A centralized "Penicillin Los Alamos" would have cost ten of millions of lives

Thank God, thank God, thank God ----- for unanswered prayers.

Thank God that all penicillin research was not as centralized as the atomic bomb research effort was.

Because the overwhelming consensus of the loudest, most aggressive, most powerful voices in science held a rigid dogma that synthesis was the only way forward for wartime penicillin.

But wartime (& postwar) penicillin synthesis efforts proved a total failure.

"Primitive Penicillin For Everyone, Now !"

By 1945, this was Henry Dawson's winning approach in the battle over what direction wartime penicillin should take.

Of course, that year the Swedes chose to give their Nobel Prize to the losing side in this debate over penicillin's course, rewarding it to losers Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey.

Label the losers' approach as "Synthetic Penicillin For Some, Someday."

WWII's battling Penicillins, Ancient and Modern : Who makes it ? Who receives it ?

Initially the Allied medical-scientific elite had planned that penicillin was to made the modern way, man-made by synthetic chemists in huge factories.

And then it was to only be distributed, during wartime, to lightly wounded frontline Allied troops, after the surprise D-Day landings had been successful.

In the end, thankfully nothing of this horrific scheme came to pass.

For a start, no commercial synthetic penicillin was ever made during WWII (and still hasn't happened yet).

Instead ancient, tiny but highly efficient penicillium factories made penicillin production seem effortless and easy, rather like Nijinsky dancing ballet.

Manhattan doctor Martin Henry Dawson had introduced the penicillin-making fungus to Brooklyn soda pop industry supplier Charles Pfizer & Co and Pfizer alone made 85% of the penicillin landed on the D-Day beaches.

Pfizer made so much penicillin in 1944 that it could - all by itself - supply enough penicillin to treat all those in the world dying for lack of it.

And it found governments suddenly willing to buy all that naturally-made penicillin and to distribute to all in need, without fear or favour.

Because Dr Dawson had also introduced the lifesaving capabilities of penicillin to WPB heavyweight Floyd Odlum.

And it was the WPB's OPRD that overruled Vannevar Bush's ORSD, together with Sir Howard Florey & Sir Alexander Fleming, in their desire to only use wartime penicillin as a secret weapon of war.

Instead the OPRD picked up on Dawson's efforts to see that wartime penicillin was distributed to all in need of it.

The terminally-ill Dawson had started his penicillin-for-all crusade in October 1940, given history's first ever antibiotic injections to two minority patients he knew would be denied real medical care under the guise of 'we need all resources to go to front line troops'.

He lived just long enough to see his efforts come to full fruition ...

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 .....

When a scientific consensus was proven wrong : DNA and Penicillium

Dr Martin Henry Dawson was widely considered a minor medical researcher, all because he had bet on two clearly losing horses.

In 2020, it might no longer be seen that way.

In the first case back in between the wars, the general scientific consensus was that large proteins had to be complicated and hence 'smart' and long chains of mere repeating acids had to be simple and hence 'stupid'.

So when Dawson's pioneering 1920s test tube research on the ability of some bacteria to take up the genes of other species (today known as HGT) led to one of these long simple repeating chains rather than to a protein, the scientific jungle telegraph dot dashed out a signal : "Dawson --- dead wrong, dead end !"

But of course, the telegraph signal is itself nothing but long chains of very simple repeating sub units, a mere dot and a dash, yet it has no problem transmitting the most complicated examples of human reasoning perfectly accurately.

And so to with the simple-appearing DNA .

For as it turns out, it (the tortoise not the hare) was the actual brains behind genetics, while the complicated protein was merely a (highly useful) spindle for the coil of DNA.

Bacteria, it seems, can smoothly nip and tuck DNA bits and bobs ( genes basically) and we humans still can't.

Oh, we appear to, but actually we let the bacteria take all the hard work while we take all the credit.

Round One, ultimately, to Dr Dawson.

Kitchen Mold

During WWII, many scientists again thought Dawson had backed the wrong horse.

They felt that he had chosen, in effect, to endanger dying patients by delivering Vitamin C via old fashioned crude un-purified natural orange juice rather than via modern, progressive pure synthetic Vitamin C pills.

For in 1940, the scientific consensus was that German chemists were very very brilliant and the tiny microbes were very very stupid.

Dawson thought that if supposedly simple bacteria could do excellent gene engineering while Man could only fumble about, maybe other microbes might also be better at certain types of chemistry than even the smartest chemists in the universe.

So Dawson bet that the humble penicillium mold might just do the job of making massive amounts of (admittedly impure but totally safe) penicillin better and cheaper (and certainly quicker) than all that human chemists had produced, after a fifteen years of fruitless trying.

Dawson (along with his fellow believers at Pfizer and the OPRD) were proven spectacularly right and the synthetic-obsessed Nobel Prize winning pair of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey (along with Merck and Vannevar Bush's feckless OSRD) were proven wrong, wrong, wrong.

We humans - 75 years later - still can't make economical Penicillin G by total synthesis and the little bugs still make it by the tens of thousands of tons, which we then modify to produce most of the antibiotics we use today.

And the wartime efforts of German chemists were even worse when it came to making penicillin (their wartime successes were mostly limited to producing the Zyklon B gas used in the Holocaust.)

If the doubly right Dawson remains unknown today, it is hardly surprising, because a scientist rarely wins fame by bucking a worldwide scientific consensus of their elders.

