'Noir Science' of the 1940s

Compared to the complex , indeterminate and unresolved plots of 1940s Noir films, mainstream Hollywood plots - then and now - tend to look like they had all been successfully predicted centuries in advance by Isaac Newton or Pierre-Simon Laplace.

Predictable, determinist, reductionist, logical, elegant : words of praise in Science - and in mainstream Hollywood.

It as if news of the 20th century revolutions in probability theory, quantum theory, contingency theory et al has never reached mainstream Hollywood.

Okay - a commonplace criticism of Hollywood plot-making.

But what if we reversed the criticism : searched scientific theories to see if some of them displayed the makings of a well-made Hollywood plot and others  displayed more Noirish plotting ?

How to be intellectually invisible : criticize the modern era's grand narratives --- without offering up one of your own

The Modern Era (1875-1965) was very tolerant of criticisms of its rules - as long as your criticism played by those same rules.

So individual Modern intellectuals might disagree profoundly with the content of your particular grand narrative but they still greatly admired the fact that you had one.

Dozens of major ideologies - isms of all sorts and shapes - poured forth in that age - each vigorously disagreeing with all others,  except for the Modern Era's one overarching grand narrative : that to make a credible critique of Modern grand narrative, one must have one as well.

It was not the time for guardedly measured criticisms : it was an age of Alpha Male ideologies and their Alpha Male critics : dream (and critique) big and bold --- or stay home.

Murray Howard Dawson ... and me

I never knew Murray Dawson and he never knew me.

He died July 24 2004, about 4 months before I began to get interested in his father's (Dr Martin Henry Dawson) amazing career.

But despite Murray being almost ten years older than me (he born September 23 1941, me on September 20 1951) I feel a kinship with him that I can never share with his surviving brother and sister , who I do know a little.

This is because Murray and I are of the post-Modernity generation, people who never knew a time before mass destruction nuclear bombs delivered by good-enough inaccuracy by jet bombers and continent spanning rockets, before Auschwitz, and before natural antibiotics like penicillin.

Citation on Military Cross reveals the essential Martin Henry Dawson

Martin Henry Dawson , enroute to battlefields of WWI

Henry Dawson went to WWI as a private and came back an officer and a decorated war hero (MC with citation for bravery and leadership in the field).

He also had two grave war wounds which left him permanently partially disabled.

Time spent recovering from those wounds and the resulting infections, together with a year overseas as an orderly in Dalhousie's Number Seven Base Hospital, meant he had spent almost half of his war in hospitals or recovering in convalescent homes.

Perhaps as a result, he had decided to change his career plans and become a medical doctor.

Unfortunately,some highly ambitious medical students who successfully avoided war service ( such as Howard Florey and Chester Keefer) had a vital four year start on him in his new profession.

Despite all this, I argue that the war did not fundamentally change his personality.

New Yorker supermen in costumes before "Superman" : Fascists, the Bund and Popular Front organizations

 New York City has always been filled, will always be filled , with organizations advocating changes that they see as reforms, to what they see as an ongoing malaise.

But in the 1920s and 1930s , some of these organizations took to putting on colourful costumes and uniforms and engaging in deliberately provocative street marches , as a leading part of their efforts to effect reform.

These colourful street efforts were most successful if they ended in violent clashes between rival reform groups , where the strongest fists won the field.

Because the resulting media publicity benefitted both winners and losers in the fist fight.

Why, after 4 billion years, most bacteria STILL can't swim

Back in the Modern Era (1870s -1960s , gone but hardly lamented) a strong proof for Darwin devotees' claims that bacteria were incredibly primitive was the established fact that after 4 billion years of existence, most bacteria still couldn't swim.

Couldn't move at all in fact , most of them.

Ironically, for a man in a hurry, Howard Florey takes a very very slow plane to America

By March 1941, according to young eye witness John Hedley-Whyte , Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey both knew (via gossipy trans-Atlantic letters between eye specialists) that there had been a gratifying academic response in America to Florey's August 1940 penicillin article in LANCET.

