I do not find it at all impossible to comprend why so many Germans found it easy to cold-bloodedly murder millions of 'useless' outsiders, whom they hated and feared, after learning that they first killed hundreds of thousands of their 'own kind of people', kinfolk that they regarded as 'useless mouths' impeding an all-out total war effort.
While these numbers killed dwarf any other killings during the last War, they do not seem to me to plump the depths of the evil that modernist utilitarianism proved capable of during Modernism's big war.
As just one example,German soldiers east of Berlin, near the end of the war, followed orders to blow up a river bridge to stop the Russians coming over it, despite the fact that the bridge was loaded with hundreds of German civilians.
I call this 'deliberate friendly fire' (and I do not consider fragging as friendly fire at all).
My definition of deliberate friendly fire : "you know there are people from your side - soldiers or civilians - in the very small area you are accurately aiming your weapons at, and you fire away anyway and kill many of your own side while attempting to kill the enemy".
It is fairly well known that naval escorts were routinely under orders to never stop to pick up convoy survivors in the freezing North Atlantic waters but rather to abandon them (to likely die), while they chased subs instead.
Sometimes they had to be even more brutal - dropping depth charges in among survivors ,knowing many would die from the blast.
In September 1942, the converted Cunard liner LACONIA, which had frequently docked in Halifax during the war,
was sunk by a U-boat off Africa.
She was an armed warship, so this was fully allowed under the rules of war, though the U boat thought she was a troop carrier, not an armed naval vessel.
The U boat captain got a shock when he heard the survivors in the water speak Italian and learned that there were 1500 Italian POWs on board, along with Allied women and children.
He told Berlin he was going to signal his position in clear language and try and arrange a rescue trip, under the flag of the Red Cross, to a neutral (Vichy) port.
The British ,suspecting a trap, didn't fully inform a near by
American fighter bomber base, who decided to bomb the U-boat, even though it would mean the death of many near-by allied sailors and families - as it did.
The ultimate decision was apparently made by one plane's bomb sighter's adamant eagerness to drop bombs on civilians, if needed to record a u-boat kill.
His personal decision led first the Germans and then the US to create a formal and public "sink everything without warning or rescue" submarine policy worldwide - leading to hundreds of thousands of extra civilian deaths - many of them being innocent people 'from their own side'.
My partner Rebecca, without giving it much thought, said things like this happen - 'sometimes you must kill a few to save the many' .
I told her I rejected utilitarianism absolutely and decided to write this blog entry to try and explain why to her.
World War Two was many kinds of war.
After all, it was the same war that saw Americans unwilling to send healthy young fathers off to fight till forced to in late 1943.
They also rejected using the one in ten Americans who were black in combat roles and they rejected a wider use of women to replace men to go off and fight.
They objected to almost every rationing rule with real bite.
This unwillingness to fully engage their national resources, if doing so led to inconveniencing civilian lifestyles and upsetting prewar civilian norms, meant that America couldn't put up enough military resources to stop the relatively small number of U boats wrecking havoc all over the Atlantic.
This, in turn, led to these brutal 'kill our own side if need be to kill the enemy' orders as Allied commanders tried everything to try and keep the U boats from winning the war on their own.
Everything? Did I say that ?
I didn't mean that Allied commanders were willing to put a serious number of their longest range bombers on U-boat patrol - the one thing needed to stop the U boats cold.
No, those were saved for the glamorous (but mostly useless) high tech bomber war against Germany itself - not the boring but useful patrols over the Atlantic.
I say that utilitarianism is never moral - even if we ( literally all of we - from child to grandmom) all agreed to draw straws.
Straws to see who goes off to die in the infantry and who gets to stay home.
This total utilitarianism without limits would end up consuming itself until we, on all sides, would literally fight to the last person.
But we haven't seen - Thank God ! - this kind of utilitarianism - yet.
What we got in World War Two was selective use of total utilitarianism, almost always invoked by the higher-ups and almost always inflicted upon those lower down.
In 1942-1943,during the same time as the Laconia Incident, thsat same US government also decided to deny penicillin to the SBEs that Dawson championed.
The small supply of penicillin would go instead to quickly cure GIs in Italy who had deliberately incurred cases of VD to get out of the constant killing zone that was the American front line.
Once quickly cured in a day or two by penicillin, (the old protocol took months to get a full cure), they could be ordered back to fight - to fight until they died thanks to the American 'no rotation' rule'.
This was all decided so that American civilians back home won't have to be called up to fill out their depleted ranks.
This penicillin decision likely meant death for both SBE and GI.
A selective, lethal, slice of 'total war' was applied there, on these few people, so that a less lethal slice of total war did not have to be applied here, among many people.
I find it a horrifically cynical policy but it has its defenders, even today.
The right policy would have been to issue the threat of a government factory to supply this miracle drug, if the private drug companies proved too slow.
The fear that a Democrat government factory would have ended up getting the credit for "supplying the miracle", rather than private enterprise, would have lit a fire under the backside of Republicans like George W Merck as nothing else could.....
Monday, October 18, 2010
Saturday, October 16, 2010
First ANTIBIOTIC use 70 years ago today lifted youth off his deathbed
Forget the famous February 1941 story of a poor policeman dying from the scratch of a rose.
Its bull - bullfeathers.
Totally bogus - at least as a founding legend of penicillin.
You know the one, where our policeman dies, despite the desperate attempts to save his life with the 'first ever' needles of penicillin by an Australian born doctor named Florey.
Dig deeper and there is lots about that story to question - but that's for another day.
Today we are to celebrate , not to criticize.
The "first ever" use of an antibiotic by needle to save a human life actually happened months earlier and an ocean away and that needle was given by a Canadian-born doctor named Martin Henry Dawson.
