I am still not fully recovered from the disaster of my first public talk on wartime penicillin before Dalhousie University's Medical History Society.
I was given a very generous amount of time by the Society's Jock Murray and Allan Marble to state my case but it didn't help : my choice for a title slide in my powerpoint presentation simply covered far too big a subject and left me no 'on the spot' wiggle room.
" Wartime Penicillin : from secret 'war weapon' to widely publicized 'beacon of hope' " is not a topic line easy to compress.
(Though last night's blog entry on the Janus Month of March 1943 would have been a good attempt at compression.)
Within a minute or two into the talk, I felt like crawling into a hole and disappearing forever --- I could see by the faces of the audience that I was giving far too much unknown information far too quickly.
Any two or three of my powerpoint slides, from the forty two I had actually come with, could have formed the basis of an interesting talk and a lively amount of discussion afterwards.
Eight and a half years of research has finally made me more or less comfortable with the vast array of sound-alike organizations involved in wartime penicillin, and their activities are just as important as the individual stories of individuals like Fleming, Florey and Dawson.
But trying to establish what the OSRD and OPRD were in the first place, even before trying to show how much at odds these two similar sounding government agencies really were on penicillin is a month's work - not a small part of a 40 minute talk.
It is entirely my fault - because the night before the lecture I had noticed that even a well known expert on the history of wartime penicillin (name omitted !) still managed to badly confuse the two in an major article in a digitalized book I found on the internet.
And when a printed work is digitalized and put on the internet, an error is forever and eternity --- and visible to all, worldwide.
That is why my penicillin work will remain electronically fluid on this blog and in website e-books.
My errors of fact and interpretation (and I expect and even hope to make many) will be instantly correctable as new information comes to light or savvy readers spot errors and typos.)
And another thing about individuals and institutions when Cinderella unexpectedly turns into the Queen of the Ball.
After passing the buck for years, they now suddenly tack hard right and start clawing each other to take all the credit .
Sorting who actually did what when, not what they claimed ,after the war ,in expensive official histories, that they did, is itself a work of many lifetimes...
Showing posts with label oprd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oprd. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
America LOSES WWII : because of quarrels between government agencies, such as over Penicillin
The above headline sounds bizarre to our ears, because we are used to only hearing it being used as the standard explanation given as to why Japan and Germany lost the (largely technical and scientific) world war against the Allies.
After all, both of these nations had talented and committed cadres of scientists and engineers but endless feuding between various sub sections of the government seriously diluted the impact they might have had on the war, if only they had worked together.
In Japan the Army and Navy Departments frequently seemed more at war with each other, than with America.
In the case of Germany, each of the senior figures in the Nazi hierarchy commanded a lot of semi-independent resources and each Nazi war lord seemed to spend as much time trying to grow at the expense of their political bureaucratic rivals, as in uniting against the common enemy.
But Vannevar Bush chooses, in the foreword to his famous "ENDLESS FRONTIER", not to see any serious conflicts in the American and Allied scientific and technical effort.
And we believe him - the historians (grateful for the steady diet of research grants to peacetime academics that he is credited with having created) above all .
And after all his side won ----- shouldn't that alone silence all potential criticism ?
Still, in this particular foreword, he chooses to blow his particular agency's horn very very carefully indeed, when it comes to penicillin.
So for once, it is not his own OSRD that he credits with seeing that "our grievously wounded men" got penicillin in time : he says it was "the government" that did the bang up job of co-ordinating the research and development that speeded penicillin up to the front.
For a very conservative Republican ,like Bush, to be praising "the government" is truly a startling sight. He more usually carefully distinguishes agencies like his own highly conservative OSRD from the left wing agencies filled with New Dealers, such as the WPB's own OPRD.
But what could he do ?
For his own right wing OSRD agency chose to take the totally wrong turn on the way to moving penicillin to the D-Day beaches and delivered not one tiny sliver of its vaunted synthetic penicillin to our troops or anyone else : not on June 6th 1944 and in fact, not ever.
It was left to the left wingers in the OPRD to get literally tons of penicillin to the Allied side, between the time they first took up the cause in September 1943 and the end of the war.
They did this not merely by the unimportant but useful work they did on the production side - for by statute this was their job, just as the OSRD's job was not production but research - but by also doing the OSRD's job , in an area of research that the OSRD choose to seriously neglect.
That was the OSRD-neglected research in studying ways to up the very front end of the penicillin process : upping the initial biological yield of penicillin.
