To many of us who see 'death as death', it has always been un-obvious why coughing to death from WWI gas clouds was so much different than being hit in the guts out in No Man's Land and coughing your life away for a half an hour while your comrades are helpless to intervene.
A similar phobia existed against openly conducting warfare with radiation clouds or clouds of fire or germs.
Showing posts with label germ warfare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label germ warfare. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Saturday, December 27, 2014
'Weaponizing' the Wind
The Allies actively 'weaponized' the wind to increase the lethalness of two death-creators during WWII (fire bombs and atomic radiation) and had fall back plans to use it with two others (chemicals and germs).
The Axis did weaponize the wind with the latter two (Japan with germs and Italy with chemical gas).
But it may be said that the elites of these modern nations all did so very, very reluctantly --- even secretly.
For handing over some of their total powers over life and death to Nature (the wind) was as about as comfortable for these male elites of superior races as it would be if they offered to share those powers with women, the poor , the unfit and the lesser races.
For pre WWII modernity was all about illusions of total control and total precision and total predictability and the wayward wind held none of those attributes.
How modernity really wanted to fight WWII was with the Norden Bombsight, able - it was claimed - to unerringly drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 25,000 feet.
The Norden and its equivalents in long range land artillery, battleship guns and long lance torpedoes would make victory swift, almost bloodless and cheap.
WWII , of course, was anything but.
So a year or two into the unexpectedly long war, most modernist elites reluctantly - and secretly - changed tack.
Germ and gas (wind-carried) warfare had never been totally ignored but were quite low in priority - now more money was poured into secret efforts to make them workable weapons of war --- if desperate need required it.
National leaders went on parroting in public their bomber commanders' line that precision use of high explosives would take out vital enemy industrial assets without killing many civilians - but more and more mixed in with the (in)precise HE bombs were largely un-publicized fire bombs.
The HE was really only there to calm public and armed forces consciences ---- and to 'open up' buildings so the fire bombs could work better with the far more inflammable material inside.
If the weather had been dry enough and the wind was just right, and enough fire and HE bombs fell in the centre of a very big city in a short enough period, a self-sustaining firestorm could do far more damage than any single WWII atomic bomb was capable of.
The updraft from the intense concentrated burn drew in air/oxygen from all sides at ground level - creating intense winds and mimicking exactly the bellows that allows primitive furnaces of wood charcoal (think civilian wood framed homes) and lots of oxygen to effortlessly melt ores and metals... and human bodies.
Once having gotten over their public (and private) distaste for using imprecise fire bombs to mostly kill civilians rather than to destroy hard-to-hit factories, elites on the Allied side looked again at nuclear radiation which they had earlier rejected.
(Earlier very modest funding had really been directed at the possibility of nuclear boiler engines for ultra long range submarines.)
It had always been easy to powderize low grade nuclear material (even just enriched ore) and drop it into the wind over a huge city as basically a terror radiation weapon.
But now the claims by some that atoms could be used in a bomb that had HE like blast effects and fire and radiation effects was irresistible for some in the Allied elite.
The public would be lied to and told the new bomb worked by old fashioned blast effects and precision - indeed the atomic bombs were dropped with the aid of the Norden bombsight - but in fact they would mostly kill by wind-fed fire and wind-carried fallout radiation.
Man just had to claim WWII victory at Hiroshima - not Nature.
But Nature listens to no master and Axis-intended radiation dropped at Hiroshima was instead wafted back into Allied children's milk all over the world.
The 'Victory Bomb' was actually our very first man-made global weather cum environmental disaster.
Still think our current climate change disaster can be easily solved by just another 'Manhattan Project' superhero quick-fix ??
The Axis did weaponize the wind with the latter two (Japan with germs and Italy with chemical gas).
But it may be said that the elites of these modern nations all did so very, very reluctantly --- even secretly.
For handing over some of their total powers over life and death to Nature (the wind) was as about as comfortable for these male elites of superior races as it would be if they offered to share those powers with women, the poor , the unfit and the lesser races.
For pre WWII modernity was all about illusions of total control and total precision and total predictability and the wayward wind held none of those attributes.