Most importantly, that first ever patient, a 27 year old youth named Charles Aronson, walked away from his deathbed !
(Charlie was suffering from an invariably fatal disease called SBE, the final stage of Rheumatic Fever).
The amount of penicillin given to him was far far far too small to kill his biofilmic bacteria around his heart valves ---- but it might have affected his heart greatly nevertheless : his emotional heart.
It lifted his morale and that way enough for this boy with a cat-like nine lives when it came to Strep bacteria attacks.
When last contacted in early 1946, Charlie was still alive, still here !
Truro, Nova Scotia ( Dawson's hometown) take a bow .....your boy did us all proud....
Its bull - bullfeathers.
Totally bogus - at least as a founding legend of penicillin.
You know the one, where our policeman dies, despite the desperate attempts to save his life with the 'first ever' needles of penicillin by an Australian born doctor named Florey.
Dig deeper and there is lots about that story to question - but that's for another day.
Today we are to celebrate , not to criticize.
The "first ever" use of an antibiotic by needle to save a human life actually happened months earlier and an ocean away and that needle was given by a Canadian-born doctor named Martin Henry Dawson.
Most importantly, that first ever patient, a 27 year old youth named Charles Aronson, walked away from his deathbed !
(Charlie was suffering from an invariably fatal disease called SBE, the final stage of Rheumatic Fever).
The amount of penicillin given to him was far far far too small to kill his biofilmic bacteria around his heart valves ---- but it might have affected his heart greatly nevertheless : his emotional heart.
It lifted his morale and that way enough for this boy with a cat-like nine lives when it came to Strep bacteria attacks.
When last contacted in early 1946, Charlie was still alive, still here !
Truro, Nova Scotia ( Dawson's hometown) take a bow .....your boy did us all proud....
Friday, October 15, 2010
the epic triumph of DEMAND SIDE penicillin
All penicillin histories - to date - have been about what I call "SUPPLY SIDE" penicillin.
"They did so by dropping the new miracle cure penicillin upon them, out of the blue, in September 1943."
This version of the saga says penicillin is best told in two competing stories or parts.
But both parts are united in being all about active scientists --- with no role what so ever for us, the totally passive and inert citizenry, or in our roles as patients and patients' families.
Part One ,(1928-1937), features Dr Fleming - discoverer of penicillin - with far too many pages devoted to the mysteries of that discovery and with too few of the rest devoted to his efforts to bring his penicillin juice forward to the point of actually saving lives -----when used as an antiseptic.
Part Two, (1937-1940), features Dr Florey of Oxford University (all bow) and his years of wartime work on the chemistry of penicillin - all about his troubles extracting and purifying and synthesizing penicillin.
My book will be about Part Three, (1940-1943), the era of "DEMAND SIDE" penicillin. It will be all about the life-saving done by early penicillin doctors (not scientists), on the rare occasions when penicillin was diverted to the ward bedside and away from the synthetic chemists.
It will focus on Dr Dawson - the patient. Yes, the patient.
Dawson was not unique in deciding to become a doctor after months spent in a hospital - Dr Colitti ( of Patty-Malone-and-penicillin fame) resolved to become a doctor after his own childhood bouts in hospital dealing with his spinal TB that left him a permanent hunchback.
For Dawson, his insights as a doctor dealing with chronically and terminally ill SBE patients could only have deepened when he himself became a chronically and terminally ill MG patient at about the same time.
Actually I will focus on Dawson, on his first penicillin cure Charlie Aronson, on Baby Patricia Malone's family and on the mother of a dead child he never got to save - Mae Smith, wife of Pfizer chief John L Smith.
In August 1943,Dr Dante Colitti - inspired by Dawson's illegal SBE successes (an early example of ACTING UP) at another hospital a mile away, got Mr and Mrs Malone to also 'ACT UP' and publicly demand penicillin for their dying child.
Soon hundreds of families were doing the same all over North America and when enough Doctor Moms kicked up a fuss, even the stupidest men in Washington or Brooklyn listened - penicillin production really got moving, after 15 years of male excuses for 'not taking out the trash'.
CHRONICALLY ILL are always 4F
Med Schools in that era - and perhaps even today - hated the chronically ill because they refused to die or get better, within the only school term that could be devoted to that particular form of illness.
The chronically ills' failure to get better 'put paid' to the notion that Science was always successful.
And Society in general packed the chronically ill of low income families away in large impersonal institutions with too many patients and too little money.
It got worse in wartime - a lot worse. A lot of people feel free to unleash their inner evilness in wartime and the helpless are a safe target.
In Hitler's Germany, the chronically ill were actively gassed - particularly those 'useless mouths' type patients like the SBEs (Charlie) and MGs (Dawson) who needed lots of repeated interventions of high tech medical care without any hope they would eventually recover and start back at productive war work.
In Vichy France or in the US, it was more subtle - the eugenics of benign neglect.
Budgets were cut for the chronically ills day to day living expenses so more money could go to the war, or simply back to the well to do taxpayer when no one was able to complain.
Many chronically ill in institutions died of hunger-induced infections while the budget-cutters' consciences could remain unsullied.
Chronic illness research efforts were re-directed away from these useless mouths 4Fs towards the 1As and war medicine.
Many patients were conscripted,without their informed consent, in some very dangerous experiments for the war - humans being as badly and baldly treated and cast off as laboratory white mice usually are.
Dawson and his supporters rejected the artificial divide between Social Medicine and War medicine, between social penicillin and war penicillin.
They said , against Hitler and Tojo, social medicine was war medicine,in fact the best kind of war medicine.
