The re-invention of a military-only antiseptic into "bedside penicillin for all" creates a global beacon of hope for a world at war

the tiny stone the builders rejected

Despite the self-centred claims of physicists, the greatest benefits to humanity have generally been ardently pursued (invented), not accidentally stumbled upon (discovered).

DNA was discovered in 1860s by an Swiss doctor, but for most of us, it was really only discovered 125 years later in the late 1980s.

That was when it began to first be successfully used to solve unsolved criminal cases, when British researcher Alec Jeffries re-invented 'DNA' as a means to definitely identify biological evidence left at the scene of a crime.


The great medical pioneer Joseph Lister clearly re-invented carbolic acid, when he took it from just one of many industrial solvents and turning it into a global life-saver.

Paul Gelmo "invented" sulfa as man-made chemical in Vienna in 1908 and it was routinely patented in 1909 by Bayer the chemical giant hoping it might yet be a useful chemical intermediate reagent.

But not until Gerhard Domagk , also of Bayer, who systemically tested every one of his firm's new chemical creations for its medical potential, was its life-saving abilities "discovered".

But I still hold this to be a case of re-invention.

 It took an awful lot of grit and determination during the Great Depression to waste scarce company money by systemically and thoroughly testing every one of the thousands of chemicals Bayer made, on then very remote possibility one might have medical applications.

The Nobel committee obviously agreed with me - giving Domagk the inventor and not Gelmo the discoverer the Nobel Prize for sulfa.

Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in1928 and "discovered" it was only useful as a military-style antiseptic.

In 1940, Florey and Chain accidentally discovered that penicillin also might work as a systemic.

But like Fleming (by 1940) ,they still choose to emphasize its rather limited application against combat wounds infected by staph bacteria : a tiny, tiny, TINY proportion of all the deaths caused by WWII.

They were hardly alone : I was amazed to discover in my research that I could find no penicillin-making researcher between 1928 and 1945 who first put their penicillin to work as a human systemic life-saver, before they also tried it on localized wounds.

With one crucial exception: Henry Dawson.

In October 1940, months ahead of the schedule that he and his three fellow researchers had already worked out, he choose to inject systemic penicillin into two young men suffering from invariably fatal endocarditis.

At least one of the men - unexpectedly - lived.

It wasn't because of Dawson's penicillin : at an estimated 8 units per mg, it was about .56% pure.

Useless Junk ? Or Love, Hope and Charity ?

The rest (99.44%) was junk - or as I like to emphasis : "99 and 44 100ths percent pure love....hope... and charity" -- bedside penicillin.

A good bedside manner has probably saved more lives throughout history than all but a tiny handful of medications.

I contend that Dawson deliberately used his tiny amounts of home-made penicillin as part of his traditional clinician's bedside manner, to rally his patients' own body defences against their disease.

As prove, I offer up Gladys Hobby, a fellow member of his tiny team, who said she daily walked through Henry Dawson's wards, showing the patients the growing penicillium in flasks, hoping their rising interests in their treatment might rally their psychic resources.

Dawson was not content to reserve his invention of "bedside penicillin" to the handful of endocarditis patients that his small home-made supply could hope to treat.

So Dawson quickly told a convention of his colleagues (the world's top clinical researchers) that natural penicillin had "unlimited possibilities", thousands times stronger than the then acclaimed synthetic sulfas, but without their toxic side effects and inability to work well in blood and pus.

These researchers took his claims home to their labs all over the world.

Meanwhile popular media, like the New York Times , Newsweek and the wire services, spread his gospel throughout North America.

He tried to get the American government - in 1941 -(and by extension all Allied governments) to take over the production of penicillin form Big Pharma and mass produce it themselves in quantity.

Instead, wartime government bureaucrats, who were themselves paid consultants to Big Pharma , censored Dawson's conventional scientific methods to spread his good news - by restricting his access to scientific journals and restricting what he could say at scientific conferences.

But in wartime, person-to-person gossip becomes the new telegraph.