Now I fully believe the burning of fossil fuels is causing a highly dangerous greenhouse gas effect in our atmosphere -and my view is also the consensus of scientists worldwide.

But I hope that I am still historically-minded enough to recall that many similar scientific consensus in the past have proven to be totally wrong.

Totally, totally, totally wrong ....

wartime penicillin's Progressives vs Naturalists

The Progressives (people such as Sir Howard Florey, the OSRD and Merck) literally intended to RE-FORM things, wholesale - the human body in particular.

They advocated a sort of 'synthetic autarky' with Man replacing everything that came from Mother Nature with a better and cheaper & quicker to make artificial form.

But such re-forming, in practise, often broke down the very old fashioned farming practise of culling out whatever was regarded as 'unfit' and selecting and favouring whatever was regarded as the 'fittest'.

(Here cue the word : Eugenics.)

But with eyes only for the future, no Progressive would ever publicly admit to using such old fashioned farming techniques.

Clinging to such vestiges of the past were supposed to be the preserves of their opponents, the Naturalists, people such as Florey's opponent, Dr Martin Henry Dawson, the OPRD and Pfizer.

But all efforts - by  hundreds of the smartest chemists in the universe with money to burn- to synthesize commercial penicillin failed.

Instead, a few Naturalists, with very little resources, patiently picked the best of the best of the best of the best penicillin producing penicillium molds to greatly up penicillin yields at the point of the cow's utter rather than in improving the machinery in the milk factory.

Only near the end of the war, did a scientist finally get the chance to set a $20 UV heat lamp (bog ordinary variety !) upon a sample of the naturally best penicillin producing molds.

All this to deliberate fry the poor penicillium's DNA with UV rays, in the hope that among the dead and living dead offspring, a few fully alive cells' DNA might be altered (re-formed) to produce even more penicillin.

He indeed found these winners by the old fashioned farmers' method of patiently picking the most likely big producers and putting them to it - the proof was in the penicillin they did produce.

Against the Progressives' 'terrible simplicities', my brief account shows the unexpected wartime success of natural penicillin was a bit more complicated than might be expected ----- as usual ....

A Complicated Triumph

The terrible simplicities of scientific reductionism was the very mother's milk of  all the horrible 'terrible simplifiers' of High Modernity (1875-1965): starting with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and crossing the water to their gentler and kinder Anglo-American opponents.

For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.

One Manhattan Project - the nuclear one - was very much of this ilk --- barefacedly claiming we'd soon see atomic electricity too cheap to meter and atomic planes and cars filling our skies and streets.

We're still waiting, because all three claims were based on a Big Lie (or two or three) and deep down these nuclear complexity over-simplifiers knew it .

WWII's Terrible Simplifiers rebuked by the Terrible Complicatedness of Reality

By contrast, the other Manhattan Project - the one based on natural penicillin for the wartime all - rejected the scientific simplicity that spoke of a single trajectory of life.

A simple single inclined pole of progress, with the smallest and oldest at the bottom left always the stupidest while the newest and the biggest life forms -  scientists from the biggest civilizations - invariably the smartest at the top right.

Instead Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his team suggested, that depending on the capability being measured, all life forms variously fell at the top, bottom and middle of literally hundreds of scales.

Theories of simplicity had to give way - once again - to the strong evidence of the sheer confounded complicatedness of reality.

So - and unexpectedly - when it came to making pure, cheap, abundant penicillin, the tiny slime fungi did a far better job than assembled thousands of the world's best synthetic chemists.

And if the microbial smallest and weakest showed such unexpected abilities, Dawson argued maybe, too, the smallest and weakest among humanity were also smarter and stronger than the best educated and healthiest of humanity - at least on some unexpected measures.

And so modernity shouldn't be so quick to write off either the fungal slime or the wartime 4Fs.

In a surprise reversal, one branch of the highly competitive Washington DC wartime bureaucracy (the New Dealish WPB) bought Dawson's arguments and bested another branch in Washington (the Republican-dominated OSRD/NAS) who fiercely opposed giving any wartime penicillin to the 'unfit' of the world.

And like Washington, neither the Axis or Allied worlds were in fact as single-minded as wartime Home Front bompf and piddle would have you believe.

And as a result, any accurate account of almost any WWII event need be a very complicated one.

So the tale of the unexpected wartime triumph of natural penicillin-for-all is a complicated one - with many an unexpected twist and turn.

But then so is Reality itself - reductionist claims to the contrary...

OSRD (and academia's) dirty little secret : just how little the OSRD spent on penicillin - not how MUCH it spent on A-Bomb

Vannevar Bush grew a whole lot fonder of penicillin after it was highly successful (and highly popular among voters and congressmen) than when its future lay in doubt and only he had the power to ensure it succeeded.

The uncomfortable fact is that it was Washington's tiny New Deal-oriented OPRD (and not the similar-sounding but Republican Party-dominated much larger ORSD) that actually gave the world cheap abundant natural penicillin in time to save millions of lives during the wartime and postwar health crises.

While the OPRD had all the ideas and all the energy, it was the OSRD that had all the money --- and all that money bought plenty of tame academics  prepared to rewrite war history - for money - in a manner than would have even given Goebbels himself pause.

Bush - never a top drawer scientist but always a Beltway bureaucrat with very sharp elbows - was determined to use the 'miracle of penicillin' as a weapon to bludgeon money out of a hitherto reluctant Congress to fund the postwar dreams of university academics.

