It ended up public and 'public domain' natural, thanks to Henry Dawson and his supporters.
The British War Department and the American OSRD (run by Vannevar Bush) had expected to quickly, cheaply and, above all, secretively mass produce synthetic penicillin.
Enough artificial penicillin to supply the Allied front lines in the big pushback against Tojo and Hitler, while the enemy had to make do with the rapidly failing Sulfa drugs or try to produce tiny amounts of impure natural penicillin.
The whole project depended on keeping accounts of penicillin's miracle cures away from the Allied public.
That would only create a public sensation , as it had earlier for Sulfa's first miracle cures, which the Axis would soon learn about , thanks to newspaper articles in Neutral papers.
Once alerted, clever German and Japanese chemists would also soon synthesize penicillin and negate the temporary military advantage the Allies had gained via secrecy.
So : the potentially morally shabby story of wartime penicillin : medicine as a weapon.
But when the normally-stodgy Henry Dawson actually dared to steal government-sanctioned war penicillin to successfully save some young 4F kids banefully abandoned by their government as just 'useless mouths' , word spread rapidly in the gossip-driven circles of wartime medical New York.
A young doctor with his own burden of prejudice from the anglo protestant medical elite to rouse his ire, Dante Colitti, got the newspaper chain that invented yellow journalism (Hearst) to come to the defence of the yellow magic and no sooner than you could say 'that darling little Patty Malone', the jig was up for the OSRD and War Department.....
Showing posts with label OSRD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OSRD. Show all posts
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Aktion 4F : something done to 4Fs, rather than something done for 4Fs ?
For years, I have thought and written of Dr Henry Dawson's efforts to try and save the lives of young SBE patients ,"The 4Fs of the 4Fs" , as if it was a sort of counterpoint to Nazi Germany's efforts to kill similar chronically ill people, the infamous Aktion T4 campaign.
His own Aktion 4F as a sort of counterblast to their Aktion T4.
But Dawson wasn't actually directly opposing the German Nazis' murderously utilitarian disposal of humans judged useless consumers of badly needed resources in a Total War.
He was combating similar notions held by the powerful in the Anglo-American medical establishment.
The OSRD , the NAS and the MRC all judged SBE to be a "militarily unimportant disease" and refused to allow any penicillin be diverted to saving its patients.
This despite Dawson demonstrating over and over that penicillin was the only thing that could cure this hitherto invariably fatal disease dubbed "the Polio of the Poor".
So in a way, the Allied treatment of the SBE 4Fs , along with their diverting penicillin away from badly wounded frontline troops in the Mediterranean towards otherwise fit soldiers who had deliberately contracted VD to avoid combat , could be see as exact counterparts to how the Nazis behaved in similar medical situations.
(For example, secretly killing Eastern Front soldiers rendered permanently mentally ill in combat to free up medical beds and supplies for soldiers judged able to return to battle eventually.)
In which case, the co-ordinated campaign , around the Allied world , from the US to Canada to Britain to Australia , to deny penicillin to SBE cases, can be seen as being the true Aktion 4F.
Food for thought....
His own Aktion 4F as a sort of counterblast to their Aktion T4.
But Dawson wasn't actually directly opposing the German Nazis' murderously utilitarian disposal of humans judged useless consumers of badly needed resources in a Total War.
He was combating similar notions held by the powerful in the Anglo-American medical establishment.
The OSRD , the NAS and the MRC all judged SBE to be a "militarily unimportant disease" and refused to allow any penicillin be diverted to saving its patients.
This despite Dawson demonstrating over and over that penicillin was the only thing that could cure this hitherto invariably fatal disease dubbed "the Polio of the Poor".
So in a way, the Allied treatment of the SBE 4Fs , along with their diverting penicillin away from badly wounded frontline troops in the Mediterranean towards otherwise fit soldiers who had deliberately contracted VD to avoid combat , could be see as exact counterparts to how the Nazis behaved in similar medical situations.
(For example, secretly killing Eastern Front soldiers rendered permanently mentally ill in combat to free up medical beds and supplies for soldiers judged able to return to battle eventually.)
In which case, the co-ordinated campaign , around the Allied world , from the US to Canada to Britain to Australia , to deny penicillin to SBE cases, can be seen as being the true Aktion 4F.
Food for thought....
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
"Pax Penicillia" : how Churchill's Britain won the war and lost the peace
The decision by Winston Churchill's (Tory) Minister of Supply (MoS) not to divert the money for one additional Lancaster squadron, used to bomb civilians in Europe, towards providing enough penicillin for British (and European) civilians resulted in Churchill's Tories winning the war for Britain --- but at the cost of losing the peace.
By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.
Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.
And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...
By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.
Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.
And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Penicillin's "Bengali Famine Years" : 1943-1944
It was not America and Britain, it was not even the British and American governments ,that made the momentous decision, between late 1942 and early 1943, not to divert tax money just a little away from bombs and towards penicillin production instead.
This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944, to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.
It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.
But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.
Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.
By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.
Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.
These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.
As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.
And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.
FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.
But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.
That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .
Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.
If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .
If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.
My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.
Just as in the UK, Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.
And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.
For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....
This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944, to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.
It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.
But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.
Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.
By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.
Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.
These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.
As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.
And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.
FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.
But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.
That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .
Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.
If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .
If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.
My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.
Just as in the UK, Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.
And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.
For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
The first - and internally fatal - Tory response to the Beveridge Report : the Ministry of Supply takes over Penicillin ...
To make sense of this claim, we need to clear as to what the role of Britain's powerful wartime Ministry of Supply actually was.
The Ministry of Supply (the MoS) was never the British equivalent of the American War Production Board (WPB), no matter how many times this claim is offered up.
In fact, it was very much closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development (the OSRD) per the role set out for both under statute , than it was to the statutory role set out for the WPB.
Britain's Ministry of Supply strived to supply the military's needs - period. Unlike the WPB, it did not try to arbitrate between the conflicting demands of civilian and military claims upon scarce material and manpower.
Equally, the OSRD did NOT deal with all of America's wartime science and research efforts , a point that no doubt Jesus Christ himself will have to repeat again and again to academics on Judgement Day and on into all Eternity.
It only dealt with that amount of science and research that involved the designing of (but not the production of) new weapons that could come into use, during the current war.
Bush was very very careful to sharply limit the parameters of his organization, all to make it more dominant within its narrow but vital sphere.
So when Howard Florey went to both the OSRD and to the Ministry of Supply to help in the production of penicillin - rather than going instead to ask help from the American Public Health Service and the British Ministry of Health, he had already made it very clear where his penicillin priority lay.
He wanted additional penicillin production yes --- but only sufficient to supply the armed forces, period.
Florey was strongly conservative, as were all the key individuals within the Minister of Supply and the OSRD : Big Government to them was abhorrent.
Thus the sudden willingness, eagerness even, of the Ministry of Supply in the Fall of 1942 to go all out and seize control of all of the British commercial penicillin production has to be seen as ideologically surprising.
Unless it can (and should) be seen as the opening conservative counter-attack against the rumoured radical notions of the Beveridge Report.
A preemptive move to ensure that the Ministry of Health (also run by a Tory minister but with wider than just military responsibilities) didn't dominate penicillin production.
If is often claimed that the Ministry of Supply took over all of penicillin production because the Scottish-born minister was an old pal of fellow Scot, Alec Fleming, who asked him to do so.
Politicians - grant us at least this - do not spontaneously fall upon old friends and their requests with open arms --- not unless it suits us.
In September and October 1942, Fleming's request much suited Duncan and the British Tories.
In late September and October 1942, the tenor of the Beveridge report, though as yet unreleased, was well known within the top officials of Whitehall.
It called for a placing the values of equality and egalitarianism at the core of the British government - a notion intensely hostile to Tory values.
For penicillin, all this Beveridge "equality" talk could only mean one of two things.
It might mean divvying inadequate amounts of penicillin equally between dying civilians and dying soldiers - when Tories felt the most vital hope of penicillin was that it would help maintain current front line troop levels without the need to "call up" middle class men (their voters) now at home engaged in war work.
Or it might mean diverting the cost of one additional Lancaster squadron (three million pounds) away from the all-out bombing of civilian Germany , towards creating more penicillin factories on the successful Glaxo model.
Glaxo had taken up space in bits of idle factories and by using local cheap and plentiful unskilled labour,( aka women) , had cheaply but efficiently produced a lot of penicillin with current low technology methods and equipment.
(Basically making penicillin as if it was a milk product , using the very abundant modern dairy equipment existing everywhere thanks to the 1920s civilized world's mania over pure milk.)
A lot of similar factories could be quickly brought up to speed, supplying a good deal of penicillin, without requiring too much vital material like stainless steel, already in desperately short supply.
If all this sounds very familiar, that is because this solution is what Britain in the end was forced to do - but very late and only under intense public pressure.
If it had been done wholeheartedly in the Fall of 1942, there would have been no highly public late 1944 civilian penicillin famine crisis.
But the Conservative bits and bob of the Coalition Government wanted no part of equality and penicillin was just the first of many counterattacks against the threat of Beveridge.
They were unsuccessful in the extreme, blowing what had to seem to them (and to Labour !), a sure electoral victory at war's end.
"Unfair distribution of a vital commodity in short supply" , to quote The Times (of all people !) referencing an earlier debate over Hugh Dalton's fuel rationing proposals , was totally anathema to the British public.
In June 1945, what little polling type information we have suggests it was the unfair rationing of medical services that moved people to Labour .
The most current example of that unfair medical rationing had to be rationing difficulties with life saving penicillin.
Let me repeat that : "life saving". This was not just temporary unfairness in allocating housing or clothing : this was the unfair allocation of life itself.
You can't get a more "vital commodity" than life itself : to switch from the specialized language of the economist to that of the political scientist trying to account for a surprise pattern of vote changing, "life" is a very salient issue.
If so, the unexpected and total defeat of Churchill's Tories in June 1945 can be seen as having its origins in the Fall of 1942, when the Ministry of Supply (and Howard Florey) successfully re-defined the shortage of penicillin (contra Beveridge), as a shortage of military penicillin, civilians be damned.....
The Ministry of Supply (the MoS) was never the British equivalent of the American War Production Board (WPB), no matter how many times this claim is offered up.
In fact, it was very much closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development (the OSRD) per the role set out for both under statute , than it was to the statutory role set out for the WPB.
Britain's Ministry of Supply strived to supply the military's needs - period. Unlike the WPB, it did not try to arbitrate between the conflicting demands of civilian and military claims upon scarce material and manpower.
Equally, the OSRD did NOT deal with all of America's wartime science and research efforts , a point that no doubt Jesus Christ himself will have to repeat again and again to academics on Judgement Day and on into all Eternity.
It only dealt with that amount of science and research that involved the designing of (but not the production of) new weapons that could come into use, during the current war.
Bush was very very careful to sharply limit the parameters of his organization, all to make it more dominant within its narrow but vital sphere.
So when Howard Florey went to both the OSRD and to the Ministry of Supply to help in the production of penicillin - rather than going instead to ask help from the American Public Health Service and the British Ministry of Health, he had already made it very clear where his penicillin priority lay.
He wanted additional penicillin production yes --- but only sufficient to supply the armed forces, period.
Florey was strongly conservative, as were all the key individuals within the Minister of Supply and the OSRD : Big Government to them was abhorrent.
Thus the sudden willingness, eagerness even, of the Ministry of Supply in the Fall of 1942 to go all out and seize control of all of the British commercial penicillin production has to be seen as ideologically surprising.
Unless it can (and should) be seen as the opening conservative counter-attack against the rumoured radical notions of the Beveridge Report.
A preemptive move to ensure that the Ministry of Health (also run by a Tory minister but with wider than just military responsibilities) didn't dominate penicillin production.
If is often claimed that the Ministry of Supply took over all of penicillin production because the Scottish-born minister was an old pal of fellow Scot, Alec Fleming, who asked him to do so.
Politicians - grant us at least this - do not spontaneously fall upon old friends and their requests with open arms --- not unless it suits us.
