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.

Fleming's seminal 1929 article on penicillin is missing two words : impurities and crude

Fleming, in this extremely famous article, defines his "penicillin" as consisting of  one or more soluble solid active ingredients in a liquid nutritional  broth, no more and no less.

He makes it clear that "penicillin" is merely a useful shorthand for that cumbersome longer phrase.

He never once uses the word impurities or impure or crude: to him his active ingredient is perhaps ALL  of the soluble solids left behind when the water is evaporated .

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.

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.

Was there a Parran-Hearst Telegram ? (You provide the penicillin, I'll provide the pictures)

"Operator, get me Washington, tell 'em I'm from Hearst..."

There is no firm evidence that Citizen Hearst ever sent that infamous telegram to the famous war artist Frederic Remington in Cuba.

We all know which telegram:  the one where Remington is sent out to illustrate the ongoing civil war in Cuba, but finds all is quiet and begs to go home.

Hearst supposedly telegraphs him to stay : "(If) you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."

"Jabbing" BIG PHARMA awake

Good things happen when you quit the shilly-shalling and "do the clinical" - ie 'stick the needle in and see what happens'.

I have said before that it was in October 1940 - the same month that Martin Henry Dawson jabbed the very first needle of antibiotics in a patient - that the American Drug Companies and the American medico-scientific establishment (NAS-NRC) finally woke up and started smelling the coffee on penicillin.

Example ?

That very month, Squibb asked for a sample of Fleming's penicillin mold from the culture collection in Peoria.

They did the smartest thing that Squibb ever did in the entire Penicillin Saga - they threw the chemists out of the building and let the mycologists get down and into it.

Don't you wish all the other labs had done ditto?

 Alexander Fleming, unfortunately, seemed to really hate mycologists - and he rarely - in public anyway - disliked anyone

Thankfully, the result was a much improved strain from Fleming's original and it was eventually called NRRL 1249. (January 1942)

All praise to Dr Geoffrey Rake and his co-workers at Squibb who never get any thanks for giving us life-saving penicillin in time for D-Day.

Instead the big losers in the penicillin affair, the chemists, have written all the official histories, blowing smoke rings so we won't see how they failed to deliver on their promises.

Other claims to the contrary,history is usually written by the losers - at least "the losers with l'argent..." *

Mycologists take a bow : thanks to you , it was natural NRRL 1249 and its offspring , 1249.B21, (December 1942) that delivered most of the penicillin produced in World War II.

The chemists just delivered papers and articles instead....

* Canadian-anglophone-only joke --- Yanks and Brits/Anzacs etc can safely ignore it