As always, I think of the novella 'as a container, not its contents'.
Similar to Edgar Allan Poe, I like best a text (cum book) that you can read in one sitting and which results in one overall impression upon the reader.
So I have stolen the term 'novella' from the literary types, who use it most consistently for fictional work of between roughly 12,500 words and 25,000 words.
In practice, a novella today is usually around 19,000 words long.
(I think most of us regard fiction between 7500 words to about 15,000 words as either a novelette or a long short story, just as we tend to regard fiction over 30,000 words in length as a short novel.)
In terms of work that isn't fully or overtly fictional, like my work, this results a book of between 50 and 120 pages, depending on illustrations and formatting.
I think most of us can read a book like this, if it is clearly written and attractively laid out, in between 75 and 150 minutes - the same range of length as most movies/plays/ musicals and concerts.
My 'book' , "MO goes PO, 1939-1945" , is actually a series of 16 separate but connected essays easy of novella length.
Hopefully each will average around 12,500 words, giving an overall length for the entire series of 200,000 words.
I have had to condense the story greatly.
This meant I had to pick just sixteen key days, over a war that lasted six years and raged over 2000 separate days.
As a result, I have gone back 'n' forth/ forth 'n' back over the specific sixteen dates, so I can still tell the story succinctly but accurately and dramatically.
So here are my tentative dates and titles - always subject to further change, of course:
January 1st 1941 : "We Are The Dead".
March 15th 1941 : "Synthetic Hope".
May 20th 1941: "Life Unworthy" .
September 30th 1941 : "Thank You - And GOODBYE" .
January 30th 1942 : "Kristall Lust" .
March 12th 1942 : "Patient Betrayal" .
June 30th 1942 : "Censored" .
November 6th 1942 : "Going Native" .
January 29th 1943 : "Hill Of Beans" .
June 14th 1943 : "When Doctors Gossip" .
August 11th 1943 : "Fire This Time" .
October 30th 1943 : "Patricia, Harriet and Mae" .
January 25th 1944 : "Saved By Face" .
March 19th 1944 : "The Great White Hope" .
June 23rd 1944 : "Lazarus, Too" .
August 15th 1944 : "Blanket Harbour" .
Some will also have explanatory subtitles ...
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Thursday, October 21, 2010
'AGAPE penicillin' project was ALL about smallness and simplicity
Manhattan's other Project was one of World War Two's smallest projects in what turned out to be History's biggest ever human effort; our biggest effort - if one of our least moral - by what ever measure is taken.
Smallest is rarely an indicator of importance, and never less so than when set against the world's largest ever war.
In addition, this small project happened seventy years ago, and great distance back in time tends to render small projects even less of importance to us.
Everything about World War Two was gigantic.
Armed military occupied the deeps of the middle of the oceans, the heights of the skies and the tops of mountain ranges. They were found in the high Arctic and the deep Antarctica - in fact for the first time ever war touched every continent on earth simultaneously.
Armed military occupied the deeps of the middle of the oceans, the heights of the skies and the tops of mountain ranges. They were found in the high Arctic and the deep Antarctica - in fact for the first time ever war touched every continent on earth simultaneously.
Fighting occurred year around, night and day, in all kinds of weather, for six long years - fighting in the dry heat of desert sands, in the cold of ice and snow, in the wet heat of dark jungles.
Geographic spread was matched by the number of people pulled in directly as soldiers, war workers, in occupied nations and as refugee peoples.
Indirectly, almost everyone on Earth suffered restrictions on where they could travel or what they could buy and at what price.
Globally, about 100 million people either died during the war, or not long after the war, because of wartime conditions.
In terms of non-renewable resources consumed - literally - blown up, burnt up or sunk deep in the ocean, our share of the world's bounty took a hit we will never ever recover from.
We are still paying the debt of fighting the war and for repairing the structures and bodies affected.
The opportunities lost for what we might have achieved, as a human race ,without WWII, can never be known - only regretted.
Set against all these Big Battalions of facts and figures, why should historians, anymore than God, care about a truly tiny project ?
Well, I happen to believe, with all my heart and soul, Napoleon to the contrary, that God is actually totally on the side of the small battalions.
AGAPE penicillin was not just a small project, it was a project about smallness, all about smallness.
