I am a member of the transitional era boomer generation (born 1940-1956) : we historical few who experienced both the waning of modernity and the dawning of postmodernity during our crucial - plastic - formative years.
Very few of us were born in Manhattan (very few people ever are) but we were all Manhattan's janus children in a very real sense : the healthiest and most frightened generation of children ever born.
Showing posts with label penicillin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label penicillin. Show all posts
Friday, January 2, 2015
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
'Running against New York City' secret of OSRD and NAS wartime success in Washington
In 1940 New York City and New York State were at the very height of their power in the United States.
At that time, they even retained a very significant chunk of the American population - which translated into things like crucial electoral college votes.
They held an even greater percentage of the nation's wealth and financial lending clout, its best research facilities and research libraries, its biggest and most varied industrial base (from light to the heaviest of industries), its media and cultural arbitors of national taste.
It was also filled with immigrants of all sorts, with uppity Harlem Negroes, priest-dominated Roman Catholic Italians and left wing Jews : everything the rest of America : mostly native-born, white, Protestant Anglo Saxons raised in small towns feared and disliked.
At that time, they even retained a very significant chunk of the American population - which translated into things like crucial electoral college votes.
They held an even greater percentage of the nation's wealth and financial lending clout, its best research facilities and research libraries, its biggest and most varied industrial base (from light to the heaviest of industries), its media and cultural arbitors of national taste.
It was also filled with immigrants of all sorts, with uppity Harlem Negroes, priest-dominated Roman Catholic Italians and left wing Jews : everything the rest of America : mostly native-born, white, Protestant Anglo Saxons raised in small towns feared and disliked.
Monday, December 29, 2014
Manhattan's OTHER Project : Gotham's penicillin un-superheroes (and why they are ignored by academics)
If another secretive, undemocratic, big science Manhattan Project is more likely to cause a global environmental disaster (think nuclear winter or geo-engineering) than prevent it - then does the experiences of wartime Gotham have anything at all to still teach us, as we face global climate meltdown ?
Well, unbeknownst to virtually all, Manhattan actually had another ( far different) wartime project that still has lessons for today.
Its global effect were almost as big as that of the much better known atomic Manhattan Project, but by pointed contrast to it, it was near universally always warmly received worldwide.
Because Manhattan's real enduring gift to humanity during and after the war years was not The Bomb (or the infamous Norden Bombsight) but rather bog-ordinary cheap available-to-all public domain natural penicillin. You know - the stuff the academics are always telling us that the British gave us.
Well, unbeknownst to virtually all, Manhattan actually had another ( far different) wartime project that still has lessons for today.
Its global effect were almost as big as that of the much better known atomic Manhattan Project, but by pointed contrast to it, it was near universally always warmly received worldwide.
Because Manhattan's real enduring gift to humanity during and after the war years was not The Bomb (or the infamous Norden Bombsight) but rather bog-ordinary cheap available-to-all public domain natural penicillin. You know - the stuff the academics are always telling us that the British gave us.
Friday, October 17, 2014
Howard Florey : a dominant Alpha Male ... fiercely defending the banal and conventional ideas of Normal Science !
An irony there : the fearsome Howard Florey stands revealed as an intellectual milquetoast , behind his public persona as verbal and physical monster terrifying the calm corridors of 1930s British academic science.
By contrast, to fellow scientists the 1930s Henry Dawson was seen as a submissive and an Omega male , but intellectually his personal ideas created great unease among those same scientists , in almost an Alpha manner.
By contrast, to fellow scientists the 1930s Henry Dawson was seen as a submissive and an Omega male , but intellectually his personal ideas created great unease among those same scientists , in almost an Alpha manner.
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Un-Super Heroes, the Epilogue : Apollo Theatre , February 17th 1956
Scene 1, Act I of Un-Super Heroes opens on October 16th 1940 with the arrival of patient Charles Aronson at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York City just as the last scene of the last Act (V) is August 15th 1944 with Charlie's departure from that same hospital.
But every drama deserves an epilogue and Un-Super Heroes's epilogue is set onstage at New York City's Apollo Theatre, just a mile from the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, on the night of February 17th 1956.
Appearing as a headliner in New York City for the very first time is a Georgia-born black singer from a dead poor family , a singer born with a badly handicapped leg.
