There are always tons of people who claim to have "discovered" this or that movie star, after the fact, but only a handful who actually gave them their first part way back when.
As Scottish Christians are wont to say : there is a huge difference between all those who just talk the talk and the very few that actually walk the walk.
They should know.
Because when it came to giving penicillin a real job (saving lives) old scotsman Alexander Fleming only talked the talk - it was new scotsman Henry Dawson who actually walked the walk : October 16th 1940...
Showing posts with label alexander fleming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alexander fleming. Show all posts
Friday, October 3, 2014
Thursday, September 18, 2014
Impurity IS Danger : Mary Douglas explains the revulsion towards natural penicillin
In the relatively new academic fields of Horror Theory and Monster Theory , Mary Douglas's 1966 classic "Purity and Danger" is frequently evoked.
In the ancient academic field of penicillin studies, Douglas's Big Idea has never been braced ---- until now.
In the ancient academic field of penicillin studies, Douglas's Big Idea has never been braced ---- until now.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
The poor poor pitiful slimed - always misunderstood , always maligned ...
In 1928, the year Fleming discovered and then rejected (three times) the penicillium that makes lifesaving penicillin, there were about two billion humans on the planet.
That year , tens and tens of millions of miscarriages and premature deaths were caused or hastened by bacteria and virus.
Everybody knew somebody who had died from bacteria or virus - everyone knew the primeval fear of raging epidemics.
That same year tens and tens of hundreds of people died from fungus - their individual deaths - spotted here and there almost at random- usually just seen as the result of eating 'bad' food.
Except in a few remote cultures, almost no one knew anyone who had died from fungus.
Yet in the world of cultural horrors and monsters , did we see this reality reflected at all ?
That year , tens and tens of millions of miscarriages and premature deaths were caused or hastened by bacteria and virus.
Everybody knew somebody who had died from bacteria or virus - everyone knew the primeval fear of raging epidemics.
That same year tens and tens of hundreds of people died from fungus - their individual deaths - spotted here and there almost at random- usually just seen as the result of eating 'bad' food.
Except in a few remote cultures, almost no one knew anyone who had died from fungus.
Yet in the world of cultural horrors and monsters , did we see this reality reflected at all ?
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Rumours of death of wartime penicillins : "Greatly Exaggerated"
Seventy five years on , the wartime penicillins are just dusty relics , found only in some museum of medical curios, right ?
(You been talking to your GP again ?)
It is simply amazing how many family doctors dismiss wartime penicillins and say 'we physicians are all into the latest beta lactams today' .
(You been talking to your GP again ?)
It is simply amazing how many family doctors dismiss wartime penicillins and say 'we physicians are all into the latest beta lactams today' .
Time for some FACTS, Doc :
Active inventor Alfred Nobel screwed by passive academic discoverers
You write your will with the help of the smartest lawyers in the universe , you die , and then you take your chances.
Because no matter how simple blunt and explicit your will instructions were , the ambitious and the dishonest will still find a way to screw the dead.
Like the disgusting way the worldwide academic science community has screwed poor dead Alfred Nobel and all his fellow (living) inventors.
Because no matter how simple blunt and explicit your will instructions were , the ambitious and the dishonest will still find a way to screw the dead.
Like the disgusting way the worldwide academic science community has screwed poor dead Alfred Nobel and all his fellow (living) inventors.
Monday, September 8, 2014
Twelve year resistance against injecting crude natural penicillin was normal...science
Doctors Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey did nothing at all about injecting crude natural penicillin into patients to try and save lives during the 12 long years between the Fall of 1928 and and the Fall of 1940.
But they did nothing more (less ?) than did all the other doctors in the world.
Their (lack of) response to the great potential in a crude penicillium liquid that was very non-toxic to primates and very toxic to death-dealing bacteria was perfectly normal..science.
Because doctors - just like the rest of us - also have unconscious Ids and also have unconscious fears about monsters.
Back in that era - pace H P Lovecraft and innumerable horror movies - the unconscious monster feared the most were the slime beings lying an uneasy halfway between stable solids and mobile liquids.
The scientific reluctance to inject the poop and pee of slime molds into the temple of the human body might have had a multiple of scientific excuses to support it but let's be frank - it was really was just an Id thing .
After all , doctors had no such reluctance to inject all sorts of man-made chemicals into the body - very dangerous chemicals like Salvarsan and Sulfa drugs.
They also had no reluctance to inject dangerous horse serum into humans.
But they did nothing more (less ?) than did all the other doctors in the world.
Their (lack of) response to the great potential in a crude penicillium liquid that was very non-toxic to primates and very toxic to death-dealing bacteria was perfectly normal..science.
Because doctors - just like the rest of us - also have unconscious Ids and also have unconscious fears about monsters.
Back in that era - pace H P Lovecraft and innumerable horror movies - the unconscious monster feared the most were the slime beings lying an uneasy halfway between stable solids and mobile liquids.
The scientific reluctance to inject the poop and pee of slime molds into the temple of the human body might have had a multiple of scientific excuses to support it but let's be frank - it was really was just an Id thing .
After all , doctors had no such reluctance to inject all sorts of man-made chemicals into the body - very dangerous chemicals like Salvarsan and Sulfa drugs.
They also had no reluctance to inject dangerous horse serum into humans.
Friday, September 5, 2014
How can you tell when a scientist is lying? They don't footnote : the sad case of Gwyn MacFarlane
Before I knew much about penicillin , I really enjoyed Gwyn Macfarlane's two books on penicillin - he's such a smooth writer.
But now that I have seen many of the primary documents and more particularly now that I have the exact 20 year chronology of early penicillin firmly set in my mind (one of the very few things I don't mind saying that I am very good at) , MacFarlane severely depresses me.
Why are so many scientists such morally bad historians ?
But now that I have seen many of the primary documents and more particularly now that I have the exact 20 year chronology of early penicillin firmly set in my mind (one of the very few things I don't mind saying that I am very good at) , MacFarlane severely depresses me.
Why are so many scientists such morally bad historians ?
How a handful of Gotham unfits rescued the unbroken bronco of modern medicine (un-patentable natural lifesaving penicillin-for-all) and set it free to do good
When your life hangs in the balance because of bacterial infection and all else has failed, hospitals reach for Plan G - a needleful of Penicillin G - 87 years old and still our most potent , safest and yet by far the cheapest lifesaver.
Big Pharma practically giving away its most potent and yet safest lifesaver - that hardly sounds like the Big Pharma you and I know --- and hate !
Penicillin still remains un-patentable - still remains made naturally by tiny bugs in a bottle , not by human chemists in a factory.
Big Pharma practically giving away its most potent and yet safest lifesaver - that hardly sounds like the Big Pharma you and I know --- and hate !
Penicillin still remains un-patentable - still remains made naturally by tiny bugs in a bottle , not by human chemists in a factory.
Friday, August 29, 2014
1929 : Penicillin discovery announced in journal NATURE , world aroused
What would Alexander Fleming's historical report on penicillin have looked like if he had decided to see it published in LANCET, BMJ or the journal NATURE ?
My guess is that would only have happened if one of his junior team members - acting against Fleming's express orders - had injected a sick mouse with his penicillin juice and found that contrary to the boss's "opinion" , the mouse was cured.
Fleming would swallow his anger , and adopt a much more positive view of his new medicine and seek a more positive tone to describe it , in a much more important journal.
Instead he mentally damned its application as an internal (ie life saving ) medicine for all eternity , damned even its use as an antiseptic unless first synthesized and so decided to bury his report of a new discovery in a new - relatively obscure - Britain-circulating-only - journal ....
My guess is that would only have happened if one of his junior team members - acting against Fleming's express orders - had injected a sick mouse with his penicillin juice and found that contrary to the boss's "opinion" , the mouse was cured.
Fleming would swallow his anger , and adopt a much more positive view of his new medicine and seek a more positive tone to describe it , in a much more important journal.
Instead he mentally damned its application as an internal (ie life saving ) medicine for all eternity , damned even its use as an antiseptic unless first synthesized and so decided to bury his report of a new discovery in a new - relatively obscure - Britain-circulating-only - journal ....
Thursday, August 28, 2014
How New York rescued natural life-saving penicillin-for-all from Alexander Fleming
If you are Alexander Fleming you only have to make three big mistakes to win a Nobel prize and eternal acclaim.
Mistake one : insist that penicillin will never be a success unless man first synthesizes it.
(We're still waiting !)
Mistake two : insist that penicillin will never work if taken internally but will only work as a topical antiseptic.
