Genes-o-cide only covers some of the crimes of Hitler,Stalin and Tojo : Triage-cide instead ?

It was Stalin who got the West to agree that the UN definition of genocide shouldn't including killing everyone belonging to a political, economic or social group.

(Clever - because that was exactly the sort of mass killing that Communists, rather than Fascists, much preferred ---- not that Communists didn't kill ethnic groups like the Poles as readily as Hitler killed economic groups like German trade unionists.)

Gene-o-cide or Genetic-cide betrays its dusty old Modernity roots : the focus on the "fact" that people are fixed forever by their forebearers' genes, so as to remain your enemy even into future unborn generations.

Hitler acted upon those ideas - insisting that killing Jewish and Roma babies would prevent them coming back as adult destroyers of the Aryan race.

Stalin, too, often killing the children of those he deemed traitors claiming they were tarred by their erring parents' brush.

The Soviets definitely won this dictionary war ---- today most of us limit genocide to killing people related genetically, rather than seeing it extends to masses of murdered people only related by all holding the same party or trade union or football team card.

Raphael Lemkin the Jewish Polish lawyer who first coined the term genocide more than 75 years ago, wanted it to encompass the mass killing of any group that had something in common - in both their eyes and in the eyes of their killers.

His occupation - he was a Polish lawyer - was a favorite group to kill, much sought out by both Germans and Russians : for being ethnically Polish and for being economically upper middle class and for being intellectuals and for being potential leaders.

Thrown in being Jewish as well and presto : you have five good reasons to want him dead.

Unfortunately for academics doing head counts, you can only kill someone once - so what column of dead exactly would you have placed Mr Lemkin, if he had been killed in Timothy Synder's Bloodlands during WWII ?

Triage-cide  rather than genetic-cide ?

He would have been, above all else, yet another individual killed by global Modernity's craving to mass triage its way into a permanently perfectly frozen Utopia.

Triage-cide might well be a more accurate word to describe the intent behind all of these highly varied killings done by all these highly varied killers, all of whom saw themselves as modernists .....

WWII: the horrific medical 'Triaging' of New York Jews and Blacks

Here is a challenge I throw out to New York City's many amateur historians and genealogical detectives : find out more about the young New Yorker who was the first person ever in the world to be treated - successfully - with penicillin-the-antibiotic.

Particularly if you interested in uncovering more about the harsh wartime treatment afforded many first generation inner city New York Blacks and  Jews.

So, again, a challenge : find out more about PATIENT ONE , the young New Yorker(s)  who first introduced the Age of Antibiotics against fierce resistance from the medical establishment.

Here's a little what we already know for certain (past and future posts on this blog will add more details : the keywords to search are Charles Aronson , Aaron Alston and (Martin) Henry Dawson.)

Patient One , A and B

Actually, two young New Yorkers were given a needle of penicillin by Doctor Martin Henry Dawson on that same history-making day (October 16th 1940) at the famed Columbia Prebyterian Medical Centre : a young Black and a young  Jew, both probably poor.

Its quite a story from how these two young ,poor, men from these ethnicities, traditionally regarded as 'last' , came to be 'first' ever in the world to receive the miracle of antibiotics.

Both young men were dying of then common dreaded and 99% invariably fatal SBE (Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis), a disease that hits the heart valves.

Heart valves damaged earlier by RF (Rheumatic Fever).

Working in tandem, these two related diseases were the most common way for school age children to die in the 20th Century , until about 1960.

The Polio of the Poor

RF was "The Polio of the Poor", because just as the much less common Polio was highly selective and tended to hit the children of well to do WASPs in the leafy suburbs, RF tended to hit  hardest among the poor children of inner city immigrants and minorities.

Unless you are wilfully naive , you probably have guessed by now why you have heard so very much more about relatively uncommon serious cases of Polio than about the much more common - and commonly fatal - RF & SBE !

There is no doubt at all that first patient to be selected for this experimental treatment was a young black man, Aaron Alston.

