Too bad so many books, movies and TV shows force us to remember how WWII ended with a bang over a city in Japan, with tens of thousands of young mothers and babies burning to death in the streets below.
Because WWII also ended with a whimper, in a city in the Netherlands, and this time with a young mother snatched from death , just in time, and her new baby happily and noisily whimpering at her breast.
Her salvation was stolen from Allied government stores and wafted gently down to her, strictly on the QT, via a RAF issued handkerchief used as a makeshift parachute, from a bomber riding shotgun above her nation.
Life-saving Natural Penicillin , the only truly Good News story of WWII, just won't have happened during WWII, if not for a few brave souls.
A few with the moral courage and the intellectual courage (and in one case, the physical courage) to stand up to doubting colleagues and censuring government bureaucrats and who were willing to break laws and steal penicillin, to do what was right and to try and save lives while there was still time to do so.
A few brave souls can indeed change our whole world, for the better, forever....
Showing posts with label pfizer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pfizer. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
Patient ONE of the Antibiotics Era : how the saving of Charlie Aronson changed our world
During his lifetime, Dr Henry Dawson only gave penicillin to several dozen endocarditis patients, Charlie Aronson first among them ; only saved several dozen lives, Charlie among them.
Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.
But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.
If only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.
Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.
Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.
It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.
Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.
The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.
There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.
Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.
Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.
This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.
They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.
Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.
A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).
This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.
Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.
We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.
Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.
America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana, again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".
Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.
But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.
Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.
Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.
But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.
Dante Colitti forced their hand.
In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital, was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.
But he did.
He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.
And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.
Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.
The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.
Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/ needed penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?
Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.
The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone: John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944, is clear enough .
Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....
Dawson's pioneering effort to inject Charlie with penicillin on October 16th and 17th 1940 (Dies Miribilis) certainly didn't directly save many lives.
But the moral fact that Dawson cared enough in the first place about Charlie-the-person, to pioneer in making and to giving him penicillin, has certainly saved tens and tens of millions of lives ever since Dawson's premature death in 1945.
If only the greater cultural milieu surrounding Dawson and Charlie had been as willing - nay as eager - to save Charlie 'the 4F of the 4Fs' as Dawson was, it might also have been as willing - nay eager - to save the Jews of Europe as well.
Immaterial that Charlie was almost certainly Jewish as well : the point to Dawson was that Charlie was a fellow human being, end of story.
Social medicine, Dawson's domain, says that medicine is not just the narrow manipulating of bio-chemical activities to save lives.
It holds instead the view that most people die prematurely, not because their bodies failed or because medicines failed, but because the world around them see them as not worth much, so not worthy of much effort, time and expense to try to save them.
Doctors who challenge these utilitarian views by their voices and their actions indirectly save far more lives than do their equally competent colleagues who may directly save more lives, but who are content to only save the lives their culture deems worthy of saving.
The Allies (rather like the Axis, differing only in degree not in kind) divided the world of World War Two into three parts, like Gaul.
There were the enemy-oriented people and the allies-oriented people : themselves further divided into 1A allies and 4F allies.
Until June 1943, only enough American resources were going to be devoted to penicillin to ensure that the needs of the 1A allies would be met.
Then the American WPB (Wartime Production Board) made its most surprising decision ever : that a considerable portion of America's bomb and bullet making potential would be diverted instead to making lifesavers - penicillin lifesavers enough to save soldier and civilian alike.
This was not a decision followed by Britain , Canada and Australia.
They decided to divert only enough of their country's resources to penicillin-making to fill the needs of their armed forces at a minimal level.
Winston Churchill and his Tory-dominant government took the lead on this decision, by their broad hints and inaction (if nothing else), and the other Commonwealth nations chose to follow his lead rather than that of the WPB.
A single additional Lancaster bomber squadron is about three million pounds in 1943 money,(about a million pounds in planes , plus two million pound more for the 500 members of the squadron , hangers, armaments, fuel etc).
This amount would have paid for enough new penicillin production facilities such that by early 1944 , Britain's could have supplied its civilians as well as its soldiers.
Ie, match the Americans' penicillin output, despite using a lower level of technology.
We know well enough the costs of a Lancaster squadron and the costs of Glaxo's low tech but highly efficiently run bottle-penicillin factories , to be able to make this claim with a great deal of certainty.
Churchill, however, chose 'LANCs over PEN' and paid for it in the surprising election results of June 1945 ; the inequalities of wartime health care provision being the number one reason most people chose the egalitarian Labour Party over the war-winning Tories.
America's super abundance of wartime penicillin allowed it to use penicillin as a tool of diplomacy , replacing British influence with that of the Americans at every turn : replacing Pax Britannica with Pax Americana, again causing Churchill to "win the war but lose the world".
Dawson did not force the WPB to make the decision it did, though certainly his uniquely civilian oriented approach to penicillin treatment, starting way back in September 1940, must have played a part.
But the WPB pledge was just that : a pledge - it was up to industry to carry it out.
Industry was willing - even eager - to build high tech buildings out of extremely scarce materials now suddenly obtainable thanks to top-of-the-drawer allocation quotas for would-be penicillin producers.
Postwar, those buildings would give them an early lead on their competitors.
But they weren't so willing to make biological penicillin in those shiny new buildings, not with rumours than synthetic penicillin was just months away.
Dante Colitti forced their hand.
In August 1943, the junior staffer, a surgical resident at a small hospital a mile from Henry Dawson's hospital, was about to get married and go on a honeymoon. He didn't have to go poke his nose into the affairs of a patient in the non-surgical part of the hospital.
But he did.
He was moved by what he had heard about the dying Henry Dawson a mile away being willing to steal government penicillin to save the weak and the small.
And perhaps because Colitti himself was a lifelong "cripple", suffering from TB of the spine.
Dante decided to risk his own career by intervening over the other more senior doctors' heads on a patient that wasn't even his --- urging the patient's parents to call the Hearst newspaper chain directly, to ask them to help obtain the tightly rationed penicillin needed to save the baby's life.
The resulting day by day heart-rendering accounts and photos of the life-saving efforts for little Patty Malone finally - albeit 15 years late - put a human face on penicillin.
Suddenly the population woke up to the fact that they wanted/ needed penicillin -right now ! - and what was their Congressman doing to see that it happened ?
Doctor Mom, in high dudgeon , can provoke fear even in generals, industrialists and Presidents and soon John L Smith, boss of the biggest potential penicillin producer (Pfizer) got the moral message as well.
The chain reaction : Dawson + Charlie : Dante Colitti and Patty Malone: John L and Mae Smith and memories of their own dead daughter + Pfizer : tons of and tons of penicillin by April 1944, is clear enough .
Also clear enough is an ageless message : one person, even if they are dying, can indeed make a world-quaking difference .....
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Howard Florey saw potential enemies everywhere, but with "friends" like A N Richards and Robert Coghill, he hardly need bother looking any further
Howard Florey's correspondence twice notes that he has just received a higher yielding strain of penicillium from America.
The first, in November 1941 ,was obtained from Dr Rake at Squibb - a higher producing mutant from Fleming's original strain.
The second time in November 1943, some un-named strains were obtained from Robert Coghill of the NRRL , while he was visiting Oxford .
But in the two crucial years in between ?
I see bugger all evidence that Florey got the latest improvements in penicillium strains as they emerged at Peoria. (Prove me wrong, please) .
The mycologists at the NRRL research centre in Peoria had steadily improved and improved and improved again Rake's variant and their final version, NRRL 1249.B21 produced - via surface cultivation - most of the world's wartime penicillin until quite late in the war.
At that point, submerged strain NRRL 832, from a non-Fleming strain first found in Belgium, took over.
I believe that Merck's chief consultant and OSRD medical chief ( giant conflict of interest alert !) A N Richards, supposedly Florey's second closest American friend, using as an excuse that America was now at war, deliberately held back the giving these improved strains to Florey.
All to further America's ( sorry ! Merck's) post-war commercial opportunities.
Nicolas Rasmussen, in his article "Of 'Small Men', Big Science and Bigger Business", looks much closer than most historians at the day to day workings of the medical wing of the famous OSRD.
He points to several examples where Richards authorizes the further spending of taxpayers' money, supposedly only for war weapons, on drug research that no longer had an obvious military use, because he claimed that keeping American's edge in their development would definitely benefit the nation.
If not in this war, or any war, how would the drug's successful development benefit a nation at war - supposedly the sole purpose of the OSRD, whose mandate was set up to expire the moment peace was declared ?
Richards doesn't say.
So let me suggest a more sinister purpose , because Rasmussen does not.
I note that the two examples that Rasmussen gives where the OSRD spends taxpayers money on projects that no longer seemed to have a military need were pet projects of Merck, the firm that Richards advised.
