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.

Roy S Koch "shows me the money" on wartime penicillin

In December 1944, a very youthful looking economist named Roy S Koch was heading up The Biologicals and Parenteral Solutions Unit, hitherto an unimportant sub-section of a sub-section of a sub-section, buried deep somewhere in the bowels of the powerful War Production Board in wartime Washington.

Then , overnight in August 1943, penicillin became one of those parenterally delivered biologicals and nothing was ever quite the same.

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.

Sir Robertson's curious letter and curiouser claim

Late August and early September 1942 saw a furious burst of letters to the editor directed at The Times of London, provoked by an August 27th editorial in paper concerning penicillin.

The three hundred word effort echoed an earlier editorial from The Lancet , and supported their claim that the drug was non toxic and more active than sulfa drugs and that its production should be greatly expanded and quickly.

Since penicillin looked to be a real comer with much 'moral capital' accruing to the companies or institutions that best claimed the laurels for first developing it, naturally all the major bodies involved had to elbow their way forward to stake their claim -  the current 'all-for-one' war effort not withstanding.

(A note to errant historians and authors: the drug companies' penicillin research arm, the TRC,were actually the first to gave themselves credit. Only then did St Mary's Hospital step in to also seek some glory.)

Sir Robert Robertson, the world famous Oxford chemist , spoke for the Oxford team.

Some of what he claimed were mere weasel words.

Dawson published the results of his treatment of 12 patients by May 1941, Florey his results on ten patients in August 1941.

Both were admirably cautious in assessing what if anything penicillin had done for their patients.

Dawson was actually the first to treat a patient and see that patient go home from his deathbed --- so Robertson was content to use weasel words that Florey was the first to "demonstrate the value
(of penicillin) clinically."

'Demonstrate' is a subjective term - in the eyes of the beholder - and Robertson knew it.

So, he had as well admitted that Fleming discovered penicillin and that Dawson had been the first to use it clinically as a life-saving systemic antibiotic.

What credit left for Oxford?

Robertson then told the bare-faced lie that toxic materials were produced by the penicillium mold, along with penicillin.

 Florey was therefore to be praised for being the first to separate the unsafe impurities from the safe pure penicillin so that it could be at last safely used on humans. (But wasn't, not by Florey - at least not right away ...!)

Nobody who ever worked with penicillin-producing penicillium , starting with Fleming in 1928 and carrying right on through twenty years later, ever saw enough of anything harmful, at levels enough to be toxic.


All made a point to note that the raw penicillin juice was not toxic even when injected in huge quantities by normal medical standards.

Foremost among these supporters of the use of  semi-purified or raw penicillin was one Howard Florey.

He publicly marveled that in hundreds of IM injections, no damage was ever seen at the site of the needle - not even in babies. The impure preparations he rated at 10% pure at the max (actually 3% pure) yet their impurities ( 97% of the dose) were non toxic - even when given in huge dosages.

It is hard to imagine a better test for proving the impurities were NOT toxic --- I can not,myself, imagine one.

What was going on then - in the mind of Professor Robertson and his chemist-manque Dr Florey ?

If Robertson and Florey had made any headway on synthesizing penicillin, I am sure this would have been their sole claim to glory.

But they hadn't.

So what can chemists do?

They can separate substances, even if they can't synthesize them, and even if the substances didn't need separating !

A nice meal does not improve when a chemist burns it all and then pours acid over the remains, to separate it into its constitute elements.

Penicillin juice - as Australian Dr James Vincent Duhig demonstrated in Brisbane in the Fall of 1943, doesn't need to be separated from its impurities at all, in order to save lives safely.

When it comes to questions of health, trust Duhig,MD over chemist Robertson PhD.

I don't expect Oxford University's academics to ever set the scholastic record straight about what Oxford did and didn't do with penicillin.

Claiming a leading role in developing the best lifesaver the world will ever know is simply too much of a money spinner for Oxford and the entire Thames Valley community.....

FLOREY's biggest mistake : Spring 1938-May 1940

Two wrongs can never make a right.

Millions of lives, literally, might have been saved if Alexander Fleming had only run a quick animal protection test with a mouse, a bit of staph bacteria and a needle full of his wet penicillin juice , back in October 1928.

It wasn't until about ten years later that sulfa drugs began to be universally available and regularly used - and even then they didn't work as well as penicillin.

The lives needlessly lost in that period have to be laid at Fleming's door.

Howard Florey and his entire Oxford University team never stopped criticizing Fleming for this elemental failure - as most people would have a full right to do.

But Florey and his team do not have that right.

For they failed to do the same thing they criticized Fleming for not doing,that bog simple animal protection test with wet penicillin juice, something they neglected to do from early Spring 1938 till May 1940.

They had the wet penicillin, the mice and the skill to do the test.

If they had done that test, we might have seen penicillin development work started in earnest by British drug firms in 1938, before the Munich Crisis, long before the fall of France in June 1940.

In which case the exciting wartime penicillin story might have ended happily before it even began.

Not until they had accomplished their  real goal - concentrating Fleming's impure 2-5 units per mg penicillin sticky brown toffee into a 2-5 units per mg dry brown powder - and claiming it was highly purified penicillin, did the Oxford University think about the all important animal protection test.

All the evidence is that while Ernest Chain was anxious to do it, Florey didn't think they had gone far enough along the so called purification route to move into stage two animal trials.

Chain had to force the issue - making Florey so angry that Chain never ever regained Florey's trust.

Here was Britain about to be invaded, civilization tottering in the balance and Florey was plodding through every scientific experiment in his rulebook, instead of cutting to the chase on a drug that might save many Britons lives.

He was thinking like a scientist ,not like a patriot - fair enough - a common failing among scientists - even during a war crisis.

But most scientists who think like that don't have the nerve to turn around and very publicly blame a colleague for failing to do what they themselves also failed to do.

It is things like this that make it very hard for me to stomach Howard Florey as a whole - though there are many things I do admire about the man.

And don't think I let Florey's many admiring biographers off any more lightly - how in the name of all that is holy do they justify admiring Florey for delaying that critical wet penicillin animal protection test  for more than two years?

The recent British television movie on Florey criticizes Fleming for never doing the animal test, but remains silent on why on earth Florey waited until well into the Battle of Britain crisis to 'poke the mouse'.

Fleming deserves to be blamed for some of his failings.

Fair enough.

But Florey needs to be held to the same high standard - I only wish Eric Lax and others had done so....