In September and October 1942, Fleming's request much suited Duncan and the British Tories.
In late September and October 1942, the tenor of the Beveridge report, though as yet unreleased, was well known within the top officials of Whitehall.
It called for a placing the values of equality and egalitarianism at the core of the British government - a notion intensely hostile to Tory values.
For penicillin, all this Beveridge "equality" talk could only mean one of two things.
It might mean divvying inadequate amounts of penicillin equally between dying civilians and dying soldiers - when Tories felt the most vital hope of penicillin was that it would help maintain current front line troop levels without the need to "call up" middle class men (their voters) now at home engaged in war work.
Or it might mean diverting the cost of one additional Lancaster squadron (three million pounds) away from the all-out bombing of civilian Germany , towards creating more penicillin factories on the successful Glaxo model.
Glaxo had taken up space in bits of idle factories and by using local cheap and plentiful unskilled labour,( aka women) , had cheaply but efficiently produced a lot of penicillin with current low technology methods and equipment.
(Basically making penicillin as if it was a milk product , using the very abundant modern dairy equipment existing everywhere thanks to the 1920s civilized world's mania over pure milk.)
A lot of similar factories could be quickly brought up to speed, supplying a good deal of penicillin, without requiring too much vital material like stainless steel, already in desperately short supply.
If all this sounds very familiar, that is because this solution is what Britain in the end was forced to do - but very late and only under intense public pressure.
If it had been done wholeheartedly in the Fall of 1942, there would have been no highly public late 1944 civilian penicillin famine crisis.
But the Conservative bits and bob of the Coalition Government wanted no part of equality and penicillin was just the first of many counterattacks against the threat of Beveridge.
They were unsuccessful in the extreme, blowing what had to seem to them (and to Labour !), a sure electoral victory at war's end.
"Unfair distribution of a vital commodity in short supply" , to quote The Times (of all people !) referencing an earlier debate over Hugh Dalton's fuel rationing proposals , was totally anathema to the British public.
In June 1945, what little polling type information we have suggests it was the unfair rationing of medical services that moved people to Labour .
The most current example of that unfair medical rationing had to be rationing difficulties with life saving penicillin.
Let me repeat that : "life saving". This was not just temporary unfairness in allocating housing or clothing : this was the unfair allocation of life itself.
You can't get a more "vital commodity" than life itself : to switch from the specialized language of the economist to that of the political scientist trying to account for a surprise pattern of vote changing, "life" is a very salient issue.
If so, the unexpected and total defeat of Churchill's Tories in June 1945 can be seen as having its origins in the Fall of 1942, when the Ministry of Supply (and Howard Florey) successfully re-defined the shortage of penicillin (contra Beveridge), as a shortage of military penicillin, civilians be damned.....
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Howard Florey saw potential enemies everywhere, but with "friends" like A N Richards and Robert Coghill, he hardly need bother looking any further
Howard Florey's correspondence twice notes that he has just received a higher yielding strain of penicillium from America.
The first, in November 1941 ,was obtained from Dr Rake at Squibb - a higher producing mutant from Fleming's original strain.
The second time in November 1943, some un-named strains were obtained from Robert Coghill of the NRRL , while he was visiting Oxford .
But in the two crucial years in between ?
I see bugger all evidence that Florey got the latest improvements in penicillium strains as they emerged at Peoria. (Prove me wrong, please) .
The mycologists at the NRRL research centre in Peoria had steadily improved and improved and improved again Rake's variant and their final version, NRRL 1249.B21 produced - via surface cultivation - most of the world's wartime penicillin until quite late in the war.
At that point, submerged strain NRRL 832, from a non-Fleming strain first found in Belgium, took over.
I believe that Merck's chief consultant and OSRD medical chief ( giant conflict of interest alert !) A N Richards, supposedly Florey's second closest American friend, using as an excuse that America was now at war, deliberately held back the giving these improved strains to Florey.
All to further America's ( sorry ! Merck's) post-war commercial opportunities.
Nicolas Rasmussen, in his article "Of 'Small Men', Big Science and Bigger Business", looks much closer than most historians at the day to day workings of the medical wing of the famous OSRD.
He points to several examples where Richards authorizes the further spending of taxpayers' money, supposedly only for war weapons, on drug research that no longer had an obvious military use, because he claimed that keeping American's edge in their development would definitely benefit the nation.
If not in this war, or any war, how would the drug's successful development benefit a nation at war - supposedly the sole purpose of the OSRD, whose mandate was set up to expire the moment peace was declared ?
Richards doesn't say.
So let me suggest a more sinister purpose , because Rasmussen does not.
I note that the two examples that Rasmussen gives where the OSRD spends taxpayers money on projects that no longer seemed to have a military need were pet projects of Merck, the firm that Richards advised.
The first was the chemical synthesis work on penicillin , carried on well past the point (say June 1944) when biological penicillin was being produced en masse and cheaply.
The other was after mid 1943, when it was clear that cortisone would not help pilots fly higher longer - an important advantage for any nation's air force if proven so.
Merck got nothing for all the money it spent on synthetic penicillin but its finally successful efforts on cortisone was and is one of its biggest successes for both its scientific reputation and its pocketbook (the two of course being closely related).
First success with Cortisone would be an advantage to America as well as Merck, over European (Swiss) competitors --- but synthetic penicillin's success could only have come by crushing fellow American firm Pfizer and given the field to Merck.
How then would that serve America's interests, rather than merely Merck's?
Because Europe wasn't even in the running on biological penicillin in 1944.
Perhaps Richards, already a pensioner when he took on the job of heading the OSRD medical wing and with the rigidity of old age, still believed synthetic penicillin would better Pfizer's penicillin in price and yield.
Then Merck would beat their only European synthetic penicillin rival : Florey !
Normally, Vannevar Bush's OSRD - as in denying the British to atomic energy research - did a better job of using taxpayers' military-assigned money to screw America's European Allies' commercial chances after the war , without favouring any one American firm.
Richard's willingness to screw Pfizer and even his friend Florey, shows just how much further he was prepared to go to aid Merck.
But he needed pliant helpers to succeed.
Luckily for him, the NRRL's Robert Coghill seemed to have had a hard time accepting that research paid for by his employer , the US Department of Agriculture and ultimately the American public, belonged to the USDA.
And that this research shouldn't only go where a different agency's chief bureaucrat, A N Richards, wanted it to go - though he hadn't paid for it and had no statutory (legal) control over it.
However , I see Coghill, a misplaced chemist running a biological program, wanted in so badly on a "technically sweet" chemical problem (the synthesis of penicillin) that he sold out the farmers he had sworn to help.
Synthetic penicillin would only negate the ready market for hundreds of thousands of tons of farm waste corn steep liquor, farm waste whey and farm waste crude brown sugar, all used in the natural fermentation of penicillin and other antibiotics coming along in the pipeline.
Coghill did publicly announce that he was giving the top two commercial strains of penicillium (presumably NRRL 1249.B21 and 832) to the entire world in November 1943, about the same time as Florey first mentions having them.
Why ?
I can only suspect because they were about to become obsolete, as synthetic penicillin seemed only months away.
By April 1944, that no longer seemed so and Coghill was back on the side of the biological angels, publicly praising Pfizer's biological penicillin and modestly claiming a role in their success.
Coghill's talents seemed rather wasted in democratic America - I can see him as the ultimate bureaucratic survivor in Stalin's Russia, adroitly changing sides as the situation shifted, moment by moment.....
The first, in November 1941 ,was obtained from Dr Rake at Squibb - a higher producing mutant from Fleming's original strain.
The second time in November 1943, some un-named strains were obtained from Robert Coghill of the NRRL , while he was visiting Oxford .
But in the two crucial years in between ?
I see bugger all evidence that Florey got the latest improvements in penicillium strains as they emerged at Peoria. (Prove me wrong, please) .
The mycologists at the NRRL research centre in Peoria had steadily improved and improved and improved again Rake's variant and their final version, NRRL 1249.B21 produced - via surface cultivation - most of the world's wartime penicillin until quite late in the war.
At that point, submerged strain NRRL 832, from a non-Fleming strain first found in Belgium, took over.
I believe that Merck's chief consultant and OSRD medical chief ( giant conflict of interest alert !) A N Richards, supposedly Florey's second closest American friend, using as an excuse that America was now at war, deliberately held back the giving these improved strains to Florey.
All to further America's ( sorry ! Merck's) post-war commercial opportunities.
Nicolas Rasmussen, in his article "Of 'Small Men', Big Science and Bigger Business", looks much closer than most historians at the day to day workings of the medical wing of the famous OSRD.
He points to several examples where Richards authorizes the further spending of taxpayers' money, supposedly only for war weapons, on drug research that no longer had an obvious military use, because he claimed that keeping American's edge in their development would definitely benefit the nation.
If not in this war, or any war, how would the drug's successful development benefit a nation at war - supposedly the sole purpose of the OSRD, whose mandate was set up to expire the moment peace was declared ?
Richards doesn't say.
So let me suggest a more sinister purpose , because Rasmussen does not.
I note that the two examples that Rasmussen gives where the OSRD spends taxpayers money on projects that no longer seemed to have a military need were pet projects of Merck, the firm that Richards advised.
The first was the chemical synthesis work on penicillin , carried on well past the point (say June 1944) when biological penicillin was being produced en masse and cheaply.
The other was after mid 1943, when it was clear that cortisone would not help pilots fly higher longer - an important advantage for any nation's air force if proven so.
Merck got nothing for all the money it spent on synthetic penicillin but its finally successful efforts on cortisone was and is one of its biggest successes for both its scientific reputation and its pocketbook (the two of course being closely related).
First success with Cortisone would be an advantage to America as well as Merck, over European (Swiss) competitors --- but synthetic penicillin's success could only have come by crushing fellow American firm Pfizer and given the field to Merck.
How then would that serve America's interests, rather than merely Merck's?
Because Europe wasn't even in the running on biological penicillin in 1944.
Perhaps Richards, already a pensioner when he took on the job of heading the OSRD medical wing and with the rigidity of old age, still believed synthetic penicillin would better Pfizer's penicillin in price and yield.
Then Merck would beat their only European synthetic penicillin rival : Florey !
Normally, Vannevar Bush's OSRD - as in denying the British to atomic energy research - did a better job of using taxpayers' military-assigned money to screw America's European Allies' commercial chances after the war , without favouring any one American firm.
Richard's willingness to screw Pfizer and even his friend Florey, shows just how much further he was prepared to go to aid Merck.
But he needed pliant helpers to succeed.
Luckily for him, the NRRL's Robert Coghill seemed to have had a hard time accepting that research paid for by his employer , the US Department of Agriculture and ultimately the American public, belonged to the USDA.
And that this research shouldn't only go where a different agency's chief bureaucrat, A N Richards, wanted it to go - though he hadn't paid for it and had no statutory (legal) control over it.
However , I see Coghill, a misplaced chemist running a biological program, wanted in so badly on a "technically sweet" chemical problem (the synthesis of penicillin) that he sold out the farmers he had sworn to help.
Synthetic penicillin would only negate the ready market for hundreds of thousands of tons of farm waste corn steep liquor, farm waste whey and farm waste crude brown sugar, all used in the natural fermentation of penicillin and other antibiotics coming along in the pipeline.
Coghill did publicly announce that he was giving the top two commercial strains of penicillium (presumably NRRL 1249.B21 and 832) to the entire world in November 1943, about the same time as Florey first mentions having them.
Why ?
I can only suspect because they were about to become obsolete, as synthetic penicillin seemed only months away.
By April 1944, that no longer seemed so and Coghill was back on the side of the biological angels, publicly praising Pfizer's biological penicillin and modestly claiming a role in their success.
Coghill's talents seemed rather wasted in democratic America - I can see him as the ultimate bureaucratic survivor in Stalin's Russia, adroitly changing sides as the situation shifted, moment by moment.....
