During the thick of the fiercest combat in WWII, the entire US Navy got the same amount
of scarce purified patient-ready penicillin as did just nine American Drug Companies , "for their own use".
I've read this statement in dozens of penicillin accounts without asking - "why so much patient-ready penicillin for just nine companies and what on earth did they need it for?"
After all, other patient-ready penicillin was being allocated for clinical trials run by a separate organization, the NAS-COC - the drug firms had no hand in it.
Their routine testing for anti-bacteria activity took incredibly tiny amounts of penicillin - about one millionth the amount allocated to them.
What these accounts have elided out of their story is that all of this patient-ready penicillin was being destroyed in experiments to totally purify and totally synthesis penicillin, at a time when patients were dying because of lack of penicillin.
"The Chemistry of Penicillin", a massive monograph released by Hans Clarke of Columbia University in 1949, was the official history of the six year long unsuccessful effort to synthesis penicillin in commercially-salable quantities, an effort that involved thousands of chemists and technical workers, millions of dollars and the best university and industry teams in the Allied countries.
In every way, it was a parallel effort to the Columbia University-based portion of the Manhattan Project.
Not just in its scale but also in the fact that it too started with a yellow powder consisting of a mixture of substances that were 99.99% alike and could only count itself successful when it ended up with one shiny clear crystal that was 100% pure.
The Bomb would have dropped on Hiroshima with or without success from Columbia's chemists --- but the Cold War wouldn't have happened if they had failed.
All the Cold War Bombs, on all sides, were built with molecule-separation technology perfected at Columbia during WWII.
By contrast, the molecule-separation technology that gave us pure crystals of penicillin came from the Wool Institute of Northern England in 1938 and proved useful enough to win a Nobel prize for its two developers.
And if you hear me once, you'll hear me a million times - their work was not peer-reviewed-grant-based research - (ie,it wasn't DIGNIFIED SCIENCE but OPERATIC SCIENCE to use my own terms).
The origins of this technique (chromatography) are even more interesting - they came from a Russian botanist and were long ignored by chemists because, (a) well he was a botanist after all and (b) it was all way too easy.
Chemists adhere to the notion that if you aren't in pain after you exercise, you haven't done it enough - every chemist's scientific papers are a testosterone-rich tale of endless amounts of back-breaking effort and mounds of chemical reagents used up to achieve the end result.
But chromatography worked so well it is now one of the most widely used chemical techniques - it relies on the fact that even molecules that almost totally alike are still absorbed onto other molecules at ever so slightly different rates.
(Note that in separating the two types of almost similar uranium for the Bomb, it was known they had slightly different weighs and sizes and so it was hoped they would tend to go through tiny holes at slightly different rates .)
They did, but sooooooooo slowly that some molecules put into the production line in the mid-1940s were still inside the same production line 40 years later when the Cold War ended !
Now it is true that this is a physical process ,not a chemical process, in the final analysis but the effort to make it all happen was really a physical chemist's type of work, rather than something a regular physicist would excel at.
In Dutch, the word for Chemistry is Scheikunde - "the art of separation" - a very good way to describe much of chemistry - and frequently the part of it judged most useful/most profitable to industry and society.
Back to the process by the Wool Institute's Synge and Martin, as applied to penicillin.
In this process, during each run of the process, 5 to 7 grams of patient-grade penicillin (that is between 2.5 and 25 million units of penicillin depending on the year the work was done) was poured down a column of alumina or silicon gel, and the penicillin separated itself out into various colored bands.
These different colored bands of sticky wet alumina were carefully cut apart with a knife
and then the biologically most active colors were used in further tests to get almost pure samples of various types of penicillin.
Think about how those chemists must have felt as they performed each run- they weren't heartless men and women.
They knew that each run used up and destroyed enough patient-grade penicillin to save the life of six children with blood poisoning or one young adult with SBE (sub acute bacterial endocarditis). Sulfa drugs weren't working - so no penicillin meant death.
The Chemistry of Penicillin describes many of these runs and the specific amounts of penicillin used in each run.
I love facts and figures and dates and prices (up to a point) and hate the fact that most accounts of penicillin either avoid them - or worse - screw them up by factors of one thousand or more ( mistaking grams for milligrams is routine, for example).
The facts and figures in this massive tome of a book look reliable to me and I feel that it -and they - are underused resources.
Even more useful are the facts and figures that are not there.
The firm (Pfizer) that produced most of World War II's penicillin, the firm that was the first to make patient-ready penicillin, a firm early into the blessed circle of synthesis research, is almost totally absent from this book in any meaningful way.
It had a vast amount of experience, having worked with penicillin almost longer than anyone else and it was making lots of money and taking on lots of talented staff during the war.
It even got the second or third largest allocation of penicillin to play with.
Yet with all these advantages, it produced almost nothing remotely useful towards the synthesis of penicillin.
This isn't just me (a totally non-chemist) saying this.
Accounts years later that tend to give an summary overview of the road to synthetic penicillin, written by penicillin chemists with no axe to grind, see nothing in Pfizer's work to highlight. Even very minor penicillin players get more attention than Pfizer.
So where did all that Pfizer experimental penicillin go then, if not into useful synthesis work?
John L -(John L Smith ,head of Pfizer's penicillin efforts) -care to explain ?
"I secretly broke my solemn signed agreement with my government and diverted the penicillin away from synthesis to give to patients dying of SBE, patients that that very same government had refused to treat."
Why ?
