This was Henry Dawson's Acid Test : during World War Two, did the treatment of the weak and the strong by the nations that ultimately made up the Allies differ in kind or only in degree from that of the Axis nations?
Any single individual - let alone a single dying individual - could not pose that question across a broad spectrum of issues and expect to force a response.
But in focussing tightly upon the Allies' differential medical treatment of the lightly wounded combat soldier and of his high school pal back home dying of endocarditis, Dawson did manage to hit a sore spot among the Allies --- across America and Britain in particular.
In late 1943 , Henry Dawson was able to make the Allied public realize that , on this issue, their elite leaders differed far less in kind from the "the weak must die so the strong can flourish" philosophy of the Axis that anyone could have comfortably imagined back in 1939.
When the Allied public forced their leaders to alter course and provide penicillin, during wartime, for endocarditis patients, the whole of civilized thought shifted course --- permanently.
No mean response for a persistent little team locked away in a ward, a lab and a doctor's office ......
Friday, February 8, 2013
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Dies Mirabilis : October 16th 1940 : the first ever peacetime 1A Draft and the first ever 4F penicillin needle
Oh, to be there , just to see the Janus-like faces of Columbia University's campus on dies mirabilis, October 16th 1940.
Over in one corner, led by blustery University President Butler himself, most of the campus was busily and very publicly (cue the news reel cameras) engaged in the nation's first ever peacetime draft registration process : busy triaging the best 1A youth away from the 4F rejects.
Over in another corner of the campus, a tiny band of four individuals was just as busily triaging away in the opposition direction.
Led by two world war one frontline military veterans, they had deliberately - almost provocatively - picked this, of all sacred days in WASPish America's calendar - to usher in the Age of Antibiotics.
Their choice of the first ever patients was equally provocative, not merely that one was Black and the other one was Jewish, but because both were SBEs : the 4Fs of the 4Fs, in Draft Registration terms.
Both were dying from the disease rated as about "one hundred and ten" on a priority list running from one to one hundred on diseases of military priority.
Later on (by 1943), Columbia's campus again resumed a Janus-like cast, as one part beavered away at The Bomb, determined to se it at working ,killing, before peace broke out , while in another part of the campus, our tiny team was at work trying to see penicillin in high production, before death and pestilence broke out in the occupied lands.
But I like to think we will never again see such a contrasting day in such a small place, as we did on October 16th 1940 at Columbia University ....
Over in one corner, led by blustery University President Butler himself, most of the campus was busily and very publicly (cue the news reel cameras) engaged in the nation's first ever peacetime draft registration process : busy triaging the best 1A youth away from the 4F rejects.
Over in another corner of the campus, a tiny band of four individuals was just as busily triaging away in the opposition direction.
Led by two world war one frontline military veterans, they had deliberately - almost provocatively - picked this, of all sacred days in WASPish America's calendar - to usher in the Age of Antibiotics.
Their choice of the first ever patients was equally provocative, not merely that one was Black and the other one was Jewish, but because both were SBEs : the 4Fs of the 4Fs, in Draft Registration terms.
Both were dying from the disease rated as about "one hundred and ten" on a priority list running from one to one hundred on diseases of military priority.
Later on (by 1943), Columbia's campus again resumed a Janus-like cast, as one part beavered away at The Bomb, determined to se it at working ,killing, before peace broke out , while in another part of the campus, our tiny team was at work trying to see penicillin in high production, before death and pestilence broke out in the occupied lands.
But I like to think we will never again see such a contrasting day in such a small place, as we did on October 16th 1940 at Columbia University ....
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
OSRD /1942: did Manhattan Project type thinking bleed over and obstruct the Penicillin Project as well ?
It is crystal clear that Merck's top scientific advisor A N Richards was never a strong advocate for fast-paced penicillin development within Merck, as that drug company casually messed about with penicillin, from November 1939 till August 1941.
That is, Merck had 18 months of some sort of commercial and scientific activity around penicillin , before Howard Florey actually arrived on the scene.
But Florey eventually made Richards a strong convert to the idea of having Richards' military medical weapon oriented agency , the famous OSRD , use penicillin for secret military advantage over the Axis.
It is not clear that this would have extended - in practise - to denying penicillin to dying Axis POWs.
But keeping penicillin a secret from the Axis definitely would have denied penicillin to dying Allied POWs behind Axis lines : something that all of Florey's, Richards' and Fleming's present day defenders universally ignore.
Very much to his credit then that WWI vet and WWII military officer and doctor Robert Pulvertaft did dis-obey orders and shared the secrets of penicillin production with Axis-friendly Turkish doctors.
But imagining a Canadian dying of sulfa-resistant blood poisoning in a German POW camp and the Canadian POWs being told by the German doctor, 'we could save him , if only we had a bit of this Allied-invented penicillin that we've been hearing rumours of'.
When the Canadians ask why doesn't the doctor get some, the doctor says that if the Allies won't even share penicillin with their own dying civilians, how can they be expected to share it with the enemy ?
But could penicillin have really ever have been a potentially secret and successful medical weapon ?
Here I , following closely on Henry Dawson's thinking, definitely part company with Florey and his friend Richards.
Henry Dawson demonstrated - in just five weeks - and under conditions as fully primitive as Fleming's, that one could quickly make a lot of crude penicillin that was non-toxic when injected into humans.
