Their revolutions WERE rhetoricized : Jacob Burckhardt's "terrible simplifiers"

Just as the famous Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt had earlier predicted, the Age of Modernity (1865-1965) was a time when 'terrible simplifiers' made that century the most violent and horrific on record.

A time of Grand - simple - Narratives, of soaring rhetoric , when all of life's problems and solutions seemed 'clearcut' , to use a word greatly overused by Sir Howard Florey, a much honored doyen of Modernity.

To his great penicillin rival, Martin Henry Dawson, nothing was ever simple or clearcut - a viewpoint that naturally won him no honours at all during the Era of Modernity.

And Dawson died in 1945, years away from being honoured under the very different value system of our current post-modern Era of Global Commensality....

No second acts for most war veterans - except in booming NY ?

F Scott Fitzgerald's most famous line is also his most misquoted line.

For Fitzgerald - like his character Jay Gatsby - was ever the eternal optimist , never the cynic.

Howard Florey : a dominant Alpha Male ... fiercely defending the banal and conventional ideas of Normal Science !

An irony there : the fearsome Howard Florey stands revealed as an intellectual milquetoast , behind his public persona as verbal and physical monster terrifying the calm corridors of 1930s British academic science.

By contrast, to fellow scientists the 1930s Henry Dawson was seen as a submissive and an Omega male , but intellectually his personal ideas created great unease among those same scientists , in almost an Alpha manner.


Howard Florey gauged his very public and very blunt opinions extremely carefully.

He was always - always - on the cutting edge of medical progress - never ever before that edge and never ever behind it.

He distilled the commonplace ideas of the scientifically powerful and then spat them back at them as bluntly and loudly as he could.

"Oh, what a roaring colonial rebel that Florey is - but his new ideas make perfect sense to me" said his flattered superiors about this artful sycophant.

But when the meek and mild Dawson mumbled his shocking personal ideas, his superiors shifted uneasily in their seats and dismissed him as a good ('sound') man in the relative backwater of arthritis studies - but wildly off base in his wide claims about the fundamental importance of microbial variance.

So the wartime clash between Florey and Dawson - over penicillin - was bound to lack verbal and physical fireworks , with no efforts by Florey to get into a fist fight with Dawson as he had done with others in the past.

The fight was all intellectual - all about Dawson's Paradigm Science surmounting Florey's Normal Science - and here the Alpha Male lost completely ....

This Era of Plentudism : the post modern welcoming of plenitude vs modern plenticide

We are - deniers aside - all plentudists these days.

We actually welcome and cherish the chaos and complexity of a multilayered world - welcome and cherish communities composed of  many wildly different little neighbourhoods.

'The more the merrier' is today our motto.

We are all Jane Jacobs and not Robert Moses today - we are all Henry Dawson and not Howard Florey these days.

We no longer have a an almost physical phobia against the mere thought of anything that is all mixed together.

Be that a bunch of different New York City ethnicities,  New York City neighbourhoods or various unknown compounds in New York City crude penicillin juice.

We no longer seek to replicate the chemists' process of separation and purification outside the beaker and flask.

We no longer practise it on human cities ( via the doctrine of widely separated uses and strict zoning) or on so called human 'races' ( with white separated and superior to blacks and Jews).

Adolf Hitler, Robert Moses and Howard Florey all tried that during WWII , and all failed and all were eventually discredited .....

Ironically, for a man in a hurry, Howard Florey takes a very very slow plane to America

By March 1941, according to young eye witness John Hedley-Whyte , Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey both knew (via gossipy trans-Atlantic letters between eye specialists) that there had been a gratifying academic response in America to Florey's August 1940 penicillin article in LANCET.

This, after it had fallen on deaf ears throughout the rest of the world.

Much 'too gratifying' for Florey's taste (and potentially very embarrassing for Fleming).

After all, Dr Fleming had, for 12 years, consistently and confidently insisted penicillin would not work if used as an antibiotics, ie as an internal lifesaving drug against severe bacterial infections.

Fleming saw penicillin as a viable drug only if a synthetic form could be invented - and even then it would be only useful as a topical antiseptic.

Now seemingly natural penicillin had been used as an internal antibiotic by Canadian born American doctor Henry Dawson , to successfully save Charles Aronson from invariably fatal SBE.

"Ouch !" said the ever tender Fleming ego.

Florey was even more alarmed - alarmed enough to halt his own efforts to synthesis penicillin after he had treated two patients in February.

He returned, posthaste, to treating more patients and to preparing a massive - frank and complete - article.

An article completely different from his earlier short and secretive article of August 1940.

Time for The Big Dog to piss along his chosen territory limits - time for the Australian to completely destroy this upstart Canadian colonial rival , Dawson.

He would submit his article for publication before Dawson and then go to America armed with the unpublished manuscript to regain his claim to "own" penicillin's bragging rights.

His chance came in early April when Warren Weaver of the Rockefeller Research Foundation was unexpectedly delayed in London when his fact-finding trip was broken by a car accident.

Florey nabbed him in his London hospital , feeding him on exaggerated tales of bombed out British drug companies.

Florey neglected to tell Weaver that Oxford hadn't been bombed and never would be bombed . Or that many drug companies - particularly outside London hadn't and won't be bombed.

But it was a seemingly good excuse to justify Florey's willingness to trade his patentable-in-Britain penicillin process off to an American drug firm merely for producing one kilogram of 2.5% (semi-pure) penicillin, to help him resume clinical trials.

For just a relatively small amount of penicillin , 40 Mega Units , it remains unclear why if his own process was so good and if Oxford had totally escaped the Blitz, that he and his top production worker, Norman Heatley, didn't simply stay home and produce it themselves rather than slowly production why waltzing off to America.

Or why a series of letters to various American drug firms, via Rockefeller Foundation research executives, together with advance copies of his latest detailed article wouldn't work just as well as a personal pitch and at the same time allow the pair to stay home producing penicillin all the while.

It was because the kilo of penicillin was never the real point.

Florey spent little time in America (only one day three months) actually doing any penicillin research there.

Instead he spend the entire three months barnstorming countless university researchers and drug research heads alike , talking up how his team had been the first to discover the method purify penicillin and then to use it as an antibiotic.

Even in a wartime crisis, there are many scientists to whom claiming personal priority for discovery is the real priority.

So Florey, the infamous Bushwacker of medical research, was out on the warpath again and taking no prisoners because he played science like he played tennis : ruthlessly.