"Because I had just bet the farm and Pfizer's entire fate on the guess that my biologists on this side of the Hudson could make deep tank penicillin successfully - and make it better and quicker than Merck's chemists could make artificial penicillin on their side of the Hudson. I was betting that soon there would be more penicillin than we would know what to do with - plenty for Second Front soldiers AND SBEs here at home."
"Was I right; was I right ?!"
Yes, you were. And some SBE patients and their families are very grateful you bucked your wartime government and diverted penicillin towards dying SBE patients.
"Well, I must say I learned how to divert penicillin and 'buck' from the best - Henry."
Dawson ?
"Yes,the old stubborn mule, Henry Dawson ..."
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Monday, August 16, 2010
"4Fs and WOMEN and the GRACE of GOD"
The Official History of Vannevar Bush's famous wartime science agency the OSRD, home to World War Two's 'elitist science' , is called "ORGANIZING SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH FOR WAR" and was written by Dr Irvin Stewart.
In discussing penicillin and the medical section of the OSRD, Stewart claims that "Laboratories cannot be run by 4-Fs or Women or by the Grace of God alone." (Page 107).
Well, I know a great book or movie title when I see one and so I took up Irvin Stewart's intended insult to 4Fs and Women (and God) with relish.
Two 4F doctors called Dawson and Hunter together with three women scientists called Hobby,Chaffee and Olmstead could run a lab very well indeed ------and did more than anyone else to bring us NATURAL penicillin in time for the D-Day beaches and all those wounded young soldiers.
And the Grace of God no doubt came in handy a lot....
In discussing penicillin and the medical section of the OSRD, Stewart claims that "Laboratories cannot be run by 4-Fs or Women or by the Grace of God alone." (Page 107).
Well, I know a great book or movie title when I see one and so I took up Irvin Stewart's intended insult to 4Fs and Women (and God) with relish.
Two 4F doctors called Dawson and Hunter together with three women scientists called Hobby,Chaffee and Olmstead could run a lab very well indeed ------and did more than anyone else to bring us NATURAL penicillin in time for the D-Day beaches and all those wounded young soldiers.
And the Grace of God no doubt came in handy a lot....
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....
" 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....
Alexander Fleming's "HAY" identified?
I wish to offer up a possible identification of Alexander Fleming's long mysterious "HAY" bacteria and a possible explanation why it was among the very first bacteria he tested penicillin on.
It is well accepted that Fleming seeded that famous Petri dish at the end of July 1928, discovered that a mold had dissolved mature staph colonies on it in early September 1928 but that he only recorded his first experiment with the mold juice on October 30th 1928.
The results of this (quick) experiment implied to Fleming, I believe, that penicillium juice clearly inhibited the growth of staph-type (gram positive) bacteria .
However it had no effect on coli-type bacteria (gram negative) or acid-fast HAY-type bacteria (ie mycobacterium, the group of bacteria that causes Tuberculosis.)
The Timothy Hay Bacillus, Mycobacterium Phei , I suggest was that "HAY" bacteria and was used as a safe stand-in for the deadly tuberculosis bacteria that had killed so many lab workers in the past.
It is almost tuberculosis-on-steroid in some ways, but is almost completely harmless to humans.
Like all mycobacterium, it is one of the hardest types of bacteria to kill, because it is covered in mycolic acids that resist anything the chemical industry or the immune system can throw at them.
Perhaps Fleming thought an agent that could dissolve even mature staph colonies would be up for dissolving the tough coat of the mycobacterium group - if so he was disappointed.
Because it is not only harmless to humans, but is also the fastest growing of the very slow growing mycobacterium - always important for increasing lab productivity - Mycobacterium Phei seemed a useful addition to the well equipped Bacteriology Lab.
It also has a very unusual nucleic acid composition - 75% GC content - making it of interest to early workers in what we now call DNA research.
Parke Davis, the drug company that bought Fleming's institute's vaccines and serums , was very interested in this bug in the summer of 1928.
They had assisted a group at Yale in investigating some of its characteristics as they related to and contrasted with the deadly TB bug that was killing so many people world wide.
This was a potentially fresh approach to solving the age old TB problem - approaching the beast from an indirect angle.
This Yale team was led by Robert D Coghill - another famous leader in the penicillin saga.
Perhaps the Detroit drug firm had also communicated their interest in the Timothy Hay Bacillus to all researchers connected to Parke Davis International that summer --- including Fleming ?
I would be interested to hear what more experienced writers on Fleming and penicillin think of this suggestion...
It is well accepted that Fleming seeded that famous Petri dish at the end of July 1928, discovered that a mold had dissolved mature staph colonies on it in early September 1928 but that he only recorded his first experiment with the mold juice on October 30th 1928.
The results of this (quick) experiment implied to Fleming, I believe, that penicillium juice clearly inhibited the growth of staph-type (gram positive) bacteria .
However it had no effect on coli-type bacteria (gram negative) or acid-fast HAY-type bacteria (ie mycobacterium, the group of bacteria that causes Tuberculosis.)
The Timothy Hay Bacillus, Mycobacterium Phei , I suggest was that "HAY" bacteria and was used as a safe stand-in for the deadly tuberculosis bacteria that had killed so many lab workers in the past.
It is almost tuberculosis-on-steroid in some ways, but is almost completely harmless to humans.
Like all mycobacterium, it is one of the hardest types of bacteria to kill, because it is covered in mycolic acids that resist anything the chemical industry or the immune system can throw at them.
