If we ever do encounter a 'spot of bother' (their words) over global warming, Rogue Boomers fervently expect the engineering equivalent of the tooth fairy or superman to waft over and quickly sort it out .
Their forebears used to worship scientists and science , so this is a bit of a change - because these Boomers don't like scientists, at least as they imagine them to be.
University profs mostly, sitting in ivory tower labs, forever dissing this or that sincere effort to 'grow' the economy.
What they do still like are engineers - at least they imagine them to be - actually often their imagined engineers are scientists - field or production scientists employed by private industry.
Pose any big crisis at these Rogue Boomers and just wait for it : yep, within a minute or two, they are sure to pull out the 'it just needs another Manhattan Project - this time for cancer - to solve it'.
Big Science - Big Money - Big Faith : throw enough at it and any problem will go away.
By contrast, my segment of that same Boomer generation, those of us I call the 'Noir's Children', just as confidently expect that 'anything that can go wrong, will go wrong'.
It is not as if we always grimly shut off the TV after viewing a downbeat Film Noir and go put our heads in the oven.
It is more that if a mysterious light ever glows overhead and a thousand soldiers arrive to seal off the site , we don't take it on faith when some guy in a suit arrives and says "I'm from the FBI in Washington - and I am here to help."
Ronald Reagan conservatives bought that line - the Rogue Boomers still buy that line - but we don't ...
Showing posts with label big science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label big science. Show all posts
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Saturday, September 6, 2014
1945 Big Science's failed promises : synthetic stability and predictability
Chemically-minded/blinded scientists (and during WWII that included almost all scientists) hate, hate, hate penicillium mold.
To them , it is like an unbroken , un-house-trained mustang bronco .
A petulant two year old pooping penicillin all over the floor and then mutating like crazy so it now refuses to eat right, go to bed on cue or produce more penicillin on demand.
And natural penicillin itself - it also sometimes mysteriously lost its potency in mere days or even hours.
"For Darwin's Sake, give me man-made penicillin every time !" was their universal cry.
To them , it is like an unbroken , un-house-trained mustang bronco .
A petulant two year old pooping penicillin all over the floor and then mutating like crazy so it now refuses to eat right, go to bed on cue or produce more penicillin on demand.
And natural penicillin itself - it also sometimes mysteriously lost its potency in mere days or even hours.
"For Darwin's Sake, give me man-made penicillin every time !" was their universal cry.
1945's apogee of Modern science , Big science, Synthetic science : Zyklon-B, Plutonium, Napalm , DDT , Freon and leaded gas
Wow ! Quite a lot for Big Science (particularly chemists and synthetic scientists) to celebrate in 1945.
Set against that , a bit of a minor and undoubtedly temporary disappointment.
For there was (also in 1945) the totally unexpected failure by a thousand of the smartest guys in the room - nay the entire universe - to quickly synthesize the simple small molecule made by some small and extremely simple beings : penicillin.
Flash forward Gordon to 2015.
Set against that , a bit of a minor and undoubtedly temporary disappointment.
For there was (also in 1945) the totally unexpected failure by a thousand of the smartest guys in the room - nay the entire universe - to quickly synthesize the simple small molecule made by some small and extremely simple beings : penicillin.
Flash forward Gordon to 2015.
Saturday, July 12, 2014
Penicillin-for-All : Postmodernity's "Manhattan Project"
We know far too well Modernity's "Manhattan Project" - Big Science's Atom Bomb - it sometimes seems that middle-aged male non-fiction writers write about nothing else than those heady - now long gone -days of Modernity and Male dominance.
(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .
And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.
This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)
Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.
P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.
It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.
Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.
So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...
(Yes it is almost always middle-aged men who write the books and articles about Manhattan's atomic bomb .
And perhaps it is also almost always middle-aged men who read them , despite the fact that ordinarily most readers are women of all ages.
This publishing fixation on the past glories of long gone Modernity may hurt publishing firms' bottom line but it is unlikely to change as long as most publishing bosses are also middle-aged males with a strong taste of nostalgia for when men like themselves ruled the roust unchallenged.)
