WWII as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science....

The night 'the music died' began when the young pilot of the small plane that Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were in, misread an instrument and thought he was climbing above a storm when he was really going full blast down into the ground.

Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.

They mis-read the Atomic Energy fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap Natural Penicillin and Auschwitz's gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

Life-saving penicillin can be a little bit fermented but not a little bit synthetic

If a medicine will save lives when nothing else will do so - in war as in peace - then Henry Dawson's example reminds us that our first moral requirement is to make it as much as we can, anyway we can, save lives anyway we can..... and only then try to perfect it.

Merck has credible excuses for being beaten on D-Day penicillin by Pfizer - but none whatsoever for being crushed by Commercial Solvent

Merck, the OSRD, Florey's Oxford team (all part of the synthetic penicillin obsession) continue to have many defenders among academia.

Keep something out of the newspapers and it can remain a secret forever - even when it is not : the case of wartime DDT

Hard to explain why both the Germans and the Japanese of WWII failed to make use of DDT to reduce their truly immense manpower losses due to endemic insect borne diseases : its use alone, could have prolonged the war a year or two more.

After all, knowledge of how to make the stuff was in the public domain, and in the open scientific literature, having been synthesized more than seventy(70) years earlier.

Nova Scotia-born Dr Henry Dawson and the wartime re-invention of a military secret weapon into a widely publicized beacon of hope

I am talking about penicillin of course.

What other artifact of war has so abruptly and so totally changed its character over the course of a war ?

MAE WEST on Modernity : rubes....

Michael Marshall

The hallmark of  THE AGE OF MODERNITY ( aka THE AGE OF MASCULINITY) was to mistake size for sophistication, which as MAE WEST once famously quipped, is the mark of the male rube and the unsophisticated .

God, said Modernity, not Viagra, was on the side of the Big Battalions, if you know (wink,wink,nudge,nudge) what I mean.

Mae said, in essence, "'taint the meat, its the motion..."

Still, to hear Modernity talk, the very best way to be sure to sink a 70,000 ton battleship was to send in a half dozen battleships, each with thousands of crew, and all bristling with guns and armour.

 Then use their very long range naval guns with their very big shells, to safely sink the 70,000 tonner from 25 miles away.

To destroy a mile square chemical plant ?  Just send in a few hundred heavy bombers ,(battleships of the air) , bristling with men, machine guns and armour, to safely drop lots of large bombs on it from 25,000 feet above it.

But any cursory reality check of WWII reveals that very different methods were required for real results.

One small submarine or one small dive bomber (or one sea mine, for real economy) getting in very close,time and again, proved to be much more accurate and hence much more lethal in sinking battleships and aircraft carriers.

Lethal often as well to the submarine or dive bomber.

But hot courage, not cool science, seems to work out better for this particular human activity.

Similarly, a single light, unarmed and unarmoured wooden bomber, the Mosquito, seemed to do much better than the vast air armadas when it came to halting the production of chemical plants.

Sneaking in low and unobserved - something that can not be said for a stream of hundreds of large aircraft dozens flying in a formation that is dozens of miles long and wide, the Mosquito
got in 'close and personal' with the chemical plant's key bottleneck
building - perhaps its power plant or cat converter.

A single bomb, delivered close and accurately, could do the job.

The air armanda, by contrast, usually ended up dropping most of its bombs from so high up that they landed instead on civilians' homes.

In addition, that unsuccessful raid frequently cost 10% of those aircraft.

With their large crews ,that meant the lost of hundreds of young lives.

And the need to constantly build more replacement bombers  represented a large percentage of the economic output of their entire nation back home, because they were so large and complex.

They consumed resources that then could not be devoted to more useful and economic ways to end the war and save lives.

Which is to say: smaller aircraft/vessels, with their smaller crews to end up dead.

Now a chemical plant, a human chemical plant, at first glance seems to be very big and sophisticated.

Big and complex and expensive yes --- but hardly sophisticated.

"Surely not !", you exclaim, still trusting that old high school chemistry teacher.

"Just look at all those incredibly sturdily built massive reactor vessels and tubing and the incredibly elaborate instrumentation dials."

Oh yes, all those vast amounts of fossil fuels going in to heat things up, to cool things down, to heat them up again, to cool them down again.

And yes, all that energy devoted to increasing pressures to hundreds of atmospheres - hence the need for very thick and sturdy ( read: very expensive) reactor vessels.

Still not convinced ?

Well let use make some totally man-made synthetic penicillin then, using today's best chemistry.

One caveat - we will make it at factory sized scale, not in a flask like some academic with one eye an article for NATURE and another on a Nobel prize - we want to make this a profitable venture.

We will start with lots of very complicatedly made chemical reagents - themselves the products of factory-sized operations.

We will heat them up/cool them down and pressure them up/pressure them down, from reactor vessel to reactor vessel,  chemical step by chemical step.

The basic ingredients of penicillin itself cost pennies , but the reagents needed to make it are very expensive so we need to recover them , as well as very expensively separate them from the chemical results at each step of the process.

