I'm today's go-to-expert on yesterday's battle over "penicillin-for-all" - by default

While I consider myself the world's leading expert on the wartime battle over the principle of penicillin for all, I also recognize I am also probably the only person in the world who gives a tinker's damn over that 75 year old battle.

A pity that.

Because there are still lessons for today in that old battle, particularly with regards to drugs now costing cancer patients $300,000 a year per person.

If wartime penicillin was a wah pedal ....

Imagine the Nobel prize winner for medicine , Baron Howard Florey, being pulled off his efforts to discover new antibiotics in the late 1940s by an impatient Leo Fender.

Leo pleads, "Howard,make me a wah pedal, and make it quick ; I need something unique for my new guitar and amp line".

Howard takes his time, and delivers the pedal years late. But it is beautiful finished and has a high fidelity electronic circuit that is so pure that it delivers vanishingly small amounts of harmonic distortion (albeit at the cost of an anemic output).

I can already hear guitar players going "Oh, goody !"

Luckily for humanity, Leo has also telepathed the spirit of penicillin pioneer Henry Dawson back to earth and given him the same assignment.

Early next morning, Henry has the job all done : a crude but workable bread-board design, with screamingly high distortion impurities, but with a low battery drain design and the effect level preset on 11 on a scale of one to ten (aka ("stun").

It is very basic looking , with just one big button, set in the very middle of the sturdy front panel of the wah pedal.

Henry's genius is that this button simply says one word : MORE !

And that my friends, is the essential kernel of the conflict between these two giants of wartime penicillin....

That 'ever-climbing' Aussie Howard Florey: year by year his listed degrees got longer and longer

While we all know the differences between a BA, MA and PhD , few of us can fathom the distinctions between a BM/MB, and DM/M.D. in the field of medicine --- even when our life literally depends on it.

Most of us today, particularly in North America, tend to regard as the only real medical doctor someone who not merely has a degree of some sort from a medical school, but who has also passed an internship at a hospital (if not a residency), in addition to passing a local medical society's entry exams and gaining some hospital admitting privileges.

We tend to think , in other words, that the only real medical doctor is a full MD in the lay sense of that technical term, who is licensed to deal directly with acutely ill patients , giving them all forms of narcotics and IV needles,  can perform minor outpatient operations and is able to admit them to nearby large general hospitals.

In the British Commonwealth (outside of Canada), rather than a doctorate in medicine (M.D.) being the first medical degree, it is one reserved for medical researchers doing a PhD thesis in medicine. (DM=PhD in medicine= MD.)

One gets an initial BM/BS (BM=MB) and then goes off for various internships, residencies, local medical society and or speciality society exams, hospital admitting privileges etc just as brand new MDs do in North America.

Interestingly, none of the many people included in the Oxford team that Howard Florey assembled to develop penicillin were full MDs, in that lay sense of the word, including Florey himself.

(So Dr Florey was licensed, but only to do  operations on research animals but not licensed to deal with humans in the local general hospital..... Dr Chain wasn't even licensed to give needles to research animals !)

But in 1944, his old university in Adelaide gave Florey an honorary M.D. degree and he used it for the rest of his life with pride, as he did all of his honorary degrees.... without indicating their honorary nature.

His first well-known article (on penicillin) in 1940, lists him only as having a M.B.

By 1941 with his second article on penicillin, he could and did add a FRS to that.

By 1949 he is listed ,as chief author of the two volume history called simply "Antibiotics", with a MA, MD, PhD and FRS : that old oddball MB is forgotten history.

By, contrast Henry Dawson's rival penicillin effort had a much smaller team of just four people, but both he and Dr Meyer had M.D.s ---- an important distinction in 1940s American research hospitals, where by contrast with today, the PhD was a low degree indeed.

(His other team members ? Hobby had a PhD in bacteriology and Chaffee a BSc in chemistry.)

Obscure degrees, in author listings DO matter ...

Florey's team was oriented by their training and hence personal inclination , to fundamental research on on the nature of penicillin and away from saving individual lives.

Dawson's team was dominated, by training and hence personal inclination, to saving individual lives with therapeutic penicillin .

This matter of obscure degrees after researchers' names then turns out to matter greatly ...

Wartime Penicillin was a race between a Tortoise and a Hare,unexpectedly the Tortoise won but the Hare got to phone-in the results...

People invariably find the story of wartime penicillin fascinating because 75 years after the earliest events, it still remains a real puzzler with lots of inexplicables and unanswered questions.

The story of wartime penicillin is actually quite clear.... but it is its history that seems so full of holes and silences.

A great Russian poet once voiced the thought that lovers only sing love songs when they are far apart --- when they are together they have much better things to do.

