In an era that worshipped the Big, the Fast and the New, he championed the small, the slow and the old - and changed our whole world not just once but twice

The small and the slow and the old

A Canadian newspaper recently touted some Canadian based scientists as saying that the new techniques allowing the mass sequencing of genomes in test tubes, from DNA gathered up from all over the world, is letting science reveal hidden secrets from the distant past.

Hurray for Man !

Not mentioned is the fact that it is actually bacteria and their enzymes that do all the heavy lifting or that it was a Canadian (Martin Henry Dawson) who first put bacteria and DNA to work in a test tube eighty five long, dusty years ago.

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.

His agape love had no hometown....

(Martin) Henry Dawson was born in Truro but spent his formative years going to school in Halifax and Montreal or saving lives and fighting Huns in World War One France.

He later worked in hospitals in Kentucky and in New York City.

In WWII, he gave up his own life to try and save hundreds of thousands of people - people totally unknown to him and from all over the world - who were dying (needlessly) of subacute bacterial endocarditis (SBE) .

His actions ultimately has benefitted ten billion of us , so far, since 1940 - via a form of herd immunity generated when penicillin, thanks largely to Henry, became a inexpensive public domain lifesaver.

Whatever Henry did, Henry did by himself - it was not done by the community of his birth, Truro.

So honour him in Truro, if you want ,  but also honour him everywhere valour earns acclaim ...

Francis W Peabody : agape starts in the mind and moves to the heart

In the mid-1920s a busy dean of medicine, among many other things, briefly addressed a student body.

And then a year or two later he died, the early victim of fatal sarcoma.

Normally a dean of medicine from 80 years ago is remembered, if at all, only as one name among many underneath the long lines of dusty portraits in the hallway leading up to the office of the current med school dean.

But in fact Francis W Peabody lives on, bigger than he ever was in real life, because of a very short phrase he spoke to that student assembly, just one of the many things he did in the course of a short but very busy, productive life.

Fame into Posterity, indeed, is ever a case of quality over quantity.

In his talk, Peabody suggested a re-boot of the traditional common sense definition of charity and agape altruism : it was not enough to be 'open' to the needs of someone in pain or trouble --- to be agape with your heart.

It isn't even likely to be medically effective.

One , first, needs to be agape with your mind  : to be open to others' activities, to them as individuals, individuals with an inherent dignity , even when not needy.

"Caring for an individual really begins when we first care about them as individuals," said Peabody.

He emphasized that the main satisfaction in the medicine life is through the forming of brief but intimate bounds with patients and their families, even if the medical staffer fails to obtain a medical cure.

Dawson and Peabody, not Dawson and Cole ?

Now it is well known that Dr (Martin) Henry Dawson was a 1926-1927 NRC Fellow at the Rockefeller Hospital in New York, becoming the first to ever work with DNA in a test tube, before moving on to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and his equally pioneering work with Penicillin.

But his arrival at Rockefeller was not his only choice - dare I suggest, perhaps not his first choice as a NRC fellow ?

The journal SCIENCE records in May 21 1926, that Dawson could take his fellowship at Rockefeller under Dr Rufus Cole or at Boston's Thorndyke Lab under Dr Francis W Peabody.

But, alas, Peabody already had terminal sarcoma and so was too ill to take on new fellows - he died later in 1927.

It seems like a tragically missed opportunity, because I see very little of Cole in Dawson's character while he and Peabody could have been soul brothers.

In October 1940, for the first time in his medical career, Dawson's heart was fully open (agape) to helping save the lives of the many young people facing certain death from the dreaded SBE, subacute bacterial endocarditis.

(SBE was in a section of medicine about as far from his medical day job as a disease could be, so he won't have normally had an opportunity to exercise whatever agape his heart might have felt for the SBE patients.)

And his was hardly the only heart open to helping the SBEs, the "4Fs of the 4Fs".

(Admittedly , when he did get involved, he went much further than anyone else to save them in wartime when the Allied governments had collectively ordered that they to be abandoned to a certain death.)

But Dawson's mind was also agape, that rare scientist in 1940 who was truly open to taking in all that that life's small and the weak were capable of, whether in need or not.

