It is the first case I could find of penicillin being used to save a life in Canada : 70 years ago this week, Mrs Frank Oxford dying in a Hardisty hospital of childbirth fever was given penicillin specially flown all the way from the Banting Institute in Toronto.
The Americans a week earlier had specially flown penicillin ( in a bomber no less !) to save a dying girl and the Canadians authorities scurried to play me-too catchup.
A life and death story involving women and children that successfully and repeatedly made it to the front pages of North American newspapers that usually only told the life and death stories of men - men fighting overseas.
Let us see if the Edmonton Herald et al misses this anniversary of this historical story .....
Friday, September 13, 2013
So I am a punster , is that such a crime !?
Stone-heartedness : physical or moral affliction or both ?
I am sure a gene is responsible.... or its early neural damage while a child-to-be is still resting on the placenta.
Whatever.
Punning can't be cured - only endured.
So my 'stone-hearted' : a play on the stone-like calcined formations on the heart valves that defines the SBE disease that Henry Dawson eventual cured with his 'inclusive' penicillin ?
Did Dawson merely want to see these teenagers and youth enjoy all the courting and dancing that all the others their age enjoyed : 'dancing' over stone (hearted valves) ?
Did he merely hate to think of the SBEs slowly dying inside mentally and emotionally as well as physically, as their medical condition forbade them doing anything vigorous and youth-like , in case it hastened their inevitable early end ?
Or is my title a broad hint that Dawson's real target was much bigger than the few dozen lives he saved directly : was his inclusive penicillin really aimed at curing all of the morally stone-hearted ?
That is to say, the majority of us between 1931 and 1945.
The us who were so determinately indifferent to doing anything concrete to save our weaker and smaller neighbours when they were under attack by big bullies like Hitler , Stalin and Tojo ?
The same morally stone-hearted of us who refused to allow any live-saving penicillin go to the physically stone-hearted SBEs ?
Or all of the above .......?
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Fred J Stock : righteous among the nations ? (Part I)
Part I : the Era of Sulfa has run out of steam...
In May 1943, almost 15 years after the world's best lifesaver - Penicillin G - was first discovered , the whole world was making about a 100 million units of it a month.
That sounds like a lot but it is not at all - that amount of Penicillin G today would be only sufficient to treat one ordinarily sick patient requiring it !
A severely ill patient today requiring penicillin G might need a whole year's worth (1200 million units) at May 1943 production rates.
But May 1943 was hardly ordinary times with ordinary patients - it was the height of WWII , the biggest deadliest war ever seen : a seven ring circus of sickness and injury where the box office never closed.
The only other lifesaver around at that time - the wonderful sulfa drugs - had had a great five year run of success (cheap and easy to make in huge amounts, easy to give to patients) but had now run out of steam and were in grave danger of collapse.
By the Fall of 1942 , the chemists had a convincing scientific explanation for why they had run out of places on the basic sulfa ring to insert new additional "side chain" molecules, to provide additionalanti-bacterial action via new variants of sulfa.
So : no new sulfa drugs for germ-killing ---- ever .
The existing ones were now meeting unexpectedly rapid bacterial resistance - the normal solution : up the dosage amount and duration of treatment to overcome that resistance - had revealed just how dangerously toxic the safe sulfa drugs could be at high and prolonged dosages.
A repeat of WWI's deadly combo pandemic of Spanish (viral) Flu and (bacterial) Pneumonia and maybe this time more than a 100 million people (one in twenty) might die.
A huge potential disaster loomed, just offstage.
The problem , as always , was that scientists were in charge of public policy on penicillin - not politicians.
The academic scientists - on penicillin - had made common cause with their normally mortal enemies : Big Pharma.
Penicillin had long been ready to report for war duty - but only as a public domain natural substance made up in medieval brews by rural peasant midwives from mold slime ( I am paraphrasing the scientists' and CEOs' mutual objections here.)
The CEOs were chemically-minded as only executives matured during the chemistry-made interwar years could be and really wanted a synthetic penicillin.
Synthetic means man-made means patents : patents to raise prices and secure world markets free from profit-cutting competitors.
The scientists claimed to abhor profit-making but loved reputation making instead.
