WWII's the Mighty and the Wise "confounded" by bacteria and bazooka Resistance Movements

It is clear now that WWII's twin defeats of Sulfa drugs and Armoured tanks by the bacterial and bazooka "Resistance Movements" spelt the beginning of the end for prewar Reductionist cum Constructionist Modernity.

(Martin) Henry Dawson could publish endless articles on the commensality of reality till the end of time ,but they cut no ice with the Mighty and the Wise compared to the short sharp lessons they learned at the great university of real life that was WWII.

"The Blitz dog ate my homework" and other tired penicillin-related excuses from UK historians

David Edgerton excepted of course -- he hasn't really written on Britain's deliberately pathetic production of penicillin during the war years but he is unlikely to blame it on the Warfare State's "abject poverty" and "The Blitz".

Pure Sulfa or Salvarsan drugs were far more toxic than impure crude penicillin : so what was the fuss REALLY about then ?

Before 1945, an entire generation of doctors world wide (except for perhaps a half dozen of them) were more willing to put pure but toxic sulfa or salvarsan drugs into their patients than put impure but non toxic penicillin into them.

I will go further:  an entire generation of doctors were willing to seen letting their patients DIE, rather than be seen by other doctors as putting an impure substance into those dying patients.

Nova Scotia-born Dr Henry Dawson and the wartime re-invention of a military secret weapon into a widely publicized beacon of hope

I am talking about penicillin of course.

What other artifact of war has so abruptly and so totally changed its character over the course of a war ?

The re-invention of a military-only antiseptic into "bedside penicillin for all" creates a global beacon of hope for a world at war

the tiny stone the builders rejected

Despite the self-centred claims of physicists, the greatest benefits to humanity have generally been ardently pursued (invented), not accidentally stumbled upon (discovered).

DNA was discovered in 1860s by an Swiss doctor, but for most of us, it was really only discovered 125 years later in the late 1980s.

That was when it began to first be successfully used to solve unsolved criminal cases, when British researcher Alec Jeffries re-invented 'DNA' as a means to definitely identify biological evidence left at the scene of a crime.

1942's key question : not can penicillin save lives but can SULFA still save lives ...

wartime PENICILLIN's unlikely saviour

Popular and academic historians alike continue to treat the histories of wartime penicillin and wartime sulfa as if they existed on separate universes, when, in fact , they were fierce, close competitors.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson and the MORAL INVENTION of 4F penicillin ---- during a 1A war (PART 1)

Thalidomide has had 9 lives...

Is it truly unfair that only Paul Gelmo initially invented Sulfa-the-(useless)-chemical, but is was Gerhard Domagk , 25 years later, who won the Nobel prize for Sulfa?

DRUGS and Romney's 47% : AZT, Penicillin and Sulfa once didn't pay federal income tax either

AZT once part of the 47%

In a dynamic - Democratic - world, one minute you're down, not paying any federal tax, the next minute you're paying millions. But in a static - Republican - world : when you are down, you're out - for all time.

Sulfa's Alexander Fleming : Paul Gelmo, winner of 1939 medical Nobel for discovery of Sulfa

Sulfa the MIRACLE drug

Alas Paul Gelmo , discoverer of Sulfa, is not likely to ever be as famous as Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin and it is a mystery worth investigating to ask why not.

Physics,Chemistry break 1940 promises

At the time of the New York World's Fair, with its theme of a learned gaze into the crystal ball to reveal the America of the 1960s, Big Physics and Big Chemistry made two firm promises:

Physics promised that with nuclear fission newly achieved, by 1960 your family home would be heated and lit by electricity '"too cheap to meter", made by atomic energy.

It also said that this war would be a clean quick war, hitting only military targets, as  B-17 bombers, with precision Norden bombsights, would be able to drop a bomb into a pickle barrel ,from 15,000 feet.

Chemistry pledged that your family would be disease free by the 1960s, "with hospitals no longer used for infectious diseases", thanks to pure,defined, man-made chemicals like the growing family of sulfa drugs.

But in 1945, atomic energy was used only to destroy homes (and the families inside).

(And with a bomb that powerful there was no need to aim, which was just as well ,as the Norden bombsights turned out to be useless.)

True, diseases were being held at bay, but not conquered, by 1945.

But not by the toxic and increasingly ineffective sulfa drugs.

Rather the success was due to penicillin - an impure,undefined mixture made by Nature and grown on an impure, undefined mixture of nutritional mediums also made by Nature.

And it was the humble science of biology that helped make it all work - while chemists only got in the way.