(In fact, penicillin really only works when taken internally, as an antibiotic, to save lives while as an antiseptic it may actually impede healing of minor scrapes and cuts.)
Mistake three : go along with the Churchill government's decision to only make enough wartime penicillin to help frontline Allied forces with wounds moderate enough to be likely to quickly return to battle.
(When America's New Deal-oriented WPB (War Production Board) decided to mass produce wartime natural penicillin, American diplomats were soon using that bounty to save lives (and win hearts and minds) all over the Allied, Neutral and Occupied world.
Soon a Pax Americana (Pax Penicillia ?) was replacing a century-old Pax Britannica.)
By contrast , on October 16th 1940 , Gotham City's Dr Henry Dawson set out to challenge these three tenets of fellow Scot Alexander Fleming, line by line.
In just five weeks, he read an early - vague -report on penicillin, located some spores, grew them, tested them on himself for toxicity and then gave the world's first ever "crude" natural antibiotic shots.
To two young men dying of SBE , a then invariably fatal form of endocarditis.
(A) Dawson was never shy about admitting that his penicillin shots were not 100% synthetical pure or even 100% naturally pure.
In fact he was the first to label his type of penicillin as 'crude' and natural --- and the label stuck.
(B) Crude or not, he had shown that natural penicillin was non toxic - in fact far less toxic than the conventional alternative, the sulfa drugs. So why not use it internally , to save lives ?
(C) Social Medicine (a sort of 1930s version of Obamacare) was in the Fall of 1940 being destroyed by conservatives under the guise of War medicine.
War medicine's eugenic claim (the same claim as Hitler made on the first day of WWII) was that we couldn't afford to waste precious medicine on useless 4Fs when our precious 1A soldiers need all our help.
Top of the list among the 4Fs to be Code Slow-ed to death by war medicine's Death Panels were the SBEs - which is why Dawson so insolently chose the SBEs as the ones he gave history's first penicillin needles to.
To make the sting of his rebuke even more obvious, he gave those historic needles to these '4Fs of the 4Fs' on the very day that America was conducting its very first peacetime draft registration, seeking out all of its 1As.
As is well known, Alexander Fleming's synthetic penicillin laid a big egg .
So it was left to the NYC firm that had most bought into Dawson's vision, Pfizer (then a modestly sized supplier to the soda pop industry) to supply 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - in fact to supply most of the world's penicillin during WWII.
And that is how New York rescued the miracle of penicillin from the man who found it - like an unwanted gift - on his desk 16 years earlier...
Mistake one : insist that penicillin will never be a success unless man first synthesizes it.
(We're still waiting !)
Mistake two : insist that penicillin will never work if taken internally but will only work as a topical antiseptic.
(In fact, penicillin really only works when taken internally, as an antibiotic, to save lives while as an antiseptic it may actually impede healing of minor scrapes and cuts.)
Mistake three : go along with the Churchill government's decision to only make enough wartime penicillin to help frontline Allied forces with wounds moderate enough to be likely to quickly return to battle.
(When America's New Deal-oriented WPB (War Production Board) decided to mass produce wartime natural penicillin, American diplomats were soon using that bounty to save lives (and win hearts and minds) all over the Allied, Neutral and Occupied world.
Soon a Pax Americana (Pax Penicillia ?) was replacing a century-old Pax Britannica.)
By contrast , on October 16th 1940 , Gotham City's Dr Henry Dawson set out to challenge these three tenets of fellow Scot Alexander Fleming, line by line.
In just five weeks, he read an early - vague -report on penicillin, located some spores, grew them, tested them on himself for toxicity and then gave the world's first ever "crude" natural antibiotic shots.
To two young men dying of SBE , a then invariably fatal form of endocarditis.
(A) Dawson was never shy about admitting that his penicillin shots were not 100% synthetical pure or even 100% naturally pure.
In fact he was the first to label his type of penicillin as 'crude' and natural --- and the label stuck.
(B) Crude or not, he had shown that natural penicillin was non toxic - in fact far less toxic than the conventional alternative, the sulfa drugs. So why not use it internally , to save lives ?
(C) Social Medicine (a sort of 1930s version of Obamacare) was in the Fall of 1940 being destroyed by conservatives under the guise of War medicine.
War medicine's eugenic claim (the same claim as Hitler made on the first day of WWII) was that we couldn't afford to waste precious medicine on useless 4Fs when our precious 1A soldiers need all our help.
Top of the list among the 4Fs to be Code Slow-ed to death by war medicine's Death Panels were the SBEs - which is why Dawson so insolently chose the SBEs as the ones he gave history's first penicillin needles to.
To make the sting of his rebuke even more obvious, he gave those historic needles to these '4Fs of the 4Fs' on the very day that America was conducting its very first peacetime draft registration, seeking out all of its 1As.
As is well known, Alexander Fleming's synthetic penicillin laid a big egg .
So it was left to the NYC firm that had most bought into Dawson's vision, Pfizer (then a modestly sized supplier to the soda pop industry) to supply 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - in fact to supply most of the world's penicillin during WWII.
And that is how New York rescued the miracle of penicillin from the man who found it - like an unwanted gift - on his desk 16 years earlier...
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
God knows what Henry Dawson did - even if Stockholm didn't
Sometimes people ask me if I think Henry Dawson should have gotten a Nobel Prize for his successful pushing of the wartime mass production of natural penicillin.
As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to Howard Florey (and Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.
(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)
I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.
Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.
The UK was depressed after winning a war but then being forced to see massive amounts of Manhattan Natural penicillin liberally used by American diplomats to save the lives of countless people in Neutral and Liberated countries overseas.
Because, at the time, Britain (the discoverer but not the developer of penicillin) didn't really have enough penicillin for its own Commonwealth troops - let alone to give to British civilians at home or for foreigners abroad.
This was solely a moral failure - not a technical failure - of the Churchill-led government.
Because America had just as many Big Pharma firms , scientists and government bureaucrats as the UK equally convinced that it was better (a) to wait for synthetic penicillin and (b) to restrict production to immediate military use only.
And both nations basically had access to the same advanced level of penicillin technology or could easily afford to license it - if they choose.
But fortunately for wartime humanity , a few - a very few - American firms, scientists and bureaucrats felt differently from the majority of their Allied comrades.
Thanks to Henry Dawson's constant prodding , the top man at both the New Dealerish WPB (War Production Board) and Pfizer saw the need for the production of enough penicillin - now ! - to heal all those in a world at war who were dying for lack of it.
As Pfizer's natural penicillin took off on countless overseas mercy missions it slowly but surely produced a new Pax Americana that gradually drove out the century old Pax Britannica.
All the global goodwill towards Britain built up while The Few held off the Nazi bombers alone was thus lost in an diplomatic instant.
All because Churchill's government was unwilling to see any more badly needed penicillin plants built -- not if it meant even as few as one less heavy bomber squadron was commissioned.
Penicillin was a total disaster for the British Tories - it might have even cost them the 1945 General Election - but it was also a disaster solely of their own making ...
As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to Howard Florey (and Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.
(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)
I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.
Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.
The UK was depressed after winning a war but then being forced to see massive amounts of Manhattan Natural penicillin liberally used by American diplomats to save the lives of countless people in Neutral and Liberated countries overseas.
Because, at the time, Britain (the discoverer but not the developer of penicillin) didn't really have enough penicillin for its own Commonwealth troops - let alone to give to British civilians at home or for foreigners abroad.
Churchill's moral failure over penicillin
This was solely a moral failure - not a technical failure - of the Churchill-led government.
Because America had just as many Big Pharma firms , scientists and government bureaucrats as the UK equally convinced that it was better (a) to wait for synthetic penicillin and (b) to restrict production to immediate military use only.
And both nations basically had access to the same advanced level of penicillin technology or could easily afford to license it - if they choose.
But fortunately for wartime humanity , a few - a very few - American firms, scientists and bureaucrats felt differently from the majority of their Allied comrades.
Thanks to Henry Dawson's constant prodding , the top man at both the New Dealerish WPB (War Production Board) and Pfizer saw the need for the production of enough penicillin - now ! - to heal all those in a world at war who were dying for lack of it.
As Pfizer's natural penicillin took off on countless overseas mercy missions it slowly but surely produced a new Pax Americana that gradually drove out the century old Pax Britannica.
All the global goodwill towards Britain built up while The Few held off the Nazi bombers alone was thus lost in an diplomatic instant.
All because Churchill's government was unwilling to see any more badly needed penicillin plants built -- not if it meant even as few as one less heavy bomber squadron was commissioned.
Penicillin was a total disaster for the British Tories - it might have even cost them the 1945 General Election - but it was also a disaster solely of their own making ...
