Howard Florey probably spent no more than a few hours of his whole life in the labs of the NRRL at Peoria, Illinois where most of the fruitful work that gave us the antibiotics revolution was actually done.
Showing posts with label norman heatley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label norman heatley. Show all posts
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Thursday, January 17, 2013
Howard Florey, Henry Dawson,Penicillin and the NEW YORK TIMES : how then-tiny Pfizer became the biggest drug company in the world
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| "Giant Germicide" article changed history ... |
Saturday, November 17, 2012
For Howard Florey's mausoleum of an institute, penicillin's therapeutic value was incidental to putting paying bums on seats
Howard Florey's discovery that impure natural penicillin could cure experimentally induced infections in mice was incidental to his number one concern : getting enough paying guests in his mausoleum of an institute, to pay its annual heating bills.
Friday, October 8, 2010
CRITICAL biography of Norman Heatley long, long overdue
I don't think Norman Heatley (1911-2004) did as much to advance penicillin as he thought he did.
I think a more balanced collective biography of the entire Oxford team might better spread the credit (and blame) about.
It seems to me that Glister and Sanders did far more, and Heatley far less ,to get penicillin production actually working and producing.
Norman himself conveyed to the world his view that he felt he was no longer a key member of the Oxford penicillin team after 1943 - as the historical blue plaque on his home so indicates.
(He even tried to apply for a job at a drug firm far far from the Dunn in 1944 !)
The Oxford team kept up their penicillin work up to the war's end in 1945 and beyond -I am curious to know what it was that Heatley felt he was doing at the Dunn between 1943 and 1946, if it didn't involve penicillin.
Sanders and Glister and all the rest - except Florey and Heatley -were never very interested to tell their part in the penicillin saga at Oxford.
So in this land of the blind, the one-eyed Heatley became king - particularly in the 36 years after Florey's death.
Heatley grew ever bolder in his claims ,as more and more of
'the old gang' passed on beyond the point of rebuttals via 'letters to the editor', directed at The Times.
The Oxford community, still unable to understand how credit for penicillin was taken up by a Scotsman (Alexander Fleming) and a parvenu American soda pop company (Pfizer), fully supported Heatley in this effort.
I don't expect my biography of another penicillin pioneer, close associate of Pfizer, and a Scotman, Martin Henry Dawson, to be any more popular in Oxford.....
I think a more balanced collective biography of the entire Oxford team might better spread the credit (and blame) about.
It seems to me that Glister and Sanders did far more, and Heatley far less ,to get penicillin production actually working and producing.
Norman himself conveyed to the world his view that he felt he was no longer a key member of the Oxford penicillin team after 1943 - as the historical blue plaque on his home so indicates.
(He even tried to apply for a job at a drug firm far far from the Dunn in 1944 !)
The Oxford team kept up their penicillin work up to the war's end in 1945 and beyond -I am curious to know what it was that Heatley felt he was doing at the Dunn between 1943 and 1946, if it didn't involve penicillin.
Sanders and Glister and all the rest - except Florey and Heatley -were never very interested to tell their part in the penicillin saga at Oxford.
So in this land of the blind, the one-eyed Heatley became king - particularly in the 36 years after Florey's death.
Heatley grew ever bolder in his claims ,as more and more of
'the old gang' passed on beyond the point of rebuttals via 'letters to the editor', directed at The Times.
The Oxford community, still unable to understand how credit for penicillin was taken up by a Scotsman (Alexander Fleming) and a parvenu American soda pop company (Pfizer), fully supported Heatley in this effort.
I don't expect my biography of another penicillin pioneer, close associate of Pfizer, and a Scotman, Martin Henry Dawson, to be any more popular in Oxford.....
Monday, September 6, 2010
Why HEATLEY rather than Fletcher,Chain or Jennings ?
The attempt to make Oxford penicillin the "Received Pronunciation" of world penicillin....
OXFORD :"First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin, Paris and Cape Town..."
************
Fletcher could have accompanied Florey to America to remind Americans that Britons had also ,me-too, used penicillin to treat patients... after Dawson did it first in America.
Chain could be there, to say penicillin was his idea and that Florey only got interested after it got promising - and to admit, yes, his own chemical work was not yet as advanced as Meyer and the Schering Corp was in America.
Jennings could have gone along to say that Britain did the first animal protection test (which Fleming didn't do) but that, yes, Dawson did the first human protection test, in America.
But Heatley-the-invisible, he'd never steal any glory from Florey.
And he was the assay man - the man who would act like the schoolmaster he looked like - checking every American firms' penicillin sample to measure it against the Oxford Standard, and docking marks for any firm that failed to measure up.
