It remains unknown whether Henry Dawson expected his quixotic wartime efforts (to "waste" weaponized penicillin on 'useless' SBEs ) to go as far as they ultimately did.
He certainly was extremely unhappy that America was treating its wartime 'SBE lives unworthy of life' in almost as bad a fashion as Nazi Germany was known to be doing to its SBEs and others seen as "useless mouths".
But did he suspect his assault on weaponizing penicillin would extend beyond the Allies' horrific wartime neglect of the poorer chronically ill ?
He probably couldn't have foreseen just how quickly the pipeline of ever-newer ever-better sulfa drugs would dry up or just how quickly so many strains of deadly bacteria would become resistant to any sulfa drug , leaving penicillin as the only wartime lifesaver between disease and death.
This meant de-weaponizing penicillin had consequences far beyond those people suffering from SBE and denied their only chance at life.
If weaponized penicillin had remained throughout the war successfully censored and had remained denied to the civilian world (as weaponized DDT successfully was, never let us forget) , it would have ranked as one of WWII's major war crimes, like Katyn Forest or Auschwitz.
Millions of people around the world during WWII would have died needlessly from massive infections that only penicillin alone could have stopped.
Penicillin in 1943 was not as it is today, just one among dozens of antibiotics - it was the only one - and in addition, no new anti-bacterial sulfa drugs were coming along to replace the ones that bacteria had so rapidly grown resistant to.
Refusing to divert a tiny amount of war resources to make penicillin available to civilians - anywhere and everywhere - was to refuse them Life itself.
Worse, there was no trade-off to debate ; penicillin, like sulfa before it, was no war-winning secret medical weapon, at least in its intended war-winning use at the front .
Brand new (front line) wounds either contain abundant alternative bacteria foods to the deadly sulfa 'food' (the Fildes theory, known since 1940) or contain abundant proteins to bind to penicillin and render it useless.
However penicillin, and sulfa, were very useful a little further back in the military hospital system, as a life-saving systemic in cases of possible blood poisoning.
The case against secret weaponized penicillin gets even worse.
As an impure natural drug, penicillin would have taken the Germans at least a year or two or three to successfully mass produce it , even if its virtues had been sung from the heavens by the American media in 1942.
But as a pure synthetic penicillin in supposedly cheap abundant mass production (an event that in fact as not yet ever occurred) the chemistry-minded Germans would have rapidly back-engineered the drug and synthesized it rapidly themselves.
Because remember it took 15 years of hard effort to purify natural penicillin enough to determine its structure - but only months thereafter to 'synthesize' it artificially.
Back-engineering that synthesis would also only have taken months.
Penicillin's real secret was just how difficult the mass production of natural penicillin could be if you set your mind on doing everything the hard way ---- not the OSRD-Merck-Oxford fantasy of secret synthesis.
Dawson certainly set up the stage for the Allies re-setting of their moral compass , from his endocarditis efforts from September 1940 to September 1943 : but it was the immediate outcry resulting from the Patty Malone and Marie Barker cases that forced them to actually do something concrete.
His gut instinct in 1940 ,that not treating the otherwise fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis would prove the acid test for the Allies' pernicious morality, certainly was correct.
But while he couldn't have foreseen how far his actions would impact, he wouldn't have been unhappy that they did so......
Showing posts with label ddt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ddt. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Thursday, January 10, 2013
Like synthetic penicillin, the harder the A-Bomb was to make, the more attractive it was to the OSRD
Late in 1942, Britain's highest political, military and Intelligence leadership decided that the Atomic Bomb was almost certainly too difficult and too expensive for Hitler's Germany to produce during World War II ---- if only because it would take too many resources from more pressing necessities for the Nazi war machine.
But they decided not to tell the scientists who had only agreed to build an atomic bomb because that seemed the only way to stop the Germans from doing it first and using it first to win the war.
These British leaders had also come to the same conclusion about their own Atomic Bomb program taking too many scarce resources as well.
(Like the mostly emigre Jewish scientists pushing hardest to build an Allied A-Bomb, the British had been originally willing to commit all the needed resources and more, if it seemed that Germany might actually make The Bomb ---- and make it first.)
But if Germany couldn't pull it off in time to influence this war, it seemed reasonable to put the British program on the back burner , keeping Britain's hand in, but no more.
They didn't tell the atomic scientists this, but they told Washington.
But the moment the British signalled these joint -and obviously closely related- conclusions to America's leadership, a paradoxical response happened.