So as a result, he was intellectually ready to understood what the other doctors and the rest of humanity circa 1940 could not, that a lowly fungi mold (among the "4Fs" of non-human life) could indeed be capable of saving the SBE and many others as well, when the best of human chemists had repeatedly failed.

His intellectual agape made his emotional agape medically effective.

Dawson's intellectual courage in seeing natural penicillin could cure the SBEs and then having the emotional courage to continue to apply that cure, against stiff wartime Allied government opposition, is the best example we have of Francis Peabody's dictate in action...

1945 : as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science

Hitler may have successfully convinced his most rabid followers that the murder of every last Jew in Europe was a fitting consolation prize for his failure to deliver up western Russia as the new frontier for the Aryan super race in 1941.

But the rest of humanity regarding Auschwitz as a particularly (and peculiarly)  modern and scientific crime made it particularly hard for modern scientists in the rest of the world to present their continuing support of eugenics as the public face of postwar biology.

Still Auschwitz in the end proved a godsend to Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist claims that Free Will didn't really exist but was simply manipulated by the chemical workings of a simple molecule called DNA.

Thanks to DNA, the old science of eugenics, ( ie its old positive program, along with a reduced version of its old negative program (now to be limited to families agreeing, semi-voluntarily, to the abortions of genetically 'damaged' foetuses) could carry on as before, but as the new science of DNA genetics.

DNA thus joined Atom-busting and Penicillin as three of the biggest triumphs of Modern Science, the three big Plan As that had emerged during WWII, if not all  as actual products of that war.

But let us look at these claims more closely.

 Atom-busting and atomic re-arranging is a natural event, discovered, rather than invented, by Modern Scientists.

It is based upon the discovery in 1896 (the same year that Henry Dawson was born) of natural radioactivity.

This is an event that is totally random and totally anti-deterministic ; we still have no idea when and why an individual atom breaks into two or more pieces.

I would thus take natural radioactivity as anti-modern, post modern, science at its most characteristic because it refutes one of three cornerstones of  all Modern Science : strong determinism .

This holds not just that every thing has a cause as to by it happens, but also that humans can discern that cause and then manipulate it to our advantage.

Another cornerstone of modern science is reductionism.

In the weak version of genetic reductionism, the one that we virtually all hold, it was already known by everybody before 1944, that whatever a gene was, at the bottom it had to exist as some arrangement of atoms.

(By contrast, strong genetic reductionism (chemical eugenics), as held by Avery, holds that once we know how those atoms are arranged, we can predict whether or not a girl will agree to date a particular boy.)

Viewed in this light, we might do well to remember that DNA manipulation was not invented by humans, but rather was only discovered by them  ---- and discovered by medical doctors, not geneticists.

Those medical doctors, led , above all, by Henry Dawson, discovered that some bacteria (intellectually as far from the mind of the modern scientist as can be) easily manipulate DNA in ways directly contrary to the Central Dogma of Biology and Genetics that genetic inheritance in vertical forward only.

(This vertical inheritance is the view that all that we are or can ever be , came directly from our (past) parents and their parents, an inheritance that is always strictly limited to remaining within our own species.)

In fact, microbes ( bacteria, viruses,sub-viruses, together with the smallest plants and animals are happy to snip DNA from here and drop it there, willy nilly : horizontal inheritance, HGT, across species, genus and families.

This is the major source for most of the real interesting genetic variety, including why all the world's bacteria can become resistant to a new drug in just ten years.

HGT is another 'difficult-to-get-your-head-around-if-you-have-High-School-Science', postmodern scientific concept, but it was guised in 1945 as another Plan A from Modern Science.

Penicillin was not invented like the totally synthetic sulfa drugs that proceeded it but rather it is produced by incredibly tiny fungus factories smaller than the eye can see.

Henry Dawson - again - led the way in proposing and using natural penicillin today over obtaining synthetic penicillin - maybe - tomorrow.

 But the chuzpha-bound men of modern science, naturally, tried to "point-to-with-pride" to the large stainless steel human factories that (nominally) held the smaller fungus factories doing all the work, as the source of our penicillin : just another Plan A of Modern Science.

Cheek !

