Did Hollywood's notorious Joe Breen spend his entire career defending normal movie making within the current movie-making paradigm , rather than encouraging new voyages into untravelled waters ?
Is that how social scientist Thomas Kuhn would have regarded the Academy of Film Producers' reviewing activities, if he had looked at them instead of the Academy of Scientists ?
We'll never know - but it is worth asking ...
Showing posts with label nas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nas. Show all posts
Monday, December 15, 2014
Monday, December 8, 2014
Mostly poor people ALL OVER THE WORLD denied life --- by wartime's Republican-dominated NAS death panel
American doctor-run death panels did exist and they did sentence people to an inevitable death based on mostly eugenic driven considerations.
It happened during WWII.
It happened during WWII.
Sunday, November 30, 2014
Open Commensal Publishing : because on climate change , pace President Obama or the NAS , 7 billion heads are better than one or even 2000
Open Commensal Publishing simply means that anyone should have a right to publish --- without either commercial , professional or academic gatekeepers pre-censoring that right.
Laws of Libel still apply.
And peer (and non-peer) reviews still happen under this approach --- as they do now, after publication --- whether that publication was pre-vetted or not.
Laws of Libel still apply.
And peer (and non-peer) reviews still happen under this approach --- as they do now, after publication --- whether that publication was pre-vetted or not.
Sunday, August 24, 2014
Time to end the much-told cover-up of UNSUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin and tell the untold tale of SUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin
Against about fifty previous books about wartime penicillin , I want my penicillin book to do something wildly different --- I want to celebrate success, not cover-up failure.
If the wartime deployment of penicillin was ultimately successful (and everybody seems to agree it was) what exactly did this successful penicillin look like?
It turns out it actually was :
(a) naturally made penicillin - not man made.
(b) and (via exports of massive amounts of American penicillin under Lend-Lease and other programs), it was made available to all in the wartime world dying from any and all diseases it could cure - not just reserved for a relatively small number of frontline Allied soldiers judged capable of returning to immediate combat, if given penicillin.
Ie , what successful wartime penicillin definitely was not, was synthesized and weaponized.
I am writing this book because I believe , 75 years after the start of wartime penicillin , it is overdue time to finally have a long, hard and brutally honest look at the actual record of the people and institutions universally regarded as the heroes of wartime penicillin.
Chief among them - by general consensus - are Fleming, Florey along with the MRC and the Ministry of Supply in Britain.
In America : the OSRD-CMR, NRRL chief Coghill , Merck Inc and the NAS-COC .
Yet all these heroes spent the entire war stridently opposed both to (a) the immediate mass production of naturally made penicillin and (b) its wartime production in quantities sufficient for all dying for lack of it in the world .
If they be the 'heroes' of wartime penicillin , it hardly needed villains !
By contrast , institutions like the British Royal Navy, Glaxo , Pfizer , the WPB and people like Dawson , Demerec , Pulvertaft and Duhig rate a paragraph (or at best , a page or two) in even lengthy accounts of wartime penicillin.
Yet these people and institutions strongly promoted the immediate wartime mass production of naturally produced penicillin for all - and then set out and did it - they made the successful version of wartime penicillin.
They did not advocate holding off on the wartime production of badly needed penicillin until it had been totally synthesized at commercial prices (something that hasn't happened yet).
Nor did they advocate that wartime penicillin be only used for those who were moderately injured, among the frontline Allied troops.
All these people and institutions shared one more thing in common (besides achieving the only universally popular scientific success of WWII).
They were not part of the Anglo-American medical-scientific establishment.
Thus they did not have privileged access (during the crucial years of 1944-1948) to information still labelled secret and only released - on a highly selective basis - in self-serving official histories that successfully polished the turd that was the total failure of weaponized synthetic penicillin.
It was not until 1972, with Lennard Bickel's invaluable book "RISE UP TO LIFE" , that many of the secrets of wartime penicillin began to be revealed - at least to the majority of the world that looked to British-oriented authors to explain penicillin.
Bickel was actually merely trying to boost credit to Howard Florey over that given to Alexander Fleming, but his book was just late enough to avoid the strictures of wartime secrecy and just early enough to interview many penicillin pioneers before they died.
And his account tried very hard to balance the British-oriented accounts published to date with information about lesser known but very important penicillin efforts around the world.
But Bickel , like all others to date, did not set WPB-Pfizer-Glaxo natural penicillin in total opposition to OSRD-Merck-Oxford synthetic penicillin.
Rather, like all accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project, he sees them as being equally funded, equally ardently pushed parallel efforts towards a common (time-sensitive) goal.
But in the case of the atomic bomb , the documentary record is very clear - almost any and all ways that might help to make enough nuclear material for even a few bombs before the war's end were massively funded and whipped into a flurry of activity by General Groves .
So for example, a trillion dollar (in 2014 dollars) gaseous diffusion production plant were built as fast as possible , before any pilot plant had even shown that particular process might work !
Even so, America only got enough weapon material for just two small bombs a scant month before Japan surrendered.
By contrast, natural penicillin's breakthrough technology ( a repeated process of selecting the best natural mutations of the penicillium mold, radiating them to produce more mutations and so on) only required a few biologists working a few months at a cost of a few thousands of dollars.
Thanks to this breakthrough, most countries outside of the USA successfully provide much of their wartime penicillin needs with a scaled up version of the primitive technology that Fleming first used - and rejected - way back in 1928 !
Only a political and moral unwillingness to create more of these primitive factories kept the UK, Canada and Australia from supplying all possible needs with scaled up 1928 technology.
It was the WPB's totally unknown OPRD , a latecomer to the penicillin effort , that quickly and cheaply made penicillin production with mutated natural penicillin such a success that we still produce all the world's antibiotics the same way to this day.
It was clear in the case of penicillin that almost everyone (outside our valiant few) from government ministers to newspaper reporters to ordinary GP doctors to Big Pharma, felt that penicillin was going to have to be first made synthetically to make enough for a wartime world and that this event was going to be quickly achieved.
(At the same time, I should say that most of the synthetic advocates generally didn't know the full extent of the intention to weaponize penicillin and that thankfully many seemed to oppose that idea when its morally repugnant nature was made clearer.)
Efforts to synthesize penicillin were fully backed by the British and American medical scientific establishment while efforts to push natural penicillin production that came from people like Cold Spring Harbour Lab chief Miloslav Demerec and Glaxo's boss Harry Jephcott were rebuffed by that same elite.
Spurred by the efforts of Dr Dawson , Dr Dante Colitti got he Hearst media empire to rouse the Dr Moms of the world with the plight of baby Patty Malone.
Even the powerful men running the Anglo-American medical-scientific establishment (& Big Pharma) momentarily quailed before the uproar from Dr Mom , but soon they returned to pushing for perfected synthetic penicillin before seeking any all-out production.
But Big Pharma was not totally united - one man within its ranks differed - and sometimes one individual is more than enough to change a whole world.