How modernity really wanted to fight WWII was with the Norden Bombsight, able - it was claimed - to unerringly drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from 25,000 feet.
The Norden and its equivalents in long range land artillery, battleship guns and long lance torpedoes would make victory swift, almost bloodless and cheap.
WWII , of course, was anything but.
So a year or two into the unexpectedly long war, most modernist elites reluctantly - and secretly - changed tack.
Germ and gas (wind-carried) warfare had never been totally ignored but were quite low in priority - now more money was poured into secret efforts to make them workable weapons of war --- if desperate need required it.
National leaders went on parroting in public their bomber commanders' line that precision use of high explosives would take out vital enemy industrial assets without killing many civilians - but more and more mixed in with the (in)precise HE bombs were largely un-publicized fire bombs.
The HE was really only there to calm public and armed forces consciences ---- and to 'open up' buildings so the fire bombs could work better with the far more inflammable material inside.
If the weather had been dry enough and the wind was just right, and enough fire and HE bombs fell in the centre of a very big city in a short enough period, a self-sustaining firestorm could do far more damage than any single WWII atomic bomb was capable of.
The updraft from the intense concentrated burn drew in air/oxygen from all sides at ground level - creating intense winds and mimicking exactly the bellows that allows primitive furnaces of wood charcoal (think civilian wood framed homes) and lots of oxygen to effortlessly melt ores and metals... and human bodies.
Once having gotten over their public (and private) distaste for using imprecise fire bombs to mostly kill civilians rather than to destroy hard-to-hit factories, elites on the Allied side looked again at nuclear radiation which they had earlier rejected.
(Earlier very modest funding had really been directed at the possibility of nuclear boiler engines for ultra long range submarines.)
It had always been easy to powderize low grade nuclear material (even just enriched ore) and drop it into the wind over a huge city as basically a terror radiation weapon.
But now the claims by some that atoms could be used in a bomb that had HE like blast effects and fire and radiation effects was irresistible for some in the Allied elite.
The public would be lied to and told the new bomb worked by old fashioned blast effects and precision - indeed the atomic bombs were dropped with the aid of the Norden bombsight - but in fact they would mostly kill by wind-fed fire and wind-carried fallout radiation.
Man just had to claim WWII victory at Hiroshima - not Nature.
But Nature listens to no master and Axis-intended radiation dropped at Hiroshima was instead wafted back into Allied children's milk all over the world.
The 'Victory Bomb' was actually our very first man-made global weather cum environmental disaster.
Still think our current climate change disaster can be easily solved by just another 'Manhattan Project' superhero quick-fix ??
Monday, September 22, 2014
Merck's conflict of interest : planning to use molds as poisons of war makes it hard to see molds as lifesavers...
 |
| George W Merck (with big cigar) with Chemical Warfare officer at a drug trade conference (!) |
George W Merck spent most of WWII dividing his time between heading the biological weapons effort of the US government (which including researching molds as deadly poisons) and trying to create a synthetic version of the lifesaving penicillium mold.
Mentally that must have made it hard for Merck, head of Merck Drugs, to give a fair hearing to the possibility that the penicillium mold - all by itself, 'as is' - might be able to save lives...
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Spores and Wartime Secrecy : can they actually co-exist ?
You might think I am going to talk about Anthrax spores and asymmetrical terrorist germ warfare.
But you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
I want to talk instead about wartime penicillin, and a part of it that is never ever discussed.
Its inherently asymmetrical medical nature.
Which appropriately enough, then "drifts over" into its inherently asymmetrical military potential.
So lets start.
And lets start talking about just how the intellectually mis-guided (as well as seriously morally misguided) were the prolonged attempts by the medical establishment in both America and Britain to regard penicillium spores as something that really could remain Top Secret medical military weapons.
And not just the wartime medical establishment, for recently author Eric Lax and his publishers felt they had a real winner in an exciting clock and dagger title for their book on wartime penicillin : "The Mould in Doctor Florey's Coat".
There was always something faintly Walter Mittyesque about Florey anyway - never more so than in the incident that gave this book its title.
