The grey-haired teenagers of the 1870s to 1890s, the guys who actually ran World War Two, grew up on the stories of the Golden Age of Mysteries and Detectives, starting with Sherlock Holmes' Study in Scarlet in 1887.
And one thing you quickly learned in all those thousands of books in dozens of languages was that the formula that the spy had stolen from the safe - the formula upon which the fate of the Empire ( or perhaps even the world) hung - was never a formula in physics or biology or geology or astronomy.
It was always a formula in Chemistry : always a formula for the synthesis of some extremely powerful explosive or fuel or drug.
Showing posts with label mycologists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mycologists. Show all posts
Monday, January 14, 2013
Thursday, August 12, 2010
"Jabbing" BIG PHARMA awake
Good things happen when you quit the shilly-shalling and "do the clinical" - ie 'stick the needle in and see what happens'.
I have said before that it was in October 1940 - the same month that Martin Henry Dawson jabbed the very first needle of antibiotics in a patient - that the American Drug Companies and the American medico-scientific establishment (NAS-NRC) finally woke up and started smelling the coffee on penicillin.
Example ?
That very month, Squibb asked for a sample of Fleming's penicillin mold from the culture collection in Peoria.
They did the smartest thing that Squibb ever did in the entire Penicillin Saga - they threw the chemists out of the building and let the mycologists get down and into it.
Don't you wish all the other labs had done ditto?
Alexander Fleming, unfortunately, seemed to really hate mycologists - and he rarely - in public anyway - disliked anyone
Thankfully, the result was a much improved strain from Fleming's original and it was eventually called NRRL 1249. (January 1942)
All praise to Dr Geoffrey Rake and his co-workers at Squibb who never get any thanks for giving us life-saving penicillin in time for D-Day.
Instead the big losers in the penicillin affair, the chemists, have written all the official histories, blowing smoke rings so we won't see how they failed to deliver on their promises.
Other claims to the contrary,history is usually written by the losers - at least "the losers with l'argent..." *
Mycologists take a bow : thanks to you , it was natural NRRL 1249 and its offspring , 1249.B21, (December 1942) that delivered most of the penicillin produced in World War II.
The chemists just delivered papers and articles instead....
* Canadian-anglophone-only joke --- Yanks and Brits/Anzacs etc can safely ignore it
I have said before that it was in October 1940 - the same month that Martin Henry Dawson jabbed the very first needle of antibiotics in a patient - that the American Drug Companies and the American medico-scientific establishment (NAS-NRC) finally woke up and started smelling the coffee on penicillin.
Example ?
That very month, Squibb asked for a sample of Fleming's penicillin mold from the culture collection in Peoria.
They did the smartest thing that Squibb ever did in the entire Penicillin Saga - they threw the chemists out of the building and let the mycologists get down and into it.
Don't you wish all the other labs had done ditto?
Alexander Fleming, unfortunately, seemed to really hate mycologists - and he rarely - in public anyway - disliked anyone
Thankfully, the result was a much improved strain from Fleming's original and it was eventually called NRRL 1249. (January 1942)
All praise to Dr Geoffrey Rake and his co-workers at Squibb who never get any thanks for giving us life-saving penicillin in time for D-Day.
Instead the big losers in the penicillin affair, the chemists, have written all the official histories, blowing smoke rings so we won't see how they failed to deliver on their promises.
Other claims to the contrary,history is usually written by the losers - at least "the losers with l'argent..." *
Mycologists take a bow : thanks to you , it was natural NRRL 1249 and its offspring , 1249.B21, (December 1942) that delivered most of the penicillin produced in World War II.
The chemists just delivered papers and articles instead....
* Canadian-anglophone-only joke --- Yanks and Brits/Anzacs etc can safely ignore it
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