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.....
Showing posts with label an richards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label an richards. Show all posts
Sunday, February 10, 2013
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........
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....
Saturday, January 19, 2013
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....
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Between Wartime Penicillin's initial failure ( Chemistry) and its final success (Biology) stood a third party : the humanitarians
When I call Henry Dawson "Penicillin's Third Man", I am being more than ordinarily facetious.
Penicilin's problem was chemistry-besotted biologists, the solution was biologically-pragmatic chemists and the connecting threat were a tiny group of humanitarian-minded clinicians.
I mean that penicillin's main problem was - dating from September 1928 - was that its initial (biological) investigators -names like Fleming,Florey and Richards spring to mind - tacitly accepted penicillium production levels of one microgram of penicillin per gram of medium as a given.
As a result, they sought - blinker-eyed - only one possible solution : the total chemical synthesis of penicillin.
By contrast, it was chemist Larry Elder who finally pushed mycologists into doing their jobs like people on a mission, not people politely going through the motions.
And it was Larry who sought out "farmer-minded" scientists from any and all fields to up penicillium yields the old-fashioned way, the way farmers had successfully done so with other species for thousands of years : trial and error selective breeding.
But before people like Larry could be called in on the file, the public in September 1943 had to be outraged, ("its been 15 years since penicillin was discovered and its still in desperately short supply !") and demanding that the authorities put new people on the job to finally start making this stuff - now - and in bulk.
The humanitarians like Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft, Rudy Schulinger , Frank Queen and Dante Colitti all pushed the civil and military powers to be to make penicillin available for all who are dying - now !
And when the purple-toned slash yellow press of Citizen Hearst picked up on their efforts, all the pieces fell into place.
In less than six months, the government of America was pulling a little bit of its money out from making nuclear bombs and germ warfare and towards saving lives and the job was done.
America - and soon the world - would be awash with cheap naturally-breed penicillium-made penicillin....
Penicilin's problem was chemistry-besotted biologists, the solution was biologically-pragmatic chemists and the connecting threat were a tiny group of humanitarian-minded clinicians.
I mean that penicillin's main problem was - dating from September 1928 - was that its initial (biological) investigators -names like Fleming,Florey and Richards spring to mind - tacitly accepted penicillium production levels of one microgram of penicillin per gram of medium as a given.
As a result, they sought - blinker-eyed - only one possible solution : the total chemical synthesis of penicillin.
By contrast, it was chemist Larry Elder who finally pushed mycologists into doing their jobs like people on a mission, not people politely going through the motions.
And it was Larry who sought out "farmer-minded" scientists from any and all fields to up penicillium yields the old-fashioned way, the way farmers had successfully done so with other species for thousands of years : trial and error selective breeding.
But before people like Larry could be called in on the file, the public in September 1943 had to be outraged, ("its been 15 years since penicillin was discovered and its still in desperately short supply !") and demanding that the authorities put new people on the job to finally start making this stuff - now - and in bulk.
Elder, Colitti, Queen, Hearst never get the credit they deserve
The humanitarians like Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft, Rudy Schulinger , Frank Queen and Dante Colitti all pushed the civil and military powers to be to make penicillin available for all who are dying - now !
And when the purple-toned slash yellow press of Citizen Hearst picked up on their efforts, all the pieces fell into place.
In less than six months, the government of America was pulling a little bit of its money out from making nuclear bombs and germ warfare and towards saving lives and the job was done.
America - and soon the world - would be awash with cheap naturally-breed penicillium-made penicillin....
Saturday, December 8, 2012
WWII : penicillin as punishment for self-inflicted wounds - or for saving lives ?
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| In WWII, they used PENICILLIN , instead.... |
Were the Allies to devote a limited amount of resources to producing just enough penicillin to use as a punishment in cases of self-inflicted wounds such as VD , as Florey and his mentor Dr AN Richards acquiesced in or advocated ?
Or were the Allies to devote resources to produce enough penicillin - not in spite of it being wartime, but particularly because it was wartime - to treat all people dying of disease (regardless of income, race or gender) as a highly popular and public example of the ethical nature of Allied War Aims, as advocated and practised by Henry Dawson ?
Penicillin only became popular among the military elite of Britain, Canada and America in 1943, when it became apparent that combat troops in the European Theatre, fearing the worst against the tough Germans, were deliberately infecting themselves with VD, in hopes of a two month treatment away from the upcoming invasion of Sicily.
Deliberately getting VD, by not using Army-provided free condoms was considered a Self-Inflicted Wound, SIW, and during WWI made a Capital Offense punishable by death by firing squad.
