"Collar the Lot" : Churchill's callousness push-starts A-bomb and Penicillin development

I don't like Winston Churchill.

Granted he was a very complex man, much given to uttering extreme verbal outbursts on whatever position he held that moment, replaces a few hours or weeks later by an equally exaggerated outburst on the opposite view on that same issue.

So it is easy to find vivid quotes from him displaying both humanity and brutality towards the German Jews and Leftists who fled Hitler for Britain before 1939.

For brutal , see his comment 'collar the lot' as soon as he became PM in May 1940.

Until then, the UK had sensibly only interned ( interned gently) those it deemed as obviously pro-Nazi.

But as he threw pro Nazi Aryans and very anti Nazi Jews together in internment camps, those few (because judged potentially 'valuable' to the war effort) German Jews still free in the English-speaking democracies could see dire times ahead for them too.

If they didn't move from being potentially valuable to 'actually valuable' and soon, they and their families would be interned with all the rest.

Ironically, existing restrictions on their current activities actually helped many succeed in becoming valuable ( very,very,very valuable) to the Allied cause.

We already well know about all those Jewish physicists, denied the right to work on important war efforts like Radar, who  fell back upon the then scientific backwater of a possible engine of atomic energy.

Their energetic development (hello Simon, Szilard and others) led directly to the idea of a possible A-Bomb becoming not the last but the first priority of the war.

It is not often thought of in the same way, but the Penicillin project (often twinned with the A-Bomb as one of the two big discoveries of the war) was push-started by two German Jewish emigres also facing possible internment for themselves and their families in the Spring and Summer of 1940, after Churchill's churlish actions.

Ernst Chain had to push and pull Howard Florey into realizing their peacetime, long term, basic research on microbe on microbe warfare could have huge wartime implications.

He probably pushed and pulled a little too hard in claiming credit on a back up project - this one on the chemical nature of the activity of the (mildly anti-bacterial) connective cellwall-destroying enzyme Lysozyme.

This had the effect of rousing the anger of , and the fear within, of another German Jewish emigre in America who had additional fears as he was also an WWI veteran of the Central Powers.

Karl Meyer had worked with (Martin) Henry Dawson among many others,to do the initial work on the chemical nature of Lysozyme and on some other important connective tissue destroying enzymes.

He saw himself as the pioneer in this small but valuable new field in bio-chemistry.

Meyer heard of Chain's forthcoming exaggerated claims for his Lysozyme efforts via the American-born Jew Leslie A Epstein (later Falk).

Like Meyer and Chain in those days, Epstein was a left-winger in politics and in medicine.

He got along with both of these two fellow Jews.

He had been forced, by general government order,  to flee Oxford University and a Rhodes scholarship before his year and PhD was completed.

So he completed his work, begun under Chain in Oxford, with Meyer in New York, because he was the other recognized expert on the topic.

He there mentioned Chain's part in the recent successful demonstration (May 1940) that the twelve year old nigh-on useless penicillin actually could cure bacterial disease inside mice without harming them.

This meant it probably could do likewise inside humans - humans perhaps even with guns and helmets. There was a shooting war on , after all.

This work was to be published in late August 1940 in Lancet.

Chain was soon tasked to try and synthesize the natural active ingredient as fast as possible.

Meyer - I believe correctly - felt that Chain was a far better 'big ideas man' than a working bio-chemist and that Meyer could do the job far better than Chain or the fungi ever could .

He couldn't beat the fungi, as it turned out - no one could - no one ever has.

But Meyer's secret plan to repay Chain for stealing his Lysozyme credit AND secure his family from possible internment with Nazis by synthesizing penicillin was not without its own profound consequences.

Because he badly needed his friend Henry Dawson and his two skills , if his project was to succeed.

Dawson and his co-worker Gladys Hobby were expert micro-biologists.

They were highly skilled in growing large amount of microbes, like the penicillium.

Their skill was needed to provide the huge amounts of raw natural product Meyer had to destructively analyze, all to guide the process of synthesis of penicillin from pure chemical compounds.

Secondly, only Dawson the clinician had the licensed legal access to animal and human subjects to test the biological effectiveness of any new results at synthesis.

Then Dawson abruptly decided Meyer's penicillin might do a lot more than just be tested on human patients.

It might just cure patients otherwise doubly-fated to an inevitable death from the dreaded SBE.

 Doubly fated to needlessly die, because in the Fall of 1940, it seemed the medical establishment was using the upcoming war effort as an excuse to treat research upon them as the very lowest priority.

In addition, American Big Pharma had shown no interest in providing any raw starting material of a potential - natural - drug they considered far tougher to work with than the still tractable and still profitable - chemically-oriented - sulfa family of drugs.

And they had no interest in developing a consultant-style relationship with a virtually unknown emigre Jewish biochemist, even with a growing reputation for the quality of his work.

(Meyer did have some sort of relationship with German-controlled Schering but they didn't see the potential - at least for their firm at this time - in the area of fungal-based antibiotics.)

Dawson saw this growing indifference to the sad fate of the poor SBE youths as part and parcel of the growing general meanness of the Modern Age itself, as exemplified by humanity's attitudes to small nations under attack from their big bullying neighbours.

This indifference to the fate of smaller 'others' started in Manchuria in 1931, then extended to Ethiopia and Spain in the mid 1930s  and then Austria and Czechoslovakia at the end of the decade.

Now it was Poland, Finland, the three Balt states, Denmark, Norway and Belgium turn to be attacked and generally conquered by bully neighbours.

Still America's population and hence government remained firmly 'neutral' - as did the vast majority of the still sovereign nations of the world.

In hindsight, it is better to regard them all , us all , as being cold-hearted bystanders in the global schoolyard, watching indifferently as bullies beat up babies.

When Dawson decided to use Meyer's penicillin project to confront this indifference to the small of the world, starting with the specific case of the young people needlessly dying of SBE , he eventually set in motion a globe-wide reaction against Modernity's cult of callousness.

But let us never forget it was Winston Churchill's own particular callousness that first set it all in motion , back in May 1940 ....

WWII: Bullies and Bystanders vs Innocents and Intervenors

NYC-based Dr Henry Dawson in 1941 was clearly an intervenor with his 'inclusive' penicillin (and may I point out that adult intervenors (as I well know) were often bullied themselves as children).

 SBE patients , such as his patients Charlie and Miss H were clearly the innocents.

NYC-based Dr Foster Kennedy in 1941 was clearly a bully, particularly telling that he would use the excuse of the shortage of staff and resources during an upcoming war as an excuse to finally implement his long held plan to kill all the deformed children.

Shades of Adolf Hitler in an exactly similar setting.

His active verbal supporters at the very top of the world's largest and most influential mental health body, the American Psychiatric Association, were clearly the stone-hearted bystanders a bully needed to get away with his deeds.

In the wider world of WWII, one can easily spot the bullies, the innocents and stone hearted bystanders (aka Neutrals)  as individuals and as (almost) entire nations.

But sadly, no one nation stands out as a whole hearted intervenor.

That noble task is left to a few in all nations, to try and heal the hearts of the stone-hearted majority by rousing their consciences  to the sad and unfair fate of the small and the weak in face of bullies.

Bullies like Hitler, Stalin, Tojo and sometimes even people like Churchill and others on the Allied and Neutral side.....

Penicillin flown to save Mrs Frank Oxford ,Amisk : 70 years ago this week

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 .....

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 .......?

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.....

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.......

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 .....