Washington's military-political-scientific elite had long been cool to seeing the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of this war and hence something worth diverting billions in scarce war resources towards.
Indeed that elite - centred in and around Vannevar Bush's OSRD war weapon agency - had even been skeptical The Bomb would become a weapon in any future war.
But now the possibility of an all-powerful strategic weapon so complex and expensive only the US could afford to build it and still play a full part in the current war made it an exceedingly attractive diplomatic weapon for what Washington saw as its new role as the world's new global policeman in the post war world.
America decided to share (and even there reluctantly) only information in areas of atomic bomb research that Britain and Canada were already equal scientific partners in.
Meanwhile America would command by force majeure all the vital Canadian resources crucial to making The Bomb, denying them both to Canada and Britain.
Canada's uranium wasn't vital, just useful, but its processing plants and expertise for making uranium oxide and heavy water were vital in the sense that replicating them might add nine months to the path to the first successful atomic blast, possibly taking it outside the timeline of the war.
(The OSRD was praying that the Germans and Japanese didn't surrender too fast, because then Congress would instantly stop spending billions on a merely possible atomic bomb.)
I have never accepted the conventional explanations as to why America suddenly pushed their atomic bomb program into high gear at the same time they cut out Britain from the originally-planned team effort.
But as I came to see how synthetic penicillin's very difficult nature made it more - not less - attractive as a secret war weapon to the OSRD, I began to see how the same could apply to the A-Bomb as well.
You see, cutting out Britain from A-Bomb research during the war would not make any sense at all, if Germany had a well developed A-Bomb effort.
Because at the end of the war, all the leading Allies would have an equal moral right to profit off of Germany's scientific treasures.
Britain and Russia would then learn - from the Germans - the 'devil in the details' knowledge to take the atomic bomb from university lab theory to successful factory production.
Believing that neither Britain and Germany would make an atomic bomb easily (let alone Russia, Japan, Italy and France) feed Washington's early-senility induced delusion that the atomic bomb secret really existed.
That 'secret' only existed for a short period - during the war itself - rather like the DDT secret.
Still, a useful period if it really was to be a war-ending weapon ( which no one in Washington believed) but useless if post-war secrecy was key to its success as a diplomatic weapon.
Poor old Washington and poor old London and poor old Berlin.
Always forced to fight a three front war.
Two minor fronts (against your darkest enemies) and then a major one ---- against your dearest friends......
But they decided not to tell the scientists who had only agreed to build an atomic bomb because that seemed the only way to stop the Germans from doing it first and using it first to win the war.
These British leaders had also come to the same conclusion about their own Atomic Bomb program taking too many scarce resources as well.
(Like the mostly emigre Jewish scientists pushing hardest to build an Allied A-Bomb, the British had been originally willing to commit all the needed resources and more, if it seemed that Germany might actually make The Bomb ---- and make it first.)
But if Germany couldn't pull it off in time to influence this war, it seemed reasonable to put the British program on the back burner , keeping Britain's hand in, but no more.
They didn't tell the atomic scientists this, but they told Washington.
But the moment the British signalled these joint -and obviously closely related- conclusions to America's leadership, a paradoxical response happened.
Washington's military-political-scientific elite had long been cool to seeing the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of this war and hence something worth diverting billions in scarce war resources towards.
Indeed that elite - centred in and around Vannevar Bush's OSRD war weapon agency - had even been skeptical The Bomb would become a weapon in any future war.
But now the possibility of an all-powerful strategic weapon so complex and expensive only the US could afford to build it and still play a full part in the current war made it an exceedingly attractive diplomatic weapon for what Washington saw as its new role as the world's new global policeman in the post war world.
America decided to share (and even there reluctantly) only information in areas of atomic bomb research that Britain and Canada were already equal scientific partners in.
Meanwhile America would command by force majeure all the vital Canadian resources crucial to making The Bomb, denying them both to Canada and Britain.
Canada's uranium wasn't vital, just useful, but its processing plants and expertise for making uranium oxide and heavy water were vital in the sense that replicating them might add nine months to the path to the first successful atomic blast, possibly taking it outside the timeline of the war.
(The OSRD was praying that the Germans and Japanese didn't surrender too fast, because then Congress would instantly stop spending billions on a merely possible atomic bomb.)
I have never accepted the conventional explanations as to why America suddenly pushed their atomic bomb program into high gear at the same time they cut out Britain from the originally-planned team effort.
Lessons from the attractiveness of difficult-to-synthesize penicillin
But as I came to see how synthetic penicillin's very difficult nature made it more - not less - attractive as a secret war weapon to the OSRD, I began to see how the same could apply to the A-Bomb as well.
