Remembering when PENICILLIN was as expensive as Avastin is today

In 1943, penicillin-at-cost (at least so claimed Big Pharma and no one ever asked for or got firm proof as to their accuracy) was sold to the US government for $20 per 100,000 units .

The most meaningful way to describe the effect on a family's budget in 1943, if they had had the chance to actually buy the stuff, is to ask how it would have taken them at work to earn that $20.

In 1943, the median male wage earner took about a week to earn $20, the median female about two weeks.

In today's terms, that meant it would cost about $1000 for that dose of penicillin.

Admittedly, that single dose back then in 1943 saved many a life -cured ! - and they didn't need to have another dose again.

By contrast , today's Avastin is a fairly costly cancer drug that can extend life in some terminal patients , but only for an additional four months on average , and at a potential cost of $100,000 a year and up.

To work, it has to be taken constantly every 2 weeks until the patient either dies of the cancer or of old age.

But there are some bacterial diseases ,then and now, that were invariably fatal unless given enormous seeming doses of penicillin  - often the penicillin must being given every few hours, for periods of several months.

Still the cures of even supposedly fatal cases of extraordinarily persistent and antibiotic resistant endocarditis can happen - but it has taken up to a kilo of pure penicillin to do so.

That is equal to 17,000 doses of Penicillin G, each of of 100,000 units in strength !

That is $340,000 in 1943 dollars at 1943 prices and would have  taken 340 years for the average male worker back then to pay for it !

But in the 1943 era, the actual maximum amount of penicillin ever give to an endocarditis patient was a still quite hefty 15 million units  - costing a median 1943 worker 3 solid years of labour to buy.

Three years work for the median worker today in 2013 is at least $100,000 - IE, the average cost for Avastin patients and or their insurers, private and government.

So in 1943, the miracle drug Penicillin G was as expensive for some patients as Avastin and other miracle cancer drugs are today.

But what is the real current at-cost/ bulk price of 100,000 units of Penicillin G today,  in 2013  dollars ?

That would be 2 cents : and would take today's worker not one or two weeks of 40 hour each to pay for it, but rather only about 2 seconds to earn !

Clearly Penicillin G has gone from being the most expensive lifesaver in 1943 to being by far the cheapest lifesaver in 2013 - a lifesaver cheaper than water, a lifesaver too cheap to meter.

The Official History version of why it happens credits those wonderful people at Big Pharma.

If you find that at all credible, you really shouldn't be reading this blog.....

Stephen Harper: Cereal Lier

Soon to be a breakfast-time board book about a little boy named "Stephen", who lies down in the bears' porridge while they are away on the election trail.

It's designed for two year olds, whose mommie and daddie have struggled in vain to describe what all the fuss on the TV is about...

I'm today's go-to expert on yesterday's battle over 'penicillin for all' --- by default

While I consider myself the world's leading expert on the wartime battle over the principle of penicillin for all, I also recognize I am also probably the only person in the world who gives a tinker's damn over that 75 year old battle.

A pity that.

Because there are still lessons for today in that old battle, particularly with regards to drugs now costing cancer patients $300,000 a year per person.

World's most effective lifesaver is the most beloved AND the cheapest

That's not at all like Big Pharma, the world's least beloved industry.

Usually their effective lifesavers cost a big fortune and their ineffective ones merely cost a small fortune.

By contrast, our beloved inexpensive penicillin G has seen wide use among the world's poorest patients and as a result  billions of us have had a 'free ride' :  a quasi-herd immunity to millennium old contagious bacterial infections like Rheumatic Fever.

Tired, Poor or Huddled

Roche's Avastin-for-all versus Henry Dawson's Penicillin-for-all , what's the difference ?

Avastin is not in short supply and Roche sells it to all, regardless of race gender et al.

Penicillin G : ditto,ditto .

But Avastin costs $100,000 a year and only extends life an average of 4 months.

In bulk, Penicillin G is only about $1 for a two week long life-saving treatment.

The Manhattan Project for the small

Gather 'round kiddies, as teacher tells you how America burned a hundred thousand children to a crisp, along with their mommies and daddies and grandmas.

Oh wait ---------- darn !! ------ there's a subtitle !

Ah hem.

Now children , have you ever been so sick that you have to go to the doctor ? Well sometimes children are so very sick that the doctor even comes to their house - and at top speed to.

Better for America winning friends : A-bomb or 'Penicillin-for-all' ?

How was the post-war Pax Americana to be best created ?

Was it best to intimidate other nations into being friendly to America by reminding them who held the A-Bomb, and held it alone ?

Or was it best to freely give away 'Penicillin-for-all' , to hope to win other nations' respect by this example of America's open-hearted generosity ?

In other words, was it best for America to project itself as the Gordon Gekko side of Manhattan and reward the efforts of those 'Masters of the Universe', Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves ?

Or was it best to project itself as the Emma Lazarus side of Manhattan and exalt the efforts of the smallest Manhattan Project , that of Henry Dawson, Karl Meyer, Eleanor Chaffee and Gladys Hobby ?

FDR and Churchill beat Hitler and Tojo - and then they tried to oppose Henry Dawson...

Martin "Henry" Dawson, a dying doctor.

A lapsed Scottish Presbyterian, but of the old school, the kind  not easily stopped, not when they believed they were duty-bound to do what was right.

A lapsed Calvinist on a catholic mission.

 For Dawson's goal was "Penicillin-for-all".

Particularly at the height of a Total War in which - if you believed the newspapers - his Allied nation opposed the Nazis mostly for their nasty habit of mentally dividing the world in the deserving elect and the non-deserving non-elect.

Of course, in fact,  much of the Allied world mentally did the same - and publicly opposing Dawson's goal merely exposed this awkward fact.

Poor Frank and Winnie when they took on Henry : they simply never stood a chance....

Gladys Hobby : a Calvinist, on a catholic mission...

From September 1940 till December 1943, Dr Gladys Hobby, a devout Presbyterian on a catholic mission ("Penicillin-for-all") , daily visited the Green wards of Columbia-Presbyterian hospital, where the young victims of green SBE waited out their inevitable deaths.

Daily, she held aloft before them a petri dish just aglow with radiated golden penicillium mold, as if it were some marvelous medical monstrance.

As she and her tiny team undoubtedly believed it was.

Pen !!!! Stat !!!!!!!

In the house of the beta-lactams there are many mansions and one might think the most modest one might be occupied by the oldest beta-lactam, the only begetter , the original,  penicillin G.

But it 'taint necessarily so' .

Talking to an emergency ward nurse recently I asked her if they ever used penicillin G much these days.

"Oh my yes ",she said, but added with a smile, "we don't call it penicillin G any more."

"What do you call it then?" , I asked.

"We call it 'Pen Stat' and we say it like we might say 'Code Blue' ..."

Nice to know it is still in the medical armoire and still pulled out whenever the going gets tough and the tough get going : Pen !!!!! Stat !!!!!!

The very smallest Manhattan Project improved the lives of ten billion people

That is an awful lot of us , being positively affected by so few of them.

Many people today would like to do something to make our world a better place but are overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible odds against having any visible effect.

Take heart !

There was never more than three other people at a time involved with Dr Martin Henry Dawson in his five year long quest to bring forth  'penicillin for all'.

His tiny project had no government grants grants nor much enthusiastic institutional support from his own university.

 Even Dawson's immediate bosses opposed his efforts - but this was nothing to the resistance he got from the Anglo-American medical establishment.

That medical establishment was firmly enmeshed within the wartime governments of "win the war at all costs (to human rights)" FDR and Churchill.

Dawson himself was dying the whole time of his quest.

Dying of a particularly debilitating disease (Myasthenia Gravis , MG) , well before the days when patients with it could expect to make their way through semi-normal days.

Economics as if human survival really matters

Unbridled growth, even at the cost of burning to death in our own carbon wastes.

This is what the mantra of "ever bigger is ever better" is leading us to.

What it is not leading to is ever greater happiness.

For if the richest and most powerful among us are not happy, who on earth can be ?

Some apparently.

They live and work in smaller walkable communities without - thanks to the likes of Skype and the internet - feeling at all cut off from the great wide world and distant friends and kin.

They use less carbon energy than you or I not because they restrain themselves like monks but because their life is set up spatially to use and need less carbon energy.

They don't miss what they don't need.

More green energy is not the solution to our carbon addiction : more, more, more is never much of a permanent solution - in tumour growth or in real world economics.

We must develop full happy lifestyles where we need less energy to be well off and happy.

Many small communities in the past developed some of the ways to do so ---- often centuries and millenniums ago.

But before Internet and telegraphs and radio , it came at the price of emotional isolation.

Marry the new Internet and those centuries old ways of living compactly and what will be actually born will be hard to predict - but I feel at least confident that it can't be any worse than the route-to-hell we are now taking ....

Penicillin is not Avastin, but it could have been...

My book - The smallest Manhattan Project  - is about us , all 10 billion of us , here today or years dead, whose lives have been improved by the advent of inexpensive penicillin.

In a sense, this book is a rarity : one written from the patient's eye view of how that drug came to be ; a welcome change after decades of endless books exclusively devoted to how penicillin looked to the people who discovered and developed it.

Penicillin is frequently called the Miracle Drug but few consider that its biggest medical miracle was really in fact its cost, or rather 'lack of cost'.

Because the diseases that penicillin treats are contagious,  patients too poor to afford a cure remains a reservoir of the most virulent strains, waiting to infect the rest of us.