But if racism, poverty and his affliction have held him back , he could only echo the sentiments from one of the first of Dawson's SBE cures, Miriam Laskowitz .
Because, like her , regardless of what problems life has tossed him, his heart and lungs certainly weren't one of them.
No siree Bob - or should that be no siree
"A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom!"
But every drama deserves an epilogue and Un-Super Heroes's epilogue is set onstage at New York City's Apollo Theatre, just a mile from the Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, on the night of February 17th 1956.
Appearing as a headliner in New York City for the very first time is a Georgia-born black singer from a dead poor family , a singer born with a badly handicapped leg.
But if racism, poverty and his affliction have held him back , he could only echo the sentiments from one of the first of Dawson's SBE cures, Miriam Laskowitz .
Because, like her , regardless of what problems life has tossed him, his heart and lungs certainly weren't one of them.
No siree Bob - or should that be no siree
"A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom!"
Penicillin meeting is just the cover story for atomic bomb meeting
On December 17 1941, the medical wing of America's famous OSRD war research agency held a rare - possibly unique - meeting outside the Washington beltway.
Even rarer was the presence of one attendee, the boss of the OSRD himself, Vannevar Bush, never one to think war would be won by advances in medicine.
What on earth was really going on ?
Even rarer was the presence of one attendee, the boss of the OSRD himself, Vannevar Bush, never one to think war would be won by advances in medicine.
What on earth was really going on ?
Sunday, October 5, 2014
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 ....
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 ....
Saturday, October 4, 2014
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.
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.
Friday, October 3, 2014
Henry Dawson DIDN'T discover penicillin , but after penicillin endured underemployment for 12 years , he did give it its first real job : lifesaving
There are always tons of people who claim to have "discovered" this or that movie star, after the fact, but only a handful who actually gave them their first part way back when.
As Scottish Christians are wont to say : there is a huge difference between all those who just talk the talk and the very few that actually walk the walk.
They should know.
Because when it came to giving penicillin a real job (saving lives) old scotsman Alexander Fleming only talked the talk - it was new scotsman Henry Dawson who actually walked the walk : October 16th 1940...
As Scottish Christians are wont to say : there is a huge difference between all those who just talk the talk and the very few that actually walk the walk.
They should know.
Because when it came to giving penicillin a real job (saving lives) old scotsman Alexander Fleming only talked the talk - it was new scotsman Henry Dawson who actually walked the walk : October 16th 1940...
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Snot, vomit , excrement, spit , semen : physical monsters vs moral monsters
We've all seen enough films and TV to be wrongly confident of what a typical lifelong serial contract killer looks like.
They are ultra normal looking .
Even good looking.
Oh so symmetrical in features and body shape, modest in speech, polite, neat , always tipping the waitress well, always picking up a fluffy animal 'for the daughter' on these infrequent way-from-home business trips.
But their quick, clean, cold hits include a lady doctor who advises on abortions, an investigative journalist and a small time drug dealer who ran short on his returns to his supplier, Mr Big.
They are , in a word, a moral monster : with our fascination for them entirely wrapped around how such seemingly normal people can be so evil.
Now physical monsters are not merely scaled up ten feet tall versions of Ms Right, the serial killer, a monster who can now kill with her bare hands instead of with a high powered sniper rifle.
Instead these monsters are always disgusting and repulsive , as well as being cold blooded determined to kill on sight.
Why ?
They are ultra normal looking .
Even good looking.
Oh so symmetrical in features and body shape, modest in speech, polite, neat , always tipping the waitress well, always picking up a fluffy animal 'for the daughter' on these infrequent way-from-home business trips.
But their quick, clean, cold hits include a lady doctor who advises on abortions, an investigative journalist and a small time drug dealer who ran short on his returns to his supplier, Mr Big.
They are , in a word, a moral monster : with our fascination for them entirely wrapped around how such seemingly normal people can be so evil.
Now physical monsters are not merely scaled up ten feet tall versions of Ms Right, the serial killer, a monster who can now kill with her bare hands instead of with a high powered sniper rifle.
Instead these monsters are always disgusting and repulsive , as well as being cold blooded determined to kill on sight.
Why ?
Monday, September 29, 2014
Citrus tree , Citrus juice , vitamin C , sCurvy : Penicillium mold , Penicillium juice , Penicillin , Pneumonia
When I was a schoolkid, a teacher taught me a little trick to correctly associate the juice from citrus trees with vitamin c and scurvy. (Think of their common link : "C".)
