Needed : a MORAL history of Wartime Penicillin

SBE fatal to heart valves

It is impossible to write a truthful scientific or economic history of how wartime natural penicillin production became the template for today's enormous biotechnology industry.

Not impossible to write such histories - dozens of historians have already done so.

 Just not possible to do the job --- with any faithfulness to the actual contemporary record --- through those prisms.

Penicillin History has been Whig History....

By artfully cutting and pasting bits of the contemporary primary record it is possible to recast everything, even from that day in September 1928 when Fleming first saw that funny mold in his petri dish, as moving steadily and inevitably forward to the time when billions of units of natural produced systemic penicillin daily rolled off the line at Pfizer in the early Spring of 1944 - with natural (microbe produced) antibiotics being the norm to this day.

But in fact, most of the early1940s scientific, medical and commercial establishment was stunned into silence when penicillin ended up (a) suddenly proven up as the world's best-ever systemic life-saver and (b) being produced cheaply, abundantly and reliably - and produced only thanks to microbes to boot.

The 15 years up to 1944 had seen no new scientific advances or new commercial reasons to suddenly turn to penicillin as a systemic/lifesaver or to favour its production by natural (microbial) means  ---- over the situation as Alexander Fleming had described it in his first paper of  June 1929.

The scientific and commercial arguments against natural systemic penicillin in mass production were as good in March 1944 as they had been in March 1929, 15 years earlier.

Only the moral situation had changed.

All the scientific, medical and commercial reasons were still valid against Henry Dawson for staking his life to cure invariably fatal SBE with natural systemic penicillin and against "John L" Smith of Pfizer for staking his company to help him.

But their personal moral reasons for doing so were overwhelming to these two men and so they attempted and achieved the impossible.

 And our whole world was changed for the better, forever, as a result of those two - individual - moral decisions.....

Calling his voyages "out-sourcing to India", Romney and Ryan veto any more government money to 47%er Christopher Columbus

Columbus also never paid federal taxes

For the first 15 years, (1492-1507), Columbus was thought to have merely discovered a new route to India, not the entire New World.


For first 15 years, (1928-1943), Alexander Fleming was also thought to have merely discovered another useless systemic drug, not the best known, best loved, most priceless medication ever.

Penicillin and the Americas : who would have ever thought that they shared a common fate : discovered to be one (relatively useless) thing by one person, only to re-evaluated by another person as something far more marvellous altogether ?

Well that is the danger of voting and thinking like a Republican ; thinking that the world is a static place and that everything is either always useful ("makers") and or always useless ("takers").

If Ryan and Romney were sitting on the throne in Spain in the late 1490s, they would have tossed off Columbus and his requests for more government aid for sea voyages as just another waster from the useless 47% set.

When did Columbus ever pay federal income taxes ?

But if the King of Spain had taken that modern, social darwinistic,  attitude there'd be no historical  Columbus , no America , no Romney, no Ryan and no Republican party.

And won't that be a great loss to humanity .......

Aktion 47% : saving the 4Fs in a time of the 1As , putting them back to work and paying taxes : the OTHER Manhattan project

Romneycare DEATH PANELS for the 47%

In 1941, penicillin was lying about in the gutter, part of the medical world's unfit 47%.

Also in the 1941 medical gutter were the "4Fs of the 4Fs", those young men dying of invariable fatal SBE, seen as consuming precious medical resources at a time when many in the medical elite thought that the sole medical priority should be war medicine for the fit 1As.

Think of today's Mitt Romney as 1941's Dr Romney, if you aren't getting the picture yet.

But somebody - a nobody - in Manhattan had a different idea.

He thought both "unfits" (penicillin and the SBEs) could be redeemed, pulled out of that illusionary gutter, and put back to work combatting the Nazi evil.

For the Nazi evil included not just tanks and subs but also Aktion 4T : a scheme to kill all Germans ( and later everybody) who were judged not productive enough to bother having around .

Romneycare "death panels"

 It is hard to tell just how many people would have ultimately have ended up dead in Romneycare styled "death panels",  if the demands of the war for all forms of labour hadn't intervened.

 Who knows , perhaps as many as 47%.

The nobody's plan was a sort of Aktion 4F.

It was to be a rebuttal to the Nazi Aktion T-4 .

And a rebuttal as well as to his own 1A eugenically obsessed colleagues, like Dr Foster Kennedy who suggested killing the unfit young in that same year, 1941, to a wide round of applause.

Think of it as "the other wartime Manhattan Project" : saving the 4Fs of the 4Fs at the very height of an all out obsession with 1As.

Think of it, perhaps, as the most profound rebuttal to everything Hitler stood for : it said, even in war, we Allies care ( or should care) about the least of the these, as well as the wise and the mighty.