The first was the chemical synthesis work on penicillin , carried on well past the point (say June 1944) when biological penicillin was being produced en masse and cheaply.
The other was after mid 1943, when it was clear that cortisone would not help pilots fly higher longer - an important advantage for any nation's air force if proven so.
Merck got nothing for all the money it spent on synthetic penicillin but its finally successful efforts on cortisone was and is one of its biggest successes for both its scientific reputation and its pocketbook (the two of course being closely related).
First success with Cortisone would be an advantage to America as well as Merck, over European (Swiss) competitors --- but synthetic penicillin's success could only have come by crushing fellow American firm Pfizer and given the field to Merck.
How then would that serve America's interests, rather than merely Merck's?
Because Europe wasn't even in the running on biological penicillin in 1944.
Perhaps Richards, already a pensioner when he took on the job of heading the OSRD medical wing and with the rigidity of old age, still believed synthetic penicillin would better Pfizer's penicillin in price and yield.
Then Merck would beat their only European synthetic penicillin rival : Florey !
Normally, Vannevar Bush's OSRD - as in denying the British to atomic energy research - did a better job of using taxpayers' military-assigned money to screw America's European Allies' commercial chances after the war , without favouring any one American firm.
Richard's willingness to screw Pfizer and even his friend Florey, shows just how much further he was prepared to go to aid Merck.
But he needed pliant helpers to succeed.
Luckily for him, the NRRL's Robert Coghill seemed to have had a hard time accepting that research paid for by his employer , the US Department of Agriculture and ultimately the American public, belonged to the USDA.
And that this research shouldn't only go where a different agency's chief bureaucrat, A N Richards, wanted it to go - though he hadn't paid for it and had no statutory (legal) control over it.
However , I see Coghill, a misplaced chemist running a biological program, wanted in so badly on a "technically sweet" chemical problem (the synthesis of penicillin) that he sold out the farmers he had sworn to help.
Synthetic penicillin would only negate the ready market for hundreds of thousands of tons of farm waste corn steep liquor, farm waste whey and farm waste crude brown sugar, all used in the natural fermentation of penicillin and other antibiotics coming along in the pipeline.
Coghill did publicly announce that he was giving the top two commercial strains of penicillium (presumably NRRL 1249.B21 and 832) to the entire world in November 1943, about the same time as Florey first mentions having them.
Why ?
I can only suspect because they were about to become obsolete, as synthetic penicillin seemed only months away.
By April 1944, that no longer seemed so and Coghill was back on the side of the biological angels, publicly praising Pfizer's biological penicillin and modestly claiming a role in their success.
Coghill's talents seemed rather wasted in democratic America - I can see him as the ultimate bureaucratic survivor in Stalin's Russia, adroitly changing sides as the situation shifted, moment by moment.....
The first, in November 1941 ,was obtained from Dr Rake at Squibb - a higher producing mutant from Fleming's original strain.
The second time in November 1943, some un-named strains were obtained from Robert Coghill of the NRRL , while he was visiting Oxford .
But in the two crucial years in between ?
I see bugger all evidence that Florey got the latest improvements in penicillium strains as they emerged at Peoria. (Prove me wrong, please) .
The mycologists at the NRRL research centre in Peoria had steadily improved and improved and improved again Rake's variant and their final version, NRRL 1249.B21 produced - via surface cultivation - most of the world's wartime penicillin until quite late in the war.
At that point, submerged strain NRRL 832, from a non-Fleming strain first found in Belgium, took over.
I believe that Merck's chief consultant and OSRD medical chief ( giant conflict of interest alert !) A N Richards, supposedly Florey's second closest American friend, using as an excuse that America was now at war, deliberately held back the giving these improved strains to Florey.
All to further America's ( sorry ! Merck's) post-war commercial opportunities.
Nicolas Rasmussen, in his article "Of 'Small Men', Big Science and Bigger Business", looks much closer than most historians at the day to day workings of the medical wing of the famous OSRD.
He points to several examples where Richards authorizes the further spending of taxpayers' money, supposedly only for war weapons, on drug research that no longer had an obvious military use, because he claimed that keeping American's edge in their development would definitely benefit the nation.
If not in this war, or any war, how would the drug's successful development benefit a nation at war - supposedly the sole purpose of the OSRD, whose mandate was set up to expire the moment peace was declared ?
Richards doesn't say.
So let me suggest a more sinister purpose , because Rasmussen does not.
I note that the two examples that Rasmussen gives where the OSRD spends taxpayers money on projects that no longer seemed to have a military need were pet projects of Merck, the firm that Richards advised.
The first was the chemical synthesis work on penicillin , carried on well past the point (say June 1944) when biological penicillin was being produced en masse and cheaply.
The other was after mid 1943, when it was clear that cortisone would not help pilots fly higher longer - an important advantage for any nation's air force if proven so.
Merck got nothing for all the money it spent on synthetic penicillin but its finally successful efforts on cortisone was and is one of its biggest successes for both its scientific reputation and its pocketbook (the two of course being closely related).
First success with Cortisone would be an advantage to America as well as Merck, over European (Swiss) competitors --- but synthetic penicillin's success could only have come by crushing fellow American firm Pfizer and given the field to Merck.
How then would that serve America's interests, rather than merely Merck's?
Because Europe wasn't even in the running on biological penicillin in 1944.
Perhaps Richards, already a pensioner when he took on the job of heading the OSRD medical wing and with the rigidity of old age, still believed synthetic penicillin would better Pfizer's penicillin in price and yield.
Then Merck would beat their only European synthetic penicillin rival : Florey !
Normally, Vannevar Bush's OSRD - as in denying the British to atomic energy research - did a better job of using taxpayers' military-assigned money to screw America's European Allies' commercial chances after the war , without favouring any one American firm.
Richard's willingness to screw Pfizer and even his friend Florey, shows just how much further he was prepared to go to aid Merck.
But he needed pliant helpers to succeed.
Luckily for him, the NRRL's Robert Coghill seemed to have had a hard time accepting that research paid for by his employer , the US Department of Agriculture and ultimately the American public, belonged to the USDA.
And that this research shouldn't only go where a different agency's chief bureaucrat, A N Richards, wanted it to go - though he hadn't paid for it and had no statutory (legal) control over it.
However , I see Coghill, a misplaced chemist running a biological program, wanted in so badly on a "technically sweet" chemical problem (the synthesis of penicillin) that he sold out the farmers he had sworn to help.
Synthetic penicillin would only negate the ready market for hundreds of thousands of tons of farm waste corn steep liquor, farm waste whey and farm waste crude brown sugar, all used in the natural fermentation of penicillin and other antibiotics coming along in the pipeline.
Coghill did publicly announce that he was giving the top two commercial strains of penicillium (presumably NRRL 1249.B21 and 832) to the entire world in November 1943, about the same time as Florey first mentions having them.
Why ?
I can only suspect because they were about to become obsolete, as synthetic penicillin seemed only months away.
By April 1944, that no longer seemed so and Coghill was back on the side of the biological angels, publicly praising Pfizer's biological penicillin and modestly claiming a role in their success.
Coghill's talents seemed rather wasted in democratic America - I can see him as the ultimate bureaucratic survivor in Stalin's Russia, adroitly changing sides as the situation shifted, moment by moment.....
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Fleming never saved Churchill, but Gladys Hobby saved Florey's sister when his own penicillin couldn't !
Howard Florey was never more sleazy than in his dealings with Henry Dawson's team, as he desperately fought to restore the family name that his father dis-honored, by trying to remain the sole "hero" of wartime penicillin.
Just try to imagine what an university ethics committee today might say about a professor using his main rival's unpublished paper, sent to him in secret by his close friend (the same government official who censored his rival's paper and forbade its release) to improve his own work that is about to be allowed to be freely published !
That is what full Professor Howard Florey and university vice president and full Professor A N Richards actually did to associate professor chemist Professor Karl Meyer of Dawson's team , in mid 1942.
(As they say, tenure is 'red in tooth and claw'.)
The multi-hatted Professor A Newton Richards was a Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the medical wing of the OSRD , chief consultant to Merck and one of Howard Florey's best friends.
Like Mayor Rob Ford, he also never met a conflict of interest he could resist.
(By contrast, when Norman Heatley met Meyer in January 1942, Heatley recorded that Meyer was willing to send his data to Florey, but Heatley boldly told his boss (Florey) he (Heatley) won't because it didn't seem right, not if Florey was about to publish and Meyer was forbidden to.)
However, Professor Richards was of a very different moral character and saw nothing wrong in sending Professor Meyer's embargoed chemical work on the structure of penicillin to his main academic rival, Professor Florey.
By contrast, Dawson bent over backwards to try and find a source of penicillin for Florey (even at places like Pfizer - a place Florey determinedly didn't want to visit), totally unaware of Florey's well known reputation in the UK for being an academic bush whacker and a magpie of other people's hard work.