Few middle-aged male writers , however , write about the simultaneous (in time and space) Post Modern Manhattan Project --- Penicillin-for-All.
P-F-A was an unexpected triumph -- because all-powerful wartime Big Government (and Big Pharma) definitely had other plans.
It was the unexpected triumph of a tiny band of unfits (with no government grants to aid them by the way) successfully defying both Allied and Axis eugenicism (and their own physical failings) to bring us Penicillin-for-All.
Call it a triumph of the unfit, weak, small - above all call it the triumph of DIY small science, since key to the unfits' success was their ability to create their own tiny life-saving penicillin factory , regardless of how Big Pharma and Big Government wanted to play out wartime penicillin.
So if WWII definitely began in 1939 at the height of the Era of Eugenic Modernity , equally it ended in 1945 at the beginnings of our present Era of Welcoming Diversity & Postmodernity and it is time male non-fiction writers accept this historical reality...
Saturday, June 28, 2014
Manhattan's OTHER project : how seven lives 'unworthy of life' improved the lives of seven billion of us ...
WWII as a triumph of small science
Conventional accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project and of the development of wartime penicillin strongly emphasize that they were the first of what has come to be called Big Science --- something that is taken as the norm for today's science.
But in fact much of the science of the atomic bomb and atomic energy was actually done by very small teams working with very little money and home made equipment - it was the engineering aspects that were the truly massive part of that particular project.
With regards to wartime penicillin it was much the same : small science , not Big Science.
One must remember that wartime penicillin's powerful impact came not merely from its unique scientific characteristics --- ie that it was first (and to some extent, the last) broad spectrum but non-toxic bacterial killer.
Its biggest impact really came from the fact that wartime penicillin G was unexpectedly inexpensive and and unexpectedly widely available for such a potent lifesaver.
This is because a very cheap and abundant (because it was non-patented) lifesaver could save far more lives than any very expensive patent-limited lifesaver could ever do.
And then we all benefit.
Because by a sort of a global herd immunity when even the poorest people living in the most remote places on Earth are cured of killer strains of disease, we in wealthier places tend also to never see those diseases again.
This is because such diseases have been around seemingly for ever as endemic diseases --- all by surviving in geographic cum cultural pockets, among those considered too poor or too worthless to treat properly medically.
So the true miracle of wartime penicillin was more moral than scientific in nature.
Its miracle lay in the unexpected success of a small band of seven physically challenged individuals in convincing the American public that penicillin should be made available to all Americans who need it to survive.
Convincing them that their Allied leaders should not just producing a small amount of penicillin as secretively as possible, just so they could use it as a weapon of war to give D-Day's front line Allied commanders an advantage over their Nazi counterparts.
The Allies had - because of dysgenic fears - far too few infantrymen to really defeat the Nazis or the Japanese in a hard fight.
(And the few infantrymen they did have were more 4F than 1A, in comparison to the average military serviceman !)
The Allies instead hoped to quickly re-use most of their relatively small forces of infantry when they got moderately severely wounded - by employing advanced medical efforts - so their frontline rifleman could get a second and third crack at being killed in combat.
(As a member member of an reserve infantry unit, may I quickly say ---- "Oh joy !!")
If these medical efforts failed , it meant many more 'decent, middle class, white, Protestant men' would end up dying in the PBI (Poor Bloody Infantry) and this was seen as an eugenic mistake that the Allied cultural elite was not about to repeat from WWI.
If their scheme worked, they would keep the best of their breed safe from the trenches and still have a big advantage over the enemy.
Because , by contrast, they figured the average German infantry, when moderately severely wounded , was out for half a year - while the average Japanese under such circumstances simply died of their wounds.
Their thinking was that that much bigger Axis armies, with much of their troops in hospital beds, couldn't defeat assaults from much smaller Allied Corps , if the Corps had most of their troops in fighting trim.