Dunkirk was underway just as Florey at long last accepted that ole Flem's penicillin just might be priceless after all.
But how to save penicillin for the rest of the Allied cause, if Britain fell to the Germans ?
'Let's all rub penicillium spores in the inner seams of our clothing - so even if only one of us gets away, the precious fire of penicillin research can still be re-lit elsewhere'.
But none of these Oxford naifs seemed to have dared ask the boss (Florey) just how they came to possess these incredible spores in the first place.
Henry Dawson's first big scientific effort was in promoting the concept of HGT (Horizontal Gene Transfer) ,the instant transfer of genes between different species and even different families of Life, when its initial discoverer seemed reluctant to even publish his work.
Today it is believed that soil bacteria created the first beta lactam antibiotics about ten million years ago and - via HGT - gave it to soil molds who modified it slightly and made it penicillin.
So, sometime in 1928, a particularly productive penicillin producer strain of penicillium mold blow into a fancy home in London.
Alexander Fleming's colleague John Freeman was an expert on allergies, with many rich and powerful patients.
In 1928, Freeman heard a Dutch specialist claim that basement mold spores were the cause of many allergies.
Freeman got his rich London patients (or more likely their scullery maids) to scrape molds off their basement walls to be tested by his most recent hire, Irish-born mycologist Charles La Touche, towards seeking ways to gradually desensitize the patients against their particular household mold allergens.
La Touche had no high tech ways to keep spores inside his lab alone - not that I think in the long run a spore or two doesn't get out of the most secure modern facility.
There are many more fungus than us and they have and will be on the Earth a lot longer than us primarily because of their spores.
Their spores are incredibly tiny examples of temporarily suspended Life - Dried-up Life - inside a very hardy and bumpy package.
Tiny is the key here - so tiny they float anywhere and everywhere on the gentlest of breezes - down the hall and around the world.
Being bumpy but tiny and light doesn't hurt either - they can cling to almost any surface - like a human and its luggage bound for Australia, for example.
However if that surface is the tiniest bit damp and the tiniest bit tasty (they seem willing to eat almost anything faintly organic), they spring back into active slimey life.
One of La Touche's spores drifted out of his room and along the stairs to Fleming open Petri dish.
The rest actually wouldn't have been "legend", if Fleming hadn't promptly taken a sub culture of the resulting "spoiled" petri dish, and carefully and correctly preserved it.
Fleming did little to promote the medical use of penicillin in curing disease but he did vigerously promote it as a useful way for busy hospital labs to easily isolate the so called flu bacteria (sic) .
Dozens of labs world wide got a sample from him - they then gave samples of their samples to at least dozens of others.
That is how Florey got his penicillium spores he was so busy stuffing down his coat - from a sub culture Fleming had sent to the previous director of Florey's Dunn Institute.
The Free World beyond Britain had lots of sub cultures of penicillium spores of the rare - right - type, even without Florey's belated act of charity.
In theory they didn't really need Fleming's spores, only his public article - but in practise, until 1943, they really did need his spores.
Examples of Fleming's spores were actually everywhere - some even better penicillium producers than his original un-mutated version as well.
But they could only be found by teams of researchers seeking hundreds of the right looking blue-green mold on walls and spoiled fruit, and then testing all for their possible anti-bacterial qualities.
Until miracle cures got rumoured about, no one in the world was willing to go to that much effort , just to test a troublesome possible antiseptic.
But by 1943, the miracle cure stories were out amongst the clinical doctors everywhere - and I do really mean everywhere.
Everywhere that Florey went, Egypt, Iran, Russia he had to endure local doctors thrusting excellent producing strains of penicillin molds in his face that they had found locally !
The Axis were just as quick off the mark - Japan got its strain by merely looking about locally.
And the clever Japanese correctly guessed - from one badly reproduced photo in an Egyptian picture magazine - just how best to produce the stuff !
The atomic bomb was effectively secret even if the US had proclaimed it was making one from the rooftops in 1942.
Uranium was everywhere - like penicillium spores - but a bomb from it takes the world's largest, most expensive, building ever built merely to get started on separating pure U-235 from the more abundant U-238.