For just as nobody anywhere else spoke as good an English as OXFORD ENGLISH , so too nobody's penicillin would ever quite measure up to to the Oxford Standard, the Received Pronunciation of penicillin, the only penicillin you could prescribe on the BBC or give to the King.
Two points: (1) the supposed standard, OXFORD PENICILLIN, was actually composed of 98% rubbish - and don't get me started about Oxford in general.
(2) There were in fact many many strains of penicillium producing many many different types of penicillin, depending on what they had to eat and how acidic their surroundings were etc. This is Reality at ground zero. But Florey spent the next 4 years denying and downplaying any existence of differences in types of penicillin.
His only chance at grasping the golden ring was to constantly maintain his claim that he was the first to purify penicillin - he couldn't have this claim disputed by people asking which of the twenty variants of penicillin did he ,ahem, first 'purify' exactly ?!
I don't know if Florey played chess - but he had the chess player's skill of always thinking six moves ahead of anyone he thought might possibly be his opponent as he clawed his way to the top of English Society.
And when he was a Baron and president of the Royal Society, you'd never guess he had been born in the Outback - his English was now far more RP than his penicillin ever became....
OXFORD :"First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin, Paris and Cape Town..."
************
Fletcher could have accompanied Florey to America to remind Americans that Britons had also ,me-too, used penicillin to treat patients... after Dawson did it first in America.
Chain could be there, to say penicillin was his idea and that Florey only got interested after it got promising - and to admit, yes, his own chemical work was not yet as advanced as Meyer and the Schering Corp was in America.
Jennings could have gone along to say that Britain did the first animal protection test (which Fleming didn't do) but that, yes, Dawson did the first human protection test, in America.
But Heatley-the-invisible, he'd never steal any glory from Florey.
And he was the assay man - the man who would act like the schoolmaster he looked like - checking every American firms' penicillin sample to measure it against the Oxford Standard, and docking marks for any firm that failed to measure up.
For just as nobody anywhere else spoke as good an English as OXFORD ENGLISH , so too nobody's penicillin would ever quite measure up to to the Oxford Standard, the Received Pronunciation of penicillin, the only penicillin you could prescribe on the BBC or give to the King.
Two points: (1) the supposed standard, OXFORD PENICILLIN, was actually composed of 98% rubbish - and don't get me started about Oxford in general.
(2) There were in fact many many strains of penicillium producing many many different types of penicillin, depending on what they had to eat and how acidic their surroundings were etc. This is Reality at ground zero. But Florey spent the next 4 years denying and downplaying any existence of differences in types of penicillin.
His only chance at grasping the golden ring was to constantly maintain his claim that he was the first to purify penicillin - he couldn't have this claim disputed by people asking which of the twenty variants of penicillin did he ,ahem, first 'purify' exactly ?!
I don't know if Florey played chess - but he had the chess player's skill of always thinking six moves ahead of anyone he thought might possibly be his opponent as he clawed his way to the top of English Society.
And when he was a Baron and president of the Royal Society, you'd never guess he had been born in the Outback - his English was now far more RP than his penicillin ever became....
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The things they buried...
I know, I know, a shameless knock-off from Tim O'Brien's classic.
What I am about to compare is the contrasting ways Fleming and Florey chose to deal with the more amateurish and stochastic areas of their involvement in the Penicillin Saga.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin was not - Horrors ! The Shame of it ! - peer-reviewed funded.
It was an accident and he wasn't being paid to discover or develop it.
But he made the most of that fact and in fact delighted in it.
He preserved the famous accidental Petri Dish so that all can still see it in the British Museum, 82 years later. He saved a bit of the accidental mold, sent its children out to any that asked.
Hundreds of collections worldwide still keep its great-grandchildren going and growing.
He kept his sparse notebooks for the entire period 1928-1945 dealing with his steady work on penicillin - not bold or visionary work sadly - but he still kept proof of just how little he did do -and revealed it for all to see, without shame.
He and his institution (St Mary's Hospital) positively delight in exposing and preserving just how amateurish his penicillin work was -- there is a museum dedicated to that amateurishness and the sheer unlikely stochastic-ness of his discovery.
Unauthorized but sympathetic biographers of Florey's work with penicillin also delight in revealing the utterly amateurishness of Florey's extraction equipment, assembled as it was from old bathtubs, coal hoppers, pie tins etc etc - Rube Goldberg on Acid.
Not Florey though: no, no, never.
He always (mis) presented his team as having a much more sophisticated operation than what even a well-equipped teaching hospital's Lab Service could ever put together.
He even told anyone foolish enough to ask that only his Oxford-produced penicillin or that produced by Big Pharma was safe to put into patients .
And that any teaching hospital lab's penicillin was bound to be unsafe .
All this despite the fact that Florey was not , in the conventional sense, a clinically-oriented medical doctor with patients and hence in a position to properly judge patient safety.