Penicillin had been discovered exactly 12 years earlier and a little ( very primitive work) had been even been published on growing it , but it remained basically unknown and unused in 1940.

So Dawson and his co-workers ( Meyer, Hobby and Chaffee) were still at the square one of square one, a few weeks into their first attempt to try and grow the mold in their hospital lab,  when a seriously ill Aaron Alston arrived on a ward that Dawson 'attended' (had some limited medical authority over).

It had not been expected that they would have enough penicillin made, purified and tested for clinical trials for another four months.

But Dawson's heart went out to Alston, because Dawson reasoned, based on what little he knew of penicillin, that  penicillin might finally conquer SBE.

(A disease by the way he had never published even one word on - he was in fact hired to work in an area that was very neglected and directed to leave a well researched disease like SBE to the time- proven experts.)

The disease then (and perhaps still now) was regarded as the Mount Everest of all infectious disease, the Gold Standard test of any new anti-bacterial medication.

Delay meant Death

He decided to ignore laborious hospital protocols for pre-testing new drug treatments : Alston would die before he got this one last shot at life , if they choose to wait four further months  down the road.

Dawson would first test penicillin's potential toxicity (of which there was , to put it extremely mildly, absolutely no evidence of, judging by lots of  previously published work on small animals and human blood cells) on himself.

Then he'd give a little at a time to Alston, slowly and cautiously.

The team was only making very little amounts of a very weak penicillin at that time, so this was really just making a virtue of necessity !

How did Dawson know that Alston was so rapidly dying, that haste was imperative ?

There is no direct evidence but the indirect evidence is compelling, I believe, that Alston had already received the conventional treatment for SBE in 1940, prolonged and massive treatments by the new miracle drugs, the sulfas.

Most SBE patients in 1940 got at least a brief improvement with sulfa drugs.

 But the bacteria fought back and the same miserable one percent survived with sulfa treatments (only to die when the disease returned a year or two later)...... as with those receiving no treatment what so ever.

However some patients got no relief from sulfa - the number of bacteria colonies in the blood went up (and not down) after treatment and the doctors then knew these patients' particular strain of oral strep bacteria in their heart valves were particularly resistant to the sulfa drugs and that death would be swift and certain.

 I believe Alston was one of these patients and this is why Dawson decided to go to clinical trial four months early, and after only five weeks from first even learning of what very little was known about penicillin.

And why the other more senior doctors let him try his penicillin on the clearly dying Alston.

Since massive and prolonged amounts of sulfa had failed to kill off all the heart valve bacteria, it seemed pointless to hope that a very little bit of very weak penicillin would do the trick.

But it was worth the effort to Dawson and the others doctors really couldn't see why he couldn't at least try, this once - but only in his own spare time, when he won't be neglecting his own proper duties.

 Dawson's ideas on the immense worth of penicillin were regarded as madness by his hospital colleagues and he really needed to show even a small , if temporary, reduction in the number of bloodstream bacterial colonies if he hoped to receive further help, not further hinderance, from his hospital chiefs.

In fact, it took three more years before any more than a few dozen doctors in the whole world thought that penicillin was worth bothering about.

 Need I add, three more war years, filled with additional millions  of patients dying from war-related bacterial infections ?

For the fact is that for the first fifteen long years, penicillin's worst enemy wasn't bacteria but rather doctors themselves.

Antibiotics arrives, despite doctors' best efforts

By and large, the Age of Antibiotics arrived in this world despite the best efforts of doctors, not because of their efforts.

Hence Dawson's decision to use all of a tiny amount of a weak solution, pushed into just one patient, in hopes of seeing even a hint of successful, if temporary, results.

 A chance to keep his hospital bosses off his back and a chance they'd let him continue his massive mold-growing efforts inside their precious neat and tidy ultra-modern medical centre.

That first needle offered up a potential lifeline to a young dying black man.... and a potential lifeline to billions of future patients.