Monday, August 25, 2014
Manhattan Natural : green Life-Saving , from the concrete jungle ...
The urban jungle that is Manhattan, with all its concrete skyscrapers, should be the very last place on earth where one might expect to see the start of a turning away from the Modern obsession with the artificial and the synthetic and a turn to the Postmodernity's renewed relationship with Nature.
But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .
Fiction's drive for the smooth closure of all narrative lines demands that penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming (in his brand new 1931 hospital factory) should have been the first one to grow the green stuff in amounts sufficient to begin to save the world's fatally infected - but he didn't.
Instead it was Columbia's Martin Henry Dawson and Pfizer's John L Smith that rose to World War Two's moral challenges.
And very soon it was postmodern natural penicillin from Manhattan's concrete jungle that was radiating hope all around a war-shattered world --- while Fleming and Florey's modern artificial penicillin from leafy-green Oxford University never even got off the drawing board.
The natural from concrete and the artificial from green : life is filled with ironies isn't it ?
So why should I ever think of writing 'mere fiction' ?
No novel-writing for me - not when the extraordinary truth is so much stranger than any fantasied fiction....
But Manhattan is in fact the place where the wartime mass production of natural penicillin - with all that momentous decision's consequences for postmodernity - actually began .
Fiction's drive for the smooth closure of all narrative lines demands that penicillin discoverer Alexander Fleming (in his brand new 1931 hospital factory) should have been the first one to grow the green stuff in amounts sufficient to begin to save the world's fatally infected - but he didn't.
Manhattan Natural -- fermenting a life-saving revolution from the concrete jungle
Instead it was Columbia's Martin Henry Dawson and Pfizer's John L Smith that rose to World War Two's moral challenges.
And very soon it was postmodern natural penicillin from Manhattan's concrete jungle that was radiating hope all around a war-shattered world --- while Fleming and Florey's modern artificial penicillin from leafy-green Oxford University never even got off the drawing board.
natural from concrete --- artificial from greenery
So why should I ever think of writing 'mere fiction' ?
No novel-writing for me - not when the extraordinary truth is so much stranger than any fantasied fiction....
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Penicillin for patients : stable ? pure ? or just 'safe enough' ? -- the essential disagreement between Fleming, Florey and Dawson
Alexander Fleming was famously known for his frugality : in speech, in the use of materials and in his physical exertions on his paid job.
Being too self confident in his own intellectual abilities (and perhaps also being too frugal cum lazy in the physical exertion department ?) fatally led him to avoid doing the needed series of experiments to prove up his claim that penicillin would never have time to do its work inside the body.
So he misled himself - and more importantly , the entire world, for 14 years that penicillin would only work on the body, never in the body - and tens of millions died premature deaths that could have/ should have been avoided.
However, because Fleming saw penicillin as only working outside the body he had no need for Howard Florey's delusions about penicillin having to be highly purified to work safely inside the body.
Fleming merely want the chemists to make penicillin as a stable powder in a bottle any doctor could readily buy from a near by druggist, store on an unrefrigerated shelf for years and still expect to work as an external antiseptic at 100% efficiency when needed.
Call this 'lazy man medicine' or call it normalcy.
Because only one doctor in ten thousand world wide ever tried making homemade penicillin even after it was proclaimed a life-saving miracle.
They all preferred to simply patiently wait until this miracle came to them as a stable and certified safe powder in a bottle from Big Pharma.
(I am not sure all their dying patients were as patient.)
Howard Florey - to his credit - seemed to have never bought Fleming's tale that penicillin would never work inside the body - as had every other medical scientist in the world .
But because he thought it had to be purified first and that purification would be very difficult , if not impossible , he did nothing until he got a competent full time chemist on staff together with a large long term grant to sustain the effort.
Meanwhile ten wasted years (1929-1939) went by.
Clearly Florey was no medical crusader, burning to save lives NOW!
And he , too , had too much faith in his own intellectual powers.
In 1939 he requested grant money for his co-worker Ernst Chain's work on three bacteria-killing chemicals produced by living microbes against other living microbes (what scientists call antibiosis).
One was penicillin and one key phrase in the grant request reveals his thinking and his fatal flaw.
He believed that penicillin , if it can be purified, will prove safe and effective inside the body (eventually and hopeful inside the bodies of infected human patients).
But he just assumes this , again just like Fleming .
Without actually doing any of the needed experiments to prove his contention, one simply can not say that penicillin is non toxic inside the body and it is the impurities that will be unsafe inside the body.
Actually there are always - in advance of the actual experiments - a range of possibilities sliding between three poles (that represent absolutes rather than real world situations.)
The three poles are (a) only the main product is toxic (b) only the impurities are toxic (c) both are equally toxic or equally non toxic.
Let us get concrete with a few examples.
You are a chemical firm making the poison prussic acid. You discover impurities in the resulting mix (impurities being anything that isn't prussic acid).
Prussic acid is almost uniquely toxic and it is the main product - any impurities thrown up may or maybe not toxic but are unlikely to be anywhere as toxic as prussic acid.
But in this case, you are seeking pure toxicity - impure non-toxicity is the problem , not the solution.
Grapefruit are a so so source of pure vitamin C . A 500 gram fruit might hold only 50 mg of vitamin C - one bit in 10,000 is pure vitamin C and the rest is - technically - impurities.
So why do we bother ?
Well they are very tasty , providing lots of water, fibre, sugar and various other minerals and vitamins - as well as some of the tasteless vitamin C we could get from a pill.
(And surprise surprise, that pill , when taken with the needed glass of water, is also mostly dross and a tiny amount, often only 100 mg, of vitamin C !)
And all those grapefruit 'impurities 'are safe - we eat them without any danger and in fact with a great deal of enjoyment.
All our food mostly consists of a vast bulk of relatively safe impurities and tiny amounts of pure vitamins and minerals.
But some foods - some very tasty mushrooms - consist of mostly nice food and tiny amounts of impurities called toxins that kill us.
So it all depends.
First we must define what is the main product we want from a mixture before we can define its 'impurities'.
Do grapefruits consist of 90% food (discarding only the skin and seeds) or do they consist of .001 % vitamin C and 99.99% dross ?
Then we need to do the experiments before drawing any conclusions.
Because sometimes , as with weak impure penicillin juice versus pure strong penicillin powder , it turns out that penicillin allergy deaths only began with massive amounts of the 100% pure stuff !
By sheer good luck, in this particular mushroom (this strain of the sometimes dangerous penicillium mold), the impurities were non-toxic as was the penicillin .
But for a relatively large percent of people, if given large amounts of pure penicillin direct into a vein by careless doctors, it can kill on the spot in a severe allergy reaction.
The safe solution is to go on using pure penicillin but to test new patients with tiny amounts - just beneath the skin - first.
Florey spent more than ten years - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s seeking ever purer penicillin to increase the safety of this injectable drug.
His obsession was scientifically wrong, logically deluded and it delayed the wartime introduction of mass produced penicillin for years.
Florey was an eugenicist and a racist from his youth and I believe this sort of racial purity thinking leaked over into the science side of his brain - he saw penicillin as the Anglo Saxons and the impurities as the Blacks.
Blood that was 99% Anglo Saxon and 1% Black was impure and defiled - and much the same applied to pure versus impure penicillin.
In Florey's twisted mind.
Another problem was that both Fleming and Florey were far more lab doctors than ward doctors - while Martin Henry Dawson divided his time equally between both.
Sheltered university chemists quickly lose their delusions about the academic awards for obtaining 100% total synthesis ,regardless of expense or yield, once on the factory floor of a profit-seeking chemical firm.
So too with busy ward doctors balancing a dying patient versus a very dangerous drug that might injure them as well as save their life.
My mother , in her early thirties, was saved from certain infectious death by a single course of streptomycin .
It left her deaf in one ear - by that time, in 1962 , this was a well known risk of high doses of that drug.
She didn't complain then and she never ever did .
She told how grateful she was to lose her hearing to gain her life just three days before she suffered her fatal stroke - when she was in her eighties, a half century later.
So call me prejudiced - I like doctors who take chances to save patients' lives.
I like Martin Henry Dawson.
He saw two patients about to die from invariably fatal endocarditis.
All other known medical solutions had failed.
He knew penicillin seemed non toxic in various animals and in human blood - from his own research and that of Fleming and Florey.
He tested a small amount of penicillin that he suspected to be probably very weak , on himself, injected just under his skin.
No toxic results.
He did the same on the two patients - not toxic.
