"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.

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.

The first - and internally fatal - Tory response to the Beveridge Report : the Ministry of Supply takes over Penicillin ...

To make sense of this claim, we need to clear as to what the role of Britain's powerful wartime Ministry of Supply actually was.

Howard Florey saw potential enemies everywhere, but with "friends" like A N Richards and Robert Coghill, he hardly need bother looking any further

Howard Florey's correspondence twice notes that he has just received a higher yielding strain of penicillium from America.

two is a coincidence, three is a pattern : the OSRD on the weak and the strong

It is a commonplace to note that Vannevar Bush's wartime agency the OSRD, the biggest of Washington's many wartime scientific bureaucracies, favoured the strongest companies and the strongest universities.

Coincidence, say many.

But the fact that the OSRD, the strongest companies and the strongest universities all ganged up together to deny penicillin to America's weakest of the weakest seems more than a long stream of coincidences : it betrays a pattern......

OSRD /1942: did Manhattan Project type thinking bleed over and obstruct the Penicillin Project as well ?

It is crystal clear that Merck's top scientific advisor A N Richards was never a strong advocate for fast-paced penicillin development within Merck, as that drug company casually messed about with penicillin, from November 1939 till August 1941.

That is, Merck had 18 months of some sort of commercial and scientific activity around penicillin , before Howard Florey actually arrived on the scene.

But Florey eventually made Richards a strong convert to the idea of having Richards' military medical weapon oriented agency , the famous OSRD , use penicillin for secret military advantage over the Axis.

Penicillin in wartime: an alphabet soup of organizations passing the buck then hogging the credit

I am still not fully recovered from the disaster of my first public talk on wartime penicillin before Dalhousie University's  Medical History Society.

I was given a very generous amount of time by the Society's Jock Murray and Allan Marble to state my case but it didn't help : my choice for a title slide in my powerpoint presentation simply covered far too big a subject and left me no 'on the spot' wiggle room.

" Wartime Penicillin : from secret 'war weapon' to widely publicized 'beacon of hope' " is not a topic line easy to compress.

 (Though last night's blog entry on the Janus Month of March 1943 would have been a good attempt at compression.)

America LOSES WWII : because of quarrels between government agencies, such as over Penicillin

The above headline sounds bizarre to our ears, because we are  used to only hearing it being used as the standard explanation given as to why Japan and Germany lost the (largely technical and scientific) world war against the Allies.

Fleming never saved Churchill, but Gladys Hobby saved Florey's sister when his own penicillin couldn't !

Howard Florey was never more sleazy than in his dealings with Henry Dawson's team, as he desperately fought to restore the family name that his father dis-honored, by trying to remain the sole "hero" of wartime penicillin.

Just try to imagine what an university ethics committee today might say about a professor using his main rival's unpublished paper, sent to him in secret by his close friend (the same government official who censored his rival's paper and forbade its release) to improve his own work that is about to be allowed to be freely published !

That is what full Professor Howard Florey and university vice president and full Professor A N Richards actually did to associate professor chemist Professor Karl Meyer of Dawson's team , in mid 1942.

(As they say, tenure is 'red in tooth and claw'.)

How wartime penicillin's American miracle cures were censored - and why

From early in 1942, American medical journal editors and authors joined scientific journal editors and authors already being "self censored".

James Baxter's Pulitzer Prize winning nonsense about wartime penicillin

As part of OSRD's campaign to spin its considerable successes and many failures, William College president and historian  James Phinney Baxter III was hired in mid war (1943) to assemble a bewitching mixture of hitherto-secret facts and sheer blarney, called "Scientists Against Time".

It sure fooled the 1947 Pulitzer Committee, but it shouldn't continue to fool us.

Who am I ? asks a very famous bright yellow powder from WWII

OK, Manhattan : Who am I ????

(a) In the popular imagination, I am often thought of as being a bright yellow powder (though if fact I might often be dark red or brown or even some other color).

(b) Oddly enough, it is exactly the same for me.

(a)  Some of my most important developments happened on Manhattan island, with strong Canadian involvement --- I think that was all about the word "Hope".

(b) Wow ! Me ditto,ditto,ditto !

Florey quickly flees the biology of NRRL Peoria for the chemical comforts of Merck

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.

Did Merck consultant A N Richards diss penicillin during the first two years of the war?

Read any "Pollyanna" history of wartime penicillin and you quickly garner the impression that wartime Washington's top medical research bureaucrat, AN Richards of the famous OSRD organization, first learned of penicillin when his former student Howard Florey dropped by in the Fall of 1941.

In my opinion : "Bullfeathers" !

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.

The A-Bomb and synthetic penicillin were attractive war weapons, not because they were easy - but because they were hard

Shades of President Kennedy explaining his decision to push for an all-out effort to land men on the Moon before the end of the decade, "not because it was easy but because it was hard" !

Like synthetic penicillin, the harder the A-Bomb was to make, the more attractive it was to the OSRD

Late in 1942, Britain's highest political, military and Intelligence leadership decided that the Atomic Bomb was almost certainly too difficult and too expensive for Hitler's Germany to produce during World War II ---- if only because it would take too many resources from more pressing necessities for the Nazi war machine.

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.....

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).

Chloroquine : hiding one of WWII's most valuable secrets in 'plain sight' : in the scientific literature

To understand how OSRD fumbled the ball on synthetic penicillin but neatly hid the fact with lot of the taxpayers' money, consider the similar case of chloroquine, the best anti-malarial drug of WWII (aside from natural quinine) and a truly horrific example of the stupidity that can result from the excessive secrecy of war science.