Never ever a shortage of wartime Penicillin : only a shortage of customers

Never ever were the basic details or making or using penicillin a secret during WWII - anywhere in the world - they had been published repeatedly in globally widely available medical journals and presented before international medical conferences.

Nor was there ever a shortage of therapeutic grade penicillin - again world wide.

The only thing that was in desperately short supply for penicillin in the fifteen years from September 1928 to September 1943 was customers.

No, not a shortage of patients dying for lack of the infection fighting antibiotic - they were always there in their millions - annually - worldwide.

But between them and a normal lifespan was a po-faced gatekeeper resisting penicillin with all their professional inertia : their GP.

NATIVE penicillin was dark and swarthy , greasy-looking, smelt of garlic , carried a stiletto and was unreliable and unpredictable

Well it often was a dark dirty reddish brown and so often did look like dry mustard that had absorbed water from the atmosphere and had darkened and moistened at the bottom of the jar.

And indeed it did reek - but less of garlic and more of a musty basement or newly turned humus-rich soil.

By contrast, white (man-made) penicillin (as yet unseen and in fact never yet seen) was widely/wildly predicted by mainstream scientists to be as pure as a Boy Scout and as predictable, reliable, dependable as clockwork.

Who ever said that scientists don't have a rich fantasy life ... or a privileged access to bad acid ?

dark, dirty, wet , NATIVE penicillin not welcome ... to help win WWII

Because WWII was to be a war for white (man-made) penicillin : pure, dry and crystal clear.

Native penicillin (which incidentally turned out to be the only penicillin produced during WWII and ever since when synthetic penicillin failed to emerge) was about as popular as the black and east Indian native was in the armies of the British Commonwealth , France and America : which is to say not at all.

Instead the war was to be won by bombers (commanded exclusively by white officers) killing enemy grandmothers and babies until the German, Italian and Japanese males in uniform surrendered without ever seeing armed combat against the western allies....