Dawson's DIY penicillin a postmodernist "shot across the bow" of Modernist Big Pharma

Two hundred years from now, only the first of the Dawson team's many articles on wartime penicillin will still be cited and still considered seminal.

This, despite the fact that Nova Scotia-born Henry Dawson's last penicillin article told a surprised world that invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (the much dreaded SBE) had finally been cured - by his penicillin method that he had pioneered 5 years earlier.

But instead it is Dawson's first penicillin first article, the "impure but non toxic" article of May 5th 1941, that had (and continues to have) ramifications beyond any one disease, ramifications indeed beyond even medicine and science itself.

In that article, delivered before a large group of international medical researchers in Atlantic City and widely reported by the popular and scientific media from The New York Times to the South Africa Medical Journal, Dawson deliberately paired and then contrasted two oxymoronic phrases.

But first, recall that Dawson chose to appear in front of all his peers to praise his new drug to the heavens AND announce that it had no therapeutic effect on a series of four SBE cases in a row.

Trust me on this one : normally scientists do not rush to the biggest conference in town to proudly announce repeated failure.

But it wasn't the lack of therapeutic success from his impure natural penicillin that Dawson was really so eager to announce.

Rather it was the lack of toxic effects from his crude homemade mixture of natural penicillin and its natural impurities that he was so proud (and perhaps amazed) to announce.

(In a sort of 'reverse Ivory Soap', his starting penicillin brew was far less than 99 and 44 100th percent impure :  pure penicillin made up only one part per million of his mixture !)

It could have had - perhaps even should have had - a highly deadly mycotoxin  poison buried somewhere in that fungus mix, but God took pity on Humanity and it did not.

We do not have a complete version of Dawson's report and ad lib comments , only various precis. But assembled together, I believe we can garner Dawson's actual words and phrases used to prescribe his main intent behind this article.

He described how his tiny team made their hospital-grown crude (impure) and natural penicillin, calling it both more potent and much less toxic than the factory-made chemically pure synthetic sulfa drugs, less potent and more toxic, made by Big Pharma .

His takeaway line, as the CBC's Don Connolly likes to say, is that "despite being impure, homemade natural penicillin was actually less toxic and much more potent than factory-made pure synthetic sulfa drugs."

"Living better chemically ?"

Today, in this postmodern age,  this statement might hardly seem controversial ; but in 1940, at the apogee of Modernity, to diss the Du Pont slogan of "living better chemically" was to indulge in sheer heresy.

At the same university as Dawson (Columbia) and at the exact same time, famed German-scholars-in-exile Adorno and Horkheimer were busy dismantling 500 years of Modernity, brick by brick, and patiently reassembling them as Postmodernity.

Perhaps posthumously, their fellow university colleague Henry Dawson can lay claim to being among Postmodernity's first scientific converts.....

Does "Boots on the ground" Exclusivity come at cost of being a lap-dog ?

FRANKLIN-bound !

While I and David Common are both Canadian citizens and journalists, only David will be on the Canadian Coast Guard vessel  Laurier as it searches the high Arctic for the remains of the long lost Franklin expedition.

So if you want a near-exclusive look at the Franklin search, from someone is actually there, please rush to view or listen or read David's reports on the various media of the CBC , David's employer.

His near-exclusive will do wonders for his employer's ratings (and ad rates and executive bonuses).

I do not know who is paying David's way - in this particular case that is well beyond the point.

Mere bags of money alone won't get me or anyone else on a small ship already well loaded with scientists and equipment.

The government-sponsered effort clearly picked who it did want on the Laurier ---- and who it did not.

It didn't want a political blogger like Warren Kinsella to be on board, denouncing the whole exercise as an empty Conservative attempt to pretend to care about the Arctic while failing to deliver real money, once the annual tour of TV cameras was gone.

Exclusives and "actuality" sell newspapers and people who spin the news know this.

So creating pseudo-events so far away and so lacking in public access that only a chosen few can be there to act as journalistic eyewitnesses ensures you can pick friendly media ---AND --- expect them not to bite the hand that feeds them.

We, the public, feed into this cosy little sham every time we buy into big media's cant talk about "shoe leather" and "boots on the ground"  of traditional journalism versus the sitting-by-a-computer-and-phone working blogger.

But, by contrast to David Commons's on-site reporting, the CBC's Laura Payton has created a much more probing look at the politics of the search for the Franklin remains, that probably was all done by phone and email and yet, arguably, is far better journalism.

Embedded science reporters...

This "insider lap dogs" vs "outsider questioners" is how popular Science works as well.

Embargoing an exclusive look at all the background material and access to the primary authors of a major study for only for a select group of journalists is almost sure to guarantee that at least some of their editors will feature the story on the front pages.

Why not - a sure exclusive to show against all their lame competitors , who must cobble a story somehow together, hours later, and based only upon the bare article on the journal website.

Will the lucky few that get the exclusive interviews with the principles in the story be hard on those scientists' new claims ?

Not if the sponsoring University and publishing Journal's PR departments has done their homework : knowing exactly which journalists do (or do not) like claims to be able to clone human life, for example.

Boots on the ground actuality and exclusivity in science, as in Iraq , often comes at the cost of being little more than becoming the "embedded" semi-official spokesperson for the organization that granted that boon of exclusivity.

I F Stone did far better journalism by avoiding all exclusivity, even of secret brown paper envelopes, and developed his articles based exclusively on close readings of the open public record.

He simply remembered what was claimed yesterday versus the reality of today's claims and by comparing the two, blew holes the size of the Viet Nam War into the credibility of then President of the United States, LBJ....

The NEW Normal : barges stuck in mud on America's natural highway, the Mississippi

GOP denies this is a DROUGHT !

Caught this on CBC Radio's ever reliable AS IT HAPPENS show: a fascinating interview with a barge company owner lamenting what damage this year's drought has done to barge traffic on America's cheapest, most profitable super-highway : the immense Mississippi- Missouri-Ohio River system.


This river system is probably America's best economic advantage - or it was 

Forget trucks, planes or trains : this ole man river really totes them bales and moves them freight.

And during this summer,the 'warmist' on record,  it is hurtin' - bad......

* Tip of the hat to Mike at Australia's Watching the Deniers (cute name alert !) for maintaining his long running litany of climate change induced natural disasters under the smart title of "THE NEW NORMAL"