There actually were methods of preventing much of these diseases before the development of penicillin : they included the ready availability of good jobs, good food, cleaner and bigger homes, greater social respect.

Baring that, only the worldwide availability of a drug that would cure those diseases once they started up, at a price that almost all could readily afford , could reduce these diseases from being endemic or epidemic to just names in a dusty medical textbook.

That is why I can say, with absolute assurance, that even those of us who have never had a single treatment of beta-lactam (penicillin family) antibiotics are in better health today because the grandparent of them all, Penicillin G , is water cheap - literally a lifesaver "too cheap to meter" .

But it almost didn't happen , we almost lost "inexpensive penicillin".

We almost got an expensively patented synthetic drug more akin to Avastin and all those other $100,000 a year plus medications.

"The smallest Manhattan Project" is the story of a doctor ( himself slowly dying of another unrelated disease) who sacrificed his own health to see penicillin from the patient's point of view.

His name should be honoured for all time.

This, despite the fact that he did not discover penicillin and then neglect it (Fleming) nor did he start its re-discovery and eventual development, albeit while pursuing a pathway that nearly killed off that development (Florey).

Dr Martin Henry Dawson, for that was his name, merely said penicillin should be made available - now! - for every single patient whose life could be saved by it , even during the height of a Total War .

Nay, he went much, much further.

Dawson in fact said all should have access to life-saving penicillin, particularly in the middle of a Total War.

That was because that war was supposedly being fought against one opponent in particular, solely because that opponent's core philosophy said that 'some lives are more worthy than others'.

How could we continue to conduct that war with any moral vigour when our own medical establishment was 'me-tooing' Hitler's doctors ?

Now the mantra 'Penicillin for all who needed it regardless of their income level or skin colour' in the mid-1940s meant its mass production, given the vast amount of infectious disease endemic in those years.

And mass production has its myriad ways of driving production costs down, down , down --- as happily happened in the case of Penicillin G in almost textbook manner.

'Penicillin for all' quickly became 'inexpensive penicillin for all' and once that happened, penicillin began to work almost like the way a good public health vaccine program should work : the treatment of the many ultimately offering 'herd protection' to all the rest of us, free of charge.

Insulin is another drug frequently called a miracle drug.

But the sad fact is that it is far more common today than it was beforeinsulin was discovered, for a variety of reasons.

By contrast, the names of all those bacterial household scourges that so terrified our mothers and grandmothers are not even known to most of us under the age of 50, and most doctors practising today have never seen a case of them.

And that is just the sort of modern day miracle that Dawson's mantra of 'penicillin for all' can produce.

For the complex truth is that our choice of medical ethics has economic consequences and these in turn feedback and have medical consequences.

The case of what the mantra of 'penicillin for all' ultimately led to should be taught in every health economics and health ethics oriented university department for just those very reasons....

The light of the littlest red lighthouse can light up the world better than that of the greatest grey bridge

I wonder if Marjorie and Henry Dawson ever read the tale of The Little Red Lighthouse to their youngest child before Henry died in mid-1945 ?

That small and seemingly powerless-feeling child, born in 1941, was of the right age to especially appreciate the special message of the classic children's book, which first came out in 1942.

Particularly considering his father worked daily right beside the real life great grey bridge and the real life little red lighthouse.

If not, I hope the Dawson child eventually absorbed the lesson of that little book more directly, by learning more of his late father's own little Manhattan Project between 1940 and 1945.

Both the example of the book's story and the story of Henry Dawson's tiny Manhattan Project demonstrate to small children the reminder that a determined few, no matter how small in number or in power, can light up the whole world for the better .

And that little children shouldn't give up either, at the first hurdle...

Lifesaving 'too cheap to meter:' the legacy of the smallest Manhattan Project

Remember that solemn pledge from the biggest Manhattan Project ?

After killing a few hundred thousand civilians overseas, they promised to make up for it by offering us endless, abundant, safe electricity at prices 'too cheap to meter'.

They were joking, right ?!

By contrast, consider the legacy of the smallest Manhattan Project.

It has offered us decades of lifesaving at prices 'too cheap to meter'.

That is an amazing feat considering it was performed against the combined resistance from the biggest of the wartime Allied  governments and from many politically powerful firms in wartime's Big Pharma.

Penicillin, more than 85 years after its initial discovery, still can stop cold the toughest bacterial infections going, and do so at prices dirt cheap, offering us true life saving at prices too cheap to meter.

Contrast that to today's to cancer drugs,  averaging at costs between $100,000 to $350,000 a year, that can only promise to extent the average life by about four months.

This is because natural penicillin was born in the public domain, born the original genetic drug , and Man failed totally to synthesize it and expensively patent it.

Penicillin is often called the miracle drug and perhaps its biggest miracle was economic, not medical : it could be given the opportunity to save hundreds of millions worldwide because it wasn't priced like Avastin but rather was almost as cheap as water.

(A real miracle - and I repeat, it almost didn't happen, we almost lost inexpensive penicillin.)

That was because our busy wartime Allied bureaucrats and busy wartime drug executives spent zillions in scarce tax dollars to try to synthesize and patent penicillin rather than getting down to doing Job One with readily available natural penicillin.

Their Job One and Two and Three should have been saving lives in a worldwide war crisis.

Henry Dawson's 'Penicillin-for-all' did not just mean making it available to all at a steep price, like Avastin : it meant making it available to all patients, at a price even the poorest can afford...

"Code Slow", the wartime SBE patients and Hearst's "Code Yellow"

What really happens whenever a family directs a hospital that its relative receives the full and rapid CPR response ("Code Blue") in the event of their quickly fatal cardiac or breathing arrest ?

Most the time, the medical and nursing staff will do their damnest to bring that patient back from the imminent grave.

But at times, the medical and nursing staff will form a silent consensus that they will just pretend to "code blue" a patient, but will actually merely go through the motions.

This is known as "Code Slow" and it is a serious breach in medical ethics.

The staff do so because (a) they believe that particular patient isn't worth saving ----(b) or less controversially , they honestly believe that particular patient at this point in their illness can't really be saved by fullout CPR and will merely experience additional pain en route to their death.

Reasons (a) and (b) are often mixed confusingly in actual practise ---- patients judged (subconsciously) as less valuable are more often also judged less able to benefit from full out CPR on strictly medical grounds.

WWII 's own "CODE SLOW"

During WWII, the millions of young people worldwide who had e potential to suffer the invariably fatal disease known as "Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis" (SBE) as a result of endemic Rheumatic Fever, were viewed by both Allied and Axis medical elites alike as 'useless mouths' during a total war.

They consumed a lot of scarce medical care and even if 1% of the time their illness was checked , it always returned a few months later and no one was ever known to survive a second or third hospital stay while suffering SBE.

True, by early 1943, Martin Henry Dawson had cured a few SBE patients , at least the first time, with moderately high amounts of what little public domain penicillin was available between 1940 and 1943 , but the Allied medical elite decided his success had to be discounted at all costs.

For if his success with SBE was accepted and publicised , it would lead overnight to a sudden sharp public demand for enormous amounts of penicillin.

(The thinking being that ordinary doctors would believe that if penicillin can cure SBE, the Mount Everest of infectious disease, then surely to God it could easily cure their patient's less invariably fatal infection.)

This would guy the game for those who hoped to use penicillin as a secret weapon of war - keeping it secret from the Allied public and hence the Axis-friendly diplomatic corps, so it was only available  to the Allied side during the big D-Day push.

It would also guy the game for those who hoped to hold off the public demand for this miracle drug until it had been safely synthesized and patented, when Big Pharma would finally freely sell it to everybody dying of bacterial infections ---- provided the dying or their families also had big wallets.

The hope was to keep Dawson's success out of the public eye until penicillin had been both patented and had been a surprise success on D-Day - mostly by denying him anymore public domain penicillin to repeat his feats.

He was known as not the type to 'spill all' to the press if he was denied more penicillin.

The SBEs wouldn't be denied all medical care and simply left to die, tempting as that was, because that could backfire and clash fearsomely with the Allied talk of the Four Freedoms.

Instead, they would be "code slow"-ed to death : given enormous amounts of useless (and abundant) sulfa drugs so their families would think something useful was being done for them, when it actually was not.

Unfortunately for these schemers, a fiery Italian American doctor,Dante Colitti, armed with his own private grudge against a medical elite for being prejudiced against allowing Italian Catholic cripples to get medical licenses, was far more willing to go to the media.

He got the master of the Yellow Press, Citizen Hearst and his paper chain, to go full out on behalf of this miraculous Yellow Magic stuff.

The rest, as they say, is history.

For in the end, "Code Slow" proved no match against "Code Yellow" .

A "Good News Story" from the "Bad News War".....

Birth of Modernity ?

Modernity was born the moment most of the educated West replaced a belief in the Theory of the Sublime with a belief in the Theory of the Germ , ie an event that occurred in the broadly defined '1880s'.


The Theory of the Sublime explains why humans fear - and should fear - only the awesomely big : God, the devil, earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, lions, tigers, et al.

But after the advent of Darwin, Lyell, steam power, high explosives and the Higher Criticism, who could fear any of these ?

Still, when things go wrong - as they often do - who then to blame ?

Can't blame ourselves, could we ?

Conveniently, a bizarre theory emerged from Pasteur in France about the same time, suggesting that an invisible Fifth Column of tiny, weak creatures, most even incapable of basic movement , could nevertheless fell the biggest and smartest of beings with ease.

Think of Germs being a sort of Anti-Sublimity and you're on the right track.