So that nobody - Dr Martin Henry Dawson - put penicillin to work and soon his medical notes happily recorded that many of his SBE  patients had indeed gotten up from their deathbeds and had gone back to work , paying taxes.

Hitler preferred killing people with such diseases outright ( see Martin Bader for an example) while the American medical elite in the 1940s and the American political elite in the 2010s, prefers to let them die quietly offstage, by neglect. The outcome is broadly the same.

Morally, it is only a short slippery slide from a fundraiser in Boca Raton to the death camps at Auschwitz....

DRUGS and Romney's 47% : AZT, Penicillin and Sulfa once didn't pay federal income tax either

AZT once part of the 47%

In a dynamic - Democratic - world, one minute you're down, not paying any federal tax, the next minute you're paying millions. But in a static - Republican - world : when you are down, you're out - for all time.

Roughly 47% of all of our most famous, best-loved, life-saving drugs were written off as "useless" when first discovered.

In the lexicon of Ryan, Romney and Republicans everywhere : they were part of the "unfit" 47% - well past caring about.

So Sulfa, penicillin and AZT were labelled as "useless" for 30 , 15 and 20 years respectively.

But then some kindly souls picked them up out of the medical gutter and gave them second chance, a second chance to do good and save lives.

AZT, Penicillin, Sulfa later saved the lives of those who earlier wrote them off as "useless" : poetic justice

But revealing once again that God has an infinite sense of irony, He - in his spirit of forgiveness - later permitted those "unfit" miracle-inducing medications to be used to save the lives of Romney, Ryan and all the rest of those church-going Republicans.

 All the people who had earlier failed so demonstratively to obey God's command to show mercy to the "unfit" : there is a lesson here - maybe even a sermon (!) : something about how the weak and the useless are sent to humble the mighty and the wise, maybe ...

AZT, Penicillin,Sulfa : Mr Romney, 47% of life-saving drugs were once written off as "useless"

Romney "latinoing-up" for votes

Asking who invented AZT, like asking who invented Penicillin or Sulfa drugs, is entirely missing the really important point : which is "who exactly first discovered their life saving qualities?"

The people who first discovered Penicillin and AZT and Sulfa (and Carbolic Acid et al) did not in fact discover and prove-up their uniquely tremendous life-saving qualities : that credit belongs to other people.

Many famous drugs once part of Romney's "unfit" 47%

And there is a current lesson here : not a medical one - but a political one - because this ties in very closely indeed to the 2012 American Presidential election.

Many famous drugs, as well as many unfortunate American citizens, can fit---temporarily --- into Mitt Romney's 47%.

One minute a drug is down and not paying any federal income tax (and so is written off for all time by Romney and Ryan) ---- the next minute it is up --- up in the lineup to get a Nobel from the King of Sweden and wondering how it is going to tax-shelter all the billions it is making.

Some very famous drugs were discovered twice : once as a useless chemical and only later as a marvellous life saver.

Fairness demands (even if  if the black and white simplicity of contemporary journalism does not) that the credit for them be shared.

Shared between those who discovered or invented the original substance and with those who (much) later decided to try it out to save lives in unexpected applications - often against the opposition of their more cautious colleagues.

Pause from thinking of Romney's strange new Latino tan - please - to honor the memory of Jerome Horwitz who died, unnoticed and unhonored, on September 6th of this year.

In 1964, Horwitz came up with a promising theory of drug therapy that he thought might help conquer cancer. He and his colleagues synthesized "almost but not quite perfect" analogues of a common building block used by life in creating DNA.

Horwitz hoped these drugs (AZT being by far the best known) would act as a Trojan horse and confuse cancer cells into using it to try and build new DNA.

The effort would falter and then the cancer cells would cease to multiply - effectively halting the cancer growth in its tracks.

Unfortunately AZT failed to work - in cancer cells - and Horwitz put it on the shelves - unpatented.

But not before publishing his FAILURE in the open public literature.

In the success-oriented world of Science (rather like the stock market) it takes courage for a scientist to admit failure and for a journal editor to publish that admission of failure : kudos to both for doing so.

Cut to 20 years later, AIDS is in full blown attack and every smart pharma company is in hot pursuit of finding a cure.

A traditional and time tested method is "brute force science" : mindlessly try every known chemical against the HIV virus, on the off chance that one will work, despite roomfuls of Nobel Prize winners standing around whining "that it won't work /don't bother".

Ten thousand (relatively un-expensive, very unimaginative) experiments later, sometimes something totally unexpected and totally wonderful happens.

As it did for Burroughs Wellcome . They patented AZT when the results showed it slowed HIV , AIDS was seemingly repelled - at least among those who could afford their patented marvel - and they made billions in profits.

Horwitz got none of that money and little of the acclaim that AZT garnered.

But he will get someday get wide acclaim - sadly only now that he is dead - because his line of research is indeed working on a broad front against many viruses, not just against HIV.