Biology : horrors ! Just saying that word in front of Bush and the OSRD was like waving a garlic-infused cross at a vampire.
So we must credit the left wing OPRD with starting the research that resulted in that biological yield ( ie , yield before extraction) now being 2500 times as productive as it was in 1943 when the OSRD threw up its hands at the problem.
Just as the quarrelling Japanese Army and Navy did on radar, the two warring branches of Bush's "the government" , the OSRD and OPRD , came to a fork in the road on penicillin and instead of uniting to find a way to use the least resources to solve the problem, they disagreed and pursued independent courses.
Bush's Orwellian use of words like "the government" or "the nation" or "the Allies" ,to explain who won the war , allows him to dissolve any internal conflicts those huge collectivities might have encountered in very slowly moving their overwhelming larger populations into defeating much smaller and very resource-strapped enemies.
So historians mustn't simply accept Bush's Orwellian arguments on blind faith but instead carefully ask , if the nation or government "did" this or that , did that mean that all the nation/government do this or that or did just parts of it do while other parts disagreed, stood around doing nothing or even held things up ?
After all, on the evidence of their own internal memos, the OSRD not merely failed to produce the penicillin that saved our "grievously wounded", they also had no intention of wasting penicillin on anyone who couldn't aid the war effort on recovery, if they didn't have to.
That meant no wasting penicillin, if they had to choose, on those so severely wounded that if they did make a recovery, it would be to discharge and a permanent disability pension.
And it meant, that if they had to chose between saving a boy dying of endocarditis and instantly curing a boy GI of VD so he could quickly return (to perhaps die) on the Italian frontlines, they'd won't help the endocarditis case, because his disease-weakened heart would not let him do much for the war effort, even if he did recover.
So, if the only thing I ever do in my life is to destroy the OSRD's reputation for furthering penicillin when what they actually did was hold it up and then conspire to use it for truly wicked eugenic ends, I will consider my life well lived....
After all, both of these nations had talented and committed cadres of scientists and engineers but endless feuding between various sub sections of the government seriously diluted the impact they might have had on the war, if only they had worked together.
In Japan the Army and Navy Departments frequently seemed more at war with each other, than with America.
In the case of Germany, each of the senior figures in the Nazi hierarchy commanded a lot of semi-independent resources and each Nazi war lord seemed to spend as much time trying to grow at the expense of their political bureaucratic rivals, as in uniting against the common enemy.
But Vannevar Bush chooses, in the foreword to his famous "ENDLESS FRONTIER", not to see any serious conflicts in the American and Allied scientific and technical effort.
And we believe him - the historians (grateful for the steady diet of research grants to peacetime academics that he is credited with having created) above all .
And after all his side won ----- shouldn't that alone silence all potential criticism ?
Still, in this particular foreword, he chooses to blow his particular agency's horn very very carefully indeed, when it comes to penicillin.
So for once, it is not his own OSRD that he credits with seeing that "our grievously wounded men" got penicillin in time : he says it was "the government" that did the bang up job of co-ordinating the research and development that speeded penicillin up to the front.
For a very conservative Republican ,like Bush, to be praising "the government" is truly a startling sight. He more usually carefully distinguishes agencies like his own highly conservative OSRD from the left wing agencies filled with New Dealers, such as the WPB's own OPRD.
But what could he do ?
For his own right wing OSRD agency chose to take the totally wrong turn on the way to moving penicillin to the D-Day beaches and delivered not one tiny sliver of its vaunted synthetic penicillin to our troops or anyone else : not on June 6th 1944 and in fact, not ever.
It was left to the left wingers in the OPRD to get literally tons of penicillin to the Allied side, between the time they first took up the cause in September 1943 and the end of the war.
They did this not merely by the unimportant but useful work they did on the production side - for by statute this was their job, just as the OSRD's job was not production but research - but by also doing the OSRD's job , in an area of research that the OSRD choose to seriously neglect.
That was the OSRD-neglected research in studying ways to up the very front end of the penicillin process : upping the initial biological yield of penicillin.
Biology : horrors ! Just saying that word in front of Bush and the OSRD was like waving a garlic-infused cross at a vampire.
So we must credit the left wing OPRD with starting the research that resulted in that biological yield ( ie , yield before extraction) now being 2500 times as productive as it was in 1943 when the OSRD threw up its hands at the problem.
Just as the quarrelling Japanese Army and Navy did on radar, the two warring branches of Bush's "the government" , the OSRD and OPRD , came to a fork in the road on penicillin and instead of uniting to find a way to use the least resources to solve the problem, they disagreed and pursued independent courses.
