Despite Eric Lax, Howard Florey is still "Box Office Poison" to women readers

And as every book editor well knows , most readers of narrative fiction/non-fiction  are women.

But in the Lax take on the wartime penicillin saga, the hero offered up is a man who leaves his deaf middle class wife to ride around on her bike in the rain collecting urine from penicillin patients while he 'has it off' with his aristocratic mistress in the luxurious bath and bedroom suite he had at his office in (never-Blitzed) Oxford England .

And this at a time when millions of Britons in the rest of the UK were being bombed out their homes by the Blitz and (barely) living in makeshift shelters.

Charming, really charming !

Just of the sort of hero women readers want to cuddle up to - Not.

Wartime penicillin : patient-oriented or patent-oriented ?

MH Dawson

Martin Henry Dawson was Systemic Penicillin's earliest and biggest true believer. He ardently and publicly advocated producing 'second rate' penicillin for 'second rate' patients.

He didn't want to wait till systemic penicillin had been perfected, purified, synthesized, analyzed, patented, censored and marketed. Dr Dawson didn't want to wait till the war was long over before lives - on the battlefield and off - could start being saved. His only invention was moral : giving up his own life to fight for  patient-oriented, humanitarian, wartime penicillin.


He wanted penicillin , as it was at it point of development in September 1940, to go work right now, 24/7/365 saving patients.

He wanted penicillin's profit levels to be low enough so as to be cheap enough for all to afford and he wanted "second rate" penicillin to be abundant enough so that everyone, everywhere , from 1A soldier to 4F civilian, could have it.

To put it in terms from American organized medicine's internal political battle of the 1930s and early 1940s, Dawson promoted Social penicillin over War penicillin : humanitarian penicillin over penicillin as a weapon of war.

There has been much rubbish about penicillin patents written by historians , when really all there is to say is in that old saying " all roads lead to Rome" .

Just as there are many, many roads to Rome (but only one Rome), there are many alternative ways to grow, purify, test and apply natural penicillin - probably even alternatives ways to synthesize natural penicillin economically (when - and if - Man does that as well as Mold,  we will let you know.)

Almost anybody involved in the long drawn out saga of wartime penicillin who wanted to, could have had a patent on something or other.

Not particularly unique patents though --  hence not particularly valuable patents.

The big, unique, truly valuable patent - the 'Rome' patent - evaded its key searchers : Oxford University, Merck Pharmaceuticals and the American OSRD.

You couldn't patent natural penicillin, as it was in the Public Domain because the pencilliums' patent on it had run out hundreds of millions of years earlier.

So the scam was to create a 99.9% similar but ever so slightly different synthetic 'analog' ,(a so called "me too" drug) that would hopefully lead to penicillin being made much cheaper and much easier made than Man-Harnessing-Microbes could do.

The unconscious assumption, as we see now with 75 years of 20/20 hindsight, is that Man could inevitably make things cheaper in big chemical factories, than Nature could do it in its tiny biological factories.

But I digress.

It was safe to assume that sympathetic 1940s era patent examiners and judges would find this "me too" analog a truly new and patentable marvel, Man's wondrous powers for all to behold.

Then all who wanted the cheapest, easiest, penicillin would have to pay your steep licensing fees because you had a truly unique invention.

Actually I don't think the parties involved were only looking at short term patent profits but rather on much bigger, long term, "moral capital" gains for their firm, institution or university.

Lilly pharmaceuticals set them an example with insulin.

Lilly didn't hold the key original patent as the University of Toronto and Connaught Labs held that, but all the elites in the Medical and Big Pharma worlds knew the key work was actually done by Lilly and that Lilly seemed to consistently produce the best, safest insulin.

This profitable 'lead' in insulin research Lilly still holds, more 90 years later.

By force of myths and lies ( including doctoring photos in the Stalinist manner) , Oxford University and the entire Thames Valley is regarded as a biological Silicon Valley.

It has become a extremely wealthy and important part of the British economy, despite the fact that during World War Two, Oxford actually bet the farm on synthetic chemical, not biological,  penicillin and had also earlier ignored the pioneering work done in Britain on recombinant DNA !

But the artful myth that Oxford has weaved by focusing on the early labours to produce biological penicillin and ignoring the later, longer and bigger attempts to produce synthetic penicillin , has given it the moral capital to claim it led in producing wartime biological penicillin.

And they have been dining out on the myth ever since, because lazy historians and journalists let them.

In America, the 'penicillin myth' is actually much truer.

Pfizer is correctly credited with betting its all on biological penicillin while everyone else focussed on synthetic penicillin.

It won : producing 80% of all the penicillin that landed on D-Day.

Merck, the lead firm on synthetic penicillin, is widely derided for betting all on repeated failed attempts to make synthetic penicillin and in so missing the boat entirely on biological penicillin.

Columbia University - via its professor Martin Henry Dawson - could have claimed some of the life-saving glory of biological penicillin, but chose to focus on killing and death instead : prouder by far of its role in the Manhattan Project's fire bombing of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it ignored its role in the other Manhattan project .

The myth of wartime penicillin has been told many times but the real story - far more dramatic than the one hither to told to date - has never emerged......