No longer were our enemies big, external and highly visible, (first declaring war forthrightly, then pouring over the border to line up en masse in their bright red uniforms on a sunny daytime battlefield).

Instead germs , like biological franc-tireurs, shot their toxin bullets, - in our backs - at night, out of uniform, from behind fences.

Bacteria are nothing but tiny, weak, poor beings you sentimentalists say ?

No, no, a thousand times no !

They are unsporting guerillas and biological bomb-throwing anarchist terrorists.

War without mercy then upon our minorities of the weak and the small - for they are humanity's one true remaining enemy .....

Modern Era/Modernity: Matter/Anti-Matter

You have to admire the sheer audacity of Modernity as it sought a full compass rollback of the effects of the Modern Era, under the sheep's skin guise of daring to lead this counter-revolution under the name of Modernity !

Albeit it was a subconscious counter-revolution ---- all of its varied proponents went to their graves convinced they were furthering the pace of the Modern Era and merely working to destroy some of its dangerous foes.


So some of the Modern Era's most dangerous foes (and also its biggest supporters) were socialism, liberalism, communism, capitalism, fascism, democracy, totalitarianism.

Like some hair-brained firing squad, the entire world armed itself with intellectual rifles and formed a circle, with each ideology convinced that its opponent directly across the way was Modernity's worse enemy and the erstwhile 'friends' on either side of themselves were only a little bit better.

The Modern Era was notable for many things but it is possible to see that above all else was was truly new about it was the extreme mobility it brought to so many hitherto local human activities.

The increased reach, speed and universality of the flow in and out of local areas (and of entire sovereign nations) of capital, materials, products, patents, intellectual ideas, fashions and tastes, immigrants and warfare was extremely upsetting to most everybody at some time or other.

Reality now seemed seemed so complex, so diverse, so unpredictable, so rapidly changing as beyond human comprehension, let alone human control.

Modernity can thus be best seen as an intellectual claim that - contrary to this current false human sense about reality - a scientific study of Nature actually revealed that real reality was essentially simple, predictable and static, in uniformitarian equilibrium, and any change in it was so gradual as to appear invisible over the average human lifetime.

The Modern Era and Modernity were not one and the same train or even two trains running on parallel tracks, but two trains heading for a head-on wreck on the same track : WWI and WWII ....

Eugenics vs the Germ of Genius

What Popular eugenics in practise what its chief proponents consciously said it was ?

Or was its popularity due to its ability to address subconscious concerns its fans could not admit to consciously ?

It takes very little knowledge to realize that Popular eugenics presents a very oddly conflicted front face indeed.


Its most avid proponents were not among those at the very top of western society, nor those in the bottom either. It can't really be said they were found evenly scattered among those people in the middle either.

Instead its chief supporters were found those mostly highly educated - those highly educated judged in the formal sense, ie those certified so by those authorities conventionally accepted as being capable of doing so.

(Its support among autodidacts was never notably strong.)

So here we have the best educated members of society: well paid, well feed, healthy, socially powerful, etc --- terrified.

Terrified, beyond measure, by those were are uneducated, often deemed un-able to be educated (intellectually challenged as we say today) , in congenital ill health, poor, powerless.

Why would the powerful, a large majority in their society, be so fearful of those so powerless, a small minority in that same society.

The imbalance between the potency of the alleged threat and the fear it generated is hard for us to fathom today, particularly as this
irrational fear was strongest - not weakest - among those in society judged the most rational because they were most educated.

Ah - educated : the key to this puzzle.

It is not surprising that the least educated people also had the least power and income.

But it did not in fact follow that the wealthiest and most powerful people in the Modern Era (1885-1965) were also the most educated.

The best educated often held middle high positions : being doctors, scientists and professors rather than being the captains of industry and the prime ministers.

They were the highly educated and the competent rather than the inspired : few 'self made men' were among the leading proponents of Eugenics and popular eugenics.

Few famous entrepreneurs or inventors, few acclaimed writers,artists, performers and athletes, few untutored geniuses.

Few geniuses indeed.

For sheer genius : raw and untutored , able to arise anywhere among any family, was what these expensively educated but highly ordinary children and grandchildren of extraordinary fathers/grandfathers feared most.

Genius always threatens those in comfortable sinecures , secured through a long and expensive education and family connections rather than through sheer merit and talent.

Genius is just another word for the general principle of social mobility and advancement based on talent and merit.

After the first British Reform Bill's stormy passage in the 1830s, few in western society could openly support the idea that the job of a top ranking civil servant or general was the actual legal property of his family forever, regardless of whether his children and grandchildren was up for the job.

The idea of the nominal aristocracy lived on - one's children could go on being called Earl this or Viscount that, but the real power in the idea of an aristocracy was gone with this loss of an automatic right to dad's job as well as his mere title.

New aristocrats are , at the moment of their creation, always creatures of the merit principle : even the ability to buy a title for two million 1918 circa pounds speaks to an extraordinary ability to make an awful lot of money.

But often their children and grandchildren a very mixed bag.

Despite all the advantages that great wealth and privilege, together with a good education and good health, can bring , a few children are useless drones, most are merely well educated competents and a few are extraordinarily brilliant.

It is the same in all families rich or poor, at least potentially at date of birth: genius is born, at random, and not created through expensive education.

Popular eugenics denied this, claimed that the children of geniuses are geniuses and the children of village idiots were themselves idiots.

Forever and ever : it was fixed eternally in their genes.

But why then were Popular eugenics proponents so stuck on enforcing quotas to keep negroes, jews, women, catholics and immigrants out of universities like Harvard ?

Surely, by the eugenicists' own gene-fixated take on reality, these 'unfit' races of people shouldn't be able to get out of elementary school, let alone crowd the admission channels into top universities like Harvard .

But I claim, that at least unconsciously, these eugenicists really knew that talent and genius flourished anywhere and everywhere, essentially randoml.

Thus the poor negroes and poor South Boston catholics who did manage to make it into Harvard based on their marks and hard work were probably very formidable competitors indeed for those cushy sinecures these 'merely competent' Protestant scions had along taken to belong to them alone.

For professional jobs in the public service, and at non profit agencies like hospitals and teaching jobs in universities and high schools were the natural home of the 'merely competent' , 'merely ordinary', the base of the eugenicist movement.

But native born skilled tradesmen feeling threatened by hard working, more highly skilled , foreign tradesmen also filled the ranks.

Even unskilled anglo american 'white trash' might feel threatened that they would lose their dangerous, low paying jobs to negroes willing to do it for even lower wages and under even less safe conditions.

Those who realize that they are only ordinarily competent (and thus seek only the certainty of a comfortable work environment and a slow but steady career advancement) are always fearful of competitors who are more talented and more hard working .

But in the Modern Era, with its public ethos of a meritocracy, it was no longer possible to publicly say so.

Here the brand new Germ Theory came to the rescue.

Because if God was dead, so was the Devil. And Charles Lyell had proven that the formerly awesome natural catastrophes were but  local ,temporary and infrequent, ie manageable disasters.

High powered, accurately rifled, rapid repeater guns had put even the largest wild beasts on the endangered species list.

The sublime had been vanquished by Modernity - so where did evil and danger now exist in the world, to blame and thus explain away our own mistakes ?

The Germ Theory usefully claimed that things that were invisible, in fact invisibly tiny and weak, were like an internal Fifth Column able to easily destroy our health from within.

This metaphor allowed the biggest and strongest elephant tribe to credibly claim that a single baby mouse, weak  and thin from hunger, could nevertheless destroy them all.

People like the American Foster Kennedy or the German Adolf Hitler used the new Germ Theory to credibly claim that even a single handicapped baby must be killed because of the sheer threat it posed to the strongest of nations and races .

Potential competitors - geniuses or just merely extraordinary individuals rising far up the social scale on sheer merit could be usefully kept down, by the process of claiming that all the poorer classes were totally incapable of having talent - based on their genes, while all the well off had to have talent - based upon their genes.

Seeing the new theory of popular eugenics  as a lateral counter-attack on the equally new meritocracy principle can be a useful prism to explain the entire thrust of Modernity as a counter-attack on the processes of the Modern Era ....

Crowd-sourcing critical previews ?

Thanks to the advent of the internet with its email systems and blog websites, along with the flexibility of ebook production, it can be a financial breeze to get continuous feedback on a book as it is being written, chapter by chapter.


In the bad old days, even sending just one book chapter off  in the post to some expert in a distant city for preview cost the author a lot in postage out and in and the response time was very slow.

And as for altering a book's text at the gallery proof stage - you paid dearly for every little change.

And even at second re-printing, if your book was lucky enough to get one - 95% never did - redoing the plate process for correcting just one little mistake was so costly, publishers found it cheaper to pay staff to 'hand tip in' (glueing) a small piece of paper noting the corrected errors to the inside front of every copy of the book rather than face that cost and difficulty.

Today, it is all different.

Posting a chapter on my blog , it can expect to get some critical comments from readers worldwide in an instant ---- eventually, maybe.

But if I email the link to the chapter on this blog to experts in the subject area that the chapter deals with and then plead to them to do their worst in tearing my facts and opinions apart, I might expect a few to actually respond --- it costs them and me nothing.

And my resulting ebook can still be endlessly and easily altered and amended, based on reader feedback, before it finally and officially goes off to Amazon to be made into Kindle.

Now I must find out how willing Amazon is to see Kindle books amended ---- after they have entered the great Kindle gene pool...

The little Project that Could

Once upon a time there was a little yellow penicillin factory located very near that Great Grey Bridge that connects Fort Lee, New Jersey and Upper Manhattan.