John L Smith, boss of Pfizer, was prompted by his own Dr Mom - his wife - to connect Patty Malone to the death of his own daughter - a death that Fleming could have helped prevent if only he had promoted - rather than negating - penicillin by needle.
As an ordinary patriotic American , Smith also knew D-Day was due soon. Unlike ordinary Americans, he also knew that only penicillin could prevent the war deaths by infection the sulfa drugs were no longer effective against.
Like General Groves on steroids, Smith whipped Pfizer employees to produce tons of penicillin - now ! - for D-Day and civilian patients.
In a surprisingly few months ( by the Spring of 1944) - Smith - thanks admittedly greatly to the timely efforts of Miloslav Demerec - had solved the world's penicillin crisis.
But the Anglo-American medical scientific establishment - as always with bureaucrats spending other peoples' money - kept pushing hard on synthetic penicillin for two more wasted years.
Their Plan B ( eventually employed) was to push the Big Half Truth that they were always fully behind natural penicillin from 1939 onward and were merely held up by the pesky penicillium spores themselves.
In fact, the only way they could think to totally synthesize artificial penicillin was to repeatedly destroy massive amounts of natural penicillin and then examine the resulting entrails.
Thus they did in fact support the limited production of natural penicillin - all through the war - but mostly for their chemists to destroy and then analysis - not to give to any and every patient dying for lack of it.
Shamefully, academic historians have let them get away with this particular Big Half Truth ever since ....
If the wartime deployment of penicillin was ultimately successful (and everybody seems to agree it was) what exactly did this successful penicillin look like?
It turns out it actually was :
(a) naturally made penicillin - not man made.
(b) and (via exports of massive amounts of American penicillin under Lend-Lease and other programs), it was made available to all in the wartime world dying from any and all diseases it could cure - not just reserved for a relatively small number of frontline Allied soldiers judged capable of returning to immediate combat, if given penicillin.
Ie , what successful wartime penicillin definitely was not, was synthesized and weaponized.
I am writing this book because I believe , 75 years after the start of wartime penicillin , it is overdue time to finally have a long, hard and brutally honest look at the actual record of the people and institutions universally regarded as the heroes of wartime penicillin.
Chief among them - by general consensus - are Fleming, Florey along with the MRC and the Ministry of Supply in Britain.
In America : the OSRD-CMR, NRRL chief Coghill , Merck Inc and the NAS-COC .
Yet all these heroes spent the entire war stridently opposed both to (a) the immediate mass production of naturally made penicillin and (b) its wartime production in quantities sufficient for all dying for lack of it in the world .
If they be the 'heroes' of wartime penicillin , it hardly needed villains !
By contrast , institutions like the British Royal Navy, Glaxo , Pfizer , the WPB and people like Dawson , Demerec , Pulvertaft and Duhig rate a paragraph (or at best , a page or two) in even lengthy accounts of wartime penicillin.
Yet these people and institutions strongly promoted the immediate wartime mass production of naturally produced penicillin for all - and then set out and did it - they made the successful version of wartime penicillin.
They did not advocate holding off on the wartime production of badly needed penicillin until it had been totally synthesized at commercial prices (something that hasn't happened yet).
Nor did they advocate that wartime penicillin be only used for those who were moderately injured, among the frontline Allied troops.
All these people and institutions shared one more thing in common (besides achieving the only universally popular scientific success of WWII).
They were not part of the Anglo-American medical-scientific establishment.
Thus they did not have privileged access (during the crucial years of 1944-1948) to information still labelled secret and only released - on a highly selective basis - in self-serving official histories that successfully polished the turd that was the total failure of weaponized synthetic penicillin.
It was not until 1972, with Lennard Bickel's invaluable book "RISE UP TO LIFE" , that many of the secrets of wartime penicillin began to be revealed - at least to the majority of the world that looked to British-oriented authors to explain penicillin.
Bickel was actually merely trying to boost credit to Howard Florey over that given to Alexander Fleming, but his book was just late enough to avoid the strictures of wartime secrecy and just early enough to interview many penicillin pioneers before they died.
And his account tried very hard to balance the British-oriented accounts published to date with information about lesser known but very important penicillin efforts around the world.
But Bickel , like all others to date, did not set WPB-Pfizer-Glaxo natural penicillin in total opposition to OSRD-Merck-Oxford synthetic penicillin.
Rather, like all accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project, he sees them as being equally funded, equally ardently pushed parallel efforts towards a common (time-sensitive) goal.
But in the case of the atomic bomb , the documentary record is very clear - almost any and all ways that might help to make enough nuclear material for even a few bombs before the war's end were massively funded and whipped into a flurry of activity by General Groves .
So for example, a trillion dollar (in 2014 dollars) gaseous diffusion production plant were built as fast as possible , before any pilot plant had even shown that particular process might work !
Even so, America only got enough weapon material for just two small bombs a scant month before Japan surrendered.
By contrast, natural penicillin's breakthrough technology ( a repeated process of selecting the best natural mutations of the penicillium mold, radiating them to produce more mutations and so on) only required a few biologists working a few months at a cost of a few thousands of dollars.
Thanks to this breakthrough, most countries outside of the USA successfully provide much of their wartime penicillin needs with a scaled up version of the primitive technology that Fleming first used - and rejected - way back in 1928 !
Only a political and moral unwillingness to create more of these primitive factories kept the UK, Canada and Australia from supplying all possible needs with scaled up 1928 technology.
It was the WPB's totally unknown OPRD , a latecomer to the penicillin effort , that quickly and cheaply made penicillin production with mutated natural penicillin such a success that we still produce all the world's antibiotics the same way to this day.
It was clear in the case of penicillin that almost everyone (outside our valiant few) from government ministers to newspaper reporters to ordinary GP doctors to Big Pharma, felt that penicillin was going to have to be first made synthetically to make enough for a wartime world and that this event was going to be quickly achieved.
(At the same time, I should say that most of the synthetic advocates generally didn't know the full extent of the intention to weaponize penicillin and that thankfully many seemed to oppose that idea when its morally repugnant nature was made clearer.)
Efforts to synthesize penicillin were fully backed by the British and American medical scientific establishment while efforts to push natural penicillin production that came from people like Cold Spring Harbour Lab chief Miloslav Demerec and Glaxo's boss Harry Jephcott were rebuffed by that same elite.
Spurred by the efforts of Dr Dawson , Dr Dante Colitti got he Hearst media empire to rouse the Dr Moms of the world with the plight of baby Patty Malone.
Even the powerful men running the Anglo-American medical-scientific establishment (& Big Pharma) momentarily quailed before the uproar from Dr Mom , but soon they returned to pushing for perfected synthetic penicillin before seeking any all-out production.
But Big Pharma was not totally united - one man within its ranks differed - and sometimes one individual is more than enough to change a whole world.
John L Smith, boss of Pfizer, was prompted by his own Dr Mom - his wife - to connect Patty Malone to the death of his own daughter - a death that Fleming could have helped prevent if only he had promoted - rather than negating - penicillin by needle.