They said are we fighting Hitler simply because he took raw materials and markets we once regarded as ours or rather because we detest his values with all our hearts?
If it truly was the latter - FDR's Four Freedoms - we should contrast how we treat our old and weak against how Hitler treated his.
For we will all become old and weak someday.
By 1943-1944, a lot of people saw that Dawson was right - and penicillin's promise was held out to people in the occupied ,enemy, allied and neutral nations as a symbol of the rightness of the Allied Cause.
Until then it had been treated as one of the Allies' best war weapons - a strange term for a life-saver .
Yes, Dr Dawson probably did 'go a little native' when he got MG and became a perpetually ill patient as well as life-saving doctor -----but Thank God for that !
In January 1945, when AMA boss Morris Fishbein, the American medical censor, finally let Dawson tell American GPs about his five years of successfully curing SBE with penicillin, Dawson could reflect he hadn't done too badly for a chronically ill 4F.
Most histories of penicillin - to date - act like Dawson withdrew to a shadow world of chronic illness and inactivity after he got his MG diagnosis around May 1941, so the authors can return to focus on his rival Florey.
But in the Spring of 1945, Dawson could say, like a lot of chronically ill people who kept on being highly productive despite the pain, "*I'm Still Here - and so is my penicillin !"
Partially because of Dawson and Colitti's ACTING UP, patients today are much more likely to demand quick relief rather than simply waiting for the desultory scientists to get it all perfect and pure before dropping it into our grateful little hands - and Thank God for that, too....
"Brilliant scientists, working day and night in the 15 years since September 1928, once again totally surprised humble but ever grateful lay people all over the world."
"They did so by dropping the new miracle cure penicillin upon them, out of the blue, in September 1943."
This version of the saga says penicillin is best told in two competing stories or parts.
But both parts are united in being all about active scientists --- with no role what so ever for us, the totally passive and inert citizenry, or in our roles as patients and patients' families.
Part One ,(1928-1937), features Dr Fleming - discoverer of penicillin - with far too many pages devoted to the mysteries of that discovery and with too few of the rest devoted to his efforts to bring his penicillin juice forward to the point of actually saving lives -----when used as an antiseptic.
Part Two, (1937-1940), features Dr Florey of Oxford University (all bow) and his years of wartime work on the chemistry of penicillin - all about his troubles extracting and purifying and synthesizing penicillin.
My book will be about Part Three, (1940-1943), the era of "DEMAND SIDE" penicillin. It will be all about the life-saving done by early penicillin doctors (not scientists), on the rare occasions when penicillin was diverted to the ward bedside and away from the synthetic chemists.
It will focus on Dr Dawson - the patient. Yes, the patient.
Dawson was not unique in deciding to become a doctor after months spent in a hospital - Dr Colitti ( of Patty-Malone-and-penicillin fame) resolved to become a doctor after his own childhood bouts in hospital dealing with his spinal TB that left him a permanent hunchback.
For Dawson, his insights as a doctor dealing with chronically and terminally ill SBE patients could only have deepened when he himself became a chronically and terminally ill MG patient at about the same time.
Actually I will focus on Dawson, on his first penicillin cure Charlie Aronson, on Baby Patricia Malone's family and on the mother of a dead child he never got to save - Mae Smith, wife of Pfizer chief John L Smith.
In August 1943,Dr Dante Colitti - inspired by Dawson's illegal SBE successes (an early example of ACTING UP) at another hospital a mile away, got Mr and Mrs Malone to also 'ACT UP' and publicly demand penicillin for their dying child.
Soon hundreds of families were doing the same all over North America and when enough Doctor Moms kicked up a fuss, even the stupidest men in Washington or Brooklyn listened - penicillin production really got moving, after 15 years of male excuses for 'not taking out the trash'.
CHRONICALLY ILL are always 4F
Med Schools in that era - and perhaps even today - hated the chronically ill because they refused to die or get better, within the only school term that could be devoted to that particular form of illness.
The chronically ills' failure to get better 'put paid' to the notion that Science was always successful.
And Society in general packed the chronically ill of low income families away in large impersonal institutions with too many patients and too little money.
It got worse in wartime - a lot worse. A lot of people feel free to unleash their inner evilness in wartime and the helpless are a safe target.
In Hitler's Germany, the chronically ill were actively gassed - particularly those 'useless mouths' type patients like the SBEs (Charlie) and MGs (Dawson) who needed lots of repeated interventions of high tech medical care without any hope they would eventually recover and start back at productive war work.
In Vichy France or in the US, it was more subtle - the eugenics of benign neglect.
Budgets were cut for the chronically ills day to day living expenses so more money could go to the war, or simply back to the well to do taxpayer when no one was able to complain.
Many chronically ill in institutions died of hunger-induced infections while the budget-cutters' consciences could remain unsullied.
Chronic illness research efforts were re-directed away from these useless mouths 4Fs towards the 1As and war medicine.
Many patients were conscripted,without their informed consent, in some very dangerous experiments for the war - humans being as badly and baldly treated and cast off as laboratory white mice usually are.
Dawson and his supporters rejected the artificial divide between Social Medicine and War medicine, between social penicillin and war penicillin.
They said , against Hitler and Tojo, social medicine was war medicine,in fact the best kind of war medicine.
They said are we fighting Hitler simply because he took raw materials and markets we once regarded as ours or rather because we detest his values with all our hearts?
If it truly was the latter - FDR's Four Freedoms - we should contrast how we treat our old and weak against how Hitler treated his.
For we will all become old and weak someday.
By 1943-1944, a lot of people saw that Dawson was right - and penicillin's promise was held out to people in the occupied ,enemy, allied and neutral nations as a symbol of the rightness of the Allied Cause.