Pleasing then to report that the man-in-a-hurry Florey got hoisted on his own petard.

For he rejected taking the conventional two week long ship route to America via Liverpool to Halifax and then by train to New York .

And he rejected paying for it on his own nickel.

But by the time the Rockefeller Foundation approved funding and the US and UK governments approved Florey's passage on the supposedly fast clipper plane route, four months had passed.

Four long months since Dawson had first revealed his clinical results with three SBE patients, before a small public lecture audience at the New School of Social Research.

In that period, Dawson had revealed more details of his results with a total of 4 SBE patients and eight eye patients ,but this time in a paper delivered before the biggest medical research conference in North America.

The story had broken wide over the wire services and been published in the New York Times and Newsweek.

Had even got reviewed overseas in South Africa's medical journal !

The main reason Weaver and Rockefeller had given Florey $6000 was to have him go to America to pool his results with that of Dawson and Rene Dubos ( working on another antibiotic) ---  all for the good of the allied effort against Hitler.

Florey stiffed Weaver, the Rockefeller Foundation, Dawson and Dubos by dog-dancing his three months in America against any chance he might even accidentally run into Dubos and Dawson.

He wasn't about to share his glory with any others, war effort or not.

Florey was at least intellectually consistent  - he had also successfully avoided aiding the WWI war effort as well.

But his long delay in getting to America (not till July 1941) certainly didn't help his claim to be first - everywhere he went, he was asked about Dawson's earlier pioneering efforts .

Perhaps the slow ship, paid on his own nickel, might have been a lot faster than the fast plane paid for by others....

When (and why) Toronto's famed Hospital for Sick Children DIDN'T report a miracle

Miracles and Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children are mostly associated with Nobel winner Fred Banting, eleven year old Elsie Needham and insulin back in the 1920s.

Unfortunately ,they are NOT associated with July 1942, penicillin and a dying nine year old boy (possibly still alive today) known only as R. V.

Much against the will of the anglo-american medical establishment, both insulin and sulfa had their very public miracles (as in "worldwide newspaper headlines") involving saving the lives of dying children.

Banting himself pushed insulin baby miracle cures into the popular media - it seems ordinary hospital doctors in Britain did the same in the case of sulfa.

The medical research establishment didn't really fear the effect of such news headlines upon the patients and their families.

Instead, they feared its affect upon their colleagues who were not as 'measured' , 'level headed','rational' and 'scientific' as themselves.

In their minds anyway.

Because , in fact , when it comes to trying new treatments for dying patients, GPs can be faulted for being too slow off the mark, not too fast.

First the average GP trys all the conventional treatments, in a descending order of unconventionality.

Then when the patient is visibly 'decomposed' as they say in medical articles - hours from the grave  - they try sulfa or insulin or penicillin and when the patient - despite all this delay - survives and quickly goes home fully healed, it truly does seem a miracle.

Now imagine a penicillin that - by and large - doesn't work , despite the bold initial claims made for it.

The GP seeing a nearly dead patient before them , despite all the current conventional and even unconventional treatments tried upon them.

Desperate they even try this here 'pen-i-cill-in' - and it fails.

The patient dies - as seemingly they were about to anyway.

Morally,who has been harmed by all this ?

The patient and their family knows that the doctors did everything - even went the extra four miles - to try and save someone with a limited likelihood of survival.

So they failed - but at least they tried and tried hard.

No, what the medical research community chiefs fear is not failure but success.

Because then there would be big headlines celebrating drug X when drug X is still in low supply , because the drug companies are patiently waiting for the researchers' results from long term, large scale, double blind studies, before deciding whether to invest large sums in scaling up production.

Forgotten in all this long term 'research leisureliness' is that there are many real people dying needlessly and families hurting needlessly.

Because nothing speeds up mass production like the spur of real competition - and competition can come out of the woodwork whenever front page headlines scream "medical miracle -new drug - short supply".

Not every investor reads medical journals but all can translate that bit of headlinese into plain old business English : dollars, lots and lots of potential dollars, to the firm that supplies Doctor Mom first.

WWII's penicillin almost never became a miracle drug.

The first few years of penicillin miracle cures in North America deliberately went unreported in the medical media --- let alone the popular media.

In Britain, one series was published in a medical journal but the popular press was successfully avoided by its lead author, Howard Florey.

Somehow, all the British daily newspapers' science cum medical journalists normally assigned to read medical journals for potential stories were charmed into staying mum on this big headline story.

Even in wartime, Fleet Street is highly competitive - it must have been a hell of a scientific "D" notice to silence the lot of them.

The reason was that the anglo american medical research leadership was hoping to turn penicillin-the-universal-lifesaver into penicillin-the-Allies-secret-weapon-of-war.

 And - to their eternal shame - anglo american science slash medical specialist reporters matched them into forgetting their sacred professional vows.

That these medical researchers - all men - were smart there can be no doubt.

Perhaps the smartest thing they ever did was to successfully evade the front line trenches in WWI , despite being fit enough.

Now that they were all fat and all over forty, they had become positively warrior fierce.

They would help win the war by denying lifesaving penicillin to dying Allied , Neutral, Occupied and Enemy civilians - despite that oath thingy they all swore when they first became doctors .

That same ancient oath was incorporated into the requirement to give equal treatment too all the sick and wounded, under the Geneva Convention on warfare.

They would even deny giving penicillin to Allied POWs in enemy hands - and to Allied wounded judged too damaged to ever likely see combat again.

Just for a few years ,you understand - just a few years of keeping news of penicillin miracles out of the Allied popular media read by neutral officials friendly to Nazi Germany.

So it could give a big medical advantage to the Allies when casualties got really heavy after D-Day.

Canadians went along too of course - there can't be many American or British asses we won't lick , if asked politely enough.

So back to the Hospital for Sick Children and poor little R.V.

He appeared deadly ill upon arrival at the hospital from blood poisoning brought on by a (botched ?) effort to remove a mildly diseased tooth.

Sixteen days of sulfa drugs had still left the boy in dire state - never conscious , high fever, high bacterial colony blood count , etc.

His health then took a turn from very very bad to 'death is near'.

The American doctor charged with controlling the limited supplies of penicillin being made (for clinical testing), Chester Keefer in Boston, was contacted.

Perhaps a personal contact between this very well known research doctor and someone big in research in Toronto, who knows for sure ?

Keefer gets Squibb Drugs in New Jersey to send up some of the badly filtered penicillin that Squibb was famous for turning out.