He gradually and slowly upped the amounts and also moving gradually to injection methods that introduced the penicillin far quicker into the blood and hence was far more potentially dangerous.
Only local pain at the injection site and a temporary fever and shakes was noted - routine for most injected drugs then.
All Dawson sought from penicillin was that it was relatively safe - and effective.
He used the penicillin he made himself with hours or days - he wasn't afraid of hard work, unlike Fleming - so stability was an non-issue to him.
Like the food that Dawson ate and enjoyed, his crude penicillin was hardly pure - but so what - it was basically safe.
Safer in fact - even in crude form - than the 100% pure sulfa drugs that were then routinely saving many lives while also making many people very very sick in the process.
Like a chemist on the shop floor ( think Smith, Elder and Jephcott ) Dawson saw life as full of compromises and the job was determining what was really Job One.
For all of them , it was saving as many patients as they could - NOW !
And God Bless 'Em for that...
Being too self confident in his own intellectual abilities (and perhaps also being too frugal cum lazy in the physical exertion department ?) fatally led him to avoid doing the needed series of experiments to prove up his claim that penicillin would never have time to do its work inside the body.
So he misled himself - and more importantly , the entire world, for 14 years that penicillin would only work on the body, never in the body - and tens of millions died premature deaths that could have/ should have been avoided.
Howard Florey's fatal flaw
However, because Fleming saw penicillin as only working outside the body he had no need for Howard Florey's delusions about penicillin having to be highly purified to work safely inside the body.
Fleming merely want the chemists to make penicillin as a stable powder in a bottle any doctor could readily buy from a near by druggist, store on an unrefrigerated shelf for years and still expect to work as an external antiseptic at 100% efficiency when needed.
Call this 'lazy man medicine' or call it normalcy.
Because only one doctor in ten thousand world wide ever tried making homemade penicillin even after it was proclaimed a life-saving miracle.
They all preferred to simply patiently wait until this miracle came to them as a stable and certified safe powder in a bottle from Big Pharma.
(I am not sure all their dying patients were as patient.)
Florey's great insight
Howard Florey - to his credit - seemed to have never bought Fleming's tale that penicillin would never work inside the body - as had every other medical scientist in the world .
But because he thought it had to be purified first and that purification would be very difficult , if not impossible , he did nothing until he got a competent full time chemist on staff together with a large long term grant to sustain the effort.
Meanwhile ten wasted years (1929-1939) went by.
Clearly Florey was no medical crusader, burning to save lives NOW!
And he , too , had too much faith in his own intellectual powers.
In 1939 he requested grant money for his co-worker Ernst Chain's work on three bacteria-killing chemicals produced by living microbes against other living microbes (what scientists call antibiosis).
One was penicillin and one key phrase in the grant request reveals his thinking and his fatal flaw.
He believed that penicillin , if it can be purified, will prove safe and effective inside the body (eventually and hopeful inside the bodies of infected human patients).
But he just assumes this , again just like Fleming .
Without actually doing any of the needed experiments to prove his contention, one simply can not say that penicillin is non toxic inside the body and it is the impurities that will be unsafe inside the body.
Actually there are always - in advance of the actual experiments - a range of possibilities sliding between three poles (that represent absolutes rather than real world situations.)
The three poles are (a) only the main product is toxic (b) only the impurities are toxic (c) both are equally toxic or equally non toxic.
Let us get concrete with a few examples.
You are a chemical firm making the poison prussic acid. You discover impurities in the resulting mix (impurities being anything that isn't prussic acid).
Prussic acid is almost uniquely toxic and it is the main product - any impurities thrown up may or maybe not toxic but are unlikely to be anywhere as toxic as prussic acid.
But in this case, you are seeking pure toxicity - impure non-toxicity is the problem , not the solution.
Grapefruit are 99.99% impure of vitamin C - thanks be to God
Grapefruit are a so so source of pure vitamin C . A 500 gram fruit might hold only 50 mg of vitamin C - one bit in 10,000 is pure vitamin C and the rest is - technically - impurities.
So why do we bother ?
Well they are very tasty , providing lots of water, fibre, sugar and various other minerals and vitamins - as well as some of the tasteless vitamin C we could get from a pill.
(And surprise surprise, that pill , when taken with the needed glass of water, is also mostly dross and a tiny amount, often only 100 mg, of vitamin C !)
And all those grapefruit 'impurities 'are safe - we eat them without any danger and in fact with a great deal of enjoyment.
All our food mostly consists of a vast bulk of relatively safe impurities and tiny amounts of pure vitamins and minerals.
But some foods - some very tasty mushrooms - consist of mostly nice food and tiny amounts of impurities called toxins that kill us.
So it all depends.
First we must define what is the main product we want from a mixture before we can define its 'impurities'.
Do grapefruits consist of 90% food (discarding only the skin and seeds) or do they consist of .001 % vitamin C and 99.99% dross ?
Then we need to do the experiments before drawing any conclusions.
Because sometimes , as with weak impure penicillin juice versus pure strong penicillin powder , it turns out that penicillin allergy deaths only began with massive amounts of the 100% pure stuff !
By sheer good luck, in this particular mushroom (this strain of the sometimes dangerous penicillium mold), the impurities were non-toxic as was the penicillin .
But for a relatively large percent of people, if given large amounts of pure penicillin direct into a vein by careless doctors, it can kill on the spot in a severe allergy reaction.
The safe solution is to go on using pure penicillin but to test new patients with tiny amounts - just beneath the skin - first.
Florey spent more than ten years - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s seeking ever purer penicillin to increase the safety of this injectable drug.
His obsession was scientifically wrong, logically deluded and it delayed the wartime introduction of mass produced penicillin for years.
Florey was a racist
Florey was an eugenicist and a racist from his youth and I believe this sort of racial purity thinking leaked over into the science side of his brain - he saw penicillin as the Anglo Saxons and the impurities as the Blacks.
Blood that was 99% Anglo Saxon and 1% Black was impure and defiled - and much the same applied to pure versus impure penicillin.
In Florey's twisted mind.
Ward doctors are like shop floor chemists - they hold few illusions
Another problem was that both Fleming and Florey were far more lab doctors than ward doctors - while Martin Henry Dawson divided his time equally between both.
Sheltered university chemists quickly lose their delusions about the academic awards for obtaining 100% total synthesis ,regardless of expense or yield, once on the factory floor of a profit-seeking chemical firm.
So too with busy ward doctors balancing a dying patient versus a very dangerous drug that might injure them as well as save their life.
My mother would have backed Martin Henry Dawson 110%
My mother , in her early thirties, was saved from certain infectious death by a single course of streptomycin .
It left her deaf in one ear - by that time, in 1962 , this was a well known risk of high doses of that drug.
She didn't complain then and she never ever did .
She told how grateful she was to lose her hearing to gain her life just three days before she suffered her fatal stroke - when she was in her eighties, a half century later.
So call me prejudiced - I like doctors who take chances to save patients' lives.
I like Martin Henry Dawson.
He saw two patients about to die from invariably fatal endocarditis.
All other known medical solutions had failed.
He knew penicillin seemed non toxic in various animals and in human blood - from his own research and that of Fleming and Florey.
He tested a small amount of penicillin that he suspected to be probably very weak , on himself, injected just under his skin.
No toxic results.
He did the same on the two patients - not toxic.
He gradually and slowly upped the amounts and also moving gradually to injection methods that introduced the penicillin far quicker into the blood and hence was far more potentially dangerous.
Only local pain at the injection site and a temporary fever and shakes was noted - routine for most injected drugs then.
All Dawson sought from penicillin was that it was relatively safe - and effective.
He used the penicillin he made himself with hours or days - he wasn't afraid of hard work, unlike Fleming - so stability was an non-issue to him.
Like the food that Dawson ate and enjoyed, his crude penicillin was hardly pure - but so what - it was basically safe.
Safer in fact - even in crude form - than the 100% pure sulfa drugs that were then routinely saving many lives while also making many people very very sick in the process.
Like a chemist on the shop floor ( think Smith, Elder and Jephcott ) Dawson saw life as full of compromises and the job was determining what was really Job One.
For all of them , it was saving as many patients as they could - NOW !
And God Bless 'Em for that...
Wartime Penicillin Drama : 3 non-chemists promote chemical penicillin while 3 working chemists promote natural penicillin ...
Three middle-aged chemist manques who disgracefully put youthful dreams before the public good - at the height of a total war
Three of wartime penicillin's chief protagonists were men who, as youths, had hoped to become hands-on lab research chemists but whom necessity had pushed them instead into becoming medical science desk administrators.
Their names ?