You see, cutting out Britain from A-Bomb research during the war would not make any sense at all, if Germany had a well developed A-Bomb effort.
Because at the end of the war, all the leading Allies would have an equal moral right to profit off of Germany's scientific treasures.
Britain and Russia would then learn - from the Germans - the 'devil in the details' knowledge to take the atomic bomb from university lab theory to successful factory production.
Believing that neither Britain and Germany would make an atomic bomb easily (let alone Russia, Japan, Italy and France) feed Washington's early-senility induced delusion that the atomic bomb secret really existed.
That 'secret' only existed for a short period - during the war itself - rather like the DDT secret.
Still, a useful period if it really was to be a war-ending weapon ( which no one in Washington believed) but useless if post-war secrecy was key to its success as a diplomatic weapon.
Poor old Washington and poor old London and poor old Berlin.
Always forced to fight a three front war.
Two minor fronts (against your darkest enemies) and then a major one ---- against your dearest friends......
Friday, January 4, 2013
OPRD and Dawson vs OSRD and Florey : social or war penicillin ?
If America was to win the war for the Allies by being becoming a ponderous and relentlessly-slow grinding mill of the gods ( a veritable "Arsenal of Democracy" as President Roosevelt proclaimed) than sometimes Vannevar Bush's OSRD (Office of Scientific Research and Development) worked hard against that objective, never more so than with Penicillin (and DDT).
In Total War, attrition (greater weight of arms and men) rather than generalship (the better use of the elements of secrecy and surprise) is felt to be - in the long run - the truly dominant factor.
The OSRD obviously disagreed, as did Hitler's High Command and the Japanese War Cabinet.
These three agreed amongst themselves that it didn't really matter that both sides shared the same 105mm howitzer and that so the side with the best rate of production of that artillery piece and its ammunition would win in the long run.
That was so old-school, so World War One style thinking.
No, the OSRD would win a quick clean war, by speed and secrecy of new weapon invention and by taking the offensive role at every turn in the war of new weapon invention : as the British would say, WWII was to be a war between sciences : a Boffin's war, not a foot soldier's war like WWI.
But you could also see this as classic "chicken hawk" style thinking : stoutly favouring bold offensive operations, albeit from the cosy safety of an comfy armchair.
Because seemingly the only requirement for rising in the OSRD hierarchy was that you had successfully avoided combat when you were young and fit enough to do so, but now that you were now old and fat and balding and safely beyond the age of conscription your bellicosity had returned full on.
The German, Japanese and British military agreed with the OSRD - preferring to invent more truly new and superior - secret- weapons even when they knew this meant that fewer units of existing conventional weapons would be produced.
(By contrast, the Russians tended to want to produce greater numbers of a far fewer and far less technically sophisticated range of weapons - working in some minor incremental improvements over long, long production runs.)
So if the OSRD "took up" the development of Penicillin and DDT it would come with some heavy and hidden costs : for these two would now be developed strictly be for use as secret and new "instruments of war" (weapons).
Penicillin being "captured" by the OSRD in the summer of 1941 when Howard Florey took it to his old pal ( OSRD heavyweight Dr A N Richards) wasn't as bad as being captured by the Gestapo , but it was a close run thing.
By contrast, the War Production Board (WPB) and its OPRD (Office of Production Research and Development) took a more sophisticated view of war work in a Total War situation : understanding completely that if civilians don't eat or are home sick, both old-fashioned howitzers and new-fashioned atomic bombs don't get built.
So if the epidemic of lung infections in America in the winter of 1944 among war workers had become a pandemic and shell production had been cut in half, just when the Battle of the Bulge needed more 105 mmm shells not less, the OPRD would have been ready, with massive amounts of civilian penicillin for ailing war plant workers.
But the OSRD would be left touting its claim that fewer of our wounded men in the Ardennes were languishing in hospital beds than in the case of the Germans, thanks to our Allied frontline military hospitals having most of the world's scarce supply of natural penicillin.
Artificially scarce , by government fiat, only because the OSRD and its British counterpart were STILL working on trying to make top secret synthetic penicillin and didn't want to warn the Germans of penicillin's potential by letting civilian doctors use it and then talk up miracle cures.
Dawson's unexpected SBE cures with stolen government penicillin leading to dying Baby Patricia Malone's widely publicized 'stealing' of penicillin beyond the OSRD's direct jurisdiction, brought the public and the OPRD into the picture and finally got us wartime penicillin en masse : for frontline Ardennes soldier and home front civilian alike .....
