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He would submit his article for publication before Dawson and then go to America armed with the unpublished manuscript to regain his claim to "own" penicillin's bragging rights.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

Florey quickly flees the biology of NRRL Peoria for the chemical comforts of Merck

Howard Florey probably spent no more than a few hours of his whole life in the labs of the NRRL at Peoria, Illinois where most of the fruitful work that gave us the antibiotics revolution was actually done.

Within hours, he had dumped his sidekick Norman Heatley there to toil on the rural farmer-like task of growing penicillin, because Florey preferred much more the urban chemistry-oriented approach of firms like Merck and Squibb and ICL.

Florey was no country hick and disdained 'farming' penicillin

Florey after all had wanted to be part of the then most glamorous part of science( chemistry) and only took up medicine as the easiest way for an Australian to get employment in scientific research (as a medical "doctor" , he hated dealing with patients and in fact, hated dealing with people in general.)

He remained a chemist-manque all his life.

Hence why he avoided doing any hands-on research at NRRL Peoria on increasing the biological yield of penicillin .

He much preferred the chemical synthesis approach of Merck and of its chief scientific consultant, A N Richards, new head of the war  medicine section of the war weapon research organization, the OSRD....

Howard Florey, Henry Dawson,Penicillin and the NEW YORK TIMES : how then-tiny Pfizer became the biggest drug company in the world

"Giant Germicide" article changed history ...

Myth much to the contrary, Howard Florey went to America in 1941 not looking for a way to save lives, but for a way to save Allied military lives without having to save Axis, Neutral or Allied civilian lives : he was looking for a top secret medical bomb, a weapon of war.

Since publicity and top secret war weapons don't mix , this explains why when the New York Times sought to interview him upon his arrival on July 3rd 1941, fresh off the Pan Am Clipper, he curtly declined their kind offer and said nothing at all.

(Imagine : the most influential newspaper in the world offering to be your conduit for telling all of America's political and business leaders about penicillin's potential and you toss it aside like an used condom ! )

Perhaps as a result of his playing hard to get, Florey never did get the kilogram of pure penicillin that he sought so hard on this trip, because he had no public pressure backing his private appeal.

By way of contrast, Dr Henry Dawson did take his belief in penicillin's "unlimited potential" (his words) to a huge public medical conflab, attended by many of the world's science and health journalists, and got lots of publicity (as far away as South Africa) about his expansive belief in penicillin.

The New York Times article that changed history ...

Among the media who reported Dawson's comments was the New York Times , which splashed his optimistic views ("Giant Germicide") near the business section of the paper.

Next morning, some busy-- important---executive at then-tiny Pfizer chanced to read about a potential drug he had never heard of over his breakfast table ..... and the rest is history.

That same history reminds us that 90% of the penicillin that landed on the D-Day beaches in the first crucial mass clinical trial of penicillin came from Pfizer and Pfizer alone.

The one drug company in America that Florey had NOT visited on his search for his kilo.

The one drug company that Dawson did approach, ironically because he was merely seeking to help the churlish Florey.

So : "the stone the builder rejected", redeemed by an article in the New York Times.

That is the power of journalism, of publicity and of the New York Times.....

For Howard Florey's mausoleum of an institute, penicillin's therapeutic value was incidental to putting paying bums on seats

Howard Florey's discovery that impure natural penicillin could cure experimentally induced infections in mice was incidental to his number one concern : getting enough paying guests in his mausoleum of an institute, to pay its annual heating bills.


And also accidental , in the sense that Chain only poured all of the penicillin hitherto made by Chain' own methods into two healthy mice in March 1940, out of spite.

Florey had just told him the day earlier, during a very heated argument, that Norman Heatley would be making the crude penicillin from now on and by Heatley's method.

Chain was determined to establish his (or any) penicillin was in fact very non-toxic , though he should have put his brew into infected mice as he then would have really made his mark in history for sure.

But, Chain's spite at least jumped the gun on whatever decade Florey was originally planning to interrupt his precious personal research long enough to test penicillin on infected lab animals. (If that was even ever to come about in the original project -- mice cost money.)

He had at least forced Florey to put penicillin into some infected mice (the next stage in the process) or risk forever losing a claim to be the first to ever do it in history ----- and Florey liked nothing better than getting the glory of doing something first, even if his minions had to do all the hard work forever afterwards.

Much to Florey's surprise, the mice lived !

Florey - to his dying day - hated clinicians and clinical work : hated patients in fact

Now Florey was almost forced to try it on humans in an attempt to save their lives ---- which he did , almost exactly twelve months after the first mouse experiments  ----------never one to rush into clinical, live-saving, work was our Dr Florey,MD.....

CRITICAL biography of Norman Heatley long, long overdue

I don't think Norman Heatley (1911-2004) did as much to advance penicillin as he thought he did.

I think a more balanced collective biography of the entire Oxford team might better spread the credit (and blame) about.

It seems to me that Glister and Sanders did far more, and Heatley far less ,to get penicillin production actually working and producing.

Norman himself conveyed to the world his view that he felt he was no longer a key member of the Oxford penicillin team after 1943 - as the historical blue plaque on his home so indicates.

(He even tried to apply for a job at a drug firm far far from the Dunn in 1944 !)

The Oxford team kept up their penicillin work up to the war's end in 1945 and beyond -I am curious to know what it was  that Heatley felt he was doing at the Dunn between 1943 and 1946, if it didn't involve penicillin.

Sanders and Glister and all the rest - except Florey and Heatley  -were never very interested to tell their part in the penicillin saga at Oxford.

So in this land of the blind, the one-eyed Heatley became king - particularly in the 36 years after Florey's death.

Heatley grew ever bolder in his claims ,as more and more of
'the old gang' passed on beyond the point of rebuttals via 'letters to the editor', directed at The Times.

