Despite Eric Lax, Howard Florey is still "Box Office Poison" to women readers

And as every book editor well knows , most readers of narrative fiction/non-fiction  are women.

But in the Lax take on the wartime penicillin saga, the hero offered up is a man who leaves his deaf middle class wife to ride around on her bike in the rain collecting urine from penicillin patients while he 'has it off' with his aristocratic mistress in the luxurious bath and bedroom suite he had at his office in (never-Blitzed) Oxford England .

And this at a time when millions of Britons in the rest of the UK were being bombed out their homes by the Blitz and (barely) living in makeshift shelters.

Charming, really charming !

Just of the sort of hero women readers want to cuddle up to - Not.

The character - or lack of it - of Howard Florey  is what made Eric Lax's recent biography such a flop among ordinary readers.

So, despite the fact that a survey of thousands of American women found they considered penicillin the most important news story of the entire 20th century , we still have never had a successful popular book or movie about the dramatic wartime history of penicillin.

What is missing in all past efforts is a focus on the one classical hero in the whole saga : the dying Dr Dawson and his unrelenting efforts to make penicillin inclusive not exclusive.

That and a too trusting reliance by previous writers upon the official histories rather than digging deeper into the primary records.

Because the people in Washington and London who wrote the official histories determined, above all, to cover up their very expensive and very time-wasting wartime flop : the synthetic penicillin project led by Florey and George Merck and paid for mostly by the taxpayers - as always.

So they tried to pretend that the stone these builders rejected had really been their idea all along. With Dawson prematurely dead at war's end and unable to set the record straight , it was - literally - dead simple.

Women, around the world , will buy a popular history about wartime penicillin by the tens of millions of copies - with the right set of heroes and villains laid out before them.

"The smallest Manhattan Project : the unexpected triumph of inclusive penicillin" will do just that .....

the moldS in Dr Fleming's letterS

A jab - I admit - at Eric Lax's famous book title, "The Mold in Dr Florey's Coat".

Florey and his team are usually applauded for their

"selflessness" in rubbing brown penicillin liquid/powder/spores (accounts vary in the endless re-tellings) into the seams of their clothing in May 1940.

 Their supposed intention was to ensure that precious penicillin could go out into the world to grow anew and save lives everywhere, even if the beastly Nazis did succeed in conquering Britain and the spires of Oxford.

"There will always be an England ...and England's precious gift, to Humanity, Penicillin". Etc.

But what if a single bomb had destroyed their Dunn Pathology Building, killing all the entire team and all their moldy coats?

Or if the Germans invaded Britain as fast as they had overrun the rest of Europe, so that no one from the Florey team got away to what remained of the Free World?

Was there an alternative to these theatrics?

Yes there was.

Three in fact.

(1) Do what Fleming had already done for 12 years and would continue to do - sprinkle a few of his spores into a folded paper as part of an ordinary unremarked-upon letter and mail it to anyone in the world, without charge, upon request.

But because there was an invasion coming, don't just wait for requests - mail out your version of Fleming's spores to all your friends and acquaintances ----- and ask them to store them and hide those precious spores.

 Or better yet, mail them Fleming's spores, together with what you have learned so far as how to extract , semi-purify and store dry penicillin and urge them to start their own research efforts based around that work.

(2) A bit late now, but if Florey did really think that Fleming missed the boat back in 1928 by not doing the "animal protection test" why didn't Florey do it in himself in 1929, when he received the manuscript of Fleming's first paper, as an editor of the journal that paper was submitted to?

Or in 1931, when one of his subordinates at Sheffield , Dr Cecil Paine, told him of his success in external applications of liquid penicillin in curing real diseases of human patients.

Why did Florey not immediately follow this up, by seeing if liquid penicillin would work as well in curing artificial internal  diseases in lab mice by way of a needle (ie internal application), aka "the animal protection test" ?