Florey's real (if totally private) reason to come to America in 1941, was mainly to establish that he and Merck, not Dawson and Pfizer, was the real leader in the hunt for viable penicillin.
By late 1942, Florey felt sure that the dying Dawson and Pfizer (having joined Merck's cartel) was out of the race.
Sweet indeed then, when in August 1944, a sullen Howard Florey had to stand politely beside Dawson team member Gladys Hobby as she showed him the natural penicillin poring off the Pfizer lines, while Merck and Florey's team at Oxford had totally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for the D Day beaches.
Florey had spurned both Pfizer and Glaxo, yet it was they who delivered most of the penicillin that landed on the Normandy beaches that day --- "the stone the builders rejected" indeed.
Asa series of letters in the Royal Society Archive reveal, in December 1952, Florey had to eat yet more humble pie, first begging and then thanking Hobby for sending her own latest antibiotic off to save the life of his sister (Hilda Gardner) in Australia when his own penicillin wouldn't work....
Just try to imagine what an university ethics committee today might say about a professor using his main rival's unpublished paper, sent to him in secret by his close friend (the same government official who censored his rival's paper and forbade its release) to improve his own work that is about to be allowed to be freely published !
That is what full Professor Howard Florey and university vice president and full Professor A N Richards actually did to associate professor chemist Professor Karl Meyer of Dawson's team , in mid 1942.
(As they say, tenure is 'red in tooth and claw'.)
The multi-hatted Professor A Newton Richards was a Vice President of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the medical wing of the OSRD , chief consultant to Merck and one of Howard Florey's best friends.
Like Mayor Rob Ford, he also never met a conflict of interest he could resist.
(By contrast, when Norman Heatley met Meyer in January 1942, Heatley recorded that Meyer was willing to send his data to Florey, but Heatley boldly told his boss (Florey) he (Heatley) won't because it didn't seem right, not if Florey was about to publish and Meyer was forbidden to.)
However, Professor Richards was of a very different moral character and saw nothing wrong in sending Professor Meyer's embargoed chemical work on the structure of penicillin to his main academic rival, Professor Florey.
By contrast, Dawson bent over backwards to try and find a source of penicillin for Florey (even at places like Pfizer - a place Florey determinedly didn't want to visit), totally unaware of Florey's well known reputation in the UK for being an academic bush whacker and a magpie of other people's hard work.
Florey's real (if totally private) reason to come to America in 1941, was mainly to establish that he and Merck, not Dawson and Pfizer, was the real leader in the hunt for viable penicillin.
By late 1942, Florey felt sure that the dying Dawson and Pfizer (having joined Merck's cartel) was out of the race.
Sweet indeed then, when in August 1944, a sullen Howard Florey had to stand politely beside Dawson team member Gladys Hobby as she showed him the natural penicillin poring off the Pfizer lines, while Merck and Florey's team at Oxford had totally failed to produce any synthetic penicillin for the D Day beaches.
Florey had spurned both Pfizer and Glaxo, yet it was they who delivered most of the penicillin that landed on the Normandy beaches that day --- "the stone the builders rejected" indeed.
Gladys Hobby saves Howard Florey's own sister -- when he couldn't
Asa series of letters in the Royal Society Archive reveal, in December 1952, Florey had to eat yet more humble pie, first begging and then thanking Hobby for sending her own latest antibiotic off to save the life of his sister (Hilda Gardner) in Australia when his own penicillin wouldn't work....
Friday, January 18, 2013
Merck has credible excuses for being beaten on D-Day penicillin by Pfizer - but none whatsoever for being crushed by Commercial Solvent
Merck, the OSRD, Florey's Oxford team (all part of the synthetic penicillin obsession) continue to have many defenders among academia.
Yes, one academic excuse goes, yes Merck failed to deliver much penicillin to the D-Day beaches - that was left to Pfizer, which had been a major partner of Merck and Squibb in the three year long effort to produce commercial amounts of penicillin.
But, the excuse went, Pfizer had 20 years of highly successful fermentation experience before late 1941and the commercial penicillin project's beginnings.
But how then to explain the huge success of Commercial Solvents in producing medical grade penicillin from a cold start in January 1944 to levels twice that of Merck in just four months and then levels six or seven times higher than Merck in just three more months after that?
True, Commercial Solvent had 30 years of success in industrial grade fermentation in making bulk acetone but had never done anything even remote to pharmaceutical levels of purity and cleanliness.
But there it was - passing an increasingly demanding FDA testing requirements with its tens of billions of units of injectable penicillin.
Clearly, the supposedly-arcane craft could be learned fairly quickly, if a corporate culture demanded it.
Even Squibb redeemed itself by well beating Merck's output, by late 1944 .
Merck lost the race for one reason only : hubris.
It thought that since it had synthesized a few 300 molecular weight molecules that all 300 weight biological molecules were a piece of cake.
Tell that to penicillin with a weight of 334 and still not commercially synthesized.
Or tell it to quinine , molecular weight 324, and 200 years after Man-The-Almighty first started to synthesize it, still without a commercially viable synthesis technique at hand....
Yes, one academic excuse goes, yes Merck failed to deliver much penicillin to the D-Day beaches - that was left to Pfizer, which had been a major partner of Merck and Squibb in the three year long effort to produce commercial amounts of penicillin.
But, the excuse went, Pfizer had 20 years of highly successful fermentation experience before late 1941and the commercial penicillin project's beginnings.
But how then to explain the huge success of Commercial Solvents in producing medical grade penicillin from a cold start in January 1944 to levels twice that of Merck in just four months and then levels six or seven times higher than Merck in just three more months after that?
True, Commercial Solvent had 30 years of success in industrial grade fermentation in making bulk acetone but had never done anything even remote to pharmaceutical levels of purity and cleanliness.
But there it was - passing an increasingly demanding FDA testing requirements with its tens of billions of units of injectable penicillin.
Clearly, the supposedly-arcane craft could be learned fairly quickly, if a corporate culture demanded it.
Even Squibb redeemed itself by well beating Merck's output, by late 1944 .
Merck lost the race for one reason only : hubris.
It thought that since it had synthesized a few 300 molecular weight molecules that all 300 weight biological molecules were a piece of cake.
Tell that to penicillin with a weight of 334 and still not commercially synthesized.
Or tell it to quinine , molecular weight 324, and 200 years after Man-The-Almighty first started to synthesize it, still without a commercially viable synthesis technique at hand....
Thursday, January 17, 2013
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 ... |
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.....
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Roy S Koch "shows me the money" on wartime penicillin
Then , overnight in August 1943, penicillin became one of those parenterally delivered biologicals and nothing was ever quite the same.
One of Koch's jobs was tallying the actual amounts, month by month, firm by firm, of medical grade penicillin that passed from the FDA's approval into the military or civilian supply chain.
In those excited anxious days with American families's sons, brothers and fathers dying left (Pacific) and right (Atlantic) in record numbers, all eyes and ears were on the progress reports on penicillin production.
Everyone, in their own way, was pitching in to help American industry finally deliver the goods, 15 years later but better late than never.
Above all the American taxpayer was working overtime to pay for that promise of expanded production.
Paying for the government building of private-firm-run buildings, paying through extra personal taxes for the shortfall caused by the writing off of excess corporate taxes, paying for military and civilian expeditors, paying to aid to university researchers who were in turn aiding corporate coffers - on and on and on.
So a corporate failure to make good on a public promise to deliver a lot of penicillin, with the help of lots of taxpayers' money, was going to seem tantamount to committing an act of treason.
Hence Koch's carefully collected figures had to remain a closely guarded secret : American corporations may fail to deliver all the time, but the American public is never ever to know.
But in 1958, about 55 years ago and almost 15 years after the figures were first collected, a muckraking US government inquiry into price-fixing in the antibiotic business did reveal the figures --- even put it in a public domain documents so all the world could quote them freely.
But I have never seen anyone do so and I have read an awful lot on wartime penicillin : so if I am wrong, please email me at my email on this blog.
Anyway, the figures are posted above and you can access the report ("Economic Report on Antibiotics Manufacture" ) online --- this chart is from the appendix, page 331.
In January 1944, the Hare side of the race to make - and define - wartime penicillin was feeling pretty good : Merck had produced some actual therapeutically-effective penicillin by human synthesis (take that you nasty mold !), a result soon confirmed by the Oxford Hares and by other American Hares.
Yields were much lower than the mold-made penicillin and the impurities both more abundant and much more lethal than in the naturally-made penicillin , but the chemists (hundreds of the best chemists in the world) were working on it.
Soon the pesky Tortoises of wartime penicillin, mostly obscure johnnies come lately, could be kissed off - their brand new plants just so yesterday, so very obsolete : growing mold like some rural farmer and then making things by fermentation.