In fact Chemistry, the Queen of the Sciences until 1945, faded after the war as a direct result of the rise of postmodern science of microbiology ---- directly as a result of the failure of  wartime synthetic chemists to make penicillin and most other antibiotics.

So much of modern science's triumphs of 1945 can just as readily be shown to be the anti-modern triumphs of postmodern science....

A forgotten meme from "The Golden Age of Mysteries" held sway over wartime penicillin : to the detriment of the dying

The grey-haired teenagers of the 1870s to 1890s, the guys who actually ran World War Two, grew up on the stories of the Golden Age of Mysteries and Detectives, starting with Sherlock Holmes' Study in Scarlet in 1887.

And one thing you quickly learned in all those thousands of books in dozens of languages was that the formula that the spy had stolen from the safe - the formula upon which the fate of the Empire ( or perhaps even the world) hung - was never a formula in physics or biology or geology or astronomy.

It was always a formula in Chemistry : always a formula for the synthesis of some extremely powerful explosive or fuel or drug.

Chemistry and synthesis in those days held all the non-chemists in shock and awe --- from at least the1870s until after Hiroshima in 1945.

Much as physics held the minds of non-physicists between 1945 and 1985 and the way micro-biology still holds our non-biologist brain cells.

(Ever since the day we-the-laity first discovered that courts could convict serial murders just on the scientific basis of their trace DNA left at the scene of the crimes.)

The solution for almost every problem that wartime penicillin faced - and there were many - was "throw more chemists at the problem".

The solution for the shortage of penicillin being produced  just had to be "synthesis it - we humans have to be way smarter than mold slime could ever hope to be".

The real solution  - when it came - was surprisingly mundane : like farmers have done for thousands of years, we simply went out and looked for better breeders - in this case, better breeders who gave us, not more milk , but more penicillin instead.

The solution was not a chemical formula from the collective brains of thousands of top chemists, but rather the eyes of one, rather ordinary, mycologist in a fruit market in Illinois.

Remember the black humour vogue for "thin books" ?

(The best known was "Italian War Heroes" - unfair because even the Germans and British felt that the Italians were frequently brave and often very effective.)

the ultimate "THIN BOOK"

A better, truly thin, book would be "Mycologist War Heroes" .

Exactly where were those bastards between 1928 and 1945 anyway ?

They mightn't have been asked, very often, to paid work on penicillin - but they didn't seem to be exactly eager to volunteer either : and the importance of penicillin during WWII  (aside from its chemistry aspects from 1943 to 1945) was hardly top secret .

I suspect most mycologists spent the 'ultimate war between good and evil' either stamp collecting or devising secret ways to use funguses to destroy enemy food crops, aka germ or biological warfare.

Then civilians deaths could be got in truly wholesale amounts - not merely in the paltry retail numbers that Bomber Harris's aerial bombing had produced.

If wartime mycologists had gotten their wicked way, fungi would have still done their part to help win the war.

But not by saving millions, but rather by killing millions.......

The re-invention of a military-only antiseptic into "bedside penicillin for all" creates a global beacon of hope for a world at war

the tiny stone the builders rejected

Despite the self-centred claims of physicists, the greatest benefits to humanity have generally been ardently pursued (invented), not accidentally stumbled upon (discovered).

DNA was discovered in 1860s by an Swiss doctor, but for most of us, it was really only discovered 125 years later in the late 1980s.

That was when it began to first be successfully used to solve unsolved criminal cases, when British researcher Alec Jeffries re-invented 'DNA' as a means to definitely identify biological evidence left at the scene of a crime.


The great medical pioneer Joseph Lister clearly re-invented carbolic acid, when he took it from just one of many industrial solvents and turning it into a global life-saver.

Paul Gelmo "invented" sulfa as man-made chemical in Vienna in 1908 and it was routinely patented in 1909 by Bayer the chemical giant hoping it might yet be a useful chemical intermediate reagent.

But not until Gerhard Domagk , also of Bayer, who systemically tested every one of his firm's new chemical creations for its medical potential, was its life-saving abilities "discovered".

But I still hold this to be a case of re-invention.