In fact purification is the most expensive part of this whole business - we will end up sticking this in someone's bloodstream after all.

But purification isn't the fatal step - it is the level of yield after one run through ( infinitely tiny) versus the total sunk and operating costs (huge).

We can run the results of one batch back through the system to increase the yield a bit ,and so on over and over, but it is still very expensive for each iteration.

This is how the world made most of its nuclear weapons, cascading the tiny initial yields of the gaseous diffusion process, back into the system over and over, in plant buildings about a mile square.

It cost trillions but cost is no object when it comes to killing people; however if we want to save lives, we need be practical and prudent and make a profit.

Synthetic man-made penicillin would be too expensive to use - we would be shifted - as patients and doctors - to using cheaper but less effective drugs.

Or ?

Or we could switch to the chemical equivalent of the tiny submarine, dive bomber and Mosquito.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson was a decorated soldier of the First World War --- but in the Second World War, he was a civilian.

His 'war work' was not directly in the weapons business - he designed no dive bomber or submarine - he was a medical doctor not a PhD.

But he come up with the medical equivalent of the small, cheap dive bomber, submarine or Mosquito .

The living fungi cell, far too small to see, is a complete penicillin producing plant in itself.

It does the job without huge heavy reactors or heavy outlays of energy - because it makes penicillin in ordinary temperatures, at ordinary atmospheric pressure, in relatively few steps.

Best of all, these factories, when they are not making penicillin, will make duplicate chemical factories of themselves, out of agricultural waste and a little dirty water !

In fact from one tiny cell or spore, invisible to all but the best microscopes, using only a few pennies worth of agricultural waste and tap water, you will quickly see trillions of tiny chemical plants springing up, producing useable amounts of the life-saving penicillin.

Rather than using huge amounts of scarce and expensive stainless steel reactors and complicated and expensive instrumentation equipment, penicillin could have been made in underused rural milk plants using underemployed and unskilled rural workers living in their already built homes.

(For new urban housing for tens of thousands of new urban workers was one of the scarcest materials in every nation's war effort.)

Sophistication, I am saying, includes lateral thinking outside the box, and is frugal and economical not simply big for the sake of impress-the-locker-room bigness.

May I suggest that the women who grew most of the natural penicillin that we used in WWII appreciated this fact much quicker than the men ever did ?

WWII  demonstrated one thing for sure: God - the God of sophistication - is on the side of the Small Battalions.....

On the May & Baker factory floor, the magic bullet of M&B 693 was decidedly low tech

Science journalism and Chemistry Industry advertising (often hard to tell apart in the 1930s) saw the new Sulfa Drugs as the latest and most glamorous product to roll out of the cornucopia of the synthetic arcadia.

But as John Lesch describes in his account of how the British drug firm May & Baker developed its famous M&B693 (the sulfa drug that saved Churchill's life at the height of World War II) the view from the factory floor was distinctly low tech.

A dusty bottle of a rarely used chemical compound, made up for an ex-employee who never used it, but retained by the research lab of a large drug firm because, well, its the Great Depression and money is too tight to lightly throw anything out.

Experimental Chemistry Theory insisted there is absolutely no point in wasting effort in trying the contents of that old

chemical bottle in synthesising a potentially useful analogue from the original German sulfa compound.

Fortunately, an older tradition (in medicine they call this the 'hands on' or clinical approach) said "try everything" .

Unexpectedly ,and thankfully, the unusual new compound showed some promise in the chemical lab.

But the next stage would be to try it on deliberately-infected mice in another type of lab.

But this lab had none of the usual mice (infected with strep bacteria) -- money was tight in the Depression remember ?---

so a harried assistant, trying to fill in for his boss while he was away, tested the compound instead on mice inflected with the bacteria that gives us the worst kinds of pneumonia.

Nothing had ever killed these bacteria reliably and almost everything possible had been tried on them since 1919 and the pandemic of Spanish Flu.

(Most of the Spanish Flu's 50 million deaths worldwide were actually caused by pneumonia -- reason enough to research it more thoroughly than any other virulent agent had been to date.)

Once again, trying the unexpected and the unscientific paid off - this new sulfa killed the most dangerous of the pneumonia types.

This would, if confirmed, be headline news worldwide and would push May & Baker into the front rank of world drug firms.

But for now, back to Depression realities.

A number of intermediate chemicals had to be made in quantity on the way to making the actual sulfa.

Various stratagems were employed as the factory hands struggled to break up recalcitrant chunks of an important intermediate into a coarse powder, without blowing up themselves and their building.

Their delicate lab-grade tools of high precision?

A hammer and chisel !

Then a lot of ordinary mortars and pestles were filled with the crude powder and it was slowly,painfully, hand-ground down to a sufficiently fineness.

May and Baker, despite being a large, diversified , long standing British drug house , had no vacuum still and so its first sulfa 693 had to be made up in one or two litre flasks, so to make that first batch of one kilogram took two months of hard unrelenting effort on behalf of the entire team.