Perhaps Fleming thought an agent that could dissolve even mature staph colonies would be up for dissolving the tough coat of the mycobacterium group - if so he was disappointed.
Because it is not only harmless to humans, but is also the fastest growing of the very slow growing mycobacterium - always important for increasing lab productivity - Mycobacterium Phei seemed a useful addition to the well equipped Bacteriology Lab.
It also has a very unusual nucleic acid composition - 75% GC content - making it of interest to early workers in what we now call DNA research.
Parke Davis, the drug company that bought Fleming's institute's vaccines and serums , was very interested in this bug in the summer of 1928.
They had assisted a group at Yale in investigating some of its characteristics as they related to and contrasted with the deadly TB bug that was killing so many people world wide.
This was a potentially fresh approach to solving the age old TB problem - approaching the beast from an indirect angle.
This Yale team was led by Robert D Coghill - another famous leader in the penicillin saga.
Perhaps the Detroit drug firm had also communicated their interest in the Timothy Hay Bacillus to all researchers connected to Parke Davis International that summer --- including Fleming ?
I would be interested to hear what more experienced writers on Fleming and penicillin think of this suggestion...
Sunday, August 15, 2010
The things they buried...
I know, I know, a shameless knock-off from Tim O'Brien's classic.
What I am about to compare is the contrasting ways Fleming and Florey chose to deal with the more amateurish and stochastic areas of their involvement in the Penicillin Saga.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin was not - Horrors ! The Shame of it ! - peer-reviewed funded.
It was an accident and he wasn't being paid to discover or develop it.
But he made the most of that fact and in fact delighted in it.
He preserved the famous accidental Petri Dish so that all can still see it in the British Museum, 82 years later. He saved a bit of the accidental mold, sent its children out to any that asked.
Hundreds of collections worldwide still keep its great-grandchildren going and growing.
He kept his sparse notebooks for the entire period 1928-1945 dealing with his steady work on penicillin - not bold or visionary work sadly - but he still kept proof of just how little he did do -and revealed it for all to see, without shame.
He and his institution (St Mary's Hospital) positively delight in exposing and preserving just how amateurish his penicillin work was -- there is a museum dedicated to that amateurishness and the sheer unlikely stochastic-ness of his discovery.
Unauthorized but sympathetic biographers of Florey's work with penicillin also delight in revealing the utterly amateurishness of Florey's extraction equipment, assembled as it was from old bathtubs, coal hoppers, pie tins etc etc - Rube Goldberg on Acid.
Not Florey though: no, no, never.
He always (mis) presented his team as having a much more sophisticated operation than what even a well-equipped teaching hospital's Lab Service could ever put together.
He even told anyone foolish enough to ask that only his Oxford-produced penicillin or that produced by Big Pharma was safe to put into patients .
And that any teaching hospital lab's penicillin was bound to be unsafe .
All this despite the fact that Florey was not , in the conventional sense, a clinically-oriented medical doctor with patients and hence in a position to properly judge patient safety.
Instead he was a medical researcher working in a lab on basic science.
Part of this animus against teaching hospitals was because Florey hated patient-oriented doctors with a passion, but mostly it was because he wanted to keep his part in the penicillin Saga on the Dignified/peer-reviewed funded/team side rather than the heroic individual/amateur/unfunded side of the story.
But in fact his penicillin plant or that of any drug company, from 1940 till about mid 1944, was as purely amateurish as those run by individuals out of a corner of a hospital lab - perhaps differing only in being a tiny bit bigger.
But the minute he heard that Pfizer was producing more NATURAL penicillin in 5 minutes than his lab had produced in 5 years,Florey shut down his penicillin plant and had all his Rube Goldberg extraction equipment torn up and then buried in a backyard rubbish heap.
After his death,Norman Heatley built some replicas for museum use.
But generally Florey supporters have explained this by saying that Florey was forced to use amateur methods at first, until he assembled a vast Anglo-American joint effort involving governments, universities, corporations and the military, all working together, to bring us high tech penicillin - Big Science at its best.
Academics just love this myth, the myth that says if the taxpayer just gives science lots of money and then stays out of the way, they will pull rabbits out of hats every time.
The public loves the other myth - that kindly old Fleming discovered penicillin just messing about and gave it to the world without charge ------and that it was a piece of cake to get it into mass production.
Neither myth is totally untrue but both only give a part of the story.
Hopefully my effort will give a fair hearing to both Fleming and Florey but include the rest of the penicillin Story as yet unheard.....
What I am about to compare is the contrasting ways Fleming and Florey chose to deal with the more amateurish and stochastic areas of their involvement in the Penicillin Saga.
Fleming's discovery of penicillin was not - Horrors ! The Shame of it ! - peer-reviewed funded.
It was an accident and he wasn't being paid to discover or develop it.
But he made the most of that fact and in fact delighted in it.
He preserved the famous accidental Petri Dish so that all can still see it in the British Museum, 82 years later. He saved a bit of the accidental mold, sent its children out to any that asked.
Hundreds of collections worldwide still keep its great-grandchildren going and growing.
He kept his sparse notebooks for the entire period 1928-1945 dealing with his steady work on penicillin - not bold or visionary work sadly - but he still kept proof of just how little he did do -and revealed it for all to see, without shame.
He and his institution (St Mary's Hospital) positively delight in exposing and preserving just how amateurish his penicillin work was -- there is a museum dedicated to that amateurishness and the sheer unlikely stochastic-ness of his discovery.