In fact, it seemed almost designed to defend the worthiness of smallness and simplicity and to rebuke Modernity and WWII's bigness obsession, doing so by both its ends and its means.
The smallness of its ends --- the people it was intended to help -- is blindingly clear.
RHD was the leading killer of working class school kids and the resulting invariably fatal SBE, the leading killer of slightly older working class RHD victims.
However, the upper middle class medical and scientific leadership of the Allies had determined that the working class SBEs were unworthy of a share of the small amount of natural penicillin the scientific establishment had half-heartedly produced in the 15 years after its discovery.
Dawson and his AGAPE team resolved to make their own semi-concentrated impure natural penicillin to treat these '4Fs of the 4Fs' , these 'lives unworthy of penicillin' - and hence - of life.
But what is my point in exalting the smallness of the AGAPE team, the small means to that small end ?
Again, the physical - or surface - smallness of Dawson's project is clearly self evident.
The team consisted of between two and six individuals - but most of the time consisted of just three or four individuals - people who already had busy jobs in the rest of their work day.
In terms of treating SBE patients - its main emphasis - it treated about 35 patients during World War Two - set that against the seventy million war who died during and because of World War Two.
NONE of those war dead died of SBE - it is doubtful that any sort of war action made an individual's chances of getting SBE any more likely.
In direct terms, the AGAPE project contributed nothing to the direct war effort - and many argued, then and since, that it actually hurt the war effort, albeit in a small way.
The project occupied a small lab or two, the wall of part of a corridor and a typical hospital ward of the smaller sort. (And whatever space they could temporarily scrounge for their equipment - including an outside fire escape.)
AGAPE penicillin consumed a small amount of resources that weren't particularly scarce.
AGAPE penicillin consumed a small amount of resources that weren't particularly scarce.
It doesn't seem to have won more than lukewarm support from Dawson's hospital and university colleagues.
And I have found no evidence of any government agency or large foundation voting to earmark funds specifically for the AGAPE project - so it had not been formally peer-financed/peer-approved by any of the scientific establishment.
Its cost in terms of dollars couldn't have been much - seemingly absorbed out of normal department and clinic budgets.
An impressive catalogue of 'smallness' , but this is not at all what I mean by saying that its means were as small as its ends.
I mean that literally: many of the team members, the biological agent they employed, even their bacterial adversary were all about as 4F as the 4F patients they treated or afflicted.
Henry Dawson - because of his weak lungs - had Terminal-MG-just-waiting-to-happen. He frequently was stuck in an oxygen tent and could only be permitted to get away to work, if he agreed to be tethered to an oxygen tank and mask, probably in a wheelchair.
His soul mate and writing/editing assistant, his wive Marjorie, had a congenital hip problem that was never successfully treated and she needed a cane at times.
His leading clinical aide, intern and then resident Dr Tom Hunter, had had polio and needed two crutches to get about.
His friend when he really needed him,the big industrialist Floyd Odlum had contracted an extremely severe case of Rheumatoid Arthritis --- while employed to worry about the fate of ( irony !) of tiny businesses under a war economy that favoured only the biggest firms.
As a result, he frequently needed to get about with crutches or a wheelchair.
When 4F patient Charlie Aronson got his SBE-induced stroke, he too got a wheelchair and his oxygen tank- but among this 4F medical bunch, he'd scarcely stick out !
During most of the war, informed medical opinion rejected the idea that NATURAL impure (but totally safe) penicillin could have any war role.
NATURAL penicillin, not to put too fine point on it, is produced when penicillium molds 'pee' a yellow liquid into their own bathwater.
No 'pee water' of dirty, smelly basement molds and fungi
was going to sully the veins of the White Races - anymore than black Negro blood was going to go into those veins, even if needed to save a life.
Artificially made (chemically synthesized like the existing Sulfa drugs) all-white ,crystal pure, 1A penicillin had to be created in mass amounts before the medical and scientific establishment was even going to tell the wartime laity about the wondrous life-saving qualities of natural penicillin.
In a war all about 1A men and 1A chemicals, the penicillium mold was smalltime and 4F.
In fact, it was suspected that very soon, there wouldn't even be an adversary for natural or artificial penicillin to test its mettle against.