This, after it had fallen on deaf ears throughout the rest of the world.

Much 'too gratifying' for Florey's taste (and potentially very embarrassing for Fleming).

A biography that , like GOOGLE , will always be in beta ...

How can it be otherwise?

I can claim that Un-Super Heroes is a biography of penicillin but everyone knows it is really about Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson - the man who gave it its first real job.

But the sum of his personal papers is rather less than zero.

As a result,  I expect to be constantly re-writing the book as ever-newer information is uncovered - some of it hopefully brought up from deep in the ground by the interest 'roused' by the publication of my earlier volumes of the book.

That's my daft hope anyway ....

October 16 1940 : the Eyes of History focus in on a small hospital room on the nearly deserted Columbia University campus

Global contemporary opinion (and global contemporary journalism) was unanimous : the most important event in the world on October 16 1940 was Registration Day for America's first ever peacetime draft.

A world at war (Allied, Axis and Neutral) was momentarily united in wanting to know two things and two things only.

After the deprivation of the decade-long Great Depression and all the American university anti-war protests , were the young men of the world's greatest power able to fight and were they willing to fight ?

The fate of the world literally hung in the balance.

So all contemporary eyes were on the registration of America's potential A1 males.

But the Eyes of History, distilling events through the long glass tubes of time and sober second thoughts , may differ from global contemporary opinion , even when that global opinion was as united as it was on October 16 1940.

Because history - 75 years on - is agreed that a rare world-changing event actually did happen in America on October 16 1940 but it wasn't the coming of the Draft.

Instead it all happened, unnoticed at the time , in a small hospital room on the medical campus of New York City's Columbia University.

Henry Dawson gave penicillin a job - a real job : lifesaving. That's all he did. But it changed our whole world for the better , forever

Like a lot of the rest of us, penicillin was severely underemployed during the twelve mean years of the Great Depression, between 1929 and 1940.

But on October 16th 1940 (almost seventy five years ago) Henry Dawson finally gave penicillin a job. A real job : lifesaving.

That's all he did.

To most male scientists then and now (much to their discredit) because he wasn't "the first" to "discover" penicillin, he did nothing .

How big is the metropolitan New York City area ?

For people like newspaper reporters, sales reps and professionals delivering a lecture or paper, the furthest extent of metro NYC is pretty easy to measure.

If you can get into work early, check in and then take a car or train to the location, do some useful business and then return late to the office, and then still later home to sleep in one's own bed, it's still metro.

Rising early and home late may be hellish and the checkins at the office bookending your work day may be mere tokens but it avoids that expensive hotel room and best of two days (or more) away from family and office.

The time of day for your key business is paramount - an evening lecture or presentation makes the circle of distances evoke by words 'metro NYC 'very much much smaller.

the NON-TOXIC mold - ten billion served since Oct 16 1940 : the story of natural penicillin ... and how we almost lost it

Every time we hear about a building closing its doors because of toxic mold , let us always remind ourselves that for every door that closes sometimes a thousand or a million , nay billions upon billions,  open in its place.

'There's just something about a Mercury ' : how the potential of a young black man kickstarted penicillin and has benefitted ten billion of us ever since

Can we still - 75 years on - get some sense of the personality of the very first person in history to get an antibiotics injection ?

Fortunately , yes.

But why then should we even care ?

Because, children , just because.

Because the normally reserved doctor who kickstarted natural lifesaving penicillin-for-all (the medical approach that has benefited about ten billion of us since 1940) personally wrote and told Nobel winning Ernst Chain that this patient's personality and potential had directly inspired him to take up his penicillin crusade.

When the personality of a young black man inspired medicine's biggest ever paradigm shift, an event that saved my life and that of many in my family, of course I want to know all I can about this wonderful person.

