Henry Dawson "jump-started" The Age of Antibiotics because, almost alone in the medical world, he wasn't obsessed with 'purity' but rather with 'charity'

We have the records of only a few contemporary reactions to Henry Dawson's surprise decision to dramatically kick-start The Age of Antibiotics, 12 years after it should have begun but three months before it was scheduled to begin , but they are suggestive.

Gladys Hobby, his assistant, entered the Meyer-Hobby penicillin project a few weeks into it, after taking a late summer vacation.

She returned, she told penicillin author Leonard Bickel just 20 years later, to "an air of excitement filling the Dawson-Meyer lab" , Dawson had "immediately begun to work on this new project" and she "was at once caught up in his eager search".

Dawson was willing to wait "only eight days" after Meyer began purifying his first ever brew of penicillin before, "full of excitement" he injected this just-begun-being-purified material into two dying patients .

One patient died, one went home cured - Dawson refused to credit his small amount of "extremely low potency" penicillin with this cure, but he was "heartened" by the "low toxicity" of this "extremely crude" preparation. "No serious toxic effects observed."

Hobby later wrote in her own book on penicillin, that Dawson had "recognized immediately that penicillin .... might be effective in the treatment of ...subacute bacterial endocarditis in particular". The product used on October 16th 1940, she admits, was "crude" , "slightly purified (concentrated)" , even "extremely crude" .

At first, only the "low toxicity" of the "crude and impure" penicillin was noteworthy , not its curing ability.

On May 5th 1941, Dawson addressed hundreds of the world's top research doctors in Atlantic City, an event traditionally well covered by the popular media.

So we learn - via the New York Time's famous Atomic Bill Lawrence that Dawson admitted to the audience that despite his "crude" penicillin not being "pure", "no serious toxic effects were observed."

Via science journalist Steven Spencer, writing in America's largest evening paper, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, we learn that Dawson said that his penicillin was not toxic even when given in doses far beyond those dosages needed to clear up infections -- a distinct advantage over the sulfas, which are toxic to some people."

He said, reports Spencer, that penicillin had "unlimited possibilities."

Finally, an opponent of Dawson, Stanhope Bayne-Jones tells Howard Florey in strict confidence in July 1941, that Dawson is "quite honest" but "uncritically enthusiastic" .

I think I have demonstrated what was Dawson's key insight into penicillin, the insight that drove his excitement and his passion.

It was that he realized that  even a crude mix of hospital-made natural penicillin with all its natural impurities still in it was both potent AND non toxic  (in fact more potent and much less toxic than drug-company-made PURE sulfa drugs).

So morally, a doctor could not wait for 100% pure natural penicillin or for 100% pure synthetic penicillin, before starting to use penicillin to save the dying by systemic injections.

He had discovered unrefined natural penicillin's big secret....

Howard Florey, Henry Dawson,Penicillin and the NEW YORK TIMES : how then-tiny Pfizer became the biggest drug company in the world

"Giant Germicide" article changed history ...

Myth much to the contrary, Howard Florey went to America in 1941 not looking for a way to save lives, but for a way to save Allied military lives without having to save Axis, Neutral or Allied civilian lives : he was looking for a top secret medical bomb, a weapon of war.

Since publicity and top secret war weapons don't mix , this explains why when the New York Times sought to interview him upon his arrival on July 3rd 1941, fresh off the Pan Am Clipper, he curtly declined their kind offer and said nothing at all.

(Imagine : the most influential newspaper in the world offering to be your conduit for telling all of America's political and business leaders about penicillin's potential and you toss it aside like an used condom ! )

Perhaps as a result of his playing hard to get, Florey never did get the kilogram of pure penicillin that he sought so hard on this trip, because he had no public pressure backing his private appeal.

By way of contrast, Dr Henry Dawson did take his belief in penicillin's "unlimited potential" (his words) to a huge public medical conflab, attended by many of the world's science and health journalists, and got lots of publicity (as far away as South Africa) about his expansive belief in penicillin.

The New York Times article that changed history ...

Among the media who reported Dawson's comments was the New York Times , which splashed his optimistic views ("Giant Germicide") near the business section of the paper.

Next morning, some busy-- important---executive at then-tiny Pfizer chanced to read about a potential drug he had never heard of over his breakfast table ..... and the rest is history.

That same history reminds us that 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches in the first crucial mass clinical trial of penicillin came from Pfizer and Pfizer alone.

The one drug company in America that Florey had NOT visited on his search for his kilo.

The one drug company that Dawson did approach, ironically because he was merely seeking to help the churlish Florey.

So : "the stone the builder rejected", redeemed by an article in the New York Times.

That is the power of journalism, of publicity and of the New York Times.....

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.

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 .....

Penicillin, age 13, meets her first lover : Henry Dawson

Mad, is he ??

It was frequently said of Dr Henry Dawson (as it was of General James Wolfe) that he was quite mad.

But what can one say in response, that George II hasn't already said much better over two hundred and fifty years earlier ?

It is true that Henry Dawson was quite mad , mad on the subject of the "unlimited potential" of penicillin , at a time (1941) when almost all ignored it and even its own 'supporters' damned it with veiled praise.


It was the Philadelphia Bulletin, at the time America's largest evening newspaper, that quotes him as saying ( May 5th 1941) that penicillin has "unlimited possibilities."

The New York Times' headline the next day, quotes him as describing penicillin as a Giant Germicide, non-toxic to a marked degree (unlike the then standard sulfa drugs) and "the most powerful germ killer ever discovered" : thousands of times more potent than any sulfa drug.

Hundreds of the world's top doctors heard Dawson's presentation on penicillin and many doctors described it as "opening a new chapter" on the medical fight against the deadly gram-positive bacteria.

Dawson was judged as "uncritically enthusiastic"

No wonder with such gushiness that a powerful member of the American medical establishment , Stanhope Bayne-Jones , snifflingly dismissed Dawson to (later Baron) Howard Florey, as "uncritically enthusiastic".

But was there ever (will there ever be) a better life-saver to be "uncritically enthusiastic" over than penicillin ?

Mad is he ? Well, I wish he'd bite my other doctors.....

Penicillin Diplomacy comes to Cuba November 12 1943

Batista wooed by PENICILLIN

An American warplane flies south throughout the night in November 1943, all in an effort to deliver scarce American government penicillin to save the life of a small son of Cuban lawyer Angel Diaz Soto.

The effort is widely reported in all the semi-official American media such the New York Times, media that were read all around the world by government elites seeking to discern the attitudes of the largest member of the rising Allied powers of World War Two.

This particular tea leaf wasn't hard to read : penicillin was no longer to be a secret weapon of war, just for American soldiers ; but now was to be an instrument of peace , open to all the nations of the world willing to take up the yoke of defeating the evil Nazis.


Look, this effort said in effect, can you picture the Nazis giving something like life-saving penicillin to the child of an unknown civilian in small little forgotten bit of the world ?

Dawson Diplomacy

Call it Penicillin Diplomacy or Dawson Diplomacy, it doesn' really matter : what matters it that it became more and more widely practised in the last months of the war as penicillin became an evergrowing potent symbol of hope after Hitler was defeated.....