After some more filtering in the Toronto hospital, the penicillin is injected into R.V. and quickly claws him back from the grave and soon sends him on his way home.

This miracle was not reported in the medical or popular media despite July 1942 being perhaps the lowest point of the war for British Commonwealth morale (the fall of the Tobruk fortress) - such a severe morale crisis that even Churchill himself thought he might be forced to resign).

A Commonwealth lad saved by British medicine might seem to be the very morale tonic needed to pick up everyone's spirits - but it was not to be.

It was finally reported in December 1943 by Dr Nelles Silverthorne in the Canadian Medical Journal, CMJ.

Or should I say Silverthorne was allowed (or encouraged) to publish a crucial four months after Dr Dante Colitti took revenge on New York's medical elite and spilled all about penicillin, babies and miracle cures to Citizen Hearst's vast media empire ---- and ultimately to the whole world.

Dante's miracle baby ultimately died but not before his apparent early success with Baby Patty Malone touched so many mothers' hearts that the mass production of penicillin-for-all was assured from that point on.

But Canada, Toronto, The Hospital for Sick Children ?

They all just blew it ....

Rumours of death of wartime penicillins : "Greatly Exaggerated"

Seventy five years on , the wartime penicillins are just dusty relics , found only in some museum of medical curios, right ?

(You been talking to your GP again ?)

It is simply amazing how many family doctors dismiss wartime penicillins and say 'we physicians are all into the latest beta lactams today' .

Time for some FACTS, Doc :

Viagra and Lipitor are some of the best known and best selling drugs of all time.

So how much of them are produced annually ?

Two Hundred and fifty metric tons each - very impressive numbers in the world of drug production.

So how much of the old wartime penicillins ( Penicillins G , V and N) are still produced annually ?

How about fifty thousand tonnes (!!!!)

So much so, and at such cheap prices ,that some statistic indices rate them as commodity chemicals like caustic soda and ethyl alcohol - the cheap bulk raw materials intended for further chemical or biological processing.

Because that is exactly what the wartime penicillin are produced in such huge amounts for - to be worked up into the varied anti-bacterial drugs we call the modern beta lactams.

The old geezers are still the foundation beneath the largest component of the anti-bacterial armoury (and one of the largest components of overall acute care medications).

Seventy five years on , the best of chemistry and microbiology has still not bettered how cheaply and efficiently the tiny penicillium chrysogenum eat cheap farm wastes and turn them into valued lifesavers.

Alexander Fleming was dead wrong, Howard Florey was dead wrong, almost every WWII era doctor, scientist and science journalist was dead wrong.

The wartime chemists did not quickly and decisively eclipse these tiny un-super heroes of the era of antibiotics .

And they still haven't done so, even today...

In Howard Florey's Dunn , nurturing penicillium was women's work . REAL men didn't change diapers or penicillin vessels...

No women were ever allowed to be lab technicians at Howard Florey's Dunn Institute on the conservative campus of Oxford University*.

Tech work was way over their pretty little heads.

But then suddenly,  because raw natural penicillin juice is basically the piss and poop of the stinky, slinky, slippery penicillium slime , no man - at least no real man - ever wanted to touch the stuff the Dunn was forced to grow for the chemists to destroy analytically.

(In those days, no real man ever changed a diaper or had anything else to do with all those dark damp dank things , you know, "down there".)

So enter ,stage left : Ruth Callow and Clare Inayat Khan. Pioneering "penicillin girls" aka Dunn lab techs.

(Memo to Twin Tower terrorist Ramzi Yousef: lifesaving penicillin pioneer Claire was a Moslem, just like yourself - only she did good, not evil.)

But the indignity of having to deal with the unpredictable penicillium was hated by all the men at the Dunn , not something to be proud of.

So as soon as possible all the elaborate equipment used to grow and extract natural penicillin was dumped - without ceremony - into the nearest rubbish pile.

Nothing was retained to serve as historical evidence for this supposedly noble effort.

Because the real show was all in the chemistry section, trying to synthesis patentable artificial penicillin analogues.

And there - need I say more - the workers were all men.

Real men ...

* As reported by David Wilson in his book "Penicillin in perspective ",1976 - page 176.

How can you tell when a scientist is lying? They don't footnote : the sad case of Gwyn MacFarlane

Before I knew much about penicillin , I really enjoyed Gwyn Macfarlane's two books on penicillin - he's such a smooth writer.

But now that I have seen many of the primary documents and more particularly now that I have the exact 20 year chronology of early penicillin firmly set in my mind (one of the very few things I don't mind saying that I am very good at) , MacFarlane severely depresses me.

Why are so many scientists such morally bad historians ?

He sought in both books to redress the wrong done to his old boss Howard Florey by the many fabrications in the Fleming Myth that gives almost all the credit for anything good in wartime penicillin to Fleming alone.

A worthy objective.

But he can only do so it seems by doing a Fleming - by seeking to denigrate all the good done by Florey and Fleming's North American counterpart, Henry Dawson.

Macfarlane claims that Dawson's announcing of the first penicillin injections in human patients in history got little press attention.

But no footnote to back up his claim, basically saying that he has checked such indices as the North American Readers Guide to Periodical Literature and found nothing.

(See page 182 in the 1984 British edition of his book Alexander Fleming ) .

In fact, Dawson's May 5th 1941 announcement at a big big international medical convention in Atlantic City was a big press story.

More importantly, it was that rarity, an unexpected big story.

At least in the recollection of the New York Times' top science reporter William L Laurence - a man with a world reputation for knowing all and seeing all that was newsworthy in new science.

So a big headline in his New York Times , right next to the business section ,where it inspired Pfizer management to take up penicillin.

 And Pfizer (let me remind you) made most of WWII's penicillin, all by itself.

Ditto big headlines Philadelphia's biggest paper and in the then giant newsmagazine Newsweek .

Naturally then both American wire services picked it up so that it appeared in remote communities all over North America the next day.

Reported at far afield as the South African Medical Journal.

By contrast, I have never found any contemporary news coverage of the complete cure of Yale university's Ann Miller in March 1942 in any periodical.

And nobody - particularly nobody from that time period from Merck or Yale , with a great interest in seeking such material - has shown any such press citations.

As part of Macfarlane's campaign against Fleming , this cure in far off America can only add to Florey's fame - because his closest scientific friends in America were all from Merck or Yale.