So Dawson was able to keep on spreading the word until most all of the doctors in metropolitan New York and beyond had heard of his unexpected successes with systemic natural penicillin, curing incurable endocarditis , the "Gold Standard" of infectious diseases.

Penicillin , he said, didn't have only a limited wartime role, limited to just being applied to local staph infections in combat wounds or to cure self-inflicted military VD cases.

He said it  had unlimited possibilities and could cure many of the diseases that plague a peacetime nation or a multi-million man wartime military --- if only government bureaucrats opened their eyes, their hearts and their pockets and gave it a "fair go" .

When the world's general populace, after the story of Baby Patricia broke worldwide, catch Dawson's "vision thing" , governments were forced to play catch up in the production of actual penicillin.

Meanwhile, they too caught Dawson's "vision thing" and governments all over the world turned their propaganda machine full blast to tout penicillin as a beacon of future health and hope for all , if only the Allies win this war.

The key change in the Allied governments' approach was that "for all" as it became clear that the voters did not agree with an Allied war effort that deliberately limited the supply of life-saving medicine and then triaged the world into the people worth saving and those not worth saving.

That - they said - sounded awfully familiar : wasn't that also Hitler's line ?

Well it was certainly Modernity's line : the  methods of instrumental rationality ruled all the modern nations from America to Germany.

By contrast, Dawson's general systemic was 'general' in the widest sense of that word.

 He thought it was particularly important in a Total War against Absolute Evil to give - and be seen giving - life-saving health care and food & shelter to all : it  was the best single reason why people should be willing to fight and die for the Allies' cause.

And seventy five odd years later, was he not right ?

Penicillin has a powerful mystique that tens of thousands of other useful medications ,combined, can't hope to match.

Dawson's crusade to make his inexpensive, abundant, safe "bedside penicillin" a commonplace at hospital beds the world over , in war and in peace , is the major reason we grant penicillin that mystique....

Florey vs Dawson : penicillin to be perfect & a war medicine OR an imperfect but universal medicine ?

Baby Patty Malone helped the whole world discover penicillin 

As should be well known, penicillin-the-molecule and penicillin-the-lifesaver were discovered September 1943 by the whole world, (not in September 1928 by Alexander Fleming) while natural-penicillin-the-universal-livesaver was invented on October 16th 1940 by Henry Dawson.


Penicillin-the-molecule was ignored in June 1929, firstly by Alexander Fleming himself and secondly by the world.

This was because Fleming on that date indirectly denied any possibility of penicillin ever becoming a lifesaver, ie a systemic ( spread through the blood system) medication.

As a result, Fleming - and the world - yawned.

Contrast this with Banting team's excited, animated, passionate announcement --- at a Boxing Day medical conference just a few years earlier  -- that it was  just two weeks away from injecting insulin-the-lifesaver into a dying patient.

(What a Boxing Day present for millions of diabetics and their familes !)

You can just bet that insulin-the-lifesaver and insulin-the-molecule were discovered together, by the entire world, at that moment.

What about Howard Florey then ? Didn't he play some role in penicillin ?

Yes, some role.

But Florey ,along with Fleming, and along with the British and American governments together with the leading firms in the pharmaceutical world, was convinced that penicillin first must be perfected (100% pure, industry-made, probably synthetic, tested-onto-death) before being used on humans .

 And even then 'humans'  really meant 1A military personnel only, at least during the war.

In addition, they all only saw penicillin as an useful supplement to the existing sulfa drugs - mostly for use in sulfa-resistant staph infections.

Truly a perfectionist and limited vision of wartime penicillin.

One can only begin to imagine the high prices that would be charged governments and patients for such perfect material.

Chain deserved less credit for his chemistry and more for his pushiness , in forwarding the penicillin story to a happy conclusion...

By way of total contrast, only five weeks after learning of penicillin's lifesaving potential (and here Florey and above all Chain deserve the credit) , Dawson was injecting life-saving penicillin into 4F civilians ( Negroes ! Jews !) dying from a strep infection (SBE) , using imperfect , impure, hospital-made, natural, penicillin made by slimey molds.