It wasn't a very big operation - particularly not compared to the huge war-dealing projects located all over the world in all the combat nations in those years between 1940 and 1945.

But the long term impact it has had on all of us is far greater than any of its much bigger wartime rivals --- even the one that produced The Bomb and promised us safe perpetually renewable electricity at prices too cheap to meter.

It is only natural for our children and grandchildren, being very small themselves, to feel that a small person or group can never best those much bigger than themselves.

But I think my book on the story of the smallest Manhattan Project can be an object lesson  to our children and grandkids that size isn't everything in matters moral --- that a strong heart and a fierce determination to do right can indeed move mountains.

If I can even move a handful of kids to grow up determined to do the right thing by all the smallest and weakest among us, I will feel that my book efforts will have been worth it....
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What "The smallest Manhattan Project" is about

This book is about us. Ten billion of us, here today or years dead, whose lives have been changed by the advent of antibiotics.

It almost didn't happen ; we almost lost Penicillin, the only-begetter of this wonderful revolution.

"The smallest Manhattan Project" is the true story of a dying doctor who fought off his own body - and his own wartime government - just long enough to help Penicillin get its moral groove back, winning us cheap, abundant, natural Penicillin for all.

Above all it is a reminder that when it comes to having the moral courage to change our whole world for the better, size doesn't begin to matter ....

4F ... or Fifth Column ?

It sometimes seems to me that the weak and the small were the real main enemy - not those nice clean and orderly (if slightly pushy) Germans - to wartime America.

A nation many times the size of Germany or Japan, with twice as many people and a far richer economy, and separated by thousands of kms of cold deep water from its closest credible enemy, is always going to find internal enemies (Reds under Beds) far more convincing a threat than any distant external foe anyway.....

"Irish Jimmy" Duhig and his Uisce Beatha : Penicillin as Orange Juice

I woke up the middle of last night to find I had a bad cold and so naturally got to thinking about its prevention and cure.

Its natural and unnatural cure and what all this had to do with the unknown history of wartime's crude penicillin.

Naturally, one avoids respiratory colds and worse by eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables , drinking lots of liquids, getting plenty of rest, and living a secure existence in a well ventilated sizeable home.

One gets more and deadlier respiratory diseases living stressed lives in cramped, il-ventilated homes without adequate fresh fruit and vegetables.

The other way to avoid colds and such is to daily pop a lot of synthetic vitamin pills for your entire life.

You will then have become that most sought after client of Big Pharma : someone from (A) a sizeable group of people who have a (B) 'chronic' 'disease' and (C)  who can afford to buy the moderately expensive solution to the disease, daily, from a drug company for the rest of their lives.

Insulin for middle class diabetics was a big money spinner for Big Pharma , starting in the 1920s, for just those reasons ---- just as the mania for vitamin pills for the middle class was in the 1930s.

No mind that the middle class were hardly needing any vitamins, based on their adequate and varied diets based on the more expensive fresh products of Nature.

They may not have needed any tiny white synthetic vitamin pills .

But they did have enough money to buy them and they did have the necessary ingrained faith in "Science" that helped them swallow Big Pharma's claims regarding the need for daily synthetic vitamin supplements to succeed in this "busy, complex, Modern Age."

Now adequate Vitamin C is regarded as vital to prevent and limit colds.

We can get enough simply eating enough fresh vegetables but most  of us like to supplement this with a tasty morning glass of golden orange juice rather than dash down a tasteless dry little white pill of 100% pure synthetic Vitamin C.

Horrors ! said 1930s Big Pharma and its tame pill-pushing scientific "consultants".

That glass of orange juice or the even more basic orange or lime itself is so impure - containing merely a tiny fraction of one percent pure Vitamin C.

Who knows what bad toxins lurk within it ?

Well we now agree that the orange or lime holds only other goodnesses - like soluble and insoluble fibre.

Scientists knew this even back in the 1930s, but the majority had tagged along on a culture-wide Modernist mania for purity - racial and chemical - and couldn't see the fibre benefits for all their dark fears of possible unknown impurities in the innocent orange.

Nasty Reds lurking under "only innocent-looking" orange beds or groves.

Jimmy Duhig, along with Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft and a very few others didn't buy all this : they thought that the golden solution of crude penicillin was the literal Water of Life, Aqua Vitae or Uisce Beatha , for their dying patients.

Even after 100% pure natural penicillin was available after the war, Dawson's co-worker Gladys Hobby, now a key employee of Big Pharma, was allowed to publish a scientific article seeking to demonstrate that crude penicillin was ,in some way, more effective than the pure stuff !

But back to our trios of modern-day James Linds.

Instead of waiting - perhaps centuries - for a patently-profitable synthetic penicillin pill , they did a James Lind and starting saving lives - right now ! - with the penicillium equivalent of Lind's natural lime juice for scurvied sailors : natural crude penicillium juice.

The fact that these still-unknowns saved many lives while the now-famous Howard Florey merely fiddled about trying fruitlessly to make synthetic penicillin merely reminds of the power of Big Pharma and their many scientific sycophants on Nobel Prize committees.....

"Nature Made Me Do It" : All mass killings were Mercy Killings in the Modern Era

If you were fully Modern and truly believed that Nature and Darwin and Evolution had revealed the inevitability of the strong replacing the weak and the big the small, then can it ever  be said that you murdered the small and the weak ?

Weren't you simply tugging gently, tenderly, at their ankles, to hasten a merciful end, at a hanging that Mother Nature herself had ordained ?

Shouldn't you be thanked by their families , not despised ?

being Modern means never saying "The Devil Made Me Do It"

And why drag the Devil and the whole question of morality and evil into this : aren't we just talking about speeding up a scientific inevitability ?

Weren't most of the war deaths of the 20th century not military deaths at all but rather medicalized violence : death as therapy and death as mercy killings ?

ALL life is worthy of life as a full citizen or are just SOME judged 'worthy' ?

Nazi Germany - even at the depths of its imminent defeat - treated its full citizens well : recall that POW Kurt Vonnegut was working in a Dresden factory that made food supplements for pregnant mothers at the time of that city's Allied firebombing in February 1945.

But its non full citizens it killed outright or worked to death as starved slaves.

'Life worthy of Life' - 'Life unworthy of Life' are infamous German cum Nazi catchphrases that have come to symbolize THEM, so as to separate US for any shared responsibility for the horrors of  the
eugenic mass murder of WWII.

But when we re-cast those catchphrases as' life worthy or unworthy of life as full citizens' , we become uneasily aware that no society in the early 1940s was free of the sin of treating some of its members as less than fully human.

None .

When Henry Dawson proved this up for the Anglo Allies over their denying of life saving penicillin to young SBE patients deemed useless for the war effort - judged just 'useless mouths' consuming valuable medical resources - he made it clear to many just how close the Nazis and their erstwhile opponents really were, morally......

British surrender of LEROS spoils the smooth panty lines of WWII narratives

WWII began in early September 1939 and ended in early September 1945 : a net package of precisely six years with a seemingly nicely symmetrical 50/50 narrative arc about it.

(Conveniently for that oh so smooth narrative arc, truly significant events usually did occur around each of the seven Septembers.)

So go ahead ---- pick up any book on WWII at random and watch how smoothly the author's narrative is sure to unfold --- all the while bulldozing over any awkward facts in the process !

It will claim, for example , that for the first three years of the war, almost to a day, ie from early September 1939 to early September 1942, the Allies falter and fall back while the Axis advance ever forward.

Indeed, that month does mark the furthermost geographic advances of both Germany and Japan.

But then - almost on a dime, the tide turns - and now all the advances go to the Allies.

 From this moment forth the Axis only retreats , until its final formal defeat three years later, almost to the day.

(Here insert Stalingrad, Guadacanal, the Torch landings and El Alamein for colour illustration).

LEROS is one of the bumps in the panty liner of WWII narratives...

But then factor in the September 8th 1943 abject surrender of a sizeable British force on the island of Leros to the victorious Germans , more than a year later after the tide supposedly 'turned' , a big part of the little known British disaster called The Dodecanese campaign.

Little known today - though much remarked upon at the time - because it foils completely this nice smooth narrative arc and raises too many awkward questions about the whole Allied spin on WWII , as seen in virtually every book ever written on the war.

Seventy five years on, the whole world constantly pats itself on the back for the part its grandparents valiantly played in stopping the horrible horror and total evil of Nazism.

But if this is truly so, why were the Russians irrationally fighting to the death rather than surrender to the Nazis, even when beaten, only two months into their war, while the British were still rationally surrendering upon defeat to the Jerries, more than three years into their war ?

I do believe a lot of interesting and important things happened between 1939 and 1945, but the military battles were not among them.

Rather, WWII's  military actions were often deeply influenced by the results of mental conclusions already made, long in advance.

Made by the elites of the various nations of the world, all gauging each other in terms of the psychic distance between their elite values and the elite values of  any other potentially aggressor nation.

The conclusions reached decided whether that nation actively and determinedly declared war against other nations at war or whether the declaration of war was merely a formality, forced on them from the outside and not followed by any real action.

Or perhaps they decided to remain Neutral. If so, how 'neutral' ? Very friendly neutral ? Neutral Neutral ? or Hostile Neutral ?

In particular, the judged psychic distance between the various nations went into the political and military thinking of all nations as they pondered how readily they might surrender to the enemy , in the face of a likely military defeat.

Would they in the elite then all be lined up and quickly shot , or would they be treated with dignity as officer POWs and as the new passively collaborating administrative and commercial underlings ?

