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....