Until then it had been treated as one of the Allies' best war weapons - a strange term for a life-saver .
Yes, Dr Dawson probably did 'go a little native' when he got MG and became a perpetually ill patient as well as life-saving doctor -----but Thank God for that !
In January 1945, when AMA boss Morris Fishbein, the American medical censor, finally let Dawson tell American GPs about his five years of successfully curing SBE with penicillin, Dawson could reflect he hadn't done too badly for a chronically ill 4F.
Most histories of penicillin - to date - act like Dawson withdrew to a shadow world of chronic illness and inactivity after he got his MG diagnosis around May 1941, so the authors can return to focus on his rival Florey.
But in the Spring of 1945, Dawson could say, like a lot of chronically ill people who kept on being highly productive despite the pain, "*I'm Still Here - and so is my penicillin !"
Partially because of Dawson and Colitti's ACTING UP, patients today are much more likely to demand quick relief rather than simply waiting for the desultory scientists to get it all perfect and pure before dropping it into our grateful little hands - and Thank God for that, too....
* "I'm Still Here !" is a copyrighted expression and used with the kind permission of the late copyright holder, Margo Takacs Marshall, 1928-2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Florey,Dawson's clashing business models
Florey and his many scientific supporters have always said that his interest in penicillin, beginning in early 1938, was the fact that it killed staph bacteria while the sulfa drugs did not.
Staph was not a big killer back then - not like strep bacteria - at least not in peacetime.
It tended to do its worst when it settled deep into big bones that weren't well supplied with blood - making it hard for white blood cells and sulfa molecules to get at the bacteria.
This condition is called acute or chronic osteomyelitis and it was rampant among the young children of the poor - in peacetime.
In wartime, surviving victims of war wounds - or the surviving wounded from the Blitz - often had huge deep wounds that involved their leg bones - a hard-to-get-at location that was ideal for staph bacteria to settle in for a long stay.
Patients affected went back and forth from convalescence bed to hospital bed while doctors and nurses strived to prevent the patient from getting worse in the hope the body would eventually seal off the infection without crippling the patient in the process.
Often they survived but were left crippled - other times the patient's resistance weakened and the staph spread widely till the patient died of general blood poisoning.
In war time, deep bone wounds infected by staph represented a massive cost to the military medical system - consuming resources for years while the affected soldier was unlikely to ever to return to full service. Blitz victims similarly taxed the overworked civilian medical system.
So Florey's business model for "war penicillin" - penicillin as a mere supplement for the sulfas, its wartime use to be strictly limited to healing military patients with deeply set staph infections of the bones and limbs - how did it sell ?
It didn't.
There is no record in all his biographies that any military medical types ever visited him until 1943 - nor is it recorded anywhere that he visited military doctors and was turned down.
Curious - the Navy, Air Force, 8th Army in North Africa, the Blitz victims - they had no end of deep staph infections of the bones to treat from September 2nd 1939 to September 2nd 1942 (three years - half of the entire war) but they avoided penicillin like it was plagued.
Florey was set up to supply an non-existent market.
By contrast,from 1940 to 1942, Dawson's main market had more customers than he could hope to fill.
Florey,Fleming, Heatley, Merck, Dawson of course, they all got requests (from around the world) for penicillin to treat SBE after Dawson announced that he had hopes to cure SBE with the new drug.
Dawson's business model for penicillin could not have been more different from Florey's.His Social Penicillinhe wanted to be made by a government factory and made available to all ( civilians and soldiers) in quantity and at a reasonable price - and made available like yesterday.
He thought penicillin could replace sulfa, not just supplement it, and used to kill all bacteria that was sensitive to it - not just staph.
Florey didn't directly treat any cases - he had no hospital rights unlike Dawson.
But the twenty serious systemic cases he
indirectly treated were almost all staph infected - so he kept to his business model in his own practise.
Similarly, Dawson had about 125 serious systemic cases that he directly dealt with and he too kept to his business model.
Those cases included all the types of bacteria that penicillin could kill---with about a third of them SBE cases.
Penicillin was promised to the military in mid-1943 after they finally decided that they wanted it ,by seeing it work well in military staph wounds in early 1943.
Score one for Florey.
But it only actually got delivered to the military and to the civilians when Dawson's
SBE success produced a patients' revolt across America and Canada ----inspiring Pfizer to go for broke.
Credit that to Dawson's business model--- and lets recall that by 1950 penicillin had completely replaced ,not supplemented, the mighty sulfas.....
Staph was not a big killer back then - not like strep bacteria - at least not in peacetime.
It tended to do its worst when it settled deep into big bones that weren't well supplied with blood - making it hard for white blood cells and sulfa molecules to get at the bacteria.
This condition is called acute or chronic osteomyelitis and it was rampant among the young children of the poor - in peacetime.
In wartime, surviving victims of war wounds - or the surviving wounded from the Blitz - often had huge deep wounds that involved their leg bones - a hard-to-get-at location that was ideal for staph bacteria to settle in for a long stay.
Patients affected went back and forth from convalescence bed to hospital bed while doctors and nurses strived to prevent the patient from getting worse in the hope the body would eventually seal off the infection without crippling the patient in the process.
Often they survived but were left crippled - other times the patient's resistance weakened and the staph spread widely till the patient died of general blood poisoning.
In war time, deep bone wounds infected by staph represented a massive cost to the military medical system - consuming resources for years while the affected soldier was unlikely to ever to return to full service. Blitz victims similarly taxed the overworked civilian medical system.
So Florey's business model for "war penicillin" - penicillin as a mere supplement for the sulfas, its wartime use to be strictly limited to healing military patients with deeply set staph infections of the bones and limbs - how did it sell ?