And successes against viruses (outside of vaccines and Mom's advice of lots of bed rest and lots of fluids)  are rare enough to cheer to the rafters.

So why is Horwitz ,the discoverer that AZT doesn't cure cancer, ignored and why is Michael Heidelberger, the discoverer that Sulfa don't save lives, also ignored? When Fleming ,the discoverer that penicillin won't save lives, is among the best known, best loved scientists of all time.

Why mostly because popular journalism is not in fact Rocket Science or Brain Surgery. It is not particularly rational or scientific or sophisticated: its priority is to tell uncomplicated - simple - compelling stories while remaining willing to use the facts ----- but only if they fit that simple narrative.

Alexander Fleming, Paul Gelmo, Jerome Horwitz do all deserve some fame for penicillin, Sulfa drugs and AZT : but so do Martin Henry Dawson, Gerhard Domagk and the nameless boffins at Burroughs Wellcome ---- the guys who first used those useless inventions to save useful lives.

Naturally, as a patient and not a chemist, I am profoundly biased : I honor much more those who save lives then those who merely invent or discover chemicals.

Don't you wish your average journalist started thinking more like a patient and less like a chemist when they appropriate honor ?

After all their readers are almost certainly likely to be patients sometimes in their lives but very few will ever be chemists.

And don't you wish Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan would ponder the "down and then up" life stories of Sulfa, penicillin and AZT before they write off the human 47% for all time ?

Blue sky optimistic or cautious & grounded : Nature or Nurture stronger ?

We are all born leaning to either being (a) basically optimistic about the new and the unknown or (b) leaning to being cautious and skeptical towards them : that's Nature talking - our genetic and epigenetic mix. But can our upbringing (and later our own adult life circumstances) restrain or encourage those innate tendencies --- ie does Nuture also play a big part ?


I certainly think so.

The life circumstances of your parents and relatives, of your neighbours and of your local community, of your race or religion, of your class, gender, regional geography  --- all feed into how you think a particular set of circumstances that potentially will affect many people - will actually end up impacting YOU.

So talk of an impending recession might mean for some the thought that cutting a week or two out of their annual stay at their time-share condo in Florida might just to be prudent.

Or it might mean that when lay-offs come at the mill as a result of the recession - and you just know they will come despite what the President says,that you - as the most recently hired employee - and as a black woman - will almost certainly be laid off before your other 'brothers and sisters' in the Local.

Or news of a new free trade deal with the South East Asia trading block might mean wonderful wealth opportunities for your investment firm - or it could mean your electrical wiring assembly job will be soon be out-sourced to another hungry woman -  in some Cambodian "factory" that likes to surround its employees with barbed wire.

But on the other hand, some investment bankers might still be sceptical of financial deals in the farthest parts of the Far East - still feeling that too much local "who-you-know" and "who-you-bribe" is the rules of the game to make them eager to put their clients' money there.

And some at the local factory might see Far East trade simply means more places to sell their firm's tractors and hence more production hours and more overtime for them.

They figure ,"Hey wiring electrical assemblies might seem easy and might even go to Cambodia eventually, but its actually much more difficult to do the job correctly - the first time - than it looks."

"For 50 years, we here in North America have learned to make the assemblies right, so that they keep working even in tough conditions."

"Cambodia could face a hell of a learning curve ,what with angry unhappy customers unable to get their tractors onto the field in a very short plowing season because the ignition won't start. We'll survive - for a few more years - I'm sure of it."

We all fit on a continum between extreme optimism and extreme skepticism, varying somewhat on an issue to issue basis, but deep down I feel that Nurture, not Nature, is usually most powerful in determining our most likely position, in advance, on any issue.

WE don't know our future - but we do know our past - if it has generally been consistently good or bad that will powerfully color how we see our future.

As Mitt Romney learned to his doom this week, the hard working optimistic poor and the hard working optimistic rich both might be hard working, both be optimistic, but because one is rich and the other is poor, they still bring very different sets of expectations to every new situation.

I think this is how most of us intuitively decide whether we prefer the First or the Second Law of Thermodynamics's take on basic reality : we bring many lifetimes of experiences (ours and our various sub-cultures) to the decision.

As to whether Reality is simple and certain or complex and chaotic, NUTURE far out weighs Nature when we come to make our individual assessment

If Life (our parents/community/race/economic class et al) has taught us its an uncertain world out there and rarely does it go our way - we will be pessimistic and inclined to see Reality as funnelled through the Second Law's insights.

But if Life has been good for us, our parents and almost everyone down at the Country Club, we'll see the First Law as a bang-on way of looking at the world.

Victorian sentimentalism might then be seen  as the work of people who are up today, but who have been down before and easily see themselves as being down again : empathy for the downthrodden comes easy when you have - literally - already walked a mile in shoes very much like theirs.

