Duncan BC's forgotten wartime PENICILLIN pioneer, Donald MacRae

Duncan's Donald MacRae

The June 29th 1945 issue of the Canadian Army wartime newspaper, The Maple Leaf, records a Vancouver interview with a medic , Private Donald MacRae of Duncan BC , recounting his 1943 Italian experience making battlefield penicillin and saving lives.

It was just something humanitarians of all nations were required to do, in the decade and a half before Big Pharma was forced by Doctor Mom to finally start making commercial penicillin.

How KP duty helped save lives

What caught my eye in this little known story is that this particular group of penicillin-makers found the penicillium fungi grew penicillin best in the water into which potatoes had been left overnight. 

(MacRae's story rings true in all its other technical detils, right down to his group obtaining the penicillium spores from Egypt . Robert Pulvertaft's hospital-made penicillin operation in Cairo is very well documented and Pulvertaft gave his methods and his spores out freely, even to doctors from hostile neutral nations, if it would help save lives.)

Duncan honor Donald Macrae ?

Time, perhaps long overdue, for the City of  Duncan to thank Donald MacRae for this wartime life-saving.

I can add a little personal experience to the subject of Canadian Army issue potatoes, the peeling of, Sir !

 I spent a hot summer's day in a cool backroom once, doing Canadian Army KP duty, peeling potatoes and cleaning other vegetables and quite preferred it to running through the dusty sand of CFB Aldershot with a C2 light machine gun.

I was 5 foot ten and a half, 105 pounds ( with my clothes off I looked a bit like a Japanese POW) --- so naturally I always got put at the long end of a forced march arc, carrying a heavy C2 , while guys much more physically built than me got the short trip with a lighter C1 rifle.

Infantry intelligence (or lack of) -  you gotta got to love it !

I would be delighted to know if MacRae meant that the Canadian potatoes, probably from PEI and points East and shipped out in barrels, were first put in water overnight to remove remnants of Canadian dirt.

 Or was it the case that the Army's potatoes were generally peeled the night before the day of their cooking and that once peeled en masse, are quickly buried in buckets of water to prevent oxidation and discoloring until they were cooked ?

The water that peeled potatoes are held in are rich in a carbon source (starch) and are a well-known, well-used and welcome food to the fungi that make illicit beer. It would tend to retain trace amounts of minerals from the soil the potatoes were grown in.

 It would prove to be a 'complex medium'  (aka "we aren't sure what is in it") as the biologists call it and generally complex mediums did better growing penicillin than did the chemically pure "defined" growing formulas the chemists offered up.

But dirty potatoes left uncut in water overnight also leach out a little starch and other plant chemicals as well as giving lots of earth minerals. Filtered for solids, it too might be a good starting base for growing penicillin along with a bit of glucose sugar and milk sugar.

MacRae, who before the war had been a first aid man in remote logging camps, said it wasn't till March 1944 that the Canadian Army in Italy got enough commercial penicillin to cease making illicit life-saving penicillin (so it could now return to making illicit soul-saving beer instead ?)

March 1944 was the first month that then tiny soda pop supplier, Pfizer,  starting producing billions and billions of units of natural penicillin in a scaled up version of MacRae's effort  --- thanks to the advice and urgings of another Canadian penicillin pioneer , Nova Scotian born and raised Martin Henry Dawson.

Dawson was, in fact, the first person to ever inject penicillin into a patient, October 16th 1940 --- using penicillin his tiny team had grown themselves.

His team's secret ingredient ? A much loved local favourite, Jack Frost Dark (brown sugar) ....

Jack Frost Dark saved more lives ....

... than Al-Qaida will ever spend.

If you live in the Greater New York area, you don't need to be told that the Jack Frost brand of dark brown sugar, made in Yonkers, is good stuff.

Damn good stuff.

Your doctor might not agree though - so here is an argument that should appeal to their
medical 'sense of being': did they know that Jack Frost Dark led to the development of the greatest life-saver the world has ever known??!

I know, I know, I also said this about Vegamite, but both stories happen to be true.

Alexander Fleming got a lot of criticism over his use of ox heart medium to grow the first penicillin.

This abuse came from the first generation of penicillin authors -all sycophants of Howard Florey and all modernist to the core.

Ox heart medium is rich and complex and undefined - ie we don't know what all is in it or in what percentages.

As a result, chemists ( the modernist archetype ) hate it with a passion.

They prefer something like the all synthetic Czapek-Dox 'defined' medium - a bland mixture of water and salts you could just see Jeremy Bentham urging the British government to use to feed prisoners ,because it meant that they would remain alive while ensuring that they got no illict enjoyment from their food.