Bush's Orwellian use of words like "the government" or "the nation" or "the Allies" ,to explain who won the war , allows him to dissolve any internal conflicts those huge collectivities might have encountered in very slowly moving their overwhelming larger populations into defeating much smaller and very resource-strapped enemies.
So historians mustn't simply accept Bush's Orwellian arguments on blind faith but instead carefully ask , if the nation or government "did" this or that , did that mean that all the nation/government do this or that or did just parts of it do while other parts disagreed, stood around doing nothing or even held things up ?
After all, on the evidence of their own internal memos, the OSRD not merely failed to produce the penicillin that saved our "grievously wounded", they also had no intention of wasting penicillin on anyone who couldn't aid the war effort on recovery, if they didn't have to.
That meant no wasting penicillin, if they had to choose, on those so severely wounded that if they did make a recovery, it would be to discharge and a permanent disability pension.
And it meant, that if they had to chose between saving a boy dying of endocarditis and instantly curing a boy GI of VD so he could quickly return (to perhaps die) on the Italian frontlines, they'd won't help the endocarditis case, because his disease-weakened heart would not let him do much for the war effort, even if he did recover.
So, if the only thing I ever do in my life is to destroy the OSRD's reputation for furthering penicillin when what they actually did was hold it up and then conspire to use it for truly wicked eugenic ends, I will consider my life well lived....
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
James Baxter's Pulitzer Prize winning nonsense about wartime penicillin
As part of OSRD's campaign to spin its considerable successes and many failures, William College president and historian James Phinney Baxter III was hired in mid war (1943) to assemble a bewitching mixture of hitherto-secret facts and sheer blarney, called "Scientists Against Time".
It sure fooled the 1947 Pulitzer Committee, but it shouldn't continue to fool us.
In mid 1943, reports of the consistent creation of crystal pure penicillin began to came in from various laboratories - the final necessary difficult perquisite to beginning the 'easy' chemical synthesis of penicillin.
In what appeared to be a very astute move (at the time!), the OSRD moved to hand off the Congressional blame for the wasting tens of millions of 1940s taxpayers dollars on a failed expansion of biological penicillin production to an inferior Washington bureaucratical competitor (the War Production Board's OPRD).
The OSRD wanted to focus on garnering in all the certain glory coming to the Washington agency that was seen as funding and running the program that led to the synthesis of cheap and abundant artificial penicillin.
But the OSRD lost its gamble.
Instead it was the lowly OPRD that won, in a highly dramatic and timely fashion just in time for D-Day, while high-and-mighty OSRD had to eat millions of taxpayers' dollars spent generating not one nickel of therapeutic synthetic penicillin.
Baxter's job, in the chapter devoted to the OSRD's penicillin efforts, was to spin these awkward facts otherwise.
He was helped by the failure of the underfunded OPRD not to have the money needed to pay for its own tame house historian.
Baxter's job was to convert the biological success of the latecomers OPRD into being just a minor part of the final success of the long time efforts of OSRD-funded chemists to "purify" penicillin.
He sought to tie together the "chemical" ( his words - page 342 of his book) success of in natural penicillin production) as somehow coming out of the 16 years wasted on the "chemical" synthesis of the antibiotic.
The chemical "Purification" of the "crude" mixture of biological penicillin and its biological impurities was to provide that intellectual bridge.
But in fact, the body could care less about purification - it does worry about toxicity, but regards neutral fillers and water as largely irrelevant.
Quite rightly, it only regards the absolute amounts of biological activity (measured in "Units") of soluble penicillin as being important to cure an infection.
It cares not at all about their original relative degree of dryness (concentration), the amount of neutral bulk filler that comes bundled with them, or the amount of water that penicillin comes dissolved in.
After all, the human body is between 50% to 75% water and it quickly dilutes all drugs to incredibly small concentrations.
Now just to remind readers, one gram of water (mass) is one cc (cm3) of water (cubic area) is one ml (volume) --- and a gram of penicillium juice holding 3% of dissolved solids isn't going to fundamentally change this formula much.
James Duhig got 400 to 800 units of biological activity from each one litre flask (containing 200 grams of penicillin liquid) that he grew in his Brisbane lab in 1943-1944, using the exact same strain of penicillium and the exact same low level of technology that Alexander Fleming had in 1928.
That is he got 2 to 4 units per ml/cc/ gm of penicillium medium, the exact same as Fleming got way back in the Fall of 1928.