So too with the winners in the race  to define and provide wartime penicillin.

The selfless nature of the objectives of those who won the race suggests that they might be equally self-effacing in the moment of triumph : just glad that penicillin was being made available to all, at a reasonable price, and before the six year long war ended.

The losers in the penicillin race were grasping and ambitious and  lost so dramatically and so unexpectedly , and so it would seem natural for them to seek a form of physic revenge by re-writing the history of wartime history.

The losers were, in part, from the government side of the race and they had lots of taxpayers money to write and publish huge official histories.

Even after that, they held most of the solid documentation (which they thoughtfully marked as "secret" during the war) in their official archives.

The same governments that , after the war, offered to generously fund all academic researchers and research projects - that they approved of .

The losers were also Big Pharma , who held much of the unpleasant details in their closely guarded archives but who were willing to fund researchers and open their archives in a limited fashion to them, provided the drug executives had reason to feel the researchers were sympathetic to their view point.

And all the secondary researchers ever since have had to scramble from pillar to post to get any sort of firm information about the winning side of the race for penicillin , while information from the losers comes at them by the trainload in war friendly well light archives in Washington and London.

How balanced an account can we expect even the most dispassionate author to provide under those circumstances ?

My job , as I see it , is not to be dispassionate but rather a partisan for the winning side : but not to be a partisan for anybody on the winning side.

I will seek to establish a firm , fact-based chronology when things did happen (and more importantly, did not happen) and try to follow the money trail : ignoring talk and claims and promises for cold hard cash (and again : more importantly, lack of evidence of cold hard cash.)

I will review all contemporary claims of penicillin yields to judge if they were credible-- and few were.

Above all, I will separate clearly when the contemporary numbers refer to absolute amounts and when they refer to relative amounts of penicillin : for this is one of the widest failings in all accounts about penicillin and one that is at the very core of the muddle about wartime penicillin.

The winning side wanted larger and larger absolute amounts of penicillin --- to help those dying of infection, in all countries, as soon as possible.

The relative purity of those absolute units of therapeutic penicillin interested them not in the slightest : greater and greater production of absolute units of therapeutic penicillin was their only concern.

Four daily injections of 500 cc of crude penicillin juice , with about 2 units of penicillin per filtered ml of medium, (4000 units of absolute penicillin per day , in total) was judged useful to Australian Jimmy Duhig because it saves a mother's live , even though that material (in relative terms of purity) was only 1 part per million of the medium !

 By way of pointed contrast, his fellow Australian Howard Florey was very proud in getting a single milligram of solid penicillin from the same amount and strength of penicillin juice, because it assayed at 450 units per mg, ie 25% pure.

Duhig's yield of therapeutic penicillin was 100% because he lost nothing trying to purify it - and the impurities in his penicillin juice caused his patient no more than temporary discomfort.

Florey's yield was 12% , because his repeated attempts to purify his penicillin juice resulted in huge losses and huge destruction of the basic penicillin ---- and it introduced toxic chemical contaminants worse than the natural impurities it sought to get rid of !

A patient receiving this material as medicine would get much less penicillin and probably find it more painful to boot.

But thankfully , patients didn't usually get this sort of penicillin from Florey.

His patient-directed penicillin was only purified to about 40 units per mg, and while nominally 'dirtier' , was actually probably safer than the early 'pure' variety : and certainly the yield was much higher and so the patient got more absolute units of germ killing power.

(Bacteria are only killed by absolute amounts of penicillin not by its relative purity : after all, the greatest diluter of penicillin - by far - is not the original pint of medium fluid but rather the quarts of blood fluid in the human body !)

No, the "pure" (high relative purity) penicillin was a holy grail sought for only one reason : we need pure penicillin to determine its chemical nature for then Man can hope to artificially synthesize it and push Mother Nature out of the picture entirely.

Millions of patients died, needlessly, during the 15 plus years of this fruitless quest.

Wouldn't you also want to cover your tracks in this shameful episode of your life....

A forgotten meme from "The Golden Age of Mysteries" held sway over wartime penicillin : to the detriment of the dying

The grey-haired teenagers of the 1870s to 1890s, the guys who actually ran World War Two, grew up on the stories of the Golden Age of Mysteries and Detectives, starting with Sherlock Holmes' Study in Scarlet in 1887.

And one thing you quickly learned in all those thousands of books in dozens of languages was that the formula that the spy had stolen from the safe - the formula upon which the fate of the Empire ( or perhaps even the world) hung - was never a formula in physics or biology or geology or astronomy.

It was always a formula in Chemistry : always a formula for the synthesis of some extremely powerful explosive or fuel or drug.

Chemistry and synthesis in those days held all the non-chemists in shock and awe --- from at least the1870s until after Hiroshima in 1945.