Enter Charles Aronson

But then Dawson deliberately chose to blow it - or so it seemed.

Another dying young man, a  twenty seven year old Jewish boy named Charles Aronson, arrived on the ward, days before Alston was to get all the meagre penicillin that had been hand-grown so far.

Spontaneously, Dawson added him to this first clinical trial, dividing the meagre lifeline into two thinner lifelines, like a latter day Solomon.

Why ? Why when this further weakened any slim hopes of observing a clinical response?

Several reasons.

Firstly, lots of test tube results had confirmed that penicillin, by weight, was thousands as times potent as the sulfas.

This, despite the fact that their 1940 homegrown 'penicillin' was actually 99.5% dross -- but luckily they'd didn't know this .

Ordinarily, even their small amounts of weak penicillin, even divided in two, would have given clear signs of response, in almost any other bacterial disease.

Except SBE : its unique combo of 'gotchas' rightly made it the Mount Everest of infection, and thought Dawson ultimately did cure SBE with penicillin, he did so only after rolling many massive stones of Sisyphus  penicillin up that Mount.

But again they didn't know this at the time.

Secondly, Aronson had an uniquely complicated, and sad, medical history revolving around repeated attacks from all kinds of seemingly different strep bacteria diseases.

To Dawson, 'seeming different' was the key phrase.

For Dawson's personal/private research interest was in relating all the varied survival techniques he saw as shared by the strep bacteria that co-exist with us.

They live in our mouths, throats and nose much of the time and very occasionally causing serious disease by the ways some of our bodies choose to respond to those sophisticated survival techniques.

But I think this was a minor part of what got Dawson to add Aronson to that first clinical trial.

Dawson hated Triage

Because one of the abiding qualities of Dawson was his lifelong hatred of Triage , which unfortunately happened to be the chief and defining characteristic of the era he lived in, The Era of Modernity.

Modernity was all about, always, the dividing the world into two piles ---- those humans, beings and places worthy of continued life and succour and those unworthy of further life and support : in a word, Triage.

Think of all those medical doctors in jack boots, standing at the railway siding in places like Auschwitz, deciding in an instant if you were to die quickly in a shower or die slowly working too hard for too little food : Triage.

Triage had hit Dawson's hospital that Fall of 1940 : orders had gone out to focus resources on the diseases that affect front line 1A troops and to downplay devoting resources on diseases that only affect the useless 4Fs.

A wonderful time for medical political conservatives to gleefully call for a massive rollback of 1930s efforts to reduce the death rates among the poor, the minorities and the immigrants ("Social" Medicine) , under the guise that all resources were needed to keep our "boys" alive at the up-coming frontline : "War" Medicine.

Now if there ever was a Poster Child of a disease the war medicine hawks didn't want to treat, it was SBE and here is why.

Unlike Polio ( whose research efforts expanded during the war years) , the conservatives' own kids weren't likely to get RF and SBE.

And unfortunately both diseases were different from many other potentially fatal diseases like smallpox where if you got it once and survived, it would never hit you again.

Even 'curing' a bout of RF and SBE left behind permanent damage which made it not just likely you'd be hit again with new bouts, but hit harder each time as your delicate heart valves further weakened.

These were progressive, re-occuring, infectious diseases with a strong component of deadly auto-immunity to add to the mix.

Any success with SBE was going to be long and expensive in hospital resources, leave the cured patient still unable to serve in the military and do anything very arduous in a war plant - and a year later they be back in hospital again with another potentially fatal bout.

Neglect them and let them die quickly and quietly at home, at least until this war is over,  was the Allied medical establishment's decision worldwide.

Since this also was the Nazis' line, Dawson doubted we would really 'win' a war against them by taking up their horrific tactics.

This is why he deliberately choose to begin the new Age of Antibiotics on October 16 1940,  the first registration day for the
first ever peacetime draft, a day devoted to seeking out and celebrating the 1A youth of America.