Howard Florey, director of Oxford University's Dunn Path Institute , A. Newton Richards, head of the Medical Division of Vannevar Bush's famous OSRD war-science agency and George W. Merck , head of Merck.
All three greatly respected each other and worked as closely together as the American and British governments (nominally allies) allowed.
Wartime penicillin gave all three a second childhood as chemist manques and disgracefully, they ran with it* .
Even as a world at war panted instead for lots of disease-fighting drugs in any form , as long as they worked , were safe and were available NOW .
"Middle Aged Crazy"
For ten useless years (before , during and after WWII) they placed their highest priority on producing totally synthesized artificial (patentable) commercially viable penicillin.
They didn't get it and we still haven't.
If we had left penicillin just to them - as most at the top of the American and British governments had wanted - we'd never seen any amount of penicillin . Not during the war and not for long after, until newly elected governments came to their senses , cut their losses and moved on.
Let us now honour the three chemists who put public good before their chosen profession
The best solution perhaps for all time but certainly during a war emergency with its shortages of time and resources.
Let us now honour their names - as true patriots , as people who put the good of humanity before gaining more fame for their chosen profession.
These largely unknown and unhonoured heroes of the wartime penicillin saga made sure we had penicillin when it was most needed - D-Day and after.
And these three laid the groundwork for the kind of micro-biology technology that still produces all our antibiotics and many other medicines as well.
They are the American WPB's (War Production Board) Larry Elder , Glaxo chief Harry Jephcott and Pfizer chief John L Smith.
While we can show our disappointment for what Alexander Fleming, Florey , Martin Henry Dawson and all their co-workers did or didn't do with penicillin , it is my contention that all their actions were predictable , based on my through study of their personalities as displayed from youth on into middle age.
But I can't honestly say the same about Elder, Jephcott and Smith : they were the true wildcards of the whole wartime penicillin drama....
* I am mindful of former Nova Scotia premier John Buchanan who became a lawyer and a very very successful politician but who had really wanted to be a civil engineer.
Once in power, he drove the province into tremendous debt building anything and everything in sight : the once young engineer manque who finally got to 'drive the excavator'.
Most middle aged men - once they get money, a pot belly and grey hair - content themselves with finally buying the Corvette or Harley Davidson that Dad would never let them buy - but some (like Florey , Richards and Merck) do far more harm than that when they get a chance to go "middle aged crazy" .
Monday, August 11, 2014
New York Times - succinct for once - on Fleming's penicillin vs Dawson's penicillin
On Feb 23rd 2009 , the New York Times did a story about the first times it ever mentioned penicillin on its pages.
In that article the Times reporter , Nicholas Bakalar , correctly (and yet so succinctly) said that in a major story on May 6th 1941 , the Times described the first ever use of penicillin IN a patient (Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , October 16th 1940 at Manhattan's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital).
Completely true , because all previous clinical use of penicillin - stretching back 12 years and all in the UK - had involved the use of penicillin ON a patient.
The breakthrough from harmless to lifesaving happened in North America - in NYC - first.
It was left to Dr Martin Henry Dawson from new Scotland - not Dr Alexander Fleming from old Scotland -to elevate penicillin from a harmless enough antiseptic (ON) to the potent lifesaver it became (IN) - thus ushering in the Age of Lifesaving Antibiotics.
Overwhelming , external antiseptic medications* by themselves do not save patients from acute life-threatening infections - but internal antibiotic medications do .
(*Surgical and nursing procedures that follow strict disinfectant and antiseptic protocols of course do save hundreds of millions of lives worldwide each year , but indirectly, by avoiding future potential infections.)
It was Dr Dawson who lifted penicillin out of a dusty museum of medical curios and stuck it into a dying man's arm and saved his life - not Fleming.
Fleming thought penicillin was only useful as an antiseptic and only if it was first made artificially synthetic - neither which proved in any way accurate.
Bravo Nicolas ------ Fleming : first to put penicillin ON a patient , Dawson : first to put penicillin IN a patient ...
In that article the Times reporter , Nicholas Bakalar , correctly (and yet so succinctly) said that in a major story on May 6th 1941 , the Times described the first ever use of penicillin IN a patient (Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson , October 16th 1940 at Manhattan's Columbia Presbyterian Hospital).
Completely true , because all previous clinical use of penicillin - stretching back 12 years and all in the UK - had involved the use of penicillin ON a patient.
The breakthrough from harmless to lifesaving happened in North America - in NYC - first.
It was left to Dr Martin Henry Dawson from new Scotland - not Dr Alexander Fleming from old Scotland -to elevate penicillin from a harmless enough antiseptic (ON) to the potent lifesaver it became (IN) - thus ushering in the Age of Lifesaving Antibiotics.
Overwhelming , external antiseptic medications* by themselves do not save patients from acute life-threatening infections - but internal antibiotic medications do .
(*Surgical and nursing procedures that follow strict disinfectant and antiseptic protocols of course do save hundreds of millions of lives worldwide each year , but indirectly, by avoiding future potential infections.)
Antibiotics can only save patients from imminent death if used IN the body - never ON the body
It was Dr Dawson who lifted penicillin out of a dusty museum of medical curios and stuck it into a dying man's arm and saved his life - not Fleming.
Fleming thought penicillin was only useful as an antiseptic and only if it was first made artificially synthetic - neither which proved in any way accurate.
Bravo Nicolas ------ Fleming : first to put penicillin ON a patient , Dawson : first to put penicillin IN a patient ...
Tuesday, August 5, 2014
When Manhattan gives world's first penicillin shot : mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow
In May 1941, Dr Martin Henry Dawson told an international gathering of medical scientists that he had treated 4 cases of endocarditis with systemic penicillin and 8 cases of blepharitis with topical penicillin, both with hopeful results.
These results - widely reported by the New York Times, Newsweek, the wire services , even in South Africa's medical journal - first alerted the world to the fact that a half forgotten antiseptic from a dozen years earlier might have actually have wide promise as a life-saving antibiotic.
That was good enough to attract to Dawson's side a citric acid supplier to the soda pop trade, Brooklyn's then moderately sized Charles Pfizer & Co.
In March 1942, they gave Dawson and his patients the world's first commercially released penicillin.
In August 1943, further inspired by Dawson's successes, Pfizer went all out - against the general opinion of the world's drug trade - to produce massive amounts of natural penicillin , similar to what Dawson had used.
When the drug trade experts proved to be all dead wrong (no totally synthetic penicillin has ever commercially produced , even now 75 years later) , Pfizer ended up producing 80% of all the penicillin landed on the D-Day beaches and was for all of WWII, by far and away the biggest penicillin producer in the world.
Dawson's chemist, Karl Meyer, kept his friend , scientist Miloslav Demerec on Long Island , informed of the team's successes and it was Demerec who quickly invented the technology that continues to make Pfizer-style natural penicillin by far the cheapest way to produce the life-giving mold juice and all our other natural antibiotics.
But Dawson's "acorn efforts" fired up more than Pfizer and Demerec - he also inspired a hospital colleague now in the American army to badger his superiors to use penicillin on the dying wounded in Europe .... before the long war itself ended.
The Dawson success at home-made penicillin also got a doctor on Staten Island to grow some on the QT , to test his theory that penicillin could cure the dreaded syphilis quickly and safely - when he was proven right, the news electrified the international medical community even further on the possibilities in this new penicillin.
Similarly , Dawson's acorn efforts got two former patients to "act up" on behalf of his penicillin-for-all approach.
One pushed America's all-powerful War Production Board to greatly up the amounts sought by the wartime American government - enough for all in the world who were dying for lack of it - not just making a small amount to only cure those Allied servicemen fit to return to battle quickly ,the original goal.
The other obtained penicillin for a dying girl by bringing in the mighty Hearst newspaper chain - and through them, recruiting America's millions of Dr Moms to lead the charge for more penicillin - now !!!
Penicillin was first discovered and worked up in Britain and the wide wartime distribution of British penicillin to the world's sick could have given Britain great diplomatic prestige to make up for her great losses during the war.
But Churchill's government was far too niggardly in its views on how little money should be diverted away from death bombs towards life penicillin during the war - and was totally besotted with Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey 's conviction that synthetic penicillin was the only goal to aim for.
So thanks to Manhattan "natural" penicillin, Pax Britannica quietly but firmly became Pax Americana.
Mighty oaks !
These results - widely reported by the New York Times, Newsweek, the wire services , even in South Africa's medical journal - first alerted the world to the fact that a half forgotten antiseptic from a dozen years earlier might have actually have wide promise as a life-saving antibiotic.
