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 ...

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...

Un-Super Heroes : a biography of NEW DEAL penicillin ...

The post-modern NEW DEAL extrusion onto the landscape of the Modern Age

British Conservative wartime penicillin or American Republican wartime penicillin , if they had succeeded, would have totally altered the generally favourable image we have today of penicillin.

It would have been regarded as needlessly expensive and originally available - by design -  to only the richest and whitest classes.

By contrast the wartime penicillin we actually got in the end  - NEW DEAL penicillin - is probably the world's best known medicine almost entirely because it is also the most beloved of lifesaver.

It remains non-patented ( in the public domain) and naturally made and hence both cheap and available to all nations to make.

During the war this non-patented natural penicillin was made available to all those in the world dying from lack of it only because the New Deal oriented super agency known as the WPB (War Production Board) willed it to be so.

In many accounts, the New Deal was definitely on its way out in Washington and America by 1945 and the gift of cheap natural penicillin for all was merely its final, departing, gift.

But in my view, the informally postmodern New Deal morphed seamlessly into formal post-Modernity in late 1945 and the gift of  cheap natural penicillin for all became merely postmodernity's opening gambit...

"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....

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 ....

Memo to RAMZI YOUSEF : Wartime Manhattan gave the world's first penicillin shots --- as well as the world's first A-bomb

Manhattan's first ever penicillin shots (75 years ago next  October 16th 2015) were a deliberate act of provocation by Dr Martin Henry Dawson.

Penicillin shots across the bow against the Allied medical establishment for using the excuse of war medicine preparation to dismiss efforts of social medicine directed at the poor and minorities.

He felt that penicillin should be deliberately given a high enough wartime production priority to be able to give penicillin to all those in wartime dying from lack of it .

This would serve as a very public rebuttal to the Axis who felt only the 'fit' from the 'fittest' nations deserved medicine, food and indeed life itself.

Wartime penicillin for all the Allied armed forces and civilians , as well as for Allied and enemy POWs, and the people in Neutral lands ,  even via the Red Cross into the occupied lands and eventually used to save the lives of former enemies.

The aftershock from Manhattan's first penicillin shots radiated out in ever-widening circles.

The then modest biological firm of Pfizer , from Brooklyn , was quickly recruited by news of those historical first shots and began helping out Dawson.

But first Dawson had to demonstrate success against a hitherto invariable fatal disease (SBE) to really suggest what penicillin might do if it was mass produced.

 He did so, starting in November 1942, by 'going off the reservation' and used some OSRD controlled penicillin to save a group of women dying of SBE - something the OSRD strictly forbade - which meant abandoning them to a certain death.

But the astounding success he had with SBE was enough evidence for Dawson's former patient , industrialist Floyd Odlum , to suggest to his boss at the powerful (the New Deal-oriented) War Production Board (WPB) that it greatly up the original production proposed by its rival Vannevar Bush's OSRD .

But Big Pharma sat on its hands, convinced it could make much more money for a much smaller investment (and without a need to learn new skills) when it had synthetic (aka patentable) penicillin instead of this dangerous natural penicillin - which could be made by any competitor.

Such as Dawson - whose modest hospital pilot plant was for several months , the world's "biggest" penicillin producer !

Dawson had certainly convinced a fellow colleague and fellow WWI vet, Dr Rudolph (Rudy) N Schullinger in the Surgical Service of his hospital.

Rudy went overseas in mid 1942 with the CUMC's wartime Second General Hospital unit to Oxford England. Dawson had full-blown Myasthenia Gravis (MG) by that date or he would have been the Lab Chief for that military hospital.

Rudy Schullinger tried very hard to get some of the OSRD's penicillin sent into the European Theatre of War so he could both treat wounded American troops in wartime and contribute the results to the ongoing research pool.

Despite repeated entreaties the OSRD would have done of it !

Thankfully Schullinger's protests finally did pull some some penicillin out of the hands of stay-at-home civilian researchers and into the frontlines (before the war ended).

Though it was only to be used to treat american troops , he broke Regulations and used a good deal of it to save the life of a British soldier dying of the same disease Dawson was trying to cure - endocarditis !

(Dawson's "Acting Up" was infectious .)

Then another former patient , med resident Dr Dante Colitti , threw an emotional spanner in the works - suggesting to the parents of a dying two year old girl from Queens called Patty Malone that they call up Citizen Hearst's biggest paper and beg them to get penicillin the OSRD was denying her.