Because the medically convincing details of the lifesaving results of penicillin were only known by the Allied medical establishment , the hard pressed Nazis and Japanese hadn't given the development of penicillin (which they had read about in the public scientific literature) much of a priority.
If these lifesaving successes could continue to be kept out of the medical and public media until D-Day , only the Allies would have abundant patented (secret) penicillin to return their wounded to combat much quickly than had traditionally been the case.
D-Day would spill the beans soon enough , but long before the Germans and Japanese chemists had broken the penicillin patent and gone into mass production, the war would be over.
The Seven Crips
The seven argued - by contrast - that the war to defeat Hitler was as much moral as military.
Germany was the moderately big schoolyard bully and Poland was the moderately small schoolyard victim.
Hitler had gotten away with his bullying because the rest of the world - which vastly out-numbered and out-gunned him, had not intervened against his bullying but instead talked up the virtues of non-intervention in European 'schoolyard squabbles'.
Not my words - rather the shameful words of endless newspaper editorials and 'statesmen' the world over in the early 1940s.
The seven said we must not just talk The Atlantic Charter talk (the Allied declaration that said all - even the smallest and weakest and most valueless - had an absolute right to life and security).
The seven said we must make sure our own Allied actions don't echo the Nazi's counterclaims.
(That the strongest are morally justified in denying the weakest and smallest the right of life and succour.)
But instead the Allies were actually and openly "Code Slowing" tens of thousands of mostly young, mostly poor and minority people.
People with the SBE version of endocarditis - SBE being the final - hitherto terminal - disease that made childhood Rheumatic Fever such a terror.
The SBEs were considered to be so useless that they couldn't even be recruited to work in the war industries , let alone be in the military.
So no wartime penicillin was to be wasted on them and they were to be left to die --- for two reasons.
The unimportant reason was that currently penicillin was still in limited supply and the SBE were below the lowest in priority, particularly as some cases of SBE did consume extremely large amounts of that limited penicillin.
The important reason was that SBE was regarded as the "Gold Standard" of intractable infections.
Any evidence that this new fangled 'penicillin' stuff could actually cure this famously most incurable of infectious diseases would tend to break the whole story of wartime penicillin wide open in the American news media.
And nothing (to paraphrase an old old adage of the pop music business) only 'breaks local' in America .
A big news story in America becomes a big news story worldwide - including in Japan and Germany, via friendly neutral diplomats in Washington.
The seven may have realized that while the Allied medical establishment won't easily bend on the issue of SBE and penicillin, it was also a hard position for the Allied elite to sustain publicly.
Letting young kids die needlessly merely on account of being judged 'life unworthy of life' would be a hard moral sell for the Allies warring against evil governments that basically did exactly the same thing.
Dr Dawson, the leader of the seven , decided to liberate ie 'steal' government controlled penicillin to successfully save five young women dying of SBE but his success was written out of the official report indicated penicillin test results.
And there it might of ended.
But for the fact that his successes and how this most unlikely of heroes was driven to steal to save lives had become the stuff of legend in New York's wartime-strengthened gossip grapevine among it tens of thousands of medical staffers.
A former patient of his, a fellow crip and fellow doctor named Dante Colitti , decided to emulate Dawson and saw to it that the fount of Yellow Journalism, Citizen Hearst's newspaper empire , covered his efforts from gavel to gavel.
The story - involving a terminally ill and terminally cute two year old toddler named Patty Malone - broke wide , broke stateside, broke worldwide.
Soon defeated in the court of public opinion by the formidable Doctor Mom, the Allies really opened the penicillin floodgates wide when Dawson's friend among Big Pharma , John L Smith of Pfizer , took up his cause and started producing it at levels a million times higher than Pfizer had done earlier.
Small science ?
Well the seven cripples had no government grants, had strong enemies rather than warm friends in high places and were - obviously - in poor physical vigour.
That they nevertheless brought the massed Allied governments - during a Total War - to their knees shows us all what sheer raw moral courage can do.
And that when we see those physically and mentally challenged as 'lives useless of life', they are anything but ....