In Total War, attrition (greater weight of arms and men) rather than generalship (the better use of the elements of secrecy and surprise) is felt to be - in the long run - the truly dominant factor.
The OSRD obviously disagreed, as did Hitler's High Command and the Japanese War Cabinet.
These three agreed amongst themselves that it didn't really matter that both sides shared the same 105mm howitzer and that so the side with the best rate of production of that artillery piece and its ammunition would win in the long run.
That was so old-school, so World War One style thinking.
No, the OSRD would win a quick clean war, by speed and secrecy of new weapon invention and by taking the offensive role at every turn in the war of new weapon invention : as the British would say, WWII was to be a war between sciences : a Boffin's war, not a foot soldier's war like WWI.
But you could also see this as classic "chicken hawk" style thinking : stoutly favouring bold offensive operations, albeit from the cosy safety of an comfy armchair.
Because seemingly the only requirement for rising in the OSRD hierarchy was that you had successfully avoided combat when you were young and fit enough to do so, but now that you were now old and fat and balding and safely beyond the age of conscription your bellicosity had returned full on.
The German, Japanese and British military agreed with the OSRD - preferring to invent more truly new and superior - secret- weapons even when they knew this meant that fewer units of existing conventional weapons would be produced.
(By contrast, the Russians tended to want to produce greater numbers of a far fewer and far less technically sophisticated range of weapons - working in some minor incremental improvements over long, long production runs.)
So if the OSRD "took up" the development of Penicillin and DDT it would come with some heavy and hidden costs : for these two would now be developed strictly be for use as secret and new "instruments of war" (weapons).
How we "almost lost penicillin" : it got captured by the OSRD
Penicillin being "captured" by the OSRD in the summer of 1941 when Howard Florey took it to his old pal ( OSRD heavyweight Dr A N Richards) wasn't as bad as being captured by the Gestapo , but it was a close run thing.
By contrast, the War Production Board (WPB) and its OPRD (Office of Production Research and Development) took a more sophisticated view of war work in a Total War situation : understanding completely that if civilians don't eat or are home sick, both old-fashioned howitzers and new-fashioned atomic bombs don't get built.
So if the epidemic of lung infections in America in the winter of 1944 among war workers had become a pandemic and shell production had been cut in half, just when the Battle of the Bulge needed more 105 mmm shells not less, the OPRD would have been ready, with massive amounts of civilian penicillin for ailing war plant workers.
But the OSRD would be left touting its claim that fewer of our wounded men in the Ardennes were languishing in hospital beds than in the case of the Germans, thanks to our Allied frontline military hospitals having most of the world's scarce supply of natural penicillin.
Artificially scarce , by government fiat, only because the OSRD and its British counterpart were STILL working on trying to make top secret synthetic penicillin and didn't want to warn the Germans of penicillin's potential by letting civilian doctors use it and then talk up miracle cures.
Dawson's unexpected SBE cures with stolen government penicillin leading to dying Baby Patricia Malone's widely publicized 'stealing' of penicillin beyond the OSRD's direct jurisdiction, brought the public and the OPRD into the picture and finally got us wartime penicillin en masse : for frontline Ardennes soldier and home front civilian alike .....
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Keep something out of the newspapers and it can remain a secret forever - even when it is not : the case of wartime DDT
Hard to explain why both the Germans and the Japanese of WWII failed to make use of DDT to reduce their truly immense manpower losses due to endemic insect borne diseases : its use alone, could have prolonged the war a year or two more.
After all, knowledge of how to make the stuff was in the public domain, and in the open scientific literature, having been synthesized more than seventy(70) years earlier.
It had been re-synthesized in 1939 and patented by the Swiss firm Ciegy who proceeded to offer patent licenses to everyone : neutral, Allied and Axis nation alike : just as the Swiss firm Oerlikon did with its anti-aircraft guns, used by almost all military forces during WWII.
But in wartime, busy generals and even busier bureaucrats and politicians don't have time to read scientific journals, patent applications and industry magazines : though they do like to glance through their familiar newspaper from time to time, to relax.
So if you can keep news of a weapon out of the newspapers, as the US successfully did by censoring both DDT's domestic use and domestic coverage of DDT's success overseas, you can keep it effectively secret - albeit an "open" secret - throughout the war.
Unbelievable but true.
And an example of how the Allies planned to keep synthetic penicillin an effective - if open - secret as well....