Instead he was a medical researcher working in a lab on basic science.
Part of this animus against teaching hospitals was because Florey hated patient-oriented doctors with a passion, but mostly it was because he wanted to keep his part in the penicillin Saga on the Dignified/peer-reviewed funded/team side rather than the heroic individual/amateur/unfunded side of the story.
But in fact his penicillin plant or that of any drug company, from 1940 till about mid 1944, was as purely amateurish as those run by individuals out of a corner of a hospital lab - perhaps differing only in being a tiny bit bigger.
But the minute he heard that Pfizer was producing more NATURAL penicillin in 5 minutes than his lab had produced in 5 years,Florey shut down his penicillin plant and had all his Rube Goldberg extraction equipment torn up and then buried in a backyard rubbish heap.
After his death,Norman Heatley built some replicas for museum use.
But generally Florey supporters have explained this by saying that Florey was forced to use amateur methods at first, until he assembled a vast Anglo-American joint effort involving governments, universities, corporations and the military, all working together, to bring us high tech penicillin - Big Science at its best.
Academics just love this myth, the myth that says if the taxpayer just gives science lots of money and then stays out of the way, they will pull rabbits out of hats every time.
The public loves the other myth - that kindly old Fleming discovered penicillin just messing about and gave it to the world without charge ------and that it was a piece of cake to get it into mass production.
Neither myth is totally untrue but both only give a part of the story.
Hopefully my effort will give a fair hearing to both Fleming and Florey but include the rest of the penicillin Story as yet unheard.....
What I am about to compare is the contrasting ways Fleming and Florey chose to deal with the more amateurish and stochastic areas of their involvement in the Penicillin Saga.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin was not - Horrors ! The Shame of it ! - peer-reviewed funded.
It was an accident and he wasn't being paid to discover or develop it.
But he made the most of that fact and in fact delighted in it.
He preserved the famous accidental Petri Dish so that all can still see it in the British Museum, 82 years later. He saved a bit of the accidental mold, sent its children out to any that asked.
Hundreds of collections worldwide still keep its great-grandchildren going and growing.
He kept his sparse notebooks for the entire period 1928-1945 dealing with his steady work on penicillin - not bold or visionary work sadly - but he still kept proof of just how little he did do -and revealed it for all to see, without shame.
He and his institution (St Mary's Hospital) positively delight in exposing and preserving just how amateurish his penicillin work was -- there is a museum dedicated to that amateurishness and the sheer unlikely stochastic-ness of his discovery.
Unauthorized but sympathetic biographers of Florey's work with penicillin also delight in revealing the utterly amateurishness of Florey's extraction equipment, assembled as it was from old bathtubs, coal hoppers, pie tins etc etc - Rube Goldberg on Acid.
Not Florey though: no, no, never.
He always (mis) presented his team as having a much more sophisticated operation than what even a well-equipped teaching hospital's Lab Service could ever put together.
He even told anyone foolish enough to ask that only his Oxford-produced penicillin or that produced by Big Pharma was safe to put into patients .
And that any teaching hospital lab's penicillin was bound to be unsafe .
All this despite the fact that Florey was not , in the conventional sense, a clinically-oriented medical doctor with patients and hence in a position to properly judge patient safety.
Instead he was a medical researcher working in a lab on basic science.
Part of this animus against teaching hospitals was because Florey hated patient-oriented doctors with a passion, but mostly it was because he wanted to keep his part in the penicillin Saga on the Dignified/peer-reviewed funded/team side rather than the heroic individual/amateur/unfunded side of the story.
But in fact his penicillin plant or that of any drug company, from 1940 till about mid 1944, was as purely amateurish as those run by individuals out of a corner of a hospital lab - perhaps differing only in being a tiny bit bigger.
But the minute he heard that Pfizer was producing more NATURAL penicillin in 5 minutes than his lab had produced in 5 years,Florey shut down his penicillin plant and had all his Rube Goldberg extraction equipment torn up and then buried in a backyard rubbish heap.
After his death,Norman Heatley built some replicas for museum use.
But generally Florey supporters have explained this by saying that Florey was forced to use amateur methods at first, until he assembled a vast Anglo-American joint effort involving governments, universities, corporations and the military, all working together, to bring us high tech penicillin - Big Science at its best.
Academics just love this myth, the myth that says if the taxpayer just gives science lots of money and then stays out of the way, they will pull rabbits out of hats every time.
The public loves the other myth - that kindly old Fleming discovered penicillin just messing about and gave it to the world without charge ------and that it was a piece of cake to get it into mass production.
Neither myth is totally untrue but both only give a part of the story.
Hopefully my effort will give a fair hearing to both Fleming and Florey but include the rest of the penicillin Story as yet unheard.....
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