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
1945 : annus mirabilis or annus horribilis for Scientism ?
I have always been fascinated by the Janus-like nature of the year 1945 in its relationship to Science and the undue worship thereof.
1945 was the year that it was widely admitted that it was only the Allies' mild-mannered/white-coated men of modern science who had bested the superior combat skills of the jackbooted henchmen of the Axis and so won the war for humanity.
A good year for Scientism.
But 1945 was also the year that we now conventionally mark the start of post-modern science... and hence marks the end of modern science.
Surely then a bad year for Scientism.
Clearly we have two views on the alleged success of modern science in 1945 - one made at the time and still held firmly by elderly academics and citizens and another made forty years later and just as firmly held by young academics.
One credits it for ending the war on behalf of the morally right side and the other blames it for starting the war and behaving so beastly during it.
All Life is Family , part one and two, explores why it was possible for most of the modernist audience of 1945 not to see the many failings of wartime science on both sides, technical as well as moral, running from 1939 through to war's end.
And why historians ever since have repeated this initial error.
The war is simply never broken out of its narrative mode to present the predictions that each and every participant had made at a particular point in time together with an assessment of whether those predictions came to pass.
Who, for example, predicted that Hitler won't conquer Moscow within four months after June 1941 ?
No one that I am aware of, as Stalin himself soon had his doubts about this capitol's survival - some military 'experts' even publicly ventured that Moscow would fall in mere weeks not months !
Predictions proved about as inaccurate during WWII as they had all throughout history - only this time they were pressed forward with the strong claim that they were backed by the best science.
If so, the best science was wrong, over and over and over for six long years.
And if "All Life is Family" is the first to say so, so be it .....
1945 was the year that it was widely admitted that it was only the Allies' mild-mannered/white-coated men of modern science who had bested the superior combat skills of the jackbooted henchmen of the Axis and so won the war for humanity.
A good year for Scientism.
But 1945 was also the year that we now conventionally mark the start of post-modern science... and hence marks the end of modern science.
Surely then a bad year for Scientism.
Clearly we have two views on the alleged success of modern science in 1945 - one made at the time and still held firmly by elderly academics and citizens and another made forty years later and just as firmly held by young academics.
One credits it for ending the war on behalf of the morally right side and the other blames it for starting the war and behaving so beastly during it.
All Life is Family , part one and two, explores why it was possible for most of the modernist audience of 1945 not to see the many failings of wartime science on both sides, technical as well as moral, running from 1939 through to war's end.
And why historians ever since have repeated this initial error.
The war is simply never broken out of its narrative mode to present the predictions that each and every participant had made at a particular point in time together with an assessment of whether those predictions came to pass.
Who, for example, predicted that Hitler won't conquer Moscow within four months after June 1941 ?
No one that I am aware of, as Stalin himself soon had his doubts about this capitol's survival - some military 'experts' even publicly ventured that Moscow would fall in mere weeks not months !
Predictions proved about as inaccurate during WWII as they had all throughout history - only this time they were pressed forward with the strong claim that they were backed by the best science.
If so, the best science was wrong, over and over and over for six long years.
And if "All Life is Family" is the first to say so, so be it .....
Thursday, October 4, 2012
"Sending in the Shovels" : June 6th 1944
 |
| How Omaha got its "P" |
But as usual Bullshit talks and Reality walks as the two "S"s both failed spectacularly to deliver.
So it was then that early in the morning of June 6th 1944, a hundred thousand shivering infantry with low-tech rifles and a hundred thousand doses of low tech natural penicillin were bobbing about off the beaches of Normandy, about to do the job right.
Once again at the last minute , to snatch low tech victory from the jaws of high tech defeat, the wise and the mighty were reduced to "sending in the shovels".
Shades of the supposed "high tech" led victory of Vimy Ridge...
This may not the history of WWII that you are used to hearing - because it is not really true that only the victors write history : in reality it is often powerful victors with something to hide, with something to spin, that end up writing the big histories: Whig History.