But he could only do so if all the university academics kept up their end of the implicit bargain.

That was their agreeing never to probe his claims of wartime 'success' too closely - because frankly, if right wing Bush's legacy was screwed as a result, so would be a whole lot of still living left wing professors also hoping for a pot of federal gold for their pet project....

The Manhattan (natural penicillin) Project : Googling up a Ghost

How an amateur historian in a small city used the new Google Search tools to recover the lost story of wartime penicillin

 

I first fell upon the lost story of wartime penicillin way back in the Dark Ages --- late in 2004.

My computer way back then was a Mac Plus with 1 meg of RAM and a 20 meg hard drive. My internet access was via dialup and I used text-base Lynx as my search engine.

With this primitive setup , I had still managed to play an important role in a highly successful national political campaign across the vastness of Canada.

I live in Halifax Canada, a small city by world standards, with at best a metro population of only about 300,000.

It holds Canada's biggest defence base, is one of Canada's five regional administrative capitals and is a major university town with half dozen universities.

But despite the fact that all the province's universities pool their libraries into one lending consortium, they collectively still don't rate as even a middle level research university library by Canada's modest standards, let alone by world class standards.

I had a BA from Halifax's Dalhousie University, nominally in political science, but really in Nova Scotian culture and history.

Locally I was considered to be a knowledgable amateur historian, particularly about the under-explored oddities of Nova Scotia history.

In fact, I only got interested in the history of early DNA and later wartime penicillin (of which I knew little and cared less about at the time) because three of the most notable figures were Nova Scotians - albeit all living and researching in New York City.

Now my on-the-ground knowledge of London UK is considerable - particularly compared to the sum total of seven busy hours I have spent to date on the ground in NYC !

But I must say that like any well educated English speaker worldwide, I feel I know the different neighbourhoods of both NY and London quite well thank you very much - from my lifetime of reading, watching movies and listening to music.

Like almost all historians, I was completely certain that any amount of physical walkabout over the geography of 21st century NYC would have still told me very little about how people in 1930s NY once felt and acted.

It proved the case - the streets of NYC looked exactly liked the (filmed on location) streets of LAW AND ORDER... that I already knew so well.

But even today in 2015, most archival material in archives or libraries is still not online.

So living in world class cities like NYC, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow and Los Angeles still allows an amateur researcher take the local bus to do their primary research --- and still come up with a story of interest to an entire world.

The rest of us need to book expensive international flights and pay big city hotel bills for months at a time to do the same amount of research a local amateur (or local professional) historian can do over an extended period of weekends and evenings.

Fortunately I soon realized that while much of the lost history of wartime penicillin indeed lay in the archives of London and New York, where all previous books on wartime penicillin had been researched and written, much of that lost history was lost precisely because it hadn't occurred there.

Of the various earliest penicillin historians, perhaps only Australian science journalist Lennard Bickel (biographer of Nobel-winning penicillin pioneer Sir Howard Florey) back in the late 1960s and early 1970s had actually visited some of the off the beaten path penicillin sites early enough to catch some of their original flavour and speak to still living participants.

The later writers had fewer eye witnesses still alive and so had to hew closer to the physical paper archival sources located (in those pre-internet age) in just a few key cities - London, New York and Washington.

But with various Google search tools coming on stream in the early 21st century and with a better computer with true broadband, I quickly discovered I had better (and free) access to local newspapers' primary accounts of the more obscure aspects of wartime penicillin sitting in my own living room than did professional historians with sizeable research budgets sifting through OSRD penicillin-related vertical files in some Washington DC archives.

I still hadn't gained anything on the local advantage of living in a world class city and researching a world class local story via city bus.

But I had gained the local amateur historians' traditional advantage of having much more time to do research than do typical professionals.

Magazine editors, book publishers, tenure committees are always pushing professionals to conclude their research and publish the results.

All topics are badly under-researched thanks to this pressure. Professionals just hope to go back later for another bite or two at the subject area.

But I had lots of time, for several different reasons.

I faced no tenure committee or granting agency deadline.

All the key participants were dead by the time I had arrived - no longer any urgency to interview before they passed on.

And I was doing paradigm creating research not normal research - to use Thomas Kuhn's terms.

The official version of wartime penicillin had successfully withstood superficial challenges to its myth because it had all its archival evidence favouring its claims in a few large well organized collections --- and historians are only human.

They much rather devote all their energy to extensive close reading of a few big well organized definitives archives on a subject and then call it a day.

Why spend years and much money trying to track down vagaries that might or might not exist in the end?

So most historians - even historians sceptical of the offical version history of penicillin still end up in the same few spots, visiting the usual suspects.

In particular, Washington holding the NRRL, OSRD and NAS COC collections and London (and nearby Oxford) for the Fleming and Florey collections.

In the New York area, Merck (a major keeper of the official version flame) was far more active with its wartime archives than as Pfizer - not really a part of the official version.

By contrast - and almost by definition - those wartime penicillin activities arising up against the OSRD-Oxford cartel had no official Allied governments' support or funding.

And without either, the institutions employing these renegades had no incentive to collect and keep archival records of their wartime penicillin activities.

Anyone doing this type of research was going to have to devote lots of time ferreting out what evidence that could be found here and there and everywhere.

I saw no current researchers who still cared that deeply and exclusively about wartime penicillin - official or un-official version.