After all, knowledge of how to make the stuff was in the public domain, and in the open scientific literature, having been synthesized more than seventy(70) years earlier.
It had been re-synthesized in 1939 and patented by the Swiss firm Ciegy who proceeded to offer patent licenses to everyone : neutral, Allied and Axis nation alike : just as the Swiss firm Oerlikon did with its anti-aircraft guns, used by almost all military forces during WWII.
But in wartime, busy generals and even busier bureaucrats and politicians don't have time to read scientific journals, patent applications and industry magazines : though they do like to glance through their familiar newspaper from time to time, to relax.
An "open" secret can still be effectively a total secret
So if you can keep news of a weapon out of the newspapers, as the US successfully did by censoring both DDT's domestic use and domestic coverage of DDT's success overseas, you can keep it effectively secret - albeit an "open" secret - throughout the war.
Unbelievable but true.
And an example of how the Allies planned to keep synthetic penicillin an effective - if open - secret as well....
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
The 180 degree flip of wartime penicillin : from secret weapon of war to public weapon of propaganda
War is not at all like the playing fields of Eton , many reports to the contrary.
Both sides get advance notice of the time, place and nature of the activity in sports - and there is a strictly enforced set of rules.
By contrast, a successful military offensive operation is far more than half won if it is kept secret to the last moment and beyond.
Convince your foe you plan this Spring's big push there , after the roads have dried and then attack here - when the roads are still muddy - and he might still think it a feint even when your troops are in fact about to knock down the doors of his command centre.
Surprise and secrecy can often beat much higher qualities and quantities of equipment, manpower and leadership --- if most of a weak force is concentrated in a narrow sector of the enemy's lines at a time the enemy doesn't expect a major attack.
This need for surprise and secrecy applies to military activity off the battle field as well.
If - as happened all the time in the Pacific Campaign- both sides were down to 10% effective strength due to all the rest laid low by endemic local infections , the battle is almost certainly won if a secret cure-all like DDT clears up the insect source of those infections.
Because the exclusive use of DDT by only one side could enable it to send 50% of its tinier force into battle and win.
But only if DDT's abilities remain secret.
DDT was not strictly speaking "secret" ---- its chemical formula and method of manufacture was revealed in the public scientific literature back in 1874 and again in 1940 in a Swiss patent from Geigy.
But the Japanese hadn't seen those scientific reports or if so, hadn't grasped their military significance.
But even the stupidest Japanese general could correctly access urgent Japanese diplomatic cables indicating that the American domestic press was raving about the miracle success of DDT in clearing malaria from its endemic regions in the southern states of America.
So DDT was kept as secret as possible and more fundamentally , was not made available for civilian use during WWII.
This despite the fact that it was easy and cheap to make and very stable in storage - for the cost of one or two B-29s, the country's agricultural zones could all be sprayed by DDT and the resulting greater farm productivity would well repay the cost of the DDT factories.
Crops - as well as guns - win wars too, it could be argued.
But in fact, the productivity side of Total War was totally ignored over the secrecy side of Total War.
It was similar with Penicillin.
The key reason that striking, dramatic, heart-stopping successes in dragging civilian bodies back from the grave's edge in 1942-1943 were not permitted to be published by the AMA-OSRD-NAS triad was because this would indirectly alert the world to the military life-saving abilities of penicillin.
(See Wesley Spink's dramatic first success in July 1942 with seven year old "JE" - a heart-warming case which was not allowed to be published/publicized until April 1945, for a vivid example.)
Publicizing civilian cures would equalize its effects on the war if both sides, suitably alerted, then employed it freely.
Even if the health-restoring ability of penicillin made the war economy far more productive than the cost of setting up penicillin plants would take out of it ---- and this resulting extra productivity was devoted to making more weapons.
Because, at least in theory , both sides would see their economies expand equally - returning everything to the position it was before penicillin became widely public.
So instead, the Allies hoped to synthesize penicillin so that it was both cheap and abundant (like DDT) but also like DDT, they planned not to release it to the public, but use it as a military weapon - a secret medical weapon - exactly as DDT used.
But the heart-warming story of Baby Patricia in August 1943 let the cat out of the bag, as this local story in New York 'broke wide' , not just stateside but all around the world.
Now not just every civilian in the world wanted it for their sick relative like yesterday but military chiefs across the globe awoke (15 years late !) to the military potential of the miracle cure.
The chiefs of the American military medicine triad (and their equally smarmy British counterparts) pouted ---- but clever people in the Offices of War Information in both Allied nations resolved to make a virtue of necessity.