It didn't.
There is no record in all his biographies that any military medical types ever visited him until 1943 - nor is it recorded anywhere that he visited military doctors and was turned down.
Curious - the Navy, Air Force, 8th Army in North Africa, the Blitz victims - they had no end of deep staph infections of the bones to treat from September 2nd 1939 to September 2nd 1942 (three years - half of the entire war) but they avoided penicillin like it was plagued.
Florey was set up to supply an non-existent market.
By contrast,from 1940 to 1942, Dawson's main market had more customers than he could hope to fill.
Florey,Fleming, Heatley, Merck, Dawson of course, they all got requests (from around the world) for penicillin to treat SBE after Dawson announced that he had hopes to cure SBE with the new drug.
Dawson's business model for penicillin could not have been more different from Florey's.His Social Penicillinhe wanted to be made by a government factory and made available to all ( civilians and soldiers) in quantity and at a reasonable price - and made available like yesterday.
He thought penicillin could replace sulfa, not just supplement it, and used to kill all bacteria that was sensitive to it - not just staph.
Florey didn't directly treat any cases - he had no hospital rights unlike Dawson.
But the twenty serious systemic cases he
indirectly treated were almost all staph infected - so he kept to his business model in his own practise.
Similarly, Dawson had about 125 serious systemic cases that he directly dealt with and he too kept to his business model.
Those cases included all the types of bacteria that penicillin could kill---with about a third of them SBE cases.
Penicillin was promised to the military in mid-1943 after they finally decided that they wanted it ,by seeing it work well in military staph wounds in early 1943.
Score one for Florey.
But it only actually got delivered to the military and to the civilians when Dawson's
SBE success produced a patients' revolt across America and Canada ----inspiring Pfizer to go for broke.
Credit that to Dawson's business model--- and lets recall that by 1950 penicillin had completely replaced ,not supplemented, the mighty sulfas.....
Recombinant DNA and HGT's contribution to the penicillin saga
Where does one begin?
The beta-lactam molecular 'core' was originally created by bacteria and was only later was moved by HGT/ recombinant DNA into some fungi .
Those fungi then created the penicillin-variants of that very special fused beta-lactam ring .
But while this HGT operation was obviously fundamental to there being a penicillin saga to begin with, it had little direct impact on how the 1929-1944 penicillin saga actually unfolded.
But the four years of hard work and disappointments that Martin Henry Dawson endured between the Fall of 1926 and the Fall of 1930 working on HGT and recombinant DNA exchanges did make him the best qualified researcher in the world to put up with the temperamental penicillium between the Fall of 1940 and the Fall of 1944.
His pioneering work with R to S type (and S to S type) HGT exchanges between Strep pneumococcus bacteria made him eminently qualified to stand up to all the difficulties in growing penicillium to produce penicillin.
Dawson was the first in the world, together with Richard Sia, to successfully induce R to S pneumococcus HGT DNA exchanges in a test tube after most other researchers threw up their hands in despair and moved onto other research.
But he was no quitter and he pulled it off after years of failure.
Dawson then went on, with Agnes Warbasse, to do the same with S to S HGT DNA exchanges and this remains extremely difficult to do naturally, as Dawson did it.
He then went on to successfully grow colonies of M and L types of bacteria, all part of his effort over the roughly 15 years between 1926 and 1941 to establish that R,M,L were fully co-equal equivalents or alternatives to S types of bacteria - not defective or deficient versions of it.
This postmodernist notion naturally was seen as bizarre or worse in the strongly modernist atmosphere of medical research between the wars.
I see it as the bacterial equivalent of Dawson treating 4F civilians as the exact moral equivalent of 1A soldiers, not as defective 'useless mouth' variants, despite the reign of Total War Utilitarianism ruling western medicine between 1940 and 1945.
Dawson's pioneering HGT DNA/ Q-sensing work taught him ethics and it taught him technical skills - both which he called upon to get penicillin successfully launched......
The beta-lactam molecular 'core' was originally created by bacteria and was only later was moved by HGT/ recombinant DNA into some fungi .
Those fungi then created the penicillin-variants of that very special fused beta-lactam ring .
But while this HGT operation was obviously fundamental to there being a penicillin saga to begin with, it had little direct impact on how the 1929-1944 penicillin saga actually unfolded.
But the four years of hard work and disappointments that Martin Henry Dawson endured between the Fall of 1926 and the Fall of 1930 working on HGT and recombinant DNA exchanges did make him the best qualified researcher in the world to put up with the temperamental penicillium between the Fall of 1940 and the Fall of 1944.
His pioneering work with R to S type (and S to S type) HGT exchanges between Strep pneumococcus bacteria made him eminently qualified to stand up to all the difficulties in growing penicillium to produce penicillin.
Dawson was the first in the world, together with Richard Sia, to successfully induce R to S pneumococcus HGT DNA exchanges in a test tube after most other researchers threw up their hands in despair and moved onto other research.
But he was no quitter and he pulled it off after years of failure.
Dawson then went on, with Agnes Warbasse, to do the same with S to S HGT DNA exchanges and this remains extremely difficult to do naturally, as Dawson did it.
He then went on to successfully grow colonies of M and L types of bacteria, all part of his effort over the roughly 15 years between 1926 and 1941 to establish that R,M,L were fully co-equal equivalents or alternatives to S types of bacteria - not defective or deficient versions of it.
This postmodernist notion naturally was seen as bizarre or worse in the strongly modernist atmosphere of medical research between the wars.
I see it as the bacterial equivalent of Dawson treating 4F civilians as the exact moral equivalent of 1A soldiers, not as defective 'useless mouth' variants, despite the reign of Total War Utilitarianism ruling western medicine between 1940 and 1945.