I had no competition - I could take my time.

And I needed it : initially I merely suspected mysteries more by the presence of submerged hints and black holes in the evidence than with some sense that I knew exactly what I was looking for and exactly where to find it !

I just sat at my home computer patiently typing in endless variants on the few key words I had, hoping Google would eventually throw up some unexpected new document to point me ever onward.

And a dozen years later, I think I am finally seeing a clearer view of the alternative penicillin history ....

'Running against New York City' secret of OSRD and NAS wartime success in Washington

In 1940 New York City and New York State were at the very height of their power in the United States.

At that time, they even retained a very significant chunk of the American population - which translated into things like crucial electoral college votes.

They held an even greater percentage of the nation's wealth and financial lending clout, its best research facilities and research libraries, its biggest and most varied industrial base (from light to the heaviest of industries), its media and cultural arbitors of national taste.

It was also filled with immigrants of all sorts, with uppity Harlem Negroes, priest-dominated Roman Catholic Italians and left wing Jews : everything the rest of America : mostly native-born, white, Protestant Anglo Saxons raised in small towns feared and disliked.

FDR had lot of New Yorkers in his regime : particularly lots of lefties and Jews - it was in fact one of the main reasons why he was so disked in Washington.

But for the war effort, he recruited rock-ribbed Republicans to run many important agencies, hoping their presence would bring 'their kind of people' on board to defeat the evil Hitler.

In those days, the highest concentrations of Republicans weren't found in business offices but in universities - particularly among the senior scientists.

So no surprise that his most egghead/ivory tower oriented agencies were run by Republicans.

The most successful of these (the OSRD's nuclear committee and NAS COC penicillin committee for example) quickly realized that while their being a small town WASP Republican was good news in Washington politicians' eyes it was not enough.

They were also some of them damn dome-headed eggheads, alway out of touch with rural realities.

More was needed to win the bureaucratic war between New Deal and Republican oriented agencies over congressional funding, influence and support.

So they worked hard to ensure that as few New York City boys as possible were added into their governing councils.

They couldn't get away with having no one from New York State - so they tried for token New Yorkers - ones without dominating Alpha Male personalities : bench warmers.

Now unlike FDR himself, comparatively few truly successful people made a career and a name for themselves in the states) were they were born and raised.

J Robert Oppenheimer was raised in the very heart of enemy territory, on Manhattan Island itself, but he had become a born-again Westerner so he is hard to fit in one slot.

If Harold Urey (nuclear) and Alphonse Dochez (penicillin) fitted the token New Yorker role in not having commanding personalities in committee, neither were actually born and raised in New York City where they now lived and seemingly represented in these key national power structures.

But look over the key figures in the atomic bomb and penicillin efforts and see if you don't agree with me ....

Penicillin meeting is just the cover story for atomic bomb meeting

On December 17 1941, the medical wing of America's famous OSRD war research agency held a rare - possibly unique - meeting outside the Washington beltway.

Even rarer was the presence of one attendee, the boss of the OSRD himself, Vannevar Bush, never one to think war would be won by advances in medicine.

What on earth was really going on ?

Manhattan's twin wartime projects collide

Supposedly the meeting was held in New York city's highly exclusive University Club to please the CEOs of America's drug companies - but to do that , Chicago would have been a more central choice.

The head of the medical wing, Merck chief scientific consultant A N Richards , had really brought his committee to New York City solely as a favour to Bush.

Bush needed a suitable cover story for a series of meetings on something he felt far more important than Henry Dawson's little Manhattan based natural penicillin project.

Bush was finalizing a plan to ask FDR to approve a wartime atomic bomb as the top Allied war project : the atomic Manhattan Project.

So far most of America's atomic bomb research had happened at the same university where Dawson was doing his penicillin work : Columbia.

Its dean of science George Pegram and its Nobel winning physical chemist Harold Urey had just returned from a special fact finding mission to check out Britain's atomic efforts.

On their return their letter to Bush had made it clear the British plans were well advanced and that America needed to get on board or be left behind in strategic strength.

Bush was there in NYC to hear this confirmed in detail by Pegram - a man he trusted completely to be 'sound' .

Bush had to be sure , before he gave the red light to this hugely expensive project that would suck scarce resources from other (possibly war-winning) new weapons.

Bush gave so much money to Columbia for its atomic Manhattan Project work during the war - money that the entire university badly needed - that Columbia was completely willing to throw Dawson's penicillin Manhattan Project 'under the bus' when Dawson's efforts roused Bush and Richards' ire.

For in Manhattan , the twin projects Bomb/ death and penicillin/life intertwine constantly....

"The 'Cillium is a Roan that's never been rid , though thousands of chemists once claimed they did "

The title is a snatch of a song about the penicillium chrysogenum , with apologies to Curley Fletcher and his rather better known tale of the Strawberry Roan that also was never successfully rode.

To justify the expense of the Manhattan Project , America's military research bosses at the OSRD saw to it that A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then credited (wrongly) with being the sole cause for ending WWII.

To justify all the OSRD money wasted on not synthesizing penicillin, particularly when their rival WPB-OPRD spent far less to quickly make natural penicillin a resounding success, the OSRD bosses faked a synthetic success (about penicillin) to release to the gullible scientific media.

du Vigneaud's synthetic success (read synthetic = fake)

For Vincent du Vigneaud's team at Cornell Medical in NYC did indeed produce a little biologically active penicillin in the course of their efforts to synthesize penicillin.