Unauthorized but sympathetic biographers of Florey's work with penicillin also delight in revealing the utterly amateurishness of Florey's extraction equipment, assembled as it was from old bathtubs, coal hoppers, pie tins etc etc - Rube Goldberg on Acid.
Not Florey though: no, no, never.
He always (mis) presented his team as having a much more sophisticated operation than what even a well-equipped teaching hospital's Lab Service could ever put together.
He even told anyone foolish enough to ask that only his Oxford-produced penicillin or that produced by Big Pharma was safe to put into patients .
And that any teaching hospital lab's penicillin was bound to be unsafe .
All this despite the fact that Florey was not , in the conventional sense, a clinically-oriented medical doctor with patients and hence in a position to properly judge patient safety.
Instead he was a medical researcher working in a lab on basic science.
Part of this animus against teaching hospitals was because Florey hated patient-oriented doctors with a passion, but mostly it was because he wanted to keep his part in the penicillin Saga on the Dignified/peer-reviewed funded/team side rather than the heroic individual/amateur/unfunded side of the story.
But in fact his penicillin plant or that of any drug company, from 1940 till about mid 1944, was as purely amateurish as those run by individuals out of a corner of a hospital lab - perhaps differing only in being a tiny bit bigger.
But the minute he heard that Pfizer was producing more NATURAL penicillin in 5 minutes than his lab had produced in 5 years,Florey shut down his penicillin plant and had all his Rube Goldberg extraction equipment torn up and then buried in a backyard rubbish heap.
After his death,Norman Heatley built some replicas for museum use.
But generally Florey supporters have explained this by saying that Florey was forced to use amateur methods at first, until he assembled a vast Anglo-American joint effort involving governments, universities, corporations and the military, all working together, to bring us high tech penicillin - Big Science at its best.
Academics just love this myth, the myth that says if the taxpayer just gives science lots of money and then stays out of the way, they will pull rabbits out of hats every time.
The public loves the other myth - that kindly old Fleming discovered penicillin just messing about and gave it to the world without charge ------and that it was a piece of cake to get it into mass production.
Neither myth is totally untrue but both only give a part of the story.
Hopefully my effort will give a fair hearing to both Fleming and Florey but include the rest of the penicillin Story as yet unheard.....
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Biggest disease that penicillin conquered
....was not SBE, Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis, as important as it was and as important as it was to Martin Henry Dawson.
I am not writing my account of the Penicillin Saga because it conquered SBE.
I am going after much bigger game.
The dreadful disease I think NATURAL penicillin conquered in 1944 was Modernity.
I think today's GREEN movement can trace some of its beginnings to that blue green penicillium mold's triumph against the best efforts of man to recreate everything natural in an artificial form, merely because they could.
Defeating Modernity was the best thing natural penicillin ever did.
That's why I am writing this work - that's why I do what I do....
I am not writing my account of the Penicillin Saga because it conquered SBE.
I am going after much bigger game.
The dreadful disease I think NATURAL penicillin conquered in 1944 was Modernity.
I think today's GREEN movement can trace some of its beginnings to that blue green penicillium mold's triumph against the best efforts of man to recreate everything natural in an artificial form, merely because they could.
Defeating Modernity was the best thing natural penicillin ever did.
That's why I am writing this work - that's why I do what I do....
World's most important medical journal?
That's easy - there are only four types to consider when announcing a really important medical discovery.
Number four - but way at the bottom - is announcing a new medical discovery in the pages of something like LANCET or JAMA, the journals that medical doctors read .
Number three would be if that new medical discovery got reported in NATURE or SCIENCE, the journals that scientists read.
Number two would be if that new medical discovery ended up on the business pages of THE NEW YORK TIMES, the pages that the men with money read.
But all of these still remain near the bottom in importance in their ability to move a discovery out of the lab and into the GP's handbag - quickly.
Doctors,scientists and businessmen do many worthy things, but moving quickly is rarely one of them.
No,alone and way at the top as my choice to move people to action would be if that new medical discovery became attached to a human face and ended up on the pages of a women-oriented magazine in your neighbourhood supermarket's magazine stands.
Doing so, directs it to the immediate attention of........ "DOCTOR MOM".
Don't believe me ?
That's what happened back in August 1943, when Dante Colitti and CITIZEN HEARST put their heads together to make the wartime government of FDR stop focusing on killing long enough to think about the living.
At the beginning of August 1943, I bet one educated person in a million worldwide could tell you what penicillin was. By the end of September 1943, I bet 90% not only could tell you but also wanted to know why their government wasn't making it available to their citizens like yesterday .
Fifteen years earlier, penicillin had first become privately known, to Alexander Fleming.
Fourteen years earlier, penicillin had first become publicly known - as scientists are wont to say in their self-absorbed way- when it was published in a peer-reviewed journal with a few hundred readers.
And there it sat, in the British Museum of medical curios, basically unused.
It was only when penicillin became popularly known, virtually overnight 15 years later in August 1943, that it began to be used en masse to save lives.
Now getting the attention of DOCTOR MOM , a very,very busy person, is never easy but once you do that, Ms or Mr Discoverer ---- stand back a safe distance and watch the wheels spin !
So, the top medical journal in the world ????
I'd rate THE LADIES HOME JOURNAL pretty high....
Number four - but way at the bottom - is announcing a new medical discovery in the pages of something like LANCET or JAMA, the journals that medical doctors read .
Number three would be if that new medical discovery got reported in NATURE or SCIENCE, the journals that scientists read.