The conclusions reached then now seem startling in our present day eyes.

 The elites of the Western Allies and of the overseas Neutrals simply didn't think in ,the early 1940s, that their values and those of the ordinary German people and elites were all that far apart, deep down.

(The same goes for the elites of the 'colored' world, about the Japanese.

Excepting that the Slavs felt very differently about the Germans ---- as did the Chinese about the Japanese. And vice versa. As a result, most of the casualties of WWII occurred around these two combat zones.)

Back to the peoples of the Western Allies and their comparatively mild dislike of ordinary Germans .

Polls during WWII in Britain and America clearly demonstrate the existence of this view - even among ordinary people - and that it grew in popularity as the war went on. By contrast, Jews became less ,not more, popular as the war went on.)

So the people of the West didn't really want to go to war with the Germans, not merely to defend the interests of some unknown bunch of far off slavic peasants that the Germans were bringing their civilizing campaign upon.

And they didn't fear going into captivity as officer POWs or acting as the collaborating elite of a newly occupied subject nation within the German empire.

So why occur unnecessary military and civilian losses when you are clearly beaten ?

The Nazis were a bit of a different matter. They clearly did go too far, of course, way,way too far in actually acting upon their dislikes.

But even their dislikes were also largely in tune with the other countries' elites at that time.

They didn't like Socialist trade unionists, Modernist artists and intellectuals, Communists, Jews, Gypsy travellers, Homosexuals, Coloreds and those hopelessly deformed from birth --- but then who did - really ?

Most of the world's elite , in the early 1940s, believed as a fundamental of reality, that all Humanity could be scientifically divided into those Nature deemed worthy of full citizenship and those deemed worthy only of lesser citizenship - or worse.

Only a few - like Henry Dawson - among the world's elite, disagreed strongly with that global scientific consensus.

The elites of all the nations of WWII : victims, bullies, bystanders and reluctant intervenors were generally were united in sharing the supposedly scientific values of exclusion.

By contrast, fewer of our (younger) elites still feel so today and the (younger) non-elites among us are far more powerful overall, and most of them tend to favour values of inclusion.

Between the younger 'us' and our older grandparents and great grandparents there is a complete moral and scientific volte face of 180 degrees.

Until we accept that, we are going to keep getting the true history of WWII completely wrong .....

Churchill's bombers burn babies while FDR's bombers deliver penicillin to babies

I have tried awfully hard to find stories of Churchill's bombers delivering bottles of penicillin, rather than bombs of napalm, to the world's babies.

No luck so far.

But newspapers in 1943-1944 were rife with stories of FDR's bombers delivering various tiny bottles of penicillin half way around the world to save babies.

It is usual to emphasis how well the left-leaning FDR government got along with the right-leaning Churchill government but it is also possible to overdo all the censor-approved bonhomie.

Wartime penicillin is a clear example where the two differed wildly, with dire permanent consequences for Britain and the British Tories.

The Tory-dominated Ministry of Supply ,egged on by the likes of Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey, successfully kept the miracles of penicillin out of the popular British press, so that it might remain below the radar of the German chemists.

The hope was secret penicillin could be a medical-military weapon, a nasty surprise to drop on the Jerries on D-Day when Allied troop casualties quickly returning to the front while Axis wounded festered and died with only the outdated sulfa drugs to heal them.

The cost of the beginnings of an adequate supply of penicillin for British civilian and soldier alike was only one or two of Butcher Harris's endless bomber squadrons, but the MOS successfully throttled back penicillin production expenditures so that only British troop needs could be ( just barely) met.

In America, FDR's new Deal was dying, a victim of the war.

But in its last hurrah, the very New Dealish WPB (War Production Board) set the USA supply requests at a level a thousand times higher than the British levels, despite a population only three times bigger !

Thanks to Henry Dawson and Dante Colitti and Citizen Hearst, an outraged American public, led by Doctor Mom, demanded to know why the American drug companies were not cashing in on those massive 'firm orders' from Uncle Sam.

Henry Dawson's early supporter from the drug industry, John L Smith of Pfizer, took up the public's challenge and soon was producing penicillin at rates many dozens of times higher than the rest of the world combined.

Flush with excess penicillin, America could easily afford to divert some of its bombers off the killing work and towards delivering tiny vials of penicillin to dying children world wide.

Widely reported in the world press, this penicillin diplomacy from America quietly replaced the Pax Britanica with Pax Americana despite the fact that the Brits had held an exclusive on the life-saving balm for more than a dozen years.

Back home in the UK, things got worse for Churchill.

He had been widely expected to win the 1945 election - not the least by his lackluster opponents in the Labour Party , for his efforts in winning the war.

But doubts over Tory fairness in the quality of medical care for rich and for poor, highlighted in a famous Daily Mirror cartoon of a wounded British soldier, silently moved many voters (in an era before 'public' public polling) over to their opponents.

Unfairness of who got or did not get scarce British penicillin ( versus news stories of obvious American abundance), highlighted by newspaper stories of dying British children with SBE being denied the life-saving mold , was an important part of that emerging move away from the Tory-led government.

Penicillin was British-born, damn it all, and Churchill's government had fumbled the ball, giving it away to the Americans and yet denying it to British civilians.

Who gave a hoot - now - about how many European babies Butcher Harris's bombers had burned while flying above a war won on the ground by millions of Ivans ?

Wartime penicillin never cured Churchill's pneumonia - that is a myth.

But its British failure surely killed his electoral prospects, just as its American success helped pull Harry Truman back out of his expected electoral defeat.....

1945's choices : the Modern exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz or the post Modern values that gave us 'Public Domain' penicillin ?

In early 1945, two Manhattan doctors had dueling visions of the possible world ahead.

The prominent one, Foster Kennedy ,  wanted to kill all babies with developmental issues.

The unknown other, Henry Dawson, wanted all babies in the world to have access to cheap, abundant (Public Domain) penicillin.

By the end of 1945, the unknown Dawson was dead but - perhaps surprisingly - his idea lived on after him.


Because, with the beginnings of  public revulsion over the revelations of Auschwitz doctors and children coming out of the Nuremberg trials, it was clear that Dawson had won most of the educated public over to his vision.

And this only a few years after public polls indicated that the majority of the educated public favoured Foster Kennedy's murderous proposals instead.

Dawson's unstinting efforts to make wartime penicillin truly inclusive had greatly shortened his life, but clearly they hadn't been totally in vain ....

post Modern age ushered in by baby's whimper, not Bomb's bang

Two 'Booms' occurred in 1945 : which was more important ?

It was the year 1945, all historians seem to agree , that ushered out the Modern age and ushered in the post Modern age : and ushered it in with some sort of a bang.

But what sort of bang : was it the secretive Manhattan Project's Atom Bomb big Boom !!! ?

Or was it the smallest Manhattan Project's inclusive vision of penicillin priced and available for all , a vision that encouraged women all over the world to see a brighter future ahead and gave them reason to want to get pregnant ?

Was it then the penicillin-and-good-health fueled Baby Boom that really ushered in our current age ?

Was an old age ushered out by a newborn baby's contented whimper ?

That's sort of my take : yes, revulsion against yesterday's exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz.

But also gratitude for today's inclusionary values that gave us  'cheap and abundant penicillin for all' , with its promise of a healthy childhood ahead for most newborn children.....

After all, sharing unexamined assumptions is what makes two scientists 'peers' in the first place

Logically, the only thing worth examining is the unexamined assumptions that we all hold in common

The only real test of a scientific hypothesis is to have it reviewed by non-peers , for they will probably not share the underlying 'unexamined assumptions' that form the outer limits of whatever space a potentially new scientific theory can inhabit in a particular discipline.

By its very definition, peer review always fails, must fail, any truly ground-breaking scientific effort.

But having new ideas torn apart by non-peers is difficult in practise because many non-peers will fail to fully understand the context of the subtle internal arguments being made in support of that particular hypothesis.

Perhaps pre-publishing a particularly bold and unorthodox hypothesis to the world wide web and inviting critiques from all and sundry might get an useful blend of non-peers and peers tearing it apart.

But for most academics, the hypothesis in their potential article or monograph is simply too limited in 'newness' to be viewed as controversial by more than their fellow specialists.

This is a long roundabout way of saying that if a hypothesis really deserves a Nobel prize, it better have been first rejected by peer reviewers in all of the most influential journals in that scientific field.

Unfortunately, most Nobels are for normal science,  for works that only bites away at exciting new patches of grass , well inside the unexamined assumptions that form a scientific field's boundaries.

The Modern Age (and its Science) had a particularly strongly hegemonic set of unexamined assumptions to hold it together .

 This was in fact the main reason for the strength and uniformity of the underlying beliefs that united Modernity's many warring ideologies.

As a result, when a few minor and extremely non-charismatic  scientists fundamentally challenged those unexamined assumptions, they were not put on trial and burned at the stake, in a scientific sense.

Instead their views merely caused bemusement and puzzlement among the scientists and the science-following educated laity of the Modern Age.

These minor scientists might not even have been aware of how fundamental their critiques were.

Thus they saw no need to further nail their views dramatically, in a Luther-like fashion, upon the nearest lab wall as some sort of troop-raising manifesto.

One minor scientist however, did unite his intellectual opposition to the Modern Age's unexamined assumptions with his moral objections to the Modern Age's behavior and his impact, perhaps as a result, had world wide and prophetic impact.

His name was Henry Dawson (Martin Henry Dawson).