As an ordinary patriotic American , Smith also knew D-Day was due soon. Unlike ordinary Americans, he also knew that only penicillin could prevent the war deaths by infection the sulfa drugs were no longer effective against.
Like General Groves on steroids, Smith whipped Pfizer employees to produce tons of penicillin - now ! - for D-Day and civilian patients.
In a surprisingly few months ( by the Spring of 1944) - Smith - thanks admittedly greatly to the timely efforts of Miloslav Demerec - had solved the world's penicillin crisis.
But the Anglo-American medical scientific establishment - as always with bureaucrats spending other peoples' money - kept pushing hard on synthetic penicillin for two more wasted years.
Their Plan B ( eventually employed) was to push the Big Half Truth that they were always fully behind natural penicillin from 1939 onward and were merely held up by the pesky penicillium spores themselves.
In fact, the only way they could think to totally synthesize artificial penicillin was to repeatedly destroy massive amounts of natural penicillin and then examine the resulting entrails.
Thus they did in fact support the limited production of natural penicillin - all through the war - but mostly for their chemists to destroy and then analysis - not to give to any and every patient dying for lack of it.
Shamefully, academic historians have let them get away with this particular Big Half Truth ever since ....
Monday, July 7, 2014
Big Pharma -Kos : sacrificing WWII's bumpy SBE patients as scapegoats to restore a streamlined conscience
Pharmakos were those unfortunates in Ancient Greece who happened to be poor and crippled and without any local, prosperous, relatives to succour them, who were thus forced into slavery, begging or petty criminality.
When a crisis arose and the normally smoothly streamlined social sphere developed strains and cracks, the Pharmakos were scapegoated restored it.
Social 'bumps' (the Pharmakos) were beaten out - metaphorically as well as in actuality - to return streamlining and normalcy.
This was done by a sacred solemn ritual of executing, expelling or beating a physically, mentally or culturally deformed (misfitting) individual , preferably one without any powerful relatives close by to exact possible vengeance.
I have always wondered why the wartime American NAS felt it was so very very important to strenuously deny penicillin to the very small number of SBE patients asking for it between the summer of 1942 and the summer of 1943.
They were the only patients denied lifesaving penicillin for a condition where penicillin was not just a cure but the only cure.
(I have absolutely no qualms about denying penicillin (limited or not) to dying patients against which penicillin had no possible effect - viral diseases for one.)
One of the biggest social strains a war produces on the home front is the inequality of individual and family sacrifice - who goes to war and gets shot - who stays home and gets promoted ever upwards into the slots of those away fighting overseas.
I believe that the upwardly mobile chicken hawks on the NAS Death Panels turning down these SBE requests (and thus sentencing innocents to a quasi-judicial death) may have unconsciously felt they were thus 'dealing death' just like those of their age group who had been or were in combat zones - salving in a complex way their own internal social strain and bumpiness.
Who can tell ...?
When a crisis arose and the normally smoothly streamlined social sphere developed strains and cracks, the Pharmakos were scapegoated restored it.
Social 'bumps' (the Pharmakos) were beaten out - metaphorically as well as in actuality - to return streamlining and normalcy.
This was done by a sacred solemn ritual of executing, expelling or beating a physically, mentally or culturally deformed (misfitting) individual , preferably one without any powerful relatives close by to exact possible vengeance.
I have always wondered why the wartime American NAS felt it was so very very important to strenuously deny penicillin to the very small number of SBE patients asking for it between the summer of 1942 and the summer of 1943.
They were the only patients denied lifesaving penicillin for a condition where penicillin was not just a cure but the only cure.
(I have absolutely no qualms about denying penicillin (limited or not) to dying patients against which penicillin had no possible effect - viral diseases for one.)
One of the biggest social strains a war produces on the home front is the inequality of individual and family sacrifice - who goes to war and gets shot - who stays home and gets promoted ever upwards into the slots of those away fighting overseas.
I believe that the upwardly mobile chicken hawks on the NAS Death Panels turning down these SBE requests (and thus sentencing innocents to a quasi-judicial death) may have unconsciously felt they were thus 'dealing death' just like those of their age group who had been or were in combat zones - salving in a complex way their own internal social strain and bumpiness.
Who can tell ...?
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Defeating the PENICILLIN death panels
Part One : the backstory
President Obama in 2009 had absolutely no intention of emulating Hitler's use of Aktion T4 death panels, but this does not mean that death panels were not in force under an earlier Democratic administration.
These death panels - common to all Allied nations during WWII - did not directly echo the German efforts, instead they and the German death panels were all part and parcel of a world wide ground swell among the well educated and the well off in support of 'eugenic' triage.
Starting at the very outbreak of the war in 1939, Hitler had authorized doctor-run death panels to met to decide which of the weak and elderly in Germany should be actively killed off.
He had wanted to do much earlier, but judged it would be politically risky internally.
Now he could use the excuse of urgent war need as the reason to roll back the Weimar Republic's expansion of Social Medicine , supposedly in an effort to divert the freed up money towards War Medicine instead.
Sharing similar eugenic motives, the mostly eugenically-minded medical elite in Allied and in Neutral nations also used the urgent need for expanded War Medicine for the 1As, as an excuse to roll back Social Medicine for their society's 4Fs.
This roll back could lead to patients dying - death by indirection rather than direct acts of murder, of course ,because these people prided themselves on not being Nazis .
(Vichy France, for example, so reduced funds to institutions for the chronically ill, that tens of thousands were "CODE SLOWED" to death due to inadequate food, heat and medical staff attention. Just as Britain had done similarly during the last years of WWI).
Asking, "how do we ration life-saving medical resources like the 1960s' supply of kidney dialysis machines ?", is the totally wrong question
What we first need to ask is , "why did the 1960s feel the need to ration life machines in the first place, when it didn't ration death machines ?"
Clearly the totally absence of any money isn't the real issue but rather " how do we divide the very big but still limited bag of money that we do have"?
So hospital auxiliary bake sales did raise money for some kidney dialysis machines back then - but no bombers or nuclear weapons were ever fund-raised that way.
All politics is about rationing : 'the authoritative allocation of scarce resources' as the textbooks describe it .
The decision to allocate most of the available money to H-bombs and so to supply only a small amount for the supply of baby incubators and the such like was a human-made decision, not an Act of God or a Law of Nature.
Just as the President who intoned "bombs were dropped on Cambodia" in an academically-correct passive, nay wimpy, voice really meant that "men dropped bombs on Cambodian civilians and killed them, because I ordered it so."
Stalin and Hitler forthrightly ordered millions to be murdered - they did not artificially create a shortage by a human political decision and then sit around piously in death panels trying to decide how to allocate patients to that shortage as 'fairly' as they could.
Bad Faith and Hypocrisy were not among their many sins of Hot and Cold.
But the sins of the lukewarm might well be dealt with even harsher on Judgement Day and it is the lukewarm sinners of wartime penicillin that we now turn to.
Britain's Conservative-dominated government said it would only make enough penicillin in wartime to handle the military cases it wanted penicillin to deal with.
