The pure penicillin acid in 1930's crude penicillium juice vs impure penicillin salts in 2010 penicillin pills

In crude penicillium juice, as exuded (pooped) straight from the mold, penicillin exists as the 100% free pure acid, swimming about in a lot of murky water.

An old rural uneducated woman living alone (the sort we used to burn as witches) can make this stuff.

By no coincidence, most of us would describe this penicillin (inaccurately) as highly impure.

But when we take a penicillin pill , it consists of lots of buffers and fillers and a little of that free penicillin acid now chemically bound to a metal in the form of a salt.

It takes a village of highly educated men (and about a billion dollars in equipment) to raise this child.

Again by no coincidence, most of us would (inaccurately) call this pill 100% pure penicillin.

The terms of pure and impure are really nothing but scientific rhetoric , as devoid of any fixed precise meaning as every term is in scientific rhetoric...

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 ...

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.

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."

Fungus cloud rises 35,000 ft over New Mexico desert as Oppenheimer intones "I am become death , destroyer of nations"

The Boys Own Manhattan Project

Trinity's famous FUNGUS cloud

The seminal image of the other Manhattan Project, the Boys-Own version , is of a lethal fungus cloud radiating forth , roiling and boiling as it ascended to 35,000 feet above the New Mexico desert . Down below , Dr Robert Oppenheimer intoned portentously "I am become Death, destroyer of nations".

Doctor Mom's Manhattan project 

Lifesaving MONSTRANCE of penicillium

Dr Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project ( the Doctor-Mom's version) also had its seminal image , also of a fungus radiating forth.

It was held aloft like some sort of Roman Catholic monstrance (albeit by devout Presbyterian layperson Dr Gladys Hobby in New York's Presbyterian hospital !) to offer hope and succour to SBE patients facing imminent death.

This lifesaving fungus radiated forth in all directions over a large Petri dish, with its golden droplets along the wedge lines in the green blue mold looking like the rays of the sun itself.

Two wildly different fungus , two wildly different faces of Janus Manhattan.

One Manhattan , the Manhattan of Gordon Gekko , cold and mean  - the Manhattan of the Hiroshima bomb droppers that 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef raged so hard against.

The other Manhattan, the Manhattan of Emma Lazarus, offering the warm golden lamp of welcome to all the world's tired, hungry and huddled - the Manhattan that Yousef and his ilk never got to know.

If Manhattan is ever to stop the Yousefs of this world, it needs to show the Emma Lazarus side of its face.

I hope my books on Martin Henry Dawson's Manhattan Project (Agape penicillin) help start that process...

Life-saving penicillin can be a little bit fermented but not a little bit synthetic

If a medicine will save lives when nothing else will do so - in war as in peace - then Henry Dawson's example reminds us that our first moral requirement is to make it as much as we can, anyway we can, save lives anyway we can..... and only then try to perfect it.

Fermentation penicillin ( aka natural, biological penicillin) worked  (feebly) from day one (September 1928) but could be (and obviously was !) improved gradually.

By contrast, even after 15 years, synthetic penicillin in late 1943 still hadn't been gotten to work at all.  (IE, biologically : all resulting attempts showed no medical activity at all.)

In a way , synthetic molecules are completely like pregnancy.

As with pregnancy, there is no half-way house : you are or you aren't ; a synthetic molecule either works, or it doesn't.

In addition, even if synthetic penicillin could be gotten to work biologically, there were still two possible huge problems ahead of breaking out the champagne.

The yield could be much lower than the already low yield of Fleming's original strain of penicillium, not many magnitudes higher.

And the number of steps required in the synthesis and subsequent purification/ separation might require more, not less, money, equipment, manpower, care and close attention to detail than even the worst version of the fermentation method ever called for.

I have one word for you my boy. Rosebud ? No : quinine.

These are not just theoretical objections : as bad luck happens they all came to pass with synthetic penicillin.

The pursuit of  synthetic quinine , now a more than two hundred year long futile chasing of a tail by generation after generation of chemists , should have reminded the 1940s penicillin synthetic faithful of the possible pitfalls that could lie ahead......

How Parke-Davis could have made a fortune in 1929 from the ultimate in generic drugs : natural penicillin

Parke-Davis, as seen from my folks' homes

A medication made by some natural being out in Nature is the 'ultimate generic drug'  ---- being PD (Public Domain) from its birth, which possibly occurred hundreds of millions of years before Humanity first noticed it.

Penicillin - in theory - is one such 'ultimate generic drug' , but was it in fact, in 1929 ?


Many strains of various bacteria and molds make penicillin-like beta-lactam materials but most do so in such small quantities that it takes very sensitive testing to discover their existence.

As such, St Mary's hospital in 1929 had the only two known strains of  microbes known to make sufficient penicillin to be useful to man.

The original mold had been gathered as part of John Freeman's pioneering studies in allergies.

 (Freeman's researches were the only part of the entire Wright-Fleming money-making empire that had any longterm scientific validity - as evidenced by being the only part of the Institute that a drug company, Beecham, was actually willing to part good money for in the 1950s after Fleming and Wright were safely in their graves.)

Spores from Freeman's unique mold had drifted up to Fleming's lab and so the hospital now controlled two copies of the same unique strain of mold.

Parke-Davis lost its chance to remain the world's biggest drug company

The Institute had a close contractual relationship with what was then the world's biggest and best research-oriented drug company - Detroit's Parke-Davis.

 (Their enormous ( for their day) research labs were/are clearly visible right across the river from both my parents' home in Windsor Ontario.)

Patents were impossible for natural drugs but hardly needed, for St Mary's/Parke-Davis controlled the only source of the vital reagent needed to make penicillin : their unique strain of penicillium.

Keep that strain in-house and they could have a profitable monopoly forever.

Think this wildly unlikely ?

How do you think today's real penicillin makers still act ?

They develop in-house strains of penicillium and never patent them or share them.

The down-stream techniques after the penicillium express the penicillin juice are/were patented and hence public, for a fee.

But they are useless without a stable, high producing penicillium strain : one can afford to be quite cavalier with one's chemical engineering efficiencies when your unique strain out-produces all your competitors by an order or two of magnitude !

Trade Secrets rather than patents remain the most profitably business method in the biological drug business - now in 2012 as in 1928 .

When Fleming, after he too-quickly dismissed penicillin for systemic use, started freely giving away penicillium spores as a low value lab clearing agent, he ruined any hopes that Parke-Davis and St Mary's might put heavy money in penicillin production and promotion.

Ironically when he thus destroyed the early commercial hopes for penicillin production, his spores out there in the wider medical world, successfully kept the MRC/NAS/OSRD triad from delaying wartime penicillin any longer than they already did....

Earthlings is not a doc I could watch - but you should

While we are on the subject of books or movies I did not name skygods vs earthlings after, I did not name it after the doc Earthlings.

I had never heard of it until fairly recently.

I have tried to watch it but since I fled half the scenes in Wizard of Oz as just too scary, I really couldn't handle much of it.

Most other people seem to feel they can watch it gradually, in bits, and ended up learning much from it to unsettle even the most animal-friendly human.

My actual earthling point of reference, in naming my blog, was the new earth smell that newly dug WWI trenches had - as well as smell that penicillium mold has.

This uniquely earthy smell united the two wars of Doctor Martin Henry Dawson : as a World War One infantryman and his unique World War Two effort to turn his hospital into a life-saving penicillin farm.

In both wars, airmen high in the air got the skygod glamour (and hubris) , but it was earthling guys embedded deep in the dirty,smelly,humble earth that actually did the heavy lifting that finally ended the bloodshed.....