Or why did Florey not 'do the mouse' back in 1938, when he first began his research on penicillin  -- if it was that apparent that the vital "animal protection test" had been overlooked?

Any of these times would have revealed the power of penicillin as a internal, systemic, cure - ie as the first,best, modern antibiotic, rather than just another also-ran in the overcrowded and ineffective external antiseptic market.

But in 1929,1931 or in 1938, Britain and the world would have had the peacetime resources to quickly bring penicillin to market.

But waiting two years, till the Fall of France, to 'do the mouse' and only doing it because your subordinate, Chain, jumped the gun in a fit of pique hardly shows you were concerned about the fate of a unique life-saving drug.

(3) While retelling the tale of the spores rubbed into your clothing, admit it happened because only you were (inaccurately) convinced that your team were the only scientists in the world with (a) access to these unique penicillin-producing penicillium spores and (b) had found a method of extracting and preserving dry penicillin.

This is why you kept your new penicillin success a secret, even from your prime funder, the MRC, and why you also didn't tell the scientific world of your extraction method in your August 1940 paper in Lancet.

And why as late as March-April 1941, you weren't telling any outsiders the details about your extraction methods --- not even to your many friends and colleagues overseas.

And why you only revealed your extraction methods in August 1941, after it appeared that a competitor in America had already released his own methods of extraction back in February 1941.

If Britain was About to Fall and All  Civilization About to Totter, these hardly sound like the actions of a selfless individual.

But they do sound  exactly like the lifelong characteristics of one Howard Florey - from ruthless 'take-no-prisoner' teenage tennis competitor to adult scientific 'bushwhacker'.

This is why the lazy, laidback Fleming almost got the only Nobel prize to be awarded for penicillin, instead of it going to the hardworking, ambitious, Florey and his hard-driving team.

You see ,the world had just been through the most brutal war it had ever seen, a war created by a hardworking, ambitious individual.

 So, yes, Fleming might well have been lazy on following up on penicillin - he freely admitted as much.

But lazy Fleming had also never denied anyone his unique spores - or sought any payment or even reminded them that he be mentioned in their scientific publications.

(It is worth recalling that until late 1945, those same 'Fleming Spore, albeit a little subcultured and subselected, were still supplying the world all of its therapeutic penicillin--- the many efforts to find better spores and make them workable had failed up until that date.)

And Fleming had never denied anyone his methods he himself had used to extract and preserve penicillin.

That is why he got - and deserved to get - the Nobel Prize for penicillin.

I,then, am also a partisan of Fleming's worth, like Milton Wainwright and Kevin Brown ---- up to a point.

I'd take his freewill "spores in a letter", in a New York instant, over Florey's secretive "spores in a coat", any day.....

was I too harsh on Eric Lax ?

Some have worried that I was.

But I don't agree and I hope that even Eric Lax will see why I argued as I did.

Almost anyone reading Lax's book on penicillin, "The Mold in Dr Florey's Coat", is struck by the fact that the emotional climax of the book is well forward in the overall Penicillin Saga - occurring in May 1940.

 I would have set the emotional climax much later - in August/September 1943 or in May/August 1944.

Lax's book builds steadily up to the (supposedly) crucial animal protection tests that Lax and almost all other penicillin authors chide Fleming for failing to perform in the Fall of 1928.

A check of Lax's own indexing confirms the large number of pages (in a shortish book) that are devoted to animal testing and the mouse protection tests.

He is also that rarity among the many penicillin authors in deciding to quote at length from John Fulton's letter to the Nobel Committee ,in which Fulton says that Florey deserves the Nobel because of his animal experiments with penicillin.

Surely an, ahem, unique viewpoint.

But in a perverse sort of way it does show some truth - Fulton and Florey loved to experiment on the bodies of animals far more than they did anything else in life.

Lax sets up the animal protection tests of May 1940 as the moral high ground of the entire penicillin story.