Friday, February 8, 2013
two is a coincidence, three is a pattern : the OSRD on the weak and the strong
It is a commonplace to note that Vannevar Bush's wartime agency the OSRD, the biggest of Washington's many wartime scientific bureaucracies, favoured the strongest companies and the strongest universities.
Coincidence, say many.
But the fact that the OSRD, the strongest companies and the strongest universities all ganged up together to deny penicillin to America's weakest of the weakest seems more than a long stream of coincidences : it betrays a pattern......
Coincidence, say many.
But the fact that the OSRD, the strongest companies and the strongest universities all ganged up together to deny penicillin to America's weakest of the weakest seems more than a long stream of coincidences : it betrays a pattern......
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
OSRD /1942: did Manhattan Project type thinking bleed over and obstruct the Penicillin Project as well ?
It is crystal clear that Merck's top scientific advisor A N Richards was never a strong advocate for fast-paced penicillin development within Merck, as that drug company casually messed about with penicillin, from November 1939 till August 1941.
That is, Merck had 18 months of some sort of commercial and scientific activity around penicillin , before Howard Florey actually arrived on the scene.
But Florey eventually made Richards a strong convert to the idea of having Richards' military medical weapon oriented agency , the famous OSRD , use penicillin for secret military advantage over the Axis.
It is not clear that this would have extended - in practise - to denying penicillin to dying Axis POWs.
But keeping penicillin a secret from the Axis definitely would have denied penicillin to dying Allied POWs behind Axis lines : something that all of Florey's, Richards' and Fleming's present day defenders universally ignore.
Very much to his credit then that WWI vet and WWII military officer and doctor Robert Pulvertaft did dis-obey orders and shared the secrets of penicillin production with Axis-friendly Turkish doctors.
But imagining a Canadian dying of sulfa-resistant blood poisoning in a German POW camp and the Canadian POWs being told by the German doctor, 'we could save him , if only we had a bit of this Allied-invented penicillin that we've been hearing rumours of'.
When the Canadians ask why doesn't the doctor get some, the doctor says that if the Allies won't even share penicillin with their own dying civilians, how can they be expected to share it with the enemy ?
But could penicillin have really ever have been a potentially secret and successful medical weapon ?
Here I , following closely on Henry Dawson's thinking, definitely part company with Florey and his friend Richards.
Henry Dawson demonstrated - in just five weeks - and under conditions as fully primitive as Fleming's, that one could quickly make a lot of crude penicillin that was non-toxic when injected into humans.
If Fleming and Dawson could do so, (quickly, easily and cheaply, ) so too could the fired up Nazi war machine.
Not so, said Florey -and his side kick Richards.
The scientific characteristics of penicillin haven't changed at all since September 1928, but now , thanks to Florey, the scientific rhetoric totally had.
Florey tells his readers and listeners, to ignore completely what Fleming-the-author says is "penicillin".
To wit, 'a mixture of about two dozen unknown compounds in a slurry of water that is non-toxic even if injected in very large volumes internally, and yet has marked anti-bacterial affects'.
In my revision of the facts, says Florey in his first August 1940 article, "penicillin" is now actually just one of those compounds.
All the rest and all that water are just dirty, dank and dangerous.
Only if penicillin is first pure, dry and stable is it any good.
Because where it is really good , is in the front lines as a local antiseptic for open war wounds (here I do still agree with Fleming) ---- and that idea won't work if crude liquid penicillin must kept viable in portable electric refrigerators.
Who ever has heard of such things ?
But as Florey tells Richards how complex and difficult the purification process is, Richards grows despondent again, but never the less this information does go into the back of Richards brain.
Only to re-emerge in early 1942, when the forces of war censorship and secrecy can be employed in full bloom.
Because complex and expensive separation and purification processes had become very much a two-edged sword for American military science and industry.
Artificial rubber was vital to the war effort - it was easy to make but a real bugger to separate the good rubber from the bad.
Dried blood products held real promise at the front lines - but only if their separation wasn't so complex.
And the Atomic Bomb - a piece of cake to make it work - if only we could get enough pure U-235 separated.
At some point early in 1942, these problems suddenly became military and commercial opportunities in the minds of the OSRD's highest officers.
If only rich, un-bombed America could solve these complex purification problems - and then keep the details secret - this would give them a big military advantage over their poorer enemy opponents.
And give America a post-war commercial advantage as well over its smaller poorer Allied friends like Britain.
So just as we see an abrupt turn around , in mid 1942 , from the OSRD re sharing much atomic information with the British, we start to see the British also get less information from the OSRD about penicillin research as well.
Like synthetic rubber, synthetic quinine, dried blood products and U-235, the very expensive complexity of pure penicillin suddenly made it more, not less ,of an attraction to the military weapon-oriented OSRD.
The key was to keep secret from the American voters and taxpayers just how many miracle cures were happening with the current - relatively impure -penicillin.
Because if they knew that, the newspapers would be filled with it and the Germans and Japanese would hear about it via Neutral nation reporting.
They they too would also start curing their base hospital wounded with crude semi-purified penicillin ,largely negating the military advantage of fully dry stable pure penicillin.
But was there really ever an absolute need for dry stable penicillin to use it in the front lines ?
Poppycock !
Because it turned out that good old crude liquid blood was actually much better than the complex dried stuff at saving soldiers' lives and could just as easily be used even in combat : good old fashioned low tech American ingenuity (not from the OSRD high tech boys of course) came to the rescue.
Cheap, rugged, disposable, parachute-portable plywood ice boxes kept blood and penicillin cold, with refills of ice every couple of days........
That is, Merck had 18 months of some sort of commercial and scientific activity around penicillin , before Howard Florey actually arrived on the scene.
But Florey eventually made Richards a strong convert to the idea of having Richards' military medical weapon oriented agency , the famous OSRD , use penicillin for secret military advantage over the Axis.
It is not clear that this would have extended - in practise - to denying penicillin to dying Axis POWs.
But keeping penicillin a secret from the Axis definitely would have denied penicillin to dying Allied POWs behind Axis lines : something that all of Florey's, Richards' and Fleming's present day defenders universally ignore.
Very much to his credit then that WWI vet and WWII military officer and doctor Robert Pulvertaft did dis-obey orders and shared the secrets of penicillin production with Axis-friendly Turkish doctors.
But imagining a Canadian dying of sulfa-resistant blood poisoning in a German POW camp and the Canadian POWs being told by the German doctor, 'we could save him , if only we had a bit of this Allied-invented penicillin that we've been hearing rumours of'.
When the Canadians ask why doesn't the doctor get some, the doctor says that if the Allies won't even share penicillin with their own dying civilians, how can they be expected to share it with the enemy ?
But could penicillin have really ever have been a potentially secret and successful medical weapon ?
Here I , following closely on Henry Dawson's thinking, definitely part company with Florey and his friend Richards.
Henry Dawson demonstrated - in just five weeks - and under conditions as fully primitive as Fleming's, that one could quickly make a lot of crude penicillin that was non-toxic when injected into humans.
If Fleming and Dawson could do so, (quickly, easily and cheaply, ) so too could the fired up Nazi war machine.
Not so, said Florey -and his side kick Richards.
The scientific characteristics of penicillin haven't changed at all since September 1928, but now , thanks to Florey, the scientific rhetoric totally had.
Florey tells his readers and listeners, to ignore completely what Fleming-the-author says is "penicillin".
To wit, 'a mixture of about two dozen unknown compounds in a slurry of water that is non-toxic even if injected in very large volumes internally, and yet has marked anti-bacterial affects'.
In my revision of the facts, says Florey in his first August 1940 article, "penicillin" is now actually just one of those compounds.
All the rest and all that water are just dirty, dank and dangerous.
Only if penicillin is first pure, dry and stable is it any good.
Because where it is really good , is in the front lines as a local antiseptic for open war wounds (here I do still agree with Fleming) ---- and that idea won't work if crude liquid penicillin must kept viable in portable electric refrigerators.
Who ever has heard of such things ?
But as Florey tells Richards how complex and difficult the purification process is, Richards grows despondent again, but never the less this information does go into the back of Richards brain.
Only to re-emerge in early 1942, when the forces of war censorship and secrecy can be employed in full bloom.
Because complex and expensive separation and purification processes had become very much a two-edged sword for American military science and industry.
Artificial rubber was vital to the war effort - it was easy to make but a real bugger to separate the good rubber from the bad.
Dried blood products held real promise at the front lines - but only if their separation wasn't so complex.
And the Atomic Bomb - a piece of cake to make it work - if only we could get enough pure U-235 separated.
At some point early in 1942, these problems suddenly became military and commercial opportunities in the minds of the OSRD's highest officers.
If only rich, un-bombed America could solve these complex purification problems - and then keep the details secret - this would give them a big military advantage over their poorer enemy opponents.
And give America a post-war commercial advantage as well over its smaller poorer Allied friends like Britain.
So just as we see an abrupt turn around , in mid 1942 , from the OSRD re sharing much atomic information with the British, we start to see the British also get less information from the OSRD about penicillin research as well.
Like synthetic rubber, synthetic quinine, dried blood products and U-235, the very expensive complexity of pure penicillin suddenly made it more, not less ,of an attraction to the military weapon-oriented OSRD.
The key was to keep secret from the American voters and taxpayers just how many miracle cures were happening with the current - relatively impure -penicillin.
Because if they knew that, the newspapers would be filled with it and the Germans and Japanese would hear about it via Neutral nation reporting.
They they too would also start curing their base hospital wounded with crude semi-purified penicillin ,largely negating the military advantage of fully dry stable pure penicillin.
But was there really ever an absolute need for dry stable penicillin to use it in the front lines ?
Poppycock !
Because it turned out that good old crude liquid blood was actually much better than the complex dried stuff at saving soldiers' lives and could just as easily be used even in combat : good old fashioned low tech American ingenuity (not from the OSRD high tech boys of course) came to the rescue.
Cheap, rugged, disposable, parachute-portable plywood ice boxes kept blood and penicillin cold, with refills of ice every couple of days........
Penicillin in wartime: an alphabet soup of organizations passing the buck then hogging the credit
I am still not fully recovered from the disaster of my first public talk on wartime penicillin before Dalhousie University's Medical History Society.
I was given a very generous amount of time by the Society's Jock Murray and Allan Marble to state my case but it didn't help : my choice for a title slide in my powerpoint presentation simply covered far too big a subject and left me no 'on the spot' wiggle room.
" Wartime Penicillin : from secret 'war weapon' to widely publicized 'beacon of hope' " is not a topic line easy to compress.
(Though last night's blog entry on the Janus Month of March 1943 would have been a good attempt at compression.)
Within a minute or two into the talk, I felt like crawling into a hole and disappearing forever --- I could see by the faces of the audience that I was giving far too much unknown information far too quickly.
Any two or three of my powerpoint slides, from the forty two I had actually come with, could have formed the basis of an interesting talk and a lively amount of discussion afterwards.
Eight and a half years of research has finally made me more or less comfortable with the vast array of sound-alike organizations involved in wartime penicillin, and their activities are just as important as the individual stories of individuals like Fleming, Florey and Dawson.
But trying to establish what the OSRD and OPRD were in the first place, even before trying to show how much at odds these two similar sounding government agencies really were on penicillin is a month's work - not a small part of a 40 minute talk.
It is entirely my fault - because the night before the lecture I had noticed that even a well known expert on the history of wartime penicillin (name omitted !) still managed to badly confuse the two in an major article in a digitalized book I found on the internet.
And when a printed work is digitalized and put on the internet, an error is forever and eternity --- and visible to all, worldwide.
That is why my penicillin work will remain electronically fluid on this blog and in website e-books.
My errors of fact and interpretation (and I expect and even hope to make many) will be instantly correctable as new information comes to light or savvy readers spot errors and typos.)
And another thing about individuals and institutions when Cinderella unexpectedly turns into the Queen of the Ball.
After passing the buck for years, they now suddenly tack hard right and start clawing each other to take all the credit .
Sorting who actually did what when, not what they claimed ,after the war ,in expensive official histories, that they did, is itself a work of many lifetimes...