And for scientists still unsure if their new found high social status was really secure , it would be a retrograde step for the world's best ever lifesaver to be seen as something a housewife could brew up in their kitchen and apply directly.
Because that meant all its lifesaving prestige would bypass both the male academic basic scientist and the male applied scientists in medical labs and hospital wards.
(For the Gender War raged on , military war or not.)
The OSRD/NAS in America and the MRC in the UK ,dominated by Republican/Conservative Party scientists (for virtually all tenured academics in those years voted Republican or Conservative), controlled the production of penicillin until May 1943.
Their conservative views even continued to dominate the Conservative Ministry of Supply in the UK.
But in America they were soon to be defeated - in great part because they were now to deal with the very New Deal and Democratic Party-oriented War Production Board (WPB) and the formidable head of its Drugs and Cosmetics Branch, Fred J Stock.....
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
WWII was all about who we include , who we exclude ...
When we say that Henry Dawson's vision of wartime penicillin was 'inclusive', while that of Howard Florey was 'exclusive' , we are really getting at the key issue that divided all the world during, before and after WWII.
" Just who do we include in ; just who do we exclude out of our civil society's blessings ?"
Florey never called his vision for wartime penicillin 'exclusive' , but he did much use another term that means the same thing and in any case , his definite actions spoke much louder than his unspoken assumptions.
The word he always used to describe his goals for penicillin was 'pure' , chemically pure.
A dose of penicillin that excludes everything else in the original penicillin juice, whether that be helpful, neutral or harmful.
A 100 gram Vitamin C rich orange not merely concentrated into Vitamin C rich orange juice but further purified until it is a mere 100 mg of 100% chemically pure Vitamin C powder ... with all that impure orange taste and texture safely removed.
If Calvinists ever become our leading chefs, this is what our food will look like : pure carbohydrate, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals in enormous pill form and worked down with many cups of sterile water.
Hitler wanted to exclude Jews, Romas, Queers, the chronically ill and the handicapped , socialists, Blacks - you name it - to make Germany one big pure homogeneous Aryan nation and race.
Left-leaning Social Medicine, of which Dawson was a proponent , wanted to see that Medicine helped all those sick : it was inclusive.
And not just by helping those American blacks, aboriginals and immigrants usually neglected under 'for-profit' medicine either.
Its proponents also wanted to intervene (medically and otherwise), overseas ,to help those under attack by Hitler, Stalin and Tojo.
By contrast, the conservatives behind the idea of "War Medicine" wanted to use the defence of America as an excuse to roll back the New Deal emphasis on Social Medicine by claiming that in a Total War lead-up, all precious resources had to shift away from the (generally poorer) 4Fs to the (generally better off) 1A citizens.
Just because they talked war did not mean they were pro intervention overseas, just the opposite.
Their vision not just excluded helping sick 4F Americans at home, it also excluded helping sick 4Fs overseas as well.
Florey and Fleming both wanted penicillin to be chemically 100% pure and synthetic before it was produced in big volumes.
They were also both in intimate lockstep with the War Medicine proponents at Britain's Ministry of Supply and America's OSRD who wanted to restrict civilian access to (and knowledge of) the miracle cure , all the better to make penicillin a weapon of war.
If it could be kept exclusively as a secret weapon of war, the Allies could return wounded troops to combat quicker than the Germans or Japanese could.
By contrast, Dawson felt that doctors should help the sick and wounded soldiers of both sides (including Allied POWS !) and help the civilians of all sides : Neutral , Axis and Allied.
And he wanted penicillin - whether synthetically pure or naturally impure* he didn't care - produced in mass levels now , not after the war was over.
(* His team never let the impurity of their self-proclaimed "crude penicillin" stop them from being the first in history to give it systemically, via needle, to save a life.
They later even published a journal article speculating crude penicillin had additional beneficial substances that made it a better medication than just pure penicillin itself...)
Dawson definitely did not want to see the medicine produced in tiny levels so as to render acceptable the rationing of it, to justify giving it only to those civilians who were useful because of their involvement in the war effort.
He felt even a person incapable of almost any work still deserved penicillin, a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile.
Dawson felt this sort of American medical establishment thinking was far too close to that of Hitler's Aktion T4 projects - where people judged non-useful were starved, denied warm shelter and medicine or killed outright.