The Hearst media empire's emotional accounts of rushing the penicillin to the little girl with "just seven hours to spare" gripped first a nation and then a world.

It gripped - in particular - the hearts of Mr and Mrs John L Smith . They had lost a young girl to meningitis that mass produced penicillin - as Dr Dawson always insisted - could easily have cured.

The normally hyper-cautious Smith - the boss of Pfizer - now threw all caution to the wind - ordering his firm to build the world's first really big penicillin plant in as few months as a 24/7 schedule could produce.

Bolder yet - he decided to use the penicillin allocated to his firm to do synthetic studies (to secure a share of the future patents) to save the lives of people in New York  with SBE that his government was refusing to save.

A mysterious woman (probably the otherwise very upright Gladys Hobby) would arriving offering bottles of penicillin without labels to doctors like Ward J MacNeal and Leo Loewe with the oblique suggestion it might just help their SBE patients - and then disappear.

At the time it seemed clear to people inside Big Pharma that Smith had recklessly threw away a certainty of big future profits for Pfizer, just to help save the lives of a few worthless nobodies.

But his - and our - salvation lay in the most unlikeliest of all places : the former eugenic laboratories at Cold Spring Harbour in Long Island , once one of the intellectual godfathers to the Nazi holocausts agains Jews, Slavs and the 'unfit'.

For several years, its new (non-eugenically oriented) director Milislav Demerec had pleaded in vain with Vannevar Bush's OSRD to let him help develop more productive natural strains of penicillin-producing penicillium.

But the OSRD - like Florey and Fleming in England - had its heart set on a man-made synthetic triumph with penicillin - they had no intention to share the glory with anyone small and weak  - let alone microbes.

Once again , the WPB saved the day. Its Office for Production Research and Development (OPRD) had about one hundredth the budget and influence of Vannevar Bush's better known Office for Scientific Research and Development (OSRD).

But the OPRD had street smarts in spades and it wisely gave a tiny amount of money and a lot of morale-boosting support to Demerec's and the spectacular results has repaid that debt a million fold and more ever since.

Demerec gave the penicillium spores a nasty sunburn under an ordinary tanning lamp - most died from the radiation.

But a few survived and were soon producing ten - then one hundred and today 50,000 times as much penicillin from the same amount of feedstock as Fleming's original strain (and Fleming's was an extraordinarily good natural producer !)

Yet Demerec remains the most unsung among all the unsung true heroes of the wartime penicillin story : a case once again where the moral scum - not the moral cream - rises to the top of the fame charts.

Now Dawson's team wasn't the only team in New York thumbing their nose at Big Pharma and Big Medicine by starting a penicillin grow-op.

A doubting doctor John Mahoney out on Staten Island Marine Hospital questioned the OSRD's claim that penicillin couldn't cure syphilis .

With unofficial help from Dawson's team they started growing their own and tested their theory on "Easter" Bunnies (as they told their innocent children) that they kept in their home garages over the Easter holidays !

The public clamour from Doctor Mom for "more penicillin now !" that had started with the story of Patty Malone really took off with the thought that with penicillin families need no longer be threatened with VD from errant husbands.

We can't negate the atomic Manhattan Project and Hiroshima.

But Manhattan Penicillin ,the other Manhattan Project , can point with pride to the fact that 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day (in its first ever mass clinical trial) came from Pfizer's Marcy Avenue Brooklyn plant and that plant went on to supply the biggest chunk of the world's penicillin for the rest of the war.

So much penicillin that America - not the Britain of Nobel prize winners Florey and Fleming ( who were still chasing the decade old chimera of synthetic penicillin and only then mass production) - supplying most of the penicillin for the Allied, Neutral, occupied and Enemy lands.

And that in turn ushered in a Pax Americana based on diplomatic gifting of abundant New York penicillin.

Dawson's dream of abundant - non-patented - penicillin cheap enough to help all has come true - it is life-saving too cheap to meter, lifesaving far cheaper than bottled water.

It has beaten back age old diseases kept endemic by residing among remote and poor people not reached by clean water, adequate food and proper health care.

As a result a sort of herd immunity has occurred as ten billion of us since 1940 have indirectly had better health from seeing diseases like Rheumatic Fever fade from sight.

