E M Forster on Merck's mis-use of scientific writing

E M Forster is a name you pretty well have to come across  if you have ever been formally taught how to write better sentences, paragraphs and articles ---- and today that includes virtually all of us with a high school education or better.

Even senior scientists and academics. When those two deliberately ignore what they've been taught for decades, you should always expect foul play is afoot.

A Complicated Triumph

The terrible simplicities of scientific reductionism was the very mother's milk of  all the horrible 'terrible simplifiers' of High Modernity (1875-1965): starting with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and crossing the water to their gentler and kinder Anglo-American opponents.

For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.

"A Small Triumph" --- wartime's natural penicillin-for-all a triumph FOR the small, BY the small

During the Error-of-Modernity (circa about 1875-1965), most educated humans sincerely believed that "Evolutionary Progress" had only one possible pole of measurement : basically, it boiled down to the number of peer-reviewed scientific articles published annually.

Naturally that meant that the oldest, smallest and least apparently complicated beings, like the microbes, were at the very bottom left of this "45 degrees to the right" Pole of Progress.

It was the era of 'Might is Right', 'Biggest is Best' and 'God and Evolution is on the side of the Biggest Battalions'.

And so at the top right were the newest, biggest and most complex human civilizations like those of the Germans, British, Americans, Russians, French and Japanese.

As a Law Of Nature and as a Fact Of Biology, this was a doozy.

a Noirish account of wartime penicillin : un-superheroes

With Un-superheroes, I hope to offer up a bit of astringent reality, after years of  nothing but the Breen Office version of wartime penicillin -- with all its 'hands across the water' and Allied buddy bonding...

Mostly poor people ALL OVER THE WORLD denied life --- by wartime's Republican-dominated NAS death panel

American doctor-run death panels did exist and they did sentence people to an inevitable death based on mostly eugenic driven considerations.

It happened during WWII.

The patients denied access to penicillin (that was the only thing that could save their lives) were all suffering from subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) that was then a leading cause of death for poor, minority and immigrant youths - the final deadly stage of childhood attacks of rheumatic fever.

Actually the entire spectrum of possible ways to die from rheumatic fever (known as Rheumatic Heart Disease or RHD) was the leading cause of death for school age children and youths in all of the industrialized world - far far more than polio for example - and would remain so till the 1960s.

But you won't know this unless you were very poor ; it wasn't a middle class disease.

Now this story of the wartime bureaucratic denial of penicillin to SBE patients isn't totally unknown to students of the history of wartime penicillin - but most think that this diktat was limited to American patients only.

But I have been tracing how the same American-originated list of diseases to be treated (or not) by GPs using this new penicillin kept re-appearing world wide, always with virtually the same wording.

So far I have traced the publication of this diktat (intended to apply to all GPs) in journals or newspapers in Canada, Britain, Australia , and now New Zealand.

The New Zealand newspaper report in June 1944 was franker than most - the nation wasn't making its own penicillin but was wholly dependent on penicillin given to it (via Australia) by America.

But the report indicated that the penicillin gift came with strings - the Kiwis had to agree to refrain from using the medication on diseases that were being ignored in America and in all the other Allied nations.

The disease the Kiwis and all the others were specifically told to ignore was SBE.

The NAS panel headed up by Dr Chester Keefer - himself an expert on SBE - was in a dispute with Dr Martin Henry Dawson and his supporters who was insistent their numerous patient cures indicated that penicillin and only penicillin could cure SBE and do so completely.

(Dawson and his supporters were 100% right by the way !)

If news came to American SBE patient families that in New Zealand SBEs were being treated and cured by penicillin, Dawson would have a further ammunition to inadvertently embarrass Keefer.

Inadvertent because while Dawson was a rank amateur on SBE until he started in with penicillin (and was anyone never one to be mean to fellow scientists),  Keefer had made SBE's cure his life's work.

But Keefer had backed the wrong horse as to the best drug to cure SBE and wasn't willingly to publicly back down and grant that Dawson was right.

Keefer had other more public excuses for his denying penicillin to SBEs , but this was the real reason ...

John Dominic Crossan and yellow MAGIC penicillin

The idea that Jesus scholar Crossan has anything substantive to say about wartime penicillin would come as a surprise to most people , John Dominic Crossan most prominent among them.