Basically Duhig and Fleming got about one microgram of active penicillin per gram of water : one part per million, one ppm.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that is not much of a ratio of useful to useless !
But even when Fleming diluted that 1 ppm in a lot more sterile water - down to the level of one part per billion -, a tiny drop of extremely diluted stuff could still kill deadly bacteria.
But Duhig didn't dilute his stuff any further. Instead he chilled his penicillin liquid, only running it through a filter to remove solid solids.
It still contained its 3% of soluble solids "impurities", along with its 97% pure water. It was still as 'crude' as the day it was born.
Then Dr Duhig injected that liquid straight into a woman's blood stream in 300 to 600 gram amounts (aka 300 to 600 ml/cc of solution). (A thousand or two units of biological activity per injection.)
And incredibly (considering that today we would use millions not thousands of units per injection) Duhig's crude penicillin pulled a dying woman almost literally out of her grave.
He finally did in remote Queensland Australia in 1943 what Alexander Fleming in 1928 London - and every single doctor in the world after him - criminally failed to do : use the original penicillin , entirely untouched by the hands of the chemists, to save lives.
But it is another Australian-born doctor, Howard Florey (originally from Adelaide) now operating out of Oxford University, who scientists and historians (including our Dr Baxter) give all the credit for making Fleming's crude "novelty-only" penicillin into a refined/purified life saver, in a famous experiment in May 1940.
But does he - and this famous "mouse" experiment - deserve that credit?
By Florey's own words, he doesn't think so.
Its all there in Florey's second penicillin article, "Further Observations on Penicillin" ,LANCET, August 1941.
(This incredibly detailed article should have been sufficient, in and of itself, for any competent hospital or multinational drug company anywhere in the world of WWII to make life saving penicillin --- provided they could get their hands on Fleming's strain of penicillium, or one like it.)
In this article, Florey does indicate that his March 1941 human therapeutic penicillin has 40 units per mg of powder (page 178).
But on the next page (page 179) he clearly indicates that the powder used in the May 1940 mouse experiment probably had less than 1/10 the biological activity of the current human therapeutic penicillin.
So that powder had 2 to 4 units per mg , compared to the 2 to 4 units per gram of original crude fluid.
That is , we have gone from having penicillin consisting of about one part per million of liquid to consisting one part per thousand of dry powder.
Since all the water is gone, what is in the other 999 parts of that milligram ? Yep, its the same 3% of soluble biological impurities that were in the original crude watery mixture of Fleming.
Florey has not purified his penicillin at all, merely concentrated it (that is merely removed its water ; we make orange or milk powder from their watery originals in the same way, by evaporation).
My essential point is that Fleming's 1928 mixture of natural penicillin and biological impurities was safe to inject, with or without its sterile water being removed.
(And remember, Florey had to put water back into his powder to get it into his patients ; if it was to go in as a slow IV drip, it could be as diluted as it was in the original brew, before all that expensive concentrating.)
That concentration process took not just an awful lot of human energy to perform ; it also destroyed two thirds of the available penicillin.
Concentrated penicillin didn't save more patients ; criminally it actually saved two thirds less.
By late 1942 - early 1943, biological improvements in growing penicillin now gave us raw penicillin brew that gave 40 units per cc of liquid.
The Russians, logically enough, felt there was no need to waste human energy and expensive scarce equipment merely to destroy two thirds of this life-saving liquid, just so they could falsely claim to "purify" it, aka 'concentrate' it.
The other Allies might well have followed their example and then we would have had no mid-war penicillin famine.
Life saving did not require purified penicillin - in fact, the wartime purification of penicillin tended to reduce the amount of penicillin of penicillin available for the dying in figures varying from two thirds to infinity.
Yes infinity : in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was - briefly - the world's largest penicillin producer.
Incredibly, in the middle of a bloody war, none of that penicillin went to save human lives. It all went to the Glaxo chemists to destroy, trying to get it to go into crystal so they could synthesis it, analogue it and profitably patent it.
Purification, inessential to life-saving, was crucial to the efforts to synthesis penicillin.
Enough penicillin to save millions would have come years earlier if universities and drug companies had released their chemists to the Draft Boards and hired mycologists instead.
But Baxter doesn't play it that way.
Florey had merely evaporated Fleming's penicillin and had thus obtained penicillin that was relatively 1000 times stronger than Fleming.