That was good enough to attract to Dawson's side a citric acid supplier to the soda pop trade, Brooklyn's then moderately sized Charles Pfizer & Co.
In March 1942, they gave Dawson and his patients the world's first commercially released penicillin.
In August 1943, further inspired by Dawson's successes, Pfizer went all out - against the general opinion of the world's drug trade - to produce massive amounts of natural penicillin , similar to what Dawson had used.
When the drug trade experts proved to be all dead wrong (no totally synthetic penicillin has ever commercially produced , even now 75 years later) , Pfizer ended up producing 80% of all the penicillin landed on the D-Day beaches and was for all of WWII, by far and away the biggest penicillin producer in the world.
Dawson's chemist, Karl Meyer, kept his friend , scientist Miloslav Demerec on Long Island , informed of the team's successes and it was Demerec who quickly invented the technology that continues to make Pfizer-style natural penicillin by far the cheapest way to produce the life-giving mold juice and all our other natural antibiotics.
But Dawson's "acorn efforts" fired up more than Pfizer and Demerec - he also inspired a hospital colleague now in the American army to badger his superiors to use penicillin on the dying wounded in Europe .... before the long war itself ended.
The Dawson success at home-made penicillin also got a doctor on Staten Island to grow some on the QT , to test his theory that penicillin could cure the dreaded syphilis quickly and safely - when he was proven right, the news electrified the international medical community even further on the possibilities in this new penicillin.
Similarly , Dawson's acorn efforts got two former patients to "act up" on behalf of his penicillin-for-all approach.
One pushed America's all-powerful War Production Board to greatly up the amounts sought by the wartime American government - enough for all in the world who were dying for lack of it - not just making a small amount to only cure those Allied servicemen fit to return to battle quickly ,the original goal.
The other obtained penicillin for a dying girl by bringing in the mighty Hearst newspaper chain - and through them, recruiting America's millions of Dr Moms to lead the charge for more penicillin - now !!!
Penicillin was first discovered and worked up in Britain and the wide wartime distribution of British penicillin to the world's sick could have given Britain great diplomatic prestige to make up for her great losses during the war.
But Churchill's government was far too niggardly in its views on how little money should be diverted away from death bombs towards life penicillin during the war - and was totally besotted with Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey 's conviction that synthetic penicillin was the only goal to aim for.
So thanks to Manhattan "natural" penicillin, Pax Britannica quietly but firmly became Pax Americana.
Mighty oaks !
Sunday, July 27, 2014
The Stone the Builders Rejected : how New York saved natural penicillin antibiotics from the British
In London in 1928 , Sir Alexander Fleming discovered natural penicillin as a potential antibiotic but then rejected it - saying it would only be useful if chemically synthesized and even then only as a external antiseptic.
Sir Howard Florey at Oxford, together with chemist Sir Ernst Chain, took up Fleming's challenge to chemically synthesize penicillin and for a decade - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, his lab chased the chimera of totally synthesized commercial penicillin without any success.
All three men - and these three men alone - got the Nobel Prize for penicillin .
This despite the fact that the penicillin that actually saves lives is still natural in origin, not synthetic , and is a general antibiotic and not a external antiseptic --- never before or since has abject failure been so grandly rewarded !
That penicillin - the penicillin that saved millions of lives during and immediately after the war -is still the the basis of our huge family of related beta lactam antibiotics that remains our front line defence against bacterial death.
It was left to New York to pick up the stone the British builders rejected and make it into the cornerstone of our entire antibiotics industry.
New York (Manhattan) gave the first ever penicillin shots (October 16 1940) not Britain and the patient from Bronx , who was dying from then invariably fatal endocarditis , actually went home alive !
New York had the world's first pilot plant sized penicillin effort (Fall 1940).
New York gave the first ever shots of commercial penicillin
released for use on patients, made by Brooklyn-based Pfizer in March 1942 .
In August 1943, a dying baby from Queens got life-saving penicillin only after the flagship New York newspaper of the Hearst newspaper chain intervened - the story went world-wide and Doctor Mom for the first time started demanding penicillin from government and industry.
More importantly, her story morally inspired the boss of Pfizer to build the world's first serious penicillin plant - posthaste plus plus plus.
Fifteen years after natural penicillin was discovered and rejected , the world's public suddenly wanted tons of it - yesterday .
But virtually all of Big Pharma worldwide - like Fleming and Florey - still preferred to wait for (patentable) synthetic penicillin because natural penicillin could be produced by anyone and what industry really wants free enterprise if it means a lots of new competitors?
In the Fall of 1943, penicillin really got a boost when a Staten Island doctor announced that contrary to the medical consensus , it could cure syphilis quickly and safely.
A much-feared world-wide scourge for 500 years , far bigger than AIDS, suddenly almost a thing of the past - thanks to penicillin !
But natural penicillin was still costly to produce , in terms of units produced per dollar of feedstock , machinery and labour.
Then a scientist in Cold Spring Harbour Long Island was finally listened to - for years he had an idea to make the penicillium produce a lot more penicillin per dollar of effort.
Soon a hundred times as much penicillin was coming out for the same dollar of effort - using his technology today we get 50,000 times (no that is not a typo) per dollar of effort as the world got in the early 1940s.
As a result of inaction by the rest of Big Pharma , New York (read : Pfizer) was left to produce 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - and for the rest of the war, the biggest chunk of the entire world's penicillin came from its Marcy Avenue plant.
Even if Sweden's Nobel Committee didn't know all that New York did - and all that Fleming and Florey didn't do - I firmly believe that God only knows what New York had done and He is pleased ....
Sir Howard Florey at Oxford, together with chemist Sir Ernst Chain, took up Fleming's challenge to chemically synthesize penicillin and for a decade - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, his lab chased the chimera of totally synthesized commercial penicillin without any success.
All three men - and these three men alone - got the Nobel Prize for penicillin .
This despite the fact that the penicillin that actually saves lives is still natural in origin, not synthetic , and is a general antibiotic and not a external antiseptic --- never before or since has abject failure been so grandly rewarded !
That penicillin - the penicillin that saved millions of lives during and immediately after the war -is still the the basis of our huge family of related beta lactam antibiotics that remains our front line defence against bacterial death.
It was left to New York to pick up the stone the British builders rejected and make it into the cornerstone of our entire antibiotics industry.
New York (Manhattan) gave the first ever penicillin shots (October 16 1940) not Britain and the patient from Bronx , who was dying from then invariably fatal endocarditis , actually went home alive !
New York had the world's first pilot plant sized penicillin effort (Fall 1940).
New York gave the first ever shots of commercial penicillin
released for use on patients, made by Brooklyn-based Pfizer in March 1942 .
In August 1943, a dying baby from Queens got life-saving penicillin only after the flagship New York newspaper of the Hearst newspaper chain intervened - the story went world-wide and Doctor Mom for the first time started demanding penicillin from government and industry.
More importantly, her story morally inspired the boss of Pfizer to build the world's first serious penicillin plant - posthaste plus plus plus.
Fifteen years after natural penicillin was discovered and rejected , the world's public suddenly wanted tons of it - yesterday .
But virtually all of Big Pharma worldwide - like Fleming and Florey - still preferred to wait for (patentable) synthetic penicillin because natural penicillin could be produced by anyone and what industry really wants free enterprise if it means a lots of new competitors?
In the Fall of 1943, penicillin really got a boost when a Staten Island doctor announced that contrary to the medical consensus , it could cure syphilis quickly and safely.
A much-feared world-wide scourge for 500 years , far bigger than AIDS, suddenly almost a thing of the past - thanks to penicillin !
But natural penicillin was still costly to produce , in terms of units produced per dollar of feedstock , machinery and labour.
Then a scientist in Cold Spring Harbour Long Island was finally listened to - for years he had an idea to make the penicillium produce a lot more penicillin per dollar of effort.
Soon a hundred times as much penicillin was coming out for the same dollar of effort - using his technology today we get 50,000 times (no that is not a typo) per dollar of effort as the world got in the early 1940s.
As a result of inaction by the rest of Big Pharma , New York (read : Pfizer) was left to produce 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - and for the rest of the war, the biggest chunk of the entire world's penicillin came from its Marcy Avenue plant.
Even if Sweden's Nobel Committee didn't know all that New York did - and all that Fleming and Florey didn't do - I firmly believe that God only knows what New York had done and He is pleased ....
Thursday, July 24, 2014
Manhattan gave the world the first life-saving penicillin shot - as well as the first death-dealing A-Bomb
Don't let terrorists like Ramzi Yousef limit Manhattan's wartime role to killing (and here I quote his justification for blowing up the twin towers of the World Trade Centre) "250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki".
Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.
New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.
It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.
Alexander Fleming in London had discovered penicillin 12 years earlier but had decided it would only be useful if made as a patentable man-made economical synthetic and even then only useful as a surface antiseptic - not in an internally-oriented pill or needle.
Howard Florey in Oxford had taken up Fleming's challenge and for a decade his team chased the chimera of man-made patentable economical man-made penicillin - but they never succeeded and no one else ever has.
New York went back to Fleming's original semi-purified natural penicillin and ran with it - in five short weeks Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team had obtained spores, grown it , concentrated it and tested it for toxicity (on Dawson himself).
Now the team was ready to give it to patients dying of then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) for lack of it - a young black man from Sugar Hill, Harlem named Aaron Alston and a young Jewish man named Charles Aronson from the Bronx.
SBE patients were then considered the 4Fs of the 4Fs and not a priority to an Anglo-American medical establishment using the excuse of war preparation to curtail social medicine (medicine directed at the poor and minorities).
So the day Dawson picked for history's first penicillin shots couldn't have been more freighted in symbolism.
It was October 16th 1940 - the historic first day of America's draft registration process - a process still going strong 75 years later.
So on a day when all the minds of America and of the Allied and Axis world were focussed on whether or not the hardships of the Great Depression had reduced America's numbers of 1A fit-for-combat youth , a 4F black man and Jew got to make their own history in a quiet corner of upper Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Centre...
Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.
New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.
It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.
Alexander Fleming in London had discovered penicillin 12 years earlier but had decided it would only be useful if made as a patentable man-made economical synthetic and even then only useful as a surface antiseptic - not in an internally-oriented pill or needle.
Howard Florey in Oxford had taken up Fleming's challenge and for a decade his team chased the chimera of man-made patentable economical man-made penicillin - but they never succeeded and no one else ever has.
New York went back to Fleming's original semi-purified natural penicillin and ran with it - in five short weeks Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team had obtained spores, grown it , concentrated it and tested it for toxicity (on Dawson himself).
Now the team was ready to give it to patients dying of then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) for lack of it - a young black man from Sugar Hill, Harlem named Aaron Alston and a young Jewish man named Charles Aronson from the Bronx.
SBE patients were then considered the 4Fs of the 4Fs and not a priority to an Anglo-American medical establishment using the excuse of war preparation to curtail social medicine (medicine directed at the poor and minorities).
So the day Dawson picked for history's first penicillin shots couldn't have been more freighted in symbolism.
It was October 16th 1940 - the historic first day of America's draft registration process - a process still going strong 75 years later.
So on a day when all the minds of America and of the Allied and Axis world were focussed on whether or not the hardships of the Great Depression had reduced America's numbers of 1A fit-for-combat youth , a 4F black man and Jew got to make their own history in a quiet corner of upper Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Centre...
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
Emma Lazarus's message to immigrants : America , if it is about anything , is ALL about second acts ...
F Scott Fitzgerald got it wrong. Not about everything , of course. But the bit about there being 'no second acts in American lives' - that 24/7 bromide of the modern news and entertainment biz.
As Emma Lazarus's own legacy demonstrates , there is plenty of room in America for second and even third acts.
Not really a surprise to readers of the New Testament I suppose.
Or to tens of millions of born again Americans (or to the many fans of Richard M Nixon) .
Emma was actually quite an internationally prominent poet and social activist in her day.
Her poem written to raise funds for the pedestal of the French-donated Statue of Liberty was the definite hit of the fund-raising effort.
But then she took seriously ill with a terminal cancer and so became inactive in America's literary cum social action circles.
Thus, in the lead up to the actual ceremony mounting the statue in New York harbour neither she or her poem was mentioned.
(Again , re-affirming a cliche of the modern news and celebrity biz - you have to be out there all the time self-promoting or you're yesterday's news.)
The poem was also almost totally absent from the many tributes to her on her death in 1887.
No artistic figure , no matter how prominent or how big a seller while alive , remains so unless they created a historically important institution, school of thought or work of art.
That is to say no one remains prominent unless they are taught about in school or college.
One sixty word poem tossed off in an hour, but considered highly suitable for a students' anthology, can easily out-weigh a lifetime spent writing three million profitable words , in this fame game.
Seemingly , Emma lacked that 'hit' .
But in 1903 , a friend of Ms Lazarus , Georgina Schuyler , re-discovered the poem about the statue (The New Colossus) in an used book store.
She succeeded , after a great deal of resistance from Emma's family, in having the last few lines of it engraved on a modest bronze plaque in a corner of the statue.
There it remained un-noticed for another thirty years until a Slovene immigrant and social activist , Louis Adamic , campaigned tirelessly for decades , until his death in 1951 , to turn the poem and the statue into a symbol of how America should still welcome immigrants.
(In 1924, America had closed its doors to all but a handful of immigrants from a handful of nordic protestant countries.)
By 1936, at the fifty year celebration of the statue, FDR's carefully eloquent speech had to take in this new sense of the statue taking in (all) refugees who thereby got a second chance at life in America --- because, in FDR's equally careful bow to the right - America offered expanded liberties (to all those who qualified as good enough to become Americans) - the original meaning of the statue.
Gradually , though still contested today by many on the right, Lazarus's hijacking of the Statue of Liberty's original meaning has won the day.
And what person worldwide would be considered truly educated by others if they instantly failed to know what the words tired, huddled and wretched refer to ?
I have written and spoken before (on my local CBC) about how fragile the early existence of today's universally understood myths often were.
My starting point was simply a passing reference in George F Williston's Saints and Strangers of how during the Revolutionary War , the British took the crucial manuscripts of Governor Bradford, the only real chronicler of the early Plymouth Colony , from out of a Boston church steeple and behind the counter of a humble Halifax grocery store.
There the sheets of paper manuscript detailing the tale of the First Thanksgiving Dinner almost got consumed itself --- as wrappers for greasy pieces of cheese on their way home to hungry post-revolutionary Nova Scotian diners !
This led me to discover the long and windy path to today's universally known account of that first dinner.
So today's story of the first thanksgiving dinner actually is fully faithful to the original event.
However , for most of the 19th century, the story was re-cast as the Indians sending hostile arrows and tomahawks, not peaceful food, to the gathering !
Now I am trying to revive a symbolic tale for Manhattan and America.
True but nevertheless forgotten : Martin Henry Dawson and penicillin-for-all.
His hugely significant role was well noted in the first detailed newspaper and book accounts about wartime penicillin - which coincided with his premature death.
But Dawson had four problems if he wished to have a 'hit' .
He was extremely modest about his role while alive.
He was dead. ( And had no kin or friend who felt like working hard to keep his story alive.)
Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey were alive.
They were total failures in terms of totally failing to do what they intended to do with penicillin versus what America had done so successfully with penicillin.
They were pushy self-promoters. And all of Britain backed them fully in this need to re-cast the history of wartime penicillin as a British triumph.
Academic historians have fully bought into either the Fleming or Florey version .
Though I find it rather noteworthy that generations of Hollywood producers (armed only with cigars rather than doctorates) consider both men's story to be box office poison and have failed to make a movie out of the dramatic events of wartime penicillin.
My efforts might thus seem totally hopeless but for one more bromide from the North American newsroom.
Those heartless bastards in the news and entertainment biz who give you your fleeting 15 minutes of fame and then toss you out like a used condom ?
They love - simply love - a comeback story - clawing your way back out of the grave like a 'where are they now' lazarus.
The latest example - timely this - is Weird Al Yankovic , who write , sings and performs musical video parodies of well known pop songs while sending up pop culture.
The very physically unattractive and supernerdy Yankovic was supposed to remain a one hit wonder from almost 40 years ago - a weird guy playing accordion at a time of heavy metal and punk.
But he hung on in and gradually getting him to parody you
became as crucial to an superstar's ego as dipping your feet in cement in Hollywood or seeing yourself in wax at Madame Tussauds .
This week his latest album debuted at number one in America and the press went crazy --- this just seemed the-paint-by-numbers kit of all comeback stories - even if Weird Al never really left.
Dawson's no prettier than Al - his biting wit not as potent - but morally , his story really can't be beat.
There's hope yet ...
As Emma Lazarus's own legacy demonstrates , there is plenty of room in America for second and even third acts.
Not really a surprise to readers of the New Testament I suppose.
Or to tens of millions of born again Americans (or to the many fans of Richard M Nixon) .
Lazarus arising
Emma was actually quite an internationally prominent poet and social activist in her day.
Her poem written to raise funds for the pedestal of the French-donated Statue of Liberty was the definite hit of the fund-raising effort.