Edward Mellanby, the head of Britain's all-powerful MRC and the chief financial backer of Howard Florey, had said in 1937, that in fifty years there wouldn't be any hospitals about devoted to infectious diseases, because they would all such diseases would have been conquered, permanently, by chemical medicines like the thousands of sulfa variants.
So, too, the Strep and other pathogenic bacteria were assigned to the 4F, loser, section of Life.
All penicillin books to date - even that written by AGAPE team member Gladys Hobby's, at least to some extent - devote almost all their length to Howard Florey's effort to create chemically pure penicillin.
But midway through their 300 pages and 120,000 words, they break long enough to devote a paragraph or page to the AGAPE team.
One can accurately summarize all their writing thusly:
Aaron was treated on that first day back in October 16th 1940, and he did seems to have died, perhaps by February 1941.
But the first patient ever treated with penicillin was almost certainly Charles Aronson, also treated that same day, with an amount of penicillin that also was far too small to have any effect on his heart bacteria.
But Charlie was made of the stuff God usually assigned to cats with nine lives and the fact that he knew he was getting not the back of medicine's hand but rather receiving the first ever systemic dose of a new wonder drug may have affected his heart - his emotional heart.
In any case, he survived this bout of SBE - a very rare but very real possibility with any case of a supposedly 'incurable' disease - perhaps because this 'boost to his morale' was converted into a 'boost to his immune system'.
This was no temporary event - he remained free of SBE for three years and was cured a second time by Dawson - again with penicillin - and was still alive at the war's end.
In 1945, Charlie could say "I'm still here !", despite being written off years earlier by all the doctors.
Worse, he has been written out of history by stupid,dumb,lazy,f-king brain-dead writers ever since.
(His history, the best recorded of any of Dawson's three dozen SBE patients, can be found in two frequently cited landmark medical articles, easily available to any writer seriously researching Dawson's part in penicillin's story.)
Dawson did get terminal MG a few months after beginning the AGAPE project, but he hung on for four and half years, the normal time patients with serious MG hung on in the early 1940s.
He worked steadily until a month before he died, and the long list of published articles and recorded appearances before public scientific meetings, demonstrates that fact to even today's stupidest,laziest writers - if they hadn't a semi-conscious agenda to bury him even deeper in the ground than any grave digger could arrange.
In early 1945, he also could say "I'm still here !" and point to the fact that not only was he still alive and active, but that even the AMA had accepted his claim that systemic natural penicillin could cure the incurable SBE.
Further, his close medical companion, the penicillium mold, if it could only speak, could also claim that it too was "still here !"
Florey's seven year effort to find chemically pure penicillin to inject into patients had failed - synthetic penicillin was a disaster in terms of yield and even in terms of its chemical rationality.
Naturally produced penicillin was the only penicillin used to save lives during World War Two--- and in the seventy years ever since.
And Dawson's first time use of systemic (internal) penicillin to treat human disease had not only ended up near the business pages of the New York Times - it had influenced at least some of those all important men-with-money.
A then small 'fine chemical' company with only a toe hold in the outskirts of the drug business (Pfizer) answered his clarion call for help.
Eventually, moved emotionally ( just like Charlie) by the AGAPE project, they betted their house on the unpopular NATURAL penicillin and won big - they ended up producing most of the penicillin of World War Two.
Today they are not just one of the biggest drug companies in the world , they are one of the biggest companies in the world, period.
Dismissed by Florey, in preference for 1A chemically-oriented MERCK , Florey never even visited Pfizer in 1941.
But in 1944 he simply HAD to go to Pfizer driven there by the dictates of the PR battle touting the hope of penicillin as the best single reason for everyone to hang on until the war's end.
So there he was, standing beside the AGAPE project's Gladys Hobby, and pretend to be moved by all the vials of natural penicillin tumbling off their production line while his own baby, synthetic penicillin, lay stillborn.
Pfizer too could say in 1945, "we may have been judged 4F by Howard Florey, but we too 'are still here' !"
Even Dawson's adversaries, the bacteria, could prove Edward Mellanby's proud boast wrong by 1945.
Even in 1945, sulfa and penicillin-resistant bacteria were abundant -- and the situation is even more serious today - so the small bacteria too could say "I'm still here !"
And of course ( because there always is a 'of course' in my blog entries) of course PostModernity is all about smallness, localness, variety, diversity, alternative modes of existence --- just as Modernity is all about 'bigger always being better'.