But if one regards the sheer amount of resistance medical orthodoxy put up (for twenty wasted years) against the idea of injecting native penicillin into dying patients , one can see the application of Crossan's concept of 'magician healing' : which he regards as all healing that lies outside outside the orthodoxies of the day, medical or otherwise.

Jesus's healing being his prime but by no means only example.

We never did get commercial white man-made penicillin : all the penicillin during WWII and ever since has been grown naturally , natively, by tiny yeast like beings.

Virtually all of our antibiotics are still mere modified versions of WWII's original native penicillin.

Medical orthodoxy today swears by native penicillin and all its life saving derivatives.

Mea culpa is more a word Jesus would use than one many MDs are comfortable using --- but would it really hurt - just this once - to admit that the elders of their profession got it 180 degrees wrong back then in the darkest days for humanity, infected or otherwise .....

Citation on Military Cross reveals the essential Martin Henry Dawson

Martin Henry Dawson , enroute to battlefields of WWI

Henry Dawson went to WWI as a private and came back an officer and a decorated war hero (MC with citation for bravery and leadership in the field).

He also had two grave war wounds which left him permanently partially disabled.

Time spent recovering from those wounds and the resulting infections, together with a year overseas as an orderly in Dalhousie's Number Seven Base Hospital, meant he had spent almost half of his war in hospitals or recovering in convalescent homes.

Perhaps as a result, he had decided to change his career plans and become a medical doctor.

Unfortunately,some highly ambitious medical students who successfully avoided war service ( such as Howard Florey and Chester Keefer) had a vital four year start on him in his new profession.

Despite all this, I argue that the war did not fundamentally change his personality.

His parents raised him right - and to do right.

Always a serious studious both as a schoolboy and as a young university student , he merely shifted his lifelong love of learning to medicine - becoming a research doctor rather than some kind of university professor in the humanities.

His parents had instilled in him and his brothers a Christian concern for helping others less fortunate and if he later fell away from a formal affiliation with the church , some of that upbringing clearly never left him.

It is that upbringing that earned him his MC .

He won it for his efforts during his first ever time in combat.

Partly it was won for his considerable physical triumph in rising up after being wounded in the big toe to lead repeated charges against the enemy through the heavy mud.

And for his efforts later that day re-organizing a badly disorganized general front line from counterattacks, after more senior officers failed.

A wounded big toe is a total game changer for combat activity - which is why so many soldiers deliberately shoot out their own big toe through a sand bag  to get out of war service.

Without two working big toes, we can't really run or walk , let alone while carrying heavy back packs through heavy mud.

It is our unique big toes, not our primate-shared and relatively common set of opposing thumbs, that truly marks out the humans from the rest of the lifeforms.

 But what really secured his MC was what he did when he was finally ordered off the field to hospital.

He gave up his place in a stretcher and instead walked through miles of mud to the rear hospital, at the cost of great physical pain and adding further damage to his wounded foot.

He gave up that seat he said so that a severely wounded ordinary soldier, who had been triaged to die out in the front line mud with a blanket as his only solace in his final hours, could exercise his 'faint hope clause' for a further lease on life.

Dawson's concern that all humanity should have a fighting chance ("a fair go") to enjoy a normal full lifespan was never more revealed than in this small wartime incident.

This same concern later made him notable for being the first doctor to use penicillin as an antibiotic.

A pioneering effort he did all because he hoped to save some patients he felt the wartime medical establishment were deliberately triaging to die by neglect.

His efforts (again achieved at a great physical cost because this time he was dying of a painful terminal disease) directly saved a few dozen of these patients.

But indirectly , his efforts have benefitted ten billion of us - so far since 1940 - all living longer healthier lives as the result of his initially small efforts.

Small bread cast on big waters....

Nazis manning 88mm gun might be eugenic but its shells were not - democratically wounding 1A soldier and 4F civilian alike

Deadly group A strep bacteria (GAS) will tolerantly and democratically carry off all sorts of injured and wounded individuals : Aryan, Jewish, 4F ,1A , fit, unfit , warrior or civilian.

It knows and accepts no hierarchy of worthiness but like any incoming artillery shell it kills and maims in perfect equal opportunity randomness.

Remember all this when the true wartime story of penicillin-for-all is made into a typical Hollywood fantasy.