No, the 250,000 lives lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki can never be re-gained by actions in other areas - but I think I have offered up evidence to terrorists like Ramzi Yousef and others that wartime Manhattan was at least as much from Venus as it was from Mars.

And if Manhattan citizens are too modest to blow their own horn about its decisive role in making cheap abundant penicillin available to ALL in a world tired, huddled and wretched - then the rest of us should do it for them.

We can't continue to let a terrorist like Ramzi Yousef be the last word on Manhattan's wartime role ....

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 ....

Churchill's bombers burn babies while FDR's bombers deliver penicillin to babies

I have tried awfully hard to find stories of Churchill's bombers delivering bottles of penicillin, rather than bombs of napalm, to the world's babies.

No luck so far.

But newspapers in 1943-1944 were rife with stories of FDR's bombers delivering various tiny bottles of penicillin half way around the world to save babies.

It is usual to emphasis how well the left-leaning FDR government got along with the right-leaning Churchill government but it is also possible to overdo all the censor-approved bonhomie.

Wartime penicillin is a clear example where the two differed wildly, with dire permanent consequences for Britain and the British Tories.

The Tory-dominated Ministry of Supply ,egged on by the likes of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, successfully kept the miracles of penicillin out of the popular British press, so that it might remain below the radar of the German chemists.

The hope was secret penicillin could be a medical-military weapon, a nasty surprise to drop on the Jerries on D-Day when Allied troop casualties quickly returning to the front while Axis wounded festered and died with only the outdated sulfa drugs to heal them.

The cost of the beginnings of an adequate supply of penicillin for British civilian and soldier alike was only one or two of Butcher Harris's endless bomber squadrons, but the MOS successfully throttled back penicillin production expenditures so that only British troop needs could be ( just barely) met.

In America, FDR's new Deal was dying, a victim of the war.

But in its last hurrah, the very New Dealish WPB (War Production Board) set the USA supply requests at a level a thousand times higher than the British levels, despite a population only three times bigger !

Thanks to Henry Dawson and Dante Colitti and Citizen Hearst, an outraged American public, led by Doctor Mom, demanded to know why the American drug companies were not cashing in on those massive 'firm orders' from Uncle Sam.

Henry Dawson's early supporter from the drug industry, John L Smith of Pfizer, took up the public's challenge and soon was producing penicillin at rates many dozens of times higher than the rest of the world combined.

Flush with excess penicillin, America could easily afford to divert some of its bombers off the killing work and towards delivering tiny vials of penicillin to dying children world wide.

Widely reported in the world press, this penicillin diplomacy from America quietly replaced the Pax Britanica with Pax Americana despite the fact that the Brits had held an exclusive on the life-saving balm for more than a dozen years.

Back home in the UK, things got worse for Churchill.

He had been widely expected to win the 1945 election - not the least by his lackluster opponents in the Labour Party , for his efforts in winning the war.

But doubts over Tory fairness in the quality of medical care for rich and for poor, highlighted in a famous Daily Mirror cartoon of a wounded British soldier, silently moved many voters (in an era before 'public' public polling) over to their opponents.

Unfairness of who got or did not get scarce British penicillin ( versus news stories of obvious American abundance), highlighted by newspaper stories of dying British children with SBE being denied the life-saving mold , was an important part of that emerging move away from the Tory-led government.

Penicillin was British-born, damn it all, and Churchill's government had fumbled the ball, giving it away to the Americans and yet denying it to British civilians.

Who gave a hoot - now - about how many European babies Butcher Harris's bombers had burned while flying above a war won on the ground by millions of Ivans ?

Wartime penicillin never cured Churchill's pneumonia - that is a myth.

But its British failure surely killed his electoral prospects, just as its American success helped pull Harry Truman back out of his expected electoral defeat.....

Fred J Stock : righteous among the nations ? (Part I)

Part I : the Era of Sulfa has run out of steam...

In May 1943, almost 15 years after the world's best lifesaver - Penicillin G - was first discovered , the whole world was making about a 100 million units of it a month.

That sounds like a lot but it is not at all - that amount of Penicillin G today would be only sufficient to treat one ordinarily sick patient requiring it !

A severely ill patient today requiring penicillin G might need a whole year's worth (1200 million units) at May 1943 production rates.

