been obsessed with SBE ? Show me ! 'Cause I'm from Missouri ...

Dawson & SBE ?! well I'm from MISSOURI

Even Gladys Hobby says so.

And God Knows, she should know almost better than anyone but Dawson himself.


In her book on penicillin, "Meeting the Challenge", she claims that Dawson had become "especially interested in subacute bacterial endocarditis" (SBE , a heart valve disease).

But no dates when and no specifics. All other writers repeat her claim and again offer no specifics.

I have always been skeptical.

Dawson's day job was running an outpatient clinic in chronic arthritis .

This , at a pre-war large research hospital where discipline borders were heavily policed and where there was a distinct pecking order , from live-saving surgery at the top and outpatient clinics at the bottom.

It still remains true today that dentists don't do open heart surgery and outpatient clinic directors don't handle heart valve diseases.

It is admitably true that in his course of Dawson's job, which consisted in handling the arthritis ( joint inflammation) aspects of every single sort of disease that offers it (and virtually every disease imaginable can offer arthritis pain, if only in a few patients and only transiently) , he would on occasion come across patients with a potential for endocarditis.

But normally a patient who actually had endocarditis in the 1930s was someone with a 99% certainty of a quick death and their arthritis issues were hardly a priority.

In his subsection of his overall department (Internal Medicine) there were people who did work on Rheumatic Fever (RF) and RF frequently ends in SBE, but they specifically tasked not to share RF research with Dawson's clinic.

(They surely exchanged insights and gossips, but only informally.)

During the hospital Grand Rounds, Dawson would definitely come across SBE patients as it was a heart-breakingly common disease to be seen at big hospitals in those days.

But so would every doctor in every big hospital on Earth in 1940 --- so why didn't  hundreds of other doctors  also take up the chance to try the new penicillin on SBE ?

Instead of SBE, Dawson had many other diseases to interest himself in that were closer to the nominal limits of his clinic.

To give but one example of alternate diseases Dawson could have branched into, Dawson did frequently work with patients who had gonorrhea (VD/the clap) because a very common aspect of their disease was arthritis problems.

So, for example, he was one of the first to use the new sulfa diseases on patients with gonorrheal arthritis, starting in March 1937.

But he did not, as a result of this frequent and work-related contact with patients with venereal disease, decide to try Meyer's experimental penicillin on syphilis --- that bold experiment was left to others years later.

So we circle around the issue again : why SBE, a disease so far away from his job definition that him getting involved could only rankle all-powerful senior doctors across the entire hospital?

And if Dawson had a long interest in endocarditis ,where was the proof ?

I am not aware of any published articles by Dawson*, between 1926 -1940,  that even mentioned SBE .

His many recorded comments at conferences in those years also fail to include words involving SBE.

In that same period, Dawson wrote various chapters in medical handbooks (Nelson's Loose Leaf and Cecil's) that involved many aspects of oral strep bacteria , an area where he was considered a world expert, but again nothing on endocarditis, even though SBE originates with the actions of two varieties of oral strep bacteria.

He could have waxed widely here, without raising too many hackles - but again nothing. (By contrast, his young co-worker Thomas H Hunter did write the chapter on SBE in both these textbooks, after Dawson's premature death.)

No specifically medical or scientific explanation for Dawson's sudden and overwhelming interest in SBE

The strong possibility remains - in my studied view - that his sudden and permanent interest in curing SBE with penicillin even at the cost of his own life, has to be set, instead,  against Fall 1940's political and military background in still-neutral America.

We might have to look at why and how Dawson finally got involved in a tremendous effort in WWI , to suggest why and how Dawson choose to get involved in a parallel tremendous effort in WWII.

Substitute WWII Belgium for SBE and Dawson's actions start to become clearer....

* I am unable to find any articles by his three co-workers on the SBE-penicillin project that reference endocarditis, even in passing.

I may be wrong on all this : but show me !

Penicillin, from EROS to AGAPE : synthetic crystals to the natural mold

Anders Nygren,1890-1978, Swedish theologian and pharmacologist ?!

Why not ?

His seminal text of 1932, "Eros and Agape", does offer an unique way to compress the long wartime penicillin saga into something vividly digestible.

On one side, we have Professor Florey.