Much as physics held the minds of non-physicists between 1945 and 1985 and the way micro-biology still holds our non-biologist brain cells.

(Ever since the day we-the-laity first discovered that courts could convict serial murders just on the scientific basis of their trace DNA left at the scene of the crimes.)

The solution for almost every problem that wartime penicillin faced - and there were many - was "throw more chemists at the problem".

The solution for the shortage of penicillin being produced  just had to be "synthesis it - we humans have to be way smarter than mold slime could ever hope to be".

The real solution  - when it came - was surprisingly mundane : like farmers have done for thousands of years, we simply went out and looked for better breeders - in this case, better breeders who gave us, not more milk , but more penicillin instead.

The solution was not a chemical formula from the collective brains of thousands of top chemists, but rather the eyes of one, rather ordinary, mycologist in a fruit market in Illinois.

Remember the black humour vogue for "thin books" ?

(The best known was "Italian War Heroes" - unfair because even the Germans and British felt that the Italians were frequently brave and often very effective.)

the ultimate "THIN BOOK"

A better, truly thin, book would be "Mycologist War Heroes" .

Exactly where were those bastards between 1928 and 1945 anyway ?

They mightn't have been asked, very often, to paid work on penicillin - but they didn't seem to be exactly eager to volunteer either : and the importance of penicillin during WWII  (aside from its chemistry aspects from 1943 to 1945) was hardly top secret .

I suspect most mycologists spent the 'ultimate war between good and evil' either stamp collecting or devising secret ways to use funguses to destroy enemy food crops, aka germ or biological warfare.

Then civilians deaths could be got in truly wholesale amounts - not merely in the paltry retail numbers that Bomber Harris's aerial bombing had produced.

If wartime mycologists had gotten their wicked way, fungi would have still done their part to help win the war.

But not by saving millions, but rather by killing millions.......

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.....

Penicillin : from Modern to ante-Modern in six bloody years

The biggest battle of WWII was NOT Stalingrad ( physically huge but intellectually a mere bun fight between History's worst dictators) but rather the battle over wartime penicillin : who makes it and who receives it.

For WWII definitely had a 'war within a war' aspect to it .


The billions of individuals who made up the modern global civilization of 1939 had six long - bloody  - years to re-evaluate whether the core values of their culture were really worth dying for, or were they only good for starting aggressive wars  - but not the sort of values for ending aggressive wars and securing permanent peace.

The New York World's Fair of 1939 promised a total world of man-made-ness but in the case of penicillin, man-made-ness ended in abject failure and it was Mother Nature that brought us this wonder drug when Man proved to be 'not up for the job'.

The world of 1939 eugenically exalted the Big and the Mighty and denigrated the weak and the small : penicillin (once it was a perfectly pure crystal shining brighter than a thousand suns) would be distributed on strictly Darwinian lines.

It would not be made in such quantities that would require the Allies to make one less bomber or battleship : so it would have to be rationed and so would go only to the eugenically 1A people .

(Be they fighting in foreign combat lines or winning the war behind some important desk in London or Washington.)

But by 1945, those same bombers were being pulled off their jobs of riding shotgun over the NRA nation and converted into butterflies to deliver life-saving grams of Nature-made penicillin to the dying all over the world : regardless of age, color, gender and economic status.

1945 was indeed the year that baby "Baby Boomers" started entering a very new , ante-Modern world......

America sure loves its minutemen and riflemen - except during wartime

MOS 745 (circa 1780)

Do you accept - or do you deny - gun control and climate change?

Do you think that wartime penicillin should just be for healthy young  scallywags who cheat on their wives but are still fully combat-ready or do you think it should be "wasted" on the dying of all nations, races and creeds ?

Some things never change and the skygods and earthlings still mix it up to oppose each other as much today on gun control and climate change as they did back almost 75 years ago on the best uses for wartime penicillin.

Skygods sure love their guns and sure believe in an America where every man had a gun handy, to defend his family or his nation at a minute's notice.

One can't see much American culture without noticing the omnipresence of two very old symbols from yesterday in this land of tomorrow : the Revolutionary Era Minuteman and the post-Civil War Western rifleman.

It was much the same during WWII, where ads and movie iconography always focused on the modern day minuteman cum rifleman : the Army MOS 745 , the infantry trade of rifleman.

But reality spoke quite differently.

Any one moment in time, only about one American in one thousand (that's about 150,000 people) were actually up in the combat lines, fighting, as MOS 745s.

A few more were in the pipeline waiting their turn, while the vast bulk of America was - in the most profound sense - merely holding the rifleman's cloak.

Nobody much , in reality, actually wanted to be a real life rifleman or minuteman in good old WWII.

