Illinois credits CORN liquor, Wisconsin DAIRY sugar for success of wartime penicillin

Call me cynical, but if Florey had been steered to the University of  Wisconsin in Madison in 1941 instead of to the USDA lab in Peoria , we might have gotten wartime penicillin in serious production a whole lot quicker.

Albeit with only one (ahem) drawback: we'd all be deaf hearing  how it was the addition of lactose than finally made penicillin production commercially viable - and hear virtually nothing about the addition of corn steep liquor to the happy mix !


The Peoria team was backed by a Washington scientific organization (the OSRD) whose research was so so but whose postwar PR efforts were first class.

Peoria boss Robert Coghill had spent much of the war backing the wrong (synthesis) approach to penicillin, then deserted that sinking ship and began touting corn steep liquor....

By contrast, Madison was also hooked up with a Washington scientific body (the OPRD) whose science was A1, but who lost out badly in that always crucial press-agency side of serious, fundamental ,science.

In applied science, a process or machine either works or it doesn't.

But in fundamental science, the theories only grow on their listeners if well supplied with plenty of bullshit.

Or steep corn liquor......

Illinois has a few houses and peolpe but otherwise is mostly tens of thousands of square miles of corn fields (and pig barns).

Wisconsin , by contrast, is all grass and cows.....

ROP on this penicillin milch cow is beyond astounding : and it is all down to lactose intolerance !

Ironic isn't it ? Hundreds of millions of people have enjoyed longer lives thanks to the lactose intolerance of some slimy little mold.


That mold makes penicillin : in the beginning, very little,  only converting about one millionth of the war-rationed sugar that was so lovingly fed into penicillin.

Turns out that was the biggest part of our problem : we were feeding it far too well, on easy-to-digest sugars and so it failed to produce any penicillin.

But as soon as we learned to starve it slowly, by giving it milk sugar, (lactose) a sugar it didn't exactly live to eat , it started into giving us tons of penicillin.

Lactose stresses the diets of molds something wicked and when they get food-stressed, but not to the point of actual starvation, they play defence .

The penicillin they start making kills and keeps at bay possible bacteria competitors for what little suitable food the mold can lay its threads upon.

But actually starve a mold (and early researchers often accidentally did that), and they started to rapidly self-suicide themselves in despair.

But feed it lousy lactose, just at the right time, just after its had a day or two of easy living on some nice sugar and protein, and it will produce tons of penicillin.

Literally : annual penicillin product induced by human industry is now at least 20,000 metric tonnes a year.

In 1928, it was about one micro-gram. That's about what Fleming saw in the bottom of his petri dish and it was about as much penicillin as was used in its first cure : curing a newborn baby of a lifetime of blindness , in 1930.

A micro gram is 1 millionth of a gram , so there are a billion of these tiny micro grams in a kilogram of penicillin ( ie about 2 pounds of penicillin). And a trillion of them in a metric tonne of penicillin ( ie about 2000 pounds of penicillin if you are old school.)

So we now produce 20,000 thousand trillion times as much penicillin today as we did 85 years ago.

Fleming's particular penicillium mold was actually very good producer - seemingly the best in the world for 15 years, but only produced one micro gram of penicillin in every gram of liquid medium.

That is a million parts junk to one part money ratio, unbelievably dismal in comparison to every other fermentation process in commercial use at the time.

Today, we get 50 milligrams of penicillin per gram of medium : that is 50,000 times better.

That is a 5,000,000 percent improvement in about 50 years.

Think your grandfather's prize milk cow had an outstanding ROP improvement ?

Try this rapid a percentage improvement on for size !

The main reason why we didn't see this sort of improvement for almost 20 years after Fleming found his mold is because we let chemistry guide our thinking ; trying hard to extract ever more of the penicillin we did manage to produce.

But as I used to say to the CUPE picketeers whenever the Gerry Regan government boasted of the size of its final, final, contract offer : " ten percent of nothing is .... still nothing" .

Only by learning to starve penicillium molds, which we had done by late 1944, did we begin to see enough penicillin to make the stuff a paying proposition , not a charity case, for Big Pharma.

But you can read all the best known books on war time penicillin - and I believe I have - and yet never read one word said about starvation of the molds.

The same goes for present day articles from historians and social scientist about wartime penicillin.