If Fleming and Dawson could do so, (quickly, easily and cheaply, ) so too could the fired up Nazi war machine.
Not so, said Florey -and his side kick Richards.
The scientific characteristics of penicillin haven't changed at all since September 1928, but now , thanks to Florey, the scientific rhetoric totally had.
Florey tells his readers and listeners, to ignore completely what Fleming-the-author says is "penicillin".
To wit, 'a mixture of about two dozen unknown compounds in a slurry of water that is non-toxic even if injected in very large volumes internally, and yet has marked anti-bacterial affects'.
In my revision of the facts, says Florey in his first August 1940 article, "penicillin" is now actually just one of those compounds.
All the rest and all that water are just dirty, dank and dangerous.
Only if penicillin is first pure, dry and stable is it any good.
Because where it is really good , is in the front lines as a local antiseptic for open war wounds (here I do still agree with Fleming) ---- and that idea won't work if crude liquid penicillin must kept viable in portable electric refrigerators.
Who ever has heard of such things ?
But as Florey tells Richards how complex and difficult the purification process is, Richards grows despondent again, but never the less this information does go into the back of Richards brain.
Only to re-emerge in early 1942, when the forces of war censorship and secrecy can be employed in full bloom.
Because complex and expensive separation and purification processes had become very much a two-edged sword for American military science and industry.
Artificial rubber was vital to the war effort - it was easy to make but a real bugger to separate the good rubber from the bad.
Dried blood products held real promise at the front lines - but only if their separation wasn't so complex.
And the Atomic Bomb - a piece of cake to make it work - if only we could get enough pure U-235 separated.
At some point early in 1942, these problems suddenly became military and commercial opportunities in the minds of the OSRD's highest officers.
If only rich, un-bombed America could solve these complex purification problems - and then keep the details secret - this would give them a big military advantage over their poorer enemy opponents.
And give America a post-war commercial advantage as well over its smaller poorer Allied friends like Britain.
So just as we see an abrupt turn around , in mid 1942 , from the OSRD re sharing much atomic information with the British, we start to see the British also get less information from the OSRD about penicillin research as well.
Like synthetic rubber, synthetic quinine, dried blood products and U-235, the very expensive complexity of pure penicillin suddenly made it more, not less ,of an attraction to the military weapon-oriented OSRD.
The key was to keep secret from the American voters and taxpayers just how many miracle cures were happening with the current - relatively impure -penicillin.
Because if they knew that, the newspapers would be filled with it and the Germans and Japanese would hear about it via Neutral nation reporting.
They they too would also start curing their base hospital wounded with crude semi-purified penicillin ,largely negating the military advantage of fully dry stable pure penicillin.
But was there really ever an absolute need for dry stable penicillin to use it in the front lines ?
Poppycock !
Because it turned out that good old crude liquid blood was actually much better than the complex dried stuff at saving soldiers' lives and could just as easily be used even in combat : good old fashioned low tech American ingenuity (not from the OSRD high tech boys of course) came to the rescue.
Cheap, rugged, disposable, parachute-portable plywood ice boxes kept blood and penicillin cold, with refills of ice every couple of days........
That is, Merck had 18 months of some sort of commercial and scientific activity around penicillin , before Howard Florey actually arrived on the scene.
But Florey eventually made Richards a strong convert to the idea of having Richards' military medical weapon oriented agency , the famous OSRD , use penicillin for secret military advantage over the Axis.
It is not clear that this would have extended - in practise - to denying penicillin to dying Axis POWs.
But keeping penicillin a secret from the Axis definitely would have denied penicillin to dying Allied POWs behind Axis lines : something that all of Florey's, Richards' and Fleming's present day defenders universally ignore.
Very much to his credit then that WWI vet and WWII military officer and doctor Robert Pulvertaft did dis-obey orders and shared the secrets of penicillin production with Axis-friendly Turkish doctors.
But imagining a Canadian dying of sulfa-resistant blood poisoning in a German POW camp and the Canadian POWs being told by the German doctor, 'we could save him , if only we had a bit of this Allied-invented penicillin that we've been hearing rumours of'.
When the Canadians ask why doesn't the doctor get some, the doctor says that if the Allies won't even share penicillin with their own dying civilians, how can they be expected to share it with the enemy ?
But could penicillin have really ever have been a potentially secret and successful medical weapon ?
Here I , following closely on Henry Dawson's thinking, definitely part company with Florey and his friend Richards.
Henry Dawson demonstrated - in just five weeks - and under conditions as fully primitive as Fleming's, that one could quickly make a lot of crude penicillin that was non-toxic when injected into humans.
If Fleming and Dawson could do so, (quickly, easily and cheaply, ) so too could the fired up Nazi war machine.
Not so, said Florey -and his side kick Richards.
The scientific characteristics of penicillin haven't changed at all since September 1928, but now , thanks to Florey, the scientific rhetoric totally had.
Florey tells his readers and listeners, to ignore completely what Fleming-the-author says is "penicillin".
To wit, 'a mixture of about two dozen unknown compounds in a slurry of water that is non-toxic even if injected in very large volumes internally, and yet has marked anti-bacterial affects'.
In my revision of the facts, says Florey in his first August 1940 article, "penicillin" is now actually just one of those compounds.
All the rest and all that water are just dirty, dank and dangerous.