In this Modern Age !
Really, the nerve !
Still, in January 1944, some of the leaders in the secret effort to make penicillin by synthesis are still putting up a good front in aiding the build-up of penicillin supplies for the widely expected opening of the Second Front (D-day) in the late spring or early summer.
Their production of natural penicillin was quite good - compared to even a few months earlier.
The all-mighty Merck (leader, along with Howard Florey in Oxford England, of the penicillin Hares) delivered 3.1 billion units that month, about as much as some obscure mushroom farmer (Reichel) did , buried somewhere out in the backwoods of rural Pennsylvania.
Merck wasn't going to really go all out to produce a lot of natural penicillin for the boys overseas, not when they were about to blow the world away with their very own "technically sweet" synthetic penicillin.
But the boss, George W Merck, was still determined to be patriotic none the less, "do his bit".
Pfizer, another part of the New York area Hare triad, led the production, just barely, with 3.98 billion units.
Squibb ,the third of that triad, was not pulling its weight - even the War Production Board could barely contain their anger , as the folks at Squibb laying back on the oars --- producing just .61 billion units.
The Mid-West group of Hares hadn't done as well, but they hadn't been at it as long : Abbott did .71 billion, Lilly .43 , Upjohn .07 , Parke Davis .03.
Let us jump to April 1944.
Synthetic penicillin yields are still so low that they were a joke - making even Fleming's small amounts that he produced in 1928 look enormous in comparison.
But almost everyone's natural penicillin output has improved --- it was getting close, after all, to make the deadline to get into the pipeline to Kansas City's big depot and then out again to Southern England for the D-Day medical supply loadings.
Every drug CEO wanted to boast later in ads that it was his firm's penicillin that had won the day in the invasion of Nazi Europe.
Reichel had fallen way back below its January output and Merck hadn't even doubled its output.
But Squibb had increased its supply by 10 times , albeit from a low base and Abbott had done almost as well.
(Commercial Solvents had increased its output by 300 times, from a very low base - but it was a real newcomer.)
Pfizer switches sides and kills Modernity ...
But Pfizer wasn't playing fair, for it had turned from being a Hare into a Tortoise : it had increased its natural penicillin output by 10 times, from a very high base and doubled it again in May : producing more than the entire world's penicillin plants combined.
By July, Merck was almost producing less than it had in January, while Pfizer was producing 25 times as much as it had in January.
Still no early sign of synthetic penicillin production and Pfizer was on its way to producing enough penicillin for the entire world,naturally, with or without Merck's 'technically sweet" synthetic stuff .
Modernity had just taken a fatal shot to the base of the neck and deep down, everyone knew it....
Sunday, January 13, 2013
The elevator pitch for "By stubborn, Stars we steer"
Some people call it the takeaway sentence while others call it the elevator pitch : that line that tags a movie's every radio/TV spot and poster, the same line that got the movie green-lighted (financed) in the first place.
Ten seconds long ; one longish sentence .
My takeaway line , as you leave the elevator where you have been helplessly trapped with me as as I relentlessly tell you about Henry Dawson's own personal Manhattan Project :
Ten seconds long ; one longish sentence .
My takeaway line , as you leave the elevator where you have been helplessly trapped with me as as I relentlessly tell you about Henry Dawson's own personal Manhattan Project :
"Its a parable about Jesus and the Devil arm-wrestling over the soul of a pedestrian 'everyman' called John L Smith, who also happens to be the real life wartime head of Pfizer Drugs......"
"A Rare Breed Indeed" : US wartime Int'l treaties on the A-Bomb, Lend-Lease, Bases for Destroyers ... and synthetic penicillin
Most of the antibiotics we use today (beta-lactams) are still the close relatives of the first and best-ever antibiotic, Penicillin G.
They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.
They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.
But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.
Instead another - exceedingly rare - international treaty was negotiated by the wartime American government --- a nation historically very loath to sign any sort of international treaty.
It focused exclusively on the post-war perfection of what had been - at one time - intended to be a timely wartime secret weapon of war : that elusive and illusionary phantom known as synthetic penicillin.
So it was that if between 1943 and 1946, a individual scientist had increased the amount of penicillin retained from the initial crude penicillin medium from 50% to 100% on first purification run through, she or he would have been classed be a war-hero and covered under this Acheson-Halifax Treaty, via its clause on the purification of penicillin.
(Even if success in this case might merely mean that the scientist retained 2 units of semi-purified penicillin per 2 units of initial crude penicillin rather than just the normal 1unit semi-refined from 2 units of initial crude penicillin.)
But if a scientist or firm increased the production of crude penicillin from the 2 crude units per ml of starting medium (as was common in the first 14 years of penicillin production) to 80,000 units of crude penicillin per ml of starting medium (as is common today) , they won't be considered important enough to be covered under this treaty !
It was this loophole that allowed a small soda pop supplier to become, in time, the biggest drug company in the world.
This was when Pfizer incredibly rapidly increased its production of natural penicillin from 2 units over 14 days to 2000 units over 4 days, per ml of starting medium ---- down right under the noses of the treaty negotiators.
As a result, 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches came from this one firm alone - making its world wide reputation over night.
That was because Pfizer's John L Smith, alone among his industry's CEOs, decided to make upping the production levels of natural penicillin his Job One, rather than going full out on synthesizing artificial penicillin and giving just lip service to public claims to be making more natural penicillin for the dying.
When a CUPE local for mental health orderlies and support staff went on strike here in Nova Scotia, I was no longer a mental health employee or union local member but I did devise the winning strike slogan : "Ten Percent of Nothing is Still Nothing !".
The government had told the public these ungrateful employees were getting a hefty 10% pay raise out of your tax dollars : but we came back with the fact some of the employees were earning less than the government's own, mandated by law, legal minimum wage !
Two units of penicillin per ml of starting medium is nothing, for such a lot of time, care and expense. Retaining 100% of it , instead of 50% of it , is still nothing.
The penicillin we use today is exceedingly cheap and abundant : because even if retaining only 50% of the 80,000 units per ml yield it is indeed still a very, very, very, big something....
They are all still produced, by mold slime, ie naturally : and this will probably always be so.
They are produced almost as bulk chemicals, thousands of tons worth annually, a multi-billion dollar industry that lies at the very foundations of the multi-trillion dollar health industry.
But there is (and was) no international treaty, closely negotiated at the very top level (Lord Halifax and Dean Acheson) , at the height of total war and over an extended period of two years, on the patents and scientific information involved in this crucial production of natural penicillin.
Instead another - exceedingly rare - international treaty was negotiated by the wartime American government --- a nation historically very loath to sign any sort of international treaty.
It focused exclusively on the post-war perfection of what had been - at one time - intended to be a timely wartime secret weapon of war : that elusive and illusionary phantom known as synthetic penicillin.
So it was that if between 1943 and 1946, a individual scientist had increased the amount of penicillin retained from the initial crude penicillin medium from 50% to 100% on first purification run through, she or he would have been classed be a war-hero and covered under this Acheson-Halifax Treaty, via its clause on the purification of penicillin.
(Even if success in this case might merely mean that the scientist retained 2 units of semi-purified penicillin per 2 units of initial crude penicillin rather than just the normal 1unit semi-refined from 2 units of initial crude penicillin.)
But if a scientist or firm increased the production of crude penicillin from the 2 crude units per ml of starting medium (as was common in the first 14 years of penicillin production) to 80,000 units of crude penicillin per ml of starting medium (as is common today) , they won't be considered important enough to be covered under this treaty !
It was this loophole that allowed a small soda pop supplier to become, in time, the biggest drug company in the world.
This was when Pfizer incredibly rapidly increased its production of natural penicillin from 2 units over 14 days to 2000 units over 4 days, per ml of starting medium ---- down right under the noses of the treaty negotiators.
As a result, 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches came from this one firm alone - making its world wide reputation over night.
That was because Pfizer's John L Smith, alone among his industry's CEOs, decided to make upping the production levels of natural penicillin his Job One, rather than going full out on synthesizing artificial penicillin and giving just lip service to public claims to be making more natural penicillin for the dying.
10% of nothing is ..... still nothing !!
When a CUPE local for mental health orderlies and support staff went on strike here in Nova Scotia, I was no longer a mental health employee or union local member but I did devise the winning strike slogan : "Ten Percent of Nothing is Still Nothing !".
The government had told the public these ungrateful employees were getting a hefty 10% pay raise out of your tax dollars : but we came back with the fact some of the employees were earning less than the government's own, mandated by law, legal minimum wage !
Two units of penicillin per ml of starting medium is nothing, for such a lot of time, care and expense. Retaining 100% of it , instead of 50% of it , is still nothing.