Dressing up and playing a Minuteman was lots of fun

As a result, the few MOS 745s America could obtain were almost all conscripts : generally those who were the poorest in life skills and formal education and often (a real shocker !) smaller and thinner than the non-combat boys in the rear echelons of the war.

This is why so much of the Allied debate over wartime penicillin involved these MOS 745s : they were so very few in number.

And so if the one-in-a-thousand American who was a MOS 745 was out of combat-readiness only temporarily because of something that penicillin could quickly fix, then the other 999 out of a 1000 Americans who weren't riflemen and didn't want to be riflemen, were much in favour of giving him scarce penicillin.

That was much better than "wasting it" (to use Winston Churchill's own infamous words) on some gravely wounded MOS 475 who was never was going to be able to fight again - even if he did survive his infection.

They call that rational instrumentality, and it was the hallmark of the Age of Modernity :' use 'em and then toss 'em aside like a used condom, the minute they are of no further use to you'.

Pretty sickening isn't , what granddad and grandma were up to  (morally speaking) back between 1939 and 1945: doesn't it make you want to just go off somewhere and wash your hands till they bleed with some good strong soap ?

For a medicine Modernity reserved for the military, penicillin sure missed a lot of battles ...

The USSR had at least 3 million life-threatening cases of bacterial infection between August 1940 and August 1945 that penicillin could have successfully treated.

It is not well known that Russia did make it its own penicillin and did treat some serious infections with it and saved some lives as a result during those five war years.

Sort of.

Soviet doctors treated 300 cases with their penicillin over those five years : out of at least 3 million life-threatening cases.

Not surprisingly, the Miracle of Penicillin does not loom highly in Russian historical accounts of the Great Patriotic War.

This too might easily have been the fate of wartime penicillin in the Allied West as well.


A few thousand cases treated in all, a few hundred in life-threatening situations, a few dozen front line military casualties.

Out of tens of millions of potentially life-threatening infections among the Western Allies that it was fully capable of curing.

For a medicine supposedly denied civilian use because it was needed at the battlefront, penicillin was decidedly gun-shy.

Between May 1940 and May 1941, it was proven up as a potentially unique life-saver and government fiat could have directed a gradually scaling up of production of penicillin, using the technology known at the time.

The government could have monitored the success or failure of penicillin at the Home-Front based military hospitals , which routinely treat every know disease , not just those gained in combat.

The military all by itself, at least in wartime , holds an enormous proportion of a nation's population : all ages from 17 to 67, mostly male but some female.

It can become the clinical lab, all by itself, to prove up or fail a new medication - without going anywhere near the rugged conditions at the front - rightly judged unsuitable for most experimental drugs.

Open-wound-oriented antiseptics are mostly useful on the battlefield itself, but general systemics are best used in rear base hospitals.

I suggest it was the obsession of a group of chicken-hawk medical bureaucrats , who had successfully avoided WWI when young and fit, which kept the definition of a successful medication limited to its battlefront use.

Ironically, they lacked the knowledge that real front line veterans like Henry Dawson already knew : that most military medicine is done well behind battle lines.

No Prime Minister or President, no Cabinet or Cabinet minister, no Parliament or Congress ever passed any statute or proclamation that limited the scarce wartime resources devoted to penicillin during the first four or five years of a six year war to almost nothing.

Un-elected, un-representative doctor-bureaucrats made that decision : they must bear the moral burden of explaining that signal failure of professionals swore to save lives, failing to save lives
on the most massive scale ever known to humanity......

Raymond Chandler biographers' alert : his entire war records posted online

Sgt Ray Chandler, SIR !!

Perhaps a fan of Raymond Chandler at the Public Archives of Canada, exasperated beyond measure by all the bosh written by Chandler biographers about his war record in the Canadian Army in WWI, has decided to set the record straight by posting all his military records online, free for the downloading.

Since "1940s Chivalry" (what an oxymoron !) is the most important meme in my book de-bunking the current myth of wartime penicillin, I am deeply interested myself in Chandler's WWI experiences in the Canadian infantry.

Down the mean corridors of wartime medicine....

This is because Chandler, alone and along with the subject my wartime penicillin book (Dr Henry Dawson) , was about the only public proponent of chivalry during WWII.

("The Big Sleep" and all of the Philip Marlowe series.)

And yes, Dawson too served in the Canadian Army Infantry about the same time as Chandler and he too implied it was the most formative event in his life.

Conventionally it is said that chivalry died in the aftermath of the millions of moderns who experienced the inhumanity and machine-like nature of modern war on the Western front.

These two men did experience warfare there at its harshest but came away perhaps more on fire for chivalry than before.

Something isn't adding up and I aim to ferret the truth out....