A special kind of Whig History, history re-written with an unique type of hindsight, so that it appears that all events on the victor's side of the war worked together to bring the war to the conclusion that actually happened.
D-Day then not just happened (hard to deny something as big as that anyway !) but was always planned to have happened, and happen when it did and as it did.
But while WWII was Modernity's very own war , at last, it turned out to be the Nadir of Modernity as well.
Because D-Day and the infantry-led conquest of Hitler's Germany, like the mass production of cheap natural penicillin , like the "non-precision" bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , weren't supposed to happen.
They were , all three , low tech "Plan B"s ,to cover-up the failure of three of the Allies' high tech "Plan A"s.......
Monday, September 6, 2010
Thanks to DOCTOR MOM, "he (and she) will be coming home!"
Most wartime GIs who drank too much Schenley whiskey and ran their jeeps off the road and woke up in the hospital with a penicillin drip in their arm, never realized that not only did Schenley sell them the bite of a snake but they also sold them the cure.
That wartime penicillin might have come from Schenley Labs.
Their whiskey is still here - but their penicillin is long gone.
But Schenley did have the satisfaction for having produced the most iconic image of the entire saga of early penicillin.
Printed in rich vivid glossy magazine color, this ad featured the realistic style painting of a medic putting penicillin in the arm of a wounded Marine in a place that looks to be Tawara, as photographed by Marine photographer Norman Hatch.
Seventy years later, Hatch's photos remain the gold standard of 'you are there' combat photography.
This famous island battle first brought home to America just how bloody this war was going to be - particularly because of the casualty count.
But mostly because Hatch's grim photographs were deliberately released, rather than censored, to toughen up Americans at home to the mounting death toll that lay ahead.
So the ad's painting immediately conjured up a grim backdrop to any magazine readers in 1943-1945.
But the cutline below was pure uplift : "Thanks to PENICILLIN...
he will come home !"
Often rendered in the retelling as "Thanks to Penicillin, he will be coming home !"
The combination of image and cutline basically assures home viewers worried about their relative overseas that "Despite the vicious fighting and the terrible jungle conditions, thanks to penicillin, he WILL be coming home !"
This ad went totally unremarked upon during the war.
But in the 65 years since, it has grown by leaps and bounds in importance as almost every scholar today finds it to be the best single wartime expression of the sheer hope that grew in a world (bone tired of 15 years of Depression and War) that something good must lie ahead.
Usually, their subtext when recalling this ad is "Thanks to Big Science bringing us Penicillin, he will be coming home !"
I don't think this is true at all.
I believe that if left to their own devices (along with scads of our tax dollars) it would have been 1946 or later before enough penicillin would had been produced to help the soldier at the front , let alone the patient back home.
I think there were two competing strategies to speed up the production of wartime penicillin.
One was develop scientific evidence on a very wide and deep front ("Big Science") to convince scientists in universities, hospitals, corporate research labs and in bureaucratic offices that a small shift in international wartime priorities was justified to produce large amounts of penicillin as a supplement to the sulfa drugs for illnesses resistant to sulfa like those caused by staph bacteria.
But that only enough penicillin needed to be produced to aid the fighting men, at least until the war was finally won.
I hope you sense the contrast between a massive effort of "means" to secure a limited "end".
This was Howard Florey and his supporters' thesis.
The other strategy was proposed by just one man - a soon-to-be dying man - in September 1940 and maintained by him until his death in April 1945.
Martin Henry Dawson.
He said penicillin had already been privately discovered, in 1928 by Fleming, but no one had been roused and no lives had been saved.
Penicillin had also been publicly discovered,( ie published in the scientific media) in 1929 by Fleming and again in 1940 by Florey but no one had really been roused and no lives had been saved.
Dawson proposed instead to have penicillin popularly discovered - by Doctor Mom.
It was a Man's World back in 1940 .
(It mostly still is, but not as bad as back then !)
But even in 1940 women voted, bought much of the family's purchases and they were the daughters, mothers, sisters and spouses of the prominent men who ultimately ran things.