Number two would be if that new medical discovery ended up on the business pages of THE NEW YORK TIMES, the pages that the men with money read.
But all of these still remain near the bottom in importance in their ability to move a discovery out of the lab and into the GP's handbag - quickly.
Doctors,scientists and businessmen do many worthy things, but moving quickly is rarely one of them.
No,alone and way at the top as my choice to move people to action would be if that new medical discovery became attached to a human face and ended up on the pages of a women-oriented magazine in your neighbourhood supermarket's magazine stands.
Doing so, directs it to the immediate attention of........ "DOCTOR MOM".
Don't believe me ?
That's what happened back in August 1943, when Dante Colitti and CITIZEN HEARST put their heads together to make the wartime government of FDR stop focusing on killing long enough to think about the living.
At the beginning of August 1943, I bet one educated person in a million worldwide could tell you what penicillin was. By the end of September 1943, I bet 90% not only could tell you but also wanted to know why their government wasn't making it available to their citizens like yesterday .
Fifteen years earlier, penicillin had first become privately known, to Alexander Fleming.
Fourteen years earlier, penicillin had first become publicly known - as scientists are wont to say in their self-absorbed way- when it was published in a peer-reviewed journal with a few hundred readers.
And there it sat, in the British Museum of medical curios, basically unused.
It was only when penicillin became popularly known, virtually overnight 15 years later in August 1943, that it began to be used en masse to save lives.
Now getting the attention of DOCTOR MOM , a very,very busy person, is never easy but once you do that, Ms or Mr Discoverer ---- stand back a safe distance and watch the wheels spin !
So, the top medical journal in the world ????
I'd rate THE LADIES HOME JOURNAL pretty high....
Pearl Harbour Saves Florey?
As long as America was at peace ,America's businesses could compete against each other relatively freely without the ability of the "dollar a year men" in Washington to make use of " the emergency " to misuse government's wartime muscle to restrain competition, so as to favor the firms they represented in peacetime.
If Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour hadn't happened, America would have probably remained a neutral at least throughout the first half of 1942 - long enough for Pfizer and Dawson to be free to fully publicize the life-saving powers of naturally-brewed penicillin in the national media.
This would have been enough, in peacetime, to create an overwhelming public demand for its immediate mass production.
Penicillin would then become just another in a series of remarkable drug discoveries that first emerged as a small but notable success and just kept on growing in importance.
Sulfa drugs started that way - they really had no immediate or dramatic success to introduce themselves to the world.
Rather it was a series of notable successes, among a number of different years and a number of different continents that gradually made them famous.
Newer and newer sulfa variants kept on being discovered and were then put to work curing additional diseases.
Likewise,Penicillin's initial success would have focused attention on the possibility of ever more drugs from molds and bacteria - as of course happened from about 1947 onwards to today, but in a non-dramatic ,and above all, industry-directed fashion .
85 years after sulfa and penicillin first emerged in the lab (around 1928), only one drug has got any kind of universal dramatic legend attached to it and this is penicillin.
The deleterious effect of the American declaration of war on what should have been its normal emergence from lab to drug company to its acceptance by GP and patient is the reason why.
Without Pearl Harbour happening in December 1941, Florey and Merck would have been free to pursue their synthetic penicillin mirage while Dawson and Pfizer would have been equaly free to introduce natural penicillin - first grown in large trays and then from deep tanks.
The winner would have been the same (Pfizer) but they just might have emerged in May 1942 rather than be delayed until May 1944.
Ie, it would be as if the dramatic events of May 1941 to May 1944 never ever happened.
Let us go to a concrete example:
If Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour hadn't happened, America would have probably remained a neutral at least throughout the first half of 1942 - long enough for Pfizer and Dawson to be free to fully publicize the life-saving powers of naturally-brewed penicillin in the national media.
This would have been enough, in peacetime, to create an overwhelming public demand for its immediate mass production.
Penicillin would then become just another in a series of remarkable drug discoveries that first emerged as a small but notable success and just kept on growing in importance.
Sulfa drugs started that way - they really had no immediate or dramatic success to introduce themselves to the world.
Rather it was a series of notable successes, among a number of different years and a number of different continents that gradually made them famous.
Newer and newer sulfa variants kept on being discovered and were then put to work curing additional diseases.
Likewise,Penicillin's initial success would have focused attention on the possibility of ever more drugs from molds and bacteria - as of course happened from about 1947 onwards to today, but in a non-dramatic ,and above all, industry-directed fashion .
85 years after sulfa and penicillin first emerged in the lab (around 1928), only one drug has got any kind of universal dramatic legend attached to it and this is penicillin.
The deleterious effect of the American declaration of war on what should have been its normal emergence from lab to drug company to its acceptance by GP and patient is the reason why.
Without Pearl Harbour happening in December 1941, Florey and Merck would have been free to pursue their synthetic penicillin mirage while Dawson and Pfizer would have been equaly free to introduce natural penicillin - first grown in large trays and then from deep tanks.
The winner would have been the same (Pfizer) but they just might have emerged in May 1942 rather than be delayed until May 1944.
Ie, it would be as if the dramatic events of May 1941 to May 1944 never ever happened.
Let us go to a concrete example:
DOI: 10.1021/ed018p552.2
Publication Date: December 1941
This is a monthly publication of the American Chemical Society.
In 1941, when the public heard the word scientist, they thought only of chemists - chemistry was the Queen of the Sciences back then to an extent we can't begin to imagine ,unless we were living back then.... before 1945 (Physics) and 1953 (Biology).