But May 1943 was hardly ordinary times with ordinary patients - it was the height of WWII , the biggest deadliest war ever seen : a seven ring circus of sickness and injury where the box office never closed.

The only other lifesaver around at that time - the wonderful sulfa drugs - had had a great five year run of success (cheap and easy to make in huge amounts, easy to give to patients) but had now run out of steam and were in grave danger of collapse.

By the Fall of 1942 , the chemists had a convincing scientific explanation for why they had run out of places on the basic sulfa ring to insert new additional  "side chain" molecules, to provide additionalanti-bacterial action via new variants of  sulfa.

So : no new sulfa drugs for germ-killing ---- ever .

The existing ones were now meeting unexpectedly rapid bacterial resistance - the normal solution : up the dosage amount and duration of treatment to overcome that resistance - had revealed just how dangerously toxic the safe sulfa drugs could be at high and prolonged dosages.

A repeat of WWI's deadly combo pandemic of Spanish (viral) Flu and (bacterial) Pneumonia and maybe this time more than a 100 million people (one in twenty) might die.

A huge potential disaster loomed, just offstage.

The problem , as always , was that scientists were in charge of public policy on penicillin - not politicians.

The academic scientists - on penicillin - had made common cause with their normally mortal enemies : Big Pharma.

Penicillin had long been ready to report for war duty - but only as a public domain natural substance made up in medieval brews by rural peasant midwives from mold slime ( I am paraphrasing the scientists' and CEOs' mutual objections here.)

The CEOs were chemically-minded as only executives matured during the chemistry-made interwar years could be and really wanted a synthetic penicillin.

Synthetic means man-made means patents : patents to raise prices and secure world markets free from profit-cutting competitors.

The scientists claimed to abhor profit-making but loved reputation making instead.

And for scientists still unsure if their new found high social status was really secure , it would be a retrograde step for the world's best ever lifesaver to be seen as something a housewife could brew up in their kitchen and apply directly.

Because that meant all its lifesaving prestige would bypass both the male academic basic scientist and the male applied scientists in medical labs and hospital wards.

(For the Gender War raged on , military war or not.)

The OSRD/NAS in America and the MRC in the UK ,dominated by Republican/Conservative Party scientists (for virtually all tenured academics in those years voted Republican or Conservative), controlled the production of penicillin until May 1943.

Their conservative views even continued to dominate the Conservative Ministry of Supply in the UK.

But in America they were soon to be defeated - in great part because they were now to deal with the very New Deal and Democratic Party-oriented War Production Board (WPB) and the formidable head of its Drugs and Cosmetics Branch, Fred J Stock.....

"Pax Penicillia" : how Churchill's Britain won the war and lost the peace

The decision by Winston Churchill's (Tory) Minister of Supply (MoS) not to divert the money for one additional Lancaster squadron, used to bomb civilians in Europe, towards providing enough penicillin for British (and European) civilians resulted in Churchill's Tories winning the war for Britain --- but at the cost of losing the peace.

By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral  authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.

Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.

And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...

Penicillin's "Bengali Famine Years" : 1943-1944

It was not America and Britain, it was not even the British and American governments ,that made the momentous decision, between late 1942 and early 1943, not to divert tax money just a little away from bombs and towards penicillin production instead.

This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944,  to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.

It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.

But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.

Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.

By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.

Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.

These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.

As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.

And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.

FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.

But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.

That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .

Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.

If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .

If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.

My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.

 Just as in the UK,  Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.

And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.

For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....

Patient ONE of the Antibiotics Era : how the saving of Charlie Aronson changed our world

During his lifetime, Dr Henry Dawson only gave penicillin to several dozen endocarditis patients, Charlie Aronson first among them ; only saved several dozen lives, Charlie among them.

Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.

But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.

If  only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.

Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.

Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.

It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.

Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.

The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.

There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.

Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.

Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.

This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.

They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.

Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.

A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound  more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).

This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.

Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.

We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and  the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.

Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of  wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.

America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana,  again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".

Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.

But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.

Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.

Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.

But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.

Dante Colitti forced their hand.

In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital,  was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.

But he did.

He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.

 And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.

Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.

The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.

Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/  needed  penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?

Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.

The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone:  John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter  + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944,  is clear enough .

Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....

Roy S Koch "shows me the money" on wartime penicillin

In December 1944, a very youthful looking economist named Roy S Koch was heading up The Biologicals and Parenteral Solutions Unit, hitherto an unimportant sub-section of a sub-section of a sub-section, buried deep somewhere in the bowels of the powerful War Production Board in wartime Washington.