He would mark that historical date by instead seeking out and celebrating the 4Fs of the 4Fs of America, celebrating the worthiness of  the least of these.

Cynical, clinical, trials

Conventionally having two (or more) patients suffering from the same disease under your medical wing at the moment when you are about to begin a new form of medical treatment was considered a godsend.

One half would get the old treatment and the other half the new treatment.

Officially and publicly the doctor(s) claimed to agnostic between the virtues of both treatments but that was rarely really true for the first pioneering medical teams.

Inside the privacy of their mind and conscience, they really didn't think the older treatment worked or at least didn't work very well.

This is because a strong belief in the likely success of a new drug was needed before any doctor is willing to do the extremely arduous work of being the first to try out a totally new treatment.

If the disease being treated was acute and had a high fatality rate, the trial would mean some would die who could have been saved , by the time good results came in.

The discussion of the early mass clinical trials of sulfa for dangerous diseases like pneumonia make extremely disturbing reading 75 years later.

Blithely it is - briefly - noted that hundreds died in these various trials.

Hundreds who could have lived if these pioneering true believers in the virtues of sulfa had consistently given their (abundant) supplies to everyone they felt might be saved by it.

The tiny amounts moral dilemma

The worst moral dilemma for many initial trials is that only a tiny amount of a potentially life-saving drug for an acute (rapid) disease has been made - because making this new drug is still hard and expensive and the pharma firm is unwilling to scale up production before there are good signs it might work.

(One drug in a thousand survives the normally long, long expensive trek from the first look at it, to mass production and mass use.)

Such new life-saving drugs tend to go to specialists in the disease it is judged best suited for and these doctors frequently have many
rapidly dying patients at hand who might live if they get it.

The only moral, ethical, solution is to grit one's teeth, stop up your tears and resolve to divide the limited supply among the healthiest/youngest/smallest patients, hoping in this way to get a few successes that will spur on greater production of the drug.

A dozen small children might use the same weight of limited drug as one elderly , weak, fat, adult ---- and get better results.

But with this very biased success could come more of the drug, to then humanely treat all the dying without selecting one over another.

Carefully applied, triage can be highly moral.

But there didn't seem any reason, in advance, to pick one of these young men over the other for the initial clinical trial.

The war medicine hawks had already put the 1As in one worthy pile and the 4Fs in another unworthy pile and Dawson did not want to divide 4Fs into further piles based on no morally fit grounds.

Dawson refused to pick and choose between Alston and Aronson : both got a few days treatment until the supply ran out.

As it turned out, Alston later got a more extensive penicillin treatment but still died. Aronson got no further penicillin but lived - because his particular strain turned out to respond well to massive sulfa doses given for months at a time.

He didn't get another bout of SBE for about three and a half years - a true cure by even exacting standards.

This is why I believe, despite the fact that both men both penicillin within minutes of each other, Aronson got the first needle.

Alston , I  feel certain, had been getting sulfa for weeks but it is known that Aronson didn't get any sulfa until a few more weeks after his first penicillin treatment.

If Alston was in fact the very first patient ever treated by penicillin , any success with penicillin would be quickly and loudly explained away by the many, many pioneers of sulfa --- all claiming it was really due to the use of their drug.

But if the first ever patient was Aronson, any success penicillin had with him would be due to penicillin alone and hard to refute.

Convincing scientists - and their egos - is harder than making major scientific discoveries

The sad fact is that success in science is based on facts and evidence and is relatively easy to achieve.

But convincing other scientists of that success in science really means reminding a lot of awfully big egos that their particular hobby horse isn't the right path to success after all - an extremely difficult process.

Rhetoric, not facts, is key here ----- it might seem ridiculous to highlight the success of one patient given a medication just moments before another , but to truthfully claim that my medicine cured the very first patient it treated was (and is) a potent bragging point.

Dawson's ego was small but he was not naive : I believe he did treat Aronson first, if only by mere moments, to help him win his rhetorical battle with his doubting bosses.