I was given a very generous amount of time by the Society's Jock Murray and Allan Marble to state my case but it didn't help : my choice for a title slide in my powerpoint presentation simply covered far too big a subject and left me no 'on the spot' wiggle room.
" Wartime Penicillin : from secret 'war weapon' to widely publicized 'beacon of hope' " is not a topic line easy to compress.
(Though last night's blog entry on the Janus Month of March 1943 would have been a good attempt at compression.)
Within a minute or two into the talk, I felt like crawling into a hole and disappearing forever --- I could see by the faces of the audience that I was giving far too much unknown information far too quickly.
Any two or three of my powerpoint slides, from the forty two I had actually come with, could have formed the basis of an interesting talk and a lively amount of discussion afterwards.
Eight and a half years of research has finally made me more or less comfortable with the vast array of sound-alike organizations involved in wartime penicillin, and their activities are just as important as the individual stories of individuals like Fleming, Florey and Dawson.
But trying to establish what the OSRD and OPRD were in the first place, even before trying to show how much at odds these two similar sounding government agencies really were on penicillin is a month's work - not a small part of a 40 minute talk.
It is entirely my fault - because the night before the lecture I had noticed that even a well known expert on the history of wartime penicillin (name omitted !) still managed to badly confuse the two in an major article in a digitalized book I found on the internet.
And when a printed work is digitalized and put on the internet, an error is forever and eternity --- and visible to all, worldwide.
That is why my penicillin work will remain electronically fluid on this blog and in website e-books.
My errors of fact and interpretation (and I expect and even hope to make many) will be instantly correctable as new information comes to light or savvy readers spot errors and typos.)
And another thing about individuals and institutions when Cinderella unexpectedly turns into the Queen of the Ball.
After passing the buck for years, they now suddenly tack hard right and start clawing each other to take all the credit .
Sorting who actually did what when, not what they claimed ,after the war ,in expensive official histories, that they did, is itself a work of many lifetimes...
Tuesday, February 5, 2013
America LOSES WWII : because of quarrels between government agencies, such as over Penicillin
The above headline sounds bizarre to our ears, because we are used to only hearing it being used as the standard explanation given as to why Japan and Germany lost the (largely technical and scientific) world war against the Allies.
After all, both of these nations had talented and committed cadres of scientists and engineers but endless feuding between various sub sections of the government seriously diluted the impact they might have had on the war, if only they had worked together.
In Japan the Army and Navy Departments frequently seemed more at war with each other, than with America.
In the case of Germany, each of the senior figures in the Nazi hierarchy commanded a lot of semi-independent resources and each Nazi war lord seemed to spend as much time trying to grow at the expense of their political bureaucratic rivals, as in uniting against the common enemy.
But Vannevar Bush chooses, in the foreword to his famous "ENDLESS FRONTIER", not to see any serious conflicts in the American and Allied scientific and technical effort.
And we believe him - the historians (grateful for the steady diet of research grants to peacetime academics that he is credited with having created) above all .
And after all his side won ----- shouldn't that alone silence all potential criticism ?
Still, in this particular foreword, he chooses to blow his particular agency's horn very very carefully indeed, when it comes to penicillin.
So for once, it is not his own OSRD that he credits with seeing that "our grievously wounded men" got penicillin in time : he says it was "the government" that did the bang up job of co-ordinating the research and development that speeded penicillin up to the front.
For a very conservative Republican ,like Bush, to be praising "the government" is truly a startling sight. He more usually carefully distinguishes agencies like his own highly conservative OSRD from the left wing agencies filled with New Dealers, such as the WPB's own OPRD.
But what could he do ?
For his own right wing OSRD agency chose to take the totally wrong turn on the way to moving penicillin to the D-Day beaches and delivered not one tiny sliver of its vaunted synthetic penicillin to our troops or anyone else : not on June 6th 1944 and in fact, not ever.
It was left to the left wingers in the OPRD to get literally tons of penicillin to the Allied side, between the time they first took up the cause in September 1943 and the end of the war.
They did this not merely by the unimportant but useful work they did on the production side - for by statute this was their job, just as the OSRD's job was not production but research - but by also doing the OSRD's job , in an area of research that the OSRD choose to seriously neglect.
That was the OSRD-neglected research in studying ways to up the very front end of the penicillin process : upping the initial biological yield of penicillin.
Biology : horrors ! Just saying that word in front of Bush and the OSRD was like waving a garlic-infused cross at a vampire.
So we must credit the left wing OPRD with starting the research that resulted in that biological yield ( ie , yield before extraction) now being 2500 times as productive as it was in 1943 when the OSRD threw up its hands at the problem.
Just as the quarrelling Japanese Army and Navy did on radar, the two warring branches of Bush's "the government" , the OSRD and OPRD , came to a fork in the road on penicillin and instead of uniting to find a way to use the least resources to solve the problem, they disagreed and pursued independent courses.
Bush's Orwellian use of words like "the government" or "the nation" or "the Allies" ,to explain who won the war , allows him to dissolve any internal conflicts those huge collectivities might have encountered in very slowly moving their overwhelming larger populations into defeating much smaller and very resource-strapped enemies.
So historians mustn't simply accept Bush's Orwellian arguments on blind faith but instead carefully ask , if the nation or government "did" this or that , did that mean that all the nation/government do this or that or did just parts of it do while other parts disagreed, stood around doing nothing or even held things up ?
After all, on the evidence of their own internal memos, the OSRD not merely failed to produce the penicillin that saved our "grievously wounded", they also had no intention of wasting penicillin on anyone who couldn't aid the war effort on recovery, if they didn't have to.
That meant no wasting penicillin, if they had to choose, on those so severely wounded that if they did make a recovery, it would be to discharge and a permanent disability pension.
And it meant, that if they had to chose between saving a boy dying of endocarditis and instantly curing a boy GI of VD so he could quickly return (to perhaps die) on the Italian frontlines, they'd won't help the endocarditis case, because his disease-weakened heart would not let him do much for the war effort, even if he did recover.
So, if the only thing I ever do in my life is to destroy the OSRD's reputation for furthering penicillin when what they actually did was hold it up and then conspire to use it for truly wicked eugenic ends, I will consider my life well lived....
After all, both of these nations had talented and committed cadres of scientists and engineers but endless feuding between various sub sections of the government seriously diluted the impact they might have had on the war, if only they had worked together.
In Japan the Army and Navy Departments frequently seemed more at war with each other, than with America.
In the case of Germany, each of the senior figures in the Nazi hierarchy commanded a lot of semi-independent resources and each Nazi war lord seemed to spend as much time trying to grow at the expense of their political bureaucratic rivals, as in uniting against the common enemy.
But Vannevar Bush chooses, in the foreword to his famous "ENDLESS FRONTIER", not to see any serious conflicts in the American and Allied scientific and technical effort.
And we believe him - the historians (grateful for the steady diet of research grants to peacetime academics that he is credited with having created) above all .
And after all his side won ----- shouldn't that alone silence all potential criticism ?
Still, in this particular foreword, he chooses to blow his particular agency's horn very very carefully indeed, when it comes to penicillin.
So for once, it is not his own OSRD that he credits with seeing that "our grievously wounded men" got penicillin in time : he says it was "the government" that did the bang up job of co-ordinating the research and development that speeded penicillin up to the front.
For a very conservative Republican ,like Bush, to be praising "the government" is truly a startling sight. He more usually carefully distinguishes agencies like his own highly conservative OSRD from the left wing agencies filled with New Dealers, such as the WPB's own OPRD.
But what could he do ?
For his own right wing OSRD agency chose to take the totally wrong turn on the way to moving penicillin to the D-Day beaches and delivered not one tiny sliver of its vaunted synthetic penicillin to our troops or anyone else : not on June 6th 1944 and in fact, not ever.
It was left to the left wingers in the OPRD to get literally tons of penicillin to the Allied side, between the time they first took up the cause in September 1943 and the end of the war.
They did this not merely by the unimportant but useful work they did on the production side - for by statute this was their job, just as the OSRD's job was not production but research - but by also doing the OSRD's job , in an area of research that the OSRD choose to seriously neglect.
That was the OSRD-neglected research in studying ways to up the very front end of the penicillin process : upping the initial biological yield of penicillin.
Biology : horrors ! Just saying that word in front of Bush and the OSRD was like waving a garlic-infused cross at a vampire.
So we must credit the left wing OPRD with starting the research that resulted in that biological yield ( ie , yield before extraction) now being 2500 times as productive as it was in 1943 when the OSRD threw up its hands at the problem.
Just as the quarrelling Japanese Army and Navy did on radar, the two warring branches of Bush's "the government" , the OSRD and OPRD , came to a fork in the road on penicillin and instead of uniting to find a way to use the least resources to solve the problem, they disagreed and pursued independent courses.
Bush's Orwellian use of words like "the government" or "the nation" or "the Allies" ,to explain who won the war , allows him to dissolve any internal conflicts those huge collectivities might have encountered in very slowly moving their overwhelming larger populations into defeating much smaller and very resource-strapped enemies.
So historians mustn't simply accept Bush's Orwellian arguments on blind faith but instead carefully ask , if the nation or government "did" this or that , did that mean that all the nation/government do this or that or did just parts of it do while other parts disagreed, stood around doing nothing or even held things up ?
After all, on the evidence of their own internal memos, the OSRD not merely failed to produce the penicillin that saved our "grievously wounded", they also had no intention of wasting penicillin on anyone who couldn't aid the war effort on recovery, if they didn't have to.
That meant no wasting penicillin, if they had to choose, on those so severely wounded that if they did make a recovery, it would be to discharge and a permanent disability pension.
And it meant, that if they had to chose between saving a boy dying of endocarditis and instantly curing a boy GI of VD so he could quickly return (to perhaps die) on the Italian frontlines, they'd won't help the endocarditis case, because his disease-weakened heart would not let him do much for the war effort, even if he did recover.
So, if the only thing I ever do in my life is to destroy the OSRD's reputation for furthering penicillin when what they actually did was hold it up and then conspire to use it for truly wicked eugenic ends, I will consider my life well lived....
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Fleming never saved Churchill, but Gladys Hobby saved Florey's sister when his own penicillin couldn't !
Howard Florey was never more sleazy than in his dealings with Henry Dawson's team, as he desperately fought to restore the family name that his father dis-honored, by trying to remain the sole "hero" of wartime penicillin.
Just try to imagine what an university ethics committee today might say about a professor using his main rival's unpublished paper, sent to him in secret by his close friend (the same government official who censored his rival's paper and forbade its release) to improve his own work that is about to be allowed to be freely published !
That is what full Professor Howard Florey and university vice president and full Professor A N Richards actually did to associate professor chemist Professor Karl Meyer of Dawson's team , in mid 1942.
(As they say, tenure is 'red in tooth and claw'.)
The multi-hatted Professor A Newton Richards was a Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the medical wing of the OSRD , chief consultant to Merck and one of Howard Florey's best friends.
Like Mayor Rob Ford, he also never met a conflict of interest he could resist.
(By contrast, when Norman Heatley met Meyer in January 1942, Heatley recorded that Meyer was willing to send his data to Florey, but Heatley boldly told his boss (Florey) he (Heatley) won't because it didn't seem right, not if Florey was about to publish and Meyer was forbidden to.)
However, Professor Richards was of a very different moral character and saw nothing wrong in sending Professor Meyer's embargoed chemical work on the structure of penicillin to his main academic rival, Professor Florey.
By contrast, Dawson bent over backwards to try and find a source of penicillin for Florey (even at places like Pfizer - a place Florey determinedly didn't want to visit), totally unaware of Florey's well known reputation in the UK for being an academic bush whacker and a magpie of other people's hard work.
Florey's real (if totally private) reason to come to America in 1941, was mainly to establish that he and Merck, not Dawson and Pfizer, was the real leader in the hunt for viable penicillin.
By late 1942, Florey felt sure that the dying Dawson and Pfizer (having joined Merck's cartel) was out of the race.