Under Hollywood's blinkered gaze, wartime penicillin would have to have been manufactured by 1A handsome , virile/virulent , WASP military doctors with chiseled chins.

Their moral conflict driving the plot would be this : should they interrupt their vital violent combat work , just to rescue some weedy swarthy 4F civilians on the Home front who are once again revealed as too inept to resist fatal bacterial infections like GAS on their own ?

In reality , it was of course totally all the other way around.

In fact it was weedy 4F stay-at-home unfits who created the wartime penicillin that saved the lives of hunky virile 1As dying helplessly from bacteria-infected wounds from random 88mm shell fragments.

A plot so subversive of the established American literary cultural and political order that Jesus and the Gospel authors could probably write it in their sleep.

But equally so it is a plot that would be far beyond what the most supposedly 'radical' graphic novelist or Indie film director could ever write.

They - to date - have only unconsciously reproduced the traditional authoritarian rejections of democratic debate over values.

They have only unconsciously continued to hype the ageless American monomyth of regenerative violence that by-passes democratic debate ,compromise and tolerance , albeit a monomyth now cloaked in the hippest of counterculture colours...

Updating J D Ratcliff's wartime penicillin classic, YELLOW MAGIC

I like to think that my "UN-SUPER HEROES" is an 21st century updating of JD (John Drury) Ratcliff's written-to-order 1945 popular science classic "YELLOW MAGIC" .

Ratcliff wrote the facts as truthfully he knew them in 1945 (or was told about them by the few penicillin participants he was able to contact firsthand).

Since late 1941, Penicillin had been surrounded by an ever more effective wall of wartime censorship all over the Allied world.

This allowed anyone involved in wartime penicillin's development to spin their own take to Ratcliff, without fear Ratcliff would have any access to paper documents to query their oral account.

Since 1945 , many of the paper documents have been archived or made public via scholarly articles and books.

But no one has since tried to do with the dramatic tale of wartime penicillin what Ratcliff ( following somewhat upon Paul de Kruif's style) did so well in his little volume.

JD could make any Science story come alive simply by re-telling it in a series of dramatic scenes.

And by freely adding his purple imaginings whenever his participants' eye witness accounts of specific incidents failed to actually recall much color or specifics.

Remember - unlike with the contemporary workings out of atomic energy and atomic bombs - no participants in this particular medical story had any sense - until mid 1943 - that they were making world-shaking history instead of just making penicillin.

So the drama and the little personal details were generally liberally 'recalled' later - after penicillin had become world famous - rather than being accurately recorded at the time.

So we only know the distinctive smell of wartime (crude) penicillin because an otherwise ordinary 1945 war nurse recounts the smell , in passing , in her much later memoir of combat hospital experiences.

Like all writers and historians, JD had to first hear all and read all of the varying accounts about wartime penicillin and then insert his reasoned opinion as to which composite account was mostly likely to be correct.

I can't tell you what SBE patients Aaron Leroy Alston and Charles Aronson felt like on October 16 1940 - but I can and will tell you how SBE patients their age tended to act at that stage in their disease.

The same with the smell of Dawson's crude penicillin as that first historic ampoule was broken ---- I'll have to use that wartime combat nurse's description - his penicillin , being much cruder, could only have smelt worse.

 I do not know how the specific ward nurses looking after Aronson and Alston on October 16th 1940 felt about a new medicine that smelt like a return to dirty dank moldy old basements.

But we do know lots about the house-proud nurses of the 1940s , in the days before handling high tech machines replaced pails and mops in the priority list of nurse training !

I won't invent speech inside quote marks - if it is inside quote marks, it will only be there because it is a direct quote from a contemporary document.

Instead I will use a lot of an old fashioned form of free indirect speech - something quite common until the 20th century , when authors were strongly discouraged from commenting inside their own works .

I will freely intermingle my comments (my opinions) in a sound alike version of those particular participants' voice, as I try to imagine what typical participants of their age, nationality, class, gender etc would likely say at that place and point in time.

I call my book a drama in five acts - so dramatizing each scene really isn't much of a stretch  ....

Un-Super Heroes : a biography of NEW DEAL penicillin ...

The post-modern NEW DEAL extrusion onto the landscape of the Modern Age

British Conservative wartime penicillin or American Republican wartime penicillin , if they had succeeded, would have totally altered the generally favourable image we have today of penicillin.