Dawson was extremely modest and truthful : he only ever claimed that Aronson lived through this first bout of SBE due to sulfa, not his penicillin.

 (Though Dawson later did cure him of a second bout in 1944 with enough penicillin to make a real difference.)

William Osler's take on the whole affair ?

But perhaps you believe, along with the world famous Dr William Osler and a boatload of distinguished clinicians ever since, that bedside moral support is at least as important as drugs in helping a body fight off an infection.

Then you might be forgiven in thinking that the compassion Dawson displayed to Charles Aronson, in not 'triaging' him out of the penicillin trial, was at least as important as the tiny amount of penicillin he did receive, in allowing him to live.

One way to look at Dawson's early penicillin was regard it as only .56 of one percent pure.

But alternatively - particularly if, like me,  you are a big fan of New York born  Eddie Rabbit - you could regard it as being made of "nighty nine and forty four one hundreds percent pure love".

Then you can rationally believe that Dawson's penicillin did at least help cure an invariably fatal disease in the very first person in history ever to be treated by an antibiotic ....

Medical ethics - not medical techniques - are probably the leading way to decrease or increase deaths due to war

How doctors and nurses morally regard all of their fellow human beings, rather than how they medically treat their actual, relatively few, patients, is probably the number one determinate in whether wars are relatively bloodless or particularly bloody.

The entire culture takes many of its moral cues from the medical professionals and when they (as in WWII Germany and America )  sanction or even advocate neglecting or killing those judged lesser than others, this attitude bleeds across the whole country and into the actions of its troops --with horrendous consequences.

But when doctors and nurses publicly stress , particularly in wartime , that every life (even those weak and destined never to be able to contribute much directly to the war effort) is infinitely valuable and infinitely worth saving, they indirectly shorten wars and reduce bloodshed.

Because wars drag on and killing is unlimited when (a) participants feel that the other side is so worthless that it isn't wrong to kill them even after they surrender and (b) the other side is reluctant to negotiate a surrender, correctly believing they will then be all killed after they laid down their arms.

The Geneva Conventions do shorten wars and do reduce war deaths when all sides accept them and act upon them , observing the spirit of those conventions, and just not 'the letter of the law'.

In many ways, the Allies failed to observe the spirit of those conventions.

By way of pointed contrast, Henry Dawson felt it critically important that his nation be publicly seen as expending great efforts to save the lives of its most worthless citizens, even in the midst of an all-out world war.

Hence his accelerated offering of a little penicillin-of-hope for two young men dying of invariable fatal SBE infection, precisely on the morning of October 16th 1940.

He wasn't assuming it would actually save their lives, but it might* , and he was determined that they and their families would know that all efforts possible had been done to save them, despite being in a teaching hospital gearing up to focus on 1A war medicine instead.

(* Just as Dawson hadn't given up his place in a WWI  stretcher for the battlefield wounded to a man triaged as dying, in the belief that it would thereby save his life, only that it might and was worth a try.)

These two youths  can be regarded as representative of all those  about to be regarded as the 4Fs of the 4Fs, "mere useless mouths", as the first day of America's first peacetime draft registration process remorselessly triaged American citizens into those worthy and those unworthy.

Green Ward or railway siding ...

This relatively inexpensive simple act, Dawson felt, if extended  to all of America's weak and sickly, would reassure all of its citizens, all those of neutral and occupied nations, even all those of enemy combatant nations, that joining such a nation as an ally or surrendering to it, would not result in their own deaths.

Sometimes, as Medicins Sans Frontieres has shown time and and again ,the publicly perceived ethics of doctors have done far more to save lives than any surgical or chemotherapeutic procedure they could devise.

Doctors, whether in a terminal SBE "Green Ward" at Columbia Presbyterian or at a railway siding at Auschwitz, set an crucial example that all the rest of society observes and acts upon......