And Victorian Social Darwinism comes easily when you have had a lifetime of being told the only rich people are people who earned their way to the top by sheer hard work .

"If they can do it ,so can anyone, and if you can't  - or won't - do so,  then Nature should throw you to the wolves --- for the betterment of our species."

Without knowing how their individual genomes propelled them to being basically pessimistic or optimistic in nature, I am willing to stake my life on the assumption that almost all white protestant upper class professional victorian males in Manchester England saw the 1870s -1910s technological revolution much more positively than did almost all colored female peasants in Western Africa.

Nuture, (aka our past life experience) I argue, is by far the most powerful force upon how we view Reality : whether as simple and controllable or as powerful and chaotic.....

19th century simplified REALITY but 20th century "complexed it up" again ....

photo of actual ATOMS

At the beginning of the 19th century, most people saw Reality as made up of literally millions of different kinds of objects : from all the species and types of animals to all the different kinds of minerals and rocks to all the different types of weather events.

By the end of the 19th century, they all knew that all of Reality was fundamentally simple : made up of no more than about 80 different, elemental, building blocks called atoms of elements.

19th century : reality complex and unstable at macro level, stable and eternal at atomic micro level.

The surface complexity and instability of wood rotting to humus and rocks eroding to clay was merely an illusion - Reality, at the basic level was simple and stable.

These relatively few elements and atoms were permanent and eternal and universal : they couldn't be created or destroyed - merely arranged and re-arranged in an endless variety of patterns to create all the old world that Nature created and all the coming new world that Man's mind could invent.

Chemistry became the new Queen of Science and chemists saw their job as stripping Reality down into 80 (100% pure) basic building blocks and reassembling those blocks in interesting new ways.

Nature's attempts, they said, often failed because her "pure compounds" really ended up as "impure mixtures".

But under Man's command, purity was real, desirably and obtainable.

Purity became the chemists' - and the Age of Modernity's - Holy grail.

This thought became a basic meme of High School and undergraduate education by the 1890s (and is still with us 125 years later).

But ironically, cutting edge science began to feel it simply wasn't true by those same 1890s , a feeling that grew ever stronger among researchers in the basic sciences as the 20th century played itself out.

But their new knowledge failed to make it inside the door of the high school Chem Lab and still hasn't - and the resulting cognitive break between what we are taught and what is true is literally killing our planet.

We still act like we can easily control Reality for fun and profit ; Climate Change suggests we can't.

High School teachers, whether they know it or not - accept it or not - are killing us all.

On Earth, post Peak Oil, we may feel that Matter (all the soil and rock of this solid planet) is abundant and Energy is scarce, but in the total universe, the reverse is true.

Day to day ordinary matter is actually very scarce and most of the Universe seems to consist of ordinary energy, dark energy and dark matter.

Only under a relatively rare set of conditions does some of that energy become the stable atoms of  80 or so stable elements we know of on Earth.

20th century: Reality unstable at micro level, is most stable in appearance, at the macro level.

Underneath the elements ( which turn out to be composites or mixtures not at all elemental : think isotopic mixtures), are hundreds and hundreds of weird building blocks that may only exist under unbelievably extreme conditions and even then only for a trillionth of a second.

Reality, at the fundamental level turns out to be anything but simple and stable.

Even Earth's semingly stable elements are not in fact stable - while some will outlast the expected life time of the Universe , others are quite willing to break up into smaller more stable atoms and elements (think of uranium).

Day to day Iron is ever ready to rust away at the drop of a hat, but as an element, it is very reluctant to break up via natural radioactivity and so is the most stable of all the elements.

It is plunk in the middle of the periodic table in effect : too big to be easily mashed into a bigger element, too small to easily break apart into smaller elements.

So purity is absolute only as a mental construct ---- nothing in the world is 100% pure for very long : even those bars of metal in vacuum in Paris that represent the mass of a kilogram are no longer pure - they have seen some of their atoms spontaneously self destruct into smaller atoms and a bit of loose energy ; ie they now weigh LESS than a kilogram !

Purity and stability fundamentally are blue sky scientific illusions ; all matter and energy is in a state of constant eternal flux - down at the level of the basic building blocks of atoms and elements.

Surprisingly, as ordinary non-scientists, ie for the bulk of us, stability is best found away from basic science of the chemists and found instead in the geologists' lumps of minerals we see everywhere .

True they will eventually become soil and wash into the sea - but not in our's or our great great grandchildren's lifetimes.

At the macro level, we don't see a big piece of a mineral as slowly but steadily changing into something else at the individual atom (micro) level and we can enjoy thinking of it as stable enough for us and our purposes ---- to use as a building material for a 'permanent' monument for example.

Reality, under the Second Law of thermodynamics, turns out to be stable and simple at the macro level but unstable and chaotic at the fundamental building block level - a surprising and total reverse of what the First Law of thermodynamics taught the 19th century chemists .....