So page 196 of Macfarlane's Alexander Fleming has him claiming (as always without a footnote of proof)  that the American popular press made much of her cure and that it pressed for rapid factory production of this miracle cure - one paper at this time, he claims , even called it a "giant germ killer".

Err, no they didn't.

But the headline in the New York Times a year earlier on May 6th 1941 (you can look it up ) did call Dawson's pioneering efforts a Giant Germ Killer.

So MacFarlane did know that Dawson had gotten much press attention in May 1941 , but he ignored this fact .

All because it stole some of the lustre from his old boss.

So instead he took this 1941 press acclaim away from Dawson and transferred it instead to an 1942 event that lacked any press attention -- all to help bolster Macfarlane's case about Florey's right to more penicillin fame.

I call this sort of academic card shark tactics sleazy and if Macfarlane was in a room with me I'd tell him so to his face - but unfortunately he died not long after publishing Alexander Fleming.

Read Macfarlane ? Yes, I do - all the time. Trust him?
No, I don't....

Abundant Penicillin by 1942 - only if Howard Florey didn't come to America ?

When ,in April 1941, Howard Florey learned that his best shot at world acclaim (as the only begetter of systemic penicillin) was at risk because Henry Dawson had got there first, the old claim jumper boot scooted over to America to shake a little dust.

Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.

Together the pair agreed that most of the wartime penicillin effort should go into first synthesizing it - rather than merely scaling up existing natural penicillin fermentation technology and getting penicillin to the military and civilian patients dying for lack of it - now.

Richards (who never met a conflict of interest he didn't like) was mindful that Merck's cross harbour rival, Pfizer, was likely to be the big winner if natural fermentation - and not Merck's strength artificial synthesis - was used to produce this priceless new drug.

Left alone, Pfizer (with Henry Dawson's team assisting) was already on the way, during that Fall in 1941 , to producing enough penicillin to get the show on the road.

A pity then that Florey had to spoil the show ...

God knows what Henry Dawson did - even if Stockholm didn't

Sometimes people ask me if I think Henry Dawson should have gotten a Nobel Prize for his successful pushing of the wartime mass production of natural penicillin.

As is well known , the Nobel Prize went instead to Howard Florey (and Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) despite the abject failure of their alternative wartime synthetic penicillin effort.

(But because so many of Stockholm's Nobel choices have been equally flawed, you can at least praise them for consistency.)

I understand Dawson to be a modest and humble man and I believe he would have regarded his saving of lives as reward enough.

Besides, I explain, Britain really needed a consolation prize (the Nobel) to cheer it up in late 1945.

The UK was depressed after winning a war but then being forced to see massive amounts of Manhattan Natural penicillin liberally used by American diplomats to save the lives of countless people in Neutral and Liberated countries overseas.

Because, at the time, Britain (the discoverer but not the developer of penicillin) didn't really have enough penicillin for its own Commonwealth troops - let alone to give to British civilians at home or for foreigners abroad.

Churchill's moral failure over penicillin

This was solely a moral failure - not a technical failure - of the Churchill-led government.

Because America had just as many Big Pharma firms , scientists and government bureaucrats as the UK equally convinced that it was better (a) to wait for synthetic penicillin and (b) to restrict production to immediate military use only.

And both nations basically had access to the same advanced level of penicillin technology or could easily afford to license it - if they choose.

But fortunately for wartime humanity , a few - a very few - American firms, scientists and bureaucrats felt differently from the majority of their Allied comrades.

Thanks to Henry Dawson's constant prodding , the top man at both the New Dealerish WPB (War Production Board) and Pfizer saw the need for the production of enough penicillin - now ! - to heal all those in a world at war who were dying for lack of it.

As Pfizer's natural penicillin took off on countless overseas mercy missions it slowly but surely produced a new Pax Americana that gradually drove out the century old Pax Britannica.

All the global goodwill towards Britain built up while The Few held off the Nazi bombers alone was thus lost in an diplomatic instant.

All because Churchill's government was unwilling to see any more badly needed penicillin plants built -- not if it meant even as few as one less heavy bomber squadron was commissioned.

Penicillin was a total disaster for the British Tories - it might have even cost them the 1945 General Election - but it was also a disaster solely of their own making ...

Wartime Oxford : the planned capital of a racially pure Nazi Britain ---- and of chemically pure penicillin

Hitler never seriously tried to bomb Oxford England , despite its very militarily important engineering works.

The often made claim that Howard Florey had to give penicillin away to America because he was bombed out of Oxford by the Blitz is made only by his American fans - even his most ardent British fans weren't ever that thick.

After all , they had survived life in British cities enduring the various Nazi bombing efforts and at the time had greatly envied Oxford's well known gilded wartime immunity.

The story is that Hitler saw Oxford as having successfully taught the Anglo-Saxon cum Aryan elite racial truths for almost a millennium (it may in fact be the world's oldest surviving university) and so it seemed to him to be the one place in Britain that most held aloft his biological political values.

Britain's elite vigorously resented Hitler's high opinion of Oxford University in his vision of the world back then - and continue to do ever since.

(Rarely do they ask why working class Britons also view Oxford as the very essence of pure Anglo Saxon privilege.)

Florey and purity - racial and chemical

Howard Florey won't have taken even a top job at NYC's Columbia University - no matter how big the salary and how big the size of his lab.

He hated Manhattan with a passion - he saw its concrete jungle as dirty, noisy, crowded and filled with Jews, catholic Italians and blacks.

By contrast, he clearly viewed becoming a full Oxford Professor of a named chair and director of an Oxford institute as meaning he had reached the near top of the Anglo Saxon intellectual ladder.

This is indicated by the fact that as soon as his position was secure, he felt he could finally return with his head held high to the Australia he had fled 15 years earlier - after his father had disgraced the family name.

So, on an ancient site where students had been taught for almost a millennium , his dreams of a chemical penicillin tomorrow first soared.

And it was here - amidst Oxford University's fabled green splendor - that his visions of the man-made, the artificial and of the synthetic pure flourished the most extravagantly.

Oxford Refined - clearly for Florey - and for Hitler - more than just an accent ...

Connecting New York's PENICILLIN dots ...

Some authors are content to merely describe a long series of coincidental dots ---- other authors like to investigate to see if anything connects all those coincidental dots.

I am one of the latter : as many a TV police detective is fond of saying , my motto is "I don't believe in coincidences."