However, in absolute terms of therapeutic penicillin per flask of penicillin brew, it was actually three times less strong (and remember our bodies and their germs only care about absolute amounts, not relative amounts.)
But Baxter (who wasn't at the experiment) deliberately ignores Florey's own words (and Florey was at the experiment) to confidently and falsely claim that the mouse experiment penicillin was 3% pure.
Actually it was .3% pure , as Florey himself admitted in 1941,the same as Fleming's 1928 crude mixture.
Fleming deserves a lot of credit for making penicillin available - but also a lot of blame as well, when he failed to confirm his failed micro experiment on the possible systemic use of his crude penicillin - by trying it again on a variety of animals and humans.
Florey, similarly, deserved much credit for pushing penicillin to the front of scientific attention - but also a lot of blame for his obsessive need to put make purified crystal penicillin for chemical synthesis.
Worse, he mis-used his scientific authority to actively brow-beated many other decent doctors into stopping their production of "good enough" penicillin, merely to try to save lives in the middle of a savage war.
If they saved lives with crude penicillin, he saw his sole claim to scientific fame disappearing.
Florey readily admitted that he wasn't the first to discover penicillin (Fleming) and tried not to admit that he was not the first to put it into a patient (Dawson) ,but he wanted very much to claim that he was the first to purify it, so it could be injected into humans.
Duhig would dismiss that claim.
As would Dawson, who was at great pains (in his May 1941 article on penicillin) to publicly emphasize that his first human injections were taken from crude, concentrated "not purified, yet non-toxic" penicillin.
And so should have Dr Baxter......
It sure fooled the 1947 Pulitzer Committee, but it shouldn't continue to fool us.
In mid 1943, reports of the consistent creation of crystal pure penicillin began to came in from various laboratories - the final necessary difficult perquisite to beginning the 'easy' chemical synthesis of penicillin.
In what appeared to be a very astute move (at the time!), the OSRD moved to hand off the Congressional blame for the wasting tens of millions of 1940s taxpayers dollars on a failed expansion of biological penicillin production to an inferior Washington bureaucratical competitor (the War Production Board's OPRD).
The OSRD wanted to focus on garnering in all the certain glory coming to the Washington agency that was seen as funding and running the program that led to the synthesis of cheap and abundant artificial penicillin.
But the OSRD lost its gamble.
Instead it was the lowly OPRD that won, in a highly dramatic and timely fashion just in time for D-Day, while high-and-mighty OSRD had to eat millions of taxpayers' dollars spent generating not one nickel of therapeutic synthetic penicillin.
Baxter's job, in the chapter devoted to the OSRD's penicillin efforts, was to spin these awkward facts otherwise.
He was helped by the failure of the underfunded OPRD not to have the money needed to pay for its own tame house historian.
Baxter's job was to convert the biological success of the latecomers OPRD into being just a minor part of the final success of the long time efforts of OSRD-funded chemists to "purify" penicillin.
He sought to tie together the "chemical" ( his words - page 342 of his book) success of in natural penicillin production) as somehow coming out of the 16 years wasted on the "chemical" synthesis of the antibiotic.
The chemical "Purification" of the "crude" mixture of biological penicillin and its biological impurities was to provide that intellectual bridge.
But in fact, the body could care less about purification - it does worry about toxicity, but regards neutral fillers and water as largely irrelevant.
Quite rightly, it only regards the absolute amounts of biological activity (measured in "Units") of soluble penicillin as being important to cure an infection.
It cares not at all about their original relative degree of dryness (concentration), the amount of neutral bulk filler that comes bundled with them, or the amount of water that penicillin comes dissolved in.
After all, the human body is between 50% to 75% water and it quickly dilutes all drugs to incredibly small concentrations.
Now just to remind readers, one gram of water (mass) is one cc (cm3) of water (cubic area) is one ml (volume) --- and a gram of penicillium juice holding 3% of dissolved solids isn't going to fundamentally change this formula much.
James Duhig got 400 to 800 units of biological activity from each one litre flask (containing 200 grams of penicillin liquid) that he grew in his Brisbane lab in 1943-1944, using the exact same strain of penicillium and the exact same low level of technology that Alexander Fleming had in 1928.
That is he got 2 to 4 units per ml/cc/ gm of penicillium medium, the exact same as Fleming got way back in the Fall of 1928.
Basically Duhig and Fleming got about one microgram of active penicillin per gram of water : one part per million, one ppm.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that is not much of a ratio of useful to useless !
