Howard Florey, Henry Dawson,Penicillin and the NEW YORK TIMES : how then-tiny Pfizer became the biggest drug company in the world

"Giant Germicide" article changed history ...

Myth much to the contrary, Howard Florey went to America in 1941 not looking for a way to save lives, but for a way to save Allied military lives without having to save Axis, Neutral or Allied civilian lives : he was looking for a top secret medical bomb, a weapon of war.

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.

Wartime Penicillin was a race between a Tortoise and a Hare,unexpectedly the Tortoise won but the Hare got to phone-in the results...

People invariably find the story of wartime penicillin fascinating because 75 years after the earliest events, it still remains a real puzzler with lots of inexplicables and unanswered questions.

The story of wartime penicillin is actually quite clear.... but it is its history that seems so full of holes and silences.

Penicillin's four most famous patients shouldn't have been PATIENTS... according to the research protocol

When anal-retentive children grow up, if indeed they ever grow up, they either became clients of Madame X the Dominatrix... or they become medical research scientists devoted to extremely strict and rigid clinical trials with firm protocols and hard-fast deadlines.

A forgotten meme from "The Golden Age of Mysteries" held sway over wartime penicillin : to the detriment of the dying

The grey-haired teenagers of the 1870s to 1890s, the guys who actually ran World War Two, grew up on the stories of the Golden Age of Mysteries and Detectives, starting with Sherlock Holmes' Study in Scarlet in 1887.

And one thing you quickly learned in all those thousands of books in dozens of languages was that the formula that the spy had stolen from the safe - the formula upon which the fate of the Empire ( or perhaps even the world) hung - was never a formula in physics or biology or geology or astronomy.

It was always a formula in Chemistry : always a formula for the synthesis of some extremely powerful explosive or fuel or drug.

"I sail by stubborn stars, let rocks take heed.."

"... and should I sink... then sinking be my creed".

And that poetry stanza  was  in fact very much the bold personal credo of Kenneth Leslie , poet and anti-fascist activist (1892-1974).

Most of the penicillin grown in its first 15 years, was wasted on useless attempts at synthesis, not used to save the dying

If my claim be wrong : show me the money !

The elevator pitch for "By stubborn, Stars we steer"

Some people call it the takeaway sentence while others call it the elevator pitch : that line that tags a movie's every radio/TV spot and poster, the same line that got the movie green-lighted (financed) in the first place.

"A Rare Breed Indeed" : US wartime Int'l treaties on the A-Bomb, Lend-Lease, Bases for Destroyers ... and synthetic penicillin

Most of the antibiotics we use today (beta-lactams) are still the close relatives of the first and best-ever antibiotic, Penicillin G.

They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.

They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.

But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.

For female pioneers of wartime penicillin, 1910 was a very good year ...

Dorothy Crowfoot , Gladys Hobby and Nancy Atkinson were about the only women who played an independent role in the development of wartime penicillin.

The A-Bomb and synthetic penicillin were attractive war weapons, not because they were easy - but because they were hard

Shades of President Kennedy explaining his decision to push for an all-out effort to land men on the Moon before the end of the decade, "not because it was easy but because it was hard" !

The 20 year effort to synthesize Penicillin : "technically sweet" but morally purposeless

The Chemistry of Penicillin (1949)  has more words in it than the Bible and is so heavy that if dropped from a plane, it would kill more people than penicillin has saved.

My review of it could consist of just three words : "why?" and "technically sweet" .

Medical ethics - not medical techniques - are probably the leading way to decrease or increase deaths due to war

How doctors and nurses morally regard all of their fellow human beings, rather than how they medically treat their actual, relatively few, patients, is probably the number one determinate in whether wars are relatively bloodless or particularly bloody.

The entire culture takes many of its moral cues from the medical professionals and when they (as in WWII Germany and America )  sanction or even advocate neglecting or killing those judged lesser than others, this attitude bleeds across the whole country and into the actions of its troops --with horrendous consequences.

By stubborn, Stars we steer : sometimes charisma can be over-rated ...

"Be careful how you walk, so you won't step into the charisma" warns one cartoon character to the other : ie, don't mistake apparent charisma for actual bullshit.

Henry Dawson oozed non-charisma in spades but what he did have by the buckets full was mere ordinary stubbornness.

By stubborn , Stars we steer...

Considering all that this dying man did achieve with just his extra-ordinary stubbornness and his penicillin-of-hope, it is safe to say that charisma can sometimes be over-rated....