Aside from VEGEMITE, what did Aussies Gray & Duhig have that Alexander Fleming totally lacked ? (Moral Fervour)

6 million might have lived

In the Fall of 1943, fifteen years after Nobel Prize winner Alexander Fleming proved that penicillin - at least his method of making penicillin - could NOT save lives, two intrepid Aussies using his very same penicillin strain and his very same methods (right down to the use of Seitz asbestos filter pads) plucked a half dozen patients from the jaws of certain death.
  Aussie "Men at Work" , under tough wartime conditions

"They came from a land down under" - working in fact in then remote Brisbane Australia , under severe wartime shortage of staff and materials, their methods displayed NO technical improvements over what Fleming and his two young assistants had managed 15 years earlier.

Unfortunately, Altruism was never Alexander Fleming's long suit...

The key difference was that they had the moral fervour ( that Fleming totally lacked) to try almost anything to save people who were certain to die in days if not hours , by pumping extraordinary amounts of impure ("crude") penicillin water into their bodies.

Even at that late stage in penicillin's development, when the whole middle class world was talking up the miracle of penicillin, most doctors would rather see a patient die, than publicly admit that they injected an impure natural substance into a human being's bloodstream.

(It, after all, was an age of eugenics, and pure breeds, families of good blood and evil half bloods , pure-blooded Indians, when 1/32 or even one drop of black blood made you legally black and when the American Red Cross would not allow the mixing of black and white blood in transfusions : pureness and blood had a quasi-scientific, almost mystical , quality in those years .)

 Nothing impure went into such a symbol of purity as human blood.

So even in late 1943, only a few doctors let the two pioneers, Duhig and Gray, inject raw penicillin juice into their patients - and even they, only when their patient seemed at death's door.

So these were not average very sick patients - they were gravely weakened patients given up for dead - so their recovery was all the more remarkable.

Penicillin's Holocaust

If Fleming had displayed any of their moral fervour in the 12 peacetime years when he had penicillin virtually to himself, an estimated six millions lives might have been saved.

Including - tragically - his own favourite brother  John in 1937 - whose pneumonia case was easily curable by even modest amounts of crude penicillin water - if only Alexander Fleming  had tried.

Instead it was left to the moral fervour of another Scot, Nova Scotian born  Martin Henry Dawson, to first put impure penicillin into a patient's bloodstream, in 1940.

Fewer doctors than you can count on your hands followed Dawson's moral fervour when it came to fighting for the right of impure - natural - penicillin's  to save lives,  in those all important  years between October 1940 and May 1944....

* They used Vegemite in the making of their penicillin juice , as a growth stimulant

VEGEMITE also had its hour ; one far fierce hour and sweet

Yellow Snow Bad; Yellow Uisce Beatha Good

It is no secret that Irishmen like their drink, even ( or perhaps, particularly) in wartime.

For a real Irishman likes nothing better than defying straitlaced authorites who think sugar and alcohol has higher uses in wartime than to just use in beverages - such as using them to make more and stronger explosive materials.

So in November 1943, it probably won't seem that unusual to see a feisty Irish-Australian named Jim Duhig sprinkle some yeast-like material over a vat of water and molasses and put it in a cool dark place for ten days.

We say yeast-like because yeast extract was unavailable in wartime Brisbane (Queensland) Australia.

Jim did what any quick thinking Aussie would do - he reached for that all purpose substitute, Vegemite in .3% solution, because after all, he did come from the land down under, where beer flows and strong men chunder.

Also not unusual was his decision to strain the resulting golden colored liquid at the bottom of the vat through a piece of cheesecloth and put it into bottles.

But what he did next might surprise you : he drew some of that golden liquor out in a big needle and stuck it - again and again - into a dying woman.

He saved her life with this golden uisce beatha and saved four other dying patients' lives with it as well, in addition to successfully treating another two dozen less severe infections with his brew.

Duhig's technique, as crude as it seems, is about as high tech as antibiotic science & industry ever has to get, if its only interest is in saving lives.

But it isn't and Jim Duhig's heroic actions came 15 years after Penicillin's initial discovery.

Millions would have lived ( longer - for we all must die at some time) if Alexander Fleming had felt in 1928 as Dr Duhig felt in 1943.

But he didn't and neither would have Dr Duhig in 1928.

It took someone else, someone far bolder than Fleming or Dunhig or Florey, to kickstart the radical-at-the-time idea that injecting natural penicillin into a patient's bloodstream was the best possible treatment of most life-threatening systemic bacterial infections.

That bold idea was first enacted upon on a tiny island, not far off the American coast, a few years earlier.....

Jim Duhig was indeed very Irish - his uncle was the archbishop of Queensland - but in real life he didn't brew liquor - or even drink - he was the head of a prohibitionist society.

But he did brew penicillin---- rather than see some patients die needlessly while waiting for Big Pharma to get its act together to do in decades what Jim had done in weeks !

Life is much stranger than fiction.