AGAPE penicillin - in all its dimensions - was the first successful postmodernist rebuke of the life-hostile ethics of Modernity and the Modernist war that was WWII.....
Its cost in terms of dollars couldn't have been much - seemingly absorbed out of normal department and clinic budgets.
An impressive catalogue of 'smallness' , but this is not at all what I mean by saying that its means were as small as its ends.
I mean that literally: many of the team members, the biological agent they employed, even their bacterial adversary were all about as 4F as the 4F patients they treated or afflicted.
Henry Dawson - because of his weak lungs - had Terminal-MG-just-waiting-to-happen. He frequently was stuck in an oxygen tent and could only be permitted to get away to work, if he agreed to be tethered to an oxygen tank and mask, probably in a wheelchair.
His soul mate and writing/editing assistant, his wive Marjorie, had a congenital hip problem that was never successfully treated and she needed a cane at times.
His leading clinical aide, intern and then resident Dr Tom Hunter, had had polio and needed two crutches to get about.
His friend when he really needed him,the big industrialist Floyd Odlum had contracted an extremely severe case of Rheumatoid Arthritis --- while employed to worry about the fate of ( irony !) of tiny businesses under a war economy that favoured only the biggest firms.
As a result, he frequently needed to get about with crutches or a wheelchair.
When 4F patient Charlie Aronson got his SBE-induced stroke, he too got a wheelchair and his oxygen tank- but among this 4F medical bunch, he'd scarcely stick out !
During most of the war, informed medical opinion rejected the idea that NATURAL impure (but totally safe) penicillin could have any war role.
NATURAL penicillin, not to put too fine point on it, is produced when penicillium molds 'pee' a yellow liquid into their own bathwater.
No 'pee water' of dirty, smelly basement molds and fungi
was going to sully the veins of the White Races - anymore than black Negro blood was going to go into those veins, even if needed to save a life.
Artificially made (chemically synthesized like the existing Sulfa drugs) all-white ,crystal pure, 1A penicillin had to be created in mass amounts before the medical and scientific establishment was even going to tell the wartime laity about the wondrous life-saving qualities of natural penicillin.
In a war all about 1A men and 1A chemicals, the penicillium mold was smalltime and 4F.
In fact, it was suspected that very soon, there wouldn't even be an adversary for natural or artificial penicillin to test its mettle against.
Edward Mellanby, the head of Britain's all-powerful MRC and the chief financial backer of Howard Florey, had said in 1937, that in fifty years there wouldn't be any hospitals about devoted to infectious diseases, because they would all such diseases would have been conquered, permanently, by chemical medicines like the thousands of sulfa variants.
So, too, the Strep and other pathogenic bacteria were assigned to the 4F, loser, section of Life.
All penicillin books to date - even that written by AGAPE team member Gladys Hobby's, at least to some extent - devote almost all their length to Howard Florey's effort to create chemically pure penicillin.
But midway through their 300 pages and 120,000 words, they break long enough to devote a paragraph or page to the AGAPE team.
One can accurately summarize all their writing thusly:
"Actually, and unknown to them, the Florey team was not the first to treat a patient with systemic (antibiotic) penicillin. That happened a few months earlier at New York's Columbia University when Dr Martin Henry Dawson gave a small amount of weak penicillin to a patient, Aaron Alston, with incurable SBE.
The amount was far too small to have an affect but was judged to be non-toxic.
Alston died and Dawson, already suffering from incurably MG, was too weak to do any further work and also died. His brief report, read before a medical conference, was never published and while noted in the New York Times, had no impact on the further course of wartime penicillin and he necessarily passes out of our story."None of this was true.
Aaron was treated on that first day back in October 16th 1940, and he did seems to have died, perhaps by February 1941.
But the first patient ever treated with penicillin was almost certainly Charles Aronson, also treated that same day, with an amount of penicillin that also was far too small to have any effect on his heart bacteria.
But Charlie was made of the stuff God usually assigned to cats with nine lives and the fact that he knew he was getting not the back of medicine's hand but rather receiving the first ever systemic dose of a new wonder drug may have affected his heart - his emotional heart.
In any case, he survived this bout of SBE - a very rare but very real possibility with any case of a supposedly 'incurable' disease - perhaps because this 'boost to his morale' was converted into a 'boost to his immune system'.