The conclusions he drew about the microbial small and the weak from his pioneering studies in HGT (and other such marvels) , put steel beneath the velvet of his moral objections as to how the human small and weak were being mis-treated by Modernity's Axis and Allied alike in WWII.

His heart was open, agape, to the sufferings of small but his mind was also open, agape, to the brilliance of the small as well.

And that made all the difference......

Dying life unworthy of wartime penicillin was Life unworthy of Life

"all Life is worthy of Penicillin"

The infamous term "Life unworthy of Life", created by a German psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in the 1920s , is generally thought of as bring used exclusively by the Nazis.

Used by them during a Total War to justify killing everyone from working class Aryan babies with developmental issues to the entire Jewish population of Europe.

But the term had a much greater transnational appeal than that .

Prominent American psychiatrist Foster Kennedy thought , in 1941 and 1942, during that same Total War, that the USA would be justified in killing its little Aryan babies with developmental issues.

Shamefully, America's leading psychiatric journal actually agreed with him and only one psychiatrist disputed his thesis.

And the Allies' medical establishment, led by Dr Chester Keefer and his NAS committee, used this idea to justify denying SBE-curing penicillin to young people dying of SBE all over the Allied world,  because they felt that even a cured SBE patient was still useless to the Total War effort.

("Life judged unworthy of Penicillin.")

By contrast, Henry Dawson and a handful of other doctors worldwide supported, and fought for, the notion that "All Life is worthy of Penicillin" - even in , particularly in , a Total War supposedly  fought precisely against the evil idea that some Life was, ipso facto, unworthy of Life.....

even DENIERS can govern well in abundant times , but ...

... when the available per capita resources get small, look to the small to govern best.

Former and soon-to-be-former PMs Howard and Harper are in the news again this week , charged with leading a renewed "war on science" (so called) but I doth protest - again.

These two, and their ilk, love science : Production science.

The science of dig it up, tear it up and burn it up.

The science of greed. Their science is so bright, you gotta wear shades.

The science they do hate is the science of second-guessing, of naysayers, of the cautious and the skeptical.

Impact science.

Canadian-born sociologist Alan Schnailberg's  seminal 1980 division of science into these two branches should be the foundational mother's milk of every Green intellectual wannabe - but sadly ( Elizabeth ??!! ) it doesn't .

Impact science denies ( OMG, he used the D-word !) the world's resources are infinite and it denies that the world's capabilities to be a toxic garbage dump are infinite.

The DENIERS merely deny the denial ; deny there are any limits to Man's god-like powers over nature and reality.

They deny the claim that we will never ever be able to replicate our Earth-like experience at a mass-level on any planet but this one.

The DENIERS have had a good run of it - with a planet this rich and the past population of humans so small and so technologically simple, they couldn't miss.

But now we are hitting the wall and their political parties and intellectual leaders are running out of moral authority and intellectual gas.

With three varieties of DENIER parties offering to form your next government, what can any fully-visioned voter do - besides cry in despair ?

WWII was a conflict within nations and within INDIVIDUALS ... as well as between nations

War ,to give it a quick definition, is a violent conflict conducted between nations, not between individuals.

But the intensity of commitment with which individuals and groups within any nation fight in that nation's war can vary immensely --- perhaps never more so than during WWII.

(We are not considering the rare case when a citizen is in total non-compliance with their nation's war decisions, by becoming a complete conscientious objector or a traitor.)

The existing WWI paradigm ,within which all existing history on that war has been written to date , never denies that each nation had a somewhat divided mind between 1931-1945 on various war issues.

Still writers accepting of that paradigm tend to focus exclusively on the nation against nation conflict and - I claim ! - seriously distort what was really going on and what was truly fundamental in a 'long history' view.

These writings tend to limit the war's big moments to a military battle between the modern age's various ideologies : liberal capitalist democracies versus race (Japan, Germany,and Italy's fascism) and class based (communist Russia) dictatorships.

There is no denying that for the world's population living inside the modern age bubble seventy five years ago , it was the differences between the various strands of modern thought that so dominated their minds.

But what excuse have we historical-minded authors , living seventy years after that bubble began breaking, to be 'captured' by our protagonists' ways of thinking ?

Historians like to claim lots of time is necessary between historian and event to render the beginnings of an objective assessment of it.

Isn't seventy five years (and more) time enough to look anew at WWII ?

To see it no merely as a Modern war, but in fact the last Modern war, and the beginnings of the post-Modern world ?

If we look again at the three big Modern ideologies : liberal capitalist imperialism, fascist cum racial imperialism and communist imperialism, we could today try to see that what they had in common , as opposed to what divided them.

What they held in common was an exclusivist or imperialist worldview that divided all the world into those deserving and those undeserving of the basic rights of humanness.

Does it really matter now, except in the details, whether or not their 'undeserving' included blacks or Jews or well off peasants ?

A Leningrad communist harshly criticizing another young communist for sharing her ration with her dying grandmother, saying the grandmother can contribute nothing to the struggle against the Nazi siege, but that young girl could and she needed all that food to keep up her strength.

A Nazi plan to kill off all German mentally challenged children in taxpayer-supported institutions so that their hospitals and staff could be used instead to look after moderately wounded soldiers capable of returning to the front.

An Allied medical establishment ( take your pick : America, the UK , Canada or Australia ) callously saying SBE was not 'a war disease' and so wives dying from it must be denied life-saying penicillin, so erring husbands with VD can return to fight on the front-lines.

This modern age utilitarianism and instrumentalism run wild - can you really tell its practitioners apart,  without a label ?

But there was an individual-based counter-reaction against it.

People all over the world between 1931 and 1946 began to internally wrestle with the morality of a exclusivist versus inclusivist worldview.

Admittedly tiny in numbers at first when it came to open rebellion against the Modern worldview, this critique came to centre on the idea that wartime penicillin should be offered to all and any.

We do know it received widespread public support, from August 1943 onwards,  at a time when the polls said that most peoples' hearts were still hardened against treating the Jew or black as fully human .

SBE, a rheumatic heart disease, was primarily a poor person's disease : the people who got it tended to be the poor among the visible minorities and immigrants.

The world's daily press correctly sensed it first.

They sensed the widespread public support for the idea these young patients with SBE should be saved, war or no war ---- number one by making a lot lot lot more penicillin than had been produced during the 15 years to date.

By 1949, the once-radical change was complete and modern exclusivity was being replaced plank by plank by our current post-Modern inclusivity.

So, for example, the  idea that it was right that enemy children should die because members of the Allied population had cut their penicillin for illicit gain was now widely viewed by film-goers as the ultimate of all possible evils,  as indicated by the viewer love of  a film that still ranks in the top ten of all time : "The Third Man" .

If only Henry Dawson was still around in 1949, to see what change in the public morality that he had wrought ....

WWII: the battle for inclusive medicine over exclusive medicine

In 1940, Big Pharma only wants to sell its profitable-expensive (patented drugs) to those who could afford to pay for them directly : just as the AMA only wanted doctors to heal those who could afford to pay directly for its members profitably-expensive services.

Against this, some doctors like Henry Dawson believed that all life dined at a common table and that all life deserved a chance to live , all life deserved medical care, including penicillin.

He did not believe in dividing the world into "life worthy of wartime penicillin" and "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".


When the AMA and Big Pharma, working together at the OSRD and the NAS , thought and acted differently , he promoted among his fellow doctors the idea of hospital-made inclusive penicillin.

Inclusive Penicillin  was that hospital made by individual doctors , without thought of patents or personal gain, to save the lives of all those regarded by the government's medical establishment as being "life unworthy of wartime penicillin".

The movement consisted of just Dawson's team at first, then people he directly convinced to follow his ideals.

It then spread all around the world as more and more doctors , encouraged by an awakened and angered laity, urged them on.

All the dramatic new stories, on young mothers and young children snatched from certain death at the last minute by minute amounts of penicillin flown around the world by seconded heavy bombers, seemed to have had an unexpected secondary affect.

Suddenly many of the modern era's population rediscovered feelings of compassion and empathy they thought they had successfully exorcised under the rationalism and utilitarianism
of modern culture.

Their hearts softened at the sight of all those saved babies, children of strangers, and they looked at all their neighbours and all strangers in a new, kindlier light .

An post-modern light ...

"Never Show it , if you can Tell It"

I'm a story-teller, not a story-shower.

If I was in the Showing Business, I'd be making a movies, not writing a book.

Not that I haven't thought seriously of the potential of Henry Dawson's penicillin story as a 21st century version of an oratorio.

 But I realize most successful musical-dramatic works - due to their need for textual brevity - must rely upon the audience's existing knowledge to fill in the gaps in the storyline and mood.

So this book first, then someone else can develop its musical and dramatic potential.

I do eventual see a successful musical story, set entirely in the Dawson team's tiny, tight little world of lab - clinician's consulting office- hospital ward at Columbia Presbyterian, and  running between September 1940 and September 1944.

But as for my book itself, I actually feel more comfortable telling it, using as few (real) direct quotes as possible.

It is popular history slash biography ,not popular journalism , after all.

For some reason,  biography slash popular history gets very little attention in any standard account of narrative non-fiction and creative non-fiction.

That account tends to regard lots of direct quotes from interviews and elaborate scene-recreating, complete with pages of dialogue, as the very exemplars of the art.

I instead want a narrative voice located somewhere between today's Economist magazine and the early Time Magazine : a voice that must smoothly synthesize lots of material ,hidden just below the surface in years of research, and present it to the reader in nice small digestible chunks.

Academic history, in contrast to popular history, tends to cast a much smaller net in each book , and replaces creative non-fiction mantra of lots of direct quotes with a need for lots of citations .