And without 90% pure U-235, no working bomb. No nothing.
Tons and tons of scarce money, time and effort kept the A-Bomb an American secret, even from the British and Canadians , let alone the Axis and Neutrals.
But by late 1943, popular magazine articles cheekily showed how one could make penicillin at home, on a kitchen top, for about $5 in equipment and growth mediums.
One didn't even need to go out searching for those semi-rare penicillin-producing strains by then.
In a surprising - even shocking - total volt face, the NRRL's Coghill and Raper had released the top two strains of penicillium.
That's right, the top two strains that were then producing most of the Allies' military-bound penicillin - to the public American mold type collection in Washington where, as they told the readers of JAMA worldwide, "anyone" can get some at a "nominal charge".
!!!!!!!!
No word if Argentina's Washington DC based scientific attache quickly took a cab over, got some samples and sent them off to his friends in Germany.
Clearly, penicillin was never a viable secret military medical weapon - Florey and Richards were both , to put it kindly, completely deluded to ever think so.
Deluded by utopian visions of near-total purity.
Because unlike the Atomic Bomb and U-235, penicillin's starting material (the spores) were both common worldwide AND its production fully successful even in a highly impure (aka low tech) state.
This was what Fleming had discovered in 1928 but never acted upon - this was the key insight that Henry Dawson brought to the penicillin story, starting on October 16th 1940....
But you are wrong, wrong, wrong.
I want to talk instead about wartime penicillin, and a part of it that is never ever discussed.
Its inherently asymmetrical medical nature.
Which appropriately enough, then "drifts over" into its inherently asymmetrical military potential.
So lets start.
And lets start talking about just how the intellectually mis-guided (as well as seriously morally misguided) were the prolonged attempts by the medical establishment in both America and Britain to regard penicillium spores as something that really could remain Top Secret medical military weapons.
And not just the wartime medical establishment, for recently author Eric Lax and his publishers felt they had a real winner in an exciting clock and dagger title for their book on wartime penicillin : "The Mould in Doctor Florey's Coat".
There was always something faintly Walter Mittyesque about Florey anyway - never more so than in the incident that gave this book its title.
Dunkirk was underway just as Florey at long last accepted that ole Flem's penicillin just might be priceless after all.
But how to save penicillin for the rest of the Allied cause, if Britain fell to the Germans ?
'Let's all rub penicillium spores in the inner seams of our clothing - so even if only one of us gets away, the precious fire of penicillin research can still be re-lit elsewhere'.
But none of these Oxford naifs seemed to have dared ask the boss (Florey) just how they came to possess these incredible spores in the first place.
Henry Dawson's first big scientific effort was in promoting the concept of HGT (Horizontal Gene Transfer) ,the instant transfer of genes between different species and even different families of Life, when its initial discoverer seemed reluctant to even publish his work.
Today it is believed that soil bacteria created the first beta lactam antibiotics about ten million years ago and - via HGT - gave it to soil molds who modified it slightly and made it penicillin.
So, sometime in 1928, a particularly productive penicillin producer strain of penicillium mold blow into a fancy home in London.
Alexander Fleming's colleague John Freeman was an expert on allergies, with many rich and powerful patients.
In 1928, Freeman heard a Dutch specialist claim that basement mold spores were the cause of many allergies.
Freeman got his rich London patients (or more likely their scullery maids) to scrape molds off their basement walls to be tested by his most recent hire, Irish-born mycologist Charles La Touche, towards seeking ways to gradually desensitize the patients against their particular household mold allergens.
La Touche had no high tech ways to keep spores inside his lab alone - not that I think in the long run a spore or two doesn't get out of the most secure modern facility.
There are many more fungus than us and they have and will be on the Earth a lot longer than us primarily because of their spores.
Their spores are incredibly tiny examples of temporarily suspended Life - Dried-up Life - inside a very hardy and bumpy package.
Tiny is the key here - so tiny they float anywhere and everywhere on the gentlest of breezes - down the hall and around the world.
Being bumpy but tiny and light doesn't hurt either - they can cling to almost any surface - like a human and its luggage bound for Australia, for example.