The battle over wartime penicillin, EUGENICALLY speaking : who makes it and who gets it ?

Eugenics dominated ALLIED war aims

Wartime America was consumed by "popular-eugenic" emotions, (as was the rest of the world of the early 1940s.)

These emotions lay just below conscious thought, but were often behind conscious deed.


But in practise, even semi-conscious eugenic emotion divided into soaring rhetoric and sagging reality.

Modernity/Eugenics/Triage/Conscription (the four terms are basically 100% interchangeable) was consumed with the thought of competition ; with the mighty and the wise usually winning out over the weak and the foolish.

War, of course, was the ultimate form of competition for survival.

In theory, only the 1As of the world went to war, to defend the 4Fs of the world who were too weak  and /or too cowardly to defend themselves.

But in practise, modernity's wars were "a competition too far" to mis-use Cornelius Ryan's phrase : modern war was too competitive, often resulting in as many deaths on the side of the winners, as on the side of the losers.

In the minds of popular eugenics , sending our 'best blood' off to defend the country, meant only the loss of our best blood while those of 'weaker blood' stayed home - safe - and multiplied their offspring even more than normal.

Too many successful wars, and soon our nation would be overrun by imbeciles and their children !

So bravery in war had to be divided into physical bravery (actually going into battle against bullets and shells with only your serge cloth uniform as your armour) and leadership bravery (inspired military leadership, from safely well behind the front lines.)

This latter definition of bravery proved a morally slippery slope.

Because soon scientific efforts and organizational planning of  production and logistics in modernity's wars became almost as important as mere generalship.

Soon, appearances to the contrary, a well educated healthy, wealthy young 1A man safe behind a desk in Washington wasn't evading the draft, he was - in fact -  'winning the war !'

And to the middle-class, middle-aged men running the local draft boards, it didn't seem fair that only their well-fed, well-educated sons met the draft requirements of a modern mechanized armed forces.

(This was all thanks to the dozen years of the Great Depression reducing the health and occupational skills of the working class and poor.)

So soon those failing the first draft calls : those illiterate, in indifferent health, in jail, black, latino and aboriginal were lifted and they were being drafted as fast as possible.

 They were to provide the physical bravery in the front lines, at the pointy end of America's big stick.

Donkeys.

But these quasi 4Fs couldn't be led (aka pushed) without inspired bravery from the 1As in the rear, the lions.

So the sons of the middle class and sons of the upper ends of the prosperous working class got exemptions from the draft ; they were needed at home to provide the skills to create the mechanical equipment that would really win the war.

(The donkeys in the infantry would merely form the occupation garrison after the real battle was won.)

The middle class has always loved mechanized war, the more high tech the better: it lowers their chances of actually having to die in the front lines to a much lower level.

Old fashioned infantry wars come down to personal bravery and this , eugenically speaking, should be found more in the middle class 1As than in the 4Fs of the poor - so as in the 19th century myth, the middle class would have had to dominate the front lines of every infantry battle.

There were just a few flies in this happy middle class ointment.

( I won't discuss the most ironic one : that the supposedly safe middle class military occupation of driving a high tech plane dropping bombs on civilians 3 miles below you, turned out to be even more dangerous than the ultimate low tech job of the poor slobs holding a bolt-action rifle in a foxhole !)

One was that there were never enough well feed well educated young white men freed up to fight America's mechanical war all around the globe.

So one way to free up more such mechanically-trained men was to
say that mom's husband , as well as her sons, should be liable for the draft.

Exempted men opposed this idea strongly, claiming that they weren't being cowardly (they were potentially 1A draft picks after all) but that it was more important that they maintained the home front: their daughters really needed a father to see they weren't off running round with 4f boys.

Or worse : getting a factory job.

Because some patriotic fools wanted to see draft-free women do many of the industrial jobs that men had always traditionally done and were still doing in wartime.

Men literally rioted over this threat to their safety, though they were careful not to put it in those terms.