 It took an awful lot of grit and determination during the Great Depression to waste scarce company money by systemically and thoroughly testing every one of the thousands of chemicals Bayer made, on then very remote possibility one might have medical applications.

The Nobel committee obviously agreed with me - giving Domagk the inventor and not Gelmo the discoverer the Nobel Prize for sulfa.

Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin in1928 and "discovered" it was only useful as a military-style antiseptic.

In 1940, Florey and Chain accidentally discovered that penicillin also might work as a systemic.

But like Fleming (by 1940) ,they still choose to emphasize its rather limited application against combat wounds infected by staph bacteria : a tiny, tiny, TINY proportion of all the deaths caused by WWII.

They were hardly alone : I was amazed to discover in my research that I could find no penicillin-making researcher between 1928 and 1945 who first put their penicillin to work as a human systemic life-saver, before they also tried it on localized wounds.

With one crucial exception: Henry Dawson.

In October 1940, months ahead of the schedule that he and his three fellow researchers had already worked out, he choose to inject systemic penicillin into two young men suffering from invariably fatal endocarditis.

At least one of the men - unexpectedly - lived.

It wasn't because of Dawson's penicillin : at an estimated 8 units per mg, it was about .56% pure.

Useless Junk ? Or Love, Hope and Charity ?

The rest (99.44%) was junk - or as I like to emphasis : "99 and 44 100ths percent pure love....hope... and charity" -- bedside penicillin.

A good bedside manner has probably saved more lives throughout history than all but a tiny handful of medications.

I contend that Dawson deliberately used his tiny amounts of home-made penicillin as part of his traditional clinician's bedside manner, to rally his patients' own body defences against their disease.

As prove, I offer up Gladys Hobby, a fellow member of his tiny team, who said she daily walked through Henry Dawson's wards, showing the patients the growing penicillium in flasks, hoping their rising interests in their treatment might rally their psychic resources.

Dawson was not content to reserve his invention of "bedside penicillin" to the handful of endocarditis patients that his small home-made supply could hope to treat.

So Dawson quickly told a convention of his colleagues (the world's top clinical researchers) that natural penicillin had "unlimited possibilities", thousands times stronger than the then acclaimed synthetic sulfas, but without their toxic side effects and inability to work well in blood and pus.

These researchers took his claims home to their labs all over the world.

Meanwhile popular media, like the New York Times , Newsweek and the wire services, spread his gospel throughout North America.

He tried to get the American government - in 1941 -(and by extension all Allied governments) to take over the production of penicillin form Big Pharma and mass produce it themselves in quantity.

Instead, wartime government bureaucrats, who were themselves paid consultants to Big Pharma , censored Dawson's conventional scientific methods to spread his good news - by restricting his access to scientific journals and restricting what he could say at scientific conferences.

But in wartime, person-to-person gossip becomes the new telegraph.

So Dawson was able to keep on spreading the word until most all of the doctors in metropolitan New York and beyond had heard of his unexpected successes with systemic natural penicillin, curing incurable endocarditis , the "Gold Standard" of infectious diseases.

Penicillin , he said, didn't have only a limited wartime role, limited to just being applied to local staph infections in combat wounds or to cure self-inflicted military VD cases.

He said it  had unlimited possibilities and could cure many of the diseases that plague a peacetime nation or a multi-million man wartime military --- if only government bureaucrats opened their eyes, their hearts and their pockets and gave it a "fair go" .

When the world's general populace, after the story of Baby Patricia broke worldwide, catch Dawson's "vision thing" , governments were forced to play catch up in the production of actual penicillin.

Meanwhile, they too caught Dawson's "vision thing" and governments all over the world turned their propaganda machine full blast to tout penicillin as a beacon of future health and hope for all , if only the Allies win this war.

The key change in the Allied governments' approach was that "for all" as it became clear that the voters did not agree with an Allied war effort that deliberately limited the supply of life-saving medicine and then triaged the world into the people worth saving and those not worth saving.

That - they said - sounded awfully familiar : wasn't that also Hitler's line ?

Well it was certainly Modernity's line : the  methods of instrumental rationality ruled all the modern nations from America to Germany.

By contrast, Dawson's general systemic was 'general' in the widest sense of that word.