However if that surface is the tiniest bit damp and the tiniest bit tasty (they seem willing to eat almost anything faintly organic), they spring back into active slimey life.
One of La Touche's spores drifted out of his room and along the stairs to Fleming open Petri dish.
The rest actually wouldn't have been "legend", if Fleming hadn't promptly taken a sub culture of the resulting "spoiled" petri dish, and carefully and correctly preserved it.
Fleming did little to promote the medical use of penicillin in curing disease but he did vigerously promote it as a useful way for busy hospital labs to easily isolate the so called flu bacteria (sic) .
Dozens of labs world wide got a sample from him - they then gave samples of their samples to at least dozens of others.
That is how Florey got his penicillium spores he was so busy stuffing down his coat - from a sub culture Fleming had sent to the previous director of Florey's Dunn Institute.
The Free World beyond Britain had lots of sub cultures of penicillium spores of the rare - right - type, even without Florey's belated act of charity.
In theory they didn't really need Fleming's spores, only his public article - but in practise, until 1943, they really did need his spores.
Examples of Fleming's spores were actually everywhere - some even better penicillium producers than his original un-mutated version as well.
But they could only be found by teams of researchers seeking hundreds of the right looking blue-green mold on walls and spoiled fruit, and then testing all for their possible anti-bacterial qualities.
Until miracle cures got rumoured about, no one in the world was willing to go to that much effort , just to test a troublesome possible antiseptic.
But by 1943, the miracle cure stories were out amongst the clinical doctors everywhere - and I do really mean everywhere.
Everywhere that Florey went, Egypt, Iran, Russia he had to endure local doctors thrusting excellent producing strains of penicillin molds in his face that they had found locally !
The Axis were just as quick off the mark - Japan got its strain by merely looking about locally.
And the clever Japanese correctly guessed - from one badly reproduced photo in an Egyptian picture magazine - just how best to produce the stuff !
The atomic bomb was effectively secret even if the US had proclaimed it was making one from the rooftops in 1942.
Uranium was everywhere - like penicillium spores - but a bomb from it takes the world's largest, most expensive, building ever built merely to get started on separating pure U-235 from the more abundant U-238.
And without 90% pure U-235, no working bomb. No nothing.
Tons and tons of scarce money, time and effort kept the A-Bomb an American secret, even from the British and Canadians , let alone the Axis and Neutrals.
But by late 1943, popular magazine articles cheekily showed how one could make penicillin at home, on a kitchen top, for about $5 in equipment and growth mediums.
One didn't even need to go out searching for those semi-rare penicillin-producing strains by then.
In a surprising - even shocking - total volt face, the NRRL's Coghill and Raper had released the top two strains of penicillium.
That's right, the top two strains that were then producing most of the Allies' military-bound penicillin - to the public American mold type collection in Washington where, as they told the readers of JAMA worldwide, "anyone" can get some at a "nominal charge".
!!!!!!!!
Didn't they know there was a war on ?
No word if Argentina's Washington DC based scientific attache quickly took a cab over, got some samples and sent them off to his friends in Germany.
Clearly, penicillin was never a viable secret military medical weapon - Florey and Richards were both , to put it kindly, completely deluded to ever think so.
Deluded by utopian visions of near-total purity.
Because unlike the Atomic Bomb and U-235, penicillin's starting material (the spores) were both common worldwide AND its production fully successful even in a highly impure (aka low tech) state.
This was what Fleming had discovered in 1928 but never acted upon - this was the key insight that Henry Dawson brought to the penicillin story, starting on October 16th 1940....
Saturday, January 19, 2013
Did Merck consultant A N Richards diss penicillin during the first two years of the war?
Read any "Pollyanna" history of wartime penicillin and you quickly garner the impression that wartime Washington's top medical research bureaucrat, AN Richards of the famous OSRD organization, first learned of penicillin when his former student Howard Florey dropped by in the Fall of 1941.
In my opinion : "Bullfeathers" !