But even when Fleming diluted that 1 ppm in a lot more sterile water - down to the level of one part per billion -, a tiny drop of extremely diluted stuff could still kill deadly bacteria.
But Duhig didn't dilute his stuff any further. Instead he chilled his penicillin liquid, only running it through a filter to remove solid solids.
It still contained its 3% of soluble solids "impurities", along with its 97% pure water. It was still as 'crude' as the day it was born.
Then Dr Duhig injected that liquid straight into a woman's blood stream in 300 to 600 gram amounts (aka 300 to 600 ml/cc of solution). (A thousand or two units of biological activity per injection.)
And incredibly (considering that today we would use millions not thousands of units per injection) Duhig's crude penicillin pulled a dying woman almost literally out of her grave.
He finally did in remote Queensland Australia in 1943 what Alexander Fleming in 1928 London - and every single doctor in the world after him - criminally failed to do : use the original penicillin , entirely untouched by the hands of the chemists, to save lives.
But it is another Australian-born doctor, Howard Florey (originally from Adelaide) now operating out of Oxford University, who scientists and historians (including our Dr Baxter) give all the credit for making Fleming's crude "novelty-only" penicillin into a refined/purified life saver, in a famous experiment in May 1940.
But does he - and this famous "mouse" experiment - deserve that credit?
By Florey's own words, he doesn't think so.
And incredibly, Baxter had Florey's actual words in front of him, when he wrote his own account just after the war's end.
Its all there in Florey's second penicillin article, "Further Observations on Penicillin" ,LANCET, August 1941.
(This incredibly detailed article should have been sufficient, in and of itself, for any competent hospital or multinational drug company anywhere in the world of WWII to make life saving penicillin --- provided they could get their hands on Fleming's strain of penicillium, or one like it.)
In this article, Florey does indicate that his March 1941 human therapeutic penicillin has 40 units per mg of powder (page 178).
But on the next page (page 179) he clearly indicates that the powder used in the May 1940 mouse experiment probably had less than 1/10 the biological activity of the current human therapeutic penicillin.
So that powder had 2 to 4 units per mg , compared to the 2 to 4 units per gram of original crude fluid.
That is , we have gone from having penicillin consisting of about one part per million of liquid to consisting one part per thousand of dry powder.
Since all the water is gone, what is in the other 999 parts of that milligram ? Yep, its the same 3% of soluble biological impurities that were in the original crude watery mixture of Fleming.
Florey has not purified his penicillin at all, merely concentrated it (that is merely removed its water ; we make orange or milk powder from their watery originals in the same way, by evaporation).
My essential point is that Fleming's 1928 mixture of natural penicillin and biological impurities was safe to inject, with or without its sterile water being removed.
(And remember, Florey had to put water back into his powder to get it into his patients ; if it was to go in as a slow IV drip, it could be as diluted as it was in the original brew, before all that expensive concentrating.)
That concentration process took not just an awful lot of human energy to perform ; it also destroyed two thirds of the available penicillin.
Concentrated penicillin didn't save more patients ; criminally it actually saved two thirds less.
By late 1942 - early 1943, biological improvements in growing penicillin now gave us raw penicillin brew that gave 40 units per cc of liquid.
The Russians, logically enough, felt there was no need to waste human energy and expensive scarce equipment merely to destroy two thirds of this life-saving liquid, just so they could falsely claim to "purify" it, aka 'concentrate' it.
The other Allies might well have followed their example and then we would have had no mid-war penicillin famine.
Life saving did not require purified penicillin - in fact, the wartime purification of penicillin tended to reduce the amount of penicillin of penicillin available for the dying in figures varying from two thirds to infinity.
Yes infinity : in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was - briefly - the world's largest penicillin producer.
Incredibly, in the middle of a bloody war, none of that penicillin went to save human lives. It all went to the Glaxo chemists to destroy, trying to get it to go into crystal so they could synthesis it, analogue it and profitably patent it.
Purification, inessential to life-saving, was crucial to the efforts to synthesis penicillin.
Enough penicillin to save millions would have come years earlier if universities and drug companies had released their chemists to the Draft Boards and hired mycologists instead.
But Baxter doesn't play it that way.
Florey had merely evaporated Fleming's penicillin and had thus obtained penicillin that was relatively 1000 times stronger than Fleming.
However, in absolute terms of therapeutic penicillin per flask of penicillin brew, it was actually three times less strong (and remember our bodies and their germs only care about absolute amounts, not relative amounts.)