If they got on the case of the men to bring them penicillin and they stayed on the case (as women are very good at doing - some dare call it 'persistent nagging') , even reluctant men will eventually give in and get moving.
So Dawson persuaded Meyer and Hobby and Chaffee, his entire team of 'little science', to refocus their primary aim of their newborn penicillin pilot project.
He said they should immediately and narrowly focus on curing a single disease, Rheumatic Fever-induced Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.
This disease was the one that all parents in the western world regarded as a constant Sword of Damocles over their heads ,at least until all their children had gotten safely into their early twenties.
Tuberculous might be the disease feared more by the poorest families and Diphtheria and Scarlet Fever might have been feared more in grandma's day, but from about 1910 to 1960, Rheumatic Fever (RF) was the number one killer of school age kids .
In addition, the invariably fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) it brought to many Rheumatic Fever 'survivors' was a big killer of youth and adults all along life's journey.
But the main point of the myth of The Sword of Damocles was not the pain of the instant the sword actually did fall and kill you but rather that the situation made you afraid all of your life, just waiting for the day the sword might fall.
Most parents never experienced their children getting RF or SBE but all dreaded it might happen someday.
RF starts with a child getting a sore throat or tonsillitis from strep bacteria.
Think about it - what child doesn't get tons of those, even today with antibiotics?
Before antibiotics, the kids might cure themselves.
But one attack did not bring immunity.Your children got them again and again - like the common cold they were common, endemic ,ubiquitous.
Always the fear was that this strep throat attack will lead to something worse. Many kinds of worse, but the deadliest and the most common was Rheumatic Fever (RF).
Most times, nothing happened. But like Russian Roulette, for no good reason one strep throat attack or tonsillitis attack could lead to RF.
Now RF could kill your child outright, during the very first attack.
But in most cases, the child lived, even emerged unharmed.
But again it did not bring immunity.
Far from it, one incident of RF made a child more vulnerable to another and more severe attack of RF and so on and so on, ever downhill.
Now suppose the child survived all those severe repeater attacks but with a damaged heart - particularly damaged heart valves.
Now in their teens, the child was less likely to see RF ever again, but instead they faced the fact that ordinarily harmless tooth bacteria, swept into their blood stream by a single vigorous tooth brushing, could settle in on their damaged heart valves and lead to an 'invariably fatal' case of SBE.
They might , nevertheless, fight off a single bout of SBE - as perhaps as many as 10 to 20% did.
(The near 100% death rate for SBE as normally reported, was biased by only counting cases sick enough to end up in hospitals. But autopsy work often revealed hints of healed SBE scars on the valves of young traffic accident victims.)
But again, and I know I am a broken record, one cure of SBE did not prevent those tooth bacteria from settling in again on your valves - and the second bout was fatal.
RF induced SBE was a chronic ,invariably fatal, disease.
Dawson treated patients as young as 10 and as old as 60. After penicillin, patients were found to dying of RF mediated SBE into their seventies - deaths often disguised as a 'stroke' .
More bad news : the kind of strep throat bacteria that gives you RF grow more virulent by being passed back and forth repeatedly between humans in close contact.
If you had lots of children, that meant that your chances that several would get RF and SBE was higher than the statistical average, even when corrected for the number of children you had.
That is if you had six kids and a small house, their chances that one
of them would get RF should be six times 3.3 per 100,000 ( ie 1 in 5,000) but in fact it was much higher than this - more like 1 in a 1,000.
Small houses and big families being more common among poorer families, they got hit the hardest, resulting in it being called The Polio of the Poor.
But no family was really immune.
Dawson knew that a report of a cure for either RF or SBE would grab the attention of every single DOCTOR MOM in the world.
And Doctor Mom, not Dad (in charge of the bread winning), was the person in charge of the entire family's health -- if she wanted penicillin , now, she would get it - or governments (even wartime governments) would tremble.
Drug companies would rush in to take her money.