The Oxford community, still unable to understand how credit for penicillin was taken up by a Scotsman (Alexander Fleming) and a  parvenu American soda pop company (Pfizer), fully supported Heatley in this effort.

I don't expect my biography of another penicillin pioneer, close associate of Pfizer, and a Scotman, Martin Henry Dawson, to be any more popular in Oxford.....

Why HEATLEY rather than Fletcher,Chain or Jennings ?

The attempt to make Oxford penicillin the "Received Pronunciation" of world penicillin....

OXFORD :"First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin, Paris and Cape Town..."
                                        ************

Fletcher could have accompanied Florey to America to remind Americans that Britons had also ,me-too, used penicillin to treat patients... after Dawson did it first in America.

Chain could be there, to say penicillin was his idea and that Florey only got interested after it got promising - and to admit, yes, his own chemical work was not yet as advanced as Meyer and the Schering Corp was in America.

Jennings could have gone along to say that Britain did the first animal protection test (which Fleming didn't do) but that, yes, Dawson did the first human protection test, in America.

But Heatley-the-invisible, he'd never steal any glory from Florey.

And he was the assay man - the man who would act like the schoolmaster he looked like - checking every American firms' penicillin sample to measure it against the Oxford Standard, and docking marks for any firm that failed to measure up.

For just as nobody anywhere else spoke as good an English as OXFORD ENGLISH , so too nobody's penicillin would ever quite measure up to to the Oxford Standard, the Received Pronunciation  of penicillin, the only penicillin you could prescribe on the BBC or give to the King.

Two points: (1) the supposed standard, OXFORD PENICILLIN, was actually composed of 98% rubbish - and don't get me started about Oxford in general.

(2) There were in fact many many strains of penicillium producing many many different types of penicillin, depending on what they had to eat and how acidic their surroundings were etc. This is Reality at ground zero. But Florey spent the next 4 years denying and downplaying any existence of differences in types of penicillin.

His only chance at grasping the golden ring was to constantly maintain his claim that he was the first to purify penicillin - he couldn't have this claim disputed by people asking which of the twenty variants of penicillin did he ,ahem, first 'purify' exactly ?!

I don't know if Florey played chess - but he had the chess player's skill of always thinking six moves ahead of anyone he thought might possibly be his opponent as he clawed his way to the top of English Society.

And when he was a Baron and president of the Royal Society, you'd never guess he had been born in the Outback - his English was now far more RP than his penicillin ever became....

The things they buried...

I know, I know, a shameless knock-off from Tim O'Brien's classic.

What I am about to compare is the contrasting ways Fleming and Florey chose to deal with the more amateurish and stochastic areas of their involvement in the Penicillin Saga.

Fleming's discovery of penicillin was not - Horrors ! The Shame of it ! - peer-reviewed funded.

It was an accident and he wasn't being paid to discover or develop it.

 But he made the most of that fact and in fact delighted in it.

He preserved the famous accidental Petri Dish so that all can still see it in the British Museum, 82 years later. He saved a bit of the accidental mold, sent its children out to any that asked.

 Hundreds of collections worldwide still keep its great-grandchildren going and growing.

He kept his sparse notebooks for the entire period 1928-1945 dealing with his steady work on penicillin - not bold or visionary work sadly - but he still kept proof of just how little he did do -and revealed it for all to see, without shame.

He and his institution (St Mary's Hospital) positively delight in exposing and preserving just how amateurish his penicillin work was -- there is a museum dedicated to that amateurishness and the sheer unlikely stochastic-ness of his discovery.

Unauthorized but sympathetic biographers of Florey's work with penicillin also delight in revealing the utterly amateurishness of Florey's extraction equipment, assembled as it was from old bathtubs, coal hoppers, pie tins etc etc - Rube Goldberg on Acid.

Not Florey though: no, no, never.

He always (mis) presented his team as having a much more sophisticated operation than what even a well-equipped teaching hospital's Lab Service could ever put together.

 He even told anyone foolish enough to ask that only his Oxford-produced penicillin or that produced by Big Pharma was safe to put into patients .

And that any teaching hospital lab's penicillin was bound to be unsafe .

All this despite the fact that Florey was not , in the conventional sense, a clinically-oriented medical doctor with patients and hence in a position to properly judge patient safety.

Instead he was a medical researcher working in a lab on basic science.

Part of this animus against teaching hospitals was because Florey hated patient-oriented doctors with a passion, but mostly it was because he wanted to keep his part in the penicillin Saga on the Dignified/peer-reviewed funded/team side rather than the heroic individual/amateur/unfunded side of the story.

But in fact his penicillin plant or that of any drug company, from 1940 till about mid 1944, was as purely amateurish as those run by individuals out of a corner of a hospital lab - perhaps differing only in being a tiny bit bigger.

But the minute he heard that Pfizer was producing more NATURAL penicillin in 5 minutes than his lab had produced in 5 years,Florey shut down his penicillin plant and had all his Rube Goldberg extraction equipment torn up and then buried in a backyard rubbish heap.

After his death,Norman Heatley built some replicas for museum use.

 But generally Florey supporters have explained this by saying that  Florey was forced to use amateur methods at first, until he assembled a vast Anglo-American joint effort involving governments, universities, corporations and the military, all working together, to bring us high tech penicillin - Big Science at its best.

Academics just love this myth, the myth that says if the taxpayer just gives science lots of money and then stays out of the way, they will pull rabbits out of hats every time.

The public loves the other myth - that kindly old Fleming discovered penicillin just messing about and gave it to the world without charge ------and that it was a piece of cake to get it into mass production.

Neither myth is totally untrue but both only give a part of the story.

Hopefully my effort will give a fair hearing to both Fleming and Florey but include the rest of the penicillin Story as yet unheard.....