And if you have ever had a family member saved by antibiotics and if you have even an ounce of gratitude within you, so should you.

Meet the "GOTHAM SEVEN"

Their leader, Dr Henry Dawson, dying of Myasthenia Gravis (MG) with deadly bulbar nerve involvement.

By the end , his MG crisis were ever more frequent and he was reduced to working out of a wheelchair, with oxygen assist.

WWI poison gas and too much time in damp trenches hadn't helped his lungs now threatened by bulbar nerve failings.

His foot and shoulder had also been severely wounded in the war, resulting in months spent in hospitals recovering.

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 ?

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.

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.

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

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" .

Holocaust Studies (and Jewish genealogy) ignoring the Jews saved from 'death by deliberate neglect' planned for them by hostile ALLIED medical establishments ?

"Code Slowing" New York Jews to a certain death during height of Holocaust - and the dying Gentile who saved them

During the darkest days of WWII - at the height of the Holocaust - Charles Aronson , Miriam Laskowitz, Penny Mehler and Otto Morowitz all faced a death sentence as sure as any issued by the Nazis.

They were children of immigrants growing up in crowded homes in the NYC area during the late 1910s and 1920s , at the height of the deadliest phase of acute Rheumatic Fever.

As a result all had badly damaged heart valves and now as young adults during the war years, faced certain death from the uniformly fatal SBE (subacute bacterial endocarditis).

Taking a page out of the Nazi handbook , Anglo-American medical elites were using the excuse of 'war necessity' to deny them the medicine that could save these Jewish lives.

Yet as other Jews around the the world were dying from battlefield bullets or in secret gas chambers , these New York City Jews (and ultimately tens of thousands of other Jews worldwide very like them) , were plucked from death and given a new life.

As the result of a selfless act of agape from a dying Gentile doctor.

This Canadian-born doctor gave up his own life to save the lives of strangers - and changed our whole world for the better - forever.

I mention these patients' names only because they have already been already made public long ago , by Gladys Hobby in her seminal account of the exciting saga of wartime penicillin (PENICILLIN : MEETING THE CHALLENGE).

Hobby was one member of Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny medical team at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital (today's CUMC) who had laboured for five years to save these four and dozens of others.

These four can not be all the wartime Jews plucked from death by the direct and indirect efforts of Dr Dawson's tiny team - it is just that they are the only names I currently know.

And that is almost all I know about them - they have vanished from history.

Next year - October 16th 2015 - will mark the 75th anniversary that the first of these Jews (Charles Aronson) was saved from death by Dr Dawson's hospital-brewed natural penicillin - an event that also ushered in our era of life-saving antibiotics.

Jewish Genealogy in the New York City area

I appeal to those involved in New York City area Jewish genealogy , to New York City medical personnel with an interest in medical history and to all those scholars researching Jewish death and survival during WWII .

Please consider helping to mark the 75th anniversary of the world's first ever penicillin shot (Manhattan Oct 16th 1940) by turning your eyes and skills towards recovering some of this lost story of Jews saved from certain death.

Beginning with recovering the stories of Charles, Miriam, Penny and Otto and their families ...

Charles born about 1913
Miriam born about 1920
Otto born about 1914
Penny born about 1932

Based on my assessment of their penicillin treatment patterns and Gladys Hobby's whereabouts upon retirement , I believe all four were living in the greater NYC area in the mid 1940s (ie including the near-by parts of New Jersey) and the last three were still living there circa 1980 as she prepared her book.

Penny's last name might be Mahler. There is always a distinct possibility that all these names are actually their middle names (or that they are their first names but their families knew them by other names.)

After all , the Dawson patient who was received the world's first penicillin shot was recorded as Aaron Alston , but was known as Leroy to family and friends and he always wrote his name as A. Leroy Alston !

I think that Charles might well have died in the 1950s - for a child and man who cheated death at least six or more times, a by no means bad fate ....

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.)

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 ...