The poor poor pitiful slimed - always misunderstood , always maligned ...

In 1928, the year Fleming discovered and then rejected (three times) the penicillium that makes lifesaving penicillin, there were about two billion humans on the planet.

That year , tens and tens of millions of miscarriages and premature deaths were caused or hastened by bacteria and virus.

Everybody knew somebody who had died from bacteria or virus - everyone knew the primeval fear of raging epidemics.

That same year tens and tens of hundreds of people died from fungus - their individual deaths - spotted here and there almost at random- usually just seen as the result of eating 'bad' food.

Except in a few remote cultures, almost no one knew anyone who had died from fungus.

Yet in the world of cultural horrors and monsters , did we see this reality reflected at all ?

Of course not - no giant viruses or bacteria stalking the innocent maiden of movie screen and genre literature ---- it was always some faceless, shapeless, smelly, flowing, slimy gooey thing : fungus, in other words !

One suspects that this is because the virus or bacteria seems invisible ( though if we walk across the rocks of a shallow stream, the slime on the rocks is bacteria made visible).

But while most mold colonies are as equally invisible as bacteria colonies, the fungus frequently grows to highly visible sizes - easily drawfing even the bacteria colonies force feed to visible size on lab petri dishes.

In our homes or out in forests , molds easily grow big, fast, furry and slimy --- and always are extremely colorful.

The slime mold (a mold indeed as the word is understood by all but experts, just not a fungus mold) actually moves and quivers - a real life monster just waiting to be scaled up to the movie screen.

But molds are definitely the least harmful to humans of the big four of microbes life forms - more a danger to plant life than to humans and animals.

They simply are - to turn a phrase around - in sight and in mind ....

Monstrous penicillium makes Marvellous penicillin

HP Lovecraft died before injections of penicillin were freely on offer but I highly doubt he would have accepted any if they had been available.

His particular set of monsters and horrors were slippery slimy moldy thingies and the thought to him of someone voluntarily polluting their sacred human temple with the pee and poop of such terrors was literally beyond the ken.

Popular culture hasn't really moved on from Lovecraft's deepest fears -- it still sees giant gooey slimy dissolving fluid lifeforms as the most terrifying of the 'monstrous made visible'.

But once outside the movieplex, we are quite willing to have white crystal-pure 'beta lactam' antibiotics from huge factories put into our 21st century human temples - despite half-knowing that the pure white powder actually originates as the time-honored waste excretions of Lovecraft's still terrifying green slime.

Penicillin (today's all-white version anyway) seems safely far far away from the moldy smelling blue-green slime that we , doctors and patients  alike, still fear is rotting out our teenager's basement apartment and making our worksite "toxic" and "sick".

Because consistency is truly 'the hobgoblin of little minds' and we are broad minded adults here , are we not ?

1928-1948 : 'normal' scientists and doctors loved penicillin but detested penicillium

What if Fleming's team , in early 1929, HAD easily purified penicillin and then synthesized and patented analogues of it ?

Contrary to myth , there never was any 1928-1948 resistance, at all, by normal doctors and scientists to the injecting of penicillin to save lives - just provided it was the penicillins that we have today.


These penicillins are all made by someone else while someone else will gladly come and deliver them to any doctor's door.

Just as chemists have worked hard to ensure these modern penicillins have a long and profitable shelf life in doctors' offices.

Someone else, actually lots of 'somebody elses', have also worked very hard to ensure that all the safe dosages and bad side effects have been found and are made are clear to everyone - laity and GPs alike.

These modern penicillins cum beta lactams emerge as crystal pure white and are usually at least partially semi-synthesized.

They are made in gleaming porcelain-white factories in high tech stainless steel tanks - operated by men mostly.

Men who almost never even seen the yucky green slime hidden inside those opaque stainless tanks.

Nature and the natural has been removed as far as possible from the scene - Man instead, is everywhere.