When I fell upon the story of Henry Dawson and wartime penicillin, I noticed that most of the twenty or so full length accounts of wartime penicillin always included the awkward fact that he (and not their hero Howard Florey) was the one to give history's first ever penicillin shots.

They briefly described that first needle in a sentence or paragraph or page or two --- and then always go on quickly to say that Dawson himself was dying of a terminal illness - 'so necessarily passes out of our story'.

The rest of their three hundred or page accounts have nothing further about Dawson's team.

Clearly they mentally needed a way to dispose of Dawson (his convenient terminal illness) without seriously engaging his team's more than five years of involvement with penicillin.


They already had a preconceived shape to their biography of Florey and so they mentally hardly wanted to investigate Dawson's story any further --- less it ruined their story's trim panty lines.

Dawson did indeed die from his illness - but that was only at the end of April 1945 , while his team effort can be said to have begun when team member Karl Meyer learned firsthand of Florey's successful curing of infected mice in the early summer of 1940 from Florey ex-team member Leslie Epstein (Falk).

Dawson in fact kept very active in pioneering penicillin work right up to his death.

His team - in particular Gladys Hobby at Pfizer and Thomas hunter at Columbia - continued to do important work with penicillin for a few more years , even after the war's end.

Now what struck me with the force of a hammer in the first few days of my research - even back ten years ago when I knew almost nothing about wartime penicillin - was the amazing number of truly significant events in the penicillin story that had happened in the New York City area.

And that they all seemed to be of a similar type - let us simply describe them as all taking a similarly non-conventional approach to solving the penicillin supply issue.

Set against the relatively inactivity of a similar nature from the other 1990 million other human beings on earth in 1940 , they certainly seemed statistically odd beyond measure to be unconnected.

Since Dawson was both the first and the most active of these NYC inside agitators , I began seeking out possible links between him (or his team members) and these other New York penicillin efforts.

I quickly found many, many direct connections - and am still doing so.

Who - just for a minor example - would have ever thought that Dr Anne Fulcher Hunter had both a husband (Thomas Hunter) working with Dawson at the heart of the natural penicillin effort at Columbia and a half brother (Donald Melville) working at the heart of the opposing synthetic penicillin effort with Vincent du Vigneaud at Cornell ?

Heatedly interesting discussions indeed around her family dinner table !

My book will make the case that Dawson's passion inspired many New York scientists and businessmen to step out of their conventional skins for once in their lives to try something very risky and yet very morally worthy.

Most of these people would probably freely admit that their wartime Dawson-inspired penicillin adventures were the high points of their careers and indeed of their entire lives.

So I will fully structure my book around Dawson and NYC, but unlike previous books, I will not damn contrasting efforts by a single sentence-paragraph-page of faint praise.

Florey, Fleming, the OSRD and Merck will all get plenty of space to make their case for limiting wartime penicillin use to frontline Allied soldiers only - and that only after it had been first perfected as a patentable synthetic analogue.

I will leave it to the reader (and to God) to decide which side made the better moral case ...

Penicillin for patients : stable ? pure ? or just 'safe enough' ? -- the essential disagreement between Fleming, Florey and Dawson

Alexander Fleming was famously known for his frugality : in speech, in the use of materials and in his physical exertions on his paid job.

Being too self confident in his own intellectual abilities (and perhaps also being too frugal cum lazy in the physical exertion department ?) fatally led him to avoid doing the needed series of experiments to prove up his claim that penicillin would never have time to do its work inside the body.

So he misled himself - and more importantly , the entire world,  for 14 years that penicillin would only work on the body,  never in the body - and tens of millions died premature deaths that could have/ should have been avoided.

Howard Florey's fatal flaw

However, because Fleming saw penicillin as only working outside the body he had no need for Howard Florey's delusions about penicillin having to be highly purified to work safely inside the body.

Fleming merely want the chemists to make penicillin as a stable powder in a bottle any doctor could readily buy from a near by druggist, store on an unrefrigerated shelf for years and still expect to work as an external antiseptic at 100% efficiency when needed.

Call this 'lazy man medicine'  or call it normalcy.

Because only one doctor in ten thousand world wide ever tried making homemade penicillin even after it was proclaimed a life-saving miracle.

They all preferred to simply patiently wait until this miracle came to them as a stable and certified safe powder in a bottle from Big Pharma.

(I am not sure all their dying patients were as patient.)

Florey's great insight

Howard Florey - to his credit - seemed to have never bought Fleming's tale that penicillin would never work inside the body - as had every other medical scientist in the world .

But because he thought it had to be purified first and that purification would be very difficult , if not impossible , he did nothing until he got a competent full time chemist on staff together with a large long term grant to sustain the effort.

Meanwhile ten wasted years (1929-1939) went by.

Clearly Florey was no medical crusader, burning to save lives NOW!

And he , too , had too much faith in his own intellectual powers.

In 1939 he requested grant money for his co-worker Ernst Chain's work on three bacteria-killing chemicals produced by living microbes against other living microbes (what scientists call antibiosis).

One was penicillin and one key phrase in the grant request reveals his thinking and his fatal flaw.

He believed that penicillin , if it can be purified, will prove safe and effective inside the body (eventually and hopeful inside the bodies of infected human patients).

But he just assumes this , again just like Fleming .

Without actually doing any of the needed experiments to prove his contention, one simply can not say that penicillin is non toxic inside the body and it is the impurities that will be unsafe inside the body.

Actually there are always - in advance of the actual experiments - a range of possibilities sliding between three poles (that represent absolutes rather than real world situations.)

The three poles are (a) only the main product is toxic (b) only the impurities are toxic (c) both are equally toxic or equally non toxic.

Let us get concrete with a few examples.

You are a chemical firm making the poison prussic acid. You discover impurities in the resulting mix (impurities being anything that isn't prussic acid).

Prussic acid is almost uniquely toxic and it is the main product - any impurities thrown up may or maybe not toxic but are unlikely to be anywhere as toxic as prussic acid.

But in this case, you are seeking pure toxicity - impure non-toxicity is the problem , not the solution.

Grapefruit are 99.99% impure of vitamin C - thanks be to God

Grapefruit are a so so source of pure vitamin C . A 500 gram fruit might hold only 50 mg of vitamin C - one bit in 10,000 is pure vitamin C and the rest is - technically - impurities.

So why do we bother ?

Well they are very tasty , providing lots of water, fibre, sugar and various other minerals and vitamins - as well as some of the tasteless vitamin C we could get from a pill.