And their Labour and Liberal partners went along with that.
So, no penicillin for penicillin for civilians in Britain or in her colonies, none to Allied POWS, none for British military casualties judged of no further military use.
Canada and Australia "me -too-ed" in agreement - one government liberal the other Labour.
America having a government of competing agencies, on the same Social Darwin model as Hitler's government , spoke with two main voices.
The scientific medical elite (OSRD and NAS) ,with some support from the military and industry , wanted only enough made to deal with priority military cases. Think of FDR as the "Doctor Win the War" of 1940 onwards.
But think also of an earlier FDR, "Doctor New Deal", and all his New Dealer supporters' high hopes.
Because what was now left of all these New Dealers were huddled in a stockade known as the WPB (War Production Board), surrounded on all sides by the hostile Republicans that FDR had brought into his administration, as part of his willingness to lose the internal social war to win the external military war.
The WPB proposed that enough wartime penicillin be made in America to generously supply all the penicillin needs of the military, the civilians and the overseas allies, neutrals and residents of enemy occupied lands.
The WPB won the argument -- when the new Army Surgeon General switched sides .
But until industry went along with the gag, America would still have not enough for anyone domestic , let alone everyone domestic and their foreign cousin.
The year long delay until one industrial firm really climbed on board with gusto allowed the OSRD-NAS to play God by convening penicillin death panels.
They might have operated unchallenged but for one man : Henry Dawson.
He fought them , won and so changed history ....
Clearly the totally absence of any money isn't the real issue but rather " how do we divide the very big but still limited bag of money that we do have"?
So hospital auxiliary bake sales did raise money for some kidney dialysis machines back then - but no bombers or nuclear weapons were ever fund-raised that way.
All politics is about rationing : 'the authoritative allocation of scarce resources' as the textbooks describe it .
The decision to allocate most of the available money to H-bombs and so to supply only a small amount for the supply of baby incubators and the such like was a human-made decision, not an Act of God or a Law of Nature.
Just as the President who intoned "bombs were dropped on Cambodia" in an academically-correct passive, nay wimpy, voice really meant that "men dropped bombs on Cambodian civilians and killed them, because I ordered it so."
Stalin and Hitler forthrightly ordered millions to be murdered - they did not artificially create a shortage by a human political decision and then sit around piously in death panels trying to decide how to allocate patients to that shortage as 'fairly' as they could.
Bad Faith and Hypocrisy were not among their many sins of Hot and Cold.
But the sins of the lukewarm might well be dealt with even harsher on Judgement Day and it is the lukewarm sinners of wartime penicillin that we now turn to.
Britain's Conservative-dominated government said it would only make enough penicillin in wartime to handle the military cases it wanted penicillin to deal with.
And their Labour and Liberal partners went along with that.
So, no penicillin for penicillin for civilians in Britain or in her colonies, none to Allied POWS, none for British military casualties judged of no further military use.
Canada and Australia "me -too-ed" in agreement - one government liberal the other Labour.
America having a government of competing agencies, on the same Social Darwin model as Hitler's government , spoke with two main voices.
The scientific medical elite (OSRD and NAS) ,with some support from the military and industry , wanted only enough made to deal with priority military cases. Think of FDR as the "Doctor Win the War" of 1940 onwards.
But think also of an earlier FDR, "Doctor New Deal", and all his New Dealer supporters' high hopes.
Because what was now left of all these New Dealers were huddled in a stockade known as the WPB (War Production Board), surrounded on all sides by the hostile Republicans that FDR had brought into his administration, as part of his willingness to lose the internal social war to win the external military war.
The WPB proposed that enough wartime penicillin be made in America to generously supply all the penicillin needs of the military, the civilians and the overseas allies, neutrals and residents of enemy occupied lands.
The WPB won the argument -- when the new Army Surgeon General switched sides .
But until industry went along with the gag, America would still have not enough for anyone domestic , let alone everyone domestic and their foreign cousin.
The year long delay until one industrial firm really climbed on board with gusto allowed the OSRD-NAS to play God by convening penicillin death panels.
They might have operated unchallenged but for one man : Henry Dawson.
He fought them , won and so changed history ....
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Dying life unworthy of wartime penicillin was Life unworthy of Life
"all Life is worthy of Penicillin"
The infamous term "Life unworthy of Life", created by a German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in the 1920s , is generally thought of as bring used exclusively by the Nazis.
Used by them during a Total War to justify killing everyone from working class Aryan babies with developmental issues to the entire Jewish population of Europe.
But the term had a much greater transnational appeal than that .
Prominent American psychiatrist Foster Kennedy thought , in 1941 and 1942, during that same Total War, that the USA would be justified in killing its little Aryan babies with developmental issues.
Shamefully, America's leading psychiatric journal actually agreed with him and only one psychiatrist disputed his thesis.
And the Allies' medical establishment, led by Dr Chester Keefer and his NAS committee, used this idea to justify denying SBE-curing penicillin to young people dying of SBE all over the Allied world, because they felt that even a cured SBE patient was still useless to the Total War effort.
("Life judged unworthy of Penicillin.")
By contrast, Henry Dawson and a handful of other doctors worldwide supported, and fought for, the notion that "All Life is worthy of Penicillin" - even in , particularly in , a Total War supposedly fought precisely against the evil idea that some Life was, ipso facto, unworthy of Life.....
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Aktion 4F : something done to 4Fs, rather than something done for 4Fs ?
For years, I have thought and written of Dr Henry Dawson's efforts to try and save the lives of young SBE patients ,"The 4Fs of the 4Fs" , as if it was a sort of counterpoint to Nazi Germany's efforts to kill similar chronically ill people, the infamous Aktion T4 campaign.
His own Aktion 4F as a sort of counterblast to their Aktion T4.
But Dawson wasn't actually directly opposing the German Nazis' murderously utilitarian disposal of humans judged useless consumers of badly needed resources in a Total War.
He was combating similar notions held by the powerful in the Anglo-American medical establishment.
The OSRD , the NAS and the MRC all judged SBE to be a "militarily unimportant disease" and refused to allow any penicillin be diverted to saving its patients.
This despite Dawson demonstrating over and over that penicillin was the only thing that could cure this hitherto invariably fatal disease dubbed "the Polio of the Poor".
So in a way, the Allied treatment of the SBE 4Fs , along with their diverting penicillin away from badly wounded frontline troops in the Mediterranean towards otherwise fit soldiers who had deliberately contracted VD to avoid combat , could be see as exact counterparts to how the Nazis behaved in similar medical situations.
(For example, secretly killing Eastern Front soldiers rendered permanently mentally ill in combat to free up medical beds and supplies for soldiers judged able to return to battle eventually.)
In which case, the co-ordinated campaign , around the Allied world , from the US to Canada to Britain to Australia , to deny penicillin to SBE cases, can be seen as being the true Aktion 4F.
Food for thought....
His own Aktion 4F as a sort of counterblast to their Aktion T4.
But Dawson wasn't actually directly opposing the German Nazis' murderously utilitarian disposal of humans judged useless consumers of badly needed resources in a Total War.