I have found it useful to do much the same with the juice from penicillium molds, penicillin and pneumonia. (Think of their common link : "P".)
Today we realize that a food consists mostly of water (needed for digestion itself as well as for the rest of our bodily activities) and non-toxic materials we can not digest ( bone and fibre) also needed for digestion.
Each food also tends to be valued for the large amount of a single essential food type it produces .
( Think fat for butter, milk for the mineral calcium , meat for protein, potato for starch carbohydrates, oranges for vitamin c) but each of course also produces some of most of the other food types.
We need great varieties of unpurified foods because we need trace (or bigger) amounts of not just vitamins and minerals but also of different types ( in chemical terms , different shapes) of the basic sugars, fats and proteins to survive and grow healthy.
Variety even trumps sheer volume.
Finally a food tends to produce small amounts of substances that while perhaps not originally designed by the plant or animal to be a poison, are toxic to humans.
We manage these poison issues by avoiding plants or animals filled with them, by avoiding plant parts filled with them, only picking plants at certain times of their growing cycle, or by treating the food before cooking - or by expecting cooking to de-nature the poison.
Finally we manage them by eating them quite deliberately but hopefully in small amounts : coffee or alcohol for example.
If we accept this new science, we can see why it is better to eat "impure" (so called - inaccurately) oranges than it is to take daily semi-synthetic vitamin c pills described (inaccurately) as pure.
Ditto, we could take our penicillin not in pure pills ( inaccurately so called) but as penicillium juice and done with care - the same sort of care we need to take while eating potatoes - it will not harm us and is certainly better than fighting a severe infection without any antibiotic.
This is one of the basic thesis of my book : wartime penicillin thought of a sort of vitamin ...
I have found it useful to do much the same with the juice from penicillium molds, penicillin and pneumonia. (Think of their common link : "P".)
Today we realize that a food consists mostly of water (needed for digestion itself as well as for the rest of our bodily activities) and non-toxic materials we can not digest ( bone and fibre) also needed for digestion.
Each food also tends to be valued for the large amount of a single essential food type it produces .
( Think fat for butter, milk for the mineral calcium , meat for protein, potato for starch carbohydrates, oranges for vitamin c) but each of course also produces some of most of the other food types.
We need great varieties of unpurified foods because we need trace (or bigger) amounts of not just vitamins and minerals but also of different types ( in chemical terms , different shapes) of the basic sugars, fats and proteins to survive and grow healthy.
Variety even trumps sheer volume.
Finally a food tends to produce small amounts of substances that while perhaps not originally designed by the plant or animal to be a poison, are toxic to humans.
We manage these poison issues by avoiding plants or animals filled with them, by avoiding plant parts filled with them, only picking plants at certain times of their growing cycle, or by treating the food before cooking - or by expecting cooking to de-nature the poison.
Finally we manage them by eating them quite deliberately but hopefully in small amounts : coffee or alcohol for example.
If we accept this new science, we can see why it is better to eat "impure" (so called - inaccurately) oranges than it is to take daily semi-synthetic vitamin c pills described (inaccurately) as pure.
Ditto, we could take our penicillin not in pure pills ( inaccurately so called) but as penicillium juice and done with care - the same sort of care we need to take while eating potatoes - it will not harm us and is certainly better than fighting a severe infection without any antibiotic.
This is one of the basic thesis of my book : wartime penicillin thought of a sort of vitamin ...
Saturday, September 27, 2014
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 .
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 .
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
When (and why) Toronto's famed Hospital for Sick Children DIDN'T report a miracle
Miracles and Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children are mostly associated with Nobel winner Fred Banting, eleven year old Elsie Needham and insulin back in the 1920s.
Unfortunately ,they are NOT associated with July 1942, penicillin and a dying nine year old boy (possibly still alive today) known only as R. V.
Unfortunately ,they are NOT associated with July 1942, penicillin and a dying nine year old boy (possibly still alive today) known only as R. V.
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
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.
Monday, September 8, 2014
Twelve year resistance against injecting crude natural penicillin was normal...science
Doctors Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey did nothing at all about injecting crude natural penicillin into patients to try and save lives during the 12 long years between the Fall of 1928 and and the Fall of 1940.