(And surprise surprise, that pill , when taken with the needed glass of water, is also mostly dross and a tiny amount, often only 100 mg, of vitamin C !)

And all those grapefruit 'impurities 'are safe - we eat them without any danger and in fact with a great deal of enjoyment.

All our food mostly consists of a vast bulk of relatively safe impurities and tiny amounts of pure vitamins and minerals.

But some foods - some very tasty mushrooms - consist of mostly nice food and tiny amounts of impurities called toxins that kill us.

So it all depends.

First we must define what is the main product we want from a mixture before we can define its 'impurities'.

Do grapefruits consist of 90% food (discarding only the skin and seeds) or do they consist of .001 % vitamin C and 99.99% dross ?

Then we need to do the experiments before drawing any conclusions.

Because sometimes , as with weak impure penicillin juice versus pure strong penicillin powder , it turns out that penicillin allergy deaths only began with massive amounts of the 100% pure stuff !

By sheer good luck, in this particular mushroom (this strain of the sometimes dangerous penicillium mold), the impurities were non-toxic as was the penicillin .

But for a relatively large percent of people, if given large amounts of pure penicillin direct into a vein by careless doctors, it can kill on the spot in a severe allergy reaction.

The safe solution is to go on using pure penicillin but to test new patients with tiny amounts - just beneath the skin - first.

Florey spent more than ten years - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s seeking ever purer penicillin to increase the safety of this injectable drug.

His obsession was scientifically wrong, logically deluded and it delayed the wartime introduction of mass produced penicillin for years.

Florey was a racist

Florey was an eugenicist and a racist from his youth and I believe this sort of racial purity thinking leaked over into the science side of his brain - he saw penicillin as the Anglo Saxons and the impurities as the Blacks.

Blood that was 99% Anglo Saxon and 1% Black was impure and defiled - and much the same applied to pure versus impure penicillin.

In Florey's twisted mind.

Ward doctors are like shop floor chemists - they hold few illusions 

Another problem was that both Fleming and Florey were far more lab doctors than ward doctors - while Martin Henry Dawson divided his time equally between both.

Sheltered university chemists quickly lose their delusions about the academic awards for obtaining 100% total synthesis ,regardless of expense or yield, once on the factory floor of a profit-seeking chemical firm.

So too with busy ward doctors balancing a dying patient versus a very dangerous drug that might injure them as well as save their life.

My mother would have backed Martin Henry Dawson 110%

My mother , in her early thirties, was saved from certain infectious death by a single course of streptomycin .

It left her deaf in one ear - by that time, in 1962 , this was a well known risk of high doses of that drug.

She didn't complain then and she never ever did .

She told how grateful she was to lose her hearing to gain her life just three days before she suffered her fatal stroke - when she was in her eighties, a half century later.

So call me prejudiced - I like doctors who take chances to save patients' lives.

I like Martin Henry Dawson.

He saw two patients about to die from invariably fatal endocarditis.

All other known medical solutions had failed.

He knew penicillin seemed non toxic in various animals and in human blood - from his own research and that of Fleming and Florey.

He tested a small amount of penicillin  that he suspected to be probably very weak , on himself, injected just under his skin.

No toxic results.

He did the same on the two patients - not toxic.

He gradually and slowly upped the amounts and also moving gradually to injection methods that introduced the penicillin far quicker into the blood and hence was far more potentially dangerous.

Only local pain at the injection site and a temporary fever and shakes was noted - routine for most injected drugs then.

All Dawson sought from penicillin was that it was relatively safe - and effective.

He used the penicillin he made himself with hours or days - he wasn't afraid of hard work, unlike Fleming - so stability was an non-issue to him.

Like the food that Dawson ate and enjoyed, his crude penicillin was hardly pure - but so what - it was basically safe.

Safer in fact - even in crude form - than the 100% pure sulfa drugs that were then routinely saving many lives while also making many people very very sick in the process.

Like a chemist on the shop floor ( think Smith, Elder and Jephcott ) Dawson saw life as full of compromises and the job was determining what was really Job One.

For all of them , it was saving as many patients as they could - NOW !

And God Bless 'Em for that...

Wartime Penicillin Drama : 3 non-chemists promote chemical penicillin while 3 working chemists promote natural penicillin ...

Three middle-aged chemist manques who disgracefully put youthful dreams before the public good - at the height of a total war

Three of wartime penicillin's chief protagonists were men who, as youths, had hoped to become hands-on lab research chemists but whom necessity had pushed them instead into becoming medical science desk administrators.

Their names ?

 Howard Florey, director of Oxford University's Dunn Path Institute , A. Newton Richards, head of the Medical Division of Vannevar Bush's famous OSRD war-science agency and George W. Merck , head of Merck.

All three greatly respected each other and worked as closely together as the American and British governments (nominally allies) allowed.

Wartime penicillin gave all three a second childhood as chemist manques and disgracefully, they ran with it* .

Even as a world at war panted instead for lots of disease-fighting drugs in any form , as long as they worked , were safe and were available NOW .

"Middle Aged Crazy"

For ten useless years (before , during and after WWII) they placed their highest priority on producing totally synthesized artificial (patentable) commercially viable penicillin.

They didn't get it and we still haven't.

If we had left penicillin just to them - as most at the top of the American and British governments had wanted  - we'd never seen any amount of penicillin . Not during the war and not for long after, until newly elected governments came to their senses , cut their losses and moved on.

Let us now honour the three chemists who put public good before their chosen profession

By pointed contrast , three working industrial chemists - men who had long struggled on the factory floor coming up with chemical solutions that reliably delivered safe, profitable, productive chemicals on time and on budget - saw naturally produced penicillin as the best solution.

The best solution perhaps for all time but certainly during a war emergency with its shortages of time and resources.

Let us now honour their names - as true patriots , as people who put the good of humanity before gaining more fame for their chosen profession.

These largely unknown and unhonoured heroes of the wartime penicillin saga made sure we had penicillin when it was most needed - D-Day and after.

And these three laid the groundwork for the kind of micro-biology technology that still produces all our antibiotics and many other medicines as well.

They are the American WPB's (War Production Board) Larry Elder ,  Glaxo chief Harry Jephcott and Pfizer chief John L Smith.

While we can show our disappointment for what Alexander Fleming, Florey , Martin Henry Dawson and all their co-workers did or didn't do with penicillin , it is my contention that all their actions were predictable , based on my through study of their personalities as displayed from youth on into middle age.

