On a day when most other youth got America's first peacetime draft card, Aaron & Charlie got History's first needle of antibiotics : Dies Mirabilis ,October 16 1940

When the possibility of  your nation joining a world wide war looms, getting your first ever draft registration card must feel just like getting the kiss of death, to a young man on the campus of Columbia University.

But when you are a young man on another part of Columbia's campus who has been written off  'as soon to die from an invariably fatal disease', getting instead History's first ever needle of antibiotics, must feel just like getting the kiss of life.

Hence the spooky Janus-like nature of Dies Mirabilis , October 16th 1940.....

Who am I ? asks a very famous bright yellow powder from WWII

OK, Manhattan : Who am I ????

(a) In the popular imagination, I am often thought of as being a bright yellow powder (though if fact I might often be dark red or brown or even some other color).

(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 .....

Almost 15 years after Penicillin discovered, most of the world's serious penicillin cases had been treated by one doctor : Martin Henry Dawson

1943 Annual Report, Columbia University

In the Spring of 1943, Columbia University released its Annual Report and mentions , in passing, that Dr MH Dawson had supervised the treatment of 65 serious cases with penicillin for the National Research Council.

(Generally Columbia's lengthy wartime annual reports successfully managed to avoid talking about penicillin - a sure sign that it was ignored by academic science elsewhere as well throughout the war.)

If we can take "serious" to mean "treated systemically" , that probably means that the largest percentage of the world's systemic penicillin cases up to that point in time had been done by Dr Dawson alone !


(It is unclear whether or not the five endocarditis cases and the unknown number of other illnesses treated by Dawson with penicillin in 1940-1941 before the NRC got involved are among that total , but in any case it is an astounding figure.)

What we among the non-medical laity may still want to know is why was the world's best ever lifesaver ignored for so long by almost every other doctor in the world  ----  except by Dr Dawson ?

Why was his vision of the potential of hospital grown natural penicillin so different from their's ?

Has a cure for cancer already been found but no doctors recognize it ?

Was penicillin really a "Miracle" drug, a miracle instantly seen by all as is typical with Bible miracles - or was it more like the message to the three poor shepherd children at Fatima - a secret given only to those who retain a child's openness to new things ?

If almost all the world's doctors can ignore the open secret of penicillin right under their noses for 15 years way back then, would they recognize a cure for cancer if it appeared in the medical literature today ?

Thumbing their nose at MODERNITY.....

During WWII (the very apogee of MODERNITY) in New York City (the very epicenter of Modernity) , a dying doctor and his few square feet of Mother Nature quietly thumbed their nose at MODERNITY...

.... and changed our whole world, for the better, for ever.

Homegrown, natural , systemic penicillin is Dr Martin Henry Dawson's practical legacy, leading on from his insights into the commensal nature of Life that is his scientific legacy.

That same university on Manhattan Island ( Columbia) that Dawson worked at all during those war years, was also home to the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Bomb.

Columbia University thus was home to the Twentieth Century's biggest high tech disaster and its smallest low tech triumph : home to the stories of the Little Boy Bomb and the Baby Girl Patty Malone: the nadir and the apogee of Twentieth Century Humanity.

Sometimes Fact truly is stranger than Fiction ever could be...

Iron Ring to Martin Henry Dawson's kids

People sometimes ask if I think if Martin Henry Dawson deserves a Nobel Prize for all his efforts in medicine and science.

Nobel Prizes only go to living scientists -a maximum of three per prize - and more often than not the Nobel Committee gives it to the wrong living scientists !

No, I think we Canadians should honor our fellow Canadian Henry Dawson in our own Canadian way.

He was not - formally - an engineer, unlike his two brothers.

But I think he fully deserves the symbol of a true engineer - the famous iron ring.

Engineers don't usually invent something truly new and significant - that is the scientist's job.

But they are the people called in to scale it up from the lab bench to pilot plant, then to full scale production, so it can start doing some good for humanity.

The people who should have been ordering the engineers in to do this work in the case of penicillin - the owners and executives of the big and little pharma firms in the UK,USA and Canada - declined to do so.

So a dying doctor - Henry Dawson - did it all up instead.

The first patient cured back in 1931 (by Cecil Paine) with penicillin-the-antiseptic, a newborn baby facing a lifetime of blindness, needed only the equivalent of one microgram (mcg) of pure penicillin.

That is the amount found in a milliliter (ml) --- or an eyedropper's worth--- of the unprocessed penicillium juice.

(A microgram is a thousandth of a milligram or a millionth of
a gram or a billionth of a kilogram.)

A milliliter (ml) aka a cubic centimeter (cc) aka a gram (gm) of liquid penicillium juice was needed (during 1928-1941) to produce that microgram.

That is a extraction ratio of one to a million, solid from liquid.