Unfortunately, the penicillium mold hates the stuff as much as prisoners do - it prefers the rich murk of the ox heart stew.

Fleming grew his mold juice in 4 to 5 days in ox heart stew while the chemists led by Raistrick took 15-20 days to get their mold juice on the sparse Quaker-approved diet.

(Interestingly, Fleming started his penicillium on a synthetic medium (Sabouraud's). He did know about them and used them ,despite what his hostile biographer, Ronald Hare, says.

But he found pre-digested extracts of spoiled meat made the penicillium produce faster AND was much much cheaper to buy. Engineers would approve on both counts - though chemists won't.)

Florey, being a chemist-manque, dismissed the ox heart brew and went for some Czapek-Dox synthetic purity instead. But it was so slooooow, and so he "modified" it.

In fact he modified it right back to Fleming's brew, more or less: he added brewer's yeast  (the cast-offs from brewing beer - rich, dirty, complex, undefined, cheap.)

Vegamite is basically brewer's yeast.

Florey retained the concept of his all important 'purity' (in his own mind ,at least) while he got the speed of faster production from this dirty stew.

Coghill, out in Peoria at the NRRL, was a chemist, but a chemist-out-of-water, in charge of a biologically-oriented Fermentation Station.

He devoted much time and effort to try to first purify and then synthesise penicillin - when that failed, he fell back to raving about the use of corn steep liquors to speed production times and increase penicillin output.

Corn steep is another industry cast-off, the stuff left over after all the pure starch has been removed from corn.

It is complex, undefined, dirty and cheap.

Coghill and Merck and many others spent the entire war, trying to figure out what was the one ingredient in corn steep liquor that gave the much better results they got with it.

They planned to synthesis that one ingredient and then dump the corn steep like a used condom.

Others, like the Dawson team, just took the dirty complex stuff as a 'black box' and a gift - they wanted penicillin for patients ,not penicillin for academic papers and academic acclaim.

In the end, it was dozens of things in the corn steep or the dirty sugar that the mold loved - we still use this stuff today - as 'undefined' as ever.

Chalk one up for the post modernist way of thought.

Adorno, the German philosopher working on the Columbia campus in 1941 could explain (and did explain) this Modernist preference for inefficient and expensive defined growth mediums over cheap and efficient but undefined growth mediums.

(Or for that matter, the equally odd Modernist obsession of favoring toxic but defined drugs over drugs that are undefined but perfectly non-toxic. As a patient, I know which one I would prefer to have coursing through my veins !)

In his 1944 "DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT", published at Columbia, (the seminal work that ushered in the post modernist era), he said that the Enlightenment's promise to lead us out of the darkness of ignorance was really an exaggerated fear of the unknown.

Not a sensible fear of the dangerous but an a priori fear of anything unknown, even ahead of things that are dangerous but known.

For penicillin read Dangerous= toxic.

Let us turn, finally, from Adorno to Meyer and Hobby and Chaffee and Dawson.

In 1942, they told the world of their secret food for their pilot penicillin plant: Jack Frost Dark.

Many others, Merck Inc among them, took up their idea, seeking the dirtiest, darkest, cheapest substitute they could find in their own local area --- if Jack Frost wasn't around.

The best brown sugar was natural or industrial brown sugar - sugar with lots of crude molasses's minerals and bio-organism waste products still in it.

It could be gotten directly from some sympathetic sugar factory chemist. Since so many industry chemists in the New York area were German or Jewish ( or both) in those days, Meyer wouldn't have found it hard to get a few hundred pound bags right off the boats from the West Indies.

It was dirt-cheap and because it was also dirty, it gave the best yield of penicillin .

You see 'defined' medium means we know exactly what the microbes like to eat, to make them produce what ever it is we want.

But using complex, un-defined ,industrial cast-off brews means we throw our hands up in the air and admit we really don't know Nature.

Instead we gave them everything and the kitchen sink and said "pick whatever you think suits you best".

I see the entire Penicillin development story 1940-1945 as a prime example and the most suitable metaphor of the shift from Modernity to Post Modernity.

So while I am making a little sport with Vegamite and Jack Frost Dark - I am also deadly serious .

 Both of these common domestic foodstuffs did not just give us greater penicillin supplies when they were so badly needed.

They also represented some of the first examples of the green post-modernist way of viewing Man's relationship to Nature's creatures as being co-equals rather than Master and Slave --- when we feed penicillium Jack Frost or Vegamite, we say " maybe you are smarter than us" .

Pass the brown sugar won't you ?