Sweet indeed then, when in August 1944, a sullen Howard Florey had to stand politely beside Dawson team member Gladys Hobby as she showed him the natural penicillin poring off the Pfizer lines, while Merck and Florey's team at Oxford had totally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for the D Day beaches.
Florey had spurned both Pfizer and Glaxo, yet it was they who delivered most of the penicillin that landed on the Normandy beaches that day --- "the stone the builders rejected" indeed.
Asa series of letters in the Royal Society Archive reveal, in December 1952, Florey had to eat yet more humble pie, first begging and then thanking Hobby for sending her own latest antibiotic off to save the life of his sister (Hilda Gardner) in Australia when his own penicillin wouldn't work....
Just try to imagine what an university ethics committee today might say about a professor using his main rival's unpublished paper, sent to him in secret by his close friend (the same government official who censored his rival's paper and forbade its release) to improve his own work that is about to be allowed to be freely published !
That is what full Professor Howard Florey and university vice president and full Professor A N Richards actually did to associate professor chemist Professor Karl Meyer of Dawson's team , in mid 1942.
(As they say, tenure is 'red in tooth and claw'.)
The multi-hatted Professor A Newton Richards was a Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the medical wing of the OSRD , chief consultant to Merck and one of Howard Florey's best friends.
Like Mayor Rob Ford, he also never met a conflict of interest he could resist.
(By contrast, when Norman Heatley met Meyer in January 1942, Heatley recorded that Meyer was willing to send his data to Florey, but Heatley boldly told his boss (Florey) he (Heatley) won't because it didn't seem right, not if Florey was about to publish and Meyer was forbidden to.)
However, Professor Richards was of a very different moral character and saw nothing wrong in sending Professor Meyer's embargoed chemical work on the structure of penicillin to his main academic rival, Professor Florey.
By contrast, Dawson bent over backwards to try and find a source of penicillin for Florey (even at places like Pfizer - a place Florey determinedly didn't want to visit), totally unaware of Florey's well known reputation in the UK for being an academic bush whacker and a magpie of other people's hard work.
Florey's real (if totally private) reason to come to America in 1941, was mainly to establish that he and Merck, not Dawson and Pfizer, was the real leader in the hunt for viable penicillin.
By late 1942, Florey felt sure that the dying Dawson and Pfizer (having joined Merck's cartel) was out of the race.
Sweet indeed then, when in August 1944, a sullen Howard Florey had to stand politely beside Dawson team member Gladys Hobby as she showed him the natural penicillin poring off the Pfizer lines, while Merck and Florey's team at Oxford had totally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for the D Day beaches.
Florey had spurned both Pfizer and Glaxo, yet it was they who delivered most of the penicillin that landed on the Normandy beaches that day --- "the stone the builders rejected" indeed.
Gladys Hobby saves Howard Florey's own sister -- when he couldn't
Asa series of letters in the Royal Society Archive reveal, in December 1952, Florey had to eat yet more humble pie, first begging and then thanking Hobby for sending her own latest antibiotic off to save the life of his sister (Hilda Gardner) in Australia when his own penicillin wouldn't work....
Monday, January 28, 2013
How wartime penicillin's American miracle cures were censored - and why
From early in 1942, American medical journal editors and authors joined scientific journal editors and authors already being "self censored".
Like them, they were asked (virtually required) to submit all articles they were uncertain about, to a NAS/NRC advisory for vetting before printing or submitting.
Supposedly the NAS medical sub-committee was only censored the chemistry of penicillin , but in fact this wasn't consistently imposed until March 1943,when it fell in line with the UK's more legally formal move in this direction.
Between January 1942 till late in 1943, this system's real ambition was to successfully keep every "miracle cure" by penicillin out of medical and scientific media - and thus, by reverse osmosis, out of the daily press.
If the American public didn't hear about this miracle drug, then the chemistry-savvy Germans won't either ---- at least not before D-Day, or so the thought went.
I think the key for this method's success was that the OSRD/CMR/COC controlled (a) all the significant new strains and all the new information on how to make penicillin in mass qualities, (b) controlled all supplies of the resulting therapeutic penicillin (c) and as well was busy dangling $500 million in high-overhead contracts to cash and equipment starved university administrators.
So it could successfully tell the university researchers, commercial penicillin firms and the medical accredited investigators, peep one word and no more penicillin/ penicillin information/ cash.
Informally, the OSRD/CMR/COC tried to fend off all requests for stories on this rumoured new wonder drug from non-science journalists, who they had no hold over.
Science journalists - hello William l Laurence ! - were already totally self-embedded in this self censorship. (Color me surprised ...)
General reporters also read popular science stories for possible leads, so with none coming forth on penicillin, they actually made very few such requests.
Of course when a *Hearst* *city desk editor* got a *Pulitzer* for *spot news reporting* for saving the life of a baby with the miracle cure penicillin (and modestly reporting the story as well) , all that changed.
(I always thought the real miracle was the Pulitzer Committee giving a prize to a Hearst paper, the arch enemy of George Pulitzer. That and a city desk editor breaking a Pulitzer-worthy foot leather news story without ever leaving his desk (or phone.)
But what I am not sure of , was Byron Price ever asked by the OSRD/CMR's Dr A.N. Richards to amend his codebooks to ask editors to avoid any any mention of penicillin.
I have a request on this out to a real expert on the American experience with self censorship in WWII....
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
James Baxter's Pulitzer Prize winning nonsense about wartime penicillin
As part of OSRD's campaign to spin its considerable successes and many failures, William College president and historian James Phinney Baxter III was hired in mid war (1943) to assemble a bewitching mixture of hitherto-secret facts and sheer blarney, called "Scientists Against Time".
It sure fooled the 1947 Pulitzer Committee, but it shouldn't continue to fool us.
In mid 1943, reports of the consistent creation of crystal pure penicillin began to came in from various laboratories - the final necessary difficult perquisite to beginning the 'easy' chemical synthesis of penicillin.
In what appeared to be a very astute move (at the time!), the OSRD moved to hand off the Congressional blame for the wasting tens of millions of 1940s taxpayers dollars on a failed expansion of biological penicillin production to an inferior Washington bureaucratical competitor (the War Production Board's OPRD).
The OSRD wanted to focus on garnering in all the certain glory coming to the Washington agency that was seen as funding and running the program that led to the synthesis of cheap and abundant artificial penicillin.
But the OSRD lost its gamble.
Instead it was the lowly OPRD that won, in a highly dramatic and timely fashion just in time for D-Day, while high-and-mighty OSRD had to eat millions of taxpayers' dollars spent generating not one nickel of therapeutic synthetic penicillin.
Baxter's job, in the chapter devoted to the OSRD's penicillin efforts, was to spin these awkward facts otherwise.
He was helped by the failure of the underfunded OPRD not to have the money needed to pay for its own tame house historian.
Baxter's job was to convert the biological success of the latecomers OPRD into being just a minor part of the final success of the long time efforts of OSRD-funded chemists to "purify" penicillin.
He sought to tie together the "chemical" ( his words - page 342 of his book) success of in natural penicillin production) as somehow coming out of the 16 years wasted on the "chemical" synthesis of the antibiotic.
The chemical "Purification" of the "crude" mixture of biological penicillin and its biological impurities was to provide that intellectual bridge.
But in fact, the body could care less about purification - it does worry about toxicity, but regards neutral fillers and water as largely irrelevant.
Quite rightly, it only regards the absolute amounts of biological activity (measured in "Units") of soluble penicillin as being important to cure an infection.
It cares not at all about their original relative degree of dryness (concentration), the amount of neutral bulk filler that comes bundled with them, or the amount of water that penicillin comes dissolved in.
After all, the human body is between 50% to 75% water and it quickly dilutes all drugs to incredibly small concentrations.
Now just to remind readers, one gram of water (mass) is one cc (cm3) of water (cubic area) is one ml (volume) --- and a gram of penicillium juice holding 3% of dissolved solids isn't going to fundamentally change this formula much.
James Duhig got 400 to 800 units of biological activity from each one litre flask (containing 200 grams of penicillin liquid) that he grew in his Brisbane lab in 1943-1944, using the exact same strain of penicillium and the exact same low level of technology that Alexander Fleming had in 1928.
That is he got 2 to 4 units per ml/cc/ gm of penicillium medium, the exact same as Fleming got way back in the Fall of 1928.
Basically Duhig and Fleming got about one microgram of active penicillin per gram of water : one part per million, one ppm.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that is not much of a ratio of useful to useless !
But even when Fleming diluted that 1 ppm in a lot more sterile water - down to the level of one part per billion -, a tiny drop of extremely diluted stuff could still kill deadly bacteria.
But Duhig didn't dilute his stuff any further. Instead he chilled his penicillin liquid, only running it through a filter to remove solid solids.
It still contained its 3% of soluble solids "impurities", along with its 97% pure water. It was still as 'crude' as the day it was born.
Then Dr Duhig injected that liquid straight into a woman's blood stream in 300 to 600 gram amounts (aka 300 to 600 ml/cc of solution). (A thousand or two units of biological activity per injection.)
And incredibly (considering that today we would use millions not thousands of units per injection) Duhig's crude penicillin pulled a dying woman almost literally out of her grave.
He finally did in remote Queensland Australia in 1943 what Alexander Fleming in 1928 London - and every single doctor in the world after him - criminally failed to do : use the original penicillin , entirely untouched by the hands of the chemists, to save lives.
But it is another Australian-born doctor, Howard Florey (originally from Adelaide) now operating out of Oxford University, who scientists and historians (including our Dr Baxter) give all the credit for making Fleming's crude "novelty-only" penicillin into a refined/purified life saver, in a famous experiment in May 1940.
But does he - and this famous "mouse" experiment - deserve that credit?
By Florey's own words, he doesn't think so.
Its all there in Florey's second penicillin article, "Further Observations on Penicillin" ,LANCET, August 1941.
(This incredibly detailed article should have been sufficient, in and of itself, for any competent hospital or multinational drug company anywhere in the world of WWII to make life saving penicillin --- provided they could get their hands on Fleming's strain of penicillium, or one like it.)
In this article, Florey does indicate that his March 1941 human therapeutic penicillin has 40 units per mg of powder (page 178).
But on the next page (page 179) he clearly indicates that the powder used in the May 1940 mouse experiment probably had less than 1/10 the biological activity of the current human therapeutic penicillin.
So that powder had 2 to 4 units per mg , compared to the 2 to 4 units per gram of original crude fluid.
That is , we have gone from having penicillin consisting of about one part per million of liquid to consisting one part per thousand of dry powder.
Since all the water is gone, what is in the other 999 parts of that milligram ? Yep, its the same 3% of soluble biological impurities that were in the original crude watery mixture of Fleming.
Florey has not purified his penicillin at all, merely concentrated it (that is merely removed its water ; we make orange or milk powder from their watery originals in the same way, by evaporation).
My essential point is that Fleming's 1928 mixture of natural penicillin and biological impurities was safe to inject, with or without its sterile water being removed.
(And remember, Florey had to put water back into his powder to get it into his patients ; if it was to go in as a slow IV drip, it could be as diluted as it was in the original brew, before all that expensive concentrating.)
That concentration process took not just an awful lot of human energy to perform ; it also destroyed two thirds of the available penicillin.
Concentrated penicillin didn't save more patients ; criminally it actually saved two thirds less.
By late 1942 - early 1943, biological improvements in growing penicillin now gave us raw penicillin brew that gave 40 units per cc of liquid.
The Russians, logically enough, felt there was no need to waste human energy and expensive scarce equipment merely to destroy two thirds of this life-saving liquid, just so they could falsely claim to "purify" it, aka 'concentrate' it.
The other Allies might well have followed their example and then we would have had no mid-war penicillin famine.
Life saving did not require purified penicillin - in fact, the wartime purification of penicillin tended to reduce the amount of penicillin of penicillin available for the dying in figures varying from two thirds to infinity.
Yes infinity : in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was - briefly - the world's largest penicillin producer.