The penicillin we use today is exceedingly cheap and abundant : because even if retaining only 50% of the 80,000 units per ml yield it is indeed still a very, very, very, big something....
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Howard Florey sole hero of 1944 American national radio play on Penicillin
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| Here, Howard Florey rules ! |
Not surprising then that the series featured an half hour show on "The Story of Penicillin" as soon as the censors would let it : which interestingly enough was April 24th 1944 --- starring Howard Florey as the one-and-only who brought us the miracle of penicillin !
(CALV 440424 380 The Story of Penicillin : episode 380, April 24 1944 is very easy to stream or download from the internet.)
Which is to say this half hour national show aired at a time when the OSRD-AMA-NAS triad was still successfully holding back all press interest in penicillin the miracle (by claiming the triad had legal censorship powers that it actually didn't possess.)
Could it be that even the powerful OSRD had to bow before the enough more powerful chemical giant, in part because it was a prime contractor of the A-Bomb ?
But what I find so interesting about this show - beyond the fact that I do not recall reading about it from any penicillin historian's writing - is that it clearly announces at its onset that its one and only star is "Howard Florey".
Was the show an attempt to discredit Pfizer's sudden success with non-chemically produced penicillin ?
(Because of all the months of the six years of war, April 1944 was the one I'd been most inclined to credit Pfizer's John L Smith as the man who finally brought us penicillin.)
Because that months of all months was the very first month that billions of units of the hitherto invisible miracle suddenly started pouring out of his rapidly-improvised Marcy Avenue ice plant cum biological penicillin brewery.)
Perhaps the triad felt a need to suddenly burnish the reputation of the big loser in the race to provide penicillin for D-Day : that loser being synthetic penicillin and Florey's synthetic efforts at Oxford University.
And believe me, having listened to as much of this half hour show as I could stand, Florey is indeed portrayed as the one and only star of this miracle of medicine.
Florey has an entire army of fans among present-day historians claiming he was elbowed out the fame-feeding-trove by that big mean bully Alec Fleming.
I have always found this hard to stomach.
Florey, in fact, was seemingly born with at least four sharp elbows of his own.
He also had a strong reputation, as a scientist, of being as ready to use his fists to win scientific arguments as Fred Banting or Vannevar Bush ever did.
I wonder if his academic defenders will still howl " he wuz robbed" after listening to this old radio show ?
Tuesday, January 1, 2013
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 .....
Sunday, November 25, 2012
Meet the DOCTOR MOM who brought us wartime penicillin when it could do us some good, not 5 years after the war ended
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| MAE SMITH |
That was because Mary Louise Smith was what her eldest daughter, born 1918 in New Jersey, was called by all.
Or rather, had been called by all.
Mary Louise junior was at the family summer home in Stonington Connecticut sometime in the 1930s when she contracted spinal meningitis and quickly died in theNew London Connecticut hospital.
There was effective treatments for some of the various forms of meningitis in the 1930s that reduced the death total from 100% down to still very high levels from between 50% to 25% .
Serum worked on two forms of the disease but required repeated highly skilled injections into the spinal cord area - sulfa which came along in the late 1930s, had a similar success rate.
But if the root cause was the pneumonia bacteria, the death rate remained at 100%.
Penicillin reduced that to between 50% to 30% and penicillin had been found to be extremely effective on pneumonia bacteria as far back as the Fall of 1928, by Alexander Fleming.
But he didn't believe it would work by injection - despite never having tried to see if what he believed was actually factual.
His laziness was needlessly fatal for millions - in particular for his own brother and for Mary Louise Smith.
Dawson's passion got to Doctor Mom
Dr Martin Henry Dawson always was plain spoken - he believed from the start that natural penicillin at the state of development it was in the Fall of 1928 (or the Fall of 1940 or 1943) was more than good enough ready to save lives .
If we only had enough penicillin from the drug companies, he'd say, we could start saving these children dying needlessly of diseases like spinal meningitis and endocarditis.
Now Mary Louise junior's father , John L Smith, was a charitable man but an exceedingly cautious man --- but he was also senior enough at the 'fine chemicals' firm where he worked, to it do his bidding if he wished.
I firmly believe that once his wife, Mae, picked up the essence of Dawson's sermonette, she never let up on her husband to move forward as fast as morally possible on making lots of penicillin.
'Our daughter is dead but there is no need for us to sit back and watch our frinds' daughters die needlessly'.
Mae was John L's moral compass and she was like a bloodhound on this issue.
Eventually her pleadings and the sight of enough dying baby girls, moved even the cautious John L.
And when he did decide to move, he moved fast and he moved hard.
In five short months his firm was producing almost more natural penicillin than the world knew what to do with it : penicillin and Pfizer never looked back.
All thanks to a tragedy, an impassioned doctor and Doctor Mom.....
Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Needed : a MORAL history of Wartime Penicillin
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| SBE fatal to heart valves |
Not impossible to write such histories - dozens of historians have already done so.
Just not possible to do the job --- with any faithfulness to the actual contemporary record --- through those prisms.
Penicillin History has been Whig History....
By artfully cutting and pasting bits of the contemporary primary record it is possible to recast everything, even from that day in September 1928 when Fleming first saw that funny mold in his petri dish, as moving steadily and inevitably forward to the time when billions of units of natural produced systemic penicillin daily rolled off the line at Pfizer in the early Spring of 1944 - with natural (microbe produced) antibiotics being the norm to this day.
But in fact, most of the early1940s scientific, medical and commercial establishment was stunned into silence when penicillin ended up (a) suddenly proven up as the world's best-ever systemic life-saver and (b) being produced cheaply, abundantly and reliably - and produced only thanks to microbes to boot.
The 15 years up to 1944 had seen no new scientific advances or new commercial reasons to suddenly turn to penicillin as a systemic/lifesaver or to favour its production by natural (microbial) means ---- over the situation as Alexander Fleming had described it in his first paper of June 1929.
Only the moral situation had changed.
All the scientific, medical and commercial reasons were still valid against Henry Dawson for staking his life to cure invariably fatal SBE with natural systemic penicillin and against "John L" Smith of Pfizer for staking his company to help him.
But their personal moral reasons for doing so were overwhelming to these two men and so they attempted and achieved the impossible.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Nova Scotian-born Dr Henry Dawson and the "Invention" of systemic - natural - penicillin
The "Invention" of systemic - natural - penicillin
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| Discovery vs Invention |
It is only since Aug 1945 (and the ascendancy of Physics over Chemistry as the Queen of Science) that we have devoted all our adulation to "discovery" , rather than "invention" in medicine.
Carbolic acid and sulfa's both had early dates of discovery (versus their much later first medical use) .
Alexander Fleming is - wrongly - credited with discovering the penicillin we have used since 1940 - but what did he actually do ?
Fleming in fact thought his penicillin would be useful as a sort of "Plan B" antiseptic -- and only if pure and synthetic.
Howard Florey - ten years later - thought his penicillin would be a useful "Plan B" back-up systemic to Sulfa -- but again, only if pure and synthetic.
By contrast, right from the start and until his death, Martin Henry Dawson thought that natural (even if impure) systemic penicillin would be the "Plan A" choice to cure the incurable, to save the unsavable --- starting with those dying of invariable fatal SBE.
Only two people in New York worked with penicillin in 1940, despite a war (with millions soon to be dying of infections) raging the world over.
One doctor published a conventional article in JBC, reminding bacteriologists how useful crude penicillin could be as an agent to clear common throat bacteria from suspected specimens of influenza bacteria.
That was about all that penicillin was in (semi-) common use for, in 1940. Just as carbolic acid had its various non-clinical uses in the days before Lister "re-invented" it as a life-saver.
The other doctor, Dawson, saw crude penicillin as the most likely cure for SBE.
NOT because it was a super-killer of bacteria, but for some less sexy but rather more "useful" characteristics: it combined nearly-limitless non-toxicity with an extraordinary diffusion ability.
NOT because it was a super-killer of bacteria, but for some less sexy but rather more "useful" characteristics: it combined nearly-limitless non-toxicity with an extraordinary diffusion ability.
He could thickly saturate the blood stream with penicillin without killing the patient, and hope some would still diffuse in past the thick vegetations (bio-films) of SBE, as that saturated blood rushed past the diseased heart valves at breakneck speed.
Some modern SBE patients have needed as much as a kilo of pure penicillin over many months - that's 1.67 BILLION units of penicillin - but have beaten the disease.
Still while penicillin - and only penicillin - could save an SBE in the 1940s, SBE was a prodigious user of then very scarce penicillin, so Dawson also had to morally kick start ("invent") an entire "natural penicillin" industry into existence, to deliver the amount of penicillin needed for his SBE patients.
