Penicillin an excellent war weapon because it was so hard to synth, not in spite of that

An excellent antiseptic like synthetic gramicidin was cheap to make, fast acting, stable and a very effective bacterial killer.

But as a weapon of war, it lacked the ability to remain secret for very long .

For if one American chemist could quickly synthesize this product of nature, the massed forces of German Chemistry, widely recognized as the best in the world, would make even shorter work of the same task.

By pointed contrast, despite its relatively small molecular weight, a dozen years of dilatory chemistry efforts by some very good biochemists and some big drug companies had failed to crack penicillin's structure.

It thus promised to be something that even the Germans might take a year to synthesize and get into mass production.

And if both the existence of synth penicillin and the success natural penicillin already had had in curing serious domestic infections could remain a secret until the Second Front opened up on the Germans, that year delay would be a fatal delay.

 Because the first the German High Command would have heard of penicillin was the explanation that it was the new secret Allied weapon that by returning more of their troops (and returning them much quicker) to the front was handily winning the manpower war against the Axis.

The only fly in this happy ointment ?

Man never did succeed, not even 75 years later,  in making penicillin as cheaply and as productively as the penicillium's tiny slime factories did.

(Given that Henry Dawson had spent his whole life demonstrating how smart even the smallest of non-pathogenic bacteria could be, I doubt that he would be surprised !)

Unlike the production of nuclear weapons, the production of penicillin remains as it began, something relatively easy to make in any hospital lab and hardly something that can remain 'secret' forever simply due to its overwhelming expense and complexity.....

Fleming's non-toxic antiseptic was useless (and was called penicillin)

Toxic - but effective - antiseptic

An extremely non-toxic ,wide-spectrum (for its time)  germ-killer that can be used as a huge-dose, long term, systemic (ie something we safely introduce into the bloodstream), is a very rare indeed.

And highly valuable, even priceless, whenever our body faces massive body-wide infections that can kill us.

By contrast, what Alexander Fleming claimed to offer between the Fall of 1928 and the Fall of 1942, was a slow acting, non-toxic, wide-spectrum antiseptic (externally applied) germ-killer that was in very short supply and very unstable.


Forget, for the moment, most of Fleming's 'claims'.

The main point his listeners would take away was that this was a non-toxic antiseptic and as such, not particularly valuable.

Non-toxic and yet not particularly valuable ??!!

Yes, even fairly toxic systemics can sometimes be useful.

And as for antiseptic use, even very toxic substances can still be totally useful.

This confusion comes about because even doctors are frequently far too loose as to what they actually mean when they say a drug is toxic.

Toxic usually means - when you dig into the subject - it kills  tender cells, in our interiors , and when delivered via the blood supply.

But toxic chemicals poured into body cavities and wounds without access to the internal blood supply (aka antiseptics) can end up doing very little damage in the overall scheme of things.

Even if they kill our body's cells at lower levels of the drug than the level needed to kill bacteria cells, they still can be useful : the wound at first might be a mess of already dead human cells acting as a food source for deadly bacteria.

Later after the bacteria are dead and the dead human cells are flushed away, the toxic antiseptic can be withdrawn before it starts killing new living human cells.

So antiseptics don't really need to be non-toxic, to be effective.

But they do need to be cheap, abundant, have long term stability and non-complicated storage requirements : everything that Fleming's offering (Penicillin) lacked.

Limited visions indeed : comparing penicillin to gramicidin

Something that Gramicidin, its chief rival from 1939 to 1943, did offer in spades. (Gramicidin was highly dangerous if taken internally but quite useful if poured into open wounds.)

But even the act of medically comparing penicillin to gramicidin , as many  medical researchers did in those years, gives us a rare insight into their personal 'war aims'.

They saw the many different sulfa drugs as essential for all forms of infections, internal and external, military and civilian : and so scarce resources must be diverted to their mass production.

But the fact that they only saw penicillin as an antiseptic , meant they saw its use limited to wound-type infections - ie mostly for military personnel and even there, only for trauma infections.

This limited estimation of the worth of penicillin contrasts vividly with penicillin's biggest booster, Henry Dawson.

Quite simply, he said in 1941 that he saw penicillin has having "unlimited possibilities" and that "the government" should mass produce it for all , rather than wait for Big Pharma to get its act together.

If Dawson saw it first and foremost as a systemic (and most deadly infections are systemic), Fleming had spent the last dozen years flatly telling all his face-to-face listeners that penicillin would never ever work as a systemic.

He said this beginning  in 1928 and he clung to this fatally incorrect "belief" until at least 1942 or 1943.

Yes, Alexander Fleming should be honoured as the father of penicillin, but he should also be condemned as the father who also trying his hardest to kill his own child for 15 years....