But popular history must self-consciously come to a lot of tiny final decisions, one way or the other, based on quite serious research, but done in areas academic historians would prefer to leave as (amply discussed) open questions.

So is the only Charles Aronson in the 1940 American Census   Henry Dawson's first penicillin patient ?

I believe so, based on a large number of closely reasoned probabilities. But I haven't proven him to be so - and an academic account would discuss all my possibilities and then leave it open to further debate and change.

Done repeatedly, this appraisal of the scant evidence history tends to leave behind, so slows the pace that 99 % of even determined readers bail out , let alone when we consider the high fail-out count among merely averagely motivated casual readers.

Perhaps upon publication, my book will provoke a lot of people to offer up contrary evidence on the exact indenity of Charlie and on many other points.

Fair enough, thankfully an ebook can be quickly altered to correct and expand its various points.

But my book has been researched as far along as I can afford to do it - short of months spent in London, then months in New York and then months in Washington DC and then again in Adelaide.

So : it is what it is......

"Collar the Lot" : Churchill's callousness push-starts A-bomb and Penicillin development

I don't like Winston Churchill.

Granted he was a very complex man, much given to uttering extreme verbal outbursts on whatever position he held that moment, replaces a few hours or weeks later by an equally exaggerated outburst on the opposite view on that same issue.

So it is easy to find vivid quotes from him displaying both humanity and brutality towards the German Jews and Leftists who fled Hitler for Britain before 1939.

For brutal , see his comment 'collar the lot' as soon as he became PM in May 1940.

Until then, the UK had sensibly only interned ( interned gently) those it deemed as obviously pro-Nazi.

But as he threw pro Nazi Aryans and very anti Nazi Jews together in internment camps, those few (because judged potentially 'valuable' to the war effort) German Jews still free in the English-speaking democracies could see dire times ahead for them too.

If they didn't move from being potentially valuable to 'actually valuable' and soon, they and their families would be interned with all the rest.

Ironically, existing restrictions on their current activities actually helped many succeed in becoming valuable ( very,very,very valuable) to the Allied cause.

We already well know about all those Jewish physicists, denied the right to work on important war efforts like Radar, who  fell back upon the then scientific backwater of a possible engine of atomic energy.

Their energetic development (hello Simon, Szilard and others) led directly to the idea of a possible A-Bomb becoming not the last but the first priority of the war.

It is not often thought of in the same way, but the Penicillin project (often twinned with the A-Bomb as one of the two big discoveries of the war) was push-started by two German Jewish emigres also facing possible internment for themselves and their families in the Spring and Summer of 1940, after Churchill's churlish actions.

Ernst Chain had to push and pull Howard Florey into realizing their peacetime, long term, basic research on microbe on microbe warfare could have huge wartime implications.

He probably pushed and pulled a little too hard in claiming credit on a back up project - this one on the chemical nature of the activity of the (mildly anti-bacterial) connective cellwall-destroying enzyme Lysozyme.

This had the effect of rousing the anger of , and the fear within, of another German Jewish emigre in America who had additional fears as he was also an WWI veteran of the Central Powers.

Karl Meyer had worked with (Martin) Henry Dawson among many others,to do the initial work on the chemical nature of Lysozyme and on some other important connective tissue destroying enzymes.

He saw himself as the pioneer in this small but valuable new field in bio-chemistry.

Meyer heard of Chain's forthcoming exaggerated claims for his Lysozyme efforts via the American-born Jew Leslie A Epstein (later Falk).

Like Meyer and Chain in those days, Epstein was a left-winger in politics and in medicine.

He got along with both of these two fellow Jews.

He had been forced, by general government order,  to flee Oxford University and a Rhodes scholarship before his year and PhD was completed.

So he completed his work, begun under Chain in Oxford, with Meyer in New York, because he was the other recognized expert on the topic.

He there mentioned Chain's part in the recent successful demonstration (May 1940) that the twelve year old nigh-on useless penicillin actually could cure bacterial disease inside mice without harming them.

This meant it probably could do likewise inside humans - humans perhaps even with guns and helmets. There was a shooting war on , after all.

This work was to be published in late August 1940 in Lancet.

Chain was soon tasked to try and synthesize the natural active ingredient as fast as possible.

Meyer - I believe correctly - felt that Chain was a far better 'big ideas man' than a working bio-chemist and that Meyer could do the job far better than Chain or the fungi ever could .

He couldn't beat the fungi, as it turned out - no one could - no one ever has.

But Meyer's secret plan to repay Chain for stealing his Lysozyme credit AND secure his family from possible internment with Nazis by synthesizing penicillin was not without its own profound consequences.

Because he badly needed his friend Henry Dawson and his two skills , if his project was to succeed.

Dawson and his co-worker Gladys Hobby were expert micro-biologists.

They were highly skilled in growing large amount of microbes, like the penicillium.

Their skill was needed to provide the huge amounts of raw natural product Meyer had to destructively analyze, all to guide the process of synthesis of penicillin from pure chemical compounds.

Secondly, only Dawson the clinician had the licensed legal access to animal and human subjects to test the biological effectiveness of any new results at synthesis.

Then Dawson abruptly decided Meyer's penicillin might do a lot more than just be tested on human patients.

It might just cure patients otherwise doubly-fated to an inevitable death from the dreaded SBE.

 Doubly fated to needlessly die, because in the Fall of 1940, it seemed the medical establishment was using the upcoming war effort as an excuse to treat research upon them as the very lowest priority.

In addition, American Big Pharma had shown no interest in providing any raw starting material of a potential - natural - drug they considered far tougher to work with than the still tractable and still profitable - chemically-oriented - sulfa family of drugs.

And they had no interest in developing a consultant-style relationship with a virtually unknown emigre Jewish biochemist, even with a growing reputation for the quality of his work.

(Meyer did have some sort of relationship with German-controlled Schering but they didn't see the potential - at least for their firm at this time - in the area of fungal-based antibiotics.)

Dawson saw this growing indifference to the sad fate of the poor SBE youths as part and parcel of the growing general meanness of the Modern Age itself, as exemplified by humanity's attitudes to small nations under attack from their big bullying neighbours.

This indifference to the fate of smaller 'others' started in Manchuria in 1931, then extended to Ethiopia and Spain in the mid 1930s  and then Austria and Czechoslovakia at the end of the decade.

Now it was Poland, Finland, the three Balt states, Denmark, Norway and Belgium turn to be attacked and generally conquered by bully neighbours.

Still America's population and hence government remained firmly 'neutral' - as did the vast majority of the still sovereign nations of the world.

In hindsight, it is better to regard them all , us all , as being cold-hearted bystanders in the global schoolyard, watching indifferently as bullies beat up babies.

When Dawson decided to use Meyer's penicillin project to confront this indifference to the small of the world, starting with the specific case of the young people needlessly dying of SBE , he eventually set in motion a globe-wide reaction against Modernity's cult of callousness.

But let us never forget it was Winston Churchill's own particular callousness that first set it all in motion , back in May 1940 ....

WWII: Bullies and Bystanders vs Innocents and Intervenors

NYC-based Dr Henry Dawson in 1941 was clearly an intervenor with his 'inclusive' penicillin (and may I point out that adult intervenors (as I well know) were often bullied themselves as children).

 SBE patients , such as his patients Charlie and Miss H were clearly the innocents.

NYC-based Dr Foster Kennedy in 1941 was clearly a bully, particularly telling that he would use the excuse of the shortage of staff and resources during an upcoming war as an excuse to finally implement his long held plan to kill all the deformed children.

Shades of Adolf Hitler in an exactly similar setting.

His active verbal supporters at the very top of the world's largest and most influential mental health body, the American Psychiatric Association, were clearly the stone-hearted bystanders a bully needed to get away with his deeds.

In the wider world of WWII, one can easily spot the bullies, the innocents and stone hearted bystanders (aka Neutrals)  as individuals and as (almost) entire nations.

But sadly, no one nation stands out as a whole hearted intervenor.

That noble task is left to a few in all nations, to try and heal the hearts of the stone-hearted majority by rousing their consciences  to the sad and unfair fate of the small and the weak in face of bullies.

Bullies like Hitler, Stalin, Tojo and sometimes even people like Churchill and others on the Allied and Neutral side.....

Penicillin flown to save Mrs Frank Oxford ,Amisk : 70 years ago this week

It is the first case I could find of penicillin being used to save a life in Canada : 70 years ago this week, Mrs Frank Oxford dying in a Hardisty hospital of childbirth fever was given penicillin specially flown all the way from the Banting Institute in Toronto.

The Americans a week earlier had specially flown penicillin ( in a bomber no less !) to save a dying girl and the Canadians authorities scurried to play me-too catchup.

A life and death story involving women and children that successfully and repeatedly made it to the front pages of North American newspapers that usually only told the life and death stories of men - men fighting overseas.

Let us see if the Edmonton Herald et al misses this anniversary of this historical story .....

So I am a punster , is that such a crime !?

Stone-heartedness : physical or moral affliction or both ?

I am sure a gene is responsible.... or its early neural damage while a child-to-be is still resting on the placenta.

Whatever.

Punning can't be cured - only endured.

So my 'stone-hearted' : a play on the stone-like calcined formations on the heart valves that defines the SBE disease that Henry Dawson eventual cured with his 'inclusive' penicillin ?

Did Dawson merely want to see these teenagers and youth enjoy all the courting and dancing that all the others their age enjoyed : 'dancing' over stone (hearted valves) ?