In terms of solid out from solids in, it took about 100 grams of relatively expensive solid "food"/ medium to produce 1 mg of solid bioactivity -BEFORE the huge producing and purifying losses found in large scale operations run at routine competency.

I would say that only 10% of nominal penicillin producing capacity was actually converted to finished clinical penicillin, between 1940-1942 ,in the larger pilot plant operations, based on the numbers and type of patients treated.

That is, in plain english, a conversion ratio of 1 kg of solid food producing 1 mg of solid bioactivity - a million to one ratio.

With these sort of ratios, engineers can already see the difficulties that lie ahead - before I tell them about penicillin's extreme lability and fragility...

The smallest test tube we have available is all the factory needed to produce a mcg or two of penicillin.

 Which is enough to save Paine's baby, or one of Howard Florey's famous baby mice, or provide the material needed for Fleming to do all his 1928-1929 initial research using his patented micro-slide cell approach.

Scale it up 1000 times, you would now need a half dozen 2 liter Ernlenmeyer flasks to grow 1000 mcg's ( ie one milligram) worth of penicillin  - about as much as Duhig and Gray used to save lives with in Brisbane in 1943.

But Dawson wanted to scale the Mount Everest of infectious disease - green SBE - the  most dreaded form of the dreadful endocarditis.

He had a few lucky patients who held a strain of green strep in their heart valves that was as sensitive to penicillin as ordinary pyogenes strep was - so he could cure them with just a million times as much penicillin as Pain's baby or Florey's mouse - ie a gram of the stuff.

But other patients of his had SBE from strains about one thousand times less sensitive than ordinary pyogenes strep.

For them, he needed a kilo of pure penicillin- one billion times as much as Paine's baby needed.

That means he and his tiny pilot plant on the eighth floor of Columbia P and S would need
to process a million liters of penicillium juice over a two or three month period - ie 10 production runs of 100,000 liters each.

(That is about 200,000 milk bottles a run. In a big city dairy setup, that means processing 1000 milk bottles an hour, every hour, 24/7 for eight days straight, for each run.)

He couldn't have done that in P and S , even if his bosses had been helpful - which they weren't--- to put it mildly.

But Columbia University is set in th verye heart of New York's dairy factory district - the university fathers could have leased a vacant dairy and produced this quantity of penicillin, (much as the University of Toronto did with insulin in 1922 when they had an opportunity to help humanity.)

Dawson wanted so badly to save any and all SBE patients, not just those who were relatively healthy and had sensitive strains of bacteria, but died in early 1945 before he could get his hands on the huge amounts of penicillin needed.

But his assistant Thomas H Hunter soon had enough penicillin to save anyone who had SBE, no matter how old and sick - Dawson's ultimate goal.

Dawson knew penicillin could do the job from the moment he first read about it back in September 1940 - he knew it didn't need more purifying and perfecting for years and years - just a swift application of the production engineer's "MORE button" .

His "Manhattan Pilot" had to be content with only producing between 50 Imperial gallons and 100 US gallons of penicillium juice per eight day run - with a 50% production loss, just enough to save one SBE patient (with a very sensitive green strep strain)  every two months.

However, he never  actually got that level out of his 700 two liter Erlenmeyer flasks pilot plant, because he never got the cool dark room (or two or three) he needed on a permanent basis, if his penicillium were to settle down and produce.

Columbia chose instead - because it did have a choice, as Brian Mulroney said - to perfect the process (gaseous diffusion) that produced most of the world's nuclear bombs  ---- ironically in that same dairy district that was more suited to making life-saving penicillin...

Columbia drops ball,Oxford runs with it

For ten months,(early September 1940-early July 1941) Columbia University had a clear lead on bringing mass produced penicillin to the world, but it blow it.

America had to give up its lead to Oxford University and the British. America lost the moral edge on this story.

But before Congress and the federal government bring out committees and commissions to investigate Columbia, it should remember it ,too, had a chance and it blew it.

"You sir, had a Choice"

Columbia and Washington may say 'we had no choice' but as Mulroney says, "you sir, had a choice."

During those same ten months, Columbia and America had another clear lead - in atomic energy.

This is the one that the federal government choose to fund, this is the one that Columbia administrators choose to find rooms for.

And as the Manhattan Project grew and grew, Columbia and the federal government found new rooms for it in the heart of Manhattan's traditional milk plant district, in north west Harlem, in the corridor connecting the downtown campus to the medical campus.

Even the Japanese hardly a milk-guzzling nation and totally cut off from all the events in Britain and America surrounding penicillin from 1940 to 1944, could instantly tell that every photo they could find of an interior of a penicillin plant looked like nothing but a typical milk plant.

Most of the world's first penicillin plants used the equipment,technologies,staff - and sometimes the very plants - of milk companies.

