Life-saving penicillin can be a little bit fermented but not a little bit synthetic

If a medicine will save lives when nothing else will do so - in war as in peace - then Henry Dawson's example reminds us that our first moral requirement is to make it as much as we can, anyway we can, save lives anyway we can..... and only then try to perfect it.

Fermentation penicillin ( aka natural, biological penicillin) worked  (feebly) from day one (September 1928) but could be (and obviously was !) improved gradually.

By contrast, even after 15 years, synthetic penicillin in late 1943 still hadn't been gotten to work at all.  (IE, biologically : all resulting attempts showed no medical activity at all.)

In a way , synthetic molecules are completely like pregnancy.

As with pregnancy, there is no half-way house : you are or you aren't ; a synthetic molecule either works, or it doesn't.

In addition, even if synthetic penicillin could be gotten to work biologically, there were still two possible huge problems ahead of breaking out the champagne.

The yield could be much lower than the already low yield of Fleming's original strain of penicillium, not many magnitudes higher.

And the number of steps required in the synthesis and subsequent purification/ separation might require more, not less, money, equipment, manpower, care and close attention to detail than even the worst version of the fermentation method ever called for.

I have one word for you my boy. Rosebud ? No : quinine.

These are not just theoretical objections : as bad luck happens they all came to pass with synthetic penicillin.

The pursuit of  synthetic quinine , now a more than two hundred year long futile chasing of a tail by generation after generation of chemists , should have reminded the 1940s penicillin synthetic faithful of the possible pitfalls that could lie ahead......

How Parke-Davis could have made a fortune in 1929 from the ultimate in generic drugs : natural penicillin

Parke-Davis, as seen from my folks' homes

A medication made by some natural being out in Nature is the 'ultimate generic drug'  ---- being PD (Public Domain) from its birth, which possibly occurred hundreds of millions of years before Humanity first noticed it.

Penicillin - in theory - is one such 'ultimate generic drug' , but was it in fact, in 1929 ?


Many strains of various bacteria and molds make penicillin-like beta-lactam materials but most do so in such small quantities that it takes very sensitive testing to discover their existence.

As such, St Mary's hospital in 1929 had the only two known strains of  microbes known to make sufficient penicillin to be useful to man.

The original mold had been gathered as part of John Freeman's pioneering studies in allergies.

 (Freeman's researches were the only part of the entire Wright-Fleming money-making empire that had any longterm scientific validity - as evidenced by being the only part of the Institute that a drug company, Beecham, was actually willing to part good money for in the 1950s after Fleming and Wright were safely in their graves.)

Spores from Freeman's unique mold had drifted up to Fleming's lab and so the hospital now controlled two copies of the same unique strain of mold.

Parke-Davis lost its chance to remain the world's biggest drug company

The Institute had a close contractual relationship with what was then the world's biggest and best research-oriented drug company - Detroit's Parke-Davis.

 (Their enormous ( for their day) research labs were/are clearly visible right across the river from both my parents' home in Windsor Ontario.)

Patents were impossible for natural drugs but hardly needed, for St Mary's/Parke-Davis controlled the only source of the vital reagent needed to make penicillin : their unique strain of penicillium.

Keep that strain in-house and they could have a profitable monopoly forever.

Think this wildly unlikely ?

How do you think today's real penicillin makers still act ?

They develop in-house strains of penicillium and never patent them or share them.

The down-stream techniques after the penicillium express the penicillin juice are/were patented and hence public, for a fee.

But they are useless without a stable, high producing penicillium strain : one can afford to be quite cavalier with one's chemical engineering efficiencies when your unique strain out-produces all your competitors by an order or two of magnitude !

Trade Secrets rather than patents remain the most profitably business method in the biological drug business - now in 2012 as in 1928 .

When Fleming, after he too-quickly dismissed penicillin for systemic use, started freely giving away penicillium spores as a low value lab clearing agent, he ruined any hopes that Parke-Davis and St Mary's might put heavy money in penicillin production and promotion.

Ironically when he thus destroyed the early commercial hopes for penicillin production, his spores out there in the wider medical world, successfully kept the MRC/NAS/OSRD triad from delaying wartime penicillin any longer than they already did....

Earthlings is not a doc I could watch - but you should

While we are on the subject of books or movies I did not name skygods vs earthlings after, I did not name it after the doc Earthlings.

I had never heard of it until fairly recently.

I have tried to watch it but since I fled half the scenes in Wizard of Oz as just too scary, I really couldn't handle much of it.

Most other people seem to feel they can watch it gradually, in bits, and ended up learning much from it to unsettle even the most animal-friendly human.

My actual earthling point of reference, in naming my blog, was the new earth smell that newly dug WWI trenches had - as well as smell that penicillium mold has.

This uniquely earthy smell united the two wars of Doctor Martin Henry Dawson : as a World War One infantryman and his unique World War Two effort to turn his hospital into a life-saving penicillin farm.

In both wars, airmen high in the air got the skygod glamour (and hubris) , but it was earthling guys embedded deep in the dirty,smelly,humble earth that actually did the heavy lifting that finally ended the bloodshed.....