But they did nothing more (less ?) than did all the other doctors in the world.
Their (lack of) response to the great potential in a crude penicillium liquid that was very non-toxic to primates and very toxic to death-dealing bacteria was perfectly normal..science.
Because doctors - just like the rest of us - also have unconscious Ids and also have unconscious fears about monsters.
Back in that era - pace H P Lovecraft and innumerable horror movies - the unconscious monster feared the most were the slime beings lying an uneasy halfway between stable solids and mobile liquids.
The scientific reluctance to inject the poop and pee of slime molds into the temple of the human body might have had a multiple of scientific excuses to support it but let's be frank - it was really was just an Id thing .
After all , doctors had no such reluctance to inject all sorts of man-made chemicals into the body - very dangerous chemicals like Salvarsan and Sulfa drugs.
They also had no reluctance to inject dangerous horse serum into humans.
But they did nothing more (less ?) than did all the other doctors in the world.
Their (lack of) response to the great potential in a crude penicillium liquid that was very non-toxic to primates and very toxic to death-dealing bacteria was perfectly normal..science.
Because doctors - just like the rest of us - also have unconscious Ids and also have unconscious fears about monsters.
Back in that era - pace H P Lovecraft and innumerable horror movies - the unconscious monster feared the most were the slime beings lying an uneasy halfway between stable solids and mobile liquids.
The scientific reluctance to inject the poop and pee of slime molds into the temple of the human body might have had a multiple of scientific excuses to support it but let's be frank - it was really was just an Id thing .
After all , doctors had no such reluctance to inject all sorts of man-made chemicals into the body - very dangerous chemicals like Salvarsan and Sulfa drugs.
They also had no reluctance to inject dangerous horse serum into humans.
Saturday, September 6, 2014
Natural penicillin the Strawberry Roan : there ain't no chemist here all alive that can stay with that mold when it makes that... high dive"
Chemists versus the fungal Strawberry Roan
To the Big Scientists of the Modern Age , natural penicillin from the penicillium mold was like an old moth-eaten cayuse , an old strawberry roan , a has been and a never was .
They saw it as a living being easily broken at the chemical wheel - requiring only a little heat and pressure to make it reveal all of its secrets.
Then the chemists could patent improved analogues of natural penicillin and thus corner the financial market on this precious lifesaver.
But as Montana Slim (Wilf Carter) might have sung it - "There ain't no chemist here all alive that can stay with that mold when it makes that... high dive."
1945's apogee of Modern science , Big science, Synthetic science : Zyklon-B, Plutonium, Napalm , DDT , Freon and leaded gas
Wow ! Quite a lot for Big Science (particularly chemists and synthetic scientists) to celebrate in 1945.
Set against that , a bit of a minor and undoubtedly temporary disappointment.
For there was (also in 1945) the totally unexpected failure by a thousand of the smartest guys in the room - nay the entire universe - to quickly synthesize the simple small molecule made by some small and extremely simple beings : penicillin.
Flash forward Gordon to 2015.
Set against that , a bit of a minor and undoubtedly temporary disappointment.
For there was (also in 1945) the totally unexpected failure by a thousand of the smartest guys in the room - nay the entire universe - to quickly synthesize the simple small molecule made by some small and extremely simple beings : penicillin.
Flash forward Gordon to 2015.
Friday, September 5, 2014
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 ?
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 ?
Penicillin fame , September 1941 : when cat Florey is out of town, mouse Fleming begins to play ...
Alexander Fleming never asserted his quite spurious claim that he had long advocated a lifesaving role for penicillin until the beginning of September 1941.
That was exactly the time when the person most likely to be able and willing to accurately dispute that claim, his friend and fellow penicillin pioneer Howard Florey, was (in) conveniently out of the country and unable to respond because of war restrictions on communications.
When one of the UK's biggest newspapers - the Daily Herald - took up Fleming's claim from his letter to the editor in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) , the infamous "Fleming Myth" was fully made.
That was exactly the time when the person most likely to be able and willing to accurately dispute that claim, his friend and fellow penicillin pioneer Howard Florey, was (in) conveniently out of the country and unable to respond because of war restrictions on communications.
When one of the UK's biggest newspapers - the Daily Herald - took up Fleming's claim from his letter to the editor in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) , the infamous "Fleming Myth" was fully made.
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