It would have been regarded as needlessly expensive and originally available - by design -  to only the richest and whitest classes.

By contrast the wartime penicillin we actually got in the end  - NEW DEAL penicillin - is probably the world's best known medicine almost entirely because it is also the most beloved of lifesaver.

It remains non-patented ( in the public domain) and naturally made and hence both cheap and available to all nations to make.

During the war this non-patented natural penicillin was made available to all those in the world dying from lack of it only because the New Deal oriented super agency known as the WPB (War Production Board) willed it to be so.

In many accounts, the New Deal was definitely on its way out in Washington and America by 1945 and the gift of cheap natural penicillin for all was merely its final, departing, gift.

But in my view, the informally postmodern New Deal morphed seamlessly into formal post-Modernity in late 1945 and the gift of  cheap natural penicillin for all became merely postmodernity's opening gambit...

How big is the metropolitan New York City area ?

For people like newspaper reporters, sales reps and professionals delivering a lecture or paper, the furthest extent of metro NYC is pretty easy to measure.

If you can get into work early, check in and then take a car or train to the location, do some useful business and then return late to the office, and then still later home to sleep in one's own bed, it's still metro.

Rising early and home late may be hellish and the checkins at the office bookending your work day may be mere tokens but it avoids that expensive hotel room and best of two days (or more) away from family and office.

The time of day for your key business is paramount - an evening lecture or presentation makes the circle of distances evoke by words 'metro NYC 'very much much smaller.

Measuring the extent of metro NYC is important in the tale of the Gotham Eight because metro residents shared a lot in common with Dr Dawson and his team.

Metro residents all heard NYC radio, possibly watched - even then - NYC TV , read the big NYC papers , understood all the local NYC area references , took in big NYC movies and musicals and sports events.

You were among your own kind, sharing a common metro culture - even in fairly frequent (because it was relatively inexpensive) all important 'personal' contact.

By contrast, Dawson's infrequent but extended wartime trips ( all prior to his late 1942 success with SBE) to such places as Baltimore, Washington DC, St Louis , Louisville, California , even his native Nova Scotia took him into fairly alien terrain.

In wartime conditions of restricted travel and censorship, and given his rapidly declining health, Dawson's post November 1942 success with penicillin for SBE was not known beyond metro NYC's medical and research community.

But a community he had been very active in , for almost twenty years.

And fortunately for all of us , the small wartime fish bowl he was stuck in (metro NYC) was a community with more people than most 1940 nations, living in close proximity with good intersecting communications and was home to much of the regional, national and global media.

So while it is true that word of his SBE successes spread only locally inside the fish bowl via local medical gossip (noting that in wartime gossip becomes much more important and much more believed) , only London could really equal metro NYC as a fortunate and powerful fish bowl to be stuck in....

Wartime Penicillin, told as sharp clash of vivid personalities and philosophies -- not as a dry scientific treatise or as cheerleading fantasy of selfless wartime cooperation

If you have never read a book about the exciting saga of wartime penicillin that is hardly because of a lack of choice.

Dozens and dozens of authors have written well researched (and well regarded) renderings of the dramatic story, even if we discount the mass of uniformly dreadful books directed at children.

But despite a potential reading audience  that since 1944 that must number in the billions, none of these books can be said to be a national - let alone international - best seller.

Even more unexpectedly, there has never been any Hollywood movie about the wartime penicillin saga, let alone any successful one.

All these penicillin books to date suffer from one honest, sincere but erroneous assumption.

All their authors are united in seeing a single reason for the 15 years of delay between fleming's discovery of penicillin and when we in the rest of the world first heard about.

The same explanation is also used to account for the 25 year delay between the 1928 discovery and when it became readily available to almost all of the world's dying (regardless of income or location) during the 1950s.

Technical Flaws ?

They believe that all the delays in bringing penicillin to a world that badly needed it can  blamed on technical flaws in our sincere efforts to purify and preserve penicillin.

These steps were judged essential before it could be safely injected into the dying and cast as not really not surprising delays ---- once the reader is shown the complex nature of the penicillin molecule .

 These  authors consider briefly and then quickly dismiss the idea that the delays were really the result of character cum intellectual flaws ... in the complex natures of those we initially allowed to lead the penicillin effort.

