NYC World's Fair 1939-1940 : in a world facing an an apocalyptic war, a synthetic wonderland that presumed never an apocalyptic war

In the Spring and Summer of 1945 , the few people still left alive in war-seared Belarus,Ukraine and Poland could easily spot the difference between the new-fashioned synthetic food promised at New York's 1939-1940 World's Fair and good old-fashioned natural food.

If one looked hard enough, one could still natural food growing all by itself close by - without aid of any human effort - shoots, roots, fruits and berries  growing in the hidden nooks and crannies of forests and fields.

From acorns, oaks ...

I can't speak confidently about the impact upon the adult population of the 1950s of the startling news that all the world's best lifesaving medicines were being made by tiny, weak, slimy beings.

The tiny and the despised besting the smartest chemists in the universe

savior of wartime Lazarus was born in a BASEMENT, not a barn

Since there are all kinds of perfectly rational explanations as to why the 'miracle' (as even admittedly atheistic scientists described life-saving natural penicillin) emerged in the times of the darkest depths of Hitler and Stalin's terror, we know that God couldn't possibly be involved, because He is irrational, right ?

Thus, as we are all agreed that the pairing of life-granting Lovecraftian penicillium slime, the lowest of the low, and mass-death-dealing war efforts of humanity's highest civilizations was just mere, sheer, pure coincidence, let us all least enjoy what a symbolic gift to narrative non fiction that coincidence really was.

At Columbia-Cornell Medicial, pre-war modernity ain't dead yet

The website for New York City's Columbia-Cornell medical centre is finally touting the two famous universities' involvement in the triumph of wartime's natural penicillin.

So of course, the collective minds at C-C Medical choose to emphasize the project that quietly failed at their institute, not the one that succeeded beyond all measure.

For what they are really marking is wartime Cornell's failure to produce synthetic penicillin at commercial prices and in commercial grade purity.

October 1940 closing of the New York World's Fair & 'The World of Yesterday'

One can only imagine that after reading about or witnessing the exuberant optimism still omnipresent at the October 27th 1940 closing of the 1939-1940 New York World's Fair, many mommies and daddies apparently went straight to bed ... and made babies.

Lots and lots of babies.

How else to account for the world's near simultaneous Boom in Baby births a few months later in 1941---- this,  after a decade of steady decline ?

1945's Natural Penicillin - and 1945's synthetic Nuclear Weapons - birthed 1960s Environmental Movement

No one who studies the matter doubts that mid-1950s fears about global fallout was the spur to today's environmental movements (and related human rights movements) that question the value of unbridled white European technology and science.

But you will have to be very,very old indeed to accept that 1945's unexpected triumph of natural penicillin from tiny primitive basement slime over the best chemical minds and laboratories in the world hit as hard a death blow to western scientism and hubris as the fallout from 1956's Castle Bravo nuclear test ever did.

distorting WWII with SOME of the facts ...

Why lie, as a historian, when you need simply instead to select a large number of widely agreed upon WWII facts from the infinitely broad and deep ocean of agreed upon facts about that war ?

To demonstrate the growth of Big Science, gentle historian, simply compare the 5 tonne Panzer I tank of 1939, with its half inch of armour and its low tech magazine loaded machine gun as its only armament with the 70 tonne Tiger II tank of 1945 with its 10 inches of armour and its ultra long barrelled ultra high velocity 88mm tank-killing gun.

Plentitude or Plenticide : Janus Manhattan 1945

Manhattan was long regarded as Modernity's 'special' city, home to most of the world's skyscrapers (and centres of eugenic research).

But a Manhattan university campus was also the first home of Adorno & Horkheimer's modest little mimeographed effort entitled "Dialectic of the Enlightenment".

WWII Columbia filters natural penicillin AND natural uranium

It is easy to see how Columbia University's two wartime Manhattan Projects differed : after all one saved countless thousands of lives while the other one caused countless thousands of deaths.

But it never hurts to consider how much they had in common - together - set against other parts of the Allied wartime nuclear and antibiotics effort.