He was combating similar notions held by the powerful in the Anglo-American medical establishment.
The OSRD , the NAS and the MRC all judged SBE to be a "militarily unimportant disease" and refused to allow any penicillin be diverted to saving its patients.
This despite Dawson demonstrating over and over that penicillin was the only thing that could cure this hitherto invariably fatal disease dubbed "the Polio of the Poor".
So in a way, the Allied treatment of the SBE 4Fs , along with their diverting penicillin away from badly wounded frontline troops in the Mediterranean towards otherwise fit soldiers who had deliberately contracted VD to avoid combat , could be see as exact counterparts to how the Nazis behaved in similar medical situations.
(For example, secretly killing Eastern Front soldiers rendered permanently mentally ill in combat to free up medical beds and supplies for soldiers judged able to return to battle eventually.)
In which case, the co-ordinated campaign , around the Allied world , from the US to Canada to Britain to Australia , to deny penicillin to SBE cases, can be seen as being the true Aktion 4F.
Food for thought....
Monday, January 28, 2013
How wartime penicillin's American miracle cures were censored - and why
From early in 1942, American medical journal editors and authors joined scientific journal editors and authors already being "self censored".
Like them, they were asked (virtually required) to submit all articles they were uncertain about, to a NAS/NRC advisory for vetting before printing or submitting.
Supposedly the NAS medical sub-committee was only censored the chemistry of penicillin , but in fact this wasn't consistently imposed until March 1943,when it fell in line with the UK's more legally formal move in this direction.
Between January 1942 till late in 1943, this system's real ambition was to successfully keep every "miracle cure" by penicillin out of medical and scientific media - and thus, by reverse osmosis, out of the daily press.
If the American public didn't hear about this miracle drug, then the chemistry-savvy Germans won't either ---- at least not before D-Day, or so the thought went.
I think the key for this method's success was that the OSRD/CMR/COC controlled (a) all the significant new strains and all the new information on how to make penicillin in mass qualities, (b) controlled all supplies of the resulting therapeutic penicillin (c) and as well was busy dangling $500 million in high-overhead contracts to cash and equipment starved university administrators.
So it could successfully tell the university researchers, commercial penicillin firms and the medical accredited investigators, peep one word and no more penicillin/ penicillin information/ cash.
Informally, the OSRD/CMR/COC tried to fend off all requests for stories on this rumoured new wonder drug from non-science journalists, who they had no hold over.
Science journalists - hello William l Laurence ! - were already totally self-embedded in this self censorship. (Color me surprised ...)
General reporters also read popular science stories for possible leads, so with none coming forth on penicillin, they actually made very few such requests.
Of course when a *Hearst* *city desk editor* got a *Pulitzer* for *spot news reporting* for saving the life of a baby with the miracle cure penicillin (and modestly reporting the story as well) , all that changed.
(I always thought the real miracle was the Pulitzer Committee giving a prize to a Hearst paper, the arch enemy of George Pulitzer. That and a city desk editor breaking a Pulitzer-worthy foot leather news story without ever leaving his desk (or phone.)
But what I am not sure of , was Byron Price ever asked by the OSRD/CMR's Dr A.N. Richards to amend his codebooks to ask editors to avoid any any mention of penicillin.
I have a request on this out to a real expert on the American experience with self censorship in WWII....
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Howard Florey sole hero of 1944 American national radio play on Penicillin
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| Here, Howard Florey rules ! |
Not surprising then that the series featured an half hour show on "The Story of Penicillin" as soon as the censors would let it : which interestingly enough was April 24th 1944 --- starring Howard Florey as the one-and-only who brought us the miracle of penicillin !
(CALV 440424 380 The Story of Penicillin : episode 380, April 24 1944 is very easy to stream or download from the internet.)
Which is to say this half hour national show aired at a time when the OSRD-AMA-NAS triad was still successfully holding back all press interest in penicillin the miracle (by claiming the triad had legal censorship powers that it actually didn't possess.)
Could it be that even the powerful OSRD had to bow before the enough more powerful chemical giant, in part because it was a prime contractor of the A-Bomb ?
But what I find so interesting about this show - beyond the fact that I do not recall reading about it from any penicillin historian's writing - is that it clearly announces at its onset that its one and only star is "Howard Florey".
Was the show an attempt to discredit Pfizer's sudden success with non-chemically produced penicillin ?
(Because of all the months of the six years of war, April 1944 was the one I'd been most inclined to credit Pfizer's John L Smith as the man who finally brought us penicillin.)
Because that months of all months was the very first month that billions of units of the hitherto invisible miracle suddenly started pouring out of his rapidly-improvised Marcy Avenue ice plant cum biological penicillin brewery.)
Perhaps the triad felt a need to suddenly burnish the reputation of the big loser in the race to provide penicillin for D-Day : that loser being synthetic penicillin and Florey's synthetic efforts at Oxford University.
And believe me, having listened to as much of this half hour show as I could stand, Florey is indeed portrayed as the one and only star of this miracle of medicine.
Florey has an entire army of fans among present-day historians claiming he was elbowed out the fame-feeding-trove by that big mean bully Alec Fleming.
I have always found this hard to stomach.
Florey, in fact, was seemingly born with at least four sharp elbows of his own.
He also had a strong reputation, as a scientist, of being as ready to use his fists to win scientific arguments as Fred Banting or Vannevar Bush ever did.
I wonder if his academic defenders will still howl " he wuz robbed" after listening to this old radio show ?
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
The 180 degree flip of wartime penicillin : from secret weapon of war to public weapon of propaganda
War is not at all like the playing fields of Eton , many reports to the contrary.
Both sides get advance notice of the time, place and nature of the activity in sports - and there is a strictly enforced set of rules.
By contrast, a successful military offensive operation is far more than half won if it is kept secret to the last moment and beyond.
Convince your foe you plan this Spring's big push there , after the roads have dried and then attack here - when the roads are still muddy - and he might still think it a feint even when your troops are in fact about to knock down the doors of his command centre.
Surprise and secrecy can often beat much higher qualities and quantities of equipment, manpower and leadership --- if most of a weak force is concentrated in a narrow sector of the enemy's lines at a time the enemy doesn't expect a major attack.
This need for surprise and secrecy applies to military activity off the battle field as well.
If - as happened all the time in the Pacific Campaign- both sides were down to 10% effective strength due to all the rest laid low by endemic local infections , the battle is almost certainly won if a secret cure-all like DDT clears up the insect source of those infections.
Because the exclusive use of DDT by only one side could enable it to send 50% of its tinier force into battle and win.
But only if DDT's abilities remain secret.
DDT was not strictly speaking "secret" ---- its chemical formula and method of manufacture was revealed in the public scientific literature back in 1874 and again in 1940 in a Swiss patent from Geigy.
But the Japanese hadn't seen those scientific reports or if so, hadn't grasped their military significance.