Baby Patty got her penicillin over the heads of the triad, but now official penicillin would be rushed by American military bombers to saving dying kids all over the world and the effort highly publicized in the process.
It would say to friend, foe and neutral alike that unlike those nasty life-denying Nazis, the Allies cared : oh how they cared.
Henry Dawson must have snickered at the blatant dishonesty in
this abrupt volte-face, but he was very glad lives were being saved however it came about and that the "unlimited potential" of the life-saving mold was at long last being released....
Both sides get advance notice of the time, place and nature of the activity in sports - and there is a strictly enforced set of rules.
By contrast, a successful military offensive operation is far more than half won if it is kept secret to the last moment and beyond.
Convince your foe you plan this Spring's big push there , after the roads have dried and then attack here - when the roads are still muddy - and he might still think it a feint even when your troops are in fact about to knock down the doors of his command centre.
Surprise and secrecy can often beat much higher qualities and quantities of equipment, manpower and leadership --- if most of a weak force is concentrated in a narrow sector of the enemy's lines at a time the enemy doesn't expect a major attack.
This need for surprise and secrecy applies to military activity off the battle field as well.
If - as happened all the time in the Pacific Campaign- both sides were down to 10% effective strength due to all the rest laid low by endemic local infections , the battle is almost certainly won if a secret cure-all like DDT clears up the insect source of those infections.
Because the exclusive use of DDT by only one side could enable it to send 50% of its tinier force into battle and win.
But only if DDT's abilities remain secret.
DDT was not strictly speaking "secret" ---- its chemical formula and method of manufacture was revealed in the public scientific literature back in 1874 and again in 1940 in a Swiss patent from Geigy.
But the Japanese hadn't seen those scientific reports or if so, hadn't grasped their military significance.
But even the stupidest Japanese general could correctly access urgent Japanese diplomatic cables indicating that the American domestic press was raving about the miracle success of DDT in clearing malaria from its endemic regions in the southern states of America.
So DDT was kept as secret as possible and more fundamentally , was not made available for civilian use during WWII.
This despite the fact that it was easy and cheap to make and very stable in storage - for the cost of one or two B-29s, the country's agricultural zones could all be sprayed by DDT and the resulting greater farm productivity would well repay the cost of the DDT factories.
Crops - as well as guns - win wars too, it could be argued.
But in fact, the productivity side of Total War was totally ignored over the secrecy side of Total War.
It was similar with Penicillin.
The key reason that striking, dramatic, heart-stopping successes in dragging civilian bodies back from the grave's edge in 1942-1943 were not permitted to be published by the AMA-OSRD-NAS triad was because this would indirectly alert the world to the military life-saving abilities of penicillin.
Wesley Spink did not rock the boat - unlike Henry Dawson
(See Wesley Spink's dramatic first success in July 1942 with seven year old "JE" - a heart-warming case which was not allowed to be published/publicized until April 1945, for a vivid example.)
Publicizing civilian cures would equalize its effects on the war if both sides, suitably alerted, then employed it freely.
Even if the health-restoring ability of penicillin made the war economy far more productive than the cost of setting up penicillin plants would take out of it ---- and this resulting extra productivity was devoted to making more weapons.
Because, at least in theory , both sides would see their economies expand equally - returning everything to the position it was before penicillin became widely public.
So instead, the Allies hoped to synthesize penicillin so that it was both cheap and abundant (like DDT) but also like DDT, they planned not to release it to the public, but use it as a military weapon - a secret medical weapon - exactly as DDT used.
But the heart-warming story of Baby Patricia in August 1943 let the cat out of the bag, as this local story in New York 'broke wide' , not just stateside but all around the world.
Now not just every civilian in the world wanted it for their sick relative like yesterday but military chiefs across the globe awoke (15 years late !) to the military potential of the miracle cure.
The chiefs of the American military medicine triad (and their equally smarmy British counterparts) pouted ---- but clever people in the Offices of War Information in both Allied nations resolved to make a virtue of necessity.
Baby Patty got her penicillin over the heads of the triad, but now official penicillin would be rushed by American military bombers to saving dying kids all over the world and the effort highly publicized in the process.
It would say to friend, foe and neutral alike that unlike those nasty life-denying Nazis, the Allies cared : oh how they cared.
Henry Dawson must have snickered at the blatant dishonesty in
this abrupt volte-face, but he was very glad lives were being saved however it came about and that the "unlimited potential" of the life-saving mold was at long last being released....