But then she took seriously ill with a terminal cancer and so became inactive in America's literary cum social action circles.
Thus, in the lead up to the actual ceremony mounting the statue in New York harbour neither she or her poem was mentioned.
(Again , re-affirming a cliche of the modern news and celebrity biz - you have to be out there all the time self-promoting or you're yesterday's news.)
The poem was also almost totally absent from the many tributes to her on her death in 1887.
No artistic figure , no matter how prominent or how big a seller while alive , remains so unless they created a historically important institution, school of thought or work of art.
That is to say no one remains prominent unless they are taught about in school or college.
One sixty word poem tossed off in an hour, but considered highly suitable for a students' anthology, can easily out-weigh a lifetime spent writing three million profitable words , in this fame game.
Seemingly , Emma lacked that 'hit' .
But in 1903 , a friend of Ms Lazarus , Georgina Schuyler , re-discovered the poem about the statue (The New Colossus) in an used book store.
She succeeded , after a great deal of resistance from Emma's family, in having the last few lines of it engraved on a modest bronze plaque in a corner of the statue.
There it remained un-noticed for another thirty years until a Slovene immigrant and social activist , Louis Adamic , campaigned tirelessly for decades , until his death in 1951 , to turn the poem and the statue into a symbol of how America should still welcome immigrants.
(In 1924, America had closed its doors to all but a handful of immigrants from a handful of nordic protestant countries.)
By 1936, at the fifty year celebration of the statue, FDR's carefully eloquent speech had to take in this new sense of the statue taking in (all) refugees who thereby got a second chance at life in America --- because, in FDR's equally careful bow to the right - America offered expanded liberties (to all those who qualified as good enough to become Americans) - the original meaning of the statue.
Gradually , though still contested today by many on the right, Lazarus's hijacking of the Statue of Liberty's original meaning has won the day.
And what person worldwide would be considered truly educated by others if they instantly failed to know what the words tired, huddled and wretched refer to ?
I have written and spoken before (on my local CBC) about how fragile the early existence of today's universally understood myths often were.
My starting point was simply a passing reference in George F Williston's Saints and Strangers of how during the Revolutionary War , the British took the crucial manuscripts of Governor Bradford, the only real chronicler of the early Plymouth Colony , from out of a Boston church steeple and behind the counter of a humble Halifax grocery store.
There the sheets of paper manuscript detailing the tale of the First Thanksgiving Dinner almost got consumed itself --- as wrappers for greasy pieces of cheese on their way home to hungry post-revolutionary Nova Scotian diners !
This led me to discover the long and windy path to today's universally known account of that first dinner.
So today's story of the first thanksgiving dinner actually is fully faithful to the original event.
However , for most of the 19th century, the story was re-cast as the Indians sending hostile arrows and tomahawks, not peaceful food, to the gathering !
Now I am trying to revive a symbolic tale for Manhattan and America.
True but nevertheless forgotten : Martin Henry Dawson and penicillin-for-all.
His hugely significant role was well noted in the first detailed newspaper and book accounts about wartime penicillin - which coincided with his premature death.
But Dawson had four problems if he wished to have a 'hit' .
He was extremely modest about his role while alive.
He was dead. ( And had no kin or friend who felt like working hard to keep his story alive.)
Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey were alive.
They were total failures in terms of totally failing to do what they intended to do with penicillin versus what America had done so successfully with penicillin.
They were pushy self-promoters. And all of Britain backed them fully in this need to re-cast the history of wartime penicillin as a British triumph.
Academic historians have fully bought into either the Fleming or Florey version .
Though I find it rather noteworthy that generations of Hollywood producers (armed only with cigars rather than doctorates) consider both men's story to be box office poison and have failed to make a movie out of the dramatic events of wartime penicillin.
My efforts might thus seem totally hopeless but for one more bromide from the North American newsroom.
Those heartless bastards in the news and entertainment biz who give you your fleeting 15 minutes of fame and then toss you out like a used condom ?
They love - simply love - a comeback story - clawing your way back out of the grave like a 'where are they now' lazarus.
The latest example - timely this - is Weird Al Yankovic , who write , sings and performs musical video parodies of well known pop songs while sending up pop culture.
The very physically unattractive and supernerdy Yankovic was supposed to remain a one hit wonder from almost 40 years ago - a weird guy playing accordion at a time of heavy metal and punk.
But he hung on in and gradually getting him to parody you
became as crucial to an superstar's ego as dipping your feet in cement in Hollywood or seeing yourself in wax at Madame Tussauds .
This week his latest album debuted at number one in America and the press went crazy --- this just seemed the-paint-by-numbers kit of all comeback stories - even if Weird Al never really left.
Dawson's no prettier than Al - his biting wit not as potent - but morally , his story really can't be beat.
There's hope yet ...
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
"Antibiotics, October 16th 1940 : 75 Years Young !"
My first book on "Agape Penicillin" , due out early in 2015 , is all about the brave Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Dawson) who first gave us penicillin the antibiotic.
It is not at all about the Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Fleming) who discovered penicillin --- but then only used it indolently, for twelve wasted years , as an useless antiseptic.
I have entitled it '75 years young' rather than '75 years old' to emphasize that the real miracle of antibiotics has mostly been for in its effects on younger rather than older patients.
Because, just as in the earlier miracle with Lazarus , people who get life-saving antibiotics still die - the miracle simply consists in moving the goalposts further along , to a point closer to Life's natural ending.
Before 1940, few large upper class families - let alone poorer families - did not know the terror of a healthy five year old child being here today and in an premature grave a few days later.
Those of us of a certain generation know well the difference between an antiseptic and an antibiotic.
Antiseptics were when we scrapped our knee falling off our tricycle - it was part of a ritual involving a cookie, "a kiss to make it better" and some orange liquid from a little bottle.
The orange stuff hurt like hell, hindered healing and promoted scarring but it was all part of the ritual back then.
But antibiotics !
You'll alway remember that fast as the ambulance was , your old family doctor (who usually moved with slow dignity) was much faster.
His car came around the corner on two wheels and he took the steps three at a time - no word of greeting - simply hauled a big needle out of his black bag and plunged it into your baby sister.
You were too young to know exactly why the room was so still and tense - a neighbour had whispered 'meningitis' but that tension suddenly broke with the doctor's next and unexpected act.
He cuddled up to your mother , put an arm familiarly around her shoulders and said "Marge , where's that cuppa ?"
Marge !? Not even your father called her that.
She looked up startled and then happily bustled off , saying "oh , where my manners."
And your father - for the first and only time in your young life - starting crying - big sobs - but smiling to beat the band all the time.
Your little sister is now a grandmother as old as the doctor was then, with grandchildren of her own.
That's what an antibiotic is - and that is why it is so worth celebrating ...
It is not at all about the Scottish Presbyterian doctor (Fleming) who discovered penicillin --- but then only used it indolently, for twelve wasted years , as an useless antiseptic.
I have entitled it '75 years young' rather than '75 years old' to emphasize that the real miracle of antibiotics has mostly been for in its effects on younger rather than older patients.
Because, just as in the earlier miracle with Lazarus , people who get life-saving antibiotics still die - the miracle simply consists in moving the goalposts further along , to a point closer to Life's natural ending.
Before 1940, few large upper class families - let alone poorer families - did not know the terror of a healthy five year old child being here today and in an premature grave a few days later.
Those of us of a certain generation know well the difference between an antiseptic and an antibiotic.
Antiseptics were when we scrapped our knee falling off our tricycle - it was part of a ritual involving a cookie, "a kiss to make it better" and some orange liquid from a little bottle.
The orange stuff hurt like hell, hindered healing and promoted scarring but it was all part of the ritual back then.
But antibiotics !
You'll alway remember that fast as the ambulance was , your old family doctor (who usually moved with slow dignity) was much faster.
His car came around the corner on two wheels and he took the steps three at a time - no word of greeting - simply hauled a big needle out of his black bag and plunged it into your baby sister.
You were too young to know exactly why the room was so still and tense - a neighbour had whispered 'meningitis' but that tension suddenly broke with the doctor's next and unexpected act.
He cuddled up to your mother , put an arm familiarly around her shoulders and said "Marge , where's that cuppa ?"
Marge !? Not even your father called her that.
She looked up startled and then happily bustled off , saying "oh , where my manners."
And your father - for the first and only time in your young life - starting crying - big sobs - but smiling to beat the band all the time.
Your little sister is now a grandmother as old as the doctor was then, with grandchildren of her own.
That's what an antibiotic is - and that is why it is so worth celebrating ...
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