It would still be best if Man had synthesized penicillin totally out of basic chemicals off the shelf but that can't be.

So while the slime still does all the actual hard work (actually makes the tasty steak), Man (medical and scientific PR) does its best to sell the sizzle instead.

The green slime is rendered as Man-made as possible before anyone has to see or touch the stuff.

Yes, normal doctors and scientists have always loved modern penicillin - it was just ancient natural penicillium molds that they (largely unconsciously) feared and detested.

Fleming in 1929 , Florey in 1940 and 1941, Dawson in 1941 and 1942 : no one responds to their Good News gospels

All three detailed to the entire world of doctors of the wide anti-bacterial potency, the extremely low toxicity and the ease of production of natural penicillin in any hospital lab .

Yet in the many published books on early penicillin there are almost no clear accounts of any  - let alone many - doctors responding to all those articles with a request for some of the starter penicillium spores.

There were no shortage of patients dying of penicillin-treatable diseases in those days.

Just seemingly a shortage of doctors willing to use elbow grease to make the penicillin to save lives - a job a later doctor admitted could be easily done by 'any' hospital lab technician.

And I just don't buy that.

I remain convinced that in the medical world from 1928 to 1948,  there were many, many hard working doctors willing to practise very heroic medicine and willing devote long hours to saving the dying.

So why the moral holdback in the sole case of penicillin - particularly when it will probably turn out to be the easiest to make, safest lifesaver to deliver that will ever be found ?

Its about the mold - not the medicine

The answer, I suggest, lies back beyond the medicine to the mold itself - our ancient (and ongoing) muddled relationship with yeasts, mushrooms and molds.

Generally we like yeasts and mushrooms but detest molds - though all are but different visible forms of the same basic being - the fungus.

To over-simplify terribly, we should think of mushrooms as the above-ground flowering heads of underground molds with the yeasts very much like the tiny spores those mushroom heads' periodically release.

Some yeast/spores are good - bread, beer - others spoil food and ruin whole crops.

Some mushrooms are among the tastiest of foods - while other ours are among our fastest fatal poisons.

Moreover by 1900 ,most of us olny saw yeast and mushrooms as divorced from nature - bought packaged in stores.

By contrast, we didn't really consciously buy mold - all by itself - in stores : though we did buy mold-infected cheeses instead.

Instead, in those largely pre-plastic polymer days - we did see mold in nature and in our homes almost daily ---- and hated doing so.

Mold spreading and spoiling our foods , ruining any clothing made of natural products stored in dark damp warm places, rotting wet wood fixtures, growing vigorously up dank dark basement walls.

Mold seemed associated with death and decay - who hadn't come across an animal body dug up by a dog and seen the mold threads running all through the shrunken corpse ?

It even smelt bad ( actually we simply associated its smell with negative situations !)

The fact that it was slimy, slippery, and jelly like was the worst.

Though we often like like materials and even food that is slippery and jelly-like.

But mold only grew by decaying something else : a black spot quickly became a furry and slimy jelly only by visibly dissolving what was once seemingly dry and solid with fixed boundaries  into a watery gell with fluid boundaries.

Now humanity isn't that upset by violent death - not by the way we love war, murders and the slaughter of animals.

And the molds rarely kill what they consume - they usually feed on the those who have died naturally or at others' hands.

So it it isn't the deadness of death they evoke - only the decay of death - the breaching of definite boundaries between the fixedness of solid substances and the fluid state of liquids.

A  mold (gell) is neither solid or liquid - or rather, worse, it is both.

The ever changing slimy mold is the very symbol of modernization or globalization - the mixing and intermingling of everything and anything in ever new unexpected ways.

By contrast, the 100% pure rationally-made chemical synthetic, built from the bottom up by chemists out of known consistent pure atoms, with consistent known repeatable results, is the very symbol of Modernity.

I buy Roger Griffin's thesis - even if he doesn't - that all Modernity (not just Fascist Modernity) was a reaction against Late Victorian modernization and globalization that progressive moderns both sought and feared.

