Oswald Avery's connection to Haldeman-Julius

It seems an unlikely connection, but there does exist a tenuous connection between two of our favorites here at the online edition of the Arcadian Recorder.

Oswald Avery's grandfather was publicly credited as having helped perfect the successful printing of tiny, light, complete, readable bibles on India Paper and thus helping to secure the fortunes of the hitherto hapless Oxford University Press.

Since OUP, as it is usually known in the book trade, is today one of the most valuable trademarks in the world, this is a story worth recalling.

OUP gained this rise to world prominence based on its exclusive hold on the secret knowledge required to make India paper - a incredibly thin, flexible, strong and yet opaque & non-yellowing paper made out of old hemp ropes and lots of lime.

It allowed you to pack in a million readable words (like the Bible) in a small, light but permanently readable book - perfect for shipping in mass quantities across the world on a very tight budget.

For Christian evangelicals determined to 'evangelize the world in one generation' it was - literally - a God-sent paper.

OUP quickly sold millions of its lightweight bibles, dictionaries and reference books based on the use of this paper.

Haldeman-Julius couldn't afford the price of this paper and expect to keep selling his 'little blue books' at the price of an American nickel shipped post-paid worldwide.

But his mind moved along the same lines of constantly seeking ways to 'mass-evangelize the world' at a reasonable price.

His book-making frugality matched and even exceeded those of his competitors in the world of Christian bible and tract makers.

I say 'competitors' because of course the personal dogma of Haldeman-Julius that drove him to be equally frugal in his printing methods was simply this: " There is no Christian God" !

Top-Down Genetics versus Mashup Genetics

'Must confess.

We never did like the term 'Horizontal Gene Transfer' , aka HGT ( sometimes otherwise known as LGT ,for Lateral Gene

Transfer).

In particular we always hated that 'transfer' bit.

The denotation is accurate enough, but its connotations conjure up entirely the wrong impression.

We'd bow in the direction of Dawson and call it HGT , Horizontal Gene Transformation.

For in fact the incoming bits of DNA disrupt - creatively - the existing fat and comfortable set of genes in the organism being invaded and the end result isn't some tidy orderly transfer of assets from one bank account to another, but more in the order of a micro-scale catastrophe.

There said it.

Catastrophe, cat-as-tro-phe - not neo-catastrophism, because we don't think it ever really went away - not out there in the real world and not out there in the real minds of many.

Only scientists and their fellow travelers consigned the word to a sudden death.

They said catastrophes rarely happen and when they do they are only local and short term - and soon we will be able to predict and prevent even these rare local events.

Catastrophes at the level of cells and microbes simply never happened.

But they do - we multi-celled creatures are the result of one such genetic mashup - when one sort of bacteria survived inside another type of bacteria to the point where it became part of the bacteria, inside its own cell walls and created the first multi-celled being .

Nine months later,more or less, you and us emerged.

There is no intellectual crime lower than seeking support for some or other human theory by claiming it merely reflects the laws of nature.

But...

But it is interesting to tease out the parallels for human creativity in the current moves to mashup old boring top down controlled copyrights to see what crawls out of the shell and the tremendous effects HGT has had in the past in mashing up stale boring old top down Vertical genetics to see what happens.

Penicillin , after all, was the result when a bacteria and a yeast decided to mashup their quite different DNAs....

The 1940 Peace Bomb joins the 1800 Peace Mine...

In any other circumstances, pacifist Leo Szilard might have been best remembered as the inventor (along with fellow pacifist Albert Einstein) of the modern fridge.

Instead he joined some others (sometimes pacifist others) in working on a super weapon that would so frighten the planet's militarists that they would instantly sue for permanent world peace.

Unfortunately, it was agreed that the backward militarist mind would require a convincing demonstration project, before being convinced.

So in the end a few hundred thousand people ended up dead in radiation and fire, all for 'the greatest good of the greatest number' ---but universal peace still did not break out - far from it.