Synthetics : everything and anything -- from nothing

Natural antibiotics : perhaps a something, underneath everything

As a naive little child, I was fascinated - like a white mouse before a cobra - by the audacious claims of Fifties synthetic scientists - those modern day alchemists of chemistry and physics.

Manhattan '45 : Janus year (on the Janus campus) in the Janus city

Ah, yes the year 1945 : it was the best of times , it was the worst of times.

It just all very much depended on who you chose to listen to.

To the many boosters of the baby-killing/war-ending Manhattan Project (like its leader General Leslie Groves) the year had given America the potential for global mass nuclear destruction 'too cheap to meter' : a future so bright that the world's morticians would have to wear shades.

Big Science, Big Modern Science had won the war against barbarians from the pre-scientific Dark Ages. The war's successful conclusion suggested that 1945 might just be the apogee of Modernity, all its centuries of promises finally fulfilled.

But to Theodor Adorno, Hiroshima, the Katyn Forest and Auschwitz were but the signs of the inevitable collective fall of Modernity and of the Enlightenment, no matter what varied ideological flag the mods had chosen to masquerade under.

(Cue 1945 as the nadir of Modernity and the birth year of post-Modernity.)

Indeed the tiny island of Manhattan, the former wartime home of both Groves and Adorno, had much to contribute to the global dialectic stew that year.

For the Manhattan nuclear Project seemed fully capable of delivering death to the globe at wholesale rates, promising to ensure hundreds of millions or more dead at the push of a red button.

Meanwhile, Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project had just as dramatically brought the promise of a normal life of three score and ten to hundreds of millions or more who might otherwise expect to die prematurely from bacterial infections.

So if Manhattan's blast, heat and radiation didn't get you, its naturally brewed penicillin just might save you.

And all this happened (nuclear weapons, Adorno's musings, natural penicillin) on the Janus like campus of Columbia University in that eternally Janus like city of Manhattan in the Janus like year of 1945.

Okay, Hollywood fiction meisters, do you think you can top that ?

How to be intellectually invisible : criticize the modern era's grand narratives --- without offering up one of your own

The Modern Era (1875-1965) was very tolerant of criticisms of its rules - as long as your criticism played by those same rules.

So individual Modern intellectuals might disagree profoundly with the content of your particular grand narrative but they still greatly admired the fact that you had one.

Dozens of major ideologies - isms of all sorts and shapes - poured forth in that age - each vigorously disagreeing with all others,  except for the Modern Era's one overarching grand narrative : that to make a credible critique of Modern grand narrative, one must have one as well.

It was not the time for guardedly measured criticisms : it was an age of Alpha Male ideologies and their Alpha Male critics : dream (and critique) big and bold --- or stay home.

Martin Henry Dawson differed profoundly with this world : perhaps most defiantly in denying the need for grand critiques against grand narratives.

As a result, he simply doesn't figure as an intellectual (by word and pen) critic of his era.

He was, instead, a critic by deed .

He carried on his efforts to secure life-saving penicillin for those young patients deemed by the Allied scientific cum medical establishment as lives unworthy of life-granting penicillin even at the cost of his own life.

But he succeeded in the end and his vision of penicillin-for-all, particularly during a total war in an era that denied the universality of all humanity, was to be profoundly influential in the post-Modern era.

Dawson did not destroy the Modern era - it did that mostly on its own.

But his Manhattan project (the wartime mass production and mass distribution of natural penicillin) sure helped speed it along ...

1945 was a triumph for modernity AND postmodernity

And that can't possibly be !

It would be as if Matter and Anti-Matter went through a revolving door together and yet both emerged equally triumphant.

At the time ( just after September 1945) most militarily-oriented accounts of the end of WWII certainly played the Allied victory as a win-win result for the forces of Modernity against a threatened return to a barbaric dark age --- and many military-oriented accounts of WWII still spin it that way.

'Modern Big Science (here insert radar, jets, atomic bomb and penicillin perhaps) beats back masses of fiercely barbaric atavists'.

But some prescient scholars , even in 1945 , people more attuned to changes in fashions in philosophy and to changes in deep broad cultural life certainly saw that that Dresden, Hiroshima, Auschwitz , the Katyn Forest and the Fall of Singapore had opened up breaches in the old certitudes that time and sunshine couldn't heal.