But even the stupidest Japanese general could correctly access urgent Japanese diplomatic cables indicating that the American domestic press was raving about the miracle success of DDT in clearing malaria from its endemic regions in the southern states of America.
So DDT was kept as secret as possible and more fundamentally , was not made available for civilian use during WWII.
This despite the fact that it was easy and cheap to make and very stable in storage - for the cost of one or two B-29s, the country's agricultural zones could all be sprayed by DDT and the resulting greater farm productivity would well repay the cost of the DDT factories.
Crops - as well as guns - win wars too, it could be argued.
But in fact, the productivity side of Total War was totally ignored over the secrecy side of Total War.
It was similar with Penicillin.
The key reason that striking, dramatic, heart-stopping successes in dragging civilian bodies back from the grave's edge in 1942-1943 were not permitted to be published by the AMA-OSRD-NAS triad was because this would indirectly alert the world to the military life-saving abilities of penicillin.
(See Wesley Spink's dramatic first success in July 1942 with seven year old "JE" - a heart-warming case which was not allowed to be published/publicized until April 1945, for a vivid example.)
Publicizing civilian cures would equalize its effects on the war if both sides, suitably alerted, then employed it freely.
Even if the health-restoring ability of penicillin made the war economy far more productive than the cost of setting up penicillin plants would take out of it ---- and this resulting extra productivity was devoted to making more weapons.
Because, at least in theory , both sides would see their economies expand equally - returning everything to the position it was before penicillin became widely public.
So instead, the Allies hoped to synthesize penicillin so that it was both cheap and abundant (like DDT) but also like DDT, they planned not to release it to the public, but use it as a military weapon - a secret medical weapon - exactly as DDT used.
But the heart-warming story of Baby Patricia in August 1943 let the cat out of the bag, as this local story in New York 'broke wide' , not just stateside but all around the world.
Now not just every civilian in the world wanted it for their sick relative like yesterday but military chiefs across the globe awoke (15 years late !) to the military potential of the miracle cure.
The chiefs of the American military medicine triad (and their equally smarmy British counterparts) pouted ---- but clever people in the Offices of War Information in both Allied nations resolved to make a virtue of necessity.
Baby Patty got her penicillin over the heads of the triad, but now official penicillin would be rushed by American military bombers to saving dying kids all over the world and the effort highly publicized in the process.
It would say to friend, foe and neutral alike that unlike those nasty life-denying Nazis, the Allies cared : oh how they cared.
Henry Dawson must have snickered at the blatant dishonesty in
this abrupt volte-face, but he was very glad lives were being saved however it came about and that the "unlimited potential" of the life-saving mold was at long last being released....
Both sides get advance notice of the time, place and nature of the activity in sports - and there is a strictly enforced set of rules.
By contrast, a successful military offensive operation is far more than half won if it is kept secret to the last moment and beyond.
Convince your foe you plan this Spring's big push there , after the roads have dried and then attack here - when the roads are still muddy - and he might still think it a feint even when your troops are in fact about to knock down the doors of his command centre.
Surprise and secrecy can often beat much higher qualities and quantities of equipment, manpower and leadership --- if most of a weak force is concentrated in a narrow sector of the enemy's lines at a time the enemy doesn't expect a major attack.
This need for surprise and secrecy applies to military activity off the battle field as well.
If - as happened all the time in the Pacific Campaign- both sides were down to 10% effective strength due to all the rest laid low by endemic local infections , the battle is almost certainly won if a secret cure-all like DDT clears up the insect source of those infections.
Because the exclusive use of DDT by only one side could enable it to send 50% of its tinier force into battle and win.
But only if DDT's abilities remain secret.
DDT was not strictly speaking "secret" ---- its chemical formula and method of manufacture was revealed in the public scientific literature back in 1874 and again in 1940 in a Swiss patent from Geigy.
But the Japanese hadn't seen those scientific reports or if so, hadn't grasped their military significance.
But even the stupidest Japanese general could correctly access urgent Japanese diplomatic cables indicating that the American domestic press was raving about the miracle success of DDT in clearing malaria from its endemic regions in the southern states of America.
So DDT was kept as secret as possible and more fundamentally , was not made available for civilian use during WWII.
This despite the fact that it was easy and cheap to make and very stable in storage - for the cost of one or two B-29s, the country's agricultural zones could all be sprayed by DDT and the resulting greater farm productivity would well repay the cost of the DDT factories.
Crops - as well as guns - win wars too, it could be argued.
But in fact, the productivity side of Total War was totally ignored over the secrecy side of Total War.
It was similar with Penicillin.
The key reason that striking, dramatic, heart-stopping successes in dragging civilian bodies back from the grave's edge in 1942-1943 were not permitted to be published by the AMA-OSRD-NAS triad was because this would indirectly alert the world to the military life-saving abilities of penicillin.
Wesley Spink did not rock the boat - unlike Henry Dawson
(See Wesley Spink's dramatic first success in July 1942 with seven year old "JE" - a heart-warming case which was not allowed to be published/publicized until April 1945, for a vivid example.)
Publicizing civilian cures would equalize its effects on the war if both sides, suitably alerted, then employed it freely.
Even if the health-restoring ability of penicillin made the war economy far more productive than the cost of setting up penicillin plants would take out of it ---- and this resulting extra productivity was devoted to making more weapons.
Because, at least in theory , both sides would see their economies expand equally - returning everything to the position it was before penicillin became widely public.
So instead, the Allies hoped to synthesize penicillin so that it was both cheap and abundant (like DDT) but also like DDT, they planned not to release it to the public, but use it as a military weapon - a secret medical weapon - exactly as DDT used.
But the heart-warming story of Baby Patricia in August 1943 let the cat out of the bag, as this local story in New York 'broke wide' , not just stateside but all around the world.
Now not just every civilian in the world wanted it for their sick relative like yesterday but military chiefs across the globe awoke (15 years late !) to the military potential of the miracle cure.
The chiefs of the American military medicine triad (and their equally smarmy British counterparts) pouted ---- but clever people in the Offices of War Information in both Allied nations resolved to make a virtue of necessity.
Baby Patty got her penicillin over the heads of the triad, but now official penicillin would be rushed by American military bombers to saving dying kids all over the world and the effort highly publicized in the process.
It would say to friend, foe and neutral alike that unlike those nasty life-denying Nazis, the Allies cared : oh how they cared.
Henry Dawson must have snickered at the blatant dishonesty in
this abrupt volte-face, but he was very glad lives were being saved however it came about and that the "unlimited potential" of the life-saving mold was at long last being released....
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Was there a Parran-Hearst Telegram ? (You provide the penicillin, I'll provide the pictures)
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| "Operator, get me Washington, tell 'em I'm from Hearst..." |
We all know which telegram: the one where Remington is sent out to illustrate the ongoing civil war in Cuba, but finds all is quiet and begs to go home.
Hearst supposedly telegraphs him to stay : "(If) you furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war."
Hearst proceeds to puff up the accidental explosion on board the battleship The Maine as an act of sneaky warfare by the Spanish, ("Remember Pearl Harbour" 50 years ahead of schedule) and the rest is history: Yellow Journalism's finest moment.