But I can't honestly say the same about Elder, Jephcott and Smith : they were the true wildcards of the whole wartime penicillin drama....

* I am mindful of former Nova Scotia premier John Buchanan who became a lawyer and a very very successful politician but who had really wanted to be a civil engineer.

Once in power, he drove the province into tremendous debt building anything and everything in sight : the once young engineer manque who finally got to 'drive the excavator'.

Most middle aged men - once they get money, a pot belly and grey hair - content themselves with finally buying the Corvette or Harley Davidson that Dad would never let them buy - but some (like Florey , Richards and Merck) do far more harm than that when they get a chance to go "middle aged crazy" .

Indie Pen versus Trolling for Grants

Trolling for Grants

Would Nobel Prize winner Sir Howard Florey have ever even gotten involved with penicillin if he hadn't first won grants to do so from the UK's  MRC and America's Rockefeller Foundation along with a book contract on the subject from Oxford University Press ?

It wasn't just their promise of money either - Florey was the type that never ventured forth unless he was assured of the stamp of approval from the powerful - and grants and book contracts from such as these were definitely that.

He was made the chaired professor (director) of a large institution within Oxford University (with a main building about the size of his rival Martin Henry Dawson 's entire alma mater -Dalhousie University - circa 1914).

But no operating budget to speak of to run it.

To keep the lights on , he needed many make work projects to operate within it - what subject areas they covered it didn't really matter to Florey- just as long as they brought in many grants for many years to many busy researchers.

Not too small a project - that gave no certainty that any grant agency would be interested. Too big and too popular  meant too many potential rivals worldwide.

He sought a medium sized but worthy project that someone should really have looked into years before - but no one had.

If he got in early enough and got in big enough, he'd have a head start in so many aspects of the subject that no serious rival would find enough virgin territory to want to stake a rival claim  --- he'd rule that entire important albeit medium sized research area forever.

The study of microbe to microbe offensive and defensive tactics (antibiosis) seemed just such an untapped area - and Florey had indeed guessed right and he was given grants to secure his institution for years to come.

But he himself had no real interest in that area - he was a Sherrington styled old fashioned physiologist , one who experimented on healthy animals to learn about the normal functions of healthy human beings.

He was in no way a microbiologist , clinician or pathologist - he had no interest in curing human disease caused by external microbes.

Only upon the Fall of France did Florey realize that Ernst Chain's project - penicillin - might yield useful materials to heal war wound infection caused by the one big family of bacteria the existing sulfas could not attack - the staph bacteria.

This basic science project of Chain's might yet make Florey a wartime medical hero - and win him anything and everything - even a much desired baronetcy .

His main rival (at least as Florey saw it) was in fact content with his lot in life but burned with the ardour of a medical crusader - he sought to make life better for the weak and the small.

Indie Pen

Dawson sought no grants , sought no prior approval from the powerful.

He was quiet, modest , diffident.

And in his quiet way, also extremely stubborn and brave.

Throughout the race, Dawson was always so far behind as to be almost out of the race.

He was also dying.

It therefore becomes a very exciting story then for me to unfold.

How on earth did this (dying) tortoise managed in the last minutes before D-Day  to suddenly pulled far ahead of his British hare rival  ?

When Manhattan gives world's first penicillin shot : mighty oaks from tiny acorns grow

In May 1941, Dr Martin Henry Dawson told an international gathering of medical scientists that he had treated 4 cases of endocarditis with systemic penicillin and 8 cases of blepharitis with topical penicillin, both with hopeful results.

These results - widely reported by the New York Times, Newsweek, the wire services , even in South Africa's medical journal - first alerted the world to the fact that a half forgotten antiseptic from a dozen years earlier might have actually have wide promise as a life-saving antibiotic.

That was good enough to attract to Dawson's side a citric acid supplier to the soda pop trade, Brooklyn's then moderately sized Charles Pfizer & Co.

In March 1942, they gave Dawson and his patients the world's first commercially released penicillin.

In August 1943, further inspired by Dawson's successes, Pfizer went all out - against the general opinion of the world's drug trade - to produce massive amounts of natural penicillin , similar to what Dawson had used.

When the drug trade experts proved to be all dead wrong (no totally synthetic penicillin has ever commercially produced , even now 75 years later) , Pfizer ended up producing 80% of all the penicillin landed on the D-Day beaches and was for all of WWII, by far and away the biggest penicillin producer in the world.

Dawson's chemist, Karl Meyer, kept his friend , scientist Miloslav Demerec on Long Island , informed of the team's successes and it was Demerec who quickly invented the technology that continues to make Pfizer-style natural penicillin by far the cheapest way to produce the life-giving mold juice and all our other natural antibiotics.

But Dawson's "acorn efforts" fired up more than Pfizer and Demerec - he also inspired a hospital colleague now in the American army to badger his superiors to use penicillin on the dying wounded in Europe .... before the long war itself ended.

The Dawson success at home-made penicillin also got a doctor on Staten Island to grow some on the QT , to test his theory that penicillin could cure the dreaded syphilis quickly and safely - when he was proven right, the news electrified the international medical community even further on the possibilities in this new penicillin.

Similarly , Dawson's  acorn efforts got two former patients to "act up" on behalf of his penicillin-for-all approach.

One pushed America's all-powerful War Production Board to greatly up the amounts sought by the wartime American government - enough for all in the world who were dying for lack of it - not just making a small amount to only cure those Allied servicemen fit to return to battle quickly ,the original goal.

The other obtained penicillin for a dying girl by bringing in the mighty Hearst newspaper chain - and through them, recruiting America's millions of Dr Moms to lead the charge for more penicillin - now !!!

Penicillin was first discovered and worked up in Britain and the wide wartime distribution of British penicillin to the world's sick could have given Britain great diplomatic prestige to make up for her great losses during the war.

But Churchill's government was far too niggardly in its views on how little money should be diverted away from death bombs towards life penicillin during the war - and was totally besotted with Alexander Fleming and Howard Florey 's conviction that synthetic penicillin was the only goal to aim for.

So thanks to Manhattan "natural" penicillin, Pax Britannica quietly but firmly became Pax Americana.

Mighty oaks !

Oxford Artificial versus Manhattan Natural

Howard Florey (along with Alexander Fleming and Winston Churchill's government) spend ten years before during and after WWII pursuing the chimera of totally artificial (patentable) penicillin --- to no avail.