He believed if the Allies were seen saving the lives of people most of the educated world saw as 'useless' - even during an all-out Total War - this would help defeat Hitler morally in the many many Neutral countries and also strengthen the resolve of those Allied frontline troops facing death to defeat him militarily.
If the OSRD and Florey used penicillin as a weapon, we need ask did Dawson use it as a weapon, as well ?
Yes he certainly did.
As a weapon in a moral battle.
Dawson's touting of the inclusive use of wartime medicine definitely did have a moral cum political/diplomatic impact, in addition to the extra patients it medically admitted to be saved.......
" Just who do we include in ; just who do we exclude out of our civil society's blessings ?"
Florey never called his vision for wartime penicillin 'exclusive' , but he did much use another term that means the same thing and in any case , his definite actions spoke much louder than his unspoken assumptions.
The word he always used to describe his goals for penicillin was 'pure' , chemically pure.
A dose of penicillin that excludes everything else in the original penicillin juice, whether that be helpful, neutral or harmful.
A 100 gram Vitamin C rich orange not merely concentrated into Vitamin C rich orange juice but further purified until it is a mere 100 mg of 100% chemically pure Vitamin C powder ... with all that impure orange taste and texture safely removed.
If Calvinists ever become our leading chefs, this is what our food will look like : pure carbohydrate, protein, fat, vitamins and minerals in enormous pill form and worked down with many cups of sterile water.
Hitler wanted to exclude Jews, Romas, Queers, the chronically ill and the handicapped , socialists, Blacks - you name it - to make Germany one big pure homogeneous Aryan nation and race.
Left-leaning Social Medicine, of which Dawson was a proponent , wanted to see that Medicine helped all those sick : it was inclusive.
And not just by helping those American blacks, aboriginals and immigrants usually neglected under 'for-profit' medicine either.
Its proponents also wanted to intervene (medically and otherwise), overseas ,to help those under attack by Hitler, Stalin and Tojo.
By contrast, the conservatives behind the idea of "War Medicine" wanted to use the defence of America as an excuse to roll back the New Deal emphasis on Social Medicine by claiming that in a Total War lead-up, all precious resources had to shift away from the (generally poorer) 4Fs to the (generally better off) 1A citizens.
Just because they talked war did not mean they were pro intervention overseas, just the opposite.
Their vision not just excluded helping sick 4F Americans at home, it also excluded helping sick 4Fs overseas as well.
Florey and Fleming both wanted penicillin to be chemically 100% pure and synthetic before it was produced in big volumes.
They were also both in intimate lockstep with the War Medicine proponents at Britain's Ministry of Supply and America's OSRD who wanted to restrict civilian access to (and knowledge of) the miracle cure , all the better to make penicillin a weapon of war.
If it could be kept exclusively as a secret weapon of war, the Allies could return wounded troops to combat quicker than the Germans or Japanese could.
By contrast, Dawson felt that doctors should help the sick and wounded soldiers of both sides (including Allied POWS !) and help the civilians of all sides : Neutral , Axis and Allied.
And he wanted penicillin - whether synthetically pure or naturally impure* he didn't care - produced in mass levels now , not after the war was over.
(* His team never let the impurity of their self-proclaimed "crude penicillin" stop them from being the first in history to give it systemically, via needle, to save a life.
They later even published a journal article speculating crude penicillin had additional beneficial substances that made it a better medication than just pure penicillin itself...)
Dawson definitely did not want to see the medicine produced in tiny levels so as to render acceptable the rationing of it, to justify giving it only to those civilians who were useful because of their involvement in the war effort.
He felt even a person incapable of almost any work still deserved penicillin, a warm meal, a warm bed and a warm smile.
Dawson felt this sort of American medical establishment thinking was far too close to that of Hitler's Aktion T4 projects - where people judged non-useful were starved, denied warm shelter and medicine or killed outright.
He believed if the Allies were seen saving the lives of people most of the educated world saw as 'useless' - even during an all-out Total War - this would help defeat Hitler morally in the many many Neutral countries and also strengthen the resolve of those Allied frontline troops facing death to defeat him militarily.
If the OSRD and Florey used penicillin as a weapon, we need ask did Dawson use it as a weapon, as well ?