Women, they exclaimed, were too physically weak, intellectually weak, above all too emotionally weak : they'd wet their pants, trying to tighten the bolts on the outside of an armoured car.

In fact the real fear was "that if women got my job, I could now be drafted and end up in that same armoured car, under enemy fire, wetting my pants !"

This reminds us to never take people's surface reasons for their actions at face value, but to probe the real, often hidden, reasons for their behaviour.

Finally, at long last, to wartime penicillin and the words of those two famous penicillin lions, Dr AN Richards and Dr Howard Florey.

The normally highly-combative Howard Florey, on his trip to the combat zone of the Middle East and Sicily, quietly knuckled under to the dictate that precious penicillin wasn't to be wasted on soldiers dying of  wounds.

(I take that to mean that his initial protests were mere pro forma and I think that even his most sycophant biographers who agree with me.)

The thinking was that these wounds were so severe, that even if they healed, they'd still be discharged and be of no further use to the army.

 and from then on , they'd just a burden to the decent middle class people at home who fund the military pension plan.

(Oh no, they'd never be so blunt as that - in public - but even a fool could follow their drift.)

Instead, the dictate read - use your precious penicillin on men who already have several alternative treatments for their non-fatal disease, the clap.

So why in earth use precious penicillin on their non-fatal wounds while letting other brave soldiers die of their combat wounds?

Because front line soldiers - like the paratroopers - by some strange coincidence - proven very likely to contract non-fatal VD (despite their free condoms) just when there were strong rumours a big push was about to begin.

(The morality of them being unfaithful to wife or girlfriend back home didn't enter into the discussion till later when the scandal went public ; for now, this was just man-to-man locker room talk.)

The treatments of VD, before penicillin, did work but involved toxic drugs and months away from the front line as careful needle followed careful needle -- by contrast, non-toxic penicillin could cure in 2 days.

Result ? The hapless paratrooper couldn't avoid possible death in the big battle , but would soon be back in the thick of it.

He mightn't be happy, but from Sicily back to Iowa, other men would sigh in silent relief : ' better him than me in the line of fire and near-certain death.'

Because if our reputed brave but clapped-out paratrooper wasn't dying for his country, who would take his place ?

Yep, chump, you would !

America's penicillin czar - the closest man to filling Dr Florey's role in the UK on penicillin - was another 'doctor' : AN Richards, part time head of the (in) famous OSRD's medical division and full time shill for Merck.

He , like Florey, cheerfully admitted that his interest in penicillin hadn't been humanitarian.

His explanation is often glossed over, so let us parse it carefully.

His interest, he wrote, wasn't in saving German or Japanese lives which is why he claimed he censored news of penicillin ( untrue - he censored only its patentable, post-war commercial aspects: in this his real enemy was his Allies' own pharmaceutical industries).

He wasn't interested in saving Allied civilians lives - which is why he never pushed for an all out effort at production of imperfect, impure, natural (again non-patentable) penicillin.

He wasn't even interested in saving Allied soldiers' lives, he wrote.

His only priority was 'getting (wounded) allied soldiers back to the front' : better your son die there, than mine, in other words.

Morally, this sort of triage: saving only those soldiers lightly wounded and thus capable of going back to the front in place of my as-yet-un-drafted son, is a very slippery moral slope.

We can beat the Nazis by being beastly, like the Nazis....

Morality, once upon this slope, ends up sliding down to a railway siding outside Oswiecim Poland , where doctors like Florey and Richards, in jackboots and whips triage the descending passengers of trains like some satanic football coach : you, to work out on the field, you, to the showers.

Doctor Henry Dawson, by way of total contrast, won his Military Cross for rebuking this heartless form of triage in WWI and from October 1940 onwards, gave up his life during WWII to rebuking it with regard to wartime penicillin ,both as to who made it and who got it.

We can only win by being as moral as the nazis are immoral...

His October 1940 war aims were not yet the Allied war aims, but that too would change - in time......