Nobel prize merely for concentrating penicillin into a SOLID for therapeutic use ?

Gloria T Sanders (in her 1986 book on amputations of the lower limbs) mentions in passing that Howard Florey was the first to concentrate penicillin into a solid, so it could finally be used in human therapy.

This has become a commonplace in recent years, as a Google search on "Florey" and "concentrated" will quickly reveal, replacing earlier claims that he was the first to "purify" penicillin.

But since the solid penicillin was in fact not a whit more stable than Fleming's original liquid penicillin, if  both were properly stored, it offered no advantages to Fleming's wet stuff and a whole lot of disadvantages.

Florey's team had to do a great deal of expensive and labour-intensive chemical work to reduce 3 grams of watery penicillin (containing about 6 to 12 units of biological activity in total) to one milligram of solid penicillin containing about 2 to 4 units in total.

So now, instead of saving three dying patients, only one could be selected to live and the other two had to be triaged to die prematurely.

Remind me again how this was a therapeutic improvement !

And in addition, since life-saving penicillin had to be injected not swallowed, that dry milligram of penicillin had to be dissolved back into three grams of water, to put into the human body.

It seemed a long and wasteful effort, only to end up right back where you began.

The view that anything dried was inevitably better ,"more modern", than its fresh and juicy original was common in the era between the two world wars, particularly in Florey's Britain.

British cooking in the 1920s can be practically defined by the sudden availability year around of abundant and cheap dried fruits from all over the Empire.

Even today, Britain remain far and away the most avid consumers of packaged foods.

But it is not so in medicine that dry is invariably better than wet , along the road of progress.

Unlike penicillin, WWII combat blood goes from dry back to wet ...

WWII started with the military medical services of the Allies happily separating the plasma from the red cells of volunteer blood, throwing away the perfectly good and valuable red cells and then shipping the dried plasma to the combat-front to deal with fatal shock from massive wounds.

Later they realized that while the plasma did prevent immediate death from shock, a badly wounded serviceman who had lots of plasma but not enough red cells was truly over-stressing his already badly stressed heart and lungs needlessly, making survival still touch and go.

So a relatively minor administrative change (providing low tech disposable iceboxes and making liquid blood by plane transport a very top priority) allowed liquid blood to flow to the front-lines in the last year of the war - saving more lives than dry plasma could.

Concentration ,let me remind you, did not separate the tiny amounts ( ppm) of penicillin from the roughly 3% of solute solids (aka impurities) in the original gram of penicillin juice - it merely removed all the (sterile by definition) water.

But since those impurities were basically non-toxic, they were no more (and no less) harmful evaporated temporarily solid or remaining dissolved in water until they were injected.

Dignified, if alpha-male-ish, scientists do not going around saying my penis is longer than yours but they did going around saving my penicillin is purer than yours.

Which is to say, instead of concentrating penicillin purposelessly only to lose two thirds of it, they truly did purify it to a point of being between 15% to 90% pure, but at an even higher cost in terms of chemicals and labour - and penicillin - lost in the process.

But it did not save lives - it cost lives : hardly something those fine folks in Stockholm should be rewarding ....

Why are we all so 'POST' the modern civilization that beat the Nazis?

If it is as the mainstrean mythology says, that it was only Modern Civilization that stood between us and an eternal Nazi hell, why then has Modernity been tossed aside like a used condom ?

Why then has the blessed savior been replaced by what ? - the same sort of eco-anti-modern trash that the no-smoking, teetotalling, vegetarian Hitler himself peddled ?

Well of course there is always the alternative explanation : that Hitler and Stalin and Tojo et al were fully modern figures.

Unfortunately they were all too fully modern figures, people who took Modernity's values to their logical conclusions --- until the civilized world reared back in revulsion at the god they had cast up and worshipped.

In this explanation we got through WWII with our modernist hegemony all in one piece (more or less) but in the calmer post war waters we began a long slow reassessment of the values we had taken for granted for more than a century.

And, by the 1979, we were prepared to say that we are totally changed from what we had been in 1939, 40 years earlier.

We are post all the modernity stuff, past it ,well past it.

It was grandpa's stuff, not ours.

But if we were sure of what set of values we didn't hold, we seemed far less certain of what new values we now did hold.

Christ people,people : soon the world will have been post-modern longer than it ever was bloody modern !

What are we for people ?? We have got to stop defining ourselves by what we are against.

Small 'g' greens the world over aren't going to have any real impact until we greens sort this WWII thing out.