He even highlights the story of the Florey team deciding to smear their coats with the most widely available 'rare' mold on Planet Earth (thanks to Fleming !), all to keep it from the Nazis.

I merely say that what is good for the goose is even better for the gander.

Yes, Fleming should have needled the mouse back in '28, but why didn't Florey do the bog simple mouse test in early 1938, when peacetime drug firms might have been able to produce commercial penicillin, even before Hitler overran Poland ?

The usual biographer's apology for Florey waiting from Spring 1938 till Spring 1940 to test penicillin against an artificial illness (and until Spring 1941 before testing against a real human illness) is that he needed purified dry penicillin before he could do an injection.

Fleming's rebuttal would be "that since I never obtained any dry purified penicillin - according to Florey" - "then I was under no moral obligation to do the mouse protection test".

"Or if I should have done so anyway with wet penicillin in 1928,then Florey should have done ditto in 1938."

Duhig from Brisbane could also chime in with that blunt Australian manner, with "Look, Florey, I saved large adults from terminal illnesses with injections of weak,wet, penicillin - surely you could cure a diseased mouse with some of your 1938 wet penicillin if you had only tried ..."

In support of Duhig, Heatley says that the first penicillin used by Chain in March 1940 ( in a sort of toxicity test) had between 2 to 5 units of anti-bacterial activity per mg and that
a 20 gram mouse got 40 mgs - that is about 4,000 to 10,000 units per kg of body weight.

For a 80 kg adult human male that is the equivalent of a single dose of 320,000 to 800,000 units of injected penicillin - even today that is 'heroic medicine'  -and as a single dose in a series for animal protection it is about one hundred times too big.

But is also the liquid penicillin you would obtain, even in 1928 or 1938, from a single medium sized lab flask  - not exactly hard work to gather up.

But it is 40 mls of liquid penicillin to inject into a mouse - far too much even if done as a slow drip.

However, injecting .5 or 1.0 ml of raw crude wet penicillin at a time into a twenty gram mouse, as part of a series of injections, would be perfectly safe.

It would give , in human adult male equivalent terms, a single dose of about 4,000 to 16,000 units - which is about what a wartime adult male penicillin patient did get in a single dose in a series of shots (usually receiving 4 to 8 such shots in a twenty four hour day).

The technical claims against using crude wet penicillin in animal protection tests fails to stand up - but fails for Florey as well as for Fleming.

In talking about (Duhig's) raw, totally non-concentrated penicillin as being suitable for animal protection tests, I am deliberately worsening the case against Fleming.

In fact, while in 1940 Florey had a dry brown powder with 2-5 units of activity per mg, in 1929, Fleming had a brown gooey toffee with 2-5 units of activity per mg - once re-wetted with distilled water to inject into a mouse, both were as equal as can be.

 Neither were pure.

But both had been concentrated successfully enough to be highly useful therapeutic penicillin - if only that pair had had the guts to 'do the clinical' .

That was something that Dawson did , and did in a ' New York minute' .

Harsh on Eric Lax ?

I don't think so...

FLOREY's biggest mistake : Spring 1938-May 1940

Two wrongs can never make a right.

Millions of lives, literally, might have been saved if Alexander Fleming had only run a quick animal protection test with a mouse, a bit of staph bacteria and a needle full of his wet penicillin juice , back in October 1928.

It wasn't until about ten years later that sulfa drugs began to be universally available and regularly used - and even then they didn't work as well as penicillin.

The lives needlessly lost in that period have to be laid at Fleming's door.

Howard Florey and his entire Oxford University team never stopped criticizing Fleming for this elemental failure - as most people would have a full right to do.

But Florey and his team do not have that right.

For they failed to do the same thing they criticized Fleming for not doing,that bog simple animal protection test with wet penicillin juice, something they neglected to do from early Spring 1938 till May 1940.

They had the wet penicillin, the mice and the skill to do the test.

If they had done that test, we might have seen penicillin development work started in earnest by British drug firms in 1938, before the Munich Crisis, long before the fall of France in June 1940.