In 1941, when the public heard the word scientist, they thought only of chemists - chemistry was the Queen of the Sciences back then to an extent we can't begin to imagine ,unless we were living back then.... before 1945 (Physics) and 1953 (Biology).
This journal was directed towards chemistry teachers and undergraduates in North America's high schools and universities--- a huge audience well beyond more prominent chemistry journals with a select but tiny audience.
This particular column was a monthly roundup of news from the popular press that had a chemical industry aspect to them.
Just reading the column in its entirety makes it clear that "WHAT"S BEEN GOING ON" for December 1941 was written and released before Pearl Harbour.
Using language from The New York Times's description of Dawson's work on penicillin back in May of 1941, the paragraph seems a little out of date to fit this speedy "up to the minute" news digest column's style.
It credits Fleming with discovering penicillin in 1929, but says nothing happened to it until Dawson at Columbia proved it up.
I admit it - I love it !!!
I admit it - I love it !!!
No mention of Oxford nor Florey no Merck no OSRD nor of the NRRL and COC.
I think it reflects a little quiet PR spin that Pfizer put behind on its corporate decision to seriously help Dawson use Pfizer-brewed NATURAL penicillin on clinical cases.
That brewing, and that corporate decision, happened in mid October 1941, a date much closer to the date the column would normally have been researched and written --- rather than about events from way back on May 5th 1941.
A Merck-oriented paragraph on penicillin in this same time period would have credited Florey and ignored Dawson totally.
Merck never had to do that media-spinning, not after Pearl Harbour.
One wartime government agency,the OSRD-CMR, run by Merck men, now controlled almost all of the news on penicillin and they spun it to focus exclusively on Florey and hence indirectly on Merck.
But they forgot to put a muzzle on Dante Colitti (and Doctor Mom) and penicillin became a legend despite the best efforts of OSRD,Merck and Florey....
Friday, August 13, 2010
PoMo Green versus Institutional Green
We all know institutional or hospital green, though we probably don't know much about it.
Technically it is called Chromium Oxide Green and though it is no longer made (much) it was a technical wonder in its day.
Most chromium paint wasn't green - the green color was selected for the paint used in public institutions like prisons (remember the Green Mile ?), hospitals and institutions for the chronically ill and mentally insane.
Today it gives a bad vibe for being associated with these places of discomfort and shame, but this pastel like shade of green was originally selected because color scientists judged it the most calming shade for institution inmates.
The reason why it was made from chromium oxide was because this paint was tough tough tough and chemically toxic - it resisted stomach contents and common hospital cleaners AND because it was so tough and smooth,that made it harder for germ-sustaining dirt to hang about.
It was the most typical color of the Streamlined Moderne Decade from about 1934-1944 - by no coincidence the Apogee of the Modernist Age.
But that is soooooo yesterday.
Today's green is PoMo Green and it is not a paint at all - it is the natural verdant color of Nature itself - green grass, green trees, green ocean deeps.
The very first PoMo green?
Glad you asked !
It was all those Kodachrome-vivid color photographs of green-blue penicillium molds in the color supplements so popular during the World War Two years (when neither TV or film gave you much color) that appeared post the Spring of 1944.
That was about the time when it became embarassingly apparent that man-made medicine was being eclipsed by life-saving medicine from a humble and slimy low life normally found in our basements --- a shock Modernist Science never really recovered from.
Now it would just take Adorno and Horkheimer to make it official, which they did - in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment.
Move over Mo, Po has arrived.....
Technically it is called Chromium Oxide Green and though it is no longer made (much) it was a technical wonder in its day.
Most chromium paint wasn't green - the green color was selected for the paint used in public institutions like prisons (remember the Green Mile ?), hospitals and institutions for the chronically ill and mentally insane.
Today it gives a bad vibe for being associated with these places of discomfort and shame, but this pastel like shade of green was originally selected because color scientists judged it the most calming shade for institution inmates.
The reason why it was made from chromium oxide was because this paint was tough tough tough and chemically toxic - it resisted stomach contents and common hospital cleaners AND because it was so tough and smooth,that made it harder for germ-sustaining dirt to hang about.
It was the most typical color of the Streamlined Moderne Decade from about 1934-1944 - by no coincidence the Apogee of the Modernist Age.
But that is soooooo yesterday.
Today's green is PoMo Green and it is not a paint at all - it is the natural verdant color of Nature itself - green grass, green trees, green ocean deeps.
The very first PoMo green?
Glad you asked !
It was all those Kodachrome-vivid color photographs of green-blue penicillium molds in the color supplements so popular during the World War Two years (when neither TV or film gave you much color) that appeared post the Spring of 1944.
That was about the time when it became embarassingly apparent that man-made medicine was being eclipsed by life-saving medicine from a humble and slimy low life normally found in our basements --- a shock Modernist Science never really recovered from.
Now it would just take Adorno and Horkheimer to make it official, which they did - in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment.
Move over Mo, Po has arrived.....
Thursday, August 12, 2010
"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
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
NRRL1249.B21 was WWII's top secret
It is not hard to replicate an Atom Reactor - just ask Joe,Mao, Winnie or Chuck.
(Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Churchill and de Gaulle.)
Even George gave it a good shot.
(George Laurence was a junior Nova Scotia-born scientist who decided to build one on his own time,by himself and with his own money --- he did a good enough job of it to be invited , along with Canada, into the very small wartime circle of the atomic bomb elite.)
The American Army built one - along with a few Bombs.
