the Coghill versus John L race

In October 1943, a committee of three chemists, including the head of the US Agriculture Department division of NATURAL Fermentation, said that SYNTHETIC penicillin would a reality in six months - in April 1944.

" Bet the farm on it ! "

That was a mighty good deadline for synthetic penicillin true believers to aim for .

Because April 1944 was about the last possible date for any sort of penicillin to enter the US Army supply pipeline, be transported to the  Kansas City Kansas central army medical supply depot and then be shipped all the way back again to the East Coast and shipped
across the Atlantic to the Southern England ports, to be loaded on hospital ships bound for D-Day's beaches.

If this chemist (Robert D Coghill) had been proven right, he would have put his own Division out of business - so he had a conflict of interest about a mile wide and mile deep.

A conflict of interest between his natural chemist's fetish to achieve the complete synthesis of anything and everything and the duty he owned to his employers at the Agriculture Department.

But across town, another chemically-oriented key mover and shaker, was having a change of heart.

John L (John Lawrence Smith, the head of Pfizer) was leading one of the firms heavily involved in synthesising penicillin.

But moved by the plight of a child so like his own daughter that he had earlier lost to meningitis, he was secretly breaking the spirit of the wartime laws governing penicillin.

 Scarce amounts of penicillin that he should have been devoting to chemical synthesis John L was instead giving to doctors (under the table) to save the lives of people dying of SBE, a traditionally always-fatal form of endocarditis.

John L was also busy backstopping his own private bet that he could produce billions of units of NATURALLY-brewed by the April 1944 deadline.

He did this by having his crew work night and day under powerful Klieg Lights with posters reminding his employees that every delay would cost lives.

And he did this be accepting the second-best as more than good enough : he didn't build a brand new shiny factory like all his competitors were doing.

He took over a ice making plant (a sort of milk plant, in many senses) and adapted it quickly to produce deep tank penicillin.

Coghill and the other synthesis believers were working just as quickly, in labs all over America and Britain, fueled by lots of taxpayers' money.

But the work was not going anywhere useful.

Meanwhile Pfizer was now producing more penicillin than even their wildest estimates had allowed for and Coghill threw in the towel and, being a good bureaucrat, moved smartly to Plan B.

In April 1944, with the biological production of penicillin an outstanding success, it was suddenly deemed to no longer be a deep military secret and Coghill spilled all the details in public - claiming his division was responsible for its success.

In a sense that was true - his low level employees had made natural penicillin possible - but Coghill himself,had been busy trying to screw them in the ear by creating synthetic penicillin to make all their work irrelevant.

More importantly, if biological penicillin was now a big success, shouldn't that mean that it was MORE of a military secret than ever - not less?

Was it really only kept secret so that synthetic penicillin could gain time to trump it ?

In May 1944, Coghill ( in his other role as the erstwhile head of the Fermentation Division ) had to go inspect the fermentation tanks at Pfizer and see vials of 100,000 units of penicillin come off the Pfizer line faster than he could count.

And Coghill the Chemist had to stand there while Pfizer's Biologists went about with shit-eating grins.

A GREEN Day indeed.

Chemists and Chemistry, the Queen of the Sciences from 1840s to the 1940s, received a blow that day that they never really recovered from.

I'd give anything to be there, the day that Modernity died and Post Modernity was born....

Coghill like Eisenhower had two speeches

It is well known that Eisenhower always prepared two speeches before each new amphibious landing.

The official one spoke of the day's success and gave all the credit to the brave boys who died to achieve it.

The unofficial one, prepared on a scrap of paper in pencil, also lauded the brave boys who died but it announced that the landing had failed and that Eisenhower took all the blame for the lack of success.

After every landing but one, he promptly tore up the scrap of paper and threw it away.

He called it his "In Case of Failure" speech.

But in the rush and excitement of D-Day, June 6th 1944, he clean forgot about tearing up this version of the speech.

On July 11th 1944, Eisenhower found the scrap of paper in a jacket pocket and showed it to his Naval  aide, Captain Harry C Butcher,while preparing to tear it up like he had always done before.

Butcher begged Eisenhower to let him keep it instead.

Reluctantly, the General gave it to him.

Fragile with the passage of time upon a piece of cheap acidic paper, it is now one of the most precious relics in the Eisenhower Museum.

I thought of this touching story when I read Robert D Coghill's famous public speech of May 1944 that he gave (with OSRD's full approval), just after watching vials of 100,000 units of NATURAL penicillin pouring off the line at Pfizer's Marcy Avenue plant faster than he could count.

That penicillin was destined for its first ever mass clinical trial --- on the bloody beaches of Normandy on June 6th 1944.

 NATURAL penicillin had both won the race to supply sufficient military penicillin vials before D-Day and had surprised everyone in the world of chemistry by beating man-made penicillin to the gate.

In the speech, Coghill, for the first time ,gave the details in a soon-to-be-cliched story of
how his NRRL facility in Peoria  (a branch of the US Department of Agriculture) had made the success of NATURAL penicillin all possible.

Charged with finding a use for thousands of tons of a farm waste product, the dank murky corn steep liquor left over from the wet conversion of corn into cornstarch, his NRRL staff had tried it as food on penicillin and presto,it turned out to be the one secret ingredient that neither Britain or Germany had and the only ingredient that made NATURAL penicillin production viable.

Cue happy smiling children recovering thanks to penicillin from Peoria - cue the happy Mid-West farmers & voters in Republican states thanking the Roosevelt administration for getting a good price for what was once a useless waste product they had to get rid of.

Cue Coghill's very happy bosses at USDA and the White House.

But Coghill had another speech ready, just in case what he had actually hoped for, had come about.

You see Coghill was a chemist ,not a biologist, and he was secretly hoping for the Nirvana of every chemist in those days - the full synthesis of some difficult yet important molecule.

On August 3rd 1943, when babies (cue the sobbing mothers) were dying because there was not enough clinical penicillin to give to most seriously ill civilians, Coghill and the NRRL bought 5 million units of clinical penicillin from the only firm actually making the stuff in any quantity (four years into a bloody war) - Reichel Labs, a backwoods mushroom farm ( I-Am-Not-Making-This-Up !!!!).

Coghill was not a medical doctor and the NRRL had no patients.

Actually, he and the NRRL staff were about to destroy the precious life-granting stuff, all in an attempt to synthesize it from ordinary industrial chemicals.

And if they had succeeded?

All those $$$$$ sales of their clients' corn steep liquor would have disappeared overnight.

But Coghill-the-survivor would have had his speech already prepared, making sure that the public and Congress knew the role he and the NRRL had had in creating the world's first SYNTHETIC penicillin.

Yessiree-bob!

Coghill, in his chilling way, convinces me that he could have survived - even flourished - in the Stalinist Politburo during the worst of the bureaucratic infighting - somehow that man's bread always managed to land butter side up....