This was no temporary event - he remained free of SBE for three years and was cured a second time by Dawson - again with penicillin - and was still alive at the war's end.
In 1945, Charlie could say "I'm still here !", despite being written off years earlier by all the doctors.
Worse, he has been written out of history by stupid,dumb,lazy,f-king brain-dead writers ever since.
(His history, the best recorded of any of Dawson's three dozen SBE patients, can be found in two frequently cited landmark medical articles, easily available to any writer seriously researching Dawson's part in penicillin's story.)
Dawson did get terminal MG a few months after beginning the AGAPE project, but he hung on for four and half years, the normal time patients with serious MG hung on in the early 1940s.
He worked steadily until a month before he died, and the long list of published articles and recorded appearances before public scientific meetings, demonstrates that fact to even today's stupidest,laziest writers - if they hadn't a semi-conscious agenda to bury him even deeper in the ground than any grave digger could arrange.
In early 1945, he also could say "I'm still here !" and point to the fact that not only was he still alive and active, but that even the AMA had accepted his claim that systemic natural penicillin could cure the incurable SBE.
Further, his close medical companion, the penicillium mold, if it could only speak, could also claim that it too was "still here !"
Florey's seven year effort to find chemically pure penicillin to inject into patients had failed - synthetic penicillin was a disaster in terms of yield and even in terms of its chemical rationality.
Naturally produced penicillin was the only penicillin used to save lives during World War Two--- and in the seventy years ever since.
And Dawson's first time use of systemic (internal) penicillin to treat human disease had not only ended up near the business pages of the New York Times - it had influenced at least some of those all important men-with-money.
A then small 'fine chemical' company with only a toe hold in the outskirts of the drug business (Pfizer) answered his clarion call for help.
Eventually, moved emotionally ( just like Charlie) by the AGAPE project, they betted their house on the unpopular NATURAL penicillin and won big - they ended up producing most of the penicillin of World War Two.
Today they are not just one of the biggest drug companies in the world , they are one of the biggest companies in the world, period.
Dismissed by Florey, in preference for 1A chemically-oriented MERCK , Florey never even visited Pfizer in 1941.
But in 1944 he simply HAD to go to Pfizer driven there by the dictates of the PR battle touting the hope of penicillin as the best single reason for everyone to hang on until the war's end.
So there he was, standing beside the AGAPE project's Gladys Hobby, and pretend to be moved by all the vials of natural penicillin tumbling off their production line while his own baby, synthetic penicillin, lay stillborn.
Pfizer too could say in 1945, "we may have been judged 4F by Howard Florey, but we too 'are still here' !"
Even Dawson's adversaries, the bacteria, could prove Edward Mellanby's proud boast wrong by 1945.
Even in 1945, sulfa and penicillin-resistant bacteria were abundant -- and the situation is even more serious today - so the small bacteria too could say "I'm still here !"
And of course ( because there always is a 'of course' in my blog entries) of course PostModernity is all about smallness, localness, variety, diversity, alternative modes of existence --- just as Modernity is all about 'bigger always being better'.
AGAPE penicillin - in all its dimensions - was the first successful postmodernist rebuke of the life-hostile ethics of Modernity and the Modernist war that was WWII.....
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
1A strong chemical purity versus dirty weak 4F 'fungus water'
Why was NATURAL (impure but totally safe*) penicillin unacceptable as a frontline live-saving medicine throughout most of the war?
Why was it treated like a 4F or a 'useless mouth' - or like a Roma or Jew ?
Why the obsession with 'All White' Penicillin, (the so called A1 or Aryan Penicillin) ; why the obsession with it having to be 100% pure and 100% artificially made by Man, before it was safe enough to inject into the average WASP's veins?
Why the American Red Cross obsession that no black blood be mixed with white blood before a blood transfusion was acceptable ?
Were our great great grandparents nuts or Nazis or both or what ?
Why did these High Modernists think the way they did - and why do we Partial Post Modernists find them so hard to understand or to stomach ?
And when it all begin to change from them to us, anyway ?
* Nobody ever died of impure penicillin - the rare penicillin allergy deaths only began when patients began receiving massive doses of pure penicillin----- before being tested first for a possible allergy reaction.