 He thought it was particularly important in a Total War against Absolute Evil to give - and be seen giving - life-saving health care and food & shelter to all : it  was the best single reason why people should be willing to fight and die for the Allies' cause.

And seventy five odd years later, was he not right ?

Penicillin has a powerful mystique that tens of thousands of other useful medications ,combined, can't hope to match.

Dawson's crusade to make his inexpensive, abundant, safe "bedside penicillin" a commonplace at hospital beds the world over , in war and in peace , is the major reason we grant penicillin that mystique....

"Race",before DNA, was BLOOD : literally. The hidden subtext behind penicillin's 15 year delay.

BLOOD was destiny, before DNA

The discovery of different blood types in the early 20th century allowed the science of eugenics to 'claim' a scientific basis for denying marriage between people of different colours, because it meant the mixing of their blood.


Their blood - that gooey red stuff - not Genes and not DNA.

"Blood" Eugenics has been re-written out of History

Don't let today's geneticists try and re-write history ---- the laws did not talk about genes or chromosomes ---- they said blood and they meant it.

In WWII, the great American Red Cross, won't let black blood pollute the lily pure blood of white folk even in transfusions to save a life.

No talk from the Red Cross of genes or DNA ---- blood.

The thought of sticking impure mold slime juice into white people's bloodstreams so sickened almost all middle class doctors between 1928 and what - 2028 ? , that they'd rather let their patient die than give them life-saving natural penicillin.

Don't ever forget the 6 million the Nazis killed of the Jews - or the 30 million dead from other groups as well - but give a thought to the Holocaust of people who might have lived out normal lives, if only hundreds of thousands of doctors had done with impure, dirty, crude, natural penicillin what Doctors Martin Henry Dawson and James Duhig did with it : save lives.

Penicillin didn't really start saving lives until 15 years after it was first discovered ---- using the same primitive level of technology in 1943 as was rejected in 1928 : what changed wasn't the technology but the moral character of the doctors involved : from 9-5 benchwarmer doctors and racist eugenic doctors to highly moral, driven, humanists....

Crick's DNA Central Dogma is 80% JUNK, new 'Encode' project intimates

Crick's central Dogma is dead

Crick's simple-minded Central Dogma of DNA : that there is a single physical spot on your chromosome that encodes for bed wetting and for why some men prefer Arsenal instead of Manchester United, has been revealed to be 80% junk by the new ENCODE project.

Yes, a few rare diseases are actually caused by mutations of small physical stretches of your DNA ---- just as the newspapers claim of all diseases and all behaviors.

Poor Crick, after been loved for some many years, is now being kicked to death by his turncoat fans

But most diseases and most behaviors are the result of a complex mix cum muddle of the effects of dozens of genes and hundreds of controller DNA switches all interacting dynamically with the rest of your unique phenotype and with your unique interaction with the external environment --- things like stress, germs, chemicals, childhood falls and dietary deficiencies.

A few people have always argued for the complexity of genetic -phenotype interactions, but most geneticists and about 95% of the general public (with cliche-minded newspaper sub editors leading the charge) have always preferred simple-minded simplicity.

Now overnight, with ENCODE, all these people are now bellowing 'we always knew it wasn't that simple.'

This is largely why I am a Christian - it is so appealing to think that all these lying BSers will have to spend at least a few million years in Limbo for this bold-faced lie, that does cheer my heart so.....

Recombinant DNA and HGT's contribution to the penicillin saga

Where does one begin?

The beta-lactam molecular 'core' was originally created by bacteria and was only later was moved by HGT/ recombinant DNA into some fungi .

Those fungi then created the penicillin-variants of that very special fused beta-lactam ring .

But while this HGT operation was obviously fundamental to there being a penicillin saga to begin with, it had little direct impact on how the 1929-1944 penicillin saga actually unfolded.

But the four years of hard work and disappointments that Martin Henry Dawson endured between the Fall of 1926 and the Fall of 1930  working on HGT and recombinant DNA exchanges did make him the best qualified researcher in the world to put up with the temperamental penicillium between the Fall of 1940 and the Fall of 1944.

 His pioneering work with R to S type  (and S to S type) HGT exchanges between Strep pneumococcus bacteria made him eminently qualified to stand up to all the difficulties in growing penicillium to produce penicillin.