DDT and the myth of "a product of WWII science"
There is no more tired (or dishonest) a journalistic bromide than the claim that this or that boon to humanity was discovered, invented, developed and produced by WWII scientists.
What actually happened, ninety nine times out of a hundred, is that belatedly some senior military or scientific bureaucrat reluctantly agreed to let some underlings spend money on a 'half-baked' idea that had been discovered or invented years earlier but had seen little commercial success up to now.
For example : DDT had been synthesized in 1874.
But no uses had been found for it by its inventor so it lay about un-used until 1939 when Paul Muller of the Swiss firm Geigy decided to try it out as a way to kill the moths that eat woollen clothing.
It worked - and worked - and worked : it was the first wide spectrum insecticide that was both harmless to humans and persistent : killing by contact, for up to six month.
Geigy knew it had a winner but the rest of the insecticide world yawned.
In 1942, it tried a new tactic : it told the military attache from the USA in Berne about its abilities, suggesting it might have wide applications in the sort of terrain the Americans were currently fighting in (dah !), and offered a licensing deal.
Naturally the Defense Department accepted the gift with great reluctance : even the normally mild-tempered Eisenhower actually had to fake a nuclear meltdown to convince the Pentagon to give him more DDT to prevent an expected mass epidemic of typhus in the winter of 1944 in Italy.
This, despite typhus being very well known as the number one military killer throughout the last half millennium of history !
DDT is very much like Penicillin : both were not run of the mill variants of their types but rather far and away the best of their types : their commercial success might have been delayed but it was inevitable they would be huge successes ultimately.
Neither were totally secret during WWII ( indeed perhaps only the great successes of the Allied and Axis code-breakers were truly secret during the war.)
But they were intended to remain largely unavailable to the general public for as long as possible , not because of any absolute inability to produce them in quantity, but because widespread public success in America would only alert the enemy overseas to their value.
The details on how to make commercial amounts of both Penicillin and DDT were in the public record but the Germans didn't take up Penicillin and the Japanese didn't take up DDT - sending hundreds of thousands of their combat troops to any early grave.
We might regard American and Japanese generals equally stupid for ignoring the military potential of DDT when it went on the market in 1940, but to be fair , we should also regard American and Japanese CEOs being equally blind to the commercial potential of DDT.
And of Penicillin.
It is indeed curious that in all the millions of words written by writers about Fleming and Florey's "seminal" public articles announcing the miracle of penicillin (over and over and over again), no author has bothered to research the amount of response back to their authors upon publication.
Perhaps because there was so very little.
Gladys Hobby says that a Dr Herrell wanted details and a penicillium sample immediately after Henry Dawson's first
penicillin presentation at a huge medical conference in Atlantic City in May 1942 and a month later, a fruitful letter offering support came from mid level Pfizer (then not really a drug company) employees.
But she says that was it .
(Except that the popular media gave Dawson's presentation huge play : New York Times, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Newsweek, the wire services, etc. : perhaps they were more on the ball than the scientific media.)
Earlier, Dawson's plans to inject penicillin into SBE patients in October 1940 had been communicated by his colleagues, consultants to various New York area drug companies, and as a result there had been a sudden flurry of activity around penicillin at these firms but it soon died back.
It generally had consisted of nothing more than putting a few flasks of penicillium up to brew.
Apparently no drug company approached him then to offer to make serious amounts for a proper clinical trial.
Word hadn't reached Pfizer in October 1940 - it was not then inside the drug company gossip and rumour circuit.
While they claim they had reps at the Atlantic City meeting, I believe that it was more likely the fact that the story of Dawson's penicillin ending up near the business section of the New York Times that probably moved the very cautious management of Pfizer to approach Dawson a month later.
One of the enduring themes of this blog is the relative un-importance of public science (being published in the scientific media) and the crucial importance of popular science (publication in the conventional media) to propel new ideas, inventions and discoveries forward.
Most senior figures in government, business, science, the military etc are simply constitutionally incapable of making the bold move from reading about a major new idea in the scientific press to promptly investing heavily in it.
Only the fear of public embarrassment if one of their competitors gets there first will move them off the toilet : and here stories in the popular media will indeed move them to do so.
'Why maybe their own daughter and wife might see the story and ask why he hadn't made enough penicillin to save his own nephew Joey at Guadalcanal?'
Put bluntly, stores in the popular media is the best (and often the only) way to embarrass bureaucrats to take seriously new ideas they have already read about - and dismissed - in the public (scientific) media.
And so informal censorship of semi-secret ideas is the best way to prevent such public embarrassment - if hardly the best way to win a war .....