World War Two was NOT a triumph of nerdy,weedy scientists in spectacles winning the war when the stud muffin /BMOC /football captains of America proved unable to best the visiting German and Japanese teams out on the field.

This was the official take on World War Two Science, as produced by the leading science bureaucrats in their official and semi-official histories.

Because this 'revenge of the nerds' is so self-flattering to academics, even normally skeptical historians have lapped up the 'official version' like it was mother's milk.

In truth, Science suffered as many defeats to its ego during WWII as any over-confident general ever did.

In 1940, Man may have batted first, but by 1945 it was Nature that bats last: and Nature bats last and Nature bats long ....

It would perhaps be a bit much to ask today's historians to turn their sights on their colleagues and themselves and ask have they probed the truth of the penicillin saga or , to paraphrase Donald J McGraw,("On Leaving the Mine ", 1991) have they been content to merely uncritically retell tales already told too often ?

September 7th 1943: Madison Ave lays egg

In September 1943, Madison Avenue's advertising agencies (America's slavering class) were all talking about the newest addition to the wonder drug family, Sulfa-Thiazole Band-Aids.

Which was unfortunate; sad really.

Because all of their clients' customers were talking about another wonder drug, Penicillin.

No contest really.

On one hand, ads offering up band-aid solutions , on the other hand, the front pages of those same newspapers busy telling tales of a young girl being plucked back from the brink of death after a dramatic cross country flight by a heavy bomber.

The B-24 heavy bomber, aptly called a Liberator , ditched its normal wartime payload of 8000 pounds worth of bombs to fly in 8 grams of this 'pen-i-cil-lin' livesaver.

What a goldmine in 'earned media' for that lucky drug company !

But search as the Mad Men may, it seemed no New York agency, large or small, had that valuable account.

FASTEST EVER ' PHENOMENON ' ?

No major phenomenon , not Elvis not TV not VCRs, ever caught on worldwide as fast as Penicillin did.

This, despite a world tied up in the all enveloping censorship of Total War.

One looks to something minor like 1958's hula hoops craze but even this fad only penetrated to some of the people in some of the countries of the world.

Penicillin was virtually unknown worldwide on August 10th 1943 (more accurately: uninteresting to the few that had heard about it) .

But by September 10th 1943, much of the world had heard about it, wanted to know more about it and above all, wanted it - yesterday.

Meanwhile, that week Johnson and Johnson was rolling out full page full color ads in all the major consumer media touting its

new sulfa-saturated Band-Aids.

One of the versions of the ad campaign has remained a popular item on E Bay, and other 'collectable' sites, to this day.

It features a painting of five incredibly cute tow-headed children playing at 'war'.

It sounds like it should repulse most of its potential customers, the mothers of America, but it doesn't seem to - this is the power of Madison Avenue at its most seductive.

The only girl among the five is the focal point and the star; she is dressed up as a nurse, and is carefully applying a Band-Aid to the upper arm of a boy soldier with a wooden gun, complete with fixed, wooden, bayonet.

He is grimacing bravely as the Band-Aid approaches.

Another boy, in a formfitting leather and wool football helmet/ pilot's helmet (complete with goggles jauntily astride on top) is staring round eyed at the approaching Band-Aid.

Meanwhile a child with a saucepan for a helmet ( and as a result looking alarming 'Kraut-like' is coming through an obstacle course made up of open-ended rain barrels, armed with his gun and bayonet.

Thankfully, the final child looks and acts like a child, coming up along rapidly as possible so he doesn't miss whatever might be going on - but even he must scramble over a wooden barrier that looks exactly like the similar wooden wall/barrier seen in every photo essay on basic training since the First World War.

The cut line for the ad informs Moms everywhere that they can finally get some of the same Sulfa medication as used in Front Line Hospitals to save lives ( perhaps even their husband's life).

It has just been added to the Band-Aids they apply for their Home Front child's minor cuts and scrapes, to give the kids the same battlefront strength protection that Dad is getting.

A much lesser know version of this ad campaign lays out its theme in a much more heavy handed manner - probably why it hasn't survived in the folk memory.

A Mother (definitely not a 'Mom') Band-Aids her worried looking pre-teen son in the right frame.

In the left frame , grim-faced (and dirty-faced) GIs and medics apply Sulfa-Thiazole to a wounded soldier in a stretcher, not far from a Pacific War battle scene.

The posing and expressions of the wounded man, the onlooking soldiers and the medic makes it appear as if the medic is applying the Last Rites, rather than saving the man's life !

The cutline praise Thiazole as one of the famous Sulfas, 'the drugs everybody's talking about' .