These authors can hardly be accused of sugarcoating the personality clashes among the best known of the penicillin leaders or of denying differences between the various international organizations involved .

But neither do they portray these clashes as lying at the very heart of the causes for the years of delays.

Big Pharma - Big Science - Big Government vs Indie PEN

Powerful individuals and organizations holding widely popular views lay behind the delay to bring penicillin to the whole world.

In the beginning only a handful of individuals with few resources refused to accept the validity of these excuses for the delay in penicillin's mass introduction.

I call them , collectively, the Indie PEN movement.

Against overwhelming odds, this handful took on Big Pharma, Big Science , Big Government at the height of a Total War - and then, quite unexpectedly, totally triumphed at the very end.

A classic tortoise and hare story.

These personality (cum intellectual) flaws were not merely of a petty pattern or whimsically inconsistent .

Character/Intellectual Flaws ?

They are seriously held, consistently represented and strongly sustained .

The conflicting intellectual arguments and those who made them were internally consistent.

That is , the differing intellectual positions were held by individuals whose personalities were of those people who generally held those particular intellectual viewpoints.

This is why I say it is hard to separate out character flaws from intellectual flaws.

Those differences ran deep - deep as can be.

They reflected deeply held personal or institutional philosophies ("Weltanschauung") that differed in almost every way possible.

Some of those philosophies that lay behind the delays to bring penicillin to the masses would be regarded as deeply repugnant today.

 I certain think that way about them - I am not shy in saying that I see more than a whiff of the clash between absolute good and absolute evil buried deep inside the wartime penicillin saga.

 And I also see those ignoble philosophies as the main reason for all the delays.

 They lay behind the secret drive to weaponize penicillin and to deny it to most of the wartime world.

So we have before us a number of vivid , strongly etched characters (with strongly held and violently different worldviews ) clashing repeatedly .

I  don't think I am wrong in thinking that this will all make for a truly propulsive page turner --- one that also happens to better represent the reality of the war years.

Seventy five years on, its finally time that we dropped all remnants of the wartime Pollyanna rah rah cheerleading.

Let's let the story of wartime penicillin finally unfold as it truly happened , ignoble warts and selfless heroics and all ....

Wartime penicillin only cures one NEW disease , until the Allied medical elite put a stop to its efforts...

Allied doctors "Code Slow" minorities, immigrants and poor to certain death 

Sometimes true facts are far stranger than anything that bad acid and bad Hollywood writing could dream up.

Fact is, wartime penicillin's so called 'miracles' usually consisted in curing many diseases than earlier medicines also cured --- albeit very fitfully.

This earlier medications - basically the various biological serums , heavy metal based drugs and the sulfa pills - had dangerous side effects, took a lot longer, were more painful , cost more , required more skill.

Above all, their cure rates were much lower than early penicillin - of the total number of patients both type of medicines treated, penicillin saw far more lives saved.

Only one new disease - SBE - subacute bacterial endocarditis ( the disease that made Rheumatic Fever (RF) so terrifying) was converted from nearly 100% fatal to nearly 100% curable , by penicillin and penicillin alone.

(Thank you Dr Dawson on behalf of my brother Bruce, who got heart valve damage from RF but never got SBE.)

Unbelievably , the Anglo-American medical establishment, taking a page from Hitler's eugenic playbook , used 'military necessity' as an excuse not to give life-saving penicillin to militarily-useless SBE patients.

Unlike Polio research - which was never curtailed during the war and mostly afflicted the middle class (can you say 'doctors', boy and girls ?) , SBE mostly afflicted the minorities, immigrants and the poor.

But perhaps I am telling you something you may have already suspected, bless your cynical little souls ...

Tortoise and Hare : the race between indies and suits for wartime penicillin

Indie Pen

The Tortoise was 'indie' penicillin , New York City penicillin , Emma Lazarus penicillin - humanized and naturalized. It had none of the innings for nine tenths of the game but pulled way ahead at the end.

The Hare was 'suits' penicillin : weaponized , synthesized , eugenicized , profitably-patentable, 'I am a Republican in a Democratic administration and I am here to help you 'penicillin.

It was supported by  the Anglo-American scientific-medical establishment ,  by Big Pharma and by the British Conservative-dominated government and some all-powerful agencies of the wartime American government.