Richards was the key outside consultant for Merck and had been so since 1931 , so key that he acted more like a trusted insider, rather than playing the traditional role of an external naysayer brought in to correct too much internal group-think.
Since November 1939, a full two years before Richards is traditionally described as first getting involved in "this 'ere pen-E- cil-in stuff", Merck had been working fitfully on trying to learn the structure of public domain natural penicillin with the hope its chemists could produce patentable, profitable "look alike" analogues.
Memo had flown back and forth and committee and board meetings had been called and minutes written.
Hard to believe that Richards the pharmaceutical expert consultant was not consulted formally and informally - ever - during those two years of internal Merck debate on the merits of seriously spending money on synthesizing penicillin.
But the silence from Merck and Richards on just what Richards said to Merck about the potential of penicillin between November 1939 and August 1941 is deafening.
It isn't at all like Richards or Merck to modestly not to claim credit for their early prescience on penicillin.
In fact Merck brass went to enormous length to do just so in the major article "Wartime Industrial Development of Penicillin in the United States", written and researched in the late 1970s (with exclusive access to secret Merck archives) by company senior executiveW H Helfand.
Mysteriously, Richards name is totally absent during this article's discussion of the two years of Merck debate about penicillin, before Florey arrives at Richards' doorstep in Philadelphia.
However Helfand's article quotes Merck executive Osgood Perkins recalling that despite a memo "from so-called experts urging Merck not to waste time on it", in 1940 the company top brass decided to grow penicillin with the aim of isolating its active ingredient.
Now Osgood Perkins was a famous actor of that era but he never worked for Merck.
However the equally famous Wall Street lawyer George W Perkins did - in fact he was the brother-in-law of the company president George W Merck and served as chief operating officer for several decades, including the war years.
(And like his brother in law, Perkins worked at the top of America's highly secret germ warfare program when America formally went to war but still kept a close eye on his company.)
But the quote is from Lennard Bickel's book on Howard Florey, Rise up to Life, and in it, Bickel says he quotes Merck executive Osgood Nichols (also referenced as Osgood Nicholls by Bickel) in conversation with AN Richards in the early 1960s.
(Osgood Nichols probably saw the memos while researching "By Their Fruits" , a book about Merck and Waksman.)
Now I have determined that Bickel did screw up names (but only slightly) in his book, so I feel certain we are looking at Nichols, not Perkins, for the source of this quote.
Richards is silent to Osgood as to who the so called experts might be (and surely he would know) but rushes to defend Florey.
Just exactly how Helfard screws all this so badly is hard to ken.
I suspect that those "so-called experts" included both the much honored Richards and the equally much-honored Columbia university medical researcher, Nobel prize winner and long time Merck consultant Dickinson Richards.
Dickinson worked literally next door to Henry Dawson, who did the most work on penicillin in North America between 1940 and 1941.
So this Dr Richards (no relation to AN Richards) saw the world's then most extensive penicillin efforts (microbiological production, chemical research and clinical efforts with the seriously ill) close up and personal every day.
Thus his opinion on penicillin , as a Merck medical consultant since 1935, between 1940 to 1941 had to be valuable to Merck - but what was it ?
I suspect one of the "the so-called experts" who dissed penicillin was Dickinson Richards.
Why ? Because Helfand does not mention Merck offering to help Dickinson Richards' floor mate Dawson in his penicillin efforts in this very long article tasked with detailing everything and anything positive that Merck had done on penicillin before Florey arrived.
(But we do know what a third outside consultant to Merck said about penicillin because Helfand does quote him extensively.)
Soon to be Nobel Prize winner Selman Waksman is recorded as being strongly in favour of working up penicillin.
I believe that Helfand's job in this article was to recall all the good news and elide any bad news on Merck and penicillin 1939-1941 and he did his job rather well.
I think it would have rather spoiled the seamless panty lines of the traditional "Pollyanna" version of wartime penicillin served up by academic historians, to have revealed that AN Richards knew all about Merck's dilatory efforts with penicillin for two years but did little to speed it along. (And may have even of dissed it.)
Much better is to say that as soon as Florey first told Richards about the wondrous penicillin, Richards leaps into patriotic action to help Britain (cue The Special Relationship) and soon the world has penicillin oozing out of its pores....
