Like synthetic penicillin, the harder the A-Bomb was to make, the more attractive it was to the OSRD

Late in 1942, Britain's highest political, military and Intelligence leadership decided that the Atomic Bomb was almost certainly too difficult and too expensive for Hitler's Germany to produce during World War II ---- if only because it would take too many resources from more pressing necessities for the Nazi war machine.

But they decided not to tell the scientists who had only agreed to build an atomic bomb because that seemed the only way to stop the Germans from doing it first and using it first to win the war.

These British leaders had also come to the same conclusion about their own Atomic Bomb program taking too many scarce resources as well.

(Like the mostly emigre Jewish scientists pushing hardest to build an Allied A-Bomb, the British had been originally willing to commit all the needed resources and more, if it seemed that Germany might actually make The Bomb ---- and make it first.)

But if Germany couldn't pull it off in time to influence this war, it seemed reasonable to put the British program on the back burner , keeping Britain's hand in, but no more.

They didn't tell the atomic scientists this, but they told Washington.

But the moment the British signalled these joint -and obviously closely related- conclusions to America's leadership, a paradoxical response happened.

Washington's military-political-scientific elite had long been cool to seeing the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of this war and hence something worth diverting billions in scarce war resources towards.

Indeed that elite - centred in and around Vannevar Bush's OSRD war weapon agency - had even been skeptical The Bomb would become a weapon in any future war.

But now the possibility of an all-powerful strategic weapon so complex and expensive only  the US could afford to build it and still play a full part in the current war made it an exceedingly attractive diplomatic weapon for what Washington saw as its new role as the world's new global policeman in the post war world.

America decided to share (and even there reluctantly) only  information in areas of atomic bomb research that Britain and Canada were already equal scientific partners in.

Meanwhile America would command by force majeure all the vital Canadian resources crucial to making The Bomb, denying them both to Canada and Britain.

Canada's uranium wasn't vital, just useful, but its processing plants and expertise for making uranium oxide and heavy water were vital in the sense that replicating them might add nine months to the path to the first successful atomic blast, possibly taking it outside the timeline of the war.

(The OSRD was praying that the Germans and Japanese didn't surrender too fast, because then Congress would instantly stop spending billions on a merely possible atomic bomb.)

I have never accepted the conventional explanations as to why America suddenly pushed their atomic bomb program into high gear at the same time they cut out Britain from the originally-planned team effort.

Lessons from the attractiveness of difficult-to-synthesize penicillin

But as I came to see how synthetic penicillin's very difficult nature made it more - not less - attractive as a secret war weapon to the OSRD, I began to see how the same could apply to the A-Bomb as well.

You see, cutting out Britain from A-Bomb research during the war would not make any sense at all, if Germany had a well developed A-Bomb effort.

Because at the end of the war, all the leading Allies would have an equal moral right to profit off of Germany's scientific treasures.

Britain and Russia would then learn - from the Germans - the 'devil in the details' knowledge to take the atomic bomb from university lab theory to successful factory production.

Believing that neither Britain and Germany would make an atomic bomb easily (let alone Russia, Japan, Italy and France) feed Washington's early-senility induced delusion that the atomic bomb secret really existed.

That 'secret' only existed for a short period - during the war itself - rather like the DDT secret.

 Still,  a useful period if it really was to be a war-ending weapon ( which no one in Washington believed) but useless if post-war secrecy was key to its success as a diplomatic weapon.

Poor old Washington and poor old London and  poor old Berlin.

Always forced to fight a three front war.

Two minor fronts (against your darkest enemies) and then a major one ---- against your dearest friends......

Howard Florey sole hero of 1944 American national radio play on Penicillin

Here, Howard Florey rules !

Du Pont's Cavalcade of America  on NBC was a very well financed American national radio and later tv show, popular before and after WWII (1935-1957), that as Marcel Lafollette points out , often featured heroes from medicine and science.

Not surprising then that the series featured an half hour show on "The Story of Penicillin" as soon as the censors would let it : which interestingly enough was April 24th 1944  --- starring Howard Florey as the one-and-only who brought us the miracle of penicillin !

(CALV 440424 380 The Story of Penicillin : episode 380, April 24 1944 is very easy to stream or download from the internet.)

Which is to say this half hour national show aired at a time when the OSRD-AMA-NAS triad was still successfully holding back all press interest in penicillin the miracle (by claiming the triad had legal censorship powers that it actually didn't possess.)

Could it be that even the powerful OSRD had to bow before the enough more powerful chemical giant, in part because it was a prime contractor of the A-Bomb ?