So poor Szilard is today primarily remembered for instigating the Manhattan Project rather than inventing the perfect fridge ....or the perfect peace.

By contrast, Robert Fulton, a fellow New York City area resident like Szilard, (albeit from a hundred and fifty years earlier ), is best known today for building the first commercial steam boat service in the world, between New York City and Albany.

But as H. Bruce Franklin points out in his ground-breaking book "War Stars" , Fulton had had his utopian pacifist weapon scheme as well.

This submarine and sea-mine system was designed to destroy the British navy, freeing the high seas for universal free trade and commerce and thus introducing an era of permanent world peace.

This was/is standard centuries-old Liberal dogma, still much spouted today.

Fulton's willingness to sink a few real ships (along with their real crews) is also right on par with all the many Liberal peace bomb efforts: in the utilitarianism-driven willingness to see a 'few' die (unwillingly and unasked) for the greater good of the greater number.

Between Fulton and Szilard, New York has thrown up a number of Liberal pacifist and their peace weapons - perhaps most notably that shy pacifist Carl Norden.... and his precision WW II bombsight of the same name.

All these plans start off as efforts to design a totally new advance on weapon systems.

But these superweapons are not for profitably continuing sales in continuous wars.

Rather they are to 'demonstrate' their horrific effects just once and then usher in world peace forever.

All of them have a scope and gravitas and a vision about them that seems perfectly cut to fit Manhattan's taste in grandness-for-the-sake-of-grandness, thus becoming 'the Empire State Building of New York intellectual conceits'.....

Oswald Avery : unknown and famous for the wrong things...

It is the tragedy of Halifax Nova Scotia born Oswald Avery that he is famous for a study he didn't really believe in (and opposed for years) and he is unknown for his lifework, which today saves millions of childrens' lives around the world each year.

Oswald Avery is today known as 'The Father of Molecular Biology' , which should tip us off right from the start.

Scientists are never more manipulative and intellectually dishonest than when they are fabricating the history of the "Father" (never the "Mother" or "parents") of their particular branch of science.

Avery is no exception. In this case, we know this to be so, because the person who created the myth of Avery (Joshua Lederberg) said so: he intended to 'do a Mendel on Avery'.

Gregor Medel did wonderful pioneering work , but his credentials for being considered the father of any science are widely regarded today as spurious - and he would be the first to say so loudly if he came back today.

As would Avery regarding his alleged founding role in molecular biology - to his credit, he never claimed much for his work in this field while he was alive - and he lived for 10 years after his 'big' discovery.

But in the saving-the-lives-of-millions-of-innocent-baby-children world, the world of conjugate vaccines, Avery is a GIANT - or should be.

He certainly is to the researchers in that field.

But he is merely 'the key individual' in an effort that spanned a century and included every continent,thousands of researchers and hundreds of millions of dollars.

It is a story far too vast and far too complicated for popular science reporting to credit to any one medical super hero and one shining experimental result: no Pasteur or Jonas Salk here.

Instead Avery is praised for one 'seminal-paper-that-was-ignored-at-the-time' --- which rather implies an intellectual oxymoron and suggests the difficulty in crediting him as the Father of anything .

That paper was published in February 1944 but had its formal beginnings with experiments that began on October 22nd 1940 on Manhattan Island, that tiny island not far off the American coast.

Ah yes ! October 1940 : menses mirabilis indeed.

It is almost as if May 1940, certainly one of the most 'menses horribilis' in all of Western Civilization, (followed by the August to September 1940 aborted invasion of England : half horribilis half mirabilis), seemed to have drawn out extraordinary efforts from various North American scientists deeply emotionally affected by the events in Europe but too old to be called to actively take up a rifle.

Because one of the things those three extraordinary laboratory efforts in October 1940 have in common is their sheer physicality - scaled up to pilot plant size before table top work had even started; dirty, tiring, dangerous work.