Yes he certainly did.
As a weapon in a moral battle.
Dawson's touting of the inclusive use of wartime medicine definitely did have a moral cum political/diplomatic impact, in addition to the extra patients it medically admitted to be saved.......
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Despite Eric Lax, Howard Florey is still "Box Office Poison" to women readers
And as every book editor well knows , most readers of narrative fiction/non-fiction are women.
But in the Lax take on the wartime penicillin saga, the hero offered up is a man who leaves his deaf middle class wife to ride around on her bike in the rain collecting urine from penicillin patients while he 'has it off' with his aristocratic mistress in the luxurious bath and bedroom suite he had at his office in (never-Blitzed) Oxford England .
And this at a time when millions of Britons in the rest of the UK were being bombed out their homes by the Blitz and (barely) living in makeshift shelters.
Charming, really charming !
Just of the sort of hero women readers want to cuddle up to - Not.
The character - or lack of it - of Howard Florey is what made Eric Lax's recent biography such a flop among ordinary readers.
So, despite the fact that a survey of thousands of American women found they considered penicillin the most important news story of the entire 20th century , we still have never had a successful popular book or movie about the dramatic wartime history of penicillin.
What is missing in all past efforts is a focus on the one classical hero in the whole saga : the dying Dr Dawson and his unrelenting efforts to make penicillin inclusive not exclusive.
That and a too trusting reliance by previous writers upon the official histories rather than digging deeper into the primary records.
Because the people in Washington and London who wrote the official histories determined, above all, to cover up their very expensive and very time-wasting wartime flop : the synthetic penicillin project led by Florey and George Merck and paid for mostly by the taxpayers - as always.
So they tried to pretend that the stone these builders rejected had really been their idea all along. With Dawson prematurely dead at war's end and unable to set the record straight , it was - literally - dead simple.
Women, around the world , will buy a popular history about wartime penicillin by the tens of millions of copies - with the right set of heroes and villains laid out before them.
"The smallest Manhattan Project : the unexpected triumph of inclusive penicillin" will do just that .....
But in the Lax take on the wartime penicillin saga, the hero offered up is a man who leaves his deaf middle class wife to ride around on her bike in the rain collecting urine from penicillin patients while he 'has it off' with his aristocratic mistress in the luxurious bath and bedroom suite he had at his office in (never-Blitzed) Oxford England .
And this at a time when millions of Britons in the rest of the UK were being bombed out their homes by the Blitz and (barely) living in makeshift shelters.
Charming, really charming !
Just of the sort of hero women readers want to cuddle up to - Not.
The character - or lack of it - of Howard Florey is what made Eric Lax's recent biography such a flop among ordinary readers.
So, despite the fact that a survey of thousands of American women found they considered penicillin the most important news story of the entire 20th century , we still have never had a successful popular book or movie about the dramatic wartime history of penicillin.
What is missing in all past efforts is a focus on the one classical hero in the whole saga : the dying Dr Dawson and his unrelenting efforts to make penicillin inclusive not exclusive.
That and a too trusting reliance by previous writers upon the official histories rather than digging deeper into the primary records.
Because the people in Washington and London who wrote the official histories determined, above all, to cover up their very expensive and very time-wasting wartime flop : the synthetic penicillin project led by Florey and George Merck and paid for mostly by the taxpayers - as always.
So they tried to pretend that the stone these builders rejected had really been their idea all along. With Dawson prematurely dead at war's end and unable to set the record straight , it was - literally - dead simple.
Women, around the world , will buy a popular history about wartime penicillin by the tens of millions of copies - with the right set of heroes and villains laid out before them.
"The smallest Manhattan Project : the unexpected triumph of inclusive penicillin" will do just that .....
It was the smallest of the wartime Manhattan Projects, but it had the biggest impact on making our world a kinder gentler place
Has the Manhattan-based Atomic Bomb and nuclear reactors really made our world a kinder healthier place ?
Was the Manhattan-based Norden bombsight and its delusion of mass bombing of civilians as way to end all future wars really the way to a kinder gentler world ?
Was Manhattan-based Dr Foster Kennedy's wartime project to propose the gassing of all the retarded children ,in emulation of Hitler's Aktion T4 project, really going to make us a better people ?