But they found The Bomb a piece of cake compared to building a Frank Sinatra.
Since the original guy was draft-exempt because of a torn eardrum (no wonder he sang so good !), I am sure the Army tried - it was bad for the fighting man's morale to have the gal-pal back home swooning over a 4Fer.
NRRL 1249 B.21 sounds like a top secret bomber, or a new super explosive, but it actually was just a bit of mold like you might scrape off an orange or a dank basement wall.
But it was a lot more like a Hollywood star or a Billboard chart-topping singer - an exact replicate couldn't be build and even a close substitute won't do at all.
All or nothing.
When the Russians and the Japanese heard rumours that the Germans, British and Americans were building an uranium bomb, based on the principle of fission they could at least hope to duplicate it.
Uranium isn't particularly scarce and the basic principles of fission were made known to all atomic physicists worldwide between 1938 to 1940.
The costs and difficulties of the chemistry and engineering were far more daunting, in practise - but it could be done, given a little time - ah, Joe ?
But without a spore or two of NRRL 1249.B21 or NRRL 832 or NRRL 1951 (still in use world wide 65 years later) , you were reduced to using Fleming's original "PD" spores - freely available - but only producing 2 units of penicillin per milliliter not 200 units a milliliter.
That meant if you weren't part of the NRRL-OSRD charmed circle, you'd have to do 100 times as much labour as those specially favoured by Coghill and Richards.
A sweet deal for a few lucky corporations - particularly since it was all paid for by the long suffering taxpayer.
Let's recap: the private stuff was PD but the publicly funded stuff was proprietary.
Only in America, you say ?
Let's just call it a New Deal for the Rich and Influential.....
(Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Churchill and de Gaulle.)
Even George gave it a good shot.
(George Laurence was a junior Nova Scotia-born scientist who decided to build one on his own time,by himself and with his own money --- he did a good enough job of it to be invited , along with Canada, into the very small wartime circle of the atomic bomb elite.)
The American Army built one - along with a few Bombs.
But they found The Bomb a piece of cake compared to building a Frank Sinatra.
Since the original guy was draft-exempt because of a torn eardrum (no wonder he sang so good !), I am sure the Army tried - it was bad for the fighting man's morale to have the gal-pal back home swooning over a 4Fer.
NRRL 1249 B.21 sounds like a top secret bomber, or a new super explosive, but it actually was just a bit of mold like you might scrape off an orange or a dank basement wall.
But it was a lot more like a Hollywood star or a Billboard chart-topping singer - an exact replicate couldn't be build and even a close substitute won't do at all.
All or nothing.
When the Russians and the Japanese heard rumours that the Germans, British and Americans were building an uranium bomb, based on the principle of fission they could at least hope to duplicate it.
Uranium isn't particularly scarce and the basic principles of fission were made known to all atomic physicists worldwide between 1938 to 1940.
The costs and difficulties of the chemistry and engineering were far more daunting, in practise - but it could be done, given a little time - ah, Joe ?
But without a spore or two of NRRL 1249.B21 or NRRL 832 or NRRL 1951 (still in use world wide 65 years later) , you were reduced to using Fleming's original "PD" spores - freely available - but only producing 2 units of penicillin per milliliter not 200 units a milliliter.
That meant if you weren't part of the NRRL-OSRD charmed circle, you'd have to do 100 times as much labour as those specially favoured by Coghill and Richards.
A sweet deal for a few lucky corporations - particularly since it was all paid for by the long suffering taxpayer.
Let's recap: the private stuff was PD but the publicly funded stuff was proprietary.
Only in America, you say ?
Let's just call it a New Deal for the Rich and Influential.....
NDM-1 SUPERBUG - the TRURO connection
A mobile gene that creates an enzyme that destroys almost all known antibiotics have been reported in NATURE this week, leading the news around the world.
Bacteria (and microbes generally), kick dust in the face of Charles Darwin and his theories of genetic inheritance.
They can send their 'seed' sideways - not just vertically down to their offspring like humans with PhDs - but also to other species or even towards other forms of life.
It is called HGT ( for Horizontal Gene Transfer) (aka Transformation) and Martin Henry Dawson from Truro,Nova Scotia (the doctor whose biography I am writing) was the first person to try to make HGT a big issue in the science world.
That happened between 1928 to 1943 but unfortunately few scientists back then cared to face his unpleasant message ---- "simple creatures are anything but."
(And its corollary, that scientists are less brillant than they think they are.)
If we start dying en masse from these new superbugs, maybe more of us will start listening to Dawson's still-pertinent message
Bacteria (and microbes generally), kick dust in the face of Charles Darwin and his theories of genetic inheritance.
They can send their 'seed' sideways - not just vertically down to their offspring like humans with PhDs - but also to other species or even towards other forms of life.
It is called HGT ( for Horizontal Gene Transfer) (aka Transformation) and Martin Henry Dawson from Truro,Nova Scotia (the doctor whose biography I am writing) was the first person to try to make HGT a big issue in the science world.
That happened between 1928 to 1943 but unfortunately few scientists back then cared to face his unpleasant message ---- "simple creatures are anything but."
(And its corollary, that scientists are less brillant than they think they are.)
If we start dying en masse from these new superbugs, maybe more of us will start listening to Dawson's still-pertinent message
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Why stop at THREE mold samples...
...when four would feel oh so good?