Literally, not just figuratively, fighting for results in the trenches of science.

So, if in October 2010, we mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the financial recognition for (a) George Laurence's efforts to build an atomic pile, and (b) Henry Dawson's start in his efforts to cure SBE with natural penicillin injections, we might as well add (c) the formal start of Oswald Avery and Colin MacLeod's efforts to determine the chemical nature of Henry Dawson's Transforming Principle - proving it to be DNA.

Did we say 'North American scientists' ??

Let it stand.

We all know that we here at the Arcadian Recorder also mean 'Nova Scotian-born scientists', but let that remain our little secret.....

The Manhattan Pilot : Harlem Shuffled

What could seem more innocent than a project initiated by pacifists and an airplane named after someone's mother?

And what could seem more threatening than a project invigorated by a group of veterans of the frontline trenches and a heavy bomber ominously named 'The B-a-a-d Penny' ?

The cliches of innocence and harm align neatly enough in Hollywood movies but in the real world, events often show themselves to be a great deal more paradoxical.

In 1999, a survey by Newseum and USA Weekend of 36,000 American men and women revealed that they thought the top news story of the entire twentieth century involved a little boy and a baby girl and took place in an eighty acre area on a tiny island not far off the American coast.

In that tiny eighty acre area, the pacifists and the frontline vets worked on their projects almost within sight of each other, albeit while existing in totally different moral universes.

And as every good eighty acres should, this story involved a mule.

His name was Henry Dawson.

This is not his biography, but it is his story....

VEGEMITE also had its hour ; one far fierce hour and sweet

Yellow Snow Bad; Yellow Uisce Beatha Good

It is no secret that Irishmen like their drink, even ( or perhaps, particularly) in wartime.

For a real Irishman likes nothing better than defying straitlaced authorites who think sugar and alcohol has higher uses in wartime than to just use in beverages - such as using them to make more and stronger explosive materials.

So in November 1943, it probably won't seem that unusual to see a feisty Irish-Australian named Jim Duhig sprinkle some yeast-like material over a vat of water and molasses and put it in a cool dark place for ten days.

We say yeast-like because yeast extract was unavailable in wartime Brisbane (Queensland) Australia.

Jim did what any quick thinking Aussie would do - he reached for that all purpose substitute, Vegemite in .3% solution, because after all, he did come from the land down under, where beer flows and strong men chunder.

Also not unusual was his decision to strain the resulting golden colored liquid at the bottom of the vat through a piece of cheesecloth and put it into bottles.

But what he did next might surprise you : he drew some of that golden liquor out in a big needle and stuck it - again and again - into a dying woman.

He saved her life with this golden uisce beatha and saved four other dying patients' lives with it as well, in addition to successfully treating another two dozen less severe infections with his brew.

Duhig's technique, as crude as it seems, is about as high tech as antibiotic science & industry ever has to get, if its only interest is in saving lives.

But it isn't and Jim Duhig's heroic actions came 15 years after Penicillin's initial discovery.

Millions would have lived ( longer - for we all must die at some time) if Alexander Fleming had felt in 1928 as Dr Duhig felt in 1943.

But he didn't and neither would have Dr Duhig in 1928.

It took someone else, someone far bolder than Fleming or Dunhig or Florey, to kickstart the radical-at-the-time idea that injecting natural penicillin into a patient's bloodstream was the best possible treatment of most life-threatening systemic bacterial infections.

That bold idea was first enacted upon on a tiny island, not far off the American coast, a few years earlier.....

Jim Duhig was indeed very Irish - his uncle was the archbishop of Queensland - but in real life he didn't brew liquor - or even drink - he was the head of a prohibitionist society.

But he did brew penicillin---- rather than see some patients die needlessly while waiting for Big Pharma to get its act together to do in decades what Jim had done in weeks !

Life is much stranger than fiction.