Former OXFORD UNIVERSITY chemist found - in National Portrait Gallery !

its all about this gold

Congratulations to Wolfgang Suschitzky , honored with a retrospective of his best known photographs at Britain's National Portait Gallery - including the un-butchered , original, version of his most enduring image.

The world famous photographer turned 100 this month !

And the missing chemist?

He is Wilson Baker, a former Oxford University chemist associated with  Big Science's highly expensive failure to synthesis penicillin during WWII.

 He went missing from one of science's iconic of all photos, after he rather 'blotted his Oxford copybook' by daring to go off to work at another university.

Iit all began back in 1944 when photographer Suschitzky took a series of still photos ,to accompany an ICL-sponsored motion film on the triumph of wartime penicillin.

The film was actually a form of a rear guard action to regain some of the "life-saving penicillin" glory for Britain, after the American soda pop supplier, Charles Pfizer and Sons, became the first firm in the world to truly mass produce penicillin.

They did it the natural way, as long advocated by their associate,  Dr Martin Henry Dawson.It is still the way we produce penicillin.

In the most famous shot in the penicillin still series (NPG P562) , a group of four of Oxford's best wartime chemists pose around a table.

They include Nobel prize winners Sir Robert Robinson and Sir Ernst Chain  and Sir Edward Abraham  (a co-developer of our most used family of antibiotics, a close relative of penicillin).

And then Wilson Baker himself, who had to settle for a FRS instead of a knighthood, perhaps because he was a committed Quaker and pacifist during WWII.

"The Chemist Vanishes...."

But ,as recounted earlier in SVE's earlier rendering, sometime after Baker 'left the family firm' , the Oxford University's copy of this famous image was butchered.

Butchered seemingly by the same high quality photo re-touchers who butchered similar photos for Stalin, after this or that former Commissar was 'liquidated', like Bain closing a factory, and had to be removed from all historical photos .

Out went Wilson and in went a cutout image of Oxford's most famous bio-tech son , Sir Howard Florey .

Florey came in via a photo scissored out crudely from another famous post-event re-staged photo : Florey and his faithful retainer needling some poor little mouse in a cage.

The resulting image never looked to be designed to avoid detection.

The fame of the mousing photo, together with the crudity of the inked backfilling to help to the final photo "jell" , ensured that anyone at all familiar with the history of penicillin would quickly detect it.

However Britain's notorious libel laws - even more favorable to the rich and powerful than those of Hitler's Germany, together with Oxford University's deep pockets for big libel law firms - ensures that no one, least of all Skygods vs earthlings , would ever call this a case of  plagiarism.

Yes plagiarism , albeit allegedly done by a university itself instead of one of its young students.

Since Oxford won't do the right thing, it is very nice that the National Portrait Gallery made the original photo - with the original Wilson Baker back in - its featured photo of the month....

STALIN lives? at the DUNN ?

I sometimes think that atheists have taken over Oxford University and that they now worship scientists (provided their 'tough minded' enough) instead of God.

Sometimes this means that Oxford have to apply some of Stalin's favorite photographic techniques for making Commissars vanish.

Stalin excelled at first the bullet to the back of the head and then a generous application of photographic varnish to the front of the head ,applied to whatever official photographs that couldn't be tossed.

Wilson Baker was a harmless little man, a devout Quaker peace activist and a darn fine chemist - he's dead but not by any bullet to the head.

But the photo vanishing varnish does apply - he's been erased from the official portrait of the moment of Oxford's University greatest triumph - the (failed) effort to synthesize penicillin during World War Two.

Baker's fault was that his mere presence in an iconic photograph interfered with the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology's panty lines when it came to exalting their best known director, Baron Sir Howard Florey.

Florey is himself dead but he still a real little money maker for the Dunn, Oxford University, Oxford City and the whole bio-med-crazy rich and rapidly growing "Thames Valley".

The original iconic photo is in Britain's National Portrait Gallery, taken in 1944 by Wolfgang Suschitzky at the Dunn in Oxford as part of a a ICI-funded film on Britain's role in penicillin:

I have shamelessly taken this from Robert Bud's book on Penicillin, together with his caption and credit line.

Now here is another almost exactly similar photo, taken this time from Eric Lax's book on penicillin, with its caption and credit line to the Dunn Pathology School.

I don't know about Pathological, but I find this all definitely creepy:

I have made these photos very small ,to save bandwidth, but they sure look alike---- aside from the tighter crop of the Dunn version.

But now look closer at the figure of Florey from the Dunn version:

It sure looks like a bad "insert" job ala Joe Stalin's technique.

And doesn't our Florey's pose look very very familiar , in fact ,iconic to cliche-worthy familiar ?

Ah yes, Florey had no license to inject people.

 The stand-in shot of him using a needle of his famous live-saving penicillin, in lieu of something more heroic, has become a posed-up shot of him and his aide, Jim Kent, needling a mouse in May 1940.

 I think its a law that it must be used in every book and article on Florey,Oxford and penicillin.

Here it is,also from Lax's book, and again provided by the Dunn people:

What do you think ?