Only if penicillin is first pure, dry and stable is it any good.
Because where it is really good , is in the front lines as a local antiseptic for open war wounds (here I do still agree with Fleming) ---- and that idea won't work if crude liquid penicillin must kept viable in portable electric refrigerators.
Who ever has heard of such things ?
But as Florey tells Richards how complex and difficult the purification process is, Richards grows despondent again, but never the less this information does go into the back of Richards brain.
Only to re-emerge in early 1942, when the forces of war censorship and secrecy can be employed in full bloom.
Because complex and expensive separation and purification processes had become very much a two-edged sword for American military science and industry.
Artificial rubber was vital to the war effort - it was easy to make but a real bugger to separate the good rubber from the bad.
Dried blood products held real promise at the front lines - but only if their separation wasn't so complex.
And the Atomic Bomb - a piece of cake to make it work - if only we could get enough pure U-235 separated.
At some point early in 1942, these problems suddenly became military and commercial opportunities in the minds of the OSRD's highest officers.
If only rich, un-bombed America could solve these complex purification problems - and then keep the details secret - this would give them a big military advantage over their poorer enemy opponents.
And give America a post-war commercial advantage as well over its smaller poorer Allied friends like Britain.
So just as we see an abrupt turn around , in mid 1942 , from the OSRD re sharing much atomic information with the British, we start to see the British also get less information from the OSRD about penicillin research as well.
Like synthetic rubber, synthetic quinine, dried blood products and U-235, the very expensive complexity of pure penicillin suddenly made it more, not less ,of an attraction to the military weapon-oriented OSRD.
The key was to keep secret from the American voters and taxpayers just how many miracle cures were happening with the current - relatively impure -penicillin.
Because if they knew that, the newspapers would be filled with it and the Germans and Japanese would hear about it via Neutral nation reporting.
They they too would also start curing their base hospital wounded with crude semi-purified penicillin ,largely negating the military advantage of fully dry stable pure penicillin.
But was there really ever an absolute need for dry stable penicillin to use it in the front lines ?
Poppycock !
Because it turned out that good old crude liquid blood was actually much better than the complex dried stuff at saving soldiers' lives and could just as easily be used even in combat : good old fashioned low tech American ingenuity (not from the OSRD high tech boys of course) came to the rescue.
Cheap, rugged, disposable, parachute-portable plywood ice boxes kept blood and penicillin cold, with refills of ice every couple of days........
Spores and Wartime Secrecy : can they actually co-exist ?
You might think I am going to talk about Anthrax spores and asymmetrical terrorist germ warfare.
But you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
I want to talk instead about wartime penicillin, and a part of it that is never ever discussed.
Its inherently asymmetrical medical nature.
Which appropriately enough, then "drifts over" into its inherently asymmetrical military potential.
So lets start.
And lets start talking about just how the intellectually mis-guided (as well as seriously morally misguided) were the prolonged attempts by the medical establishment in both America and Britain to regard penicillium spores as something that really could remain Top Secret medical military weapons.
And not just the wartime medical establishment, for recently author Eric Lax and his publishers felt they had a real winner in an exciting clock and dagger title for their book on wartime penicillin : "The Mould in Doctor Florey's Coat".
There was always something faintly Walter Mittyesque about Florey anyway - never more so than in the incident that gave this book its title.
Dunkirk was underway just as Florey at long last accepted that ole Flem's penicillin just might be priceless after all.
But how to save penicillin for the rest of the Allied cause, if Britain fell to the Germans ?
'Let's all rub penicillium spores in the inner seams of our clothing - so even if only one of us gets away, the precious fire of penicillin research can still be re-lit elsewhere'.
But none of these Oxford naifs seemed to have dared ask the boss (Florey) just how they came to possess these incredible spores in the first place.
Henry Dawson's first big scientific effort was in promoting the concept of HGT (Horizontal Gene Transfer) ,the instant transfer of genes between different species and even different families of Life, when its initial discoverer seemed reluctant to even publish his work.
Today it is believed that soil bacteria created the first beta lactam antibiotics about ten million years ago and - via HGT - gave it to soil molds who modified it slightly and made it penicillin.
So, sometime in 1928, a particularly productive penicillin producer strain of penicillium mold blow into a fancy home in London.
Alexander Fleming's colleague John Freeman was an expert on allergies, with many rich and powerful patients.
In 1928, Freeman heard a Dutch specialist claim that basement mold spores were the cause of many allergies.
Freeman got his rich London patients (or more likely their scullery maids) to scrape molds off their basement walls to be tested by his most recent hire, Irish-born mycologist Charles La Touche, towards seeking ways to gradually desensitize the patients against their particular household mold allergens.
La Touche had no high tech ways to keep spores inside his lab alone - not that I think in the long run a spore or two doesn't get out of the most secure modern facility.
There are many more fungus than us and they have and will be on the Earth a lot longer than us primarily because of their spores.
Their spores are incredibly tiny examples of temporarily suspended Life - Dried-up Life - inside a very hardy and bumpy package.
Tiny is the key here - so tiny they float anywhere and everywhere on the gentlest of breezes - down the hall and around the world.
Being bumpy but tiny and light doesn't hurt either - they can cling to almost any surface - like a human and its luggage bound for Australia, for example.
However if that surface is the tiniest bit damp and the tiniest bit tasty (they seem willing to eat almost anything faintly organic), they spring back into active slimey life.