Dawson was the first in the world, together with Richard Sia, to successfully induce R to S pneumococcus HGT DNA exchanges in a test tube after most other researchers threw up their hands in despair and moved onto other research.

But he was no quitter and he pulled it off after years of failure.

Dawson then went on, with Agnes Warbasse, to do the same with S to S HGT DNA exchanges and this remains extremely difficult to do naturally, as Dawson did it.

He then went on to successfully grow colonies of M and L types of bacteria, all part of his effort over the roughly 15 years between 1926 and 1941 to establish that R,M,L were fully co-equal equivalents or alternatives to S types of bacteria - not defective or deficient versions of it.

This postmodernist notion naturally was seen as bizarre or worse in the strongly modernist atmosphere of medical research between the wars.

I see it as the bacterial equivalent of Dawson treating 4F civilians as the exact moral equivalent of 1A soldiers, not as defective 'useless mouth' variants,  despite the reign of Total War Utilitarianism ruling western medicine between 1940 and 1945.

Dawson's pioneering HGT DNA/ Q-sensing work taught him ethics and it taught him technical skills - both which he called upon to get penicillin successfully launched......

Oswald Avery : unknown and famous for the wrong things...

It is the tragedy of Halifax Nova Scotia born Oswald Avery that he is famous for a study he didn't really believe in (and opposed for years) and he is unknown for his lifework, which today saves millions of childrens' lives around the world each year.

Oswald Avery is today known as 'The Father of Molecular Biology' , which should tip us off right from the start.

Scientists are never more manipulative and intellectually dishonest than when they are fabricating the history of the "Father" (never the "Mother" or "parents") of their particular branch of science.

Avery is no exception. In this case, we know this to be so, because the person who created the myth of Avery (Joshua Lederberg) said so: he intended to 'do a Mendel on Avery'.

Gregor Medel did wonderful pioneering work , but his credentials for being considered the father of any science are widely regarded today as spurious - and he would be the first to say so loudly if he came back today.

As would Avery regarding his alleged founding role in molecular biology - to his credit, he never claimed much for his work in this field while he was alive - and he lived for 10 years after his 'big' discovery.

But in the saving-the-lives-of-millions-of-innocent-baby-children world, the world of conjugate vaccines, Avery is a GIANT - or should be.

He certainly is to the researchers in that field.

But he is merely 'the key individual' in an effort that spanned a century and included every continent,thousands of researchers and hundreds of millions of dollars.

It is a story far too vast and far too complicated for popular science reporting to credit to any one medical super hero and one shining experimental result: no Pasteur or Jonas Salk here.

Instead Avery is praised for one 'seminal-paper-that-was-ignored-at-the-time' --- which rather implies an intellectual oxymoron and suggests the difficulty in crediting him as the Father of anything .

That paper was published in February 1944 but had its formal beginnings with experiments that began on October 22nd 1940 on Manhattan Island, that tiny island not far off the American coast.

Ah yes ! October 1940 : menses mirabilis indeed.

It is almost as if May 1940, certainly one of the most 'menses horribilis' in all of Western Civilization, (followed by the August to September 1940 aborted invasion of England : half horribilis half mirabilis), seemed to have drawn out extraordinary efforts from various North American scientists deeply emotionally affected by the events in Europe but too old to be called to actively take up a rifle.

Because one of the things those three extraordinary laboratory efforts in October 1940 have in common is their sheer physicality - scaled up to pilot plant size before table top work had even started; dirty, tiring, dangerous work.

Literally, not just figuratively, fighting for results in the trenches of science.

So, if in October 2010, we mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the financial recognition for (a) George Laurence's efforts to build an atomic pile, and (b) Henry Dawson's start in his efforts to cure SBE with natural penicillin injections, we might as well add (c) the formal start of Oswald Avery and Colin MacLeod's efforts to determine the chemical nature of Henry Dawson's Transforming Principle - proving it to be DNA.

Did we say 'North American scientists' ??

Let it stand.

We all know that we here at the Arcadian Recorder also mean 'Nova Scotian-born scientists', but let that remain our little secret.....