Or is it ?
For a start, that particular telegram was apparently never sent.
But did the aging Hearst later intervene with US Surgeon General Thomas Parran in August 1943, to get penicillin to a dying baby girl in Manhattan ?
Was this Yellow Journalism's finest moment ?
The Pulitzer Committee apparently felt so - and it is worth noting that Pulitzer and Hearst were the most bitter of bitter enemies.
Consider what we know (or think we know).
Supposedly the whole thing started with a phone call from the distraught father (Lawrence J Malone) of a dying two year old girl called Patricia Malone, made to the city desk editor of the Hearst media empire's flagship newspaper, the New York Journal-American.
Actually Malone quickly fades back into the wallpaper , as do the nominal doctors for the baby girl.
Because in fact, Malone was set up for the call by a crippled Italian-American surgical resident named Dante Colitti, then working at the tiny Lutheran Hospital in upper Manhattan, about a mile from pioneering penicillin doctor Henry Dawson's hospital, Columbia Presbyterian.
The little girl was dying of blood poisoning and normally a surgical staffer - a mere resident at that - has no place in treatment decisions for that sort of illness.
But Colitti was raised right, with a good moral education and he couldn't stand by and let her die, when he knew that not a mile away, Henry Dawson was dragging babies like her back from the grave with his Floor G penicillin.
And Colitti had no cause to love the New York medical establishment which supported the limiting of penicillin to curing VD cases among the unfaithful husbands and boyfriends of the combat corps.
In the 1930s, he had been rejected from attending any New York medical school, by an informal quota system designed to keep out Catholics and Italians.
(And Jews and Blacks and Asians and Women. Colitti's parents were recent immigrants to America).
Colitti had a permanently bent spine as a result of childhood TB and had to use crutches so it was probably the excuse given him for his rejection.
But Colitti knew that Henry Dawson, just a mile north of him, was working with a doctor who used crutches thanks to polio and another doctor who was missing an arm.
The only real difference was that these were Protestant men, with native-born parents.
Colitti paid a private medical college in Massachusetts to get his MD degree but no New York hospital would recognize any degree not granted by one of the quota-oriented establishment schools.
It was a closed loop.
But WWII led to a desperate shortage of medical staff and even New York's medical establishment had to let people like Colitti in to do the lowest medical jobs, at least until the war was over.
But the highly morally minded Colitti felt that if they had displayed no charity towards a cripple, that did not mean he would follow suit.
Hence his setting up of the phone call to the Hearst paper : he knew exactly who would cause the most noise.
The Journal-American photo-journalists were then world famous for their large, vivid, gripping front page photographs and a dying baby story was just made for their skills.
The Hearst editor got no where ( says the AP press agency) with the OSRD's Dr Richards or with the NAS Committee on Chemical Therapeutics.
But somehow or other the newspaper knew of the ongoing conflict between those who felt we could best win the war ("Hearts & Minds") through well publicized Social Medicine versus those that felt that secretive and rationed War Medicine would save more scarce resources for "Guns & Bullets".
Because the newspaper ultimately got the penicillin it needed from that supply reserved for the US Public Health Services (at that time, it only had a tiny amount of penicillin and it was only normally used for treating cases of VD among merchant seamen.)
Released by drug company Squibb upon the direct order of Thomas Parran, US Surgeon General and head of the US Public Health Services (then a relatively small and powerless body compared to its status today.)
Parran versus Weed over the fate of wartime penicillin
Parran was the de facto head of the Social Medicine forces, while the NAS's Lewis Weed was the voice of War Medicine.
Did Hearst or his senior staff know of this ongoing debate and approach Parran directly, dismissing his concerns about tackling the all-powerful OSRD and NAS by reminding him he had no love for the NAS's Weed anyway , and that if he would only provide the penicillin vials, Hearst photographers would provide the poignant pictures.
Yellow Journalism and the Yellow Magic then proceeded to make beautiful music together : because the Patty Malone Story ultimately spelled the end to the Age of Modernity ...
Sunday, December 2, 2012
The Allied battle for the world's 'hearts and minds' : NS-born Henry Dawson's patient-penicillin vs OSRD war-penicillin
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| Army is - wrongly - blamed for her SBE death |
Presidents John Adams used the phrase "hearts and mind" in this sense early in the 19th century, long before Presidents FDR, Kennedy and Johnson made it famous in the 20th century - and before recent presidents George W Bush and Obama dragged it out of the archives to use in this century.
(And to share the blame around, their wartime Ally Britain also used the phrase during its 1950s war in Malaysia.)
When American finally joined The Coalition of the Willing (December 1941), many of the world's nations still remained strictly neutral in the battle against Nazi evil , or were, at best, nominal friends but in reality merely laying back on the oars.
The world's largest, richest, most militarily-advanced economies in the world (America and the British Commonwealth) had a real job on their hands trying to convince the neutrals (all much smaller and weaker than these two superpowers) that their interests would not be subsumed before the interests of these global colossus.
Unhelpfully, America and Britain's scientific and medical elite - centred in the American National Academy of Science (NAS) and the British Medical Research Council (MRC) made the job much harder.
Reactionaries of all stripes (from Germany to America) had been determined to roll back the1930s move to Social Medicine (the claim that more poor people got sick than rich people because they were too poor to pay for adequate housing, food or routine medical care).
However, the dire effects of the Great Depression had put wind behind Social Medicine's sails and confounded the reactionaries.
Now - Thank God ! - war, or even just the possibility of war, gave the reactionaries new hope.
Hitler killed off his first "useless feeder" the same week that he declared war on the Poles and soon his Aktion T4 program was killing Germany's weakest and smallest members by the tens of thousands.
In America, people like Dr Lewis Weed (a mid-level medical researcher) dropped his unsuccessful research to become a war-medicine advocate at the NAS and its action-oriented NRC (National Research Council).
War medicine wins opening rounds against social medicine
He locked horns with Dr Thomas Parran, the American Surgeon General from 1936 to 1948, who was a strong (and powerfully-positioned) advocate of social medicine.
A war medicine proponent advocates that any nation at war - even the richest, least attacked nation at war - needs to divert resources normally assigned to civilian medicine towards making bullets instead.
In addition, much more money would have to be spent providing for the high medical requirements of an activity (war) whose stated aim is maiming and killing people on muddy fields miles away from the nearest hospital.
Limited research dollars would have to focus on war-related medical needs ( such as finding new ways to keep factory workers and bomber pilots alert for long hours) and put before finding new ways to keep elderly retirees alive) .
War medicine is, in a very real sense, 'eugenics in uniform' : the best citizens (those that are tested and rated physically and mentally to be A1) end up in the military and get top notch medical care at no cost.
Those citizens who fail these tests and end up as 4F, are second rate eugenically and get second rate medical care during the war.
Proudly promote this concept to the outside world - and America's still relatively free press during WWII did just that - and it comes across quite differently in those neutral nations still sitting on the fence with regards to whole-heartedly backing the Allied cause.