Why it took the efforts of seven "lives unworthy of full life" to finally bring penicillin to the rest of us ...

The selfless five of The Seven

Regard closely , if you will, the personal circumstances of Dr Martin Henry Dawson, his teacher wife Marjorie Dawson, doctors Dante Colitti and Thomas Hunter, industrialist Floyd Odlum.

For none of these five (out of the total of seven key - and handicapped - individuals who brought us all penicillin) actually needed penicillin in the early 1940s .

All would have had extra-privileged access to the scarce medication if they had needed it.

So their actions were purely of agape love for others, rather than as part of a patients' advocacy group.

So why were these few , a mere one out of five hundred million of all the people living on the planet in 1943 - so willing to "Act Up" to see that all those dying for lack of wartime penicillin should receive some of the new lifesaver ?

I am convinced that they responded  personally - at a deep empathetic level  - against the then fashionable eugenic arguments about why the lives of SBE patients were intrinsically unworthy of scarce lifesaving penicillin.

To be Modern was to be Eugenic 

It was then fashionable in that besotted - modern - eugenic - age to argue that these 4Fs , born with intellectual and physical challenges and even those who acquired them later in life, were unworthy of the full lives granted to those who was 1A in mind and body.

(This intellectual net thus swept up almost all those (poor or minority) members of society who caught infectious diseases by claiming they had a defective gene that made them get these diseases.)

These "handicapped" or "crippled" members of society might be denied an education, or an fair access to jobs or marriage and children or medical care.

Ultimately some of these handicapped were even denied access to Life itself  - murdered by an direct injection as in Nazi Germany or murdered by quiet but deliberate indirect neglect --- as in the rest of the world.

The then popular prejudice - at both the official and popular level against people who wore glasses  ("four eyes")  - a category that ultimately most of us fits into at some time in our lives  - suggests some of the strength of this 'modern era' insanity seeking impossible physical perfection.

Or take "The Greatest Canadian Ever", Baptist minister and socialist politician Tommy Douglas.

He is regarded as the Father of Canadian Medicare -  a lifetime spent promoting that cornerstone of Canada's present day egalitarian values : full medical care provided to all Canadians regardless of their social status.

But surprisingly, eighty years ago, this young University of Chicago PhD student in sociology (and at the height of the Great Depression in particularly badly hit Saskatchewan !) still chose an eugenic over a political or economic explanation to account for why so many were living on welfare in his home town of Weyburn.

His highly divisive eugenic values was probably entirely typical of his age group and class in the Canada of the 1930s, just as his later egalitarian values were equally in tune with the egalitarian Canada of the 1980s.

In the 1930s, Douglas seemed to regard almost any physical handicap in the children he visited as something not just genetic and eternal but as a marker of darker moral failings.

But when this net of "handicapped-ness as a symbol for useless and less than fully human" was cast so wide, most should have said to themselves, "they're coming after the SBEs today, but they'll be after all those with congenital or acquired chronic defects tomorrow."

But the world did not - but these five did.

Dawson and his wife had met as fellow wallflowers at a college dance in the dance-obsessed Twenties.

Dawson had been a champion basketball guard as a teen but being twice severely wounded during the war had left him missing the use of one Great Toe and with restricted movement in one arm and shoulder.

Marjorie had been born with a relatively common defect in one hip.

The severity of the condition varies greatly - in her case , despite the best operations money could buy in the Edwardian age - she was left with severe restrictions on her movements , sometimes requiring the use of a cane.

But she was intellectually smarter than others and emotionally livelier as well - but these bonuses didn't compensate for her physical failings in this physical perfection obsessed age.

Dawson had acquired, in late 1940, a severe and probably quickly terminal case of Myasthenia Gravis , then a horribly debilitating chronic disease.

Death usually came from respiratory 'crises' and so he often needed a wheelchair and oxygen assist to get about.

Floyd Odlum had been healthy all his life until his worries over the course of the war gave him an unusual severe case of chronic rheumatoid arthritis , so severe that for the rest of his life only his time in a warm pool ever gave him body and mind some relief.

He walked with crutches, mostly , from then on.

Thomas Hunter had severe polio at an early age - leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and requiring the use of crutches.

Despite this, he was not just a star pupil but also very active in student affairs - including coxing race-winning crews at Harvard and Cambridge.