Yes, like Banting's first insulin injections, Dawson's first penicillin injections 'stung like a bee', from natural impurities still in it. The stings, in both cases, did no permanent (or even temporary) harm.

To Dawson (and to Banting, his model) saving dying patients today with imperfect, impure medication was preferable to letting them die so we can maybe save dying patients, years from now, with a perfected pure medication.

These clashing visions of penicillin ran throughout the war with Florey's vision overwhelming dominant until Dawson's success with -stolen - government issue penicillin on SBE patients inspired another local doctor (Dante Colitti) to jump over the traces for his dying patient as well.

The resulting  heart-stirring story of baby Patty Malone ( late August - early September 1943) broke the media floodgates and the entire civilian world began to "ACT UP" and demand Dawson-style penicillin - now !

By 1944, the Allied governments, dragging the still reluctant Big Pharma firms along with them, had caved.

Semi-purifed, semi-perfect - CHEAP- natural penicillin was being mass produced and being made available for all, as fast as that was humanly possible.

And not just Allied civilians as well as Allied military personnel , but for Axis POWs , Neutral nation civilians and ultimately even Axis civilians.

Canadians Banting and Dawson and Canadian Medicare : there is a pattern here :  a strong belief in medical care that is universal in theory as to who is permitted to receive it (everyone, anywhere) and universal in practise (as a result of being very inexpensive).

But it wasn't something simply discovered and instantly received with acclaim by everyone - as science historians want you to believe how science works : as a totally bloodless affair.

 Instead, it was invented by some humans and contested fiercely by some other humans until finally most humans accepted it.

Invented by people like Banting, Dawson and Douglas ...

For Howard Florey's mausoleum of an institute, penicillin's therapeutic value was incidental to putting paying bums on seats

Howard Florey's discovery that impure natural penicillin could cure experimentally induced infections in mice was incidental to his number one concern : getting enough paying guests in his mausoleum of an institute, to pay its annual heating bills.


And also accidental , in the sense that Chain only poured all of the penicillin hitherto made by Chain' own methods into two healthy mice in March 1940, out of spite.

Florey had just told him the day earlier, during a very heated argument, that Norman Heatley would be making the crude penicillin from now on and by Heatley's method.

Chain was determined to establish his (or any) penicillin was in fact very non-toxic , though he should have put his brew into infected mice as he then would have really made his mark in history for sure.

But, Chain's spite at least jumped the gun on whatever decade Florey was originally planning to interrupt his precious personal research long enough to test penicillin on infected lab animals. (If that was even ever to come about in the original project -- mice cost money.)

He had at least forced Florey to put penicillin into some infected mice (the next stage in the process) or risk forever losing a claim to be the first to ever do it in history ----- and Florey liked nothing better than getting the glory of doing something first, even if his minions had to do all the hard work forever afterwards.

Much to Florey's surprise, the mice lived !

Florey - to his dying day - hated clinicians and clinical work : hated patients in fact

Now Florey was almost forced to try it on humans in an attempt to save their lives ---- which he did , almost exactly twelve months after the first mouse experiments  ----------never one to rush into clinical, live-saving, work was our Dr Florey,MD.....

Sulfa's Alexander Fleming : Paul Gelmo, winner of 1939 medical Nobel for discovery of Sulfa

Sulfa the MIRACLE drug

Alas Paul Gelmo , discoverer of Sulfa, is not likely to ever be as famous as Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin and it is a mystery worth investigating to ask why not.

(And in truth Paul Gelmo did not win the 1939 Nobel in Medicine for his discovery. Gerhard Domagk, the actual winner, deserved his Nobel for sulfa about as much as Ernst Chain did his Nobel for penicillin --- which is to say "still in doubt".)

Gelmo invented cum discovered  sulfanilamide in 1908 as part of his PhD in organic chemistry, doing what Germans of his generation did best : churn out endless synthetic variants of dyes.