We'll get no where until we answer the really big question: was it Modernity that saved the day in '45 - or was it the sort of thing that got us into trouble in '39  in the first place ????

A "glass-half-full" history of WWII

My book was inspired by an important poll of Americans seeking to determine the most important news story of the entire 20th Century.

In 1999, over 36,000 American men and women told the Newseum and USA Weekend magazine that the single most important event of the 20th Century involved a little boy and a baby girl and happened on a tiny island not far off the American coast back in the 1940s.

Actually the men and women divided by gender - the men pointing to the baby boy as story number one  and the women saying the baby girl was the most important.

The men , backed up by tenured, professional, important historians, said that WWII ended in a BANG, and gave a downcast glass-half-empty account of the war's end.

By contrast the women looked up from the diapers and said the war ended hopefully with a WHIMPER, and in their view the glass was half-full.

I too take this view and decided to write a green revisionist history of 1939-1945 that sees the outcome as more hopeful than not.

My view of WWII may owe more to Alexander Pope and Francois
Rabelais than to the academic Dunces of my own era but so be it....

AGAPE penicillin: Nature Won; Modernity Zero

Sixty five years later is Einstein's famous formula still the one that best describes 1945 ?

ie  E=MC2 


Or was the most lasting impact of  1939-1945's MODERN-WORLD war the fact that yesterday's Big MO (Modernity) lost.

And that Nature won.

And that in 1945, out of the resulting wreckage crawled PostModernity, aka us PO folk (the baby boom generation and our children and children's children ) ?

(Sadly resigned godparents: Adorno and Horkheimer.)

IE, is  "WWII=MOgoesPO"   today's best short, short,
short but correct formulaic answer to the exam request to sum up mankind's biggest, bloodiest war ever ?

who lost the last MODERN--WORLD war, 1939-1945 ?

You mean the one where Modernity (Big MO) warred with the World?

Big MO lost and lost badly.

 'Nature Bats Last' (and Nature bats long and deep) .

 And in 1945, out of the resulting wreckage crawled PostModernity, aka POMO or simply PO.

All of us alive today - all of us - have spent the majority of our lives  as 'PO folks' in the 65 years since 1945.

Our godparents ?

Some folks called Adorno and Horkheimer.

Forget the claim that modernist claim that 1945 means E=MC2.

Time has revealed that 1945's actual formula to be this:

WWII=MOgoesPO

WWII : German tanks mauling Polish horses to Polish horses hauling German tanks...

In September 1939, as reports emerged from neutral American and Italian journalists of 'fast-moving German panzer tanks destroying charges by the lumbering Polish horse calvary', the world's thumb-suckers all agreed: this war would see the Triumph of the Mobile Will over Stolid Matter.

A war of active chemical synthesis over passive biology and agriculture.

Of physics and active weather modification projects over the passive observations and avoidances of meteorology.

A war of fast tanks over slow horses; of high tech bombers and highly trained bomber crews over low tech shovels and the unskilled troops than employ them.

The weight of the Draft and Conscription would lay lightly on the population.

The mostly highly educated wouldn't even be drafted because scientists were too valuable to heft shovels overseas in some trench.

The highly skilled would either received deferments to remain in their home jobs or if drafted, would carry on their skills in the rear echelons of the war zone or would engage in combat from inside a high tech tank, plane or ship.

Only a relatively small number, the unskilled and the uneducated, the small and the thin, would end up assigned as riflemen.

They ,only, would be the ones to see an old fashioned war and to carry a backpack, a shovel and a rifle and to charge up and down hills at a trot and sleep in foxholes in the rain.

The highly scientifically educated A1s were each nation's most valuable asset - their least valuable asset was their chronically ill, medical-resource-consuming, too-sick-to-work, 4Fs.

Resources would be assigned to each, accordingly.

This would be the first fully Modern, first full Modernity, War : that would be the fundamental unity binding together the various combatant nations, despite the surface appearance of deep ideological differences.

Modernity united all combatant nations in this agreement: "There is nothing in Nature that Organized Man can not improve".

Natural Philosophy and active alternation would triumph completely , at long last, over passive Natural History and observation/ avoidance.

It was a time for Big Military Budgets , but relatively small military forces.

A time for Big Governments, Big Foundations, Big Businesses, Big Science.

The God of Modernity, all the thumb-suckers agreed, was on the side of the Big Battalions.

The stage was set so let the drama begin !

But entering Stage Left ,as unobserved as any airborne spore , came :


 'the Little Guy from Chrysogenum' ...