Only articles and books from physical scientists actually working in the fermentation industries routinely mention starvation stress in regards to being essential to penicillin production but even they seem to quote articles from the early 1950s as being the first to signal this fact.

But what then to make of little gem from July 26th 1941 from a letter from Norman Heatley to Howard Florey, just three weeks into Florey's effort to get American Big Pharma to make penicillin on at least a pilot plant scale?

Heatley is at a spanking brand new research facility in Peoria, set up by the US Department of Agriculture to find new uses for farm surpluses - particularly surpluses of low value farm wastes.

He is working with Andrew Moyer : one part mold genius to two parts paranoid nutter.

Already, just ten days after looking at penicillin for the first time, Moyer hazards a guess that penicillin production might be dependent on a starvation metabolism.

If Moyer had only been listened to - and there is no sign that any scientist or bureaucrat then - or historian since - ever did, we might have had commercial penicillin flowing by the Fall of 1941 not the Fall of 1944.....

Between Wartime Penicillin's initial failure ( Chemistry) and its final success (Biology) stood a third party : the humanitarians

When I call Henry Dawson "Penicillin's Third Man", I am being more than ordinarily facetious.

Penicilin's problem was chemistry-besotted biologists, the solution was  biologically-pragmatic chemists and the connecting threat were a tiny group of humanitarian-minded clinicians.


I mean that penicillin's main problem was - dating from September 1928 - was that its initial (biological) investigators  -names like Fleming,Florey and Richards spring to mind - tacitly accepted penicillium production levels of one microgram of penicillin per gram of medium as a given.

 As a result, they sought - blinker-eyed - only one possible solution : the total chemical synthesis of penicillin.

By contrast, it was chemist Larry Elder who finally pushed mycologists into doing their jobs like people on a mission, not people politely going through the motions.

And it was Larry who sought out "farmer-minded" scientists from any and all fields to up penicillium yields the old-fashioned way, the way farmers had successfully done so with other species for thousands of years : trial and error selective breeding.

But before people like Larry could be called in on the file, the public in September 1943 had to be outraged, ("its been 15 years since penicillin was discovered and  its still in desperately short supply !") and demanding that the authorities put new people on the job to finally start making this stuff - now - and in bulk.

Elder, Colitti, Queen, Hearst never get the credit they deserve

The humanitarians like Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft, Rudy Schulinger , Frank Queen and Dante Colitti all pushed the civil and military powers to be to make penicillin available for all who are dying - now !

And when the purple-toned slash yellow press of Citizen Hearst picked up on their efforts, all the pieces fell into place.

In less than six months, the government of America was pulling a little bit of its money out from making nuclear bombs and germ warfare and towards saving lives and the job was done.

 America - and soon the world - would be awash with cheap naturally-breed penicillium-made penicillin....

For the middle class of the Modernist Age, being double-dipped for their daily bread was a honor not a curse : hence their horror of hospital-made penicillin

Hard to believe that our grandparents were glad to be first soaked by milling corporations for the firms' processing away of life-giving vitamins from their flour and bread and then soaked a second time when the millers' added expensive man-made processed vitamins back in again.

It was called "Progress" and it was good.


Mom's home-made bread, prepared right in front of her kids in the kitchen, just had to be crawling with lethal germs  might even be made with (horrors) healthy vitamin-rich whole wheat flour), so it was much wiser to buy some factory-made white trash at the store.

Likewise, what family would allow their own family doctor to safely make penicillin up ( by themselves !) , to inject into a dying patient they had treated faithful for 35 years ?

Hoisted on their own modernist cum pharmaceutical petard, middle class patients between 1928 and 1943 didn't want hospital-made penicillin, even if they wound die without it ....

To a hammer, everything is a nail - to a thermometer everything is fever: but was penicillin fever BAD ??

Fever is closely associated with virtually any and every kind of illness - but does it make the disease worse or is it one of its cures ?


After the introduction of clinical thermometers in the 1870s, this fundamental question became moot.

Doctors and nurses took up this new hammer with great enthusiasm and soon saw nails everywhere.

They couldn't actually do much for most illnesses but now the carefully kept temperature chart's hills and valleys allowed them to semi-accurately predict that the patient was going to get better or go downhill.

A few doctors actually tried to raise a fever for a therapeutic purpose ,with mixed results, but most felt honour-bound to keep it down at normal at all costs.

Any drug they introduced into a patient that raised their temperature, even if only a few degrees for a few hours, made most medical staff recoil in horror.