In my opinion : "Bullfeathers" !
Richards was the key outside consultant for Merck and had been so since 1931 , so key that he acted more like a trusted insider, rather than playing the traditional role of an external naysayer brought in to correct too much internal group-think.
Since November 1939, a full two years before Richards is traditionally described as first getting involved in "this 'ere pen-E- cil-in stuff", Merck had been working fitfully on trying to learn the structure of public domain natural penicillin with the hope its chemists could produce patentable, profitable "look alike" analogues.
Memo had flown back and forth and committee and board meetings had been called and minutes written.
Hard to believe that Richards the pharmaceutical expert consultant was not consulted formally and informally - ever - during those two years of internal Merck debate on the merits of seriously spending money on synthesizing penicillin.
But the silence from Merck and Richards on just what Richards said to Merck about the potential of penicillin between November 1939 and August 1941 is deafening.
It isn't at all like Richards or Merck to modestly not to claim credit for their early prescience on penicillin.
In fact Merck brass went to enormous length to do just so in the major article "Wartime Industrial Development of Penicillin in the United States", written and researched in the late 1970s (with exclusive access to secret Merck archives) by company senior executiveW H Helfand.
Mysteriously, Richards name is totally absent during this article's discussion of the two years of Merck debate about penicillin, before Florey arrives at Richards' doorstep in Philadelphia.
However Helfand's article quotes Merck executive Osgood Perkins recalling that despite a memo "from so-called experts urging Merck not to waste time on it", in 1940 the company top brass decided to grow penicillin with the aim of isolating its active ingredient.
Now Osgood Perkins was a famous actor of that era but he never worked for Merck.
However the equally famous Wall Street lawyer George W Perkins did - in fact he was the brother-in-law of the company president George W Merck and served as chief operating officer for several decades, including the war years.
(And like his brother in law, Perkins worked at the top of America's highly secret germ warfare program when America formally went to war but still kept a close eye on his company.)
But the quote is from Lennard Bickel's book on Howard Florey, Rise up to Life, and in it, Bickel says he quotes Merck executive Osgood Nichols (also referenced as Osgood Nicholls by Bickel) in conversation with AN Richards in the early 1960s.
(Osgood Nichols probably saw the memos while researching "By Their Fruits" , a book about Merck and Waksman.)
Now I have determined that Bickel did screw up names (but only slightly) in his book, so I feel certain we are looking at Nichols, not Perkins, for the source of this quote.
Richards is silent to Osgood as to who the so called experts might be (and surely he would know) but rushes to defend Florey.
Just exactly how Helfard screws all this so badly is hard to ken.
I suspect that those "so-called experts" included both the much honored Richards and the equally much-honored Columbia university medical researcher, Nobel prize winner and long time Merck consultant Dickinson Richards.
Dickinson worked literally next door to Henry Dawson, who did the most work on penicillin in North America between 1940 and 1941.
So this Dr Richards (no relation to AN Richards) saw the world's then most extensive penicillin efforts (microbiological production, chemical research and clinical efforts with the seriously ill) close up and personal every day.
Thus his opinion on penicillin , as a Merck medical consultant since 1935, between 1940 to 1941 had to be valuable to Merck - but what was it ?
I suspect one of the "the so-called experts" who dissed penicillin was Dickinson Richards.
Why ? Because Helfand does not mention Merck offering to help Dickinson Richards' floor mate Dawson in his penicillin efforts in this very long article tasked with detailing everything and anything positive that Merck had done on penicillin before Florey arrived.
(But we do know what a third outside consultant to Merck said about penicillin because Helfand does quote him extensively.)
Soon to be Nobel Prize winner Selman Waksman is recorded as being strongly in favour of working up penicillin.
I believe that Helfand's job in this article was to recall all the good news and elide any bad news on Merck and penicillin 1939-1941 and he did his job rather well.
I think it would have rather spoiled the seamless panty lines of the traditional "Pollyanna" version of wartime penicillin served up by academic historians, to have revealed that AN Richards knew all about Merck's dilatory efforts with penicillin for two years but did little to speed it along. (And may have even of dissed it.)