If the ad had come out even a month earlier, this would be definitely true.

Most doctors hadn't even laid their eyes upon a sample of the original sulfa drug until about seven years earlier and each year had brought a major new addition to the sulfa family , curing more and more hitherto unreachable bacteria types.

All were synthetics, totally man-made and the chemists kept coming up with new creations - almost 5000 registered new variants in America alone between 1936 and 1944.

It seemed like an Oil Well that would never run dry.

And then in the space of a month, it was bang-bang, dead.

Worldwide.

Because even behind the Nazi held lines, the occupied peoples were hearing about Penicillin in terms that made it sound like a literal, not just figurative, Miracle.

Madison Avenue's stock in trade is figurative Miracles but not even it was prepared for a real Miracle it seems...

On the May & Baker factory floor, the magic bullet of M&B 693 was decidedly low tech

Science journalism and Chemistry Industry advertising (often hard to tell apart in the 1930s) saw the new Sulfa Drugs as the latest and most glamorous product to roll out of the cornucopia of the synthetic arcadia.

But as John Lesch describes in his account of how the British drug firm May & Baker developed its famous M&B693 (the sulfa drug that saved Churchill's life at the height of World War II) the view from the factory floor was distinctly low tech.

A dusty bottle of a rarely used chemical compound, made up for an ex-employee who never used it, but retained by the research lab of a large drug firm because, well, its the Great Depression and money is too tight to lightly throw anything out.

Experimental Chemistry Theory insisted there is absolutely no point in wasting effort in trying the contents of that old

chemical bottle in synthesising a potentially useful analogue from the original German sulfa compound.

Fortunately, an older tradition (in medicine they call this the 'hands on' or clinical approach) said "try everything" .

Unexpectedly ,and thankfully, the unusual new compound showed some promise in the chemical lab.

But the next stage would be to try it on deliberately-infected mice in another type of lab.

But this lab had none of the usual mice (infected with strep bacteria) -- money was tight in the Depression remember ?---

so a harried assistant, trying to fill in for his boss while he was away, tested the compound instead on mice inflected with the bacteria that gives us the worst kinds of pneumonia.

Nothing had ever killed these bacteria reliably and almost everything possible had been tried on them since 1919 and the pandemic of Spanish Flu.

(Most of the Spanish Flu's 50 million deaths worldwide were actually caused by pneumonia -- reason enough to research it more thoroughly than any other virulent agent had been to date.)

Once again, trying the unexpected and the unscientific paid off - this new sulfa killed the most dangerous of the pneumonia types.

This would, if confirmed, be headline news worldwide and would push May & Baker into the front rank of world drug firms.

But for now, back to Depression realities.

A number of intermediate chemicals had to be made in quantity on the way to making the actual sulfa.

Various stratagems were employed as the factory hands struggled to break up recalcitrant chunks of an important intermediate into a coarse powder, without blowing up themselves and their building.

Their delicate lab-grade tools of high precision?

A hammer and chisel !

Then a lot of ordinary mortars and pestles were filled with the crude powder and it was slowly,painfully, hand-ground down to a sufficiently fineness.

May and Baker, despite being a large, diversified , long standing British drug house , had no vacuum still and so its first sulfa 693 had to be made up in one or two litre flasks, so to make that first batch of one kilogram took two months of hard unrelenting effort on behalf of the entire team.

Still,a little of that very first batch in early February 1938, saved the life of a Norfolk farm labourer who was given up for dead because of his seemingly non-responsive lobar pneumonia.

A decidedly better result that the much better known first British effort, in early February 1941, to use penicillin to save the life of a policeman !

Pneumonia - the dreaded 'Captain of the Forces of Death' - had a cure !

But Lesch's detailed account of the development of M&B693 bears only the most fleeting acquaintance with the usual starry-eyed account provided to the public by Thirties media accounts...

On the May & Baker factory floor, the magic bullet of M&B 693 was decidedly low tech

Science journalism and Chemistry Industry advertising (often hard to tell apart in the 1930s) saw the new Sulfa Drugs as the latest and most glamorous product to roll out of the cornucopia of the synthetic arcadia.

But as John Lesch describes in his account of how the British drug firm May & Baker developed its famous M&B693 (the sulfa drug that saved Churchill's life at the height of World War II) the view from the factory floor was distinctly low tech.

A dusty bottle of a rarely used chemical compound, made up for an ex-employee who never used it, but retained by the research lab of a large drug firm because, well, its the Great Depression and money is too tight to lightly throw anything out.

