Dawson's DIY penicillin a postmodernist "shot across the bow" of Modernist Big Pharma

Two hundred years from now, only the first of the Dawson team's many articles on wartime penicillin will still be cited and still considered seminal.

This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.

Like Admiral Byng, but in reverse, AlexanderFleming was given a Nobel prize "pour encourager les autres"

Alexander Fleming pursued, preserved and publicized a foolish observation that turned out to be.... not so foolish after all.

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 !

"A Rare Breed Indeed" : US wartime Int'l treaties on the A-Bomb, Lend-Lease, Bases for Destroyers ... and synthetic penicillin

Most of the antibiotics we use today (beta-lactams) are still the close relatives of the first and best-ever antibiotic, Penicillin G.

They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.

They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.

But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.

Penicillin : a bunch of biologists who put all their faith in chemistry vs two chemists who put all their faith in biology

In the Alice Through the Looking Glass world of wartime penicillin it should hardly be surprising that about the only strong supporters of natural ,biological, penicillin in the upper echelons of the overall enterprise were two professional chemists : Larry Elder of the American Office for Production Research and Development (the OPRD) and Harry Jephcott of the British drug company, Glaxo.

Or that the group most strongly bewitched by the thought of synthetic penicillin were a bunch of medical doctors with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming leading the charge (with the OSRD and MRC close behind): the sort of scientists who might have been thought would normally occupy a place at the biological end of  hard science.....

Penicillin an excellent war weapon because it was so hard to synth, not in spite of that

An excellent antiseptic like synthetic gramicidin was cheap to make, fast acting, stable and a very effective bacterial killer.

But as a weapon of war, it lacked the ability to remain secret for very long .

"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944

How Omaha got its "P"

It was never supposed to have to come to this: the smart money - and Big Science - had long promised that (a) high tech strategic bombing would force the Germans out of the war without any need of an invasion and that (b) the Allies would have lots of cheap, pure, high tech synthetic penicillin.

Needed : a MORAL history of Wartime Penicillin

SBE fatal to heart valves

It is impossible to write a truthful scientific or economic history of how wartime natural penicillin production became the template for today's enormous biotechnology industry.

Nova Scotian-born Dr Henry Dawson and the "Invention" of systemic - natural - penicillin

The "Invention" of systemic - natural - penicillin

Discovery vs Invention

Many substances were "discovered" many years (sometimes centuries) before they were (re) "invented" as having a highly useful medical effect.

1939-1945: the promise of SYNTHETIC penicillin and the reality of NATURAL penicillin

Another failed promise from the mouths of Blowhard Modernistic Science.....