It had no known uses, although 11 years later it was found to have some anti-bacterial quantities by American biochemist Michael Heidelberger.

Voices off, unheard  : the cries of the dying

But Heidelberger didn't feel any moral urgency to push to have it tested clinically, to see it it might actually save lives.

(Heidelberger, a later colleague of Martin Henry Dawson , similarly declined to assist Dawson in the development of penicillin - thus missing on the ground floor action of the century's two biggest lifesavers.

Cry not for Michael - he outlived Gelmo and Dawson and died showered in laurels, apparently for never uttering an unconventional thought over his long, long life : an all around, don't-rock-the-boat, team player.)

Domagk did two things with Gelmo's sulfa , one good one bad.

The good thing is that he did what Ernst Chain did ,but which Fleming refused to do : he tested the substance at hand "in living creatures ("in vivo") despite it have failed earlier test tube tests ( "in vitro tests").

Once inside animals, surprise, surprise, it did work and it did fight off the deadliest of infections.

The bad thing he did is that he went along with his employer, I G Farben, when it delayed telling the world about this life-saving drug (the only one available at the time, mark you) for years, while it sought to invent a patentable analog of it.

Neither I G Faben or Domagk felt any moral urgency to put the drug they did have at hand on the market at once, profitably-patentable or not.

The actual dye that Domagk was originally charged with testing consisted of two separate molecules ( one of them sulfa) loosely bonded together to form a beautiful ruby-red dye---- a totally new dye and hence very patentable.

Ie potentially very profitable as a dye - but not as a drug.

This was because "in vitro", bonded together inside a test tube, the two molecule "patentable" ensemble did nothing medically.

 But once in a living body,"in vivo", the body's enzymes quickly cleaved the bonds between the two molecules and the sulfa portion - once on its own, quickly brought bacteria growth to a stop.

Sulfa could and did save tens of millions of lives.

 But as sulfa was now Public Domain (PD) 25 years after its original discovery, it would make no real money (only worldwide gratitude and acclaim) for I G Faben, and so they stalled releasing this life-saving miracle.

But as they never could find an analogue for sulfa , I G Faben finally and reluctantly released the original 2 molecule dye without telling anyone that it cleaved apart in living bodies and the active ingredient was a dirt cheap, abundant (and PD) byproduct of many dyeing operations.

Domagk-the-hero has to be forever tainted for his part in this delay.

Fleming also never tested his penicillin in a living being with a disease - he just did "in vitro" testing that told him that penicillin killed bacteria slower than it was secreted out of the body - thus to the never-one-to-waste-a-motion Fleming it seemed so useless as a systemic that it was not even worth testing "in vivo".

He felt no moral urgency in "just double checking" his hunch.

When Howard Florey - pushed hard by Chain - did finally test penicillin almost 12 years after it had been first discovered , he found it did kill artificial infections inside animals - it did work , "in vivo" !

But while he was an editor of the journal that Fleming's original 1929 article appeared in and so could have demanded Fleming do the "in vivo" tests to double check Fleming's hunch, he never did so.

That he did so only 12 years later - and this when pushed hard by Chain - hardly displays any moral urgency on his part to test this potential life-saver.

Sulfa and penicillin - successes "in vivo", failures "in vitro".

Like I G Faben , though not because it could be profitably patentable as a result, Fleming and Florey put all their priorities to see penicillin made synthetically before it was given mass distribution.

Martin Henry Dawson was all alone in believing that natural penicillin was perfectly acceptable to be mass produced and put to work right away, because people all around were dying daily without it.

Dawson thus invented a moral reason why natural penicillin should be mass produced "today - if not sooner".

It was this 'moral urgency' that Dawson alone brought to its invention, that finally led to the development of mass produced life-saving systemic penicillin.

 A moral urgency that Fleming, Florey,Heidelberger and I G Faben all so obviously lacked.....

Florey family and PATENTS :ducks and water

In the reverential biographies of  Howard Florey ( he has never had a critical biography - I hope to inspire one of them though), he is always played as the anti-patent guy on penicillin.

