"The 'Cillium is a Roan that's never been rid , though thousands of chemists once claimed they did "

The title is a snatch of a song about the penicillium chrysogenum , with apologies to Curley Fletcher and his rather better known tale of the Strawberry Roan that also was never successfully rode.

To justify the expense of the Manhattan Project , America's military research bosses at the OSRD saw to it that A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then credited (wrongly) with being the sole cause for ending WWII.

To justify all the OSRD money wasted on not synthesizing penicillin, particularly when their rival WPB-OPRD spent far less to quickly make natural penicillin a resounding success, the OSRD bosses faked a synthetic success (about penicillin) to release to the gullible scientific media.

The STRAWBERRY ROAN of Synthetic Chemistry : natural un-patented lifesaving penicillin

A thousand chemists tried and a thousand chemists died (at least in academic embarrassment) failing to break natural penicillin's bouncing bronco at the height of WWII - when they really should have been doing something far more useful - like fighting Hitler , instead of restraining the natural miracle's ability to save lives....

Natural penicillin's unexpected triumph --- against Synthetics' 1939-1945 war against Nature

Big Science - Synthetic Science - had a lot of triumphs during WWII, the war that its promises , not Hitler's megalomania, actually started.

Synthetic Oil, Synthetic Rubber, Synthetic Silk, Synthetic Quinine , Synthetic Man , Synthetic Penicillin all sought to replace 'unreliable' natural products with new improved Man-perfected 'predictable' substitutes.

Synthetic Plutonium (sic) , Synthetic DDT, Synthetic Zyklon-B , Synthetic Freon, and Synthetic Napalm went one step further when Man was considered to have created new products that Nature could never have dreamed up.

Thank God for Nature then !

And as for Man-made predictability , it is worth recalling that human chemists only make a tiny minority of all chemical compounds.

Chemists usually stumble on a compound with useful properties and then go to work on replacing its side chains until even better properties emerge.

But so too the environment and biological beings do the same to the sidechains of Man-made chemical compounds such as Freon and DDT.

 In the process Nature created massive un-natural disasters Scientific Man could never have predicted precisely but human humility might have considered a distinct possibility .

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."