But Baxter (who wasn't at the experiment) deliberately ignores Florey's own words (and Florey was at the experiment) to confidently and falsely claim that the mouse experiment penicillin was 3% pure.
Actually it was .3% pure , as Florey himself admitted in 1941,the same as Fleming's 1928 crude mixture.
Fleming deserves a lot of credit for making penicillin available - but also a lot of blame as well, when he failed to confirm his failed micro experiment on the possible systemic use of his crude penicillin - by trying it again on a variety of animals and humans.
Florey, similarly, deserved much credit for pushing penicillin to the front of scientific attention - but also a lot of blame for his obsessive need to put make purified crystal penicillin for chemical synthesis.
Worse, he mis-used his scientific authority to actively brow-beated many other decent doctors into stopping their production of "good enough" penicillin, merely to try to save lives in the middle of a savage war.
If they saved lives with crude penicillin, he saw his sole claim to scientific fame disappearing.
Florey readily admitted that he wasn't the first to discover penicillin (Fleming) and tried not to admit that he was not the first to put it into a patient (Dawson) ,but he wanted very much to claim that he was the first to purify it, so it could be injected into humans.
Duhig would dismiss that claim.
As would Dawson, who was at great pains (in his May 1941 article on penicillin) to publicly emphasize that his first human injections were taken from crude, concentrated "not purified, yet non-toxic" penicillin.
And so should have Dr Baxter......
Friday, January 4, 2013
Penicillin : a bunch of biologists who put all their faith in chemistry vs two chemists who put all their faith in biology
In the Alice Through the Looking Glass world of wartime penicillin it should hardly be surprising that about the only strong supporters of natural ,biological, penicillin in the upper echelons of the overall enterprise were two professional chemists : Larry Elder of the American Office for Production Research and Development (the OPRD) and Harry Jephcott of the British drug company, Glaxo.
Or that the group most strongly bewitched by the thought of synthetic penicillin were a bunch of medical doctors with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming leading the charge (with the OSRD and MRC close behind): the sort of scientists who might have been thought would normally occupy a place at the biological end of hard science.....
Or that the group most strongly bewitched by the thought of synthetic penicillin were a bunch of medical doctors with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming leading the charge (with the OSRD and MRC close behind): the sort of scientists who might have been thought would normally occupy a place at the biological end of hard science.....
OPRD and Dawson vs OSRD and Florey : social or war penicillin ?
If America was to win the war for the Allies by being becoming a ponderous and relentlessly-slow grinding mill of the gods ( a veritable "Arsenal of Democracy" as President Roosevelt proclaimed) than sometimes Vannevar Bush's OSRD (Office of Scientific Research and Development) worked hard against that objective, never more so than with Penicillin (and DDT).
In Total War, attrition (greater weight of arms and men) rather than generalship (the better use of the elements of secrecy and surprise) is felt to be - in the long run - the truly dominant factor.
The OSRD obviously disagreed, as did Hitler's High Command and the Japanese War Cabinet.
These three agreed amongst themselves that it didn't really matter that both sides shared the same 105mm howitzer and that so the side with the best rate of production of that artillery piece and its ammunition would win in the long run.
That was so old-school, so World War One style thinking.
No, the OSRD would win a quick clean war, by speed and secrecy of new weapon invention and by taking the offensive role at every turn in the war of new weapon invention : as the British would say, WWII was to be a war between sciences : a Boffin's war, not a foot soldier's war like WWI.
But you could also see this as classic "chicken hawk" style thinking : stoutly favouring bold offensive operations, albeit from the cosy safety of an comfy armchair.
Because seemingly the only requirement for rising in the OSRD hierarchy was that you had successfully avoided combat when you were young and fit enough to do so, but now that you were now old and fat and balding and safely beyond the age of conscription your bellicosity had returned full on.
The German, Japanese and British military agreed with the OSRD - preferring to invent more truly new and superior - secret- weapons even when they knew this meant that fewer units of existing conventional weapons would be produced.
(By contrast, the Russians tended to want to produce greater numbers of a far fewer and far less technically sophisticated range of weapons - working in some minor incremental improvements over long, long production runs.)
So if the OSRD "took up" the development of Penicillin and DDT it would come with some heavy and hidden costs : for these two would now be developed strictly be for use as secret and new "instruments of war" (weapons).
Penicillin being "captured" by the OSRD in the summer of 1941 when Howard Florey took it to his old pal ( OSRD heavyweight Dr A N Richards) wasn't as bad as being captured by the Gestapo , but it was a close run thing.