What actually happened, ninety nine times out of a hundred, is that belatedly some senior military or scientific bureaucrat reluctantly agreed to let some underlings spend money on a 'half-baked' idea that had been discovered or invented years earlier but had seen little commercial success up to now.
For example : DDT had been synthesized in 1874.
But no uses had been found for it by its inventor so it lay about un-used until 1939 when Paul Muller of the Swiss firm Geigy decided to try it out as a way to kill the moths that eat woollen clothing.
It worked - and worked - and worked : it was the first wide spectrum insecticide that was both harmless to humans and persistent : killing by contact, for up to six month.
Geigy knew it had a winner but the rest of the insecticide world yawned.
In 1942, it tried a new tactic : it told the military attache from the USA in Berne about its abilities, suggesting it might have wide applications in the sort of terrain the Americans were currently fighting in (dah !), and offered a licensing deal.
Naturally the Defense Department accepted the gift with great reluctance : even the normally mild-tempered Eisenhower actually had to fake a nuclear meltdown to convince the Pentagon to give him more DDT to prevent an expected mass epidemic of typhus in the winter of 1944 in Italy.
This, despite typhus being very well known as the number one military killer throughout the last half millennium of history !
DDT is very much like Penicillin : both were not run of the mill variants of their types but rather far and away the best of their types : their commercial success might have been delayed but it was inevitable they would be huge successes ultimately.
There were very few 'real secrets' in WWII
Neither were totally secret during WWII ( indeed perhaps only the great successes of the Allied and Axis code-breakers were truly secret during the war.)
But they were intended to remain largely unavailable to the general public for as long as possible , not because of any absolute inability to produce them in quantity, but because widespread public success in America would only alert the enemy overseas to their value.
The details on how to make commercial amounts of both Penicillin and DDT were in the public record but the Germans didn't take up Penicillin and the Japanese didn't take up DDT - sending hundreds of thousands of their combat troops to any early grave.
We might regard American and Japanese generals equally stupid for ignoring the military potential of DDT when it went on the market in 1940, but to be fair , we should also regard American and Japanese CEOs being equally blind to the commercial potential of DDT.
And of Penicillin.
It is indeed curious that in all the millions of words written by writers about Fleming and Florey's "seminal" public articles announcing the miracle of penicillin (over and over and over again), no author has bothered to research the amount of response back to their authors upon publication.
Perhaps because there was so very little.
Gladys Hobby says that a Dr Herrell wanted details and a penicillium sample immediately after Henry Dawson's first
penicillin presentation at a huge medical conference in Atlantic City in May 1942 and a month later, a fruitful letter offering support came from mid level Pfizer (then not really a drug company) employees.
But she says that was it .
(Except that the popular media gave Dawson's presentation huge play : New York Times, Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, Newsweek, the wire services, etc. : perhaps they were more on the ball than the scientific media.)
Earlier, Dawson's plans to inject penicillin into SBE patients in October 1940 had been communicated by his colleagues, consultants to various New York area drug companies, and as a result there had been a sudden flurry of activity around penicillin at these firms but it soon died back.
It generally had consisted of nothing more than putting a few flasks of penicillium up to brew.
Apparently no drug company approached him then to offer to make serious amounts for a proper clinical trial.
Word hadn't reached Pfizer in October 1940 - it was not then inside the drug company gossip and rumour circuit.
While they claim they had reps at the Atlantic City meeting, I believe that it was more likely the fact that the story of Dawson's penicillin ending up near the business section of the New York Times that probably moved the very cautious management of Pfizer to approach Dawson a month later.
One of the enduring themes of this blog is the relative un-importance of public science (being published in the scientific media) and the crucial importance of popular science (publication in the conventional media) to propel new ideas, inventions and discoveries forward.
Most senior figures in government, business, science, the military etc are simply constitutionally incapable of making the bold move from reading about a major new idea in the scientific press to promptly investing heavily in it.
Only the fear of public embarrassment if one of their competitors gets there first will move them off the toilet : and here stories in the popular media will indeed move them to do so.
'Why maybe their own daughter and wife might see the story and ask why he hadn't made enough penicillin to save his own nephew Joey at Guadalcanal?'
Put bluntly, stores in the popular media is the best (and often the only) way to embarrass bureaucrats to take seriously new ideas they have already read about - and dismissed - in the public (scientific) media.
And so informal censorship of semi-secret ideas is the best way to prevent such public embarrassment - if hardly the best way to win a war .....
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