70th Anniversary of 'the little $6,000 that grew'

In February 2010, most of the world will not celebrate the 70th anniversary of the start of the Manhattan Project.

Nor should they.

But they should mark it, and pause to reflect on its continuing consequences for us here today.

For 1940 was truly an Annus Mirabillis , and only partly because it marked the start of the development of the world's biggest life-taker.

Because 1940 was also crucial in the development of the world's smallest life-saver .

And aren't these two things the Alpha and the Omega of a continuing human existence in this universe?

During that February almost seventy years ago, two lead investigators at Columbia University in Manhattan were given $6,000 in federal tax dollars to look into the possibility of developing an atomic 'boiler' - which is to say, given money to develop an engine, not a bomb.

But the money came from orders of the president himself and FDR knew the project, if fully successful, would lead to investigating the building of an atomic bomb, to be held in reserve against the possibility the Nazis were already trying to build - and use - one.

Seventy years on, the six thousand dollars has become, for the American taxpayers alone, six trillion dollars and counting.

Laying blame for the current American debt crisis ? February 1940 is as good a place as any to start - that six trillion dollars would sure erase a lot of America's public and private debt worries.

If the American nuclear bomb arsenal of today ever gets used in a shooting match, the cost in lives would be six billion plus - and probably no one left to do the counting.

The costs of this the best known of Manhattan's wartime projects, in terms of the tarnishing of America's image abroad, is impossible to calculate.

"THE BUCK STARTS HERE"

The desk of the president is famously thought of as the place where the sign reads "the buck stops here".

But this project was highly unusual, in that it can be more truly said of the Manhattan Project, that "the buck started here", right at the president's desk.

As its political and financial father, FDR 'knew' about the start of the building of the world's biggest life-taker long before almost anyone else on the planet.

Not so with the start of the other Manhattan-based project , the one to finally start saving lives with the world's smallest life-saver, twelve years after its initial discovery.

FDR first learned of this life-saving substance at the exact same time that the rest of the world did , by opening his paper and reading a highly dramatic news story, one morning in mid-August 1943, almost three years after the life-saving project's obscure beginnings.

Perhaps the delay in the president learning of this life-saver is best explained by the fact that this project's lead investigator, also at Columbia University, never asked for any federal government grant or presidential 'seal of approval' - and in fact never sought a grant from anyone.

Still , his work never added a cent to the federal debt and his legacy continues to add lustre to the American image abroad.

Few people around the world, including those terrorists who harbor nothing but ill will towards Manhattan Island, do not have a family member or friend whose life was spared, thanks to the kick-starting efforts of this Manhattan Island life saver.

His project's 70th anniversary also comes up next year, in September 2010.

Perhaps this other Manhattan Project also needs a moment from us, to reflect on the changes it has brought into our world.

In this case, changes much for the better....

the Oxymoronic 'doomed' Megalopolis

It is always painful , here at the Arcadian Recorder anyway, to see authors writing of a 'doomed' Megalopolis.

This is akin to hearing people talk about the 'dumb version' of George W Bush.

Blame the Japanese - manga, anime and all.

Inherent in the history of, and hence in the connotations of , the original Megalopolis is the fact that the glorious future foreseen for it by its founders all came to not.

Once expected to be the biggest city on earth, it relatively quickly ended up as a deserted and unpopulated dot on a rural backroad.

It is hard to imagine a failure more total than that.

A 'Mega' flop in fact.

In the days when knowing Latin and Greek history was part of every educated person's upbringing, this fact was well known.

This perhaps is the reason we didn't see any past city fathers, even those with the most oversized egos, daring to call their large cities 'megacities' or speaking of the residents of their surrounding suburbs as living in 'megaland' .

The more modest, but more neutral, term 'metro' ( meaning 'mother' !) suits these 'fathers' just fine !

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...

Dawson & Fleming : Penicillin Pioneers Poles Apart

Sir Alexander Fleming did not discover 'penicillin'.