Incredibly, in the middle of a bloody war, none of that penicillin went to save human lives. It all went to the Glaxo chemists to destroy, trying to get it to go into crystal so they could synthesis it, analogue it and profitably patent it.
Purification, inessential to life-saving, was crucial to the efforts to synthesis penicillin.
Enough penicillin to save millions would have come years earlier if universities and drug companies had released their chemists to the Draft Boards and hired mycologists instead.
But Baxter doesn't play it that way.
Florey had merely evaporated Fleming's penicillin and had thus obtained penicillin that was relatively 1000 times stronger than Fleming.
However, in absolute terms of therapeutic penicillin per flask of penicillin brew, it was actually three times less strong (and remember our bodies and their germs only care about absolute amounts, not relative amounts.)
But Baxter (who wasn't at the experiment) deliberately ignores Florey's own words (and Florey was at the experiment) to confidently and falsely claim that the mouse experiment penicillin was 3% pure.
Actually it was .3% pure , as Florey himself admitted in 1941,the same as Fleming's 1928 crude mixture.
Fleming deserves a lot of credit for making penicillin available - but also a lot of blame as well, when he failed to confirm his failed micro experiment on the possible systemic use of his crude penicillin - by trying it again on a variety of animals and humans.
Florey, similarly, deserved much credit for pushing penicillin to the front of scientific attention - but also a lot of blame for his obsessive need to put make purified crystal penicillin for chemical synthesis.
Worse, he mis-used his scientific authority to actively brow-beated many other decent doctors into stopping their production of "good enough" penicillin, merely to try to save lives in the middle of a savage war.
If they saved lives with crude penicillin, he saw his sole claim to scientific fame disappearing.
Florey readily admitted that he wasn't the first to discover penicillin (Fleming) and tried not to admit that he was not the first to put it into a patient (Dawson) ,but he wanted very much to claim that he was the first to purify it, so it could be injected into humans.
Duhig would dismiss that claim.
As would Dawson, who was at great pains (in his May 1941 article on penicillin) to publicly emphasize that his first human injections were taken from crude, concentrated "not purified, yet non-toxic" penicillin.
And so should have Dr Baxter......
It sure fooled the 1947 Pulitzer Committee, but it shouldn't continue to fool us.
In mid 1943, reports of the consistent creation of crystal pure penicillin began to came in from various laboratories - the final necessary difficult perquisite to beginning the 'easy' chemical synthesis of penicillin.
In what appeared to be a very astute move (at the time!), the OSRD moved to hand off the Congressional blame for the wasting tens of millions of 1940s taxpayers dollars on a failed expansion of biological penicillin production to an inferior Washington bureaucratical competitor (the War Production Board's OPRD).
The OSRD wanted to focus on garnering in all the certain glory coming to the Washington agency that was seen as funding and running the program that led to the synthesis of cheap and abundant artificial penicillin.
But the OSRD lost its gamble.
Instead it was the lowly OPRD that won, in a highly dramatic and timely fashion just in time for D-Day, while high-and-mighty OSRD had to eat millions of taxpayers' dollars spent generating not one nickel of therapeutic synthetic penicillin.
Baxter's job, in the chapter devoted to the OSRD's penicillin efforts, was to spin these awkward facts otherwise.
He was helped by the failure of the underfunded OPRD not to have the money needed to pay for its own tame house historian.
Baxter's job was to convert the biological success of the latecomers OPRD into being just a minor part of the final success of the long time efforts of OSRD-funded chemists to "purify" penicillin.
He sought to tie together the "chemical" ( his words - page 342 of his book) success of in natural penicillin production) as somehow coming out of the 16 years wasted on the "chemical" synthesis of the antibiotic.
The chemical "Purification" of the "crude" mixture of biological penicillin and its biological impurities was to provide that intellectual bridge.
But in fact, the body could care less about purification - it does worry about toxicity, but regards neutral fillers and water as largely irrelevant.
Quite rightly, it only regards the absolute amounts of biological activity (measured in "Units") of soluble penicillin as being important to cure an infection.
It cares not at all about their original relative degree of dryness (concentration), the amount of neutral bulk filler that comes bundled with them, or the amount of water that penicillin comes dissolved in.
After all, the human body is between 50% to 75% water and it quickly dilutes all drugs to incredibly small concentrations.
Now just to remind readers, one gram of water (mass) is one cc (cm3) of water (cubic area) is one ml (volume) --- and a gram of penicillium juice holding 3% of dissolved solids isn't going to fundamentally change this formula much.
James Duhig got 400 to 800 units of biological activity from each one litre flask (containing 200 grams of penicillin liquid) that he grew in his Brisbane lab in 1943-1944, using the exact same strain of penicillium and the exact same low level of technology that Alexander Fleming had in 1928.
That is he got 2 to 4 units per ml/cc/ gm of penicillium medium, the exact same as Fleming got way back in the Fall of 1928.
Basically Duhig and Fleming got about one microgram of active penicillin per gram of water : one part per million, one ppm.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that is not much of a ratio of useful to useless !
But even when Fleming diluted that 1 ppm in a lot more sterile water - down to the level of one part per billion -, a tiny drop of extremely diluted stuff could still kill deadly bacteria.
But Duhig didn't dilute his stuff any further. Instead he chilled his penicillin liquid, only running it through a filter to remove solid solids.
It still contained its 3% of soluble solids "impurities", along with its 97% pure water. It was still as 'crude' as the day it was born.
Then Dr Duhig injected that liquid straight into a woman's blood stream in 300 to 600 gram amounts (aka 300 to 600 ml/cc of solution). (A thousand or two units of biological activity per injection.)
And incredibly (considering that today we would use millions not thousands of units per injection) Duhig's crude penicillin pulled a dying woman almost literally out of her grave.
He finally did in remote Queensland Australia in 1943 what Alexander Fleming in 1928 London - and every single doctor in the world after him - criminally failed to do : use the original penicillin , entirely untouched by the hands of the chemists, to save lives.
But it is another Australian-born doctor, Howard Florey (originally from Adelaide) now operating out of Oxford University, who scientists and historians (including our Dr Baxter) give all the credit for making Fleming's crude "novelty-only" penicillin into a refined/purified life saver, in a famous experiment in May 1940.
But does he - and this famous "mouse" experiment - deserve that credit?
By Florey's own words, he doesn't think so.
And incredibly, Baxter had Florey's actual words in front of him, when he wrote his own account just after the war's end.
Its all there in Florey's second penicillin article, "Further Observations on Penicillin" ,LANCET, August 1941.
(This incredibly detailed article should have been sufficient, in and of itself, for any competent hospital or multinational drug company anywhere in the world of WWII to make life saving penicillin --- provided they could get their hands on Fleming's strain of penicillium, or one like it.)
In this article, Florey does indicate that his March 1941 human therapeutic penicillin has 40 units per mg of powder (page 178).
But on the next page (page 179) he clearly indicates that the powder used in the May 1940 mouse experiment probably had less than 1/10 the biological activity of the current human therapeutic penicillin.
So that powder had 2 to 4 units per mg , compared to the 2 to 4 units per gram of original crude fluid.
That is , we have gone from having penicillin consisting of about one part per million of liquid to consisting one part per thousand of dry powder.
Since all the water is gone, what is in the other 999 parts of that milligram ? Yep, its the same 3% of soluble biological impurities that were in the original crude watery mixture of Fleming.
Florey has not purified his penicillin at all, merely concentrated it (that is merely removed its water ; we make orange or milk powder from their watery originals in the same way, by evaporation).
My essential point is that Fleming's 1928 mixture of natural penicillin and biological impurities was safe to inject, with or without its sterile water being removed.
(And remember, Florey had to put water back into his powder to get it into his patients ; if it was to go in as a slow IV drip, it could be as diluted as it was in the original brew, before all that expensive concentrating.)
That concentration process took not just an awful lot of human energy to perform ; it also destroyed two thirds of the available penicillin.
Concentrated penicillin didn't save more patients ; criminally it actually saved two thirds less.
By late 1942 - early 1943, biological improvements in growing penicillin now gave us raw penicillin brew that gave 40 units per cc of liquid.
The Russians, logically enough, felt there was no need to waste human energy and expensive scarce equipment merely to destroy two thirds of this life-saving liquid, just so they could falsely claim to "purify" it, aka 'concentrate' it.
The other Allies might well have followed their example and then we would have had no mid-war penicillin famine.
Life saving did not require purified penicillin - in fact, the wartime purification of penicillin tended to reduce the amount of penicillin of penicillin available for the dying in figures varying from two thirds to infinity.
Yes infinity : in the Spring of 1943 Glaxo was - briefly - the world's largest penicillin producer.
Incredibly, in the middle of a bloody war, none of that penicillin went to save human lives. It all went to the Glaxo chemists to destroy, trying to get it to go into crystal so they could synthesis it, analogue it and profitably patent it.
Purification, inessential to life-saving, was crucial to the efforts to synthesis penicillin.
Enough penicillin to save millions would have come years earlier if universities and drug companies had released their chemists to the Draft Boards and hired mycologists instead.
But Baxter doesn't play it that way.
Florey had merely evaporated Fleming's penicillin and had thus obtained penicillin that was relatively 1000 times stronger than Fleming.
However, in absolute terms of therapeutic penicillin per flask of penicillin brew, it was actually three times less strong (and remember our bodies and their germs only care about absolute amounts, not relative amounts.)
But Baxter (who wasn't at the experiment) deliberately ignores Florey's own words (and Florey was at the experiment) to confidently and falsely claim that the mouse experiment penicillin was 3% pure.
Actually it was .3% pure , as Florey himself admitted in 1941,the same as Fleming's 1928 crude mixture.
Fleming deserves a lot of credit for making penicillin available - but also a lot of blame as well, when he failed to confirm his failed micro experiment on the possible systemic use of his crude penicillin - by trying it again on a variety of animals and humans.
Florey, similarly, deserved much credit for pushing penicillin to the front of scientific attention - but also a lot of blame for his obsessive need to put make purified crystal penicillin for chemical synthesis.
Worse, he mis-used his scientific authority to actively brow-beated many other decent doctors into stopping their production of "good enough" penicillin, merely to try to save lives in the middle of a savage war.
If they saved lives with crude penicillin, he saw his sole claim to scientific fame disappearing.
Florey readily admitted that he wasn't the first to discover penicillin (Fleming) and tried not to admit that he was not the first to put it into a patient (Dawson) ,but he wanted very much to claim that he was the first to purify it, so it could be injected into humans.
Duhig would dismiss that claim.
As would Dawson, who was at great pains (in his May 1941 article on penicillin) to publicly emphasize that his first human injections were taken from crude, concentrated "not purified, yet non-toxic" penicillin.
And so should have Dr Baxter......
Monday, January 21, 2013
Who am I ? asks a very famous bright yellow powder from WWII
 |
| OK, Manhattan : Who am I ???? |
(b) Oddly enough, it is exactly the same for me.
(a) Some of my most important developments happened on Manhattan island, with strong Canadian involvement --- I think that was all about the word "Hope".
(b) Wow ! Me ditto,ditto,ditto !
(a) The international visual symbol for me is characters in dense black type on a bright yellow background.
(b) That's me too .
(a) A large sample of Americans (men mostly) voted me the top news story of the 20th century for the Newseum.
(b) A large sample of Americans (women mostly) also voted me the top news story of the century for the Newseum.
(a) A little boy is the dramatic climax of my story.
(b) Strange, a baby girl is the dramatic climax of my story as well.
(a) Much of my story happened on a campus at Columbia university and involved Columbia university professors.
(b) So did my story !
(a) I was top secret through most of WWII and I was regarded as one of the best Allied military weapons of the war.
(b) What can I say : ditto ditto .
(a) I am regarded as one of the top scientific discoveries to come out of WWII.
(a) Yeah ? Well so am I .
(a) I was a big project for the OSRD, who spent a fortune on me, until another government agency took me over : but the bosses at the OSRD still kept their hand in.
(b) The OSRD spent quite a bundle on me too - still kept doing so, even after I was taken over by another government agency.