One of La Touche's spores drifted out of his room and along the stairs to Fleming open Petri dish.
The rest actually wouldn't have been "legend", if Fleming hadn't promptly taken a sub culture of the resulting "spoiled" petri dish, and carefully and correctly preserved it.
Fleming did little to promote the medical use of penicillin in curing disease but he did vigerously promote it as a useful way for busy hospital labs to easily isolate the so called flu bacteria (sic) .
Dozens of labs world wide got a sample from him - they then gave samples of their samples to at least dozens of others.
That is how Florey got his penicillium spores he was so busy stuffing down his coat - from a sub culture Fleming had sent to the previous director of Florey's Dunn Institute.
The Free World beyond Britain had lots of sub cultures of penicillium spores of the rare - right - type, even without Florey's belated act of charity.
In theory they didn't really need Fleming's spores, only his public article - but in practise, until 1943, they really did need his spores.
Examples of Fleming's spores were actually everywhere - some even better penicillium producers than his original un-mutated version as well.
But they could only be found by teams of researchers seeking hundreds of the right looking blue-green mold on walls and spoiled fruit, and then testing all for their possible anti-bacterial qualities.
Until miracle cures got rumoured about, no one in the world was willing to go to that much effort , just to test a troublesome possible antiseptic.
But by 1943, the miracle cure stories were out amongst the clinical doctors everywhere - and I do really mean everywhere.
Everywhere that Florey went, Egypt, Iran, Russia he had to endure local doctors thrusting excellent producing strains of penicillin molds in his face that they had found locally !
The Axis were just as quick off the mark - Japan got its strain by merely looking about locally.
And the clever Japanese correctly guessed - from one badly reproduced photo in an Egyptian picture magazine - just how best to produce the stuff !
The atomic bomb was effectively secret even if the US had proclaimed it was making one from the rooftops in 1942.
Uranium was everywhere - like penicillium spores - but a bomb from it takes the world's largest, most expensive, building ever built merely to get started on separating pure U-235 from the more abundant U-238.
And without 90% pure U-235, no working bomb. No nothing.
Tons and tons of scarce money, time and effort kept the A-Bomb an American secret, even from the British and Canadians , let alone the Axis and Neutrals.
But by late 1943, popular magazine articles cheekily showed how one could make penicillin at home, on a kitchen top, for about $5 in equipment and growth mediums.
One didn't even need to go out searching for those semi-rare penicillin-producing strains by then.
In a surprising - even shocking - total volt face, the NRRL's Coghill and Raper had released the top two strains of penicillium.
That's right, the top two strains that were then producing most of the Allies' military-bound penicillin - to the public American mold type collection in Washington where, as they told the readers of JAMA worldwide, "anyone" can get some at a "nominal charge".
!!!!!!!!
No word if Argentina's Washington DC based scientific attache quickly took a cab over, got some samples and sent them off to his friends in Germany.
Clearly, penicillin was never a viable secret military medical weapon - Florey and Richards were both , to put it kindly, completely deluded to ever think so.
Deluded by utopian visions of near-total purity.
Because unlike the Atomic Bomb and U-235, penicillin's starting material (the spores) were both common worldwide AND its production fully successful even in a highly impure (aka low tech) state.
This was what Fleming had discovered in 1928 but never acted upon - this was the key insight that Henry Dawson brought to the penicillin story, starting on October 16th 1940....
But you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
I want to talk instead about wartime penicillin, and a part of it that is never ever discussed.
Its inherently asymmetrical medical nature.
Which appropriately enough, then "drifts over" into its inherently asymmetrical military potential.
So lets start.
And lets start talking about just how the intellectually mis-guided (as well as seriously morally misguided) were the prolonged attempts by the medical establishment in both America and Britain to regard penicillium spores as something that really could remain Top Secret medical military weapons.
And not just the wartime medical establishment, for recently author Eric Lax and his publishers felt they had a real winner in an exciting clock and dagger title for their book on wartime penicillin : "The Mould in Doctor Florey's Coat".
There was always something faintly Walter Mittyesque about Florey anyway - never more so than in the incident that gave this book its title.
Dunkirk was underway just as Florey at long last accepted that ole Flem's penicillin just might be priceless after all.
But how to save penicillin for the rest of the Allied cause, if Britain fell to the Germans ?
'Let's all rub penicillium spores in the inner seams of our clothing - so even if only one of us gets away, the precious fire of penicillin research can still be re-lit elsewhere'.
But none of these Oxford naifs seemed to have dared ask the boss (Florey) just how they came to possess these incredible spores in the first place.
Henry Dawson's first big scientific effort was in promoting the concept of HGT (Horizontal Gene Transfer) ,the instant transfer of genes between different species and even different families of Life, when its initial discoverer seemed reluctant to even publish his work.
Today it is believed that soil bacteria created the first beta lactam antibiotics about ten million years ago and - via HGT - gave it to soil molds who modified it slightly and made it penicillin.
So, sometime in 1928, a particularly productive penicillin producer strain of penicillium mold blow into a fancy home in London.
Alexander Fleming's colleague John Freeman was an expert on allergies, with many rich and powerful patients.
In 1928, Freeman heard a Dutch specialist claim that basement mold spores were the cause of many allergies.