So thousands of the world's top chemists got to take a public bow for yet another signal triumph in modern - BIG - science's endless progress ever upward.

But privately most knew that du Vigneaud synthetic goal was towards a molecule shape that did not match the necessary shape of biologically-active natural penicillin.

So this tiny amount of real penicillin must have been an accidental impurity of a mis-conceived theoretical approach !

More than 85 years after it was discovered, chemists have still not commercially synthesized a better or cheaper base penicillin molecule than what the tiny weak fungi can do on its own ...

Int'l competition spurs penicillin production as American Pfizer/Dawson goes against British ICI/Florey for most production

Wartime penicillin production was greatly hurt , not helped , when Florey came to America.

Because then an Anglo-American cartel emerged that focused on restricting what firms could produce penicillin - rather than increasing competition to produce more penicillin.

Already in September 1941, fermentation experts Pfizer and their advisor Dr Dawson were already producing commercially-oriented penicillin in the USA - without government inference or 'help' .

As was Florey's team and chemical giant ICI in the UK, again without government 'help'.

This was before Florey's across the ocean visit to his good American friend Dr A N Richards.

That led to Richard's decision to abuse the extraordinary wartime powers of American's main military research agency (the OSRD) to create an international penicillin cartel.

Only when Dawson's former patient and friend Floyd Odlum induced the equally powerful (but New Dealer oriented) WPB agency to open up penicillin production to more firms, did the spur of competition finally produce massive amounts of penicillin.

But what if Florey had stayed home instead of coming to America to mark his claim to penicillin fame over that of Dawson ?

The normally cautious Pfizer had been very bold once before - risking all on a new method of producing citric acid and ending up very wealthy.

If it decided to go all out for penicillin in 1941-1942 as it did in 1943-1944 , there would have been no wartime penicillin shortage crisis....

Manhattan Natural : wartime Gotham's un-super heroes ...

At a time (WWII) when comic book superheroes , usually operating in a make-believe Manhattan, were saving the world every day and enthralling North American children and youth , lesser known but equally larger-than-life actual heroics were taking place in a real Manhattan.

But these valiants bringing natural penicillin lifesaving to the world against government blowback were hardly Superman or indeed any sort of superheroes .

If by the term 'superhero' we mean someone strong in body as well as mind.

They were un-super heroes if ever than phrase had meaning.

They were more like a badly aged Clark Kent , still mild and meek  but now weak and crippled .

They never numbered more than a handful :  misfits , unfits and just plain rebels.

They were aptly described by the official historian of their arch enemy  , Vannevar Bush's OSRD , as "4Fs, women and the Grace of God".

Henry and Marjorie Dawson, Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Thomas Hunter, Charlie and Miss H --- they hardly had more than a handful of really good limbs between the seven of them.

'Unfits' the whole lot of them - the very 4Fs of the 4Fs - yet real life heroes despite all that .

Perhaps we could still make use of their story - as a sort of role model - by making a series of comic books or graphic novels about their wartime exploits ...

Abundant Penicillin by 1942 - only if Howard Florey didn't come to America ?

When ,in April 1941, Howard Florey learned that his best shot at world acclaim (as the only begetter of systemic penicillin) was at risk because Henry Dawson had got there first, the old claim jumper boot scooted over to America to shake a little dust.

Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.

Together the pair agreed that most of the wartime penicillin effort should go into first synthesizing it - rather than merely scaling up existing natural penicillin fermentation technology and getting penicillin to the military and civilian patients dying for lack of it - now.

Richards (who never met a conflict of interest he didn't like) was mindful that Merck's cross harbour rival, Pfizer, was likely to be the big winner if natural fermentation - and not Merck's strength artificial synthesis - was used to produce this priceless new drug.

Left alone, Pfizer (with Henry Dawson's team assisting) was already on the way, during that Fall in 1941 , to producing enough penicillin to get the show on the road.

A pity then that Florey had to spoil the show ...

Connecting New York's PENICILLIN dots ...

Some authors are content to merely describe a long series of coincidental dots ---- other authors like to investigate to see if anything connects all those coincidental dots.

I am one of the latter : as many a TV police detective is fond of saying , my motto is "I don't believe in coincidences."

When I fell upon the story of Henry Dawson and wartime penicillin, I noticed that most of the twenty or so full length accounts of wartime penicillin always included the awkward fact that he (and not their hero Howard Florey) was the one to give history's first ever penicillin shots.

They briefly described that first needle in a sentence or paragraph or page or two --- and then always go on quickly to say that Dawson himself was dying of a terminal illness - 'so necessarily passes out of our story'.

The rest of their three hundred or page accounts have nothing further about Dawson's team.

Clearly they mentally needed a way to dispose of Dawson (his convenient terminal illness) without seriously engaging his team's more than five years of involvement with penicillin.


They already had a preconceived shape to their biography of Florey and so they mentally hardly wanted to investigate Dawson's story any further --- less it ruined their story's trim panty lines.

Dawson did indeed die from his illness - but that was only at the end of April 1945 , while his team effort can be said to have begun when team member Karl Meyer learned firsthand of Florey's successful curing of infected mice in the early summer of 1940 from Florey ex-team member Leslie Epstein (Falk).

Dawson in fact kept very active in pioneering penicillin work right up to his death.

His team - in particular Gladys Hobby at Pfizer and Thomas hunter at Columbia - continued to do important work with penicillin for a few more years , even after the war's end.

