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

By pointed contrast , three working industrial chemists - men who had long struggled on the factory floor coming up with chemical solutions that reliably delivered safe, profitable, productive chemicals on time and on budget - saw naturally produced penicillin as the best solution.

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" .

Penicillin's "Bengali Famine Years" : 1943-1944

It was not America and Britain, it was not even the British and American governments ,that made the momentous decision, between late 1942 and early 1943, not to divert tax money just a little away from bombs and towards penicillin production instead.

This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944,  to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.

It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.

But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.

Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.

By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.

Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.

These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.

As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.

And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.

FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.

But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.

That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .

Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.

If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .

If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.

My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.

 Just as in the UK,  Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.

And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.

For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....

Penicillin : a bunch of biologists who put all their faith in chemistry vs two chemists who put all their faith in biology

In the Alice Through the Looking Glass world of wartime penicillin it should hardly be surprising that about the only strong supporters of natural ,biological, penicillin in the upper echelons of the overall enterprise were two professional chemists : Larry Elder of the American Office for Production Research and Development (the OPRD) and Harry Jephcott of the British drug company, Glaxo.

Or that the group most strongly bewitched by the thought of synthetic penicillin were a bunch of medical doctors with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming leading the charge (with the OSRD and MRC close behind): the sort of scientists who might have been thought would normally occupy a place at the biological end of  hard science.....