So seventy years later we can still have dozens and dozens of new books every year focussed on the meaning of the events of 1945 emerging (as it were) from two separate but parallel universes.

1945 is laid out in these parallel but widely separated streams of books as either the birth of modern Big Science and a triumph for modern progressive rational planning ---- or as the beginning of the end of the 400 year old Enlightenment Project.

First, let me make it clear that all those who saw 1945 as a triumph for Enlightenment and Modernity were sincere - and those who still hold these views are equally sincere.

But being sincere and being correct are not the same.

I see this being the result of an inevitable mental time lag between when truly philosophy-shredding events occur and when humanity correctly assesses their meaning.

During that time lag, modernity-besotted scholars can celebrate Vannevar Bush for both developing a differential analyser (basically an aiming device designed to accurately drop a shell or bomb down a pickle barrel inside a distant military plant) and for leading the development of the atomic bomb - which could miss the infamous pickle barrel by miles and still destroy the plant (and the entire city surrounding it as well).

Ouch ! What ever else these academics think they might be doing - being rationally consistent certainly isn't one of them.

Bush and the American Air Force strategic bomber proponents  had claimed - for years before, during and after WWII - that the war could be quickly and humanely won by highly accurate precision bombing.

Slow but steady infantry fighting, like slow but steady democracy, they felt was simply not up for defeating absolute evils like Hitler and Tojo.

Superheroes with superweapons were needed to impose extralegal violence , all to quickly restore justice and peace.

Indeed, the American Air Force's single bomb on Nagasaki did 'quickly' end the war --- albeit six years after it began .

 But Nagasaki's target aiming results could hardly be called accurate --- despite conditions being virtually ideal to demonstrate precise bombing --- if it actually existed anywhere outside its supporters' minds.

Similarly , throughout WWII Vannevar Bush thought natural penicillin was totally unfit for use as a medicine.

He pushed instead for penicillin to first become a man-made chemical synthetic before seeking wide public use, thereby delaying its mass introduction for precious years during an all-out Total War.

What he actually accepted credit for however, at war's end , was the unlikely triumph of natural penicillin.

Modernity's 1945 big triumphs, in other words, when more closely examined were actually modernity's biggest failures -- triumphs instead for postmodernity.

Hence my journal's focus on wartime Gotham and its doubly twin Manhattan Projects.

On one side of wartime Gotham's Janus face , modernity's failures to precisely craft the Carl Norden bombsight and Merck synthetic penicillin .

On the other side, postmodernity : Columbia University's 'close is good enough' Atomic bomb (and the Grumman close-in fighter-bomber) together with Pfizer/Dawson's slime-produced natural penicillin.

I think the subject matter for my journal is both a dramatic page-turner story for people who enjoy exciting narrative nonfiction - and a good time and place to look to discover when, how and why modernity failed and postmodernity climbed out of the wreckage.

Because modernity failed but didn't die - it lives on inside the minds of our climate deniers inhabiting almost all the places of power and wealth.

And unless we can make them see that their gods have failed , the future global debacle they have planned for all of us will make WWII look pretty petty ante ...

I'm a thinkin' : maybe its the Gotham EIGHT ?

I've always regarded the number of Gotham's 'unfits' who rescued natural lifesaving penicillin and set it free to do good as being just seven in number but now I am thinking that I was wrong.


First, the two unfit clinicians, Dr Henry Dawson and his assistant Dr Thomas Hunter.

Then three other unfits who greatly assisted them (Dawson's wife Marjorie Granger Dawson, his friend and ex-patient Floyd Odlum , and his ex-patient Dr Dante Colitti).

Finally, the two unfit patients, Charles Aronson and Ms H. H. , whose continued survival under Dawson's pioneering treatment, despite repeated setbacks, allowed the program time to finally succeed in spades.

But I now realize that these seven unfits didn't need to have gotten involved in the first place.

Not if the eighth Gotham 'unfit' , the penicillium notatum. had been accepted on its own considerable merits instead of being dismissed on sight as too small, too simple, too weak and too too disgusting.