Even during the Second World War, it could mean being sent to the dreaded Glasshouse military prisons, where the policy was to inflict punishment so severe that potential death at the front was considered a better alternative.
Unfortunately from the senior officers' point of view, many still preferred the Glasshouse, so punishment for VD cases of SIW was considered counter-productive, as it led to severely deplete ranks among the combat elite forces who faced the highest chances of dying in the invasion of Sicily.
If these combat troops were out of action, other men's sons ( like their own) would simply be 'called up' in their place and so using penicillin as a punishment was wildly popular among the officer class in the rear echelons of wartime reality.
Rather than waste penicillin on saving the lives of men so seriously wounded they would never return to fight and who - if they survived - would simply become 'useless mouths' consuming medical resources and pension funds, divert the penicillin to rapidly curing non-fatal cases of gonorrhoea among the elite combat troops.
A two day cure ( with painful penicillin shots) and they'd be back in the Front.
Why bother to waste bullets on an Allied firing squad for the offense of SIW : why not let German combat bullets do the job instead ?
We must never forget that both sides practised the policy of death for 'useless mouths' : the Allies made it "death by neglect", the Nazis "death by deliberate murder".
Deliberately limiting resources for the production of wartime penicillin was the Allies' Aktion T4
To Dawson, and to me, the notion of killing of the weak because they are considered useless as war workers and just a burden on the wartime economy is simply wrong, no matter how it happens.
Death is death.....
Friday, December 7, 2012
The battle over wartime penicillin, EUGENICALLY speaking : who makes it and who gets it ?
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| Eugenics dominated ALLIED war aims |
These emotions lay just below conscious thought, but were often behind conscious deed.
But in practise, even semi-conscious eugenic emotion divided into soaring rhetoric and sagging reality.
Modernity/Eugenics/Triage/Conscription (the four terms are basically 100% interchangeable) was consumed with the thought of competition ; with the mighty and the wise usually winning out over the weak and the foolish.
War, of course, was the ultimate form of competition for survival.
In theory, only the 1As of the world went to war, to defend the 4Fs of the world who were too weak and /or too cowardly to defend themselves.
But in practise, modernity's wars were "a competition too far" to mis-use Cornelius Ryan's phrase : modern war was too competitive, often resulting in as many deaths on the side of the winners, as on the side of the losers.
In the minds of popular eugenics , sending our 'best blood' off to defend the country, meant only the loss of our best blood while those of 'weaker blood' stayed home - safe - and multiplied their offspring even more than normal.
Too many successful wars, and soon our nation would be overrun by imbeciles and their children !
So bravery in war had to be divided into physical bravery (actually going into battle against bullets and shells with only your serge cloth uniform as your armour) and leadership bravery (inspired military leadership, from safely well behind the front lines.)
This latter definition of bravery proved a morally slippery slope.
Because soon scientific efforts and organizational planning of production and logistics in modernity's wars became almost as important as mere generalship.
Soon, appearances to the contrary, a well educated healthy, wealthy young 1A man safe behind a desk in Washington wasn't evading the draft, he was - in fact - 'winning the war !'
And to the middle-class, middle-aged men running the local draft boards, it didn't seem fair that only their well-fed, well-educated sons met the draft requirements of a modern mechanized armed forces.
(This was all thanks to the dozen years of the Great Depression reducing the health and occupational skills of the working class and poor.)
So soon those failing the first draft calls : those illiterate, in indifferent health, in jail, black, latino and aboriginal were lifted and they were being drafted as fast as possible.
They were to provide the physical bravery in the front lines, at the pointy end of America's big stick.
Donkeys.
But these quasi 4Fs couldn't be led (aka pushed) without inspired bravery from the 1As in the rear, the lions.
So the sons of the middle class and sons of the upper ends of the prosperous working class got exemptions from the draft ; they were needed at home to provide the skills to create the mechanical equipment that would really win the war.
(The donkeys in the infantry would merely form the occupation garrison after the real battle was won.)
The middle class has always loved mechanized war, the more high tech the better: it lowers their chances of actually having to die in the front lines to a much lower level.
Old fashioned infantry wars come down to personal bravery and this , eugenically speaking, should be found more in the middle class 1As than in the 4Fs of the poor - so as in the 19th century myth, the middle class would have had to dominate the front lines of every infantry battle.
There were just a few flies in this happy middle class ointment.
( I won't discuss the most ironic one : that the supposedly safe middle class military occupation of driving a high tech plane dropping bombs on civilians 3 miles below you, turned out to be even more dangerous than the ultimate low tech job of the poor slobs holding a bolt-action rifle in a foxhole !)