He basically ignores that:

 (a) there is a war on and people are dying daily from infected wounds from the Blitz
 (b) that natural impure penicillin had no toxic effects from its impurities and is available - now - to help those Blitz victims.

Despite this,Florey and his wartime coterie of Platonists and New Alchemists wasted their time and ours seeking after the chimera of a 100% pure --- all white---- crystalline penicillin for their Scientific monstrance, to hold aloft before the adoring Faithful.

Its just the sort of New Age nonsense we've come to expect from the hardheaded science departments of Oxford University.

And I really do think that its a 'guy thing' ,this growing of crystals.

Women prefer to grow living things: plants, pets and above all their own children.

But crystals are about the only non-living object that grows before your very eyes.

They don't lay you up for nine or more months,change your shape, never wake you at night, never have to have their diapers changed.

What is there not for men to like ?

And if your vision of BEAUTY sees it as a pure, austere, hard-edged sort of mechanical regularity, you will find it best displayed in crystals.

In Nygren's definition of human EROS love, EROS is found whenever humans seek to ascend to a 'god-like' status , by demonstrating their love for (and ability to grow) beautiful (literally beauty-filled) objects - in this case crystals.

They take in/ draw down some of that beauty
and by loving beauty,add some of its value to their own worthfulness.

But Nygren contrasts this to AGAPE love - a spontaneous, undignified, excessively operatic, self-denying,heart-on-our-sleeve love of the unloveable - with our enemies being the best possible objects of our agape out-flowing.

We don't draw down some of BEAUTY's perfection and purity to give us additional value and to help us ascend upwards.

Instead we give away love -and our life if necessary - down to the 'ugly' and the evil and they gain BEAUTY by our doing so.

We become "like God" by descending to the level of the ugly, flawed and evil and giving them all our love nevertheless -- just as Jesus did.

In 1940 ( as it is in 2010) people tended to see that gooey smelly mold ruining their basement walls and fixtures as something almost evil and definitely ugly and unloveable.

It took a special sort of person to see the worthfulness of the penicillium mold - that person being Doctor Dawson.

His co-worker Gladys Hobby writes of his tiny band of followers creating their own Monstrance of the furry, blue-green, smelly, mold with its clear urine-like drops of yellow penicillin, holding it aloft daily before the unlovable SBE patients, to give them courage and comfort in this world - and in the Next.

And because of Dawson's AGAPE love of this humble mold, millions of other beings - human beings - had their chance to live out their three score and ten.....

Yet more SMART women scientists in pearls -Agnes Warbasse II

Thanks to Mo goes Po devotees, I am offering up more photos of SMART women scientists in pearls.

I have to dash off to work to fill in for a sick employee ,( remember what I said about not forgetting the impact of ordinary 'day job' demands on all the wartime penicillin participants?), so this will be very brief and I will expand it in a later blog.

Agnes Warbasse ,(Junior? or Second,/II ?- we seem to have no convention for mothers and daughters who share the same first name and who both become prominent), was the co-author on what I claim was Martin Henry Dawson's most important paper.

That it is among his least known and least cited doesn't change my argument - in fact I claim it was and isn't cited because of its revolutionary nature.

Agnes Warbasse married in the early 1930s ------and as most married women did then and frequently do today, changed her job to suit her husband's career path - so she left Dawson's lab.

But for two years, between late 1929 and mid 1931, she was Dawson's first research assistant.

Here is a photo of her from around that time period:

AGNES WARBASSE II

Here is a photo of Dawson's last female research associate, Gladys Hobby :

Gladys Hobby


I think it is the eyes that grab you in both shots - the two women seem to be to be intelligent and yet guarded or self-contained. Quietly self confident.

Now I must be off to work ...

more HOBBY more PEARLS

GLADYS HOBBY in 1971, chairing the editorial board of the scientific journal she founded

Of course, people wanted more pictures of Gladys Hobby.

Well there is one color one, Hobby with Fleming, but it is all too common on the web already for me to add another copy.

But here are a few more, with pearls, natch.

I haven't put out any photos of  Meyer or Hunter or Odlum as they are well represented on the web.

But women always get short shrift, in photographs as well as in life in general.

