Apple a day won't keep the biochemist at bay

Patents and profits (but not patients) need pure penicillin.

Patients and people never ever need to see life-sustaining vitamins, minerals, nutrients, medicines as 100% pure.

Consider that when we eat a big apple, if we are lucky its 100 grams will yield up 10 mg of pure Vitamin C, but the body will have no problem using that one part in ten thousand out of all the mushed apple and acid inside our stomachs.

Similarly when Dr Vincent Duhig injected penicillium liquids straight into his patients' blood stream, the pure penicillin went straight to work killing their life-threatening infection, untroubled it was only a few parts per million of those penicillium liquids.

But biochemists in the 1940s attempting to determine the structure of a biological molecule had only crude tools and they needed both basically pure biological materials and lots of them for it to be destroyed by their brute force techniques.

One can not describe the moral disaster this caused the whole wartime penicillin situation better than the fact that in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was the world's biggest producing of penicillin and yet no one drop went into a patient's bloodstream to save their life.

Most of the penicillin grown in its first 15 years, was wasted on useless attempts at synthesis, not used to save the dying

If my claim be wrong : show me the money !

Open all the archives on university, hospital and corporate penicillin files.

Show us the size and number of penicillin production runs, month by month, from September 1928 to September 1943 ( ie including the first four years of the war).

Then shows us the amount of penicillin units actually released for therapeutic use on human patients suffering from infections suspected of  being defeatable by penicillin,  during that same time period.

Patents, Profits and Patriotism : pick two out of the three...

I have never seen any published accounts where the responsible authorities complained about all the precious potentially life-saving penicillin that was being wasted ---- during an all-out Total War ! ----on a futile 20 year long effort to synthesize patentable profitable penicillin from PD (public domain) natural penicillin.

But there are plenty of complaints from the higher-ups about all the penicillin being wasted on saving the lives of ("useless feeders") young people dying from hitherto invariably fatal SBE  (endocarditis)......