(As a by-product, the rest of the world soon got as much penicillin as anyone could need - so much so it was soon feed to cattle as a growth stimulator, partly to absorb some of the production.)
I say his "invention" was by moral argument, because the scientific and commercial consensus then was that only synthetic (patentable) penicillin could do the trick.
But only when Dawson morally convinced the head of Pfizer, John l Smith, to take a very great financial risk and go against the consensus of his industry, did the miracle of penicillin really begin to happen....
Monday, September 3, 2012
Former OXFORD UNIVERSITY chemist found - in National Portrait Gallery !
 |
| its all about this gold |
The world famous photographer turned 100 this month !
And the missing chemist?
He is Wilson Baker, a former Oxford University chemist associated with Big Science's highly expensive failure to synthesis penicillin during WWII.
He went missing from one of science's iconic of all photos, after he rather 'blotted his Oxford copybook' by daring to go off to work at another university.
Iit all began back in 1944 when photographer Suschitzky took a series of still photos ,to accompany an ICL-sponsored motion film on the triumph of wartime penicillin.
The film was actually a form of a rear guard action to regain some of the "life-saving penicillin" glory for Britain, after the American soda pop supplier, Charles Pfizer and Sons, became the first firm in the world to truly mass produce penicillin.
They did it the natural way, as long advocated by their associate, Dr Martin Henry Dawson.It is still the way we produce penicillin.
In the most famous shot in the penicillin still series (NPG P562) , a group of four of Oxford's best wartime chemists pose around a table.
They include Nobel prize winners Sir Robert Robinson and Sir Ernst Chain and Sir Edward Abraham (a co-developer of our most used family of antibiotics, a close relative of penicillin).
And then Wilson Baker himself, who had to settle for a FRS instead of a knighthood, perhaps because he was a committed Quaker and pacifist during WWII.
"The Chemist Vanishes...."
But ,as recounted earlier in SVE's earlier rendering, sometime after Baker 'left the family firm' , the Oxford University's copy of this famous image was butchered.
Butchered seemingly by the same high quality photo re-touchers who butchered similar photos for Stalin, after this or that former Commissar was 'liquidated', like Bain closing a factory, and had to be removed from all historical photos .
Out went Wilson and in went a cutout image of Oxford's most famous bio-tech son , Sir Howard Florey .
Florey came in via a photo scissored out crudely from another famous post-event re-staged photo : Florey and his faithful retainer needling some poor little mouse in a cage.
The resulting image never looked to be designed to avoid detection.
The fame of the mousing photo, together with the crudity of the inked backfilling to help to the final photo "jell" , ensured that anyone at all familiar with the history of penicillin would quickly detect it.
However Britain's notorious libel laws - even more favorable to the rich and powerful than those of Hitler's Germany, together with Oxford University's deep pockets for big libel law firms - ensures that no one, least of all Skygods vs earthlings , would ever call this a case of plagiarism.
Yes plagiarism , albeit allegedly done by a university itself instead of one of its young students.
Since Oxford won't do the right thing, it is very nice that the National Portrait Gallery made the original photo - with the original Wilson Baker back in - its featured photo of the month....
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
The Boys of Summer '44 : DODGERS tank but Brooklyn shines in extended road trip: Omaha,Utah,Juno,Gold,Sword ...
In that crucial summer of 1944, the Dodgers were on their way to the cellar in baseball, but despite that, something far greener and far more golden than "A Tree" was growing in Brooklyn and for a time, best-selling author Betty Smith had to move aside for an unknown chemist called "John L" (Smith).
During WWII some say that there was a sign at the entrance to Brooklyn, off the Brooklyn Bridge, that said "Welcome to Brooklyn, the Borough that Builds."
The borough that builds indeed !
During WWII, Brooklyn was most famous for the Brooklyn Naval Yard ,where the US Navy was building the Iowa class battleships , the world's biggest killing machines.
Less well remembered is Brooklyn's lead role in building the world's smallest lifesaving machine : tiny ampules of penicillin from Pfizer's Marcy Avenue Plant.
Along with lots of weapons and K-rations, the D-Day beaches had plenty of those ampules delivered to the beaches, against all odds, in just the nick of time for the first mass clinical trial of the world's first - and best - antibiotic.
Penicillin must be the only antibiotic that was literally baptised by fire.
Most of the penicillin on those blood-stained beaches came from just one plant: and that plant was Pfizer's, hitherto if know at all, known for making citric acid for soda pop.
A definite thirst quencher, but hardly a lifesaver - except in Coke ads.
If Pfizer boss, "John L", (or more likely his wife, Mae) hadn't become a last minute convert to the life-saving powers of fungi-grown penicillin over the mirage of man-made penicillin, there won't have been any amount of penicillin on those beaches.
Brooklyn isn't the industrial power it once was - the jobs have all gone to China and Mexico - but when it had to, it did it up right.
The Boys of Summer that summer weren't just from Brooklyn, they were from all over - and they really needed Brooklyn and Pfizer to bat 1.0 if they were to pull through.
They did --- and they did.
In that light, who really cares if the Dodgers tanked that year .....
During WWII some say that there was a sign at the entrance to Brooklyn, off the Brooklyn Bridge, that said "Welcome to Brooklyn, the Borough that Builds."
The borough that builds indeed !
During WWII, Brooklyn was most famous for the Brooklyn Naval Yard ,where the US Navy was building the Iowa class battleships , the world's biggest killing machines.
Less well remembered is Brooklyn's lead role in building the world's smallest lifesaving machine : tiny ampules of penicillin from Pfizer's Marcy Avenue Plant.
Along with lots of weapons and K-rations, the D-Day beaches had plenty of those ampules delivered to the beaches, against all odds, in just the nick of time for the first mass clinical trial of the world's first - and best - antibiotic.
Penicillin must be the only antibiotic that was literally baptised by fire.
Most of the penicillin on those blood-stained beaches came from just one plant: and that plant was Pfizer's, hitherto if know at all, known for making citric acid for soda pop.
A definite thirst quencher, but hardly a lifesaver - except in Coke ads.
If Pfizer boss, "John L", (or more likely his wife, Mae) hadn't become a last minute convert to the life-saving powers of fungi-grown penicillin over the mirage of man-made penicillin, there won't have been any amount of penicillin on those beaches.
Brooklyn isn't the industrial power it once was - the jobs have all gone to China and Mexico - but when it had to, it did it up right.
The Boys of Summer that summer weren't just from Brooklyn, they were from all over - and they really needed Brooklyn and Pfizer to bat 1.0 if they were to pull through.
They did --- and they did.
In that light, who really cares if the Dodgers tanked that year .....
Thursday, March 22, 2012
Two races against a dead - line, when "dead" not just a figure of speech
It was probably in late October 1940 , induced by the strain of setting up the world's first ever use of penicillin-the-antibiotic, that Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his long slow slide into a terminal case of MG (Myasthenia Gravis).
A Canadian study had only recently determined
that a sufferer from MG at that time lived an average of four and a half years.
Some lived much longer --- some much less.
However a rational individual , such as Dr Dawson was, would say he had till late April 1945 to live out his life.
He was proved exactly right - dying April 27th 1945.
I can't say he died happy, but I can speculate he didn't die unhappy .
Dawson lived just long enough to have the highly skeptical medical community around the world accept his claim that (systemic) (naturally-grown penicillin) (can cure SBE) --- yes, even the toughest cases of this hitherto invariable fatal disease more formally known as Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.
I have written before of the jaw-dropping fact that by 1950, just five short years later, it was widely agreed that SBE had become, to quote Dr Charles Friedberg in the world famous medical journal JAMA, "the most common form of heart disease that can be cured."
In early 1945, as Dawson lay dying, with his labours just completed, he won his race by the narrowest of margins.
JAMA , house organ of the American Medical Association (AMA) finally agreed to feature his long article on his four and half year battle - against his colleagues, his own government and his own body - to offer up "PROOF OF CONCEPT" on his bold claims.
Because he actually made three different, equally bold, claims.
He said the incurable SBE could be cured.
He said penicillin was much better as a systemic antibiotic, if people would only try it, than it ever was as Alexander Fleming's topical antiseptic.
Finally, and most boldly by far, he said naturally grown penicillin , grown by trillions of incredibly tiny little biotech factories called unicell fungi , would be cheaper, better, more available than anything chemists might be able to synthesize.
He said that the big wartime projects of MOdernity's 'Chemical Man' are not inevitably smarter than the efforts put for by the smallest and weakest members of Life.
In 1945 that offered up a stinging rebuke to the entire civilized world.
It was a sting felt never more strongly that in Germany, home of Modernist Chemistry, which had recently put its chemistry to its most spectacular use ever --- in the steam baths of Auschwitz.
He was proven right, then, on all three points and is still right today.