Dante Colitti came from a poor Italian family living in the crowded Lower East Side - he got TB as a child that went into his spine , leaving him a hunchback and requiring braces and crutches.

He spent years in hospitals and came to admire doctors and their roles.

His hunchback, his Catholicism and his Italian origin held him back in that many-prejudiced age , but he persisted and became a surgeon , though he eventually found he was more useful and much more valued as an unusually skilled anesthetist.

Noteworthy is that none of these five had a normal vocational reason to be involved in penicillin and in treating a heart condition .

They all stepped out of their comfort zone to do good , I believe , because they knew personally what it was like to be handicapped and to feel society's eyes upon them.

And they could all feel in their own bones just how the poor SBEs felt when they were handed their death sentences by an uncaring and eugenic Allied medical establishment ....

"Acting Up" : how we got wartime penicillin, despite the Allies ...

Wartime penicillin (discovered in 1928)  actually had two miracles.

The first miracle was how the Allies managed to keep new of penicillin's wondrous lifesaving abilities from their own wartime public for so long.

The other miracle was that the Allies managed to produce at least some penicillin - despite their own best efforts - before the war's end.

Bruce Springsteen reminds us that blind faith in our leaders - be they political , military or medical  - can get us all killed.

And this was as true during WWII as it still is today.

There are times when the only moral thing to do - the only patriotic thing to do - even during a Total War - is to Act Up.

And because seven cripples had the courage to Act Up over the immoral weaponization of wartime penicillin, the whole world got cheap abundant non-patented penicillin....

A freely available book about one man's struggle to make wartime penicillin freely available

When I started thinking about this project, ten years ago in 2004, I sensed that any book recounting Henry Dawson's heroic efforts to make wartime penicillin freely available to all humanity would itself have be freely available,to be morally effective.

That is, it would have to be released fully into the PUBLIC DOMAIN, to drift about globally like a spore of penicillium, sprouting up on whatever favourable ground it found.

But I also knew that most book reviewers, ironically particularly if left wing or green-oriented,  distain reviewing newly published book that were both free and in the public domain.

(Prolific book reviewer George Orwell, as always, was the sturdy exception : he loved pamphleteers and tractarians, collected their work and did a massive book about them.)

And my chances for seeing the book's inspiring message spread by way of movie or musical or hard cover book also lessened if it was PD.

The producers of such expensive and lengthy productions need to be assured of an secure window for all their time and effort, via a copyrighted manuscript being exclusively optioned to them.

So I hemmed and hawed, back and forth.

But since 2004 the economics of book publishing and of web movies and musicals have greatly changed --- as have the life expectancies of general book review sections and their employees.

A web book or movie can be done far faster and cheaper and appeal to a potentially globe wide audience than its old school counterpart.

And when an item, like penicillin spore or a book text , is in the Public Domain and available for all to take up, the forces of competition can freely play themselves out.

Wealthy and well connected producers settling in to leisurely and extravagantly throw up an expensive product about a hot topic can find themselves outflanked by poorer but hungrier rivals who quickly and cheaply get their effort to market first.

(As when Pfizer's John and Mae's Smith public domain penicillin resoundingly beat George W Merck's wannabe-patented penicillin to the crucial D-Day beaches market ---- and Pfizer never looked back.)

Book reviewing hasn't really disappeared --- there are more scholar books than ever but also more scholarly journals than ever to review them.

Similarly every new author with their first self published romance novelette still finds reviews on the zillions of tiny and not so tiny romance genre review blogs .

Books like my "All Life is Family" always tend to do better anyway when general reporters talk  them up on the general news pages as newsworthy items in themselves.

In my book's case, a mention can be dropped in as "a new book casts a historical light onto the ongoing debate over Obamacare".

General book reviews sections have shrunk or disappeared altogether because they have become small ghettos in overall newspaper readership -- largely because non-genre "literary" novels , poetry, dramas and short stories have lost most of their intellectual cachet and in fact have been reduced to a high brow genre themselves.

No longer does the well educated citizen feel that if they can't read Don DeLillo 's latest Pulitzer prize winning novel ,that they should at least read a long enough review of it to be able discuss it intelligently at cocktail parties.

If the general book reviewer doesn't need me and this book, the feeling is almost mutual.