Did he merely hate to think of the SBEs slowly dying inside mentally and emotionally as well as physically, as their medical condition forbade them doing anything vigorous and youth-like , in case it hastened their inevitable early end ?

Or is my title a broad hint that Dawson's real target was much bigger than the few dozen lives he saved directly : was his inclusive penicillin really aimed at curing all of the morally stone-hearted ?

That is to say, the majority of us between 1931 and 1945.

The us who were so determinately indifferent to doing anything concrete to save our weaker and smaller neighbours when they were under attack by big bullies like Hitler , Stalin and Tojo ?

The same morally stone-hearted of us who refused to allow any live-saving penicillin go to the physically stone-hearted SBEs ?

Or all of the above .......?

Fred J Stock : righteous among the nations ? (Part I)

Part I : the Era of Sulfa has run out of steam...

In May 1943, almost 15 years after the world's best lifesaver - Penicillin G - was first discovered , the whole world was making about a 100 million units of it a month.

That sounds like a lot but it is not at all - that amount of Penicillin G today would be only sufficient to treat one ordinarily sick patient requiring it !

A severely ill patient today requiring penicillin G might need a whole year's worth (1200 million units) at May 1943 production rates.

But May 1943 was hardly ordinary times with ordinary patients - it was the height of WWII , the biggest deadliest war ever seen : a seven ring circus of sickness and injury where the box office never closed.

The only other lifesaver around at that time - the wonderful sulfa drugs - had had a great five year run of success (cheap and easy to make in huge amounts, easy to give to patients) but had now run out of steam and were in grave danger of collapse.

By the Fall of 1942 , the chemists had a convincing scientific explanation for why they had run out of places on the basic sulfa ring to insert new additional  "side chain" molecules, to provide additionalanti-bacterial action via new variants of  sulfa.

So : no new sulfa drugs for germ-killing ---- ever .

The existing ones were now meeting unexpectedly rapid bacterial resistance - the normal solution : up the dosage amount and duration of treatment to overcome that resistance - had revealed just how dangerously toxic the safe sulfa drugs could be at high and prolonged dosages.

A repeat of WWI's deadly combo pandemic of Spanish (viral) Flu and (bacterial) Pneumonia and maybe this time more than a 100 million people (one in twenty) might die.

A huge potential disaster loomed, just offstage.

The problem , as always , was that scientists were in charge of public policy on penicillin - not politicians.

The academic scientists - on penicillin - had made common cause with their normally mortal enemies : Big Pharma.

Penicillin had long been ready to report for war duty - but only as a public domain natural substance made up in medieval brews by rural peasant midwives from mold slime ( I am paraphrasing the scientists' and CEOs' mutual objections here.)

The CEOs were chemically-minded as only executives matured during the chemistry-made interwar years could be and really wanted a synthetic penicillin.

Synthetic means man-made means patents : patents to raise prices and secure world markets free from profit-cutting competitors.

The scientists claimed to abhor profit-making but loved reputation making instead.

And for scientists still unsure if their new found high social status was really secure , it would be a retrograde step for the world's best ever lifesaver to be seen as something a housewife could brew up in their kitchen and apply directly.

Because that meant all its lifesaving prestige would bypass both the male academic basic scientist and the male applied scientists in medical labs and hospital wards.

(For the Gender War raged on , military war or not.)

The OSRD/NAS in America and the MRC in the UK ,dominated by Republican/Conservative Party scientists (for virtually all tenured academics in those years voted Republican or Conservative), controlled the production of penicillin until May 1943.

Their conservative views even continued to dominate the Conservative Ministry of Supply in the UK.

But in America they were soon to be defeated - in great part because they were now to deal with the very New Deal and Democratic Party-oriented War Production Board (WPB) and the formidable head of its Drugs and Cosmetics Branch, Fred J Stock.....

WWII was all about who we include , who we exclude ...

When we say that Henry Dawson's vision of wartime penicillin was 'inclusive', while that of Howard Florey was 'exclusive' , we are really getting at the key issue that divided all the world during, before and after WWII.

 " Just who do we include in ;  just who do we exclude out of our civil society's blessings ?"

Florey never called his vision for wartime penicillin 'exclusive' , but he did much use another term that means the same thing and in any case , his definite actions spoke much louder than his unspoken assumptions.

The word he always used to describe his goals for penicillin was 'pure' , chemically pure.

A dose of penicillin that excludes everything else in the original penicillin juice, whether that be helpful, neutral or harmful.

A 100 gram Vitamin C rich orange not merely concentrated into Vitamin C rich orange juice but further purified until it is a mere 100 mg of 100% chemically pure Vitamin C powder ... with all that impure orange taste and texture safely removed.

If Calvinists ever become our leading chefs, this is what our food will look like : pure carbohydrate, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals in enormous pill form and worked down with many cups of sterile water.

Hitler wanted to exclude Jews, Romas, Queers, the chronically ill and the handicapped , socialists, Blacks - you name it - to make Germany one big pure homogeneous Aryan nation and race.

Left-leaning Social Medicine, of which Dawson was a proponent , wanted to see that Medicine helped all those sick : it was inclusive.

 And not just by helping those American blacks, aboriginals and immigrants usually neglected under 'for-profit' medicine either.

Its proponents also wanted to intervene (medically and otherwise), overseas ,to help those under attack by Hitler, Stalin and Tojo.

By contrast, the conservatives behind the idea of "War Medicine"  wanted to use the defence of America as an excuse to roll back the New Deal emphasis on Social Medicine by claiming that in a Total War lead-up, all precious resources had to shift away from the (generally poorer) 4Fs to the (generally better off) 1A citizens.

Just because they talked war did not mean they were pro intervention overseas, just the opposite.

Their vision not just excluded helping sick 4F Americans at home, it also excluded helping sick 4Fs overseas as well.

Florey and Fleming both wanted penicillin to be chemically 100% pure and synthetic before it was produced in big volumes.

They were also both in intimate lockstep with the War Medicine proponents at Britain's Ministry of Supply and America's OSRD who wanted to restrict civilian access to (and knowledge of) the miracle cure , all the better to make penicillin a weapon of war.

If it could be kept exclusively as a secret weapon of war, the Allies could return wounded troops to combat quicker than the Germans or Japanese could.

By contrast, Dawson felt that doctors should help the sick and wounded soldiers of both sides (including Allied POWS !) and help the civilians of all sides : Neutral , Axis and Allied.

And  he wanted penicillin - whether synthetically pure or naturally impure* he didn't care - produced in mass levels now , not after the war was over.

(* His team never let the impurity of their self-proclaimed "crude penicillin" stop them from being the first in history to give it systemically, via needle, to save a life.

 They later even published a journal article speculating crude penicillin had additional beneficial substances that made it a better medication than just pure penicillin itself...)

Dawson definitely did not want to see the medicine produced in tiny levels so as to render acceptable the rationing of it, to justify   giving it only to those civilians who were useful because of their involvement in the war effort.

He felt even a person incapable of almost any work still deserved penicillin, a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile.

Dawson felt this sort of American medical establishment thinking was far too close to that of Hitler's Aktion T4 projects - where people judged non-useful were starved, denied warm shelter and medicine or killed outright.

He believed if the Allies were seen saving the lives of people most of the educated world saw as 'useless' - even during an all-out Total War - this would help defeat Hitler morally in the many many Neutral countries and also strengthen the resolve of those Allied frontline troops facing death to defeat him militarily.

If the OSRD and Florey used penicillin as a weapon, we need ask did Dawson use it as a weapon, as well ?

Yes he certainly did.

As a weapon in a moral battle.

Dawson's touting of the inclusive use of wartime medicine definitely did have a moral cum political/diplomatic impact, in addition to the extra patients it medically admitted to be saved.......

Despite Eric Lax, Howard Florey is still "Box Office Poison" to women readers

And as every book editor well knows , most readers of narrative fiction/non-fiction  are women.

But in the Lax take on the wartime penicillin saga, the hero offered up is a man who leaves his deaf middle class wife to ride around on her bike in the rain collecting urine from penicillin patients while he 'has it off' with his aristocratic mistress in the luxurious bath and bedroom suite he had at his office in (never-Blitzed) Oxford England .

And this at a time when millions of Britons in the rest of the UK were being bombed out their homes by the Blitz and (barely) living in makeshift shelters.

Charming, really charming !

Just of the sort of hero women readers want to cuddle up to - Not.

The character - or lack of it - of Howard Florey  is what made Eric Lax's recent biography such a flop among ordinary readers.

So, despite the fact that a survey of thousands of American women found they considered penicillin the most important news story of the entire 20th century , we still have never had a successful popular book or movie about the dramatic wartime history of penicillin.

What is missing in all past efforts is a focus on the one classical hero in the whole saga : the dying Dr Dawson and his unrelenting efforts to make penicillin inclusive not exclusive.

That and a too trusting reliance by previous writers upon the official histories rather than digging deeper into the primary records.

Because the people in Washington and London who wrote the official histories determined, above all, to cover up their very expensive and very time-wasting wartime flop : the synthetic penicillin project led by Florey and George Merck and paid for mostly by the taxpayers - as always.

So they tried to pretend that the stone these builders rejected had really been their idea all along. With Dawson prematurely dead at war's end and unable to set the record straight , it was - literally - dead simple.

Women, around the world , will buy a popular history about wartime penicillin by the tens of millions of copies - with the right set of heroes and villains laid out before them.

"The smallest Manhattan Project : the unexpected triumph of inclusive penicillin" will do just that .....