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 ?

Monstrous penicillium makes Marvellous penicillin

HP Lovecraft died before injections of penicillin were freely on offer but I highly doubt he would have accepted any if they had been available.

His particular set of monsters and horrors were slippery slimy moldy thingies and the thought to him of someone voluntarily polluting their sacred human temple with the pee and poop of such terrors was literally beyond the ken.

1928-1948 : 'normal' scientists and doctors loved penicillin but detested penicillium

What if Fleming's team , in early 1929, HAD easily purified penicillin and then synthesized and patented analogues of it ?

Contrary to myth , there never was any 1928-1948 resistance, at all, by normal doctors and scientists to the injecting of penicillin to save lives - just provided it was the penicillins that we have today.

Dawson's penicillin 1940-1945 : made in the Public Domain , FOR the Public Domain

Howard Florey's penicillin 1940-1945, by way of pointed contrast, was Pure penicillin for Purely military use only.

He believed that penicillium were tiny ancient life  and so , by definition , linear progressive Evolution's "Yesterday's Men" .

He was sure civilized scientific Man was bound to make penicillin better and cheaper than some slimy mold in a sort of  witch's caldron .

But, in fact , chemists actually needed hundreds of millions of dollars - in 1940s dollars - together with tens of thousands of tons of structural and stainless steel  to make a whole series of chemical factories, just to get started on making penicillin.

All those big plants, together with lots of staff, a whole lot of energy and many corrosive solvents were Man's way of making penicillin.

They needed to be build expensively strong in order to safely apply high pressure and high & cold temperature over and over in many steps.

All this to replicate what a incredibly tiny fungus cell (sixty pico grams in mass) could produce at ordinary temperatures and ordinary pressures out of a little dirty water and a bit of decaying organic material.

That tiny fungus factory weighed about one billion trillion times less than all of the factories needed to make the basic chemicals that went into the final penicillin synthetic factory.

So if you thought that perhaps the tiny fungus could do the job better and cheaper, then you were with Dawson.

Now, just as how you viewed the possibility of the continuing viability of small beings coloured the type of penicillin factory you preferred, it seemed to also colour who you thought the penicillin should help.

So, Florey: big factory penicillin for big armies only ; Dawson : small factory penicillin for small people everywhere.....

Penicillin : both its mold and its morals seem to hang out in basements and sewers

Rollo Martins the Canadian naif to Harry Lime's evil...

When I started looking into wartime penicillin, back in late 2004, I quickly felt like that other Canadian , Rollo Martins, learning far more about the immoral underbelly of  the official - and sunny - penicillin story than either of us wanted to know.


About all I originally knew about wartime penicillin was from recalling a CBC TV production (originally from Britain ?) that involved a policeman dying of a cut from a rose bush and a doctor named Fleming .

(I had seen it in the late 1950s, back when I was about eight years old.)

That and the fact that the peacetime penicillin clan was a firm family friend - having saved my family many times from serious illness.

I had no idea of penicillin's Canadian connection - like virtually everyone I wasn't aware there even was one.

I gradually and dimly recalled penicillin coming up in a great British film called The Third Man.

I looked at a video of it again and then, on a visit to my brother in Britain, read a great book on how the film and novella came to be.

From both video and the book about the film and novella, I got a strong sense of the extraordinary moral over (and under) tones that penicillin has and that the other three hundred or so existing commercial antibiotics completely lack.

I am only guessing why The Third Man is rated , not near the top of the all time best British films (a dead cert that), but at the very toppermost of the very top : but for me it is the penicillin sub-text.

Britain, unlike Japan and Germany, had really and truly lost the war and so its wartime scientific discoveries like penicillin, jets and radar were seen as absolutely essential to retaining the British sense of collective self esteem.

And so for Harry Lime to muddy penicillin's (and Britain's) good name by , in effect, using it to murder helpless kids , was for them a worse crime against humanity than anything short of Auschwitz.

Sewers as a metaphor for both good - and evil 

Dark ,cool ,dank, concrete sewers and basements is where penicillin the green and gold agent of life actually originally came from - but it was also the true home of that agent of death, Harry Lime .

This was a masterstroke from Greene and Reed ,the one Ying and Yang symbol that puts this film over the top.....