Not in the common sense meaning of that word that we have all held since the early 1940s.

He certainly did discover that excretions from a certain penicillium mold killed a wide variety of dangerous bacteria without harming human cells - the first known substance to do so.

But he quickly declared that these natural excretions, which he labelled as penicillin, were useless at curing even the mildest of infections, if injected into the body.

FLEMING: PENICILLIN WILL ONLY BE USEFUL AS ANTISEPTIC AND ONLY IF PRODUCED SYNTHETICALLY

Fleming said that penicillin was only medically useful if dabbed on the surface of a wound (that is, when used as an antiseptic) and would only be viable as a conventional treatment if it was produced synthetically by chemists.

Martin Henry Dawson was another pioneer in penicillin research.

He did not discover penicillin and only became active with it eleven years after its discovery was announced in the scientific literature.

DAWSON: PENICILLIN WILL CURE IF INJECTED, EVEN AGAINST THE TOUGHEST INFECTIONS AND EVEN IF MADE NATURALLY

However, he not only believed that penicillin would cure if injected in the body, he believed it would cure the most incurable,intractable, infection that medicine ever faced : SBE, Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.

Dawson was eventually proven right, reducing one of the most feared fatal diseases of young adults to a serious disease that was treatable and containable.

And Dawson's position on synthetic penicillin also was poles apart from that of Fleming (and of Fleming's rival Florey !) : it was 'synthetic if necessary but not necessary synthetic' .

In fact, he early on teamed up with the one penicillin manufacturer who put the production of natural penicillin in time to help the D Day invasion troops over mirages of synthetic penicillin some time after the war ended.

That company, Brooklyn's Pfizer, produced 80% of the penicillin that landed on the beaches of Normandy : natural not synthetic penicillin and intended for use by injection, not as an antiseptic .

Fleming certainly deserves some of the credit for penicillin.

But the fact that it took twelve years after his initial discovery of its healing powers before Dawson became the first person ever to give a dying patient a needle of antibiotics is a tragedy that must also be laid directly at Fleming's feet....

Brisance shatters misconceptions

High Explosives (HE) gets far less attention from historians, popular and learned, than its much older and much weaker cousin, gunpowder/blackpowder.

Perhaps much less attention that it deserves.

And what attention it does receive generally credits it too much for its impact on warfare and not enough for its impact on civil and economic life.

It could even be argued that its major impact on war was indirect, via its consequences for economic activities, including making materials for war.

BLACKPOWDER

Blackpowder is a Low Explosive (no one ever calls it LE though), it burns much more rapidly than an ordinary fire, thousands and thousands times faster than steel burns as "rust".

But it and its near cousins burn much slower than High explosives , somewhere between 10 to 10,000 times as slowly !

A pound or coal or petroleum will give off five times as much energy as even the most high tech of High explosives like RDX, but it will not explode, unless turned into a fine dust or vapor and mixed with lots of air.

Explosions are fast burnings, not necessarily efficient fast burnings.

Slow/low explosives are a form of rapid but controlled burning, propelling a human at the end of a rocket up into space without killing them with big G-forces.

They send a shell or bullet out of a relatively cheap, durable and low tech barrel without blowing up the barrel or the people near by.

In terms of power or work, they can adequately lift a pile of dirt up and away. (As can a crew of people with shovels, even before the days of blackpowder.)

But they have no brisance - they can not shatter or blast anything like hard rock.

For thousands of years, a segment of hard rock lying in the path of a canal or road had to be chipped away with tools generally much less strong than the rock they were hitting.

The best they could do was to chip at any little crack in the surface, fill it with fuel, light it till it burned white hot and then dash cold water on it and hope it shattered a big chunk away.

Then repeat, and repeat, and repeat.

Brisance, or the lack of it , is the major reason that long canal systems could take centuries to complete into early modern times - and the reason they were so narrow and shallow. The same could be said for early roads and early railways.