Freeman got his rich London patients (or more likely their scullery maids) to scrape molds off their basement walls to be tested by his most recent hire, Irish-born mycologist Charles La Touche, towards seeking ways to gradually desensitize the patients against their particular household mold allergens.
La Touche had no high tech ways to keep spores inside his lab alone - not that I think in the long run a spore or two doesn't get out of the most secure modern facility.
There are many more fungus than us and they have and will be on the Earth a lot longer than us primarily because of their spores.
Their spores are incredibly tiny examples of temporarily suspended Life - Dried-up Life - inside a very hardy and bumpy package.
Tiny is the key here - so tiny they float anywhere and everywhere on the gentlest of breezes - down the hall and around the world.
Being bumpy but tiny and light doesn't hurt either - they can cling to almost any surface - like a human and its luggage bound for Australia, for example.
However if that surface is the tiniest bit damp and the tiniest bit tasty (they seem willing to eat almost anything faintly organic), they spring back into active slimey life.
One of La Touche's spores drifted out of his room and along the stairs to Fleming open Petri dish.
The rest actually wouldn't have been "legend", if Fleming hadn't promptly taken a sub culture of the resulting "spoiled" petri dish, and carefully and correctly preserved it.
Fleming did little to promote the medical use of penicillin in curing disease but he did vigerously promote it as a useful way for busy hospital labs to easily isolate the so called flu bacteria (sic) .
Dozens of labs world wide got a sample from him - they then gave samples of their samples to at least dozens of others.
That is how Florey got his penicillium spores he was so busy stuffing down his coat - from a sub culture Fleming had sent to the previous director of Florey's Dunn Institute.
The Free World beyond Britain had lots of sub cultures of penicillium spores of the rare - right - type, even without Florey's belated act of charity.
In theory they didn't really need Fleming's spores, only his public article - but in practise, until 1943, they really did need his spores.
Examples of Fleming's spores were actually everywhere - some even better penicillium producers than his original un-mutated version as well.
But they could only be found by teams of researchers seeking hundreds of the right looking blue-green mold on walls and spoiled fruit, and then testing all for their possible anti-bacterial qualities.
Until miracle cures got rumoured about, no one in the world was willing to go to that much effort , just to test a troublesome possible antiseptic.
But by 1943, the miracle cure stories were out amongst the clinical doctors everywhere - and I do really mean everywhere.
Everywhere that Florey went, Egypt, Iran, Russia he had to endure local doctors thrusting excellent producing strains of penicillin molds in his face that they had found locally !
The Axis were just as quick off the mark - Japan got its strain by merely looking about locally.
And the clever Japanese correctly guessed - from one badly reproduced photo in an Egyptian picture magazine - just how best to produce the stuff !
The atomic bomb was effectively secret even if the US had proclaimed it was making one from the rooftops in 1942.
Uranium was everywhere - like penicillium spores - but a bomb from it takes the world's largest, most expensive, building ever built merely to get started on separating pure U-235 from the more abundant U-238.
And without 90% pure U-235, no working bomb. No nothing.
Tons and tons of scarce money, time and effort kept the A-Bomb an American secret, even from the British and Canadians , let alone the Axis and Neutrals.
But by late 1943, popular magazine articles cheekily showed how one could make penicillin at home, on a kitchen top, for about $5 in equipment and growth mediums.
One didn't even need to go out searching for those semi-rare penicillin-producing strains by then.
In a surprising - even shocking - total volt face, the NRRL's Coghill and Raper had released the top two strains of penicillium.
That's right, the top two strains that were then producing most of the Allies' military-bound penicillin - to the public American mold type collection in Washington where, as they told the readers of JAMA worldwide, "anyone" can get some at a "nominal charge".
!!!!!!!!
Didn't they know there was a war on ?
No word if Argentina's Washington DC based scientific attache quickly took a cab over, got some samples and sent them off to his friends in Germany.
Clearly, penicillin was never a viable secret military medical weapon - Florey and Richards were both , to put it kindly, completely deluded to ever think so.
Deluded by utopian visions of near-total purity.
Because unlike the Atomic Bomb and U-235, penicillin's starting material (the spores) were both common worldwide AND its production fully successful even in a highly impure (aka low tech) state.
This was what Fleming had discovered in 1928 but never acted upon - this was the key insight that Henry Dawson brought to the penicillin story, starting on October 16th 1940....
Penicillin in wartime: an alphabet soup of organizations passing the buck then hogging the credit
I am still not fully recovered from the disaster of my first public talk on wartime penicillin before Dalhousie University's Medical History Society.
I was given a very generous amount of time by the Society's Jock Murray and Allan Marble to state my case but it didn't help : my choice for a title slide in my powerpoint presentation simply covered far too big a subject and left me no 'on the spot' wiggle room.
" Wartime Penicillin : from secret 'war weapon' to widely publicized 'beacon of hope' " is not a topic line easy to compress.
(Though last night's blog entry on the Janus Month of March 1943 would have been a good attempt at compression.)
Within a minute or two into the talk, I felt like crawling into a hole and disappearing forever --- I could see by the faces of the audience that I was giving far too much unknown information far too quickly.
Any two or three of my powerpoint slides, from the forty two I had actually come with, could have formed the basis of an interesting talk and a lively amount of discussion afterwards.
Eight and a half years of research has finally made me more or less comfortable with the vast array of sound-alike organizations involved in wartime penicillin, and their activities are just as important as the individual stories of individuals like Fleming, Florey and Dawson.