Why was it treated like a 4F or a 'useless mouth' - or like a Roma or Jew ?
Why the obsession with 'All White' Penicillin, (the so called A1 or Aryan Penicillin) ; why the obsession with it having to be 100% pure and 100% artificially made by Man, before it was safe enough to inject into the average WASP's veins?
Why the American Red Cross obsession that no black blood be mixed with white blood before a blood transfusion was acceptable ?
Were our great great grandparents nuts or Nazis or both or what ?
Why did these High Modernists think the way they did - and why do we Partial Post Modernists find them so hard to understand or to stomach ?
And when it all begin to change from them to us, anyway ?
* Nobody ever died of impure penicillin - the rare penicillin allergy deaths only began when patients began receiving massive doses of pure penicillin----- before being tested first for a possible allergy reaction.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
God Knows What Dr Dawson Did With Penicillin...
.... and HE doesn't need a book to remind HIM.
But perhaps our new health science grads could still use a little inspiration....
But perhaps our new health science grads could still use a little inspiration....
God Knows What Henry Dawson,Robert Pulvertaft,Rudy Schullinger,Frank Queen And Jim Duhig Did With Penicillin...
... and now you are about to find out as well.
There have been many,many books written about PHASE I Penicillin : about the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming.
( And not enough books written as to why it then lay about unused for 12 years...)
Similarly there have been many books and articles written about PHASE II penicillin : the scientific research and development of penicillin by Howard Florey.
Supporters of both men have spent the 75 years ever since, fighting in print over which one deserves the most glory.
Very little - or nothing - has been written of PHASE III penicillin.
('Agape penicillin').
'Agape penicillin' occurred when a few isolated individuals gave their arm and heart and brain - and sometime even their life - not to discovering or researching penicillin, but simply to using penicillin to save lives.
Saving lives with penicillin as fast and as hard as they could, with whatever penicillin they could make or take, regardless of its 'purity' or lack there of.
Since no one else is writing their story, I am.
My qualifications are not that I am a doctor or scientist or even a published author.
It is simply that I am a former 'penicillin patient' (and aren't we all ?).
As such I care greatly about the stories of the first all-out efforts to take penicillin out of the science lab, to put it to work, inside patients, saving lives.
This is a book oriented towards readers who are or were patients receiving antibiotics, written by a former patient, rather than a book written by a scientist, academic or professional author.
If 'amateur author' means a book written out of love and gratitude , then I am an amateur for sure.
I started thinking about writing this book in 2005, in reaction to the aftermath to the events of 9/11. A lot of people - not just Moslems - seemed down on Manhattan, mostly for its global financial influence and partly for its part in the development of nuclear weapons during World War Two.
I decided the world needed to be reminded that not everything Manhattan did between 1941 and 1945 led to more killing and suffering.
TWO MANHATTAN PROJECTS:
The Manhattan Project had many connections to Manhattan Island and the surrounding Greater New York City area - as did the 'agape penicillin' project.
But the Manhattan Project leading to nuclear warfare was one of the biggest projects (in terms of money and manpower) - and certainly the best known, of all the projects of World War Two.
By contrast, the 'agape penicillin' project was one of the smallest and least known projects during the war.
Think of it, perhaps, as Manhattan's other Project.
If size matters to you above all else, this isn't likely to interest you.
But the 'agape penicillin' story is a truly epic story of courage arising above adversity to change our world forever, for better.....
There have been many,many books written about PHASE I Penicillin : about the discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming.
( And not enough books written as to why it then lay about unused for 12 years...)
Similarly there have been many books and articles written about PHASE II penicillin : the scientific research and development of penicillin by Howard Florey.
Supporters of both men have spent the 75 years ever since, fighting in print over which one deserves the most glory.
Very little - or nothing - has been written of PHASE III penicillin.
('Agape penicillin').
'Agape penicillin' occurred when a few isolated individuals gave their arm and heart and brain - and sometime even their life - not to discovering or researching penicillin, but simply to using penicillin to save lives.
Saving lives with penicillin as fast and as hard as they could, with whatever penicillin they could make or take, regardless of its 'purity' or lack there of.
Since no one else is writing their story, I am.
My qualifications are not that I am a doctor or scientist or even a published author.
It is simply that I am a former 'penicillin patient' (and aren't we all ?).