Now what struck me with the force of a hammer in the first few days of my research - even back ten years ago when I knew almost nothing about wartime penicillin - was the amazing number of truly significant events in the penicillin story that had happened in the New York City area.

And that they all seemed to be of a similar type - let us simply describe them as all taking a similarly non-conventional approach to solving the penicillin supply issue.

Set against the relatively inactivity of a similar nature from the other 1990 million other human beings on earth in 1940 , they certainly seemed statistically odd beyond measure to be unconnected.

Since Dawson was both the first and the most active of these NYC inside agitators , I began seeking out possible links between him (or his team members) and these other New York penicillin efforts.

I quickly found many, many direct connections - and am still doing so.

Who - just for a minor example - would have ever thought that Dr Anne Fulcher Hunter had both a husband (Thomas Hunter) working with Dawson at the heart of the natural penicillin effort at Columbia and a half brother (Donald Melville) working at the heart of the opposing synthetic penicillin effort with Vincent du Vigneaud at Cornell ?

Heatedly interesting discussions indeed around her family dinner table !

My book will make the case that Dawson's passion inspired many New York scientists and businessmen to step out of their conventional skins for once in their lives to try something very risky and yet very morally worthy.

Most of these people would probably freely admit that their wartime Dawson-inspired penicillin adventures were the high points of their careers and indeed of their entire lives.

So I will fully structure my book around Dawson and NYC, but unlike previous books, I will not damn contrasting efforts by a single sentence-paragraph-page of faint praise.

Florey, Fleming, the OSRD and Merck will all get plenty of space to make their case for limiting wartime penicillin use to frontline Allied soldiers only - and that only after it had been first perfected as a patentable synthetic analogue.

I will leave it to the reader (and to God) to decide which side made the better moral case ...

Time to end the much-told cover-up of UNSUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin and tell the untold tale of SUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin

Against about fifty previous books about wartime penicillin , I want my penicillin book to do something wildly different --- I want to celebrate success, not cover-up failure.

If the wartime deployment of penicillin was ultimately successful (and everybody seems to agree it was) what exactly did this successful  penicillin look like?

It turns out it actually was :

(a)  naturally made penicillin - not man made.

(b) and (via exports of massive amounts of American penicillin under Lend-Lease and other programs), it was made available to all in the wartime world dying from any and all diseases it could cure - not just reserved for a relatively small number of frontline Allied soldiers judged capable of returning to immediate combat, if given penicillin.

Ie , what successful wartime penicillin definitely was not, was synthesized and weaponized.


I am writing this book because I believe , 75 years after the start of wartime penicillin , it is overdue time to finally have a long, hard and brutally honest look at the actual record of the people and institutions universally regarded as the heroes of wartime penicillin.

Chief among them - by general consensus - are Fleming, Florey along with the MRC and the Ministry of Supply in Britain.

 In America : the OSRD-CMR, NRRL chief Coghill , Merck Inc and the NAS-COC .

Yet all these heroes spent the entire war stridently opposed both to (a) the immediate mass production of naturally made penicillin and (b) its wartime production in quantities sufficient for all dying for lack of it in the world .

If they be the 'heroes' of wartime penicillin , it hardly needed villains !

By contrast , institutions like the British Royal Navy, Glaxo , Pfizer , the WPB and people like Dawson , Demerec , Pulvertaft and Duhig rate a paragraph (or at best , a page or two) in even lengthy accounts of wartime penicillin.

Yet these people and institutions strongly promoted the immediate wartime mass production of naturally produced penicillin for all  - and then set out and did it - they made the successful version of wartime penicillin.

They did not advocate holding off on the wartime production of badly needed penicillin until it had been totally synthesized at commercial prices (something that hasn't happened yet).

Nor did they advocate that wartime penicillin be only used for those who were moderately injured, among the frontline Allied troops.

All these people and institutions shared one more thing in common (besides achieving the only universally popular scientific success of WWII).

They were not part of the Anglo-American medical-scientific establishment.

Thus they did not have privileged access (during the crucial years of 1944-1948) to information still labelled secret and only released - on a highly selective basis - in self-serving official histories that successfully polished the turd that was the total failure of weaponized synthetic penicillin.

It was not until 1972, with Lennard Bickel's invaluable book "RISE UP TO LIFE" , that many of the secrets of wartime penicillin began to be revealed - at least to the majority of the world that looked to British-oriented authors to explain penicillin.

Bickel was actually merely trying to boost credit to Howard Florey over that given to Alexander Fleming, but his book was just late enough to avoid the strictures of wartime secrecy and just early enough to interview many penicillin pioneers before they died.

And his account tried very hard to balance the British-oriented accounts published to date with information about lesser known but very important penicillin efforts around the world.

But Bickel , like all others to date, did not set  WPB-Pfizer-Glaxo natural penicillin in total opposition to OSRD-Merck-Oxford synthetic penicillin.

Rather, like all accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project, he sees them as being equally funded, equally ardently pushed parallel efforts towards a common (time-sensitive) goal.

But in the case of the atomic bomb , the documentary record is very clear - almost any and all ways that might help to make enough nuclear material for even a few bombs before the war's end were massively funded and whipped into a flurry of activity by General Groves .

So for example,  a trillion dollar (in 2014 dollars) gaseous diffusion production plant were built as fast as possible , before any pilot plant had even shown that particular process might work !