(a) Oh yeah, well I was so important that I was flown all over the world in big bombers.
(b) Bet you weren't flown about as much as me in big bombers.
(a) I was a big deal in Britain : they even act like they invented me.
(b), Oh boy, don't I know that feeling.
(a) The British chemical giant, ICL looked for a while like it would be running me but Vannevar Bush of the OSRD soon stopped that.
(b) And that goes for me too.
(a) In my natural state, I hardly seem to exist, consisting of less than 1% of the natural mix.
(b) I know the feeling, too, actually being much less than 1% of the natural mix.
(a) Well I am so similar to others in the mix, at least in conventional chemical terms, that its a life's work to separate me from them.
(b) That's what all the chemists say about me - usually with a very deep sigh.
(a) I won't work at all, unless I am separated from my natural mix and am about 88% pure.
(b) Now there we finally do differ : because I still work perfectly well even if I am only one part in million of the original natural mix.
(a) There was (and is) a tremendous moral row over whether I should have been built at all but none whatsoever about all the money and effort spent on separating me from my natural mix.
(b) Odd, because while there is no debate at all about whether I should have been built, there is a serious moral debate underway about whether so much scarce wartime energy and resources should have been spent on separating me from my natural mix.
(a) I am considered one of the biggest killing machines in history.
(b) Boy or girl, do we ever part company there : I am one of the smallest lifesavers ever, and one of the best too.
Can you answer this puzzler ?
(a) and (b) So, dear reader : Who am I ? Who am I ?
Answer : (a) the U-235 in the Little Boy Bomb (b) an early vial of Penicillin, who baby Patty Malone and teenagerAnne Shirley Carter helped make an overnight world sensation in August-September 1943 .....
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Florey quickly flees the biology of NRRL Peoria for the chemical comforts of Merck
Howard Florey probably spent no more than a few hours of his whole life in the labs of the NRRL at Peoria, Illinois where most of the fruitful work that gave us the antibiotics revolution was actually done.
Within hours, he had dumped his sidekick Norman Heatley there to toil on the rural farmer-like task of growing penicillin, because Florey preferred much more the urban chemistry-oriented approach of firms like Merck and Squibb and ICL.
Florey after all had wanted to be part of the then most glamorous part of science( chemistry) and only took up medicine as the easiest way for an Australian to get employment in scientific research (as a medical "doctor" , he hated dealing with patients and in fact, hated dealing with people in general.)
He remained a chemist-manque all his life.
Hence why he avoided doing any hands-on research at NRRL Peoria on increasing the biological yield of penicillin .
He much preferred the chemical synthesis approach of Merck and of its chief scientific consultant, A N Richards, new head of the war medicine section of the war weapon research organization, the OSRD....
Within hours, he had dumped his sidekick Norman Heatley there to toil on the rural farmer-like task of growing penicillin, because Florey preferred much more the urban chemistry-oriented approach of firms like Merck and Squibb and ICL.
Florey was no country hick and disdained 'farming' penicillin
Florey after all had wanted to be part of the then most glamorous part of science( chemistry) and only took up medicine as the easiest way for an Australian to get employment in scientific research (as a medical "doctor" , he hated dealing with patients and in fact, hated dealing with people in general.)
He remained a chemist-manque all his life.
Hence why he avoided doing any hands-on research at NRRL Peoria on increasing the biological yield of penicillin .
He much preferred the chemical synthesis approach of Merck and of its chief scientific consultant, A N Richards, new head of the war medicine section of the war weapon research organization, the OSRD....
Did Merck consultant A N Richards diss penicillin during the first two years of the war?
Read any "Pollyanna" history of wartime penicillin and you quickly garner the impression that wartime Washington's top medical research bureaucrat, AN Richards of the famous OSRD organization, first learned of penicillin when his former student Howard Florey dropped by in the Fall of 1941.
In my opinion : "Bullfeathers" !
Richards was the key outside consultant for Merck and had been so since 1931 , so key that he acted more like a trusted insider, rather than playing the traditional role of an external naysayer brought in to correct too much internal group-think.
Since November 1939, a full two years before Richards is traditionally described as first getting involved in "this 'ere pen-E- cil-in stuff", Merck had been working fitfully on trying to learn the structure of public domain natural penicillin with the hope its chemists could produce patentable, profitable "look alike" analogues.
Memo had flown back and forth and committee and board meetings had been called and minutes written.
Hard to believe that Richards the pharmaceutical expert consultant was not consulted formally and informally - ever - during those two years of internal Merck debate on the merits of seriously spending money on synthesizing penicillin.
But the silence from Merck and Richards on just what Richards said to Merck about the potential of penicillin between November 1939 and August 1941 is deafening.
It isn't at all like Richards or Merck to modestly not to claim credit for their early prescience on penicillin.
In fact Merck brass went to enormous length to do just so in the major article "Wartime Industrial Development of Penicillin in the United States", written and researched in the late 1970s (with exclusive access to secret Merck archives) by company senior executiveW H Helfand.
Mysteriously, Richards name is totally absent during this article's discussion of the two years of Merck debate about penicillin, before Florey arrives at Richards' doorstep in Philadelphia.
However Helfand's article quotes Merck executive Osgood Perkins recalling that despite a memo "from so-called experts urging Merck not to waste time on it", in 1940 the company top brass decided to grow penicillin with the aim of isolating its active ingredient.
Now Osgood Perkins was a famous actor of that era but he never worked for Merck.
However the equally famous Wall Street lawyer George W Perkins did - in fact he was the brother-in-law of the company president George W Merck and served as chief operating officer for several decades, including the war years.
(And like his brother in law, Perkins worked at the top of America's highly secret germ warfare program when America formally went to war but still kept a close eye on his company.)
But the quote is from Lennard Bickel's book on Howard Florey, Rise up to Life, and in it, Bickel says he quotes Merck executive Osgood Nichols (also referenced as Osgood Nicholls by Bickel) in conversation with AN Richards in the early 1960s.
(Osgood Nichols probably saw the memos while researching "By Their Fruits" , a book about Merck and Waksman.)
Now I have determined that Bickel did screw up names (but only slightly) in his book, so I feel certain we are looking at Nichols, not Perkins, for the source of this quote.
Richards is silent to Osgood as to who the so called experts might be (and surely he would know) but rushes to defend Florey.
Just exactly how Helfard screws all this so badly is hard to ken.
I suspect that those "so-called experts" included both the much honored Richards and the equally much-honored Columbia university medical researcher, Nobel prize winner and long time Merck consultant Dickinson Richards.
Dickinson worked literally next door to Henry Dawson, who did the most work on penicillin in North America between 1940 and 1941.
So this Dr Richards (no relation to AN Richards) saw the world's then most extensive penicillin efforts (microbiological production, chemical research and clinical efforts with the seriously ill) close up and personal every day.
Thus his opinion on penicillin , as a Merck medical consultant since 1935, between 1940 to 1941 had to be valuable to Merck - but what was it ?
I suspect one of the "the so-called experts" who dissed penicillin was Dickinson Richards.
Why ? Because Helfand does not mention Merck offering to help Dickinson Richards' floor mate Dawson in his penicillin efforts in this very long article tasked with detailing everything and anything positive that Merck had done on penicillin before Florey arrived.
(But we do know what a third outside consultant to Merck said about penicillin because Helfand does quote him extensively.)
Soon to be Nobel Prize winner Selman Waksman is recorded as being strongly in favour of working up penicillin.
I believe that Helfand's job in this article was to recall all the good news and elide any bad news on Merck and penicillin 1939-1941 and he did his job rather well.
I think it would have rather spoiled the seamless panty lines of the traditional "Pollyanna" version of wartime penicillin served up by academic historians, to have revealed that AN Richards knew all about Merck's dilatory efforts with penicillin for two years but did little to speed it along. (And may have even of dissed it.)
Much better is to say that as soon as Florey first told Richards about the wondrous penicillin, Richards leaps into patriotic action to help Britain (cue The Special Relationship) and soon the world has penicillin oozing out of its pores....
In my opinion : "Bullfeathers" !
Richards was the key outside consultant for Merck and had been so since 1931 , so key that he acted more like a trusted insider, rather than playing the traditional role of an external naysayer brought in to correct too much internal group-think.
Since November 1939, a full two years before Richards is traditionally described as first getting involved in "this 'ere pen-E- cil-in stuff", Merck had been working fitfully on trying to learn the structure of public domain natural penicillin with the hope its chemists could produce patentable, profitable "look alike" analogues.
Memo had flown back and forth and committee and board meetings had been called and minutes written.
Hard to believe that Richards the pharmaceutical expert consultant was not consulted formally and informally - ever - during those two years of internal Merck debate on the merits of seriously spending money on synthesizing penicillin.
But the silence from Merck and Richards on just what Richards said to Merck about the potential of penicillin between November 1939 and August 1941 is deafening.
It isn't at all like Richards or Merck to modestly not to claim credit for their early prescience on penicillin.
In fact Merck brass went to enormous length to do just so in the major article "Wartime Industrial Development of Penicillin in the United States", written and researched in the late 1970s (with exclusive access to secret Merck archives) by company senior executiveW H Helfand.
Mysteriously, Richards name is totally absent during this article's discussion of the two years of Merck debate about penicillin, before Florey arrives at Richards' doorstep in Philadelphia.
However Helfand's article quotes Merck executive Osgood Perkins recalling that despite a memo "from so-called experts urging Merck not to waste time on it", in 1940 the company top brass decided to grow penicillin with the aim of isolating its active ingredient.
Now Osgood Perkins was a famous actor of that era but he never worked for Merck.
However the equally famous Wall Street lawyer George W Perkins did - in fact he was the brother-in-law of the company president George W Merck and served as chief operating officer for several decades, including the war years.
(And like his brother in law, Perkins worked at the top of America's highly secret germ warfare program when America formally went to war but still kept a close eye on his company.)
But the quote is from Lennard Bickel's book on Howard Florey, Rise up to Life, and in it, Bickel says he quotes Merck executive Osgood Nichols (also referenced as Osgood Nicholls by Bickel) in conversation with AN Richards in the early 1960s.
(Osgood Nichols probably saw the memos while researching "By Their Fruits" , a book about Merck and Waksman.)
Now I have determined that Bickel did screw up names (but only slightly) in his book, so I feel certain we are looking at Nichols, not Perkins, for the source of this quote.
Richards is silent to Osgood as to who the so called experts might be (and surely he would know) but rushes to defend Florey.
Just exactly how Helfard screws all this so badly is hard to ken.
I suspect that those "so-called experts" included both the much honored Richards and the equally much-honored Columbia university medical researcher, Nobel prize winner and long time Merck consultant Dickinson Richards.
Dickinson worked literally next door to Henry Dawson, who did the most work on penicillin in North America between 1940 and 1941.
So this Dr Richards (no relation to AN Richards) saw the world's then most extensive penicillin efforts (microbiological production, chemical research and clinical efforts with the seriously ill) close up and personal every day.
Thus his opinion on penicillin , as a Merck medical consultant since 1935, between 1940 to 1941 had to be valuable to Merck - but what was it ?
I suspect one of the "the so-called experts" who dissed penicillin was Dickinson Richards.
Why ? Because Helfand does not mention Merck offering to help Dickinson Richards' floor mate Dawson in his penicillin efforts in this very long article tasked with detailing everything and anything positive that Merck had done on penicillin before Florey arrived.
(But we do know what a third outside consultant to Merck said about penicillin because Helfand does quote him extensively.)
Soon to be Nobel Prize winner Selman Waksman is recorded as being strongly in favour of working up penicillin.
I believe that Helfand's job in this article was to recall all the good news and elide any bad news on Merck and penicillin 1939-1941 and he did his job rather well.
I think it would have rather spoiled the seamless panty lines of the traditional "Pollyanna" version of wartime penicillin served up by academic historians, to have revealed that AN Richards knew all about Merck's dilatory efforts with penicillin for two years but did little to speed it along. (And may have even of dissed it.)