In 1970,Lennard Bickel, using information from Gladys Hobby, says that Martin Henry Dawson and Karl Meyer used a sample of Alexander Fleming's penicillin-producing strain received from Roger Reid in Baltimore to deliver History's first jab of antibiotics October 16 1940, before a sample of Ernest Chain's strain of penicillin-producing mold arrived from England via the wartime postal service.
Chain's sample - if it even was penicillium notatum - turned red and gave off no penicillin.
This story was repeated by Hobby in her 1985 definitive book on the wartime development of penicillin ---- and by most penicillin authors ever since.
Reid had originally got his penicillin strain in November 1930 from Charles Thom, the world expert on penicillium strains.
Who had gotten his sample from Harold Raistrick who got his from Fleming who got it as a contaminant in the air drifting upwards from the lab of LaTouche who scrapped it off a basement wall of somebody very rich in Belgravia.
(Finally !
The idle rich do something useful.....)
On July 9th 1941, Howard Florey visited Charles Thom who says that HM Dawson ( ie MH Dawson) contacted him directly to get a sample of Fleming's strain, after Chain's strains arrived in late October 1941.
So Dawson contacted at least three people that Fall of 1940 for a good penicillin-producung strain of the mold : Chain, Reid, Thom.
Why not then Alexander Fleming ???
Why not go to the Source, the Mother Load ?
This might account for Fleming's boss (Dr Wright) knowing all about penicillin-making at New York's Columbia University in March 1941, as referenced in Dr John Hedley-Whyte's account.
Dawson had meet Fleming at least twice, for sure -- in 1936 and 1939 when both were high poo-pahs in International Microbiology Congresses.
Anyone got any opinions on this ??
In 1970,Lennard Bickel, using information from Gladys Hobby, says that Martin Henry Dawson and Karl Meyer used a sample of Alexander Fleming's penicillin-producing strain received from Roger Reid in Baltimore to deliver History's first jab of antibiotics October 16 1940, before a sample of Ernest Chain's strain of penicillin-producing mold arrived from England via the wartime postal service.
Chain's sample - if it even was penicillium notatum - turned red and gave off no penicillin.
This story was repeated by Hobby in her 1985 definitive book on the wartime development of penicillin ---- and by most penicillin authors ever since.
Reid had originally got his penicillin strain in November 1930 from Charles Thom, the world expert on penicillium strains.
Who had gotten his sample from Harold Raistrick who got his from Fleming who got it as a contaminant in the air drifting upwards from the lab of LaTouche who scrapped it off a basement wall of somebody very rich in Belgravia.
(Finally !
The idle rich do something useful.....)
On July 9th 1941, Howard Florey visited Charles Thom who says that HM Dawson ( ie MH Dawson) contacted him directly to get a sample of Fleming's strain, after Chain's strains arrived in late October 1941.
So Dawson contacted at least three people that Fall of 1940 for a good penicillin-producung strain of the mold : Chain, Reid, Thom.
Why not then Alexander Fleming ???
Why not go to the Source, the Mother Load ?
This might account for Fleming's boss (Dr Wright) knowing all about penicillin-making at New York's Columbia University in March 1941, as referenced in Dr John Hedley-Whyte's account.
Dawson had meet Fleming at least twice, for sure -- in 1936 and 1939 when both were high poo-pahs in International Microbiology Congresses.
Anyone got any opinions on this ??
The Crude and the Dignified, ...
....are two wildly different versions of the Saga of Penicillin Development during World War Two.
You know only too well the Dignified version, as propagated by the OSRD of Vannevar Bush and by just about every academic writer on penicillin (I think it is a requirement for them to retain tenure or something) - I call it the dignified rendition of "The Revenge of the Nerds".
Martin Henry Dawson's efforts to grow, purify and apply his own homegrown penicillin to
save patients dying from invariable fatal SBE - all the while fighting off his own hospital, his own government and his own (dying) body - is the most tasteless, the most over the top and the most crude Hollywood medical bio-pic imaginable ,since the days of the dying Marie Curie laboring long into the night over her radium ores ,in a tin shed with a leaky roof.
A Forties three hankie melodrama full bore, for sure.
Enough to make any modernist scientist recoil in distaste.
Fair enough - stone-heartedness is a disease -and they are more to be pitied than blamed, etc etc.
But the patients, the punters, the bums on the seat love it.
They like - nay - love and worship - the idea of doctors who care about them enough to be willing to die for them.
I'm telling the tale for them ---- and in hopes that a few modernist scientists and academics might re-think how they deal with the real people affected by their lab efforts....
You know only too well the Dignified version, as propagated by the OSRD of Vannevar Bush and by just about every academic writer on penicillin (I think it is a requirement for them to retain tenure or something) - I call it the dignified rendition of "The Revenge of the Nerds".
Martin Henry Dawson's efforts to grow, purify and apply his own homegrown penicillin to
save patients dying from invariable fatal SBE - all the while fighting off his own hospital, his own government and his own (dying) body - is the most tasteless, the most over the top and the most crude Hollywood medical bio-pic imaginable ,since the days of the dying Marie Curie laboring long into the night over her radium ores ,in a tin shed with a leaky roof.
A Forties three hankie melodrama full bore, for sure.
Enough to make any modernist scientist recoil in distaste.
Fair enough - stone-heartedness is a disease -and they are more to be pitied than blamed, etc etc.
But the patients, the punters, the bums on the seat love it.
They like - nay - love and worship - the idea of doctors who care about them enough to be willing to die for them.
I'm telling the tale for them ---- and in hopes that a few modernist scientists and academics might re-think how they deal with the real people affected by their lab efforts....
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