Even so, America only got enough weapon material for just two small bombs a scant month before Japan surrendered.

By contrast, natural penicillin's breakthrough technology ( a repeated process of selecting the best natural mutations of the penicillium mold, radiating them to produce more mutations and so on) only required a few biologists working a few months at a cost of a few thousands of dollars.

Thanks to this breakthrough, most countries outside of the USA successfully provide much of their wartime penicillin needs with a scaled up version of the primitive technology that Fleming first used - and rejected - way back in 1928 !

Only a political and moral unwillingness to create more of these primitive factories kept the UK, Canada and Australia from supplying all possible needs with scaled up 1928 technology.

It was the WPB's totally unknown OPRD , a latecomer to the penicillin effort , that quickly and cheaply made penicillin production with mutated natural penicillin such a success that we still produce all the world's antibiotics the same way to this day.

It was clear in the case of penicillin that almost everyone (outside our valiant few) from government ministers to newspaper reporters to ordinary GP doctors to Big Pharma, felt that penicillin was going to have to be first made synthetically to make enough for a wartime world and that this event was going to be quickly achieved.

(At the same time, I should say that most of the synthetic advocates generally didn't know the full extent of the intention to weaponize penicillin and that thankfully many seemed to oppose that idea when its morally repugnant nature was made clearer.)

Efforts to synthesize penicillin were fully backed by the British and American medical scientific establishment while efforts to push natural penicillin production that came from people like Cold Spring Harbour Lab chief Miloslav Demerec and Glaxo's boss Harry Jephcott were rebuffed by that same elite.

Spurred by the efforts of Dr Dawson , Dr Dante Colitti got  he Hearst media empire to rouse the Dr Moms of the world with the plight of baby Patty Malone.

Even the powerful men running the Anglo-American medical-scientific establishment (& Big Pharma) momentarily quailed before the uproar from Dr Mom , but soon they returned to pushing for perfected synthetic penicillin before seeking any all-out production.

But Big Pharma was not totally united - one man within its ranks differed - and sometimes one individual is more than enough to change a whole world.

John L Smith, boss of Pfizer, was prompted by his own Dr Mom - his wife - to connect Patty Malone to the death of his own daughter - a death that Fleming could have helped prevent if only he had promoted - rather than negating - penicillin by needle.

As an ordinary patriotic American , Smith also knew D-Day was due soon.  Unlike ordinary Americans, he also knew that only penicillin could prevent the war deaths by infection the sulfa drugs were no longer effective against.

Like General Groves on steroids, Smith whipped Pfizer employees to produce tons of penicillin - now ! - for D-Day and civilian patients.

In a surprisingly few months ( by the Spring of 1944) - Smith - thanks admittedly greatly to the timely efforts of Miloslav Demerec - had solved the world's penicillin crisis.

But the Anglo-American medical scientific establishment - as always with bureaucrats spending other peoples' money - kept pushing hard on synthetic penicillin for two more wasted years.

Their Plan B ( eventually employed) was to push the Big Half Truth that they were always fully behind natural penicillin from 1939 onward and were merely held up by the pesky penicillium spores themselves.

In fact,  the only way they could think to totally synthesize artificial penicillin was to repeatedly destroy massive amounts of natural penicillin and then examine the resulting entrails.

Thus they did in fact support the limited production of natural penicillin - all through the war - but mostly for their chemists to destroy and then analysis - not to give to any and every patient dying for lack of it.

Shamefully, academic historians have let them get away with this particular Big Half Truth ever since ....

Oxford University Artificial Penicillin totally fails to deliver - morally as well as technically

It goes without saying that Oxford University's wartime chimera of totally synthesized artificial penicillin was an abject failure.

75 years on, we still start the production of all the penicillin and beta lactam antibiotics with natural fermentation.

So ---- just a minor technical failing ?

Few go on to consider the moral failings behind the Conservative Party-led British government's wartime penicillin decisions.

The (New Deal-oriented) American WPB (War Production Board) had greatly upped the penicillin amounts originally proposed by Oxford's American ally , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.

The WPB wanted not just enough penicillin produced to satisfy the life-saving demands of the American military, with some left for certain civilian conditions.

They wanted levels that meant all American lifesaving situations were met.

With plenty left over to fill all the unmet demands among the other Allies, with still more left for neutral nations, liberated Europe and even Axis POWs.

The WPB fulfilled Dr Martin Henry Dawson's dream of cheap abundant penicillin for all in the war world - in spades !

By contrast, Churchill's government was unwilling to divert enough resources away from yet more heavy bombers to cure all of Britain's military and civilian life-threatening bacterial infections - let alone to meet the needs of its own colonies.

And as for the rest of the world ? The could all whistle for their penicillin , as far as Churchill was concerned.

The prime minister of the nation that had given the world the discovery and early development of the world's first and best lifesaver thus threw all that global goodwill away - just for a handful of more bombs.

With that one - unbelievably heartless and stupid - decision , Churchill ensured that the Pax Britannica became the Pax Americana .....

Oxford Artificial versus Manhattan Natural

Howard Florey (along with Alexander Fleming and Winston Churchill's government) spend ten years before during and after WWII pursuing the chimera of totally artificial (patentable) penicillin --- to no avail.

As did Florey's supporters in America - Merck, Squibb and Vannevar Bush's all-powerful OSRD.