Brisance is the reason why so many potential mines couldn't be dug deep enough, cheaply and quickly enough, to reach potentially large rich ore bodies of iron ore and coal.

Without cheap plentiful iron and coal from distant places being married together at a mill, cheap, plentiful steel rail lines and cheap, strong steel excavating tools couldn't be made.

But without cheap rail transportation lines from those distant mine sites
and strong cheap steel tools to excavate the mine site, no iron or coal would reach the steel mill.

CATCH 22

It was a form of Catch 22 and it ended only gradually.

High Explosives were invented early in the 19th century but took fifty years for them to be rendered safe enough to use routinely in construction and mining.

Perhaps for the reason of their non-dramatic entry into our life, we have overlooked their impact.....

The Manhattan Project: Hidden in Plain Sight

Mention the Manhattan Engineering District (MED) aka 'The Manhattan Project', along with the wartime Atomic Bombs, and for most of us, our first thought is a mushroom cloud rising from a dry desert bed somewhere in the dusty south west of America.

Perhaps we think of other,later, Atomic Tests from similarly dusty deserts in Nevada and Utah. And their assembly - wasn't that done in isolated big plants inevitably set on dusty plains or deserts somewhere in southern and western America ? Isn't it still being done out there, somewhere ?

We are certain of one thing - none of this is taking place - or ever took place - anywhere near the wet, green, heavily urbanized American north east - certainly not in the New York City area.

THE DEVILISHLY CLEVER GENERAL GROVES

As is well known, the Atomic Bomb project was not just the most secret project in the Allied pipeline of new weapons, it was one of the few efforts rated 'Top Secret' that actually stayed truly top secret - even incoming President Truman knew nothing of it until he took office after FDR's death.

Many credit this to the mania for security to the Army Engineer Corps officer who really turned the faltering project around after he took charge in September 1942 - Colonel (and soon to be General) Leslie Groves.

Groves, born and raised in upstate New York, it is claimed, took a perverse delight in naming a project centered in rural wilderness in the South West after the biggest urban centre in the world - Manhattan - never the most popular part of New York State to its upstate residents.

Actually, it was a group decision to name the Top Secret project after Manhattan and that decision was even more brazen than any of us imagined.

The top secret project was hidden, in plain sight, in all of all places , Manhattan itself !

Most of the emotional high points of the wartime atomic project (and many of its technical solutions) happened on Manhattan or in the environs close around Manhattan and New York City.

Surprisingly, many of those warehouses,factories, office buildings and labs are still around.

Author Robert S Norris delights in reminding residents of the Big Apple that much of the world's atomic history lies all around them, unknown, as part of their daily work life environment.

It is easy to see how this confusion happened.

Most atomic authors, from 1945 till this day, have been voluntarily 'self-embedded' in the corps of the nuclear physicists, seeing the entire project through the physicists' eyes.

For the nuclear physicists, the world revolves around the Los Alamos weapons-development lab , set in the south west desert.

Without Los Alamos and its team of scientists, we won't have had the second , plutonium, (Nagasaki) bomb. But we would have had a bomb.

And it is worth noting that most of the deadly material in all of the world's Cold War nuclear arsenals was uranium, not plutonium - something you'd never gain from reading the average atomic author's breathless prose over the plutonium breakthrough.

(Uranium was a natural element, while until recently it was believed plutonium was man-made, artificial, synthetic - so it simply had to be the better and more exciting part of the atomic story.)

Actually, all of the physicists involved in the MED were, in a sense, mostly redundant after 1941 - if all had died in a plane crash in early 1942, the project would have still gone on to drop the Hiroshima bomb.

Chemists, engineers, metallurgists, factory artisans - all deserved more credit than the physicists for the first Bomb.

And in the early 1940s, most of the high tech firms and factories they worked for were headquartered or located in the greater New York City area....