Dawson's pioneering HGT DNA/ Q-sensing work taught him ethics and it taught him technical skills - both which he called upon to get penicillin successfully launched......
Leonard Colebrook is CENTRAL CASTING's penicillin hero
Time to wake up.
This isn't Hollywood.
"This Reality talking: Put your hands in the air and move slowly away from the World of Fiction".
In the World of Reality, Leonard Colebrook actually did bugger-all to advance the development of penicillin.
But Hollywood isn't totally wrong - he should have been the one to make penicillin a world wide success by 1932 or so.
He actually did do so in 1936 with a later - and lesser - 'miracle drug' : the sulfa family of drugs.
He did it by using some of the first commercially available sulfa to reduce childbed fever deaths to a very low figure - a feat that alone should have earned him immortality from grateful young mothers and families.
Childbed fever - actually commensal GAS strep bacteria (long term residents of the throats of the many attending doctors and nurses) settling in on the huge wound that is every new mother's uterus - is a particularly dreaded form of infectious death.
The death itself is often very painful. By definition the patient is relatively young (ie in her child-bearing years) . The death leaves a new born baby to be raised alone by a grieving young father and his young family.
Next Colebrook went on to pioneer new techniques to combat other forms of cross-infections that frequently develop in hospitals - starting with World War Two burn victims.
Even in retirement he led yet another crusade to modify the ubiquitous space heater so they all had clothing guards installed by law. Until this law was in place, thousands of people a year - in the UK alone - got severely burned or died, when their night clothing got set alight when it got entangled on the bare heating element.
His parents had raised him to be a Non Conformist missionary and reformer. In the event,Colebrook did as many would-be missionaries did at the turn of the last century - he channelled his missionary impulses into the field of medicine.
His highly moral impulse remained as intense as ever in everything he did.
He joined the Territorial (Reserve) Army and when he was called up in 1914, was prepared to go to the front as an infantry officer, not as a doctor.
But he was judged too valuable as a medical researcher to remain on the front lines - he spent the rest of the war in the rear echelons, with Fleming and Wright.
But at least- and unlike Fleming or Florey - he was willing to go to the Front.
In World War Two, he was again at the front, in a medical military capacity - teaching medical teams how to use sulfa powder in new war wounds ( he knew little more they did !) - and as the Front Line dissolved and became meaningless in the Battle for France he had a number of very close escapes.
He was 57 years old - and still at the front, still in the thick of it, trying to save lives 'right here, right now'.
Colebrook was the near-perfect example of the type of doctor I call the ward-doctor type.
This type of doctor may suffer from EED (Empathy Excess Disorder), in that they care too much for the patient, feel too much of their pain.
When they see patients dying needlessly around them, they are inclined to throw themselves even deeper into the battle at the bedside level - trying to use any or all of the best available techniques as best they can, as hard as they can.
What they can not see themselves doing, is beating what they'd call 'a cowardly retreat' to the quiet of a laboratory to 'study' the disease at its most fundamental level, hoping to find a cure - 'sure ,in about 6 years time'.
JV Duhig, Robert Pulvertaft, RH Boots, Perrin Long, Frank C Queen and even Karl Meyer are all doctors in the penicillin saga that fit this type.
There is a totally different type of doctor I will call a lab doctor. They probably suffer, to some extent, from EDD (Empathy Deficiency Disorder).
They too find it very hard to see patients dying needlessly, but they reject 'simply' providing 'band aid' palliative care for those who are dying without a cure in sight.
They spend their careers in the laboratory seeking the fundamentals of a disease and its cure in the universalities of chemistry and physics - as far as possible away from living, breathing, capricious individual human beings.
They may serve - if they must - in the military but they contrive that it is done in the rear echelons.
However, once over draftable age, they frequently display a newly bellicose attitude to war service that one rarely find among the ex-veterans who actually faced death on the front lines.
I am thinking of Fleming, Florey, Keefer, Richards, and their ilk.
Now they may have something to offer society as scientists, despite the negative picture I paint of them.
They are no more quitters in the lab than the clinician doctors are on the ward.
They might have the skills to grow something as difficult as penicillium and the strength to hang in there when their first ten months of efforts are marked by nothing but failure.
One could see Florey and Colebrook as the perfect combination of two men who are incomplete as individuals, when it comes to successfully developing penicillin.
Colebrook would be too focused on 'saving this patient - today' to ever set aside the months of time needed for the effort in the lab to learn how to grow penicillin.
Florey ,on his own, would be too focused on purifying penicillin to 100% pure to remember that there is a war on and patients dying while he fiddles.
But Florey and Colebrook had nothing in common, in terms of their personalities---- I couldn't see it ever happening.
Colebrook, by contrast, had worked successfully for years with Fleming at St Mary's but the relationship had soured when Fleming moved to displace Colebrook in Wright's affections.
Colebrook regarded Wright as his second father and could never forgive Fleming for this.
Besides, Fleming clearly lacked the drive to do hard work for months on end, needed if a hospital lab was to produce enough penicillin for human trials.
Colebrook succeeded with sulfa where he failed with penicillin because sulfa was abundantly and cheaply available in a stable form, ready to have any nurse give the patient as a pill as scheduled.
Penicillin had to be grown by the doctor determined to use it - as no drug company was really that willing to help.
He or she would have to concentrate and purify it and then preserved this highly labile drug long enough for it to make it to the patient's arm. It had to be given IV, and hence by doctor,likely themselves in fact ,a needle every three hours around the clock for weeks at a time.
Few doctors - even of the heroic cast like Colebrook or his American counterpart Perrin Long - were up for this.