I would really like to see a photograph of Eleanor Hahnel (of GAF industries in the 1960s) aka Eleanor Chaffee, (grad of the University of Connecticut 1937).

Or a photo of Miriam Olmstead (girlfriend of Robert Goddard of rocket fame), aka Miriam Lipman, spouse of artist Michael Lipman, aka a woman who did much to make Rheumatoid Arthritis and all auto immune diseases more understandable, if not yet much more treatable.

If you can help, leave me a comment below.

Until then, enjoy a few more pictures of Gladys Hobby:

Hobby in a formal pose , age about 75

From a picture taken of Hobby with Dr Ethel Florey, the clinician-wife who rode around on her bike in the rain collecting penicillin from patients' urine while her husband ,Howard Florey, played 'find the salami' with his mistress back in his apartment-like office at the DUNN ---- and then got most of the credit for Ethel's clinical penicillin work...ain't it always the way ?

Hobby finally gets her due

Today the best known member, at least among the general public, of the tiny Columbia University team that did the most to bring penicillin to the public as soon as possible (and did so over Columbia's dead body) is Gladys Hobby.

GLADYS LOUNSBURY HOBBY          Nov 19 1910 -July 4 1993

It is a fame she never enjoyed while still active in antibiotics.

The terminally ill Henry Dawson gets most of the credit for providing the moral energy and drive to the Columbia penicillin effort - something that Hobby and Meyer were always forthright in reminding people.

Karl Meyer lived the longest of the main foursome and lived long enough to see his lifelong scientific interest, hyaluronic acid, become a virtual growth industry.

The fourth member ,Eleanor Evelyn Chaffee (aka Mrs Eleanor Hahnel?), will emerge from the shadows, if it is the very last thing I do.

Thomas Hunter first saw fame for finishing Dawson's proof that penicillin could cure the incurable - SBE. Then he became a medical school dean best known for promoting medical education in the third world.

The fairy godfather of the team, Floyd Odlum, is probably best known today for displacing Howard Hughes at RKO.

Miriam Olmstead is today best known as a former girlfriend of the Rocket man, not Elton John, but rather Robert Goddard.

There were a few others, not as invisible as Chaffee ,but rarely connected today to this pioneering penicillin effort.

Hobby after penicillin went on to discover and prove up other big antibiotics and then take leadership roles in science organizations when few women were permitted to do so.

As a result we get many bare bones bios of her - celebrating what she did but not why.

The best - by far - of these is Elizabeth Moot O'Hern's "WOMEN SCIENTISTS" .

It is based on a 1977 interview with Hobby and includes some rare photos of Hobby - most other accounts re-cycle the photograph of Hobby shepherding Fleming about on his tour of South America.

{{What I really want is a photo of Hobby without her pearls - she always wore them - particularly at work in the lab - she was someone that people of my mother's generation would call a 'looker' because of her sharp dress and make-up.

Note the pearls ....

Perhaps this was a survival technique for daring to work above her station  in a very male-dominated world.

But those pearls ----I bet the woman wore them in the bath and to bed !

Perhaps not to church though - a true 'old skool' Presbyterian...}}

But O'Hern's admirable account fails to explain the 'why' in Hobby's four year struggle to bring penicillin to the public, over the opposition of many powerful forces.

I think Professor Jeremy Greene, from Harvard's History of Science Department, does a great job with the 'why' in his brief bio of Hobby in "NOTABLE AMERICAN WOMEN" edited by Susan Ware et al.

He focuses on her very first articles to explain how she came to hold a unique bridge role between the biological and chemical approaches to defeating bacterial infections.

Greene says she defends the validity of studying non-pathogenic bacteria .

(This was a real career-loser between 1870 and 1960 in medical science.)

Dawson's entire career - again opposed to his day job - was also devoted to exploring non- pathogens and pathogens as equally interesting and equally viable ways for commensal bacteria to survive in the human body.

This bonded Hobby to Dawson.

 A deep commitment to seeing new research put to work saving lives, even if it hadn't been all explained in scientific terms, was what bonded Meyer to Hobby.

Meyer was the rarest of 1930s biochemists - he was clinically oriented.... aka he was face to face people-oriented.

Dawson's team was very small and not well supported by his university --- but having two such unusual people to work with him (Hobby and Meyer) helped make up for this....