One was that there were never enough well feed well educated young white men freed up to fight America's mechanical war all around the globe.
So one way to free up more such mechanically-trained men was to
say that mom's husband , as well as her sons, should be liable for the draft.
Exempted men opposed this idea strongly, claiming that they weren't being cowardly (they were potentially 1A draft picks after all) but that it was more important that they maintained the home front: their daughters really needed a father to see they weren't off running round with 4f boys.
Or worse : getting a factory job.
Because some patriotic fools wanted to see draft-free women do many of the industrial jobs that men had always traditionally done and were still doing in wartime.
Men literally rioted over this threat to their safety, though they were careful not to put it in those terms.
Women, they exclaimed, were too physically weak, intellectually weak, above all too emotionally weak : they'd wet their pants, trying to tighten the bolts on the outside of an armoured car.
In fact the real fear was "that if women got my job, I could now be drafted and end up in that same armoured car, under enemy fire, wetting my pants !"
This reminds us to never take people's surface reasons for their actions at face value, but to probe the real, often hidden, reasons for their behaviour.
Finally, at long last, to wartime penicillin and the words of those two famous penicillin lions, Dr AN Richards and Dr Howard Florey.
The normally highly-combative Howard Florey, on his trip to the combat zone of the Middle East and Sicily, quietly knuckled under to the dictate that precious penicillin wasn't to be wasted on soldiers dying of wounds.
(I take that to mean that his initial protests were mere pro forma and I think that even his most sycophant biographers who agree with me.)
The thinking was that these wounds were so severe, that even if they healed, they'd still be discharged and be of no further use to the army.
and from then on , they'd just a burden to the decent middle class people at home who fund the military pension plan.
(Oh no, they'd never be so blunt as that - in public - but even a fool could follow their drift.)
Instead, the dictate read - use your precious penicillin on men who already have several alternative treatments for their non-fatal disease, the clap.
So why in earth use precious penicillin on their non-fatal wounds while letting other brave soldiers die of their combat wounds?
Because front line soldiers - like the paratroopers - by some strange coincidence - proven very likely to contract non-fatal VD (despite their free condoms) just when there were strong rumours a big push was about to begin.
(The morality of them being unfaithful to wife or girlfriend back home didn't enter into the discussion till later when the scandal went public ; for now, this was just man-to-man locker room talk.)
The treatments of VD, before penicillin, did work but involved toxic drugs and months away from the front line as careful needle followed careful needle -- by contrast, non-toxic penicillin could cure in 2 days.
Result ? The hapless paratrooper couldn't avoid possible death in the big battle , but would soon be back in the thick of it.
He mightn't be happy, but from Sicily back to Iowa, other men would sigh in silent relief : ' better him than me in the line of fire and near-certain death.'
Because if our reputed brave but clapped-out paratrooper wasn't dying for his country, who would take his place ?
Yep, chump, you would !
America's penicillin czar - the closest man to filling Dr Florey's role in the UK on penicillin - was another 'doctor' : AN Richards, part time head of the (in) famous OSRD's medical division and full time shill for Merck.
He , like Florey, cheerfully admitted that his interest in penicillin hadn't been humanitarian.
His explanation is often glossed over, so let us parse it carefully.
His interest, he wrote, wasn't in saving German or Japanese lives which is why he claimed he censored news of penicillin ( untrue - he censored only its patentable, post-war commercial aspects: in this his real enemy was his Allies' own pharmaceutical industries).
He wasn't interested in saving Allied civilians lives - which is why he never pushed for an all out effort at production of imperfect, impure, natural (again non-patentable) penicillin.
He wasn't even interested in saving Allied soldiers' lives, he wrote.
His only priority was 'getting (wounded) allied soldiers back to the front' : better your son die there, than mine, in other words.
Morally, this sort of triage: saving only those soldiers lightly wounded and thus capable of going back to the front in place of my as-yet-un-drafted son, is a very slippery moral slope.
We can beat the Nazis by being beastly, like the Nazis....
Morality, once upon this slope, ends up sliding down to a railway siding outside Oswiecim Poland , where doctors like Florey and Richards, in jackboots and whips triage the descending passengers of trains like some satanic football coach : you, to work out on the field, you, to the showers.
Doctor Henry Dawson, by way of total contrast, won his Military Cross for rebuking this heartless form of triage in WWI and from October 1940 onwards, gave up his life during WWII to rebuking it with regard to wartime penicillin ,both as to who made it and who got it.
We can only win by being as moral as the nazis are immoral...
His October 1940 war aims were not yet the Allied war aims, but that too would change - in time......
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