Dawson's decision to work with Nature, not against her, and work with Nature's 's weakest beings to save humanity's weakest beings, was COmmensality at its finest.
His battle to save a handful of SBE patients (judged to be the lowest of the low , the 4Fs of the 4Fs, during a war effort focussed on 1A soldiers) moved an older couple in Brooklyn New York .
They had lost a daughter in the age before Dawson introduced antibiotics into a doubting world.
The husband, egged on by his wife, resolved to do something about it.
At that time he was the boss of a medium sized company that was best known for making citric acid for the soda pop industry.
He would stick that company's neck way out on the line and gamble big on Dawson's claim that the tiny little penicillin factories could do the job better, faster, cheaper, safer, than anything American's chemists could come up with.
Once he made that decision he went all out - like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stockbroker Dodds in the short story, "A Shadow Before" , he became a bear in a bull stock market .
If his gamble failed - and all the betting money said it would - his firm would be ruined.
But Oh ! If it succeeded !
If it succeeded, penicillin would arrive just in time, after all, for the expected heavy casualties of D-Day and just in time for the millions of people around the world dying of infectious diseases as a result of years of wartime malnutrition.
His firm would smothered in thanks and drowned in profits.
That man, John L Smith, was proven right by Dawson and his firm, Pfizer, never did look back from that decision.
For Dawson, his race against a dead-line was a personal race --- to prove up his concept, against fierce resistance from his body and his government, before he himself was - dead.
On the same tiny island (Manhattan), in the same time period
(WWII) , at the same university (Columbia), there was another much better known race against a deadline.
This dead-line was peace - the end of the war.
If the war ended before the Manhattan Project offered up its "PROOF OF CONCEPT" by successfully wiping out a city filled with people and factories, the atomic bomb would die still born - billions spent but the bomb never used.
After all, billions were spent on poison gas and germ warfare yet none of it was ever used.
Because along with Peace came massive spending cuts on war projects.
All that research money would vanish forever, at war's end - unless there was PROOF OF CONCEPT of this untried super weapon.
It was this, not the fear of a Nazi Atomic Bomb, which had vanished in Britain or Russia by the Fall of 1942 and not incidentally both were the enemies of Germany most likely to be on the dying end of a German A Bomb, which actually drove the American Manhattan Project.
The dead in this dead-line was 100,000 dead civilians : PROOF OF CONCEPT personified in ash and traces on the concrete.
This cold callous mental calculation, by scientists as well as military men, was MOdernity at its very worst.
So, two parallel but totally different races against dead - lines , operating a few hundred metres apart from each other in Harlem : MOdernity versus COmmensality.
Now there's a story !
A Canadian study had only recently determined
that a sufferer from MG at that time lived an average of four and a half years.
Some lived much longer --- some much less.
However a rational individual , such as Dr Dawson was, would say he had till late April 1945 to live out his life.
He was proved exactly right - dying April 27th 1945.
I can't say he died happy, but I can speculate he didn't die unhappy .
Dawson lived just long enough to have the highly skeptical medical community around the world accept his claim that (systemic) (naturally-grown penicillin) (can cure SBE) --- yes, even the toughest cases of this hitherto invariable fatal disease more formally known as Subacute Bacterial Endocarditis.
I have written before of the jaw-dropping fact that by 1950, just five short years later, it was widely agreed that SBE had become, to quote Dr Charles Friedberg in the world famous medical journal JAMA, "the most common form of heart disease that can be cured."
In early 1945, as Dawson lay dying, with his labours just completed, he won his race by the narrowest of margins.
JAMA , house organ of the American Medical Association (AMA) finally agreed to feature his long article on his four and half year battle - against his colleagues, his own government and his own body - to offer up "PROOF OF CONCEPT" on his bold claims.
Because he actually made three different, equally bold, claims.
He said the incurable SBE could be cured.
He said penicillin was much better as a systemic antibiotic, if people would only try it, than it ever was as Alexander Fleming's topical antiseptic.
Finally, and most boldly by far, he said naturally grown penicillin , grown by trillions of incredibly tiny little biotech factories called unicell fungi , would be cheaper, better, more available than anything chemists might be able to synthesize.
He said that the big wartime projects of MOdernity's 'Chemical Man' are not inevitably smarter than the efforts put for by the smallest and weakest members of Life.
In 1945 that offered up a stinging rebuke to the entire civilized world.
It was a sting felt never more strongly that in Germany, home of Modernist Chemistry, which had recently put its chemistry to its most spectacular use ever --- in the steam baths of Auschwitz.
He was proven right, then, on all three points and is still right today.
Dawson's decision to work with Nature, not against her, and work with Nature's 's weakest beings to save humanity's weakest beings, was COmmensality at its finest.
His battle to save a handful of SBE patients (judged to be the lowest of the low , the 4Fs of the 4Fs, during a war effort focussed on 1A soldiers) moved an older couple in Brooklyn New York .
They had lost a daughter in the age before Dawson introduced antibiotics into a doubting world.
The husband, egged on by his wife, resolved to do something about it.
At that time he was the boss of a medium sized company that was best known for making citric acid for the soda pop industry.
He would stick that company's neck way out on the line and gamble big on Dawson's claim that the tiny little penicillin factories could do the job better, faster, cheaper, safer, than anything American's chemists could come up with.
Once he made that decision he went all out - like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stockbroker Dodds in the short story, "A Shadow Before" , he became a bear in a bull stock market .
If his gamble failed - and all the betting money said it would - his firm would be ruined.
But Oh ! If it succeeded !
If it succeeded, penicillin would arrive just in time, after all, for the expected heavy casualties of D-Day and just in time for the millions of people around the world dying of infectious diseases as a result of years of wartime malnutrition.
His firm would smothered in thanks and drowned in profits.
That man, John L Smith, was proven right by Dawson and his firm, Pfizer, never did look back from that decision.
For Dawson, his race against a dead-line was a personal race --- to prove up his concept, against fierce resistance from his body and his government, before he himself was - dead.
On the same tiny island (Manhattan), in the same time period
(WWII) , at the same university (Columbia), there was another much better known race against a deadline.
This dead-line was peace - the end of the war.
If the war ended before the Manhattan Project offered up its "PROOF OF CONCEPT" by successfully wiping out a city filled with people and factories, the atomic bomb would die still born - billions spent but the bomb never used.
After all, billions were spent on poison gas and germ warfare yet none of it was ever used.
Because along with Peace came massive spending cuts on war projects.
All that research money would vanish forever, at war's end - unless there was PROOF OF CONCEPT of this untried super weapon.
It was this, not the fear of a Nazi Atomic Bomb, which had vanished in Britain or Russia by the Fall of 1942 and not incidentally both were the enemies of Germany most likely to be on the dying end of a German A Bomb, which actually drove the American Manhattan Project.
The dead in this dead-line was 100,000 dead civilians : PROOF OF CONCEPT personified in ash and traces on the concrete.
This cold callous mental calculation, by scientists as well as military men, was MOdernity at its very worst.
So, two parallel but totally different races against dead - lines , operating a few hundred metres apart from each other in Harlem : MOdernity versus COmmensality.
Now there's a story !
Friday, October 8, 2010
CRITICAL biography of Norman Heatley long, long overdue
I don't think Norman Heatley (1911-2004) did as much to advance penicillin as he thought he did.
I think a more balanced collective biography of the entire Oxford team might better spread the credit (and blame) about.
It seems to me that Glister and Sanders did far more, and Heatley far less ,to get penicillin production actually working and producing.
Norman himself conveyed to the world his view that he felt he was no longer a key member of the Oxford penicillin team after 1943 - as the historical blue plaque on his home so indicates.
(He even tried to apply for a job at a drug firm far far from the Dunn in 1944 !)
The Oxford team kept up their penicillin work up to the war's end in 1945 and beyond -I am curious to know what it was that Heatley felt he was doing at the Dunn between 1943 and 1946, if it didn't involve penicillin.
Sanders and Glister and all the rest - except Florey and Heatley -were never very interested to tell their part in the penicillin saga at Oxford.
So in this land of the blind, the one-eyed Heatley became king - particularly in the 36 years after Florey's death.
Heatley grew ever bolder in his claims ,as more and more of
'the old gang' passed on beyond the point of rebuttals via 'letters to the editor', directed at The Times.
The Oxford community, still unable to understand how credit for penicillin was taken up by a Scotsman (Alexander Fleming) and a parvenu American soda pop company (Pfizer), fully supported Heatley in this effort.
I don't expect my biography of another penicillin pioneer, close associate of Pfizer, and a Scotman, Martin Henry Dawson, to be any more popular in Oxford.....
I think a more balanced collective biography of the entire Oxford team might better spread the credit (and blame) about.
It seems to me that Glister and Sanders did far more, and Heatley far less ,to get penicillin production actually working and producing.