By contrast, Ernst Chain is always played as the greedy pro-patent guy.

Well, he is Jewish after all - he would be the greedy  money-grubbing one, won't he ?

Edward Abraham, who was there at the time, says that both were pro-patent to a degree - seeking Oxford University to control it ,(as the University of Toronto did insulin).

I agree.

The assumption was made that because Chain's father was in some sort of chemistry business in Germany Chain the PhD chemist would know all about the importance of patents.

(But we don't actually know if his father was involved in patents.)

But Florey ,the MD, would not anything about patents - against MD ethics in the UK at the time. Etc.

Bull dung !

Florey-the-son had wanted to be a chemist and was only nominally a MD in reality anyway.

His father had made his fortune by being the first into a new cutting edge technology, the first into high tech chemistry and trade marks, and by being the first in his state to obtain exclusive geographic rights to new processes.

Joseph Florey even tried to obtain at least one patent himself - for improvements in pneumatic tyres - applied for in Western Australia on May 16 1996, according to the local daily paper.

Leather making technology hadn't changed in around 10,000 years - so when it did, many in the industry refused to take the first leap.

Beyond how technically challenging the new ways of tanning leather were, was the fact that they were not public domain and free, as the tannin way of leather-making had been for centuries.

Florey took both risks and fell into a hot area of patents and licenses and paying high fees - or ignoring patents and fees and focussing on trade marks instead.

His many ads never claimed he had a patent for his chromella leather or even a patent license with a registered number - merely that he was the exclusive South Australia agent for it and held control of it as a trademark.

I haven't been able to find the original owner of chromella leather, but I believe very much they existed.

Here is why:

Florey's very first time he is mentioned in any newspaper seems to have been the month (October 1894) - even the day - he got that exclusive agency for chromella and he took out ads proclaiming that fact.

The word chromella almost never left the Australian papers, in some form or other, until well after his death.

His wealth seemed to have started around 1894 as well.

Having that chromella agency really seemed to have mattered.

But Joseph Florey having interests in tyres and patents of his own was news to me.

Patent talk would have been mother's milk to his son, Howard.

And I think we all owe Chain a heartfelt apology....

Why stop at THREE mold samples...

...when  four would feel oh so good?

In 1970,Lennard Bickel, using information from Gladys Hobby, says that Martin Henry Dawson and Karl Meyer used a sample of Alexander Fleming's penicillin-producing strain received from Roger Reid in Baltimore to deliver History's first jab of antibiotics October 16 1940, before a sample of  Ernest Chain's strain of penicillin-producing mold arrived from England via the wartime postal service.

Chain's sample - if it even was penicillium notatum - turned red and gave off no penicillin.

This story was repeated by Hobby in her 1985 definitive book on the wartime development of penicillin ---- and by most penicillin authors ever since.

Reid had originally got his penicillin strain in November 1930 from Charles Thom, the world expert on penicillium strains.

Who had gotten his sample from Harold Raistrick who got his from Fleming who got it as a contaminant in the air drifting upwards from the lab of LaTouche who scrapped it off a basement wall of somebody very rich in Belgravia.

(Finally !

The idle rich do something useful.....)

On July 9th 1941, Howard Florey visited Charles Thom who says that HM Dawson ( ie MH Dawson) contacted him directly to get a sample of Fleming's strain, after Chain's strains arrived in late October 1941.

So Dawson contacted at least three people that Fall of 1940 for a good penicillin-producung strain of the mold : Chain, Reid, Thom.

Why not then Alexander Fleming ???

Why not go to the Source, the Mother Load ?

This might account for Fleming's boss (Dr Wright) knowing all about penicillin-making at New York's Columbia University in March 1941, as referenced in Dr John Hedley-Whyte's account.

Dawson had meet Fleming at least twice, for sure --  in 1936 and 1939 when both were high poo-pahs in International Microbiology Congresses.

Anyone got any opinions on this ??