But trying to establish what the OSRD and OPRD were in the first place, even before trying to show how much at odds these two similar sounding government agencies really were on penicillin is a month's work - not a small part of a 40 minute talk.
It is entirely my fault - because the night before the lecture I had noticed that even a well known expert on the history of wartime penicillin (name omitted !) still managed to badly confuse the two in an major article in a digitalized book I found on the internet.
And when a printed work is digitalized and put on the internet, an error is forever and eternity --- and visible to all, worldwide.
That is why my penicillin work will remain electronically fluid on this blog and in website e-books.
My errors of fact and interpretation (and I expect and even hope to make many) will be instantly correctable as new information comes to light or savvy readers spot errors and typos.)
And another thing about individuals and institutions when Cinderella unexpectedly turns into the Queen of the Ball.
After passing the buck for years, they now suddenly tack hard right and start clawing each other to take all the credit .
Sorting who actually did what when, not what they claimed ,after the war ,in expensive official histories, that they did, is itself a work of many lifetimes...
I was given a very generous amount of time by the Society's Jock Murray and Allan Marble to state my case but it didn't help : my choice for a title slide in my powerpoint presentation simply covered far too big a subject and left me no 'on the spot' wiggle room.
" Wartime Penicillin : from secret 'war weapon' to widely publicized 'beacon of hope' " is not a topic line easy to compress.
(Though last night's blog entry on the Janus Month of March 1943 would have been a good attempt at compression.)
Within a minute or two into the talk, I felt like crawling into a hole and disappearing forever --- I could see by the faces of the audience that I was giving far too much unknown information far too quickly.
Any two or three of my powerpoint slides, from the forty two I had actually come with, could have formed the basis of an interesting talk and a lively amount of discussion afterwards.
Eight and a half years of research has finally made me more or less comfortable with the vast array of sound-alike organizations involved in wartime penicillin, and their activities are just as important as the individual stories of individuals like Fleming, Florey and Dawson.
But trying to establish what the OSRD and OPRD were in the first place, even before trying to show how much at odds these two similar sounding government agencies really were on penicillin is a month's work - not a small part of a 40 minute talk.
It is entirely my fault - because the night before the lecture I had noticed that even a well known expert on the history of wartime penicillin (name omitted !) still managed to badly confuse the two in an major article in a digitalized book I found on the internet.
And when a printed work is digitalized and put on the internet, an error is forever and eternity --- and visible to all, worldwide.
That is why my penicillin work will remain electronically fluid on this blog and in website e-books.
My errors of fact and interpretation (and I expect and even hope to make many) will be instantly correctable as new information comes to light or savvy readers spot errors and typos.)
And another thing about individuals and institutions when Cinderella unexpectedly turns into the Queen of the Ball.
After passing the buck for years, they now suddenly tack hard right and start clawing each other to take all the credit .
Sorting who actually did what when, not what they claimed ,after the war ,in expensive official histories, that they did, is itself a work of many lifetimes...
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
Wartime Penicillin's coke-addled Janus Month : March 1943
In March 1943 (midway through the war) , for the very first time in WWII, a part of wartime penicillin research that had been hitherto public was finally and effectively put under official government censorship : anything involving the chemistry of penicillin.
At the very same time, other (hitherto effectively secret) parts of the penicillin story were about to become globally publicized in official government propaganda !
"I am not making this up", as Canada's Liberal Party is wont to say.
The chemical nature of penicillin was about to become Top Secret and there was to be no more public articles by Howard Florey's or Henry Dawson's team, in journals like NATURE and SCIENCE, all about the chemical structure of penicillin to aid German or Japanese chemists on how to synthesize penicillin themselves.
But given the wide availability of all the previous chemistry structure-oriented articles in these two, the biggest of all general science journals in the world, the Axis might not need much further help.
Because back issues of these two journals were still easily available to the scientific diplomatic attaches of the many still-neutral nations in capital cities like London, Ottawa and Washington, the Axis chemists may not have needed to employ spies, to seek out the newest secret research .
But the Top Secret classification reflected a new found confidence at Merck, Oxford and the ORSD that the penicillin molecule had finally been cracked and the chemistry of the molecule was a commercial and possibly military secret well worth keeping.
Even Robert Coghill, the penicillin czar at the fermenatation-oriented NRRL labs, was about to turn his coat to the side of synthesis.
What better time then to hand the hated finicky biological approach to penicillin production to the War Production Board, (the WPB) ?
Who cared if the WPB and the normally-secretive US Army seemed determined to widely publicize , to Allied, Axis and neutral nation alike, just how good this new fangled penicillin really was for military medicine ?
Yes.
Because for the first time in the war, parts of penicillin other that its chemistry (such as its clinical miracle cures which had been hitherto in America effectively if unofficially censored) were going to become the focus of official government propaganda and broadcast to the heavens.
In an variant on "the first shall be last and the last first", what had been public was about to become secret and what had been secret was about to become public.
In January 1943, Karl Meyer, the chemist of Dawson's team, could still publish the team's latest best guess on the chemical formula for penicillin, but the team still couldn't discuss their results on treating patients since October 1940.