But what I  find so interesting about this show - beyond the fact that I do not recall reading about it from any penicillin historian's writing - is that it clearly announces at its onset that its one and only star is "Howard Florey".

Was the show an attempt to discredit Pfizer's sudden success  with non-chemically produced penicillin ?

(Because of all the months of the six years of war, April 1944 was the one I'd been most inclined to credit Pfizer's John L Smith as the man who finally brought us penicillin.)

Because that months of all months was the very first month that billions of units of the hitherto invisible miracle suddenly started pouring out of his rapidly-improvised Marcy Avenue ice plant cum biological penicillin brewery.)

Perhaps the triad felt a need to suddenly burnish the reputation of the big loser in the race to provide penicillin for D-Day :  that loser being synthetic penicillin and Florey's synthetic efforts at Oxford University.

 And believe me, having listened to as much of this half hour show as I could stand, Florey is indeed portrayed as the one and only star of this miracle of medicine.

Florey has an entire army of fans among present-day historians claiming he was elbowed out the fame-feeding-trove by that big mean bully Alec Fleming.

I have always found this hard to stomach.

Florey, in fact, was seemingly born with at least four sharp elbows of his own.

He also had a strong reputation, as a scientist, of being as ready to use his fists to win scientific arguments as  Fred Banting or Vannevar Bush ever did.

I wonder if his academic defenders will still howl " he wuz robbed" after listening to this old radio show ?

Penicillin : a bunch of biologists who put all their faith in chemistry vs two chemists who put all their faith in biology

In the Alice Through the Looking Glass world of wartime penicillin it should hardly be surprising that about the only strong supporters of natural ,biological, penicillin in the upper echelons of the overall enterprise were two professional chemists : Larry Elder of the American Office for Production Research and Development (the OPRD) and Harry Jephcott of the British drug company, Glaxo.

Or that the group most strongly bewitched by the thought of synthetic penicillin were a bunch of medical doctors with Howard Florey and Alexander Fleming leading the charge (with the OSRD and MRC close behind): the sort of scientists who might have been thought would normally occupy a place at the biological end of  hard science.....

OPRD and Dawson vs OSRD and Florey : social or war penicillin ?

If America was to win the war for the Allies by being becoming a ponderous and relentlessly-slow grinding mill of the gods ( a veritable "Arsenal of Democracy" as President Roosevelt proclaimed) than sometimes Vannevar Bush's OSRD (Office of Scientific Research and Development) worked hard against that objective, never more so than with Penicillin (and DDT).

In Total War, attrition (greater weight of arms and men) rather than generalship (the better use of the elements of secrecy and surprise) is felt to be - in the long run - the truly dominant factor.

The OSRD obviously disagreed, as did Hitler's High Command and the Japanese War Cabinet.

These three agreed amongst themselves that it didn't really matter that both sides shared the same 105mm howitzer and that so the side with the best rate of production of that artillery piece and its ammunition would win in the long run.

That was so old-school, so World War One style thinking.

No, the OSRD would win a quick clean war, by speed and secrecy of new weapon invention and by taking the offensive role at every turn in the war of new weapon invention : as the British would say, WWII was to be a war between sciences : a Boffin's war, not a foot soldier's war like WWI.

But you could also see this as classic "chicken hawk" style thinking  : stoutly favouring bold offensive operations, albeit from the cosy safety of an comfy armchair.

Because seemingly the only requirement for rising in the OSRD hierarchy was that you had successfully avoided combat when you were young and fit enough to do so, but now that you were now old and fat and balding and safely beyond the age of conscription your bellicosity had returned full on.

The German, Japanese and British military agreed with the OSRD - preferring to invent more truly new and superior - secret- weapons even when they knew this meant that fewer units of existing conventional weapons would be produced.

(By contrast, the Russians tended to want to produce greater numbers of a far fewer and far less technically sophisticated range of weapons - working in some minor incremental improvements over long, long production runs.)

So if the OSRD "took up" the development of Penicillin and DDT it would come with some heavy and hidden costs : for these two would now be developed strictly be for use as  secret and new "instruments of war" (weapons).

How we "almost lost penicillin" : it got captured by the OSRD

Penicillin being "captured" by the OSRD in the summer of 1941 when Howard Florey took it to his old pal ( OSRD heavyweight Dr A N Richards) wasn't as bad as being captured by the Gestapo , but it was a close run thing.

By contrast, the War Production Board (WPB) and its OPRD (Office of Production Research and Development) took a more sophisticated view of war work in a Total War situation : understanding completely that if civilians don't eat or are home sick, both old-fashioned howitzers and new-fashioned atomic bombs don't get built.