But the God of the Modern Era (from the 1870s to the 1960s) was always on the side of the biggest battalions and the Moderns saw most of the world as being on the unworthy-of-life side of the fit/unfit question.

But they were dead wrong.

Because in fact the greatest medical blessing this world has ever seen was brought to us by a handful of unfit doctors serving unfit patients with unfit medicine.

Their unexpected victory in 1945 did not spell the immediate end of the Modern Era and the immediate rise of our present post-Modern Era.

 But it certainly spelt the beginning of that end...

Impurity IS Danger : Mary Douglas explains the revulsion towards natural penicillin

In the relatively new academic fields of Horror Theory and Monster Theory , Mary Douglas's 1966 classic "Purity and Danger"  is frequently evoked.

In the ancient academic field of penicillin studies, Douglas's Big Idea has never been braced ----  until now.

Her stunningly original thesis was that "dirt" is merely 'order out of place' : that we believe that gardening soil 'belongs' strictly in the garden field and everything is in order while it remains there.

It can never properly belong among the bed sheets.

Pure (that is , in the right place only) gardening soil is not intrinsically dirty, impure or dangerous - just as bed sheets, on beds, are equally pure and 'in order' .

But have either item leave the mental box we have inserted them into and danger, dirt and impurity quickly emerges.

They are now dynamically fluid hybrids - fused beings - a little garden soil and a little bed sheet with much of our fear coming from the uncertainty over just how much the fused creature is of each.

Douglas also does discuss the opposite of fusion - fission.

This is when a normally solid dry complete object (say a living body) becomes a dynamically uncertain mixture of part solid dry normal body and part mold-dissolved gooey wet decaying nothingness.

This produces another hybrid that crosses mental borders - with the living being solid, dry and complete - while the decayed dead is wet , dissolving and incomplete.

Something similar happens early on when as children we realize that the cooked whole fish, still biologically complete and detailed , will later emerge from us as just a pile of shapeless gooey feces.

This putrefaction of a single being, for all of us, is as least as disgusting and disturbing as any fused being.

Physically, we the living are totally unharmed by the fact that penicillium threads will soon weave their way through the dead body of our beloved in their coffin.

But mentally, that image shakes us to our core.

And that image and dozens like it centring on our revulsion to molds crippled our use of natural penicillin for twenty years : from 1928 to 1948.

Quite quickly, after only a few weeks work in 1928, it was shown that natural penicillium mold juice was both harmless and a great lifesaver.

Rather like oranges are to scurvy threatened sailors on the seas for a long time - a small amount of active Vitamin C buried in a tasty impure mixture of dozens of others of non-toxic materials.

But for about twenty wasted years, Normal science and scientists/doctors ( including the man who first determined it was perfectly safe - Alexander Fleming !) absolutely refused to save the lives of the dying.

Not if that meant having to accept the use of natural - impure - penicillium juice inside the temple of the human body.

Rationally they claimed to accepted the 1928 evidence as a scientific fact (and they were never able to disprove it) --- but emotionally they could not.

"Impurity IS Danger" was their unconscious mantra - and they consciously found ways to rationalize this emotional response into excuses as why they declined to use natural penicillin to save the dying.

Hippocrates weep !

the NON-TOXIC mold - ten billion served since Oct 16 1940 : the story of natural penicillin ... and how we almost lost it

Every time we hear about a building closing its doors because of toxic mold , let us always remind ourselves that for every door that closes sometimes a thousand or a million , nay billions upon billions,  open in its place.


Yes ,some strains of some mold species , under highly specific environmental conditions,  are somewhat toxic (even highly toxic to immune weak individuals).

But other molds - such as the mold that produces the original natural penicillin - are resoundingly non-toxic and continue to be the biological base from which almost all of today's best anti-bacterial agents are still made.

Thanks to the herd-immunity-like effect that happened when public domain natural penicillin became ultra cheap and globally available , I estimate ten billion of us have lead healthier happier lives since Henry Dawson gave the first antibiotics injection on October 16th 1940.

Cheap ,widely available penicillin allowed even poor nations to reduce the incidence of endemic pools of pathogenic strains of common virulent bacteria among their poor and the rurally isolