Wartime Penicillin intended to be secret and synthetic

It ended up public and 'public domain' natural, thanks to Henry Dawson and his supporters.

The British War Department and the American OSRD (run by Vannevar Bush) had expected to quickly, cheaply and, above all, secretively mass produce synthetic penicillin.

Enough artificial penicillin to supply the Allied front lines in the big pushback against Tojo and Hitler, while the enemy had to make do with the rapidly failing Sulfa drugs or try to produce tiny amounts of impure natural penicillin.

The whole project depended on keeping accounts of penicillin's miracle cures away from the Allied public.

Wartime Manhattan's Projects : big Little Boy versus the tiny ampoule that saved little Patty Malone

The Little Boy atomic bomb that dropped on Hiroshima was a very Big Bomb indeed : 5000 kilograms , 300 cm long, by 70 cm wide and 70 cm deep.

Long and thin : hence Little Boy.

 Big Science needed tens of thousands of workers to build it.

By contrast, the tiny ampoule of natural penicillin that saved the life of  little baby Patty Malone was only 5 grams in weight, .7cm by .7 cm by 3 cm in size.

It was thus 100 times shorter in length and width and thickness, though it too was long and thin in appearance.

 And since its density was also surprisingly similar to that of Little Boy, it appropriately weighed 5 grams : a million times less (100 x 100 x 100 = 1 million).

Small science indeed.

Particularly when we recall that natural penicillin is actually made in a fungus factory that weighs about 70 pico grams (pico : one trillionth of a gram !) .

That is about a billion trillion times less the weight of what it would require for humanity to  make the basic machinery and basic chemicals for chemists to synthesize penicillin.

The fungus only requires a bit of dirty water and a bit of decaying organic debris.

America's big bombers carried both the Little Boy bomb and the ampoules of penicillin : one went off to Hiroshima, the other also went all over the world  to save lives.

 However its first mercy run was from Brooklyn New York to Macon Georgia, to save Anne Shirley Carter.

A mighty big plane and a mighty long journey for such a small little ampoule but if any taxpayer complained, they were very careful not to do it publicly.

Could any two projects - anywhere - anytime - have been more different ?

Penicillin Baby Patricia Malone survives !

In earlier posts I had mentioned that "The Penicillin Baby", little two year old Patty Malone, whose fight against a fatal staph disease had gripped all of North America for six weeks between August 12th and September 22nd 1943, had finally died of her disease in mid September 1943.

But perhaps it isn't true.
This "claim" was based on a secondary report on her story, in an official history of the Pulitzer Prize, and from what I could find ( and not find) in newspapers from that time that are on Google when I looked.

(The newspaper and editor who had got the life-saving penicillin for her from a heartless American government had won a Pulitzer for their efforts.)

I usually search about every two months as new newspapers get digitalized and get put on the Net, while other newspapers disappear off the Net.

Today I found two stories - from tiny obscure rural newspapers  (actually a good sign - meaning it was wire copy and available to all) with a photo, both from AP.

They showed that Patty was released, fit and well, to her parents Lawrence J and Katherine M Malone on September 22nd after a six week stay at Lutheran hospital in New York.

I say fit and well because the text says so and the image of little Patricia in her cute new bonnet proves it - we also have earlier photos when she was very near death to show the distinct difference.

Emboldened by all this --- and the fact that I now had the mother's middle initial ---- I went back to the 1940 federal census in America to look real hard.

Ironically, I finally had to put less in , rather than more, and I found in 1940 a Lawrence and Katherine Malone at their exact 1943 address (apartment 1c) (83 -11 34th Avenue in Jackson Heights, Flushing, Queens, New York), the one mentioned  in many newspaper stories of the time.

(This mania for disclosing exact full names and exact full addresses was a style of many newspapers back then.)

Age and occupation matched their appearance in the 1943 photos.

(The census showed he had a few years of college, was an insurance adjuster and made a good salary of $3200 in 1940.)

They had a daughter, Jean, born in 1937. Katherine (M) Malone, the stay-at-home mother was the informant, so this had to be accurate - besides the handwritten information of the census taker was extremely neat and readable.

But a telephone number database showed a John M Malone, born about 1939 , living at the 1943 Malone address fairly recently.

If Lawrence's middle name was John, statistically more than moderately likely, then he might well name a son John.

His same telephone number was earlier held by Lawrence J Malone and Katherine M Malone living at that same address !

I tried a search in the US Social Security death registry ( a list of all people who worked for pay and so paid into the system and were alive and working after 1960, when the data started getting put into a computer database.)

I did find a Katherine M Malone whose birth ( March 27 1913)  matched the 1940 census information - she died in March 1994 in Jackson Heights.

Lawrence J Malone was born in New York 1910 and was also raised in New York , as was his wife. But the names and dates on record for New York were all for men born much later than that.

So perhaps he died before 1960.

Patricia Malone was born in 1941 (as she was two in late 1943) so if she lived to adulthood and never married she might be a Patricia A Malone, born April 14 1941, who died September 2 2009 in Brooklyn.

A search for a John M Malone on the death index found nothing - he might well still be alive, as could Jean and Patricia - the average birth date of many Americans dying today is some time in the 1920s, not in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

I will push on and search harder, but for now a nice photo of the bonneted baby Patricia, September 22nd 1943, obtained from a small town rural weekly in Texas.

Yes, a New York story, published even in the tiny town of Mexia Texas.

Because this was a Good News Story that every parent and grandparent in North America kept a moist eye on, particularly at the height of all the death and destruction of the Bad News War....

Resetting the Allied moral compass so that it diverged from the Nazis, not merely followed a muted parallel course

It remains unknown whether Henry Dawson expected his quixotic wartime efforts (to "waste" weaponized penicillin on 'useless' SBEs ) to go as far as they ultimately did.

He certainly was extremely unhappy that America was treating its wartime 'SBE lives unworthy of life' in almost as bad a fashion as Nazi Germany was known to be doing to its SBEs and others seen as "useless mouths".

But did he suspect his assault on weaponizing penicillin would extend beyond the Allies' horrific wartime neglect of the poorer chronically ill ?

He probably couldn't have foreseen just how quickly the pipeline of ever-newer ever-better sulfa drugs would dry up or just how quickly so many strains of deadly bacteria would become resistant to any sulfa drug , leaving penicillin as the  only  wartime lifesaver between disease and death.

This meant de-weaponizing penicillin had consequences far beyond those people suffering from SBE and denied their only chance at life.

If weaponized penicillin had remained throughout the war successfully censored and had remained denied to the civilian world (as weaponized DDT successfully was, never let us forget) , it would have ranked as one of WWII's major war crimes, like Katyn Forest or Auschwitz.

Millions of people around the world during WWII would have died needlessly from massive infections that only penicillin alone could have stopped.

Penicillin in 1943 was not as it is today,  just one among dozens of antibiotics - it was the only one - and in addition, no new anti-bacterial sulfa drugs were coming along to replace the ones that bacteria had so rapidly grown resistant to.

Refusing to divert a tiny amount of war resources to make penicillin available to civilians - anywhere and everywhere - was to refuse them Life itself.

Worse, there was no trade-off  to debate ; penicillin, like sulfa before it, was no war-winning secret medical weapon, at least in its intended war-winning use at the front .

Brand new (front line) wounds either contain abundant alternative bacteria foods to the deadly sulfa 'food' (the Fildes theory, known since 1940) or contain abundant proteins to bind to penicillin and render it useless.

However penicillin, and sulfa, were very useful a little further back in the military hospital system, as a life-saving systemic in cases of possible blood poisoning.

The case against secret weaponized penicillin gets even worse.

As an impure natural drug, penicillin would have taken the Germans at least a year or two or three to successfully mass produce it , even if its virtues had been sung from the heavens by the American media in 1942.

But as a pure synthetic penicillin in supposedly cheap abundant mass production (an event that in fact as not yet ever occurred) the chemistry-minded Germans would have rapidly back-engineered the drug and synthesized it rapidly themselves.

Because remember it took 15 years of hard effort to purify natural penicillin enough to determine its structure - but only months thereafter to 'synthesize' it artificially.

Back-engineering that synthesis would also only have taken months.

Penicillin's real secret was just how difficult the mass production of natural penicillin could be if you set your mind on doing everything the hard way ---- not the OSRD-Merck-Oxford fantasy of secret synthesis.

Dawson certainly set up the stage for the Allies re-setting of their moral compass , from his endocarditis efforts from September 1940 to September 1943 : but it was the immediate outcry resulting from the Patty Malone and Marie Barker cases that forced them to actually do something concrete.

His gut instinct in 1940 ,that not treating the otherwise fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis would prove the acid test for the Allies' pernicious morality, certainly was correct.

But while he couldn't have foreseen how far his actions would impact, he wouldn't have been unhappy that they did so......

Patient ONE of the Antibiotics Era : how the saving of Charlie Aronson changed our world

During his lifetime, Dr Henry Dawson only gave penicillin to several dozen endocarditis patients, Charlie Aronson first among them ; only saved several dozen lives, Charlie among them.

Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.

But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.

If  only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.

Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.

Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.

It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.

Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.

The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.

There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.

Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.

Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.

This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.

They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.

Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.

A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound  more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).

This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.

Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.

We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and  the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.

Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of  wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.

America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana,  again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".

Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.

But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.

Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.

Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.

But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.

Dante Colitti forced their hand.

In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital,  was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.

But he did.

He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.

 And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.

Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.

The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.

Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/  needed  penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?

Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.

The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone:  John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter  + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944,  is clear enough .

Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....

For female pioneers of wartime penicillin, 1910 was a very good year ...

Dorothy Crowfoot , Gladys Hobby and Nancy Atkinson were about the only women who played an independent role in the development of wartime penicillin.

Many, many, other women were involved in the production of penicillin : in fact biological (natural) penicillin production and testing was often seen as women's work par excellent : but none played an important independent scientific role that I am aware of, beyond these three women.

(I do however believe that Eleanor Chaffee, Patty Malone, Anne Shirley Carter, Marie Barker, Eleanor Roosevelt and above all Mae Smith played crucial roles in turning "penicillin the war weapon" into "the penicillin of hope.")

1910 : annus mirabilis 

Interestingly, all members of our tiny trio shared another thing in common : all three were born in the same year, 1910.....

The Allied battle for the world's 'hearts and minds' : NS-born Henry Dawson's patient-penicillin vs OSRD war-penicillin

Army is - wrongly - blamed for her SBE death

The idea that successful American governments need first to win over the 'hearts and minds' of people, before they rush to impose their objectives by legal and military fiat is an old, old , old one.

Presidents John Adams used the phrase "hearts and mind" in this sense early in the 19th century, long before Presidents FDR, Kennedy and Johnson made it famous in the 20th century - and before recent presidents George W Bush and Obama dragged it out of the archives to use in this century.

(And to share the blame around, their wartime Ally Britain also used the phrase during its 1950s war in Malaysia.)

When American finally joined The Coalition of the Willing  (December 1941), many of the world's nations still remained strictly neutral in the battle against Nazi evil , or were, at best,  nominal friends but in reality merely laying back on the oars.

The world's largest, richest, most militarily-advanced economies in the world (America and the British Commonwealth) had a real job on their hands trying to convince the neutrals (all much smaller and weaker than these two superpowers) that their interests would not be subsumed before the interests of these global colossus.

Unhelpfully, America and Britain's scientific and medical elite - centred in the American National Academy of Science (NAS) and the British Medical Research Council (MRC)  made the job much harder.

Reactionaries of all stripes (from Germany to America) had been determined to roll back the1930s move to Social Medicine (the claim that more poor people got sick than rich people because they were too poor to pay for adequate housing, food or routine medical care).

However, the dire effects of the Great Depression had put wind behind Social Medicine's sails and confounded the reactionaries.

Now - Thank God ! - war, or even just the possibility of war, gave the reactionaries new hope.

 Hitler killed off his first "useless feeder" the same week that he declared war on the Poles and soon his Aktion T4 program was killing Germany's weakest and smallest members by the tens of thousands.

In America, people like Dr Lewis Weed (a mid-level medical researcher) dropped his unsuccessful research to become a war-medicine advocate at the NAS and its action-oriented NRC (National Research Council).

War medicine wins opening rounds against social medicine

He locked horns with Dr Thomas Parran, the American Surgeon General from 1936 to 1948, who was a strong (and powerfully-positioned) advocate of social medicine.

A war medicine proponent advocates that any nation at war - even the richest, least attacked nation at war - needs to divert resources normally assigned to civilian medicine towards making bullets instead.

 In addition, much more money would have to be spent providing for the high medical requirements of an activity (war) whose stated aim is maiming and killing people on muddy fields miles away from the nearest hospital.

Limited research dollars would have to focus on war-related  medical needs ( such as finding new ways to keep factory workers and bomber pilots alert for long hours) and put before finding  new ways to keep elderly retirees alive) .

War medicine is, in a very real sense, 'eugenics in uniform' : the best citizens (those that are tested and rated physically and mentally to be A1) end up in the military and get top notch medical care at no cost.

Those citizens who fail these tests and end up as 4F, are second rate eugenically and get second rate medical care during the war.

Proudly promote this concept to the outside world - and America's still relatively free press during WWII did just that - and it comes across quite differently in those neutral nations still sitting on the fence with regards to whole-heartedly backing the Allied cause.

As individuals, the elites in these neutral nations could see themselves as A1s  --- but as nationalistically minded citizens they could only see their nations as 4Fs in America's eyes : mere inconvenient dirt beneath their advancing wheels.

When the Patty Malone vs Marie Barker debate broke in the United States media (basically, scarce penicillin for dying civilians : yes or no ?) , it broke even bigger overseas, as worried American and British diplomats noted.

Heartless or caring : the public image of the Allied cause had reached past the unimportant front pages and onto the most important page of any newspaper or magazine --- the women's page : home to Doctor Mom.

It suddenly mattered what the mothers and parents and grandparents from neutral nations thought of America and Britain's harsh dictates on penicillin.

Put your small neutral nation, say Eire or Turkey, in the place of the unfortunate Marie Barker and then ask yourself, how would you feel to just be Marie Barker-like 'incidental collateral damage' , on the pathway to the ultimate Allied Victory ?

And the Home Front within the Allied nations was just as caustic about their own governments' inactions : 'penicillin the miracle cure' had been around for 15 years and still no one in charge had bothered making enough of it for all ?

Don't the bosses know "there's a war on" ???!!!

And let us set this debate (occurring between the late Summer of 1943 and the early Spring of 1944) in its full context.

The western Allies still hadn't invaded Europe and left the heavy lifting of killing German soldiers to the beleaguered Russians.

Instead they were busy bombing Europe into rubble : busily killing civilians from both Axis and neutral nations alike.

The Germans and Allies had co-operated on censoring the results of the fire-bombing of Hamburg of July 1943, (right before the story of little Patty Malone broke) but on-site reports from neutral Swedish journalists had laid the whole horrific affair out on the newspaper pages of the world.

It had led to considerable unease - in neutral country and allied country alike.

Hadn't FDR himself raged that the bombing of civilians was a crime against all humanity and now weren't the Americans and British far out-doing the earlier Nazi efforts to bomb enemy and neutral civilians ?

Allied fire bombing of  innocent babies in occupied Europe - denying life-saving penicillin to innocent young moms in America so that their unfaithful husbands in Italy could be get a quicker ( via penicillin) cure for the Clap - it all didn't seem morally right.

Perhaps surprisingly, the American Army revealed far greater political and cultural savvy on this matter than American doctors and scientists were capable of.

The Army was sick and tired of being blamed for hogging all the penicillin and refusing to give any to the nation's dying babies.

'For Christ's Sake', they could rightfully protest, 'we can't get anywhere enough penicillin for our own dying boys, and we hadn't even heard of this stuff penicillin till a few months ago --- you ask the drug companies and the doctors what they were doing with the stuff for the last 15 years !'

Somewhere in the American Army Air Force some bright mind (s) decided to solve both PR problems (the fire bombing uproar and the penicillin uproar) at one stroke.

(And before you ask, no .)

No academic historian has yet brought us the true story behind this highly imaginative response: I see a great PhD thesis for some bright light.)

Soon, American Army "heavy" bombers were pulled off their bombing practises and were sent out on a still risky flight (because at top speed and at night) "pounding" across country with a tiny 8 grams of penicillin (instead of the normal 8000 pounds of TNT) to deliver to a dying ten pound patient.

Upon arrival, Klieg lights lit the tarmac as an ambulance, along a police escort with blazing lights and piercing sirens, raced to the hospital and the waiting doctor and patients.

Need I add to this purple-prosed drama that, thoughtfully, the local press had been notified well ahead of time ?

Quickly Army bombers were even on far more perilous missions of mercy, dangerously new cross-ocean flights, from places like San Francisco  all the way to Brisbane Australia or from New York to Havana, --- to save dying children.

In 1943, Martin Henry Dawson was dying ,but not quite dead yet, not by a long shot...

Life-saving penicillin had moved 180 degrees from being censored and rationed to being the subject of  radio, newsreel and pamphlet propaganda as an example - the example - of the better things ahead if only all joined in to hasten the Allied Cause.

Neutrals could reassure themselves that just like with dying babies and Martin Henry Dawson's useless-mouthed SBE patients, the Allies would do right by all, as they were doing so now for the least of these.

The Allied battle for the world's hearts and minds, had been won (unexpectedly) by the proponents of social medicine - thanks largely to the example of Martin Henry Dawson.

And decades before Joni Mitchell and Woodstock, the American Army Air Force itself turned its shotgun bombers into butterflies, above a wondering nation and world....

Florey vs Dawson : penicillin to be perfect & a war medicine OR an imperfect but universal medicine ?

Baby Patty Malone helped the whole world discover penicillin 

As should be well known, penicillin-the-molecule and penicillin-the-lifesaver were discovered September 1943 by the whole world, (not in September 1928 by Alexander Fleming) while natural-penicillin-the-universal-livesaver was invented on October 16th 1940 by Henry Dawson.


Penicillin-the-molecule was ignored in June 1929, firstly by Alexander Fleming himself and secondly by the world.

This was because Fleming on that date indirectly denied any possibility of penicillin ever becoming a lifesaver, ie a systemic ( spread through the blood system) medication.

As a result, Fleming - and the world - yawned.

Contrast this with Banting team's excited, animated, passionate announcement --- at a Boxing Day medical conference just a few years earlier  -- that it was  just two weeks away from injecting insulin-the-lifesaver into a dying patient.

(What a Boxing Day present for millions of diabetics and their familes !)

You can just bet that insulin-the-lifesaver and insulin-the-molecule were discovered together, by the entire world, at that moment.

What about Howard Florey then ? Didn't he play some role in penicillin ?

Yes, some role.

But Florey ,along with Fleming, and along with the British and American governments together with the leading firms in the pharmaceutical world, was convinced that penicillin first must be perfected (100% pure, industry-made, probably synthetic, tested-onto-death) before being used on humans .

 And even then 'humans'  really meant 1A military personnel only, at least during the war.

In addition, they all only saw penicillin as an useful supplement to the existing sulfa drugs - mostly for use in sulfa-resistant staph infections.

Truly a perfectionist and limited vision of wartime penicillin.

One can only begin to imagine the high prices that would be charged governments and patients for such perfect material.

Chain deserved less credit for his chemistry and more for his pushiness , in forwarding the penicillin story to a happy conclusion...

By way of total contrast, only five weeks after learning of penicillin's lifesaving potential (and here Florey and above all Chain deserve the credit) , Dawson was injecting life-saving penicillin into 4F civilians ( Negroes ! Jews !) dying from a strep infection (SBE) , using imperfect , impure, hospital-made, natural, penicillin made by slimey molds.

Yes, like Banting's first insulin injections, Dawson's first penicillin injections 'stung like a bee', from natural impurities still in it. The stings, in both cases, did no permanent (or even temporary) harm.

To Dawson (and to Banting, his model) saving dying patients today with imperfect, impure medication was preferable to letting them die so we can maybe save dying patients, years from now, with a perfected pure medication.

These clashing visions of penicillin ran throughout the war with Florey's vision overwhelming dominant until Dawson's success with -stolen - government issue penicillin on SBE patients inspired another local doctor (Dante Colitti) to jump over the traces for his dying patient as well.

The resulting  heart-stirring story of baby Patty Malone ( late August - early September 1943) broke the media floodgates and the entire civilian world began to "ACT UP" and demand Dawson-style penicillin - now !

By 1944, the Allied governments, dragging the still reluctant Big Pharma firms along with them, had caved.

Semi-purifed, semi-perfect - CHEAP- natural penicillin was being mass produced and being made available for all, as fast as that was humanly possible.

And not just Allied civilians as well as Allied military personnel , but for Axis POWs , Neutral nation civilians and ultimately even Axis civilians.

Canadians Banting and Dawson and Canadian Medicare : there is a pattern here :  a strong belief in medical care that is universal in theory as to who is permitted to receive it (everyone, anywhere) and universal in practise (as a result of being very inexpensive).

But it wasn't something simply discovered and instantly received with acclaim by everyone - as science historians want you to believe how science works : as a totally bloodless affair.

 Instead, it was invented by some humans and contested fiercely by some other humans until finally most humans accepted it.

Invented by people like Banting, Dawson and Douglas ...