By contrast, the War Production Board (WPB) and its OPRD (Office of Production Research and Development) took a more sophisticated view of war work in a Total War situation : understanding completely that if civilians don't eat or are home sick, both old-fashioned howitzers and new-fashioned atomic bombs don't get built.
So if the epidemic of lung infections in America in the winter of 1944 among war workers had become a pandemic and shell production had been cut in half, just when the Battle of the Bulge needed more 105 mmm shells not less, the OPRD would have been ready, with massive amounts of civilian penicillin for ailing war plant workers.
But the OSRD would be left touting its claim that fewer of our wounded men in the Ardennes were languishing in hospital beds than in the case of the Germans, thanks to our Allied frontline military hospitals having most of the world's scarce supply of natural penicillin.
Artificially scarce , by government fiat, only because the OSRD and its British counterpart were STILL working on trying to make top secret synthetic penicillin and didn't want to warn the Germans of penicillin's potential by letting civilian doctors use it and then talk up miracle cures.
Dawson's unexpected SBE cures with stolen government penicillin leading to dying Baby Patricia Malone's widely publicized 'stealing' of penicillin beyond the OSRD's direct jurisdiction, brought the public and the OPRD into the picture and finally got us wartime penicillin en masse : for frontline Ardennes soldier and home front civilian alike .....
In Total War, attrition (greater weight of arms and men) rather than generalship (the better use of the elements of secrecy and surprise) is felt to be - in the long run - the truly dominant factor.
The OSRD obviously disagreed, as did Hitler's High Command and the Japanese War Cabinet.
These three agreed amongst themselves that it didn't really matter that both sides shared the same 105mm howitzer and that so the side with the best rate of production of that artillery piece and its ammunition would win in the long run.
That was so old-school, so World War One style thinking.
No, the OSRD would win a quick clean war, by speed and secrecy of new weapon invention and by taking the offensive role at every turn in the war of new weapon invention : as the British would say, WWII was to be a war between sciences : a Boffin's war, not a foot soldier's war like WWI.
But you could also see this as classic "chicken hawk" style thinking : stoutly favouring bold offensive operations, albeit from the cosy safety of an comfy armchair.
Because seemingly the only requirement for rising in the OSRD hierarchy was that you had successfully avoided combat when you were young and fit enough to do so, but now that you were now old and fat and balding and safely beyond the age of conscription your bellicosity had returned full on.
The German, Japanese and British military agreed with the OSRD - preferring to invent more truly new and superior - secret- weapons even when they knew this meant that fewer units of existing conventional weapons would be produced.
(By contrast, the Russians tended to want to produce greater numbers of a far fewer and far less technically sophisticated range of weapons - working in some minor incremental improvements over long, long production runs.)
So if the OSRD "took up" the development of Penicillin and DDT it would come with some heavy and hidden costs : for these two would now be developed strictly be for use as secret and new "instruments of war" (weapons).
How we "almost lost penicillin" : it got captured by the OSRD
Penicillin being "captured" by the OSRD in the summer of 1941 when Howard Florey took it to his old pal ( OSRD heavyweight Dr A N Richards) wasn't as bad as being captured by the Gestapo , but it was a close run thing.
By contrast, the War Production Board (WPB) and its OPRD (Office of Production Research and Development) took a more sophisticated view of war work in a Total War situation : understanding completely that if civilians don't eat or are home sick, both old-fashioned howitzers and new-fashioned atomic bombs don't get built.
So if the epidemic of lung infections in America in the winter of 1944 among war workers had become a pandemic and shell production had been cut in half, just when the Battle of the Bulge needed more 105 mmm shells not less, the OPRD would have been ready, with massive amounts of civilian penicillin for ailing war plant workers.
But the OSRD would be left touting its claim that fewer of our wounded men in the Ardennes were languishing in hospital beds than in the case of the Germans, thanks to our Allied frontline military hospitals having most of the world's scarce supply of natural penicillin.
Artificially scarce , by government fiat, only because the OSRD and its British counterpart were STILL working on trying to make top secret synthetic penicillin and didn't want to warn the Germans of penicillin's potential by letting civilian doctors use it and then talk up miracle cures.
Dawson's unexpected SBE cures with stolen government penicillin leading to dying Baby Patricia Malone's widely publicized 'stealing' of penicillin beyond the OSRD's direct jurisdiction, brought the public and the OPRD into the picture and finally got us wartime penicillin en masse : for frontline Ardennes soldier and home front civilian alike .....
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