Still,a little of that very first batch in early February 1938, saved the life of a Norfolk farm labourer who was given up for dead because of his seemingly non-responsive lobar pneumonia.

A decidedly better result that the much better known first British effort, in early February 1941, to use penicillin to save the life of a policeman !

Pneumonia - the dreaded 'Captain of the Forces of Death' - had a cure !

But Lesch's detailed account of the development of M&B693 bears only the most fleeting acquaintance with the usual starry-eyed account provided to the public by Thirties media accounts...

On the May & Baker factory floor, the magic bullet of M&B 693 was decidedly low tech

Science journalism and Chemistry Industry advertising (often hard to tell apart in the 1930s) saw the new Sulfa Drugs as the latest and most glamorous product to roll out of the cornucopia of the synthetic arcadia.

But as John Lesch describes in his account of how the British drug firm May & Baker developed its famous M&B693 (the sulfa drug that saved Churchill's life at the height of World War II) the view from the factory floor was distinctly low tech.

A dusty bottle of a rarely used chemical compound, made up for an ex-employee who never used it, but retained by the research lab of a large drug firm because, well, its the Great Depression and money is too tight to lightly throw anything out.

Experimental Chemistry Theory insisted there is absolutely no point in wasting effort in trying the contents of that old

chemical bottle in synthesising a potentially useful analogue from the original German sulfa compound.

Fortunately, an older tradition (in medicine they call this the 'hands on' or clinical approach) said "try everything" .

Unexpectedly ,and thankfully, the unusual new compound showed some promise in the chemical lab.

But the next stage would be to try it on deliberately-infected mice in another type of lab.

But this lab had none of the usual mice (infected with strep bacteria) -- money was tight in the Depression remember ?---

so a harried assistant, trying to fill in for his boss while he was away, tested the compound instead on mice inflected with the bacteria that gives us the worst kinds of pneumonia.

Nothing had ever killed these bacteria reliably and almost everything possible had been tried on them since 1919 and the pandemic of Spanish Flu.

(Most of the Spanish Flu's 50 million deaths worldwide were actually caused by pneumonia -- reason enough to research it more thoroughly than any other virulent agent had been to date.)

Once again, trying the unexpected and the unscientific paid off - this new sulfa killed the most dangerous of the pneumonia types.

This would, if confirmed, be headline news worldwide and would push May & Baker into the front rank of world drug firms.

But for now, back to Depression realities.

A number of intermediate chemicals had to be made in quantity on the way to making the actual sulfa.

Various stratagems were employed as the factory hands struggled to break up recalcitrant chunks of an important intermediate into a coarse powder, without blowing up themselves and their building.

Their delicate lab-grade tools of high precision?

A hammer and chisel !

Then a lot of ordinary mortars and pestles were filled with the crude powder and it was slowly,painfully, hand-ground down to a sufficiently fineness.

May and Baker, despite being a large, diversified , long standing British drug house , had no vacuum still and so its first sulfa 693 had to be made up in one or two litre flasks, so to make that first batch of one kilogram took two months of hard unrelenting effort on behalf of the entire team.

Still,a little of that very first batch in early February 1938, saved the life of a Norfolk farm labourer who was given up for dead because of his seemingly non-responsive lobar pneumonia.

A decidedly better result that the much better known first British effort, in early February 1941, to use penicillin to save the life of a policeman !

Pneumonia - the dreaded 'Captain of the Forces of Death' - had a cure !

But Lesch's detailed account of the development of M&B693 bears only the most fleeting acquaintance with the usual starry-eyed account provided to the public by Thirties media accounts...

Sulfa - the Commissar that Vanished

Until 2007 and Professor John E Lesch's "The First Miracle Drugs" , the most recent book on the sulfa drugs aimed at the general book-reading public dated from late 1943.

Of course, that was just before the story of Baby Patricia made natural penicillin the new 'miracle drug' sensation - a position it largely retains today.

In societies uncomfortable with the very idea of 'failure' , projects aren't allowed to fail and die - instead they merely disappear and become invisible, forgotten and denied.

In the case of Sulfa drugs, that means Germany, the UK and the US -all intent on forgetting their hopes and disappointments over Sulfa compounds.

One wonders how hard it was then for this American author to find a American publisher for his book ?

Sometimes it is societies more comfortable with failure ( or more uncomfortable with success) that deal better with 'failure tales' such as the fate of Sulfa drugs.

No current study exists of the successes, failures and hopes of synthetic drug-making in general, from 1895 to 1945, before biologically-based drugs like the antibiotics took (or was that re-took ?) centre stage.

Synthetic drugs were only a part - but a very emotionally powerful part - of the worldwide push, from 1850s till the 1950s, to synthesise and replace as much as possible of the natural world , in attempt to speed up Darwin's evolution.

This is because synthetic drugs intent on keeping us alive, seem themselves more 'alive' than did synthetic silk, aka nylon, for example.

As such, it was an exact counterpart to the contemporary Eugenics movement, attempting to do the same with human beings.

We need such a study because the obsession with replacing an 'imperfect' world with a manmade 'better' one has hardly died ...