So, I have finally pulled the plug on the discussion - I have assigned all my rights in my book to the Public Domain and once that is done, there is no putting the genie back....

Finally, a penicillin hero who is NOT "Box Office Poison"

Hollywood has never done a film about the exciting wartime history of the world's best known medicine, penicillin, because the character of two best known protagonists, Alexander Fleming and Howard Fleming - on closer examination - proved 100% pure Box Office poison, particularly to women who are the main customers for medically-oriented dramas.

What exactly Henry Dawson contributed to the success of penicillin has never been in doubt, but what has frustrated American, British and Australian writers on penicillin has been determining just why this normally non-assertive, and now dying, doctor did what he did .

Why exactly did he push so hard  and so long to save the "4Fs of the 4Fs" , against the full force of wartime bureaucracy and at the cost of his own life ?

Here indeed was a hero on the Hollywood scale , if only it was clear why he did what he did .

I think the answer as to why he did what he did, is to consider the character-building events in his life,  before he settled permanently in New York and ultimately took out American citizenship.

After all, he spent the first two thirds of his relatively short life in Canada , in Nova Scotia ,where he was born and raised, in particular.

An instinctive feel for the uniqueness of Nova Scotia's history and culture in the tremulous period just after the turn of the last century is what all these foreign writers, fine as their other talents are, simply lack.

The story of Henry Dawson's quixotic-seeming but ultimately world-shaking Manhattan Project, his drive to see penicillin provided for ALL humanity, is as much character-driven as it is events-driven.

It is his quietly heroic character that will bring customers to buy the book, see the movie, attend the play and musical, above all to bring out those three hankies.

Any history of wartime penicillin seems like a chaotic jumble of events, one damn thing after another ,with no overarching theme to tie them all together.

But now wartime penicillin will be recast as the leading part of a globe wide conflict, taking place underneath the military events of WWII, between two very different ways of treating our fellow human beings .

And the clashing personalities of Henry Dawson and Howard Florey will aptly represent both sides.

But it is Henry Dawson's noble, selfless character, revealed for the first time, that will finally make the story of wartime penicillin the feel-good movie of the year it has always deserved to be....

all Life is family : Agape's Manhattan Project

This book is about us. 

Ten billion of us, who have indirectly benefited from the efforts of a dying Manhattan doctor to save ten of his fellow beings.

They (and millions of others) were judged as having no military value to WWII. Dismissed as 'lives unworthy of life-saving penicillin'.

 That doctor didn't buy Big Pharma's excuses for penicillin's continuing scarcity, 15 years after its discovery. So he 'homebrewed' it and became the first in history to inject penicillin to save lives.

 But his efforts were frustrated and censored until patients' families and ordinary GPs started "Acting Up".

 They supported Dr Dawson's call to produce "penicillin for ALL humanity".

 His moral argument had unexpected economic consequences.

As a result of his campaign, Penicillin G is our cheapest (and hence most widely available) as well as most effective lifesaver. This in turn has given all of us a sort of Herd Immunity against once endemic bacterial diseases. 

TEN BILLION benefitting from an effort to save TEN -- one person can indeed make a real difference!

I'm today's go-to-expert on yesterday's battle over "penicillin-for-all" - by default

While I consider myself the world's leading expert on the wartime battle over the principle of penicillin for all, I also recognize I am also probably the only person in the world who gives a tinker's damn over that 75 year old battle.

A pity that.

Because there are still lessons for today in that old battle, particularly with regards to drugs now costing cancer patients $300,000 a year per person.

For when the wartime general public bested the scientific elites and Big Pharma over the principle of penicillin-for-all, it changed our whole world for the better, forever , in ways few then imagined.

Because penicillin remained totally in the public domain and now had the entire world's public loudly clambering for it, its cost fell quickly to record low levels for such an effective, safe lifesaver.

It was thus given to the poorest patient in the most remote parts of the world , people normally left untreated due to cost.

It thereby knocked out the traditional residual pools for virulent strains of bacteria that kept their names household scourges by remaining endemic or epidemic for millenniums.

Millions were directly treated by penicillin G to save their lives but billions of us indirectly benefited - free of charge ! - by a form of quasi-herd immunity.

As we move to rationing expensive drugs, let us ask ourselves if the example of the battle over wartime penicillin does not suggest a better way ...