This was Dawson's thesis.
He had a small crew - four people, no government or foundation funding, with curing a single disease as its sole thrust. But against those small 'means', look at its broad 'ends'.
Doctor Mom, said Dawson, would see to it that her entire family all got lots of penicillin, now, not after the war - penicillin enough for both Frank on the battlefield on Tarawa and for little Susie in the Rhemuatic Fever ward in America.
Was he right - or did Florey's view prevail?
I will 'tell all' - on October 16th this year - in my e-book "MO goes PO".....
That wartime penicillin might have come from Schenley Labs.
Their whiskey is still here - but their penicillin is long gone.
But Schenley did have the satisfaction for having produced the most iconic image of the entire saga of early penicillin.
Printed in rich vivid glossy magazine color, this ad featured the realistic style painting of a medic putting penicillin in the arm of a wounded Marine in a place that looks to be Tawara, as photographed by Marine photographer Norman Hatch.
Seventy years later, Hatch's photos remain the gold standard of 'you are there' combat photography.
This famous island battle first brought home to America just how bloody this war was going to be - particularly because of the casualty count.
But mostly because Hatch's grim photographs were deliberately released, rather than censored, to toughen up Americans at home to the mounting death toll that lay ahead.
So the ad's painting immediately conjured up a grim backdrop to any magazine readers in 1943-1945.
But the cutline below was pure uplift : "Thanks to PENICILLIN...
he will come home !"
Often rendered in the retelling as "Thanks to Penicillin, he will be coming home !"
The combination of image and cutline basically assures home viewers worried about their relative overseas that "Despite the vicious fighting and the terrible jungle conditions, thanks to penicillin, he WILL be coming home !"
This ad went totally unremarked upon during the war.
But in the 65 years since, it has grown by leaps and bounds in importance as almost every scholar today finds it to be the best single wartime expression of the sheer hope that grew in a world (bone tired of 15 years of Depression and War) that something good must lie ahead.
Usually, their subtext when recalling this ad is "Thanks to Big Science bringing us Penicillin, he will be coming home !"
I don't think this is true at all.
I believe that if left to their own devices (along with scads of our tax dollars) it would have been 1946 or later before enough penicillin would had been produced to help the soldier at the front , let alone the patient back home.
I think there were two competing strategies to speed up the production of wartime penicillin.
One was develop scientific evidence on a very wide and deep front ("Big Science") to convince scientists in universities, hospitals, corporate research labs and in bureaucratic offices that a small shift in international wartime priorities was justified to produce large amounts of penicillin as a supplement to the sulfa drugs for illnesses resistant to sulfa like those caused by staph bacteria.
But that only enough penicillin needed to be produced to aid the fighting men, at least until the war was finally won.
I hope you sense the contrast between a massive effort of "means" to secure a limited "end".
This was Howard Florey and his supporters' thesis.
The other strategy was proposed by just one man - a soon-to-be dying man - in September 1940 and maintained by him until his death in April 1945.
Martin Henry Dawson.
He said penicillin had already been privately discovered, in 1928 by Fleming, but no one had been roused and no lives had been saved.
Penicillin had also been publicly discovered,( ie published in the scientific media) in 1929 by Fleming and again in 1940 by Florey but no one had really been roused and no lives had been saved.
Dawson proposed instead to have penicillin popularly discovered - by Doctor Mom.
It was a Man's World back in 1940 .
(It mostly still is, but not as bad as back then !)
But even in 1940 women voted, bought much of the family's purchases and they were the daughters, mothers, sisters and spouses of the prominent men who ultimately ran things.
If they got on the case of the men to bring them penicillin and they stayed on the case (as women are very good at doing - some dare call it 'persistent nagging') , even reluctant men will eventually give in and get moving.
So Dawson persuaded Meyer and Hobby and Chaffee, his entire team of 'little science', to refocus their primary aim of their newborn penicillin pilot project.
He said they should immediately and narrowly focus on curing a single disease, Rheumatic Fever-induced Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.