But Henry Dawson's tiny project was completely different : it was to see that abundant cheap natural penicillin was made available to all, without exception, at the height of a total war.
Even those judged medically in the Allied nations as being ' life unworthy of wartime medical care' .
Dawson wanted them saved not in spite of it being wartime, but rather precisely because it was wartime, because morally this was the best single way to combat Hitler's deadly yet globally popular eugenic ideology .
The legacy of the belief in life's 100% inclusivity, born from his tiny Manhattan-based project , lives on more than a half century after he's been gone.....
Was the Manhattan-based Norden bombsight and its delusion of mass bombing of civilians as way to end all future wars really the way to a kinder gentler world ?
Was Manhattan-based Dr Foster Kennedy's wartime project to propose the gassing of all the retarded children ,in emulation of Hitler's Aktion T4 project, really going to make us a better people ?
But Henry Dawson's tiny project was completely different : it was to see that abundant cheap natural penicillin was made available to all, without exception, at the height of a total war.
Even those judged medically in the Allied nations as being ' life unworthy of wartime medical care' .
Dawson wanted them saved not in spite of it being wartime, but rather precisely because it was wartime, because morally this was the best single way to combat Hitler's deadly yet globally popular eugenic ideology .
The legacy of the belief in life's 100% inclusivity, born from his tiny Manhattan-based project , lives on more than a half century after he's been gone.....
Irony : the smallest Manhattan Project has had the biggest impact in making our world better
If size truly mattered (the bigger the better), then the smallest of the wartime Manhattan projects wouldn't matter.
But it doesn't and so it did (matter).
The inclusive delivery of cheap, safe, non-patented natural penicillin was the biggest single improvement that the world saw in the 20th century.
Not primarily because of penicillin's life-saving abilities, awesome as they were and remain.
It is more from the fact that wartime penicillin was so successfully and so surprisingly converted from its intended use as a scarce, patented, expensive, exclusive-to-the-Allied-troops-only medicine by a tiny ragtag group of "acting-up" civilians and doctors.
Wartime penicillin was turned into something that was mass produced cheaply from non-patented natural penicillin for all the wartime world to benefit from : friend and foe, civilian and soldier, those judged 'worthy' and those judge 'unworthy' of life alike.
The 'inclusively of all life' was the finest legacy that the smallest Manhattan Project left for us.
Henry Dawson had intended it to combat wartime medical eugenics at home and in Germany.
But later his example was used time and again to combat any future possible attempts to go down the deadly eugenic medical route.
The biggest Manhattan Project was all about exclusivity and secrecy - even claiming that mere unspoken thoughts about nuclear energy were born secret and were the exclusive property of the American government.
But what main stream politician today dares aim for majority government by running on a platform of race, gender, class and eugenic exclusivity ?
This then is Henry Dawson's true legacy and the tiny size of his project matters not a jot or tittle .....
But it doesn't and so it did (matter).
The inclusive delivery of cheap, safe, non-patented natural penicillin was the biggest single improvement that the world saw in the 20th century.
Not primarily because of penicillin's life-saving abilities, awesome as they were and remain.
It is more from the fact that wartime penicillin was so successfully and so surprisingly converted from its intended use as a scarce, patented, expensive, exclusive-to-the-Allied-troops-only medicine by a tiny ragtag group of "acting-up" civilians and doctors.
Wartime penicillin was turned into something that was mass produced cheaply from non-patented natural penicillin for all the wartime world to benefit from : friend and foe, civilian and soldier, those judged 'worthy' and those judge 'unworthy' of life alike.
The 'inclusively of all life' was the finest legacy that the smallest Manhattan Project left for us.
Henry Dawson had intended it to combat wartime medical eugenics at home and in Germany.
But later his example was used time and again to combat any future possible attempts to go down the deadly eugenic medical route.
The biggest Manhattan Project was all about exclusivity and secrecy - even claiming that mere unspoken thoughts about nuclear energy were born secret and were the exclusive property of the American government.
But what main stream politician today dares aim for majority government by running on a platform of race, gender, class and eugenic exclusivity ?
This then is Henry Dawson's true legacy and the tiny size of his project matters not a jot or tittle .....
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