As such I care greatly about the stories of the first all-out efforts to take penicillin out of the science lab, to put it to work, inside patients, saving lives.
This is a book oriented towards readers who are or were patients receiving antibiotics, written by a former patient, rather than a book written by a scientist, academic or professional author.
If 'amateur author' means a book written out of love and gratitude , then I am an amateur for sure.
I started thinking about writing this book in 2005, in reaction to the aftermath to the events of 9/11. A lot of people - not just Moslems - seemed down on Manhattan, mostly for its global financial influence and partly for its part in the development of nuclear weapons during World War Two.
I decided the world needed to be reminded that not everything Manhattan did between 1941 and 1945 led to more killing and suffering.
TWO MANHATTAN PROJECTS:
The Manhattan Project had many connections to Manhattan Island and the surrounding Greater New York City area - as did the 'agape penicillin' project.
But the Manhattan Project leading to nuclear warfare was one of the biggest projects (in terms of money and manpower) - and certainly the best known, of all the projects of World War Two.
By contrast, the 'agape penicillin' project was one of the smallest and least known projects during the war.
Think of it, perhaps, as Manhattan's other Project.
If size matters to you above all else, this isn't likely to interest you.
But the 'agape penicillin' story is a truly epic story of courage arising above adversity to change our world forever, for better.....
God Knows What Henry Dawson Did With Penicillin...
...and HE doesn't need a gaggle of academics - or me - to remind HIM.
Monday, October 18, 2010
*In ferrum pro libertate rueban
It is thin comfort when you lose your dad or husband at an young age to note that his death had its poetic dimensions to it.
But just as Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his independent career with his work on the dagger shaped S pneumococcus, so those bacteria also brought his career to an end.
These sword-shaped bacteria - 'the old man's friend' - hastened his end when a final Myasthenia Gravis Crisis, two and a half years after his initial diagnosis, led to aspiration pneumonia which developed into full blown bacterial pneumonia.
This was the usual time period - and manner - in which people with severe MG died , before changes in emergency crisis treatment in the late 1950s greatly reduced fatal outcomes from 80% to 5% (and that 5% usually from the severely ill elderly with MG.)
A further poetic dimension to Dawson's life and death is that the man spent his whole scientific career focused on mucus - strep bacterial mucus to be exact.
(From the lifetime he spent plowing this narrow, boring-seeming furrow, Dawson nevertheless spun off HGT and Recombinant DNA, Q-sensing, Molecular Mimicry induced Autoimmune disease, and Biofilm colonies destroyed by Systemic Natural penicillin - basically the entire field of current bio medicine.)
Not bad !
But in the end, it was his own thickened mucus that his MG crisis produced but that his weak gag reflex could not expectorate that led to the aspiration pneumonia that resulted in his death.
Dawson lived for his (bacterial) mucus and he died by his (own) mucus...
* "For Freedom, They Rushed the Sword" : Virgil's AENEID
But just as Dr Martin Henry Dawson began his independent career with his work on the dagger shaped S pneumococcus, so those bacteria also brought his career to an end.
These sword-shaped bacteria - 'the old man's friend' - hastened his end when a final Myasthenia Gravis Crisis, two and a half years after his initial diagnosis, led to aspiration pneumonia which developed into full blown bacterial pneumonia.
This was the usual time period - and manner - in which people with severe MG died , before changes in emergency crisis treatment in the late 1950s greatly reduced fatal outcomes from 80% to 5% (and that 5% usually from the severely ill elderly with MG.)
A further poetic dimension to Dawson's life and death is that the man spent his whole scientific career focused on mucus - strep bacterial mucus to be exact.
(From the lifetime he spent plowing this narrow, boring-seeming furrow, Dawson nevertheless spun off HGT and Recombinant DNA, Q-sensing, Molecular Mimicry induced Autoimmune disease, and Biofilm colonies destroyed by Systemic Natural penicillin - basically the entire field of current bio medicine.)
Not bad !
But in the end, it was his own thickened mucus that his MG crisis produced but that his weak gag reflex could not expectorate that led to the aspiration pneumonia that resulted in his death.
Dawson lived for his (bacterial) mucus and he died by his (own) mucus...
* "For Freedom, They Rushed the Sword" : Virgil's AENEID
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