By January 1944, Dawson could publish his success with patients and penicillin to the world via JAMA, but later that same year, Meyer's harmless paper on biological products of penicillin written to be delivered at a conference, was forced to be withdrawn at the last minute, for fear he'd say something chemical and hence secret.
Bizarre but true ...... !
At the very same time, other (hitherto effectively secret) parts of the penicillin story were about to become globally publicized in official government propaganda !
"I am not making this up", as Canada's Liberal Party is wont to say.
The chemical nature of penicillin was about to become Top Secret and there was to be no more public articles by Howard Florey's or Henry Dawson's team, in journals like NATURE and SCIENCE, all about the chemical structure of penicillin to aid German or Japanese chemists on how to synthesize penicillin themselves.
But given the wide availability of all the previous chemistry structure-oriented articles in these two, the biggest of all general science journals in the world, the Axis might not need much further help.
Because back issues of these two journals were still easily available to the scientific diplomatic attaches of the many still-neutral nations in capital cities like London, Ottawa and Washington, the Axis chemists may not have needed to employ spies, to seek out the newest secret research .
But the Top Secret classification reflected a new found confidence at Merck, Oxford and the ORSD that the penicillin molecule had finally been cracked and the chemistry of the molecule was a commercial and possibly military secret well worth keeping.
Even Robert Coghill, the penicillin czar at the fermenatation-oriented NRRL labs, was about to turn his coat to the side of synthesis.
What better time then to hand the hated finicky biological approach to penicillin production to the War Production Board, (the WPB) ?
Who cared if the WPB and the normally-secretive US Army seemed determined to widely publicize , to Allied, Axis and neutral nation alike, just how good this new fangled penicillin really was for military medicine ?
Yes.
Because for the first time in the war, parts of penicillin other that its chemistry (such as its clinical miracle cures which had been hitherto in America effectively if unofficially censored) were going to become the focus of official government propaganda and broadcast to the heavens.
Janus month indeed.
In an variant on "the first shall be last and the last first", what had been public was about to become secret and what had been secret was about to become public.
In January 1943, Karl Meyer, the chemist of Dawson's team, could still publish the team's latest best guess on the chemical formula for penicillin, but the team still couldn't discuss their results on treating patients since October 1940.
By January 1944, Dawson could publish his success with patients and penicillin to the world via JAMA, but later that same year, Meyer's harmless paper on biological products of penicillin written to be delivered at a conference, was forced to be withdrawn at the last minute, for fear he'd say something chemical and hence secret.
Bizarre but true ...... !
America LOSES WWII : because of quarrels between government agencies, such as over Penicillin
The above headline sounds bizarre to our ears, because we are used to only hearing it being used as the standard explanation given as to why Japan and Germany lost the (largely technical and scientific) world war against the Allies.
After all, both of these nations had talented and committed cadres of scientists and engineers but endless feuding between various sub sections of the government seriously diluted the impact they might have had on the war, if only they had worked together.
In Japan the Army and Navy Departments frequently seemed more at war with each other, than with America.
In the case of Germany, each of the senior figures in the Nazi hierarchy commanded a lot of semi-independent resources and each Nazi war lord seemed to spend as much time trying to grow at the expense of their political bureaucratic rivals, as in uniting against the common enemy.
But Vannevar Bush chooses, in the foreword to his famous "ENDLESS FRONTIER", not to see any serious conflicts in the American and Allied scientific and technical effort.
And we believe him - the historians (grateful for the steady diet of research grants to peacetime academics that he is credited with having created) above all .
And after all his side won ----- shouldn't that alone silence all potential criticism ?
Still, in this particular foreword, he chooses to blow his particular agency's horn very very carefully indeed, when it comes to penicillin.
So for once, it is not his own OSRD that he credits with seeing that "our grievously wounded men" got penicillin in time : he says it was "the government" that did the bang up job of co-ordinating the research and development that speeded penicillin up to the front.
For a very conservative Republican ,like Bush, to be praising "the government" is truly a startling sight. He more usually carefully distinguishes agencies like his own highly conservative OSRD from the left wing agencies filled with New Dealers, such as the WPB's own OPRD.
But what could he do ?
For his own right wing OSRD agency chose to take the totally wrong turn on the way to moving penicillin to the D-Day beaches and delivered not one tiny sliver of its vaunted synthetic penicillin to our troops or anyone else : not on June 6th 1944 and in fact, not ever.
It was left to the left wingers in the OPRD to get literally tons of penicillin to the Allied side, between the time they first took up the cause in September 1943 and the end of the war.
They did this not merely by the unimportant but useful work they did on the production side - for by statute this was their job, just as the OSRD's job was not production but research - but by also doing the OSRD's job , in an area of research that the OSRD choose to seriously neglect.
That was the OSRD-neglected research in studying ways to up the very front end of the penicillin process : upping the initial biological yield of penicillin.
Biology : horrors ! Just saying that word in front of Bush and the OSRD was like waving a garlic-infused cross at a vampire.
So we must credit the left wing OPRD with starting the research that resulted in that biological yield ( ie , yield before extraction) now being 2500 times as productive as it was in 1943 when the OSRD threw up its hands at the problem.
Just as the quarrelling Japanese Army and Navy did on radar, the two warring branches of Bush's "the government" , the OSRD and OPRD , came to a fork in the road on penicillin and instead of uniting to find a way to use the least resources to solve the problem, they disagreed and pursued independent courses.