Norman himself conveyed to the world his view that he felt he was no longer a key member of the Oxford penicillin team after 1943 - as the historical blue plaque on his home so indicates.
(He even tried to apply for a job at a drug firm far far from the Dunn in 1944 !)
The Oxford team kept up their penicillin work up to the war's end in 1945 and beyond -I am curious to know what it was that Heatley felt he was doing at the Dunn between 1943 and 1946, if it didn't involve penicillin.
Sanders and Glister and all the rest - except Florey and Heatley -were never very interested to tell their part in the penicillin saga at Oxford.
So in this land of the blind, the one-eyed Heatley became king - particularly in the 36 years after Florey's death.
Heatley grew ever bolder in his claims ,as more and more of
'the old gang' passed on beyond the point of rebuttals via 'letters to the editor', directed at The Times.
The Oxford community, still unable to understand how credit for penicillin was taken up by a Scotsman (Alexander Fleming) and a parvenu American soda pop company (Pfizer), fully supported Heatley in this effort.
I don't expect my biography of another penicillin pioneer, close associate of Pfizer, and a Scotman, Martin Henry Dawson, to be any more popular in Oxford.....
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Mae Smith ; the real life DOCTOR MOM that gave us penicillin
Readers sometimes asked me if DOCTOR MOM was a real person.
I usually say "No, Dawson was trying to reach all the Doctor Moms in America , via his success in preventing all the deaths and all the worries caused by childhood Rheumatic Fever."
But I have reflected and maybe my readers are right - yes, there was was one specific Doctor Mom that Dawson reached - perhaps, indeed, only one that he reached.
But one can be more than enough.
Her real name was Mae Smith, though she is sometimes known as Mrs John l Smith or ,more accurately, as Mary Louise Smith.
Her husband owned 25% of the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team and after his death, she held those shares.
More books have been written on these , the original "Boys of Summer", than any other team.
Many people seem to rate the day the team left Brooklyn as more significant in the decline of America than Watergate or Viet Nam.
The other Mary Louise Smith is also very important in this story : she was the Smiths' daughter.
John L grew up in a small seaport in Connecticut and he loved to sail more than almost anything and he loved his cottage in his old home town.
One day when the family was out in the cottage, far from big cities and big city high tech hospitals, young Mary Louise said she had a stiff neck. And a headache. And a fever. And that in fact, she generally wasn't feeling very good indeed.
That put her family in a real panic.
Not as much as it did the local doctors - it was obviously Spinal Meningitis - still a deadly, every-minute-counts-disease even today with antibiotics.
By the time they got her to a big hospital, it was too late to even stabilize her - though surviving a late case of spinal meningitis can be a very mixed blessing - it often leaves you physically and mentally challenged.
An immediate (and I mean like yesterday) massive needle full of Penicillin was the best cure then , as it still is today.
Penicillin had been discovered at the time of Mary Louise II's death, but had not yet been produced, let alone mass produced.
In 1941 and 1942 and in 1943, as Dawson always naggingly reminded any and all visitors from John L.'s firm, it still was not being mass produced.
"But if it had been developed back then and if it was a staple in the black bag of even the smallest backwoods doctor, Mary Louise would be alive today."
"How many more Mary Louises would have to die needlessly before the world got enough penicillin to make a difference?"
And on and on.
John L had heard this all too many times before - he felt that Dawson simply didn't understand the technical and economic issues that prevented his firm from taking the plunge.
"What risk ", said Dawson , "are you not planning to take the company public, and to do a stock split? This war has made you guys even richer - give something back to the fighting man - and the fighting woman."
I bet John L would go home at night, get a stiff drink and unwind at his wife, all about what a nag that Henry Dawson was -- "why he even said this and he dared say that."
I don't think John L bought Dawson's line.
But to her credit, I think Mrs John L eventually did.
I bet, late at night, just when John L was trying to get some shuteye , she would softly bring up the question of 'why couldn't the firm take a little risk for once, do something extra for the war effort?'
I think it must have rubbed off eventually, because if his firm was cautious, John L was even more so.
But between late August 1943 till March 1944, that 'stiff little man' was like a man possessed, so determined was he to get a big new, NATURAL, penicillin plant on line as soon as possible.
(This was just at the very time that the Florey team at Oxford University were semi-secretly announcing that they had totally synthesised penicillin chemically and that to continue to rely on natural production by the mold was a 'retrograde' step - so John L was betting against the received opinion.)
But they went ahead anyway: shifts of crews building around the clock, lit by Klieg Lights and posters everywhere reminding employees that this was a "Race Against Death."
"The quicker this building is done, the quicker penicillin can go out to the wounded boys at the front."
It paid off because by D-Day Pfizer, his firm, was producing most of the world's penicillin---and the company has never looked back.
We never did get any of that wonderful 'Refined Penicillin' out of the chappies at Oxford - but 'Brooklyn Crude' pulled us through the war anyway.
And I like to think a lot of the credit for starting Pfizer on the road to becoming the world's biggest company should go to a quiet but persistent push from "Doc" Mae Smith.....
I usually say "No, Dawson was trying to reach all the Doctor Moms in America , via his success in preventing all the deaths and all the worries caused by childhood Rheumatic Fever."
But I have reflected and maybe my readers are right - yes, there was was one specific Doctor Mom that Dawson reached - perhaps, indeed, only one that he reached.
But one can be more than enough.
Her real name was Mae Smith, though she is sometimes known as Mrs John l Smith or ,more accurately, as Mary Louise Smith.
 |
| MAE SMITH in 1954 |
More books have been written on these , the original "Boys of Summer", than any other team.
Many people seem to rate the day the team left Brooklyn as more significant in the decline of America than Watergate or Viet Nam.
The other Mary Louise Smith is also very important in this story : she was the Smiths' daughter.
John L grew up in a small seaport in Connecticut and he loved to sail more than almost anything and he loved his cottage in his old home town.
One day when the family was out in the cottage, far from big cities and big city high tech hospitals, young Mary Louise said she had a stiff neck. And a headache. And a fever. And that in fact, she generally wasn't feeling very good indeed.
That put her family in a real panic.
Not as much as it did the local doctors - it was obviously Spinal Meningitis - still a deadly, every-minute-counts-disease even today with antibiotics.
By the time they got her to a big hospital, it was too late to even stabilize her - though surviving a late case of spinal meningitis can be a very mixed blessing - it often leaves you physically and mentally challenged.
An immediate (and I mean like yesterday) massive needle full of Penicillin was the best cure then , as it still is today.
Penicillin had been discovered at the time of Mary Louise II's death, but had not yet been produced, let alone mass produced.
In 1941 and 1942 and in 1943, as Dawson always naggingly reminded any and all visitors from John L.'s firm, it still was not being mass produced.
"But if it had been developed back then and if it was a staple in the black bag of even the smallest backwoods doctor, Mary Louise would be alive today."
"How many more Mary Louises would have to die needlessly before the world got enough penicillin to make a difference?"
And on and on.
John L had heard this all too many times before - he felt that Dawson simply didn't understand the technical and economic issues that prevented his firm from taking the plunge.
"What risk ", said Dawson , "are you not planning to take the company public, and to do a stock split? This war has made you guys even richer - give something back to the fighting man - and the fighting woman."
I bet John L would go home at night, get a stiff drink and unwind at his wife, all about what a nag that Henry Dawson was -- "why he even said this and he dared say that."
I don't think John L bought Dawson's line.
But to her credit, I think Mrs John L eventually did.
I bet, late at night, just when John L was trying to get some shuteye , she would softly bring up the question of 'why couldn't the firm take a little risk for once, do something extra for the war effort?'
I think it must have rubbed off eventually, because if his firm was cautious, John L was even more so.
But between late August 1943 till March 1944, that 'stiff little man' was like a man possessed, so determined was he to get a big new, NATURAL, penicillin plant on line as soon as possible.
(This was just at the very time that the Florey team at Oxford University were semi-secretly announcing that they had totally synthesised penicillin chemically and that to continue to rely on natural production by the mold was a 'retrograde' step - so John L was betting against the received opinion.)
But they went ahead anyway: shifts of crews building around the clock, lit by Klieg Lights and posters everywhere reminding employees that this was a "Race Against Death."
"The quicker this building is done, the quicker penicillin can go out to the wounded boys at the front."
It paid off because by D-Day Pfizer, his firm, was producing most of the world's penicillin---and the company has never looked back.
We never did get any of that wonderful 'Refined Penicillin' out of the chappies at Oxford - but 'Brooklyn Crude' pulled us through the war anyway.
And I like to think a lot of the credit for starting Pfizer on the road to becoming the world's biggest company should go to a quiet but persistent push from "Doc" Mae Smith.....
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