But did it actually harm the patient ?

No one knew and no one cared to find out.

Few asked if a bacteria infection or a foreign protein (introduced accidentally along with a pneumonia serum for example) was the instigator of a temperature change, why then was fever itself always created by the body ?

Created for its own reasons - perhaps even its own good reasons.

The claim that any "non-store-bought" penicillin (rather like mom's home-made bread) was potentially lethal, was all down to reports that a sometimes a patient's temperature went up a few degrees for a hour or so, after an injection with hospital-made penicillin.

(And very often with store-bought industrial penicillin as well, in point of fact !)

This sort of minor side effect was not uncommon with many drugs and penicillin patients could in fact count themselves lucky.

There is no drug without side effects - never has been, never will be.

These side effects - often far more lethal than a short sharp temp rise - must always be judged as to their absolute danger and frequency.

And then also weighed, relatively speaking, against the alternative choices - which could be the untreated condition rapidly sliding into death.

Fever was just an excuse

"Penicillin Fever" was just an excuse, an excuse for hundreds of thousands of doctors world-wide between 1928 to 1943 to explain away why they choose not to inject un-refined hospital-made penicillin into their dying patients.

But I rather doubt that the doctor St Luke and his boss will buy that sort of excuse....

Dawson,Humphrey & Chisholm : the three Canadians who helped formulate the final Allied 'war aims'

Dawson, Humphrey & Chisholm sounds like - to Atlantic Canadians of a certain age - more like a small town firm of accountants or insurance agents than a trio of 1940s Canadians who changed the world as we know it very much for the better.

Henry Dawson

Nova Scotia born Henry Dawson is surely no stranger to the pages of this blog.

His October 1940 war aims (that the single best way to beat the Nazis was in contrasting publicly how we treated our least and weakest members with their ruthlessness towards the weak)  had by October 1943 started to become a solid part of the Allied Nations' new war aims.

John Humphrey

John Humphrey, bullied as a kid in New Brunswick, grew up determined to never see anyone else bullied - and his draft of his ideas became the United Nations' Human Rights Declaration.

Brock Chisholm

G Brock Chisholm , Ontario born, was like Dawson a WWI veteran and a lifelong strong advocate of Social Medicine (as was Dawson and Humphrey) and got to put his ideas into the very genome of the World Health Organization (WHO) as its first director-general.

Canadians weren't really key to winning  WWII , but they sure were prominent in winning the peace 

Canada wasn't as important in winning WWII as it was in winning WWI, but with these three Canadians' individual efforts, it had a great role in securing the peace....

George Redmayne Murray : moral predecessor to Dawson,Duhig & Pulvertaft's penicillin efforts

moral predecessor to Henry Dawson

Dr George Redmayne Murray is no longer a name that trips off the lips of scientists and doctors, but he still has moral lessons to teach us today.


Thyroid conditions in his day, the 1890s, were started to being treated by grafting new thyroid glands from animals into the bodies of people with diseased ones.

It sort of worked - heroic medicine indeed.

This concept was more or less how Banting originally planned to cure diabetes.

But when Murray read of one such effort is Lisbon, he noted the results came far too immediately -  the same day in fact - for new blood vessels to have had time to grow for the organ to spread the juice of the gland into the body.

The juice must have diffused outward from the new organ, on its own.

In which case, the juice alone, from ground-up animal organs, might work - without the need for an expensive and dangerous major operation to insert the organ itself.

(And let us not go into rejection problems !)

And here is where the application to chivalrous penicillin came in : he immediately extracted the juice of animal thyroid, added a little of a bog-common preservative to the juice to kill off any bacteria within, and injected it cautiously, just under the skin, into a patient with thyroid disease.

It worked -- she recovered her strength- and the first ever successful hormone deficiency treatment had happened for the price of a hot dinner, and in about the same time period it takes to eat a hot dinner !

Insight and drive - not money - more often than not, really drives medical advances

Dawson, Duhig, Pulvertaft also injected their crude substance (penicillin juice) via this method : cautiously just under the skin ( the safest form of injection) and with a simple common preservative to kill any potential pathogens.

Advances in medicine don't always require armies of the ambitious (more eager to produce endless papers than to help patients) and factories full of equipment.

It sometimes just takes deep insight and a moral drive : Murray , like Dawson, clearly had both....