Experimental Chemistry Theory insisted there is absolutely no point in wasting effort in trying the contents of that old

chemical bottle in synthesising a potentially useful analogue from the original German sulfa compound.

Fortunately, an older tradition (in medicine they call this the 'hands on' or clinical approach) said "try everything" .

Unexpectedly ,and thankfully, the unusual new compound showed some promise in the chemical lab.

But the next stage would be to try it on deliberately-infected mice in another type of lab.

But this lab had none of the usual mice (infected with strep bacteria) -- money was tight in the Depression remember ?---

so a harried assistant, trying to fill in for his boss while he was away, tested the compound instead on mice inflected with the bacteria that gives us the worst kinds of pneumonia.

Nothing had ever killed these bacteria reliably and almost everything possible had been tried on them since 1919 and the pandemic of Spanish Flu.

(Most of the Spanish Flu's 50 million deaths worldwide were actually caused by pneumonia -- reason enough to research it more thoroughly than any other virulent agent had been to date.)

Once again, trying the unexpected and the unscientific paid off - this new sulfa killed the most dangerous of the pneumonia types.

This would, if confirmed, be headline news worldwide and would push May & Baker into the front rank of world drug firms.

But for now, back to Depression realities.

A number of intermediate chemicals had to be made in quantity on the way to making the actual sulfa.

Various stratagems were employed as the factory hands struggled to break up recalcitrant chunks of an important intermediate into a coarse powder, without blowing up themselves and their building.

Their delicate lab-grade tools of high precision?

A hammer and chisel !

Then a lot of ordinary mortars and pestles were filled with the crude powder and it was slowly,painfully, hand-ground down to a sufficiently fineness.

May and Baker, despite being a large, diversified , long standing British drug house , had no vacuum still and so its first sulfa 693 had to be made up in one or two litre flasks, so to make that first batch of one kilogram took two months of hard unrelenting effort on behalf of the entire team.

Still,a little of that very first batch in early February 1938, saved the life of a Norfolk farm labourer who was given up for dead because of his seemingly non-responsive lobar pneumonia.

A decidedly better result that the much better known first British effort, in early February 1941, to use penicillin to save the life of a policeman !

Pneumonia - the dreaded 'Captain of the Forces of Death' - had a cure !

But Lesch's detailed account of the development of M&B693 bears only the most fleeting acquaintance with the usual starry-eyed account provided to the public by Thirties media accounts...

Sulfa - the Commissar that Vanished

Until 2007 and Professor John E Lesch's "The First Miracle Drugs" , the most recent book on the sulfa drugs aimed at the general book-reading public dated from late 1943.

Of course, that was just before the story of Baby Patricia made natural penicillin the new 'miracle drug' sensation - a position it largely retains today.

In societies uncomfortable with the very idea of 'failure' , projects aren't allowed to fail and die - instead they merely disappear and become invisible, forgotten and denied.

In the case of Sulfa drugs, that means Germany, the UK and the US -all intent on forgetting their hopes and disappointments over Sulfa compounds.

One wonders how hard it was then for this American author to find a American publisher for his book ?

Sometimes it is societies more comfortable with failure ( or more uncomfortable with success) that deal better with 'failure tales' such as the fate of Sulfa drugs.

No current study exists of the successes, failures and hopes of synthetic drug-making in general, from 1895 to 1945, before biologically-based drugs like the antibiotics took (or was that re-took ?) centre stage.

Synthetic drugs were only a part - but a very emotionally powerful part - of the worldwide push, from 1850s till the 1950s, to synthesise and replace as much as possible of the natural world , in attempt to speed up Darwin's evolution.

This is because synthetic drugs intent on keeping us alive, seem themselves more 'alive' than did synthetic silk, aka nylon, for example.

As such, it was an exact counterpart to the contemporary Eugenics movement, attempting to do the same with human beings.

We need such a study because the obsession with replacing an 'imperfect' world with a manmade 'better' one has hardly died ...

Wartime Manhattan's PROJECTS

Wartime Manhattan's natural penicillin project and natural uranium bomb project were not high tech triumphs as they are usually portrayed to this day.

Instead they were both last minute/low tech/wide brush solutions to the failures of two of Manhattan's earlier High Tech /High Precision projects.

Those being man-made precision 'magic bullet' Sulfa drugs and man-made precision 'pickle barrel' Norden bomb sights.

Thus AR thinks that to continue to speak exclusively of 'The Manhattan Project' is a bit of a misnomer --- it would be much more accurate to speak of "Manhattan's Projects" and admit that their fascinating and interwoven story has never been properly told....