un-superheroes nurturing life-saving GREEN from wartime Gotham's concrete

Oxford University is justly famous for its lovely green campus .

How ironic then, that its Nobel winning slash failed efforts to produce wartime penicillin was actually an attempt to produce a form of AstroTurf - organic (chemistry) penicillin , as synthetic as plastic greenery.

By contrast , wartime New York's Gotham - at least as revealed in Super Hero comic books - was  supposedly nothing but a concrete jungle.

Life-saving GREEN from Gotham concrete

But in fact, from New York's concrete, a handful of un-superheroes spurred the successful nurturing of trillions of units of natural penicillin's life-saving green .

The concrete jungle's vats and vats of fermenting greenery , before war's end, were producing more than enough natural penicillin to save all those in the world dying from infections only the life-giving mold could stop.

In the end, Oxford University's efforts only produced scientific papers , a Nobel prize and a big thick book from OUP : but no actual penicillin.

In a further irony, New York's successful efforts to produce tons of badly needed wartime penicillin did not receive any Nobel prize - or any significant historical attention at all.

But then received history is rarely as it seems , Captain - the historian's skim milk often successfully masquerades as Devon cream ....

God knows what Henry Dawson did - even if Stockholm didn't

Sometimes people ask me if I think Henry Dawson should have gotten a Nobel Prize for his successful pushing of the wartime mass production of natural penicillin.

As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to Howard Florey (and Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.

(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)

I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.

Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.

The UK was depressed after winning a war but then being forced to see massive amounts of Manhattan Natural penicillin liberally used by American diplomats to save the lives of countless people in Neutral and Liberated countries overseas.

Because, at the time, Britain (the discoverer but not the developer of penicillin) didn't really have enough penicillin for its own Commonwealth troops - let alone to give to British civilians at home or for foreigners abroad.

Churchill's moral failure over penicillin

This was solely a moral failure - not a technical failure - of the Churchill-led government.

Because America had just as many Big Pharma firms , scientists and government bureaucrats as the UK equally convinced that it was better (a) to wait for synthetic penicillin and (b) to restrict production to immediate military use only.

And both nations basically had access to the same advanced level of penicillin technology or could easily afford to license it - if they choose.

But fortunately for wartime humanity , a few - a very few - American firms, scientists and bureaucrats felt differently from the majority of their Allied comrades.

Thanks to Henry Dawson's constant prodding , the top man at both the New Dealerish WPB (War Production Board) and Pfizer saw the need for the production of enough penicillin - now ! - to heal all those in a world at war who were dying for lack of it.

As Pfizer's natural penicillin took off on countless overseas mercy missions it slowly but surely produced a new Pax Americana that gradually drove out the century old Pax Britannica.

All the global goodwill towards Britain built up while The Few held off the Nazi bombers alone was thus lost in an diplomatic instant.

All because Churchill's government was unwilling to see any more badly needed penicillin plants built -- not if it meant even as few as one less heavy bomber squadron was commissioned.

Penicillin was a total disaster for the British Tories - it might have even cost them the 1945 General Election - but it was also a disaster solely of their own making ...