Columbia had the team - and very nearby it had the equipment, to start saving millions of lives, way back in 1941.

But it blew it - it morally blew it.

Columbia developed three world-shaking ideas on its campus during World War Two.

The Age of Antibiotics started there -millions of lives saved by the actions of a decorated frontline combat hero named Dawson.

With Adorno and Horkheimer's seminal text, in humble mimeographed form, the age of Postmodernity started there.

And the technology that powered the Cold War, on both sides, was started and perfected there - in that life-giving milk plant  district - perfected by a life-long pacifist named Harold Urey.

Yes, most of the uranium that blew up Hiroshima was not made by Columbia's technology.

But the instance the war was over, the competing totally inefficient plants were closed and massive gas diffusion plants were built instead using Columbia's technology, to create the tens of thousands of bombs on all sides during the Cold War.

That same deadly uranium is still around, fashioned into today's current bombs.

Thanks Columbia, 'Home of the Cold War' !

Now if you went to the Columbia campus today , would you find a plaque to Dawson and Adorno or to Urey ?

You guessed right - Adorno and Dawson are non-persons but Urey and death are honored to the hilt at Columbia.

 And in Washington.

The self-promoting Florey and Britain get all the moral glow of penicillin instead.

Columbia blew it - and it is still blowing it......

MO goes PO: Death or Life: America picks death

"In the 'soldiers/guns/cities/Canada/we did not make this up' department, is this bizarre but true story from America."

After you read the above blog post, reflect upon this:

Wasn't it old Ronnie Reagan who said the scariest thing you could ever hear is someone saying:

"Hi,I am from the federal government and I am here to honor you" ???

Trust the fed bureaucrats to honor Columbia University for the totally wrong wartime project - and trust Columbia University to go along with the gag....

The truth was that wartime Columbia University and Manhattan island were a Janus-like combo - part killer/ part livesaver --- a pity that only the killer side has been honored to date....

70th Anniversary of 'the little $6,000 that grew'

In February 2010, most of the world will not celebrate the 70th anniversary of the start of the Manhattan Project.

Nor should they.

But they should mark it, and pause to reflect on its continuing consequences for us here today.

For 1940 was truly an Annus Mirabillis , and only partly because it marked the start of the development of the world's biggest life-taker.

Because 1940 was also crucial in the development of the world's smallest life-saver .

And aren't these two things the Alpha and the Omega of a continuing human existence in this universe?

During that February almost seventy years ago, two lead investigators at Columbia University in Manhattan were given $6,000 in federal tax dollars to look into the possibility of developing an atomic 'boiler' - which is to say, given money to develop an engine, not a bomb.

But the money came from orders of the president himself and FDR knew the project, if fully successful, would lead to investigating the building of an atomic bomb, to be held in reserve against the possibility the Nazis were already trying to build - and use - one.

Seventy years on, the six thousand dollars has become, for the American taxpayers alone, six trillion dollars and counting.

Laying blame for the current American debt crisis ? February 1940 is as good a place as any to start - that six trillion dollars would sure erase a lot of America's public and private debt worries.

If the American nuclear bomb arsenal of today ever gets used in a shooting match, the cost in lives would be six billion plus - and probably no one left to do the counting.

The costs of this the best known of Manhattan's wartime projects, in terms of the tarnishing of America's image abroad, is impossible to calculate.

"THE BUCK STARTS HERE"

The desk of the president is famously thought of as the place where the sign reads "the buck stops here".

But this project was highly unusual, in that it can be more truly said of the Manhattan Project, that "the buck started here", right at the president's desk.

As its political and financial father, FDR 'knew' about the start of the building of the world's biggest life-taker long before almost anyone else on the planet.

Not so with the start of the other Manhattan-based project , the one to finally start saving lives with the world's smallest life-saver, twelve years after its initial discovery.

FDR first learned of this life-saving substance at the exact same time that the rest of the world did , by opening his paper and reading a highly dramatic news story, one morning in mid-August 1943, almost three years after the life-saving project's obscure beginnings.

Perhaps the delay in the president learning of this life-saver is best explained by the fact that this project's lead investigator, also at Columbia University, never asked for any federal government grant or presidential 'seal of approval' - and in fact never sought a grant from anyone.

Still , his work never added a cent to the federal debt and his legacy continues to add lustre to the American image abroad.

Few people around the world, including those terrorists who harbor nothing but ill will towards Manhattan Island, do not have a family member or friend whose life was spared, thanks to the kick-starting efforts of this Manhattan Island life saver.

His project's 70th anniversary also comes up next year, in September 2010.

Perhaps this other Manhattan Project also needs a moment from us, to reflect on the changes it has brought into our world.

In this case, changes much for the better....