As individuals, the elites in these neutral nations could see themselves as A1s --- but as nationalistically minded citizens they could only see their nations as 4Fs in America's eyes : mere inconvenient dirt beneath their advancing wheels.
When the Patty Malone vs Marie Barker debate broke in the United States media (basically, scarce penicillin for dying civilians : yes or no ?) , it broke even bigger overseas, as worried American and British diplomats noted.
Heartless or caring : the public image of the Allied cause had reached past the unimportant front pages and onto the most important page of any newspaper or magazine --- the women's page : home to Doctor Mom.
It suddenly mattered what the mothers and parents and grandparents from neutral nations thought of America and Britain's harsh dictates on penicillin.
Put your small neutral nation, say Eire or Turkey, in the place of the unfortunate Marie Barker and then ask yourself, how would you feel to just be Marie Barker-like 'incidental collateral damage' , on the pathway to the ultimate Allied Victory ?
And the Home Front within the Allied nations was just as caustic about their own governments' inactions : 'penicillin the miracle cure' had been around for 15 years and still no one in charge had bothered making enough of it for all ?
Don't the bosses know "there's a war on" ???!!!
And let us set this debate (occurring between the late Summer of 1943 and the early Spring of 1944) in its full context.
The western Allies still hadn't invaded Europe and left the heavy lifting of killing German soldiers to the beleaguered Russians.
Instead they were busy bombing Europe into rubble : busily killing civilians from both Axis and neutral nations alike.
The Germans and Allies had co-operated on censoring the results of the fire-bombing of Hamburg of July 1943, (right before the story of little Patty Malone broke) but on-site reports from neutral Swedish journalists had laid the whole horrific affair out on the newspaper pages of the world.
It had led to considerable unease - in neutral country and allied country alike.
Hadn't FDR himself raged that the bombing of civilians was a crime against all humanity and now weren't the Americans and British far out-doing the earlier Nazi efforts to bomb enemy and neutral civilians ?
Allied fire bombing of innocent babies in occupied Europe - denying life-saving penicillin to innocent young moms in America so that their unfaithful husbands in Italy could be get a quicker ( via penicillin) cure for the Clap - it all didn't seem morally right.
Perhaps surprisingly, the American Army revealed far greater political and cultural savvy on this matter than American doctors and scientists were capable of.
The Army was sick and tired of being blamed for hogging all the penicillin and refusing to give any to the nation's dying babies.
'For Christ's Sake', they could rightfully protest, 'we can't get anywhere enough penicillin for our own dying boys, and we hadn't even heard of this stuff penicillin till a few months ago --- you ask the drug companies and the doctors what they were doing with the stuff for the last 15 years !'
Somewhere in the American Army Air Force some bright mind (s) decided to solve both PR problems (the fire bombing uproar and the penicillin uproar) at one stroke.
(And before you ask, no .)
No academic historian has yet brought us the true story behind this highly imaginative response: I see a great PhD thesis for some bright light.)
Soon, American Army "heavy" bombers were pulled off their bombing practises and were sent out on a still risky flight (because at top speed and at night) "pounding" across country with a tiny 8 grams of penicillin (instead of the normal 8000 pounds of TNT) to deliver to a dying ten pound patient.
Upon arrival, Klieg lights lit the tarmac as an ambulance, along a police escort with blazing lights and piercing sirens, raced to the hospital and the waiting doctor and patients.
Need I add to this purple-prosed drama that, thoughtfully, the local press had been notified well ahead of time ?
Quickly Army bombers were even on far more perilous missions of mercy, dangerously new cross-ocean flights, from places like San Francisco all the way to Brisbane Australia or from New York to Havana, --- to save dying children.
In 1943, Martin Henry Dawson was dying ,but not quite dead yet, not by a long shot...
Life-saving penicillin had moved 180 degrees from being censored and rationed to being the subject of radio, newsreel and pamphlet propaganda as an example - the example - of the better things ahead if only all joined in to hasten the Allied Cause.
Neutrals could reassure themselves that just like with dying babies and Martin Henry Dawson's useless-mouthed SBE patients, the Allies would do right by all, as they were doing so now for the least of these.
The Allied battle for the world's hearts and minds, had been won (unexpectedly) by the proponents of social medicine - thanks largely to the example of Martin Henry Dawson.
And decades before Joni Mitchell and Woodstock, the American Army Air Force itself turned its shotgun bombers into butterflies, above a wondering nation and world....
Friday, April 27, 2012
(Houses of) PEER REVIEW
The House of Lords is a chamber of sober second thoughts, where men and women (Peers) (aged in visage and grey in hair) review proposed new ideas, from the vantage point of honored expertise and authority.
This sounds a lot like the National Academy of Science (America's NAS)
which is a perpetually self-appointing/self-anointing body of aged scientists, much honored for their expertise and authority, pronouncing upon the gravest scientific questions facing the nation.
Britain's Royal Society does much the same and most of the world's prominent scientific nations employ a similar model.
"Peer" is such an ambiguous word.
One is judged by a jury of one's peers, for example : bog-ordinary citizens like yourself, with no occupational or professional interest in crime or justice.
But the aristocracy are Peers, peers with a capital "P" , and they are presumed to be anything but ordinary, in fact the very antithesis of ordinary.
A scientist's proposed journal article, grant request or application for tenure is judged by "peer-review".
In theory, it is via a jury of people very much like the scientist. In practice the jury is often made up of Peers - scientists much superior in ranking to the supplicant scientist.
Top scientists, and the world's top professionals, are not just the aristocracy of their world.
They are the aristocracy of our world : the aristocracy of the world's successful response to the trauma of the 1832 Reform Act and similar legislation.
And to the rise of the Romantic Era, with its threat of the untutored,un-peer-reviewed, Genius and un-peer-reviewed self-made entrepreneur/celebrity....
This sounds a lot like the National Academy of Science (America's NAS)
which is a perpetually self-appointing/self-anointing body of aged scientists, much honored for their expertise and authority, pronouncing upon the gravest scientific questions facing the nation.
Britain's Royal Society does much the same and most of the world's prominent scientific nations employ a similar model.
"Peer" is such an ambiguous word.
One is judged by a jury of one's peers, for example : bog-ordinary citizens like yourself, with no occupational or professional interest in crime or justice.
But the aristocracy are Peers, peers with a capital "P" , and they are presumed to be anything but ordinary, in fact the very antithesis of ordinary.
A scientist's proposed journal article, grant request or application for tenure is judged by "peer-review".
In theory, it is via a jury of people very much like the scientist. In practice the jury is often made up of Peers - scientists much superior in ranking to the supplicant scientist.
Top scientists, and the world's top professionals, are not just the aristocracy of their world.
They are the aristocracy of our world : the aristocracy of the world's successful response to the trauma of the 1832 Reform Act and similar legislation.
And to the rise of the Romantic Era, with its threat of the untutored,un-peer-reviewed, Genius and un-peer-reviewed self-made entrepreneur/celebrity....
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