So I see this twenty year battle (between using slime mold to save lives or waiting until it has a chemical synthetic before doing so) as a key battle between Modernity and modernization.

Perhaps even the key battle : the result being the end of Modernity and the birth of a post-Modernity far more willing to seek power-with-nature rather than only wanting power-over-nature....

Dawson's penicillin 1940-1945 : made in the Public Domain , FOR the Public Domain

Howard Florey's penicillin 1940-1945, by way of pointed contrast, was Pure penicillin for Purely military use only.

He believed that penicillium were tiny ancient life  and so , by definition , linear progressive Evolution's "Yesterday's Men" .

He was sure civilized scientific Man was bound to make penicillin better and cheaper than some slimy mold in a sort of  witch's caldron .

But, in fact , chemists actually needed hundreds of millions of dollars - in 1940s dollars - together with tens of thousands of tons of structural and stainless steel  to make a whole series of chemical factories, just to get started on making penicillin.

All those big plants, together with lots of staff, a whole lot of energy and many corrosive solvents were Man's way of making penicillin.

They needed to be build expensively strong in order to safely apply high pressure and high & cold temperature over and over in many steps.

All this to replicate what a incredibly tiny fungus cell (sixty pico grams in mass) could produce at ordinary temperatures and ordinary pressures out of a little dirty water and a bit of decaying organic material.

That tiny fungus factory weighed about one billion trillion times less than all of the factories needed to make the basic chemicals that went into the final penicillin synthetic factory.

So if you thought that perhaps the tiny fungus could do the job better and cheaper, then you were with Dawson.

Now, just as how you viewed the possibility of the continuing viability of small beings coloured the type of penicillin factory you preferred, it seemed to also colour who you thought the penicillin should help.

So, Florey: big factory penicillin for big armies only ; Dawson : small factory penicillin for small people everywhere.....

Penicillin : both its mold and its morals seem to hang out in basements and sewers

Rollo Martins the Canadian naif to Harry Lime's evil...

When I started looking into wartime penicillin, back in late 2004, I quickly felt like that other Canadian , Rollo Martins, learning far more about the immoral underbelly of  the official - and sunny - penicillin story than either of us wanted to know.


About all I originally knew about wartime penicillin was from recalling a CBC TV production (originally from Britain ?) that involved a policeman dying of a cut from a rose bush and a doctor named Fleming .

(I had seen it in the late 1950s, back when I was about eight years old.)

That and the fact that the peacetime penicillin clan was a firm family friend - having saved my family many times from serious illness.

I had no idea of penicillin's Canadian connection - like virtually everyone I wasn't aware there even was one.

I gradually and dimly recalled penicillin coming up in a great British film called The Third Man.

I looked at a video of it again and then, on a visit to my brother in Britain, read a great book on how the film and novella came to be.

From both video and the book about the film and novella, I got a strong sense of the extraordinary moral over (and under) tones that penicillin has and that the other three hundred or so existing commercial antibiotics completely lack.

I am only guessing why The Third Man is rated , not near the top of the all time best British films (a dead cert that), but at the very toppermost of the very top : but for me it is the penicillin sub-text.

Britain, unlike Japan and Germany, had really and truly lost the war and so its wartime scientific discoveries like penicillin, jets and radar were seen as absolutely essential to retaining the British sense of collective self esteem.

And so for Harry Lime to muddy penicillin's (and Britain's) good name by , in effect, using it to murder helpless kids , was for them a worse crime against humanity than anything short of Auschwitz.

Sewers as a metaphor for both good - and evil 

Dark ,cool ,dank, concrete sewers and basements is where penicillin the green and gold agent of life actually originally came from - but it was also the true home of that agent of death, Harry Lime .

This was a masterstroke from Greene and Reed ,the one Ying and Yang symbol that puts this film over the top.....