Then , overnight in August 1943, penicillin became one of those parenterally delivered biologicals and nothing was ever quite the same.

One of Koch's jobs was tallying the actual amounts, month by month, firm by firm, of medical grade penicillin that passed from the FDA's approval into the military or civilian supply chain.

In those excited anxious days with American families's sons, brothers and fathers dying left (Pacific) and right (Atlantic) in record numbers, all eyes and ears were on the progress reports on penicillin production.

Everyone, in their own way, was pitching in to help American industry finally deliver the goods, 15 years later but better late than never.

Above all the American taxpayer was working overtime to pay for that promise of expanded production.

 Paying for the government building of private-firm-run buildings, paying through extra personal taxes for the shortfall caused by the writing off of excess corporate taxes, paying for military and civilian expeditors, paying to aid to university researchers who were in turn aiding corporate coffers - on  and on and on.

 So a corporate failure to make good on a public promise to deliver a lot of penicillin, with the help of lots of taxpayers' money, was going to seem tantamount to committing an act of treason.

Hence Koch's carefully collected figures had to remain a closely guarded secret : American corporations may fail to deliver all the time, but the American public is never ever to know.

But in 1958, about 55 years ago and almost 15 years after the figures were first collected, a muckraking US government inquiry into price-fixing in the antibiotic business did reveal the figures --- even put it in a public domain documents so all the world could quote them freely.

But I have never seen anyone do so and I have read an awful lot on wartime penicillin : so if I am wrong, please email me at my email on this blog.

Anyway, the figures are posted above and you can access the report  ("Economic Report on Antibiotics Manufacture" )  online --- this chart is from the appendix, page 331.

In January 1944, the Hare side of the race to make - and define - wartime penicillin was feeling pretty good : Merck had produced some actual therapeutically-effective penicillin by human synthesis (take that you nasty mold !), a result soon confirmed by the Oxford Hares and by other American Hares.

Yields were much lower than the mold-made penicillin and the impurities both more abundant and much more lethal than in the naturally-made penicillin , but the chemists (hundreds of the best chemists in the world) were working on it.

Soon the pesky Tortoises of  wartime penicillin, mostly obscure johnnies come lately, could be kissed off - their brand new plants just so yesterday, so very obsolete : growing mold like some rural farmer and then making things by fermentation.

 In this Modern Age !

Really, the nerve !

Still, in January 1944, some of the leaders in the secret effort to make penicillin by synthesis are still putting up a good front in aiding the build-up of penicillin supplies for the widely expected opening of the Second Front (D-day) in the late spring or early summer.

Their production of natural penicillin was quite good - compared to even a few months earlier.

The all-mighty Merck (leader, along with Howard Florey in Oxford England, of the penicillin Hares) delivered 3.1 billion units that month, about as much as some obscure mushroom farmer (Reichel) did , buried somewhere out in the backwoods of rural Pennsylvania.

Merck wasn't going to really go all out to produce a lot of natural penicillin for the boys overseas, not when they were about to blow the world away with their very own "technically sweet" synthetic penicillin.

But the boss, George W Merck, was still determined to be patriotic none the less, "do his bit".

Pfizer, another part of the New York area Hare triad, led the production, just barely, with 3.98 billion units.

Squibb ,the third of that triad, was not pulling its weight - even the War Production Board could barely contain their anger , as the folks at Squibb laying back on the oars --- producing just .61 billion units.

The Mid-West group of Hares hadn't done as well, but they hadn't been at it as long : Abbott did .71 billion, Lilly .43 , Upjohn .07 , Parke Davis .03.

Let us jump to April 1944.

Synthetic penicillin yields are still so low that they were a joke - making even Fleming's small amounts that he produced in 1928 look enormous in comparison.

But almost everyone's natural penicillin output has improved --- it was getting close, after all, to make the deadline to get into the pipeline to Kansas City's big depot and then out again to Southern England for the D-Day medical supply loadings.

Every drug CEO wanted to boast later in ads that it was his firm's penicillin that had won the day in the invasion of Nazi Europe.

Reichel had fallen way back below its January output and Merck hadn't even doubled its output.

But Squibb had increased its supply by 10 times , albeit from a low base and Abbott had done almost as well.