Set against then, on the opposite side of the Hudson River , was Dr Martin Henry Dawson and John l Smith , chemist and boss of Pfizer.

They saw possibilities in the fermentation of the (public domain - free for all to grow) natural penicillium to produce antibiotics.

This was despite its current yields being admittedly low: they felt as it was a totally new way of doing medicine , it might well improve drastically with more practise.

(I should mention that two other strong skeptics of the whole idea of the commercial viability of total synthesis of penicillin were also practising chemists : Glaxo boss Harry Jepcott and the WPB's penicillin czar Larry Elder.

 It was chemist manques like Florey and the OSRD's Dr Richards who were the most likely to feel that of course man-made Chemistry was always bound to be superior to Mother Nature.)

Today of course, with penicillin being produced at 50,000 times the levels of Fleming for the same cost in time labour and materials, the case against oxford Artificial seems clear - but it wasn't so throughout the war and beyond.

Long Island scientist Miloslav Demerec deserves a lot more credit than he ever gets (which is none !) for his major role in making our wonderful world of relatively cheap abundant antibiotics ....

Defeating the PENICILLIN death panels

 Part One : the backstory

President Obama in 2009 had absolutely no intention of emulating Hitler's use of Aktion T4 death  panels,  but this does not mean that death panels were not in force under an earlier Democratic administration.


These death panels - common to all Allied nations during WWII - did not directly echo the German efforts, instead they and the German death panels were all part and parcel of a world wide ground swell among the well educated and the well off in support of 'eugenic' triage.

Starting at the very outbreak of the war in 1939, Hitler had authorized doctor-run death panels to met to decide which of the weak and elderly in Germany should be actively killed off.

He had wanted to do much earlier,  but judged it would be politically risky internally.

Now he could use the excuse of urgent war need as the reason to roll back the Weimar Republic's expansion of Social Medicine , supposedly in an effort to divert the freed up money towards War Medicine instead.

Sharing similar eugenic motives, the mostly eugenically-minded medical elite in Allied and in Neutral nations also used the urgent need for expanded War Medicine for the 1As, as an excuse to roll back Social Medicine for their society's 4Fs.

This roll back could lead  to patients dying - death by indirection rather than direct acts of murder, of course ,because these people prided themselves on not being Nazis .

(Vichy France, for example, so reduced funds to institutions for the chronically ill, that tens of thousands were "CODE SLOWED" to death due to inadequate food, heat and medical staff attention. Just as Britain had done similarly during the last years of WWI).

Asking, "how do we ration life-saving medical resources like the 1960s' supply of kidney dialysis machines ?",  is the totally wrong question 

What we first need to ask is , "why did the 1960s feel the need to ration life machines in the first place, when it didn't ration death machines ?"

Clearly the totally absence of any money isn't the real issue  but rather " how do we divide the very big but still limited bag of money that we do have"?

So hospital auxiliary bake sales did raise money for some kidney dialysis machines back then - but no bombers or nuclear weapons were ever fund-raised that way.

All politics is about rationing : 'the authoritative allocation of scarce resources' as the textbooks describe it .

The decision to allocate most of the available money to H-bombs and so to supply only a small amount for the supply of baby incubators and the such like was a human-made decision, not an Act of God or a Law of Nature.

Just as the President who intoned "bombs were dropped on Cambodia" in an academically-correct passive, nay wimpy, voice really meant that "men dropped bombs on Cambodian civilians and killed them, because I ordered it so."

Stalin and Hitler forthrightly ordered millions to be murdered  - they did not artificially create a shortage by a human political decision and  then sit around piously in death panels trying to decide how to allocate patients to that shortage as 'fairly' as they could.

Bad Faith and Hypocrisy were not among their many sins of Hot and Cold.

But the sins of the lukewarm might well be dealt with even harsher on Judgement Day and it is the lukewarm sinners of wartime penicillin that we now turn to.

Britain's Conservative-dominated government said it would only make enough penicillin in wartime to handle the military cases it wanted penicillin to deal with.

And their Labour and Liberal partners went along with that.

So, no penicillin for penicillin for civilians in Britain or in her colonies, none to Allied POWS, none for British military casualties judged of no further military use.

Canada and Australia "me -too-ed" in agreement - one government liberal the other Labour.

America having a government of competing agencies, on the same Social Darwin model as Hitler's government , spoke with two main voices.

The scientific medical elite (OSRD and NAS) ,with some support from the military and industry , wanted only enough made to deal with priority military cases. Think of FDR as the "Doctor Win the War" of 1940 onwards.

But think also of an earlier FDR, "Doctor New Deal", and all his New Dealer supporters' high hopes.

Because what was now left of all these New Dealers were huddled in a stockade known as the WPB (War Production Board),  surrounded on all sides by the hostile Republicans that FDR had brought into his administration, as part of his willingness to lose the internal social war to win the external military war.

The WPB proposed that enough wartime penicillin be made in America to generously supply all the penicillin needs of  the military, the civilians and the overseas allies, neutrals and residents of enemy occupied lands.

The WPB won the argument -- when the new Army Surgeon General switched sides .

But until industry went along with the gag, America would still have not enough for anyone domestic , let alone everyone domestic and their foreign cousin.

The year long delay until one industrial firm really climbed on board with gusto allowed the OSRD-NAS to play God by convening penicillin death panels.

They might have operated unchallenged but for one man : Henry Dawson.

He fought them , won and so changed history ....