Much better is to say that as soon as Florey first told Richards about the wondrous penicillin, Richards leaps into patriotic action to help Britain (cue The Special Relationship) and soon the world has penicillin oozing out of its pores....
Friday, January 18, 2013
Merck has credible excuses for being beaten on D-Day penicillin by Pfizer - but none whatsoever for being crushed by Commercial Solvent
Merck, the OSRD, Florey's Oxford team (all part of the synthetic penicillin obsession) continue to have many defenders among academia.
Yes, one academic excuse goes, yes Merck failed to deliver much penicillin to the D-Day beaches - that was left to Pfizer, which had been a major partner of Merck and Squibb in the three year long effort to produce commercial amounts of penicillin.
But, the excuse went, Pfizer had 20 years of highly successful fermentation experience before late 1941and the commercial penicillin project's beginnings.
But how then to explain the huge success of Commercial Solvents in producing medical grade penicillin from a cold start in January 1944 to levels twice that of Merck in just four months and then levels six or seven times higher than Merck in just three more months after that?
True, Commercial Solvent had 30 years of success in industrial grade fermentation in making bulk acetone but had never done anything even remote to pharmaceutical levels of purity and cleanliness.
But there it was - passing an increasingly demanding FDA testing requirements with its tens of billions of units of injectable penicillin.
Clearly, the supposedly-arcane craft could be learned fairly quickly, if a corporate culture demanded it.
Even Squibb redeemed itself by well beating Merck's output, by late 1944 .
Merck lost the race for one reason only : hubris.
It thought that since it had synthesized a few 300 molecular weight molecules that all 300 weight biological molecules were a piece of cake.
Tell that to penicillin with a weight of 334 and still not commercially synthesized.
Or tell it to quinine , molecular weight 324, and 200 years after Man-The-Almighty first started to synthesize it, still without a commercially viable synthesis technique at hand....
Yes, one academic excuse goes, yes Merck failed to deliver much penicillin to the D-Day beaches - that was left to Pfizer, which had been a major partner of Merck and Squibb in the three year long effort to produce commercial amounts of penicillin.
But, the excuse went, Pfizer had 20 years of highly successful fermentation experience before late 1941and the commercial penicillin project's beginnings.
But how then to explain the huge success of Commercial Solvents in producing medical grade penicillin from a cold start in January 1944 to levels twice that of Merck in just four months and then levels six or seven times higher than Merck in just three more months after that?
True, Commercial Solvent had 30 years of success in industrial grade fermentation in making bulk acetone but had never done anything even remote to pharmaceutical levels of purity and cleanliness.
But there it was - passing an increasingly demanding FDA testing requirements with its tens of billions of units of injectable penicillin.
Clearly, the supposedly-arcane craft could be learned fairly quickly, if a corporate culture demanded it.
Even Squibb redeemed itself by well beating Merck's output, by late 1944 .
Merck lost the race for one reason only : hubris.
It thought that since it had synthesized a few 300 molecular weight molecules that all 300 weight biological molecules were a piece of cake.
Tell that to penicillin with a weight of 334 and still not commercially synthesized.
Or tell it to quinine , molecular weight 324, and 200 years after Man-The-Almighty first started to synthesize it, still without a commercially viable synthesis technique at hand....
Saturday, January 12, 2013
The A-Bomb and synthetic penicillin were attractive war weapons, not because they were easy - but because they were hard
Shades of President Kennedy explaining his decision to push for an all-out effort to land men on the Moon before the end of the decade, "not because it was easy but because it was hard" !
"Hard" attracted lots of top (alpha male) scientists who could graceful forget about doing something boringly useful in this current war by focusing instead on daydreams of achieving eternal scientific glory.
The glory of building a new bomb that would fire-bomb entire cities just as good as existing fire bombs already were and the glory of artificially synthesizing an already existing - and already useful- natural substance.
"Hard" also meant that A-Bombs and synthetic penicillin would remain a dark secret to the enemy for at least a year or three, even after their first use at the front revealed their existence : this is the reason why the OSRD and their British equivalent were so interested in these "hard" projects....
"Hard" attracted lots of top (alpha male) scientists who could graceful forget about doing something boringly useful in this current war by focusing instead on daydreams of achieving eternal scientific glory.
The glory of building a new bomb that would fire-bomb entire cities just as good as existing fire bombs already were and the glory of artificially synthesizing an already existing - and already useful- natural substance.
"Hard" also meant that A-Bombs and synthetic penicillin would remain a dark secret to the enemy for at least a year or three, even after their first use at the front revealed their existence : this is the reason why the OSRD and their British equivalent were so interested in these "hard" projects....
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Like synthetic penicillin, the harder the A-Bomb was to make, the more attractive it was to the OSRD
Late in 1942, Britain's highest political, military and Intelligence leadership decided that the Atomic Bomb was almost certainly too difficult and too expensive for Hitler's Germany to produce during World War II ---- if only because it would take too many resources from more pressing necessities for the Nazi war machine.
But they decided not to tell the scientists who had only agreed to build an atomic bomb because that seemed the only way to stop the Germans from doing it first and using it first to win the war.
These British leaders had also come to the same conclusion about their own Atomic Bomb program taking too many scarce resources as well.
(Like the mostly emigre Jewish scientists pushing hardest to build an Allied A-Bomb, the British had been originally willing to commit all the needed resources and more, if it seemed that Germany might actually make The Bomb ---- and make it first.)
But if Germany couldn't pull it off in time to influence this war, it seemed reasonable to put the British program on the back burner , keeping Britain's hand in, but no more.
They didn't tell the atomic scientists this, but they told Washington.
But the moment the British signalled these joint -and obviously closely related- conclusions to America's leadership, a paradoxical response happened.
Washington's military-political-scientific elite had long been cool to seeing the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of this war and hence something worth diverting billions in scarce war resources towards.
Indeed that elite - centred in and around Vannevar Bush's OSRD war weapon agency - had even been skeptical The Bomb would become a weapon in any future war.
But now the possibility of an all-powerful strategic weapon so complex and expensive only the US could afford to build it and still play a full part in the current war made it an exceedingly attractive diplomatic weapon for what Washington saw as its new role as the world's new global policeman in the post war world.
America decided to share (and even there reluctantly) only information in areas of atomic bomb research that Britain and Canada were already equal scientific partners in.
Meanwhile America would command by force majeure all the vital Canadian resources crucial to making The Bomb, denying them both to Canada and Britain.
Canada's uranium wasn't vital, just useful, but its processing plants and expertise for making uranium oxide and heavy water were vital in the sense that replicating them might add nine months to the path to the first successful atomic blast, possibly taking it outside the timeline of the war.
(The OSRD was praying that the Germans and Japanese didn't surrender too fast, because then Congress would instantly stop spending billions on a merely possible atomic bomb.)
I have never accepted the conventional explanations as to why America suddenly pushed their atomic bomb program into high gear at the same time they cut out Britain from the originally-planned team effort.
But as I came to see how synthetic penicillin's very difficult nature made it more - not less - attractive as a secret war weapon to the OSRD, I began to see how the same could apply to the A-Bomb as well.
You see, cutting out Britain from A-Bomb research during the war would not make any sense at all, if Germany had a well developed A-Bomb effort.
Because at the end of the war, all the leading Allies would have an equal moral right to profit off of Germany's scientific treasures.
Britain and Russia would then learn - from the Germans - the 'devil in the details' knowledge to take the atomic bomb from university lab theory to successful factory production.
Believing that neither Britain and Germany would make an atomic bomb easily (let alone Russia, Japan, Italy and France) feed Washington's early-senility induced delusion that the atomic bomb secret really existed.
That 'secret' only existed for a short period - during the war itself - rather like the DDT secret.
Still, a useful period if it really was to be a war-ending weapon ( which no one in Washington believed) but useless if post-war secrecy was key to its success as a diplomatic weapon.
Poor old Washington and poor old London and poor old Berlin.
Always forced to fight a three front war.
Two minor fronts (against your darkest enemies) and then a major one ---- against your dearest friends......
But they decided not to tell the scientists who had only agreed to build an atomic bomb because that seemed the only way to stop the Germans from doing it first and using it first to win the war.
These British leaders had also come to the same conclusion about their own Atomic Bomb program taking too many scarce resources as well.
(Like the mostly emigre Jewish scientists pushing hardest to build an Allied A-Bomb, the British had been originally willing to commit all the needed resources and more, if it seemed that Germany might actually make The Bomb ---- and make it first.)
But if Germany couldn't pull it off in time to influence this war, it seemed reasonable to put the British program on the back burner , keeping Britain's hand in, but no more.
They didn't tell the atomic scientists this, but they told Washington.
But the moment the British signalled these joint -and obviously closely related- conclusions to America's leadership, a paradoxical response happened.
Washington's military-political-scientific elite had long been cool to seeing the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of this war and hence something worth diverting billions in scarce war resources towards.
Indeed that elite - centred in and around Vannevar Bush's OSRD war weapon agency - had even been skeptical The Bomb would become a weapon in any future war.
But now the possibility of an all-powerful strategic weapon so complex and expensive only the US could afford to build it and still play a full part in the current war made it an exceedingly attractive diplomatic weapon for what Washington saw as its new role as the world's new global policeman in the post war world.
America decided to share (and even there reluctantly) only information in areas of atomic bomb research that Britain and Canada were already equal scientific partners in.
Meanwhile America would command by force majeure all the vital Canadian resources crucial to making The Bomb, denying them both to Canada and Britain.
Canada's uranium wasn't vital, just useful, but its processing plants and expertise for making uranium oxide and heavy water were vital in the sense that replicating them might add nine months to the path to the first successful atomic blast, possibly taking it outside the timeline of the war.
(The OSRD was praying that the Germans and Japanese didn't surrender too fast, because then Congress would instantly stop spending billions on a merely possible atomic bomb.)
I have never accepted the conventional explanations as to why America suddenly pushed their atomic bomb program into high gear at the same time they cut out Britain from the originally-planned team effort.
Lessons from the attractiveness of difficult-to-synthesize penicillin
But as I came to see how synthetic penicillin's very difficult nature made it more - not less - attractive as a secret war weapon to the OSRD, I began to see how the same could apply to the A-Bomb as well.
You see, cutting out Britain from A-Bomb research during the war would not make any sense at all, if Germany had a well developed A-Bomb effort.
Because at the end of the war, all the leading Allies would have an equal moral right to profit off of Germany's scientific treasures.
Britain and Russia would then learn - from the Germans - the 'devil in the details' knowledge to take the atomic bomb from university lab theory to successful factory production.
Believing that neither Britain and Germany would make an atomic bomb easily (let alone Russia, Japan, Italy and France) feed Washington's early-senility induced delusion that the atomic bomb secret really existed.
That 'secret' only existed for a short period - during the war itself - rather like the DDT secret.
Still, a useful period if it really was to be a war-ending weapon ( which no one in Washington believed) but useless if post-war secrecy was key to its success as a diplomatic weapon.
Poor old Washington and poor old London and poor old Berlin.
Always forced to fight a three front war.
Two minor fronts (against your darkest enemies) and then a major one ---- against your dearest friends......
Friday, January 4, 2013
Penicillin : a bunch of biologists who put all their faith in chemistry vs two chemists who put all their faith in biology
In the Alice Through the Looking Glass world of wartime penicillin it should hardly be surprising that about the only strong supporters of natural ,biological, penicillin in the upper echelons of the overall enterprise were two professional chemists : Larry Elder of the American Office for Production Research and Development (the OPRD) and Harry Jephcott of the British drug company, Glaxo.
Or that the group most strongly bewitched by the thought of synthetic penicillin were a bunch of medical doctors with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming leading the charge (with the OSRD and MRC close behind): the sort of scientists who might have been thought would normally occupy a place at the biological end of hard science.....
Or that the group most strongly bewitched by the thought of synthetic penicillin were a bunch of medical doctors with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming leading the charge (with the OSRD and MRC close behind): the sort of scientists who might have been thought would normally occupy a place at the biological end of hard science.....
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)