(Commercial Solvents had increased its output by 300 times, from a very low base - but it was a real newcomer.)

Pfizer switches sides and kills Modernity ...

But Pfizer wasn't playing fair, for it had turned from being a Hare into a Tortoise : it had increased its natural penicillin output by 10 times, from a very high base and doubled it again in May : producing more than the entire world's penicillin plants combined.

By July, Merck was almost producing less than it had in January, while Pfizer was producing 25 times as much as it had in January.

Still no early sign of synthetic penicillin production and Pfizer was on its way to producing enough penicillin for the entire world,naturally, with or without Merck's 'technically sweet" synthetic stuff .

Modernity had just taken a fatal shot to the base of the neck and deep down, everyone knew it....

OPRD and Dawson vs OSRD and Florey : social or war penicillin ?

If America was to win the war for the Allies by being becoming a ponderous and relentlessly-slow grinding mill of the gods ( a veritable "Arsenal of Democracy" as President Roosevelt proclaimed) than sometimes Vannevar Bush's OSRD (Office of Scientific Research and Development) worked hard against that objective, never more so than with Penicillin (and DDT).

In Total War, attrition (greater weight of arms and men) rather than generalship (the better use of the elements of secrecy and surprise) is felt to be - in the long run - the truly dominant factor.

The OSRD obviously disagreed, as did Hitler's High Command and the Japanese War Cabinet.

These three agreed amongst themselves that it didn't really matter that both sides shared the same 105mm howitzer and that so the side with the best rate of production of that artillery piece and its ammunition would win in the long run.

That was so old-school, so World War One style thinking.

No, the OSRD would win a quick clean war, by speed and secrecy of new weapon invention and by taking the offensive role at every turn in the war of new weapon invention : as the British would say, WWII was to be a war between sciences : a Boffin's war, not a foot soldier's war like WWI.

But you could also see this as classic "chicken hawk" style thinking  : stoutly favouring bold offensive operations, albeit from the cosy safety of an comfy armchair.

Because seemingly the only requirement for rising in the OSRD hierarchy was that you had successfully avoided combat when you were young and fit enough to do so, but now that you were now old and fat and balding and safely beyond the age of conscription your bellicosity had returned full on.

The German, Japanese and British military agreed with the OSRD - preferring to invent more truly new and superior - secret- weapons even when they knew this meant that fewer units of existing conventional weapons would be produced.

(By contrast, the Russians tended to want to produce greater numbers of a far fewer and far less technically sophisticated range of weapons - working in some minor incremental improvements over long, long production runs.)

So if the OSRD "took up" the development of Penicillin and DDT it would come with some heavy and hidden costs : for these two would now be developed strictly be for use as  secret and new "instruments of war" (weapons).

How we "almost lost penicillin" : it got captured by the OSRD

Penicillin being "captured" by the OSRD in the summer of 1941 when Howard Florey took it to his old pal ( OSRD heavyweight Dr A N Richards) wasn't as bad as being captured by the Gestapo , but it was a close run thing.

By contrast, the War Production Board (WPB) and its OPRD (Office of Production Research and Development) took a more sophisticated view of war work in a Total War situation : understanding completely that if civilians don't eat or are home sick, both old-fashioned howitzers and new-fashioned atomic bombs don't get built.

So if the epidemic of lung infections in America in the winter of 1944 among war workers had become a pandemic and shell production had been cut in half, just when the Battle of the Bulge needed more 105 mmm shells not less, the OPRD would have been ready, with massive amounts of civilian penicillin for ailing war plant workers.

But the OSRD would be left touting its claim that fewer of our wounded men in the Ardennes were languishing in hospital beds than in the case of the Germans, thanks to our Allied frontline military hospitals having most of the world's scarce supply of natural penicillin.

Artificially scarce , by government fiat, only because the OSRD and its British counterpart were STILL working on trying to make top secret synthetic penicillin and didn't want to warn the Germans of penicillin's potential by letting civilian doctors use it and then talk up miracle cures.

Dawson's unexpected SBE cures with stolen government penicillin leading to dying Baby Patricia Malone's widely publicized 'stealing' of penicillin beyond the OSRD's direct jurisdiction, brought the public and the OPRD into the picture and finally got us wartime penicillin en masse : for frontline Ardennes soldier and home front civilian alike .....