Bush's Orwellian use of words like "the government" or "the nation" or "the Allies" ,to explain who won the war , allows him to dissolve any internal conflicts those huge collectivities might have encountered in very slowly moving their overwhelming larger populations into defeating much smaller and very resource-strapped enemies.
So historians mustn't simply accept Bush's Orwellian arguments on blind faith but instead carefully ask , if the nation or government "did" this or that , did that mean that all the nation/government do this or that or did just parts of it do while other parts disagreed, stood around doing nothing or even held things up ?
After all, on the evidence of their own internal memos, the OSRD not merely failed to produce the penicillin that saved our "grievously wounded", they also had no intention of wasting penicillin on anyone who couldn't aid the war effort on recovery, if they didn't have to.
That meant no wasting penicillin, if they had to choose, on those so severely wounded that if they did make a recovery, it would be to discharge and a permanent disability pension.
And it meant, that if they had to chose between saving a boy dying of endocarditis and instantly curing a boy GI of VD so he could quickly return (to perhaps die) on the Italian frontlines, they'd won't help the endocarditis case, because his disease-weakened heart would not let him do much for the war effort, even if he did recover.
So, if the only thing I ever do in my life is to destroy the OSRD's reputation for furthering penicillin when what they actually did was hold it up and then conspire to use it for truly wicked eugenic ends, I will consider my life well lived....
After all, both of these nations had talented and committed cadres of scientists and engineers but endless feuding between various sub sections of the government seriously diluted the impact they might have had on the war, if only they had worked together.
In Japan the Army and Navy Departments frequently seemed more at war with each other, than with America.
In the case of Germany, each of the senior figures in the Nazi hierarchy commanded a lot of semi-independent resources and each Nazi war lord seemed to spend as much time trying to grow at the expense of their political bureaucratic rivals, as in uniting against the common enemy.
But Vannevar Bush chooses, in the foreword to his famous "ENDLESS FRONTIER", not to see any serious conflicts in the American and Allied scientific and technical effort.
And we believe him - the historians (grateful for the steady diet of research grants to peacetime academics that he is credited with having created) above all .
And after all his side won ----- shouldn't that alone silence all potential criticism ?
Still, in this particular foreword, he chooses to blow his particular agency's horn very very carefully indeed, when it comes to penicillin.
So for once, it is not his own OSRD that he credits with seeing that "our grievously wounded men" got penicillin in time : he says it was "the government" that did the bang up job of co-ordinating the research and development that speeded penicillin up to the front.
For a very conservative Republican ,like Bush, to be praising "the government" is truly a startling sight. He more usually carefully distinguishes agencies like his own highly conservative OSRD from the left wing agencies filled with New Dealers, such as the WPB's own OPRD.
But what could he do ?
For his own right wing OSRD agency chose to take the totally wrong turn on the way to moving penicillin to the D-Day beaches and delivered not one tiny sliver of its vaunted synthetic penicillin to our troops or anyone else : not on June 6th 1944 and in fact, not ever.
It was left to the left wingers in the OPRD to get literally tons of penicillin to the Allied side, between the time they first took up the cause in September 1943 and the end of the war.
They did this not merely by the unimportant but useful work they did on the production side - for by statute this was their job, just as the OSRD's job was not production but research - but by also doing the OSRD's job , in an area of research that the OSRD choose to seriously neglect.
That was the OSRD-neglected research in studying ways to up the very front end of the penicillin process : upping the initial biological yield of penicillin.
Biology : horrors ! Just saying that word in front of Bush and the OSRD was like waving a garlic-infused cross at a vampire.
So we must credit the left wing OPRD with starting the research that resulted in that biological yield ( ie , yield before extraction) now being 2500 times as productive as it was in 1943 when the OSRD threw up its hands at the problem.
Just as the quarrelling Japanese Army and Navy did on radar, the two warring branches of Bush's "the government" , the OSRD and OPRD , came to a fork in the road on penicillin and instead of uniting to find a way to use the least resources to solve the problem, they disagreed and pursued independent courses.
Bush's Orwellian use of words like "the government" or "the nation" or "the Allies" ,to explain who won the war , allows him to dissolve any internal conflicts those huge collectivities might have encountered in very slowly moving their overwhelming larger populations into defeating much smaller and very resource-strapped enemies.
So historians mustn't simply accept Bush's Orwellian arguments on blind faith but instead carefully ask , if the nation or government "did" this or that , did that mean that all the nation/government do this or that or did just parts of it do while other parts disagreed, stood around doing nothing or even held things up ?
After all, on the evidence of their own internal memos, the OSRD not merely failed to produce the penicillin that saved our "grievously wounded", they also had no intention of wasting penicillin on anyone who couldn't aid the war effort on recovery, if they didn't have to.
That meant no wasting penicillin, if they had to choose, on those so severely wounded that if they did make a recovery, it would be to discharge and a permanent disability pension.
And it meant, that if they had to chose between saving a boy dying of endocarditis and instantly curing a boy GI of VD so he could quickly return (to perhaps die) on the Italian frontlines, they'd won't help the endocarditis case, because his disease-weakened heart would not let him do much for the war effort, even if he did recover.
So, if the only thing I ever do in my life is to destroy the OSRD's reputation for furthering penicillin when what they actually did was hold it up and then conspire to use it for truly wicked eugenic ends, I will consider my life well lived....
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