So if the epidemic of lung infections in America in the winter of 1944 among war workers had become a pandemic and shell production had been cut in half, just when the Battle of the Bulge needed more 105 mmm shells not less, the OPRD would have been ready, with massive amounts of civilian penicillin for ailing war plant workers.

But the OSRD would be left touting its claim that fewer of our wounded men in the Ardennes were languishing in hospital beds than in the case of the Germans, thanks to our Allied frontline military hospitals having most of the world's scarce supply of natural penicillin.

Artificially scarce , by government fiat, only because the OSRD and its British counterpart were STILL working on trying to make top secret synthetic penicillin and didn't want to warn the Germans of penicillin's potential by letting civilian doctors use it and then talk up miracle cures.

Dawson's unexpected SBE cures with stolen government penicillin leading to dying Baby Patricia Malone's widely publicized 'stealing' of penicillin beyond the OSRD's direct jurisdiction, brought the public and the OPRD into the picture and finally got us wartime penicillin en masse : for frontline Ardennes soldier and home front civilian alike .....

Was it me who said Peer Review is too often "Lions reviewed by Donkeys" ?

I guess it was.

I mean that all too often 'cutting edge' research  - paradigm-shifting research - will be rejected by normal science reviewers.

Instead, a scholar's work should be posted online and judged, over time, by a jury of all of their peers the whole world around, not just by six anonymous ( and usually over-worked) colleagues.

If it stands up, then, and only then, should it be considered for formal review by a senior journal in their field....

Gradually mass produce natural penicillin, starting in 1940, but ban all mention of the word in newspapers : half way moral approach ?

Producing enough penicillin for all Allied civilians and all Allied soldiers but keeping all word of it out of the newspapers and scientific journals might have been the best possible moral approach on its wartime use.

Yes , sick people in neutral, occupied and Axis countries would still die needlessly, but given the view held by many, many powerful people in the Allied elite, that penicillin should only be used to send lightly wounded troops back into combat, it might have been the most moral approach----- that would be politically acceptable in wartime....

Chloroquine : hiding one of WWII's most valuable secrets in 'plain sight' : in the scientific literature

To understand how OSRD fumbled the ball on synthetic penicillin but neatly hid the fact with lot of the taxpayers' money, consider the similar case of chloroquine, the best anti-malarial drug of WWII (aside from natural quinine) and a truly horrific example of the stupidity that can result from the excessive secrecy of war science.

The German chemical giant I G Faben had created what was to be ultimately called chloroquine in the 1930s and named it resochin.

They soon modified it slightly because they believed it to be too toxic and re-named the result sontochin and then offered that to their American subsidiary Winthrop Stearns.

They in turn offered sonotochin to the Rockefeller Institute in 1940 who were looking at effective chemical alternatives to quinine in event of a likely Pacific war.

Their leading expert - not a chemist - nevertheless felt he knew  chemistry well enough to dismiss sontochin's formula as hopelessly far too toxic .

Meanwhile, the OSRD was ramping up a truly Manhattan Project level effort to quickly screen or invent suitable chemical anti-malaria agents now that the Japanese have almost all the world's natural quinine.

They eventually felt they had invented a totally new anti-malarial agent but then in 1943, some French chemists in North Africa noticed it was exactly like the German sontochin , available all this time on the open market !

OSRD excelled at coverups ...

Extreme embarrassment - so the American 'discovery' was quickly slightly modified and called chloroquine and the awkward facts deeply hidden in the files.

But it got worse - for it was eventually found that the American invention #2 (chloroquine) was just the same old German invention resochin and that it ( great embarrassment for I G Faben) hadn't ever been toxic after all !

Similarly, the OSRD  worked to ensure that no one ever questioned the billions they spent competing with a German A Bomb that never existed.

They planned all along to quickly use their A Bomb on the greatly hated Japanese, almost regardless of the circumstances of the war, if only to prove its military value in the next war.

So when synthetic penicillin proved to be both a 15 year life-waster and a 4 year tax money waster the OSRD knew exactly how to cover that fact up.

They announced grandly that one of their very own chemist-researchers had actually produced synthetic penicillin but that currently, natural penicillin was still cheaper.

Actually the tiny amount of synthetic penicillin produced was an tiny impurity created in passing,  in the course of taking a totally wrong approach to the structure of penicillin :  and there still remains no way in the universe to scale up an error and get success.

It was all a calculated big lie or at best a deceitful half truth and entirely in keeping with the way that the OSRD operated from beginning to end....