Only Martin Henry Dawson combined the rare strengths of Fleming/Florey and Colebrook /Long in just one person.
That is why 70 years ago this week ,it was he - and him alone - that gave that long awaited first ever needle of penicillin, that sent a young boy named Charles Aronson home from his expected deathbed.....
This isn't Hollywood.
"This Reality talking: Put your hands in the air and move slowly away from the World of Fiction".
In the World of Reality, Leonard Colebrook actually did bugger-all to advance the development of penicillin.
But Hollywood isn't totally wrong - he should have been the one to make penicillin a world wide success by 1932 or so.
He actually did do so in 1936 with a later - and lesser - 'miracle drug' : the sulfa family of drugs.
He did it by using some of the first commercially available sulfa to reduce childbed fever deaths to a very low figure - a feat that alone should have earned him immortality from grateful young mothers and families.
Childbed fever - actually commensal GAS strep bacteria (long term residents of the throats of the many attending doctors and nurses) settling in on the huge wound that is every new mother's uterus - is a particularly dreaded form of infectious death.
The death itself is often very painful. By definition the patient is relatively young (ie in her child-bearing years) . The death leaves a new born baby to be raised alone by a grieving young father and his young family.
Next Colebrook went on to pioneer new techniques to combat other forms of cross-infections that frequently develop in hospitals - starting with World War Two burn victims.
Even in retirement he led yet another crusade to modify the ubiquitous space heater so they all had clothing guards installed by law. Until this law was in place, thousands of people a year - in the UK alone - got severely burned or died, when their night clothing got set alight when it got entangled on the bare heating element.
His parents had raised him to be a Non Conformist missionary and reformer. In the event,Colebrook did as many would-be missionaries did at the turn of the last century - he channelled his missionary impulses into the field of medicine.
His highly moral impulse remained as intense as ever in everything he did.
He joined the Territorial (Reserve) Army and when he was called up in 1914, was prepared to go to the front as an infantry officer, not as a doctor.
But he was judged too valuable as a medical researcher to remain on the front lines - he spent the rest of the war in the rear echelons, with Fleming and Wright.
But at least- and unlike Fleming or Florey - he was willing to go to the Front.
In World War Two, he was again at the front, in a medical military capacity - teaching medical teams how to use sulfa powder in new war wounds ( he knew little more they did !) - and as the Front Line dissolved and became meaningless in the Battle for France he had a number of very close escapes.
He was 57 years old - and still at the front, still in the thick of it, trying to save lives 'right here, right now'.
Colebrook was the near-perfect example of the type of doctor I call the ward-doctor type.
This type of doctor may suffer from EED (Empathy Excess Disorder), in that they care too much for the patient, feel too much of their pain.
When they see patients dying needlessly around them, they are inclined to throw themselves even deeper into the battle at the bedside level - trying to use any or all of the best available techniques as best they can, as hard as they can.
What they can not see themselves doing, is beating what they'd call 'a cowardly retreat' to the quiet of a laboratory to 'study' the disease at its most fundamental level, hoping to find a cure - 'sure ,in about 6 years time'.
JV Duhig, Robert Pulvertaft, RH Boots, Perrin Long, Frank C Queen and even Karl Meyer are all doctors in the penicillin saga that fit this type.
There is a totally different type of doctor I will call a lab doctor. They probably suffer, to some extent, from EDD (Empathy Deficiency Disorder).
They too find it very hard to see patients dying needlessly, but they reject 'simply' providing 'band aid' palliative care for those who are dying without a cure in sight.
They spend their careers in the laboratory seeking the fundamentals of a disease and its cure in the universalities of chemistry and physics - as far as possible away from living, breathing, capricious individual human beings.
They may serve - if they must - in the military but they contrive that it is done in the rear echelons.
However, once over draftable age, they frequently display a newly bellicose attitude to war service that one rarely find among the ex-veterans who actually faced death on the front lines.
I am thinking of Fleming, Florey, Keefer, Richards, and their ilk.
Now they may have something to offer society as scientists, despite the negative picture I paint of them.
They are no more quitters in the lab than the clinician doctors are on the ward.
They might have the skills to grow something as difficult as penicillium and the strength to hang in there when their first ten months of efforts are marked by nothing but failure.
One could see Florey and Colebrook as the perfect combination of two men who are incomplete as individuals, when it comes to successfully developing penicillin.
Colebrook would be too focused on 'saving this patient - today' to ever set aside the months of time needed for the effort in the lab to learn how to grow penicillin.
Florey ,on his own, would be too focused on purifying penicillin to 100% pure to remember that there is a war on and patients dying while he fiddles.
But Florey and Colebrook had nothing in common, in terms of their personalities---- I couldn't see it ever happening.
Colebrook, by contrast, had worked successfully for years with Fleming at St Mary's but the relationship had soured when Fleming moved to displace Colebrook in Wright's affections.
Colebrook regarded Wright as his second father and could never forgive Fleming for this.
Besides, Fleming clearly lacked the drive to do hard work for months on end, needed if a hospital lab was to produce enough penicillin for human trials.
Colebrook succeeded with sulfa where he failed with penicillin because sulfa was abundantly and cheaply available in a stable form, ready to have any nurse give the patient as a pill as scheduled.
Penicillin had to be grown by the doctor determined to use it - as no drug company was really that willing to help.
He or she would have to concentrate and purify it and then preserved this highly labile drug long enough for it to make it to the patient's arm. It had to be given IV, and hence by doctor,likely themselves in fact ,a needle every three hours around the clock for weeks at a time.
Few doctors - even of the heroic cast like Colebrook or his American counterpart Perrin Long - were up for this.