This disease was the one that all parents in the western world regarded as a constant Sword of Damocles over their heads ,at least until all their children had gotten safely into their early twenties.
Tuberculous might be the disease feared more by the poorest families and Diphtheria and Scarlet Fever might have been feared more in grandma's day, but from about 1910 to 1960, Rheumatic Fever (RF) was the number one killer of school age kids .
In addition, the invariably fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) it brought to many Rheumatic Fever 'survivors' was a big killer of youth and adults all along life's journey.
But the main point of the myth of The Sword of Damocles was not the pain of the instant the sword actually did fall and kill you but rather that the situation made you afraid all of your life, just waiting for the day the sword might fall.
Most parents never experienced their children getting RF or SBE but all dreaded it might happen someday.
RF starts with a child getting a sore throat or tonsillitis from strep bacteria.
Think about it - what child doesn't get tons of those, even today with antibiotics?
Before antibiotics, the kids might cure themselves.
But one attack did not bring immunity.Your children got them again and again - like the common cold they were common, endemic ,ubiquitous.
Always the fear was that this strep throat attack will lead to something worse. Many kinds of worse, but the deadliest and the most common was Rheumatic Fever (RF).
Most times, nothing happened. But like Russian Roulette, for no good reason one strep throat attack or tonsillitis attack could lead to RF.
Now RF could kill your child outright, during the very first attack.
But in most cases, the child lived, even emerged unharmed.
But again it did not bring immunity.
Far from it, one incident of RF made a child more vulnerable to another and more severe attack of RF and so on and so on, ever downhill.
Now suppose the child survived all those severe repeater attacks but with a damaged heart - particularly damaged heart valves.
Now in their teens, the child was less likely to see RF ever again, but instead they faced the fact that ordinarily harmless tooth bacteria, swept into their blood stream by a single vigorous tooth brushing, could settle in on their damaged heart valves and lead to an 'invariably fatal' case of SBE.
They might , nevertheless, fight off a single bout of SBE - as perhaps as many as 10 to 20% did.
(The near 100% death rate for SBE as normally reported, was biased by only counting cases sick enough to end up in hospitals. But autopsy work often revealed hints of healed SBE scars on the valves of young traffic accident victims.)
But again, and I know I am a broken record, one cure of SBE did not prevent those tooth bacteria from settling in again on your valves - and the second bout was fatal.
RF induced SBE was a chronic ,invariably fatal, disease.
Dawson treated patients as young as 10 and as old as 60. After penicillin, patients were found to dying of RF mediated SBE into their seventies - deaths often disguised as a 'stroke' .
More bad news : the kind of strep throat bacteria that gives you RF grow more virulent by being passed back and forth repeatedly between humans in close contact.
If you had lots of children, that meant that your chances that several would get RF and SBE was higher than the statistical average, even when corrected for the number of children you had.
That is if you had six kids and a small house, their chances that one
of them would get RF should be six times 3.3 per 100,000 ( ie 1 in 5,000) but in fact it was much higher than this - more like 1 in a 1,000.
Small houses and big families being more common among poorer families, they got hit the hardest, resulting in it being called The Polio of the Poor.
But no family was really immune.
Dawson knew that a report of a cure for either RF or SBE would grab the attention of every single DOCTOR MOM in the world.
And Doctor Mom, not Dad (in charge of the bread winning), was the person in charge of the entire family's health -- if she wanted penicillin , now, she would get it - or governments (even wartime governments) would tremble.
Drug companies would rush in to take her money.
This was Dawson's thesis.
He had a small crew - four people, no government or foundation funding, with curing a single disease as its sole thrust. But against those small 'means', look at its broad 'ends'.
Doctor Mom, said Dawson, would see to it that her entire family all got lots of penicillin, now, not after the war - penicillin enough for both Frank on the battlefield on Tarawa and for little Susie in the Rhemuatic Fever ward in America.
Was he right - or did Florey's view prevail?
I will 'tell all' - on October 16th this year - in my e-book "MO goes PO".....
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