As did Florey's supporters in America - Merck, Squibb and Vannevar Bush's all-powerful OSRD.

Set against then, on the opposite side of the Hudson River , was Dr Martin Henry Dawson and John l Smith , chemist and boss of Pfizer.

They saw possibilities in the fermentation of the (public domain - free for all to grow) natural penicillium to produce antibiotics.

This was despite its current yields being admittedly low: they felt as it was a totally new way of doing medicine , it might well improve drastically with more practise.

(I should mention that two other strong skeptics of the whole idea of the commercial viability of total synthesis of penicillin were also practising chemists : Glaxo boss Harry Jepcott and the WPB's penicillin czar Larry Elder.

 It was chemist manques like Florey and the OSRD's Dr Richards who were the most likely to feel that of course man-made Chemistry was always bound to be superior to Mother Nature.)

Today of course, with penicillin being produced at 50,000 times the levels of Fleming for the same cost in time labour and materials, the case against oxford Artificial seems clear - but it wasn't so throughout the war and beyond.

Long Island scientist Miloslav Demerec deserves a lot more credit than he ever gets (which is none !) for his major role in making our wonderful world of relatively cheap abundant antibiotics ....

The Stone the Builders Rejected : how New York saved natural penicillin antibiotics from the British

In London in 1928 , Sir Alexander Fleming discovered natural penicillin as a potential antibiotic but then rejected it - saying it would only be useful if chemically synthesized and even then only as a external antiseptic.

Sir Howard Florey at Oxford, together with chemist Sir Ernst Chain, took up Fleming's challenge to chemically synthesize penicillin and for a decade - from the late 1930s to the late 1940s, his lab chased the chimera of totally synthesized commercial penicillin without any success.

All three men - and these three men alone - got the Nobel Prize for penicillin .

This despite the fact that the penicillin that actually saves lives is still natural in origin, not synthetic , and is a general antibiotic and not a external antiseptic --- never before or since has abject failure been so grandly rewarded !

That penicillin - the penicillin that saved millions of lives during and immediately after the war -is still the the basis of our huge family of related beta lactam antibiotics that remains our front line defence against bacterial death.

It was left to New York to pick up the stone the British builders rejected and make it into the cornerstone of our entire antibiotics industry.

New York (Manhattan) gave the first ever penicillin shots (October 16 1940) not Britain and the patient from Bronx , who was dying from then invariably fatal endocarditis , actually went home alive !

New York had the world's first pilot plant sized penicillin effort (Fall 1940).

New York gave the first ever shots of commercial penicillin
released for use on patients, made by Brooklyn-based Pfizer in March 1942 .

In August 1943, a dying baby from Queens got life-saving penicillin only after the flagship New York newspaper of the Hearst newspaper chain intervened - the story went world-wide and Doctor Mom for the first time started demanding penicillin from government and industry.

More importantly, her story morally inspired the boss of Pfizer to build the world's first serious penicillin plant - posthaste plus plus plus.

Fifteen years after natural penicillin was discovered and rejected , the world's public suddenly wanted tons of it - yesterday .

But virtually all of Big Pharma worldwide - like Fleming and Florey - still preferred to wait for (patentable) synthetic penicillin because natural penicillin could be produced by anyone and what industry really wants free enterprise if it means a lots of new competitors?

In the Fall of 1943, penicillin really got a boost when a Staten Island doctor announced that contrary to the medical consensus , it could cure syphilis quickly and safely.

A much-feared world-wide scourge for 500 years , far bigger than AIDS, suddenly almost a thing of the past  - thanks to penicillin !

But natural penicillin was still costly to produce , in terms of units produced per dollar of feedstock , machinery and labour.

Then a scientist in Cold Spring Harbour Long Island was finally listened to - for years he had an idea to make the penicillium produce a lot more penicillin per dollar of effort.

Soon a hundred times as much penicillin was coming out for the same dollar of effort - using his technology today we get 50,000 times (no that is not a typo)  per dollar of effort as the world got in the early 1940s.

As a result of inaction by the rest of Big Pharma , New York (read : Pfizer) was left to produce 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - and for the rest of the war, the biggest chunk of the entire world's penicillin came from its Marcy Avenue plant.

Even if Sweden's Nobel Committee didn't know all that New York did - and all that Fleming and Florey didn't do - I firmly believe that God only knows what New York had done and He is pleased ....

Manhattan gave the world the first life-saving penicillin shot - as well as the first death-dealing A-Bomb

Don't let terrorists like Ramzi Yousef limit Manhattan's wartime role to killing (and here I quote his justification for blowing up the twin towers of the World Trade Centre) "250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki".

Let us never forget that Manhattan also gave the world its first ever penicillin shots 75 years ago next year.

New York then went on to provide the wartime world with the biggest chunk of its life saving penicillin and in the process developed the new micro-engineering  technology used by all the world ever since to make all antibiotics.

It did so by returning to 'the stone the (British) builders had rejected' ---- and made it the cornerstone of our world of antibiotic lifesavers.

Alexander Fleming in London had discovered penicillin 12 years earlier but had decided it would only be useful if made as a patentable man-made economical synthetic and even then only useful as a surface antiseptic - not in an internally-oriented pill or needle.

Howard Florey in Oxford had taken up Fleming's challenge and for a decade his team chased the chimera of man-made patentable economical man-made penicillin - but they never succeeded and no one else ever has.

New York went back to Fleming's original semi-purified natural penicillin and ran with it - in five short weeks Dr Martin Henry Dawson's tiny team had obtained spores, grown it , concentrated it and tested it for toxicity (on Dawson himself).

Now the team was ready to give it to patients dying of then invariable fatal subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) for lack of it - a young black man from Sugar Hill, Harlem named Aaron Alston and a young Jewish man named Charles Aronson from the Bronx.

SBE patients were then considered the 4Fs of the 4Fs and not a priority to an Anglo-American medical establishment using the excuse of war preparation to curtail social medicine (medicine directed at the poor and minorities).

So the day Dawson picked for history's first penicillin shots couldn't have been more freighted in symbolism.

It was October 16th 1940 - the historic first day of America's draft registration process - a process still going strong 75 years later.

So on a day when all the minds of America and of the Allied and Axis world were focussed on whether or not the hardships of the Great Depression had reduced America's numbers of 1A fit-for-combat youth , a 4F black man and Jew got to make their own history  in a quiet corner of upper Manhattan's Columbia University Medical Centre...