Much better is to say that as soon as Florey first told Richards about the wondrous penicillin, Richards leaps into patriotic action to help Britain (cue The Special Relationship) and soon the world has penicillin oozing out of its pores....
Monday, January 14, 2013
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.)
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.......
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.......
Sunday, September 5, 2010
1941 penicillin:Porton Down GERM WARFARE yes, patients no
The Florey Archives at London's Royal Society has a Florey letter (HF/1/3/2/1/19 )(previously 98HF.35.1.19) that didn't get shredded but probably was intended to be.
Dated December 4th 1941, it is addressed to Doctor "Cameron" at "Porton" and mentions scientists "Courtice" and "Gaddum".
Florey says ICI penicillin is at Porton and he is glad that Gaddum wants lots and lots of penicillin.
In December 1941, no one had much penicillin - certainly no patients in UK got any - and only Dawson's patients in the USA.
This must be some of the very first ICI penicillin ever produced - not for patients - but for 'Porton' .
One of Florey's very closest of his (very few) friends was Paul Fildes, very near the top of Britain's WWII Germ Warfare effort, which was centred at Porton Down.
That place has been for a century Britain's leading gas and germ warfare centre - in fact one of the top centres in the world for this highly secret activity.
Florey's first biographer, Bickel, indicated that in 1939, Florey had been asked by the War Office if he would be a consultant in 'poison gas research' (probably because of his proven skill in doing lethal experiments on small animals and his middle-aged chickenhawk attitude to the upcoming war.)
Florey had agreed.
I have always wonder if Florey's mystery month , mid July-mid August 1941, was somehow connected with him having informal talks on germ and gas warfare with various American researchers.
Certainly, Florey go top clearance for his trip to America from US and British officials - penicillin ,alone, seemed too unproven to warrant this kind of assistance.
Now Penicillin and Porton is like Jeckyll and Hyde to British audiences - no wonder this letter has never been mentioned in all the hagiography on penicillin and Florey.....
GR - Gordon Roy- Cameron *
FC -Frederick Colin- Courtice *
JH -John Henry- Gaddum
* Part of Florey's power was his cultivation of a network among the sizable Aussie contingent working in the UK - these two are but a tiny part of this group. Florey also cultivated ex pat britons who had taught in Australia.
Dated December 4th 1941, it is addressed to Doctor "Cameron" at "Porton" and mentions scientists "Courtice" and "Gaddum".
Florey says ICI penicillin is at Porton and he is glad that Gaddum wants lots and lots of penicillin.
In December 1941, no one had much penicillin - certainly no patients in UK got any - and only Dawson's patients in the USA.
This must be some of the very first ICI penicillin ever produced - not for patients - but for 'Porton' .
One of Florey's very closest of his (very few) friends was Paul Fildes, very near the top of Britain's WWII Germ Warfare effort, which was centred at Porton Down.
That place has been for a century Britain's leading gas and germ warfare centre - in fact one of the top centres in the world for this highly secret activity.
Florey's first biographer, Bickel, indicated that in 1939, Florey had been asked by the War Office if he would be a consultant in 'poison gas research' (probably because of his proven skill in doing lethal experiments on small animals and his middle-aged chickenhawk attitude to the upcoming war.)
Florey had agreed.
I have always wonder if Florey's mystery month , mid July-mid August 1941, was somehow connected with him having informal talks on germ and gas warfare with various American researchers.
Certainly, Florey go top clearance for his trip to America from US and British officials - penicillin ,alone, seemed too unproven to warrant this kind of assistance.
Now Penicillin and Porton is like Jeckyll and Hyde to British audiences - no wonder this letter has never been mentioned in all the hagiography on penicillin and Florey.....
GR - Gordon Roy- Cameron *
FC -Frederick Colin- Courtice *
JH -John Henry- Gaddum
* Part of Florey's power was his cultivation of a network among the sizable Aussie contingent working in the UK - these two are but a tiny part of this group. Florey also cultivated ex pat britons who had taught in Australia.
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