In which case the exciting wartime penicillin story might have ended happily before it even began.

Not until they had accomplished their  real goal - concentrating Fleming's impure 2-5 units per mg penicillin sticky brown toffee into a 2-5 units per mg dry brown powder - and claiming it was highly purified penicillin, did the Oxford University think about the all important animal protection test.

All the evidence is that while Ernest Chain was anxious to do it, Florey didn't think they had gone far enough along the so called purification route to move into stage two animal trials.

Chain had to force the issue - making Florey so angry that Chain never ever regained Florey's trust.

Here was Britain about to be invaded, civilization tottering in the balance and Florey was plodding through every scientific experiment in his rulebook, instead of cutting to the chase on a drug that might save many Britons lives.

He was thinking like a scientist ,not like a patriot - fair enough - a common failing among scientists - even during a war crisis.

But most scientists who think like that don't have the nerve to turn around and very publicly blame a colleague for failing to do what they themselves also failed to do.

It is things like this that make it very hard for me to stomach Howard Florey as a whole - though there are many things I do admire about the man.

And don't think I let Florey's many admiring biographers off any more lightly - how in the name of all that is holy do they justify admiring Florey for delaying that critical wet penicillin animal protection test  for more than two years?

The recent British television movie on Florey criticizes Fleming for never doing the animal test, but remains silent on why on earth Florey waited until well into the Battle of Britain crisis to 'poke the mouse'.

Fleming deserves to be blamed for some of his failings.

Fair enough.

But Florey needs to be held to the same high standard - I only wish Eric Lax and others had done so....

STALIN lives? at the DUNN ?

I sometimes think that atheists have taken over Oxford University and that they now worship scientists (provided their 'tough minded' enough) instead of God.

Sometimes this means that Oxford have to apply some of Stalin's favorite photographic techniques for making Commissars vanish.

Stalin excelled at first the bullet to the back of the head and then a generous application of photographic varnish to the front of the head ,applied to whatever official photographs that couldn't be tossed.

Wilson Baker was a harmless little man, a devout Quaker peace activist and a darn fine chemist - he's dead but not by any bullet to the head.

But the photo vanishing varnish does apply - he's been erased from the official portrait of the moment of Oxford's University greatest triumph - the (failed) effort to synthesize penicillin during World War Two.

Baker's fault was that his mere presence in an iconic photograph interfered with the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology's panty lines when it came to exalting their best known director, Baron Sir Howard Florey.

Florey is himself dead but he still a real little money maker for the Dunn, Oxford University, Oxford City and the whole bio-med-crazy rich and rapidly growing "Thames Valley".

The original iconic photo is in Britain's National Portrait Gallery, taken in 1944 by Wolfgang Suschitzky at the Dunn in Oxford as part of a a ICI-funded film on Britain's role in penicillin:

I have shamelessly taken this from Robert Bud's book on Penicillin, together with his caption and credit line.

Now here is another almost exactly similar photo, taken this time from Eric Lax's book on penicillin, with its caption and credit line to the Dunn Pathology School.

I don't know about Pathological, but I find this all definitely creepy:

I have made these photos very small ,to save bandwidth, but they sure look alike---- aside from the tighter crop of the Dunn version.

But now look closer at the figure of Florey from the Dunn version:

It sure looks like a bad "insert" job ala Joe Stalin's technique.

And doesn't our Florey's pose look very very familiar , in fact ,iconic to cliche-worthy familiar ?

Ah yes, Florey had no license to inject people.

 The stand-in shot of him using a needle of his famous live-saving penicillin, in lieu of something more heroic, has become a posed-up shot of him and his aide, Jim Kent, needling a mouse in May 1940.

 I think its a law that it must be used in every book and article on Florey,Oxford and penicillin.

Here it is,also from Lax's book, and again provided by the Dunn people:

What do you think ?