Only Martin Henry Dawson combined the rare strengths of Fleming/Florey and Colebrook /Long in just one person.
That is why 70 years ago this week ,it was he - and him alone - that gave that long awaited first ever needle of penicillin, that sent a young boy named Charles Aronson home from his expected deathbed.....
The Mystery of Penicillin's 18 missing years
I believe that all of the penicillin books up to now - and there have been hundreds of them - have basically been a series of 100,000 word excuses - "the dog ate my penicillin homework".
Excuses to us - the lay public - on behalf of Science in general or on behalf of one or other early penicillin researchers in particular.
But eighty years later, we lay people still want to know why it was that the best life saving medicine this world will ever see took an eighteen year vacation (from September 1928 till about September 1946) before local doctors around the world could routinely prescribe it to save a life.
Whether they are from the pen of a medical historian seeking to defend all of Science/a particular team effort or the effort of a lay author defending an individual scientist they particularly admire, all those apologies basically come down to this:
(It will actually highly technical and highly accurate at times---- but only when needed to refute technical excuses and bromides.)
THE FIRST MORAL HISTORY OF PENICILLIN
Mine will be a Moral History of penicillin - it will lay out a thesis that it was moral failings, not technical difficulties, that delayed penicillin becoming popularly know and commonly prescribed during all those years of death and suffering that we now call The Great Depression and World War Two.
The two events caused an excess of 100 million premature deaths over what might have been expected in that 16 year period.
Even if we content to 'merely' reduce those excessive deaths and not seek to prevent many of the so-called normal infectious deaths, how millions might penicillin have saved if it was readily available by 1929-1930?
Or consider this: despite the new global threat from nuclear weapons, the Cold War period from 1945 till 1985 was actually an incredibly optimist period in world human history.
The promise of 1945's penicillin was sufficient, all by itself, to overcome the fear induced by 1945's A-Bomb.
For a generation, penicillin kept most of us buoyed up about ourselves and the world around us.
Could those good vibes - induced in 1928-1929 instead of twenty years later - have been enough, by themselves, to prevent the worst of the Great Depression and World War Two from even happening ?
We will never know.
But I believe these questions are still big enough,eighty years on, for it to be worthwhile to re-examine the early penicillin saga to see if there is another explanation for the delay. One that will finally convince most lay people - and hopefully - even convince a few of the scientists.
DUHIG IS PROSECUTION'S KEY WITNESS
In the Fall of 1943, in Brisbane Australia, 15 years after Fleming discovered penicillin, Dr J V Duhig saved the lives of a dozen seriously ill people using a form of penicillin juice no more sophisticated than what Fleming had on hand in November 1928.
This the single hard, hard, hard, hard ,hard, historical stone against which I am going to grind every author and every account that claims that there were 'technical complications' why the world had to wait 15 or more years to put the life-saving effects of penicillin to work.
Until and unless they can explain to everyone's satisfaction why Duhig could do this - but why Fleming/Florey and Dawson et all couldn't - I will not relent.....
Excuses to us - the lay public - on behalf of Science in general or on behalf of one or other early penicillin researchers in particular.
But eighty years later, we lay people still want to know why it was that the best life saving medicine this world will ever see took an eighteen year vacation (from September 1928 till about September 1946) before local doctors around the world could routinely prescribe it to save a life.
Whether they are from the pen of a medical historian seeking to defend all of Science/a particular team effort or the effort of a lay author defending an individual scientist they particularly admire, all those apologies basically come down to this:
The 18 year delay was due to technical difficulties, not moral failings - at least not the moral failings of my hero.My book, by contrast, is not going to be a technical book - at least in its intentions.
(It will actually highly technical and highly accurate at times---- but only when needed to refute technical excuses and bromides.)
THE FIRST MORAL HISTORY OF PENICILLIN
Mine will be a Moral History of penicillin - it will lay out a thesis that it was moral failings, not technical difficulties, that delayed penicillin becoming popularly know and commonly prescribed during all those years of death and suffering that we now call The Great Depression and World War Two.
The two events caused an excess of 100 million premature deaths over what might have been expected in that 16 year period.
Even if we content to 'merely' reduce those excessive deaths and not seek to prevent many of the so-called normal infectious deaths, how millions might penicillin have saved if it was readily available by 1929-1930?
Or consider this: despite the new global threat from nuclear weapons, the Cold War period from 1945 till 1985 was actually an incredibly optimist period in world human history.
The promise of 1945's penicillin was sufficient, all by itself, to overcome the fear induced by 1945's A-Bomb.
For a generation, penicillin kept most of us buoyed up about ourselves and the world around us.
Could those good vibes - induced in 1928-1929 instead of twenty years later - have been enough, by themselves, to prevent the worst of the Great Depression and World War Two from even happening ?
We will never know.
But I believe these questions are still big enough,eighty years on, for it to be worthwhile to re-examine the early penicillin saga to see if there is another explanation for the delay. One that will finally convince most lay people - and hopefully - even convince a few of the scientists.
DUHIG IS PROSECUTION'S KEY WITNESS
In the Fall of 1943, in Brisbane Australia, 15 years after Fleming discovered penicillin, Dr J V Duhig saved the lives of a dozen seriously ill people using a form of penicillin juice no more sophisticated than what Fleming had on hand in November 1928.
This the single hard, hard, hard, hard ,hard, historical stone against which I am going to grind every author and every account that claims that there were 'technical complications' why the world had to wait 15 or more years to put the life-saving effects of penicillin to work.
Until and unless they can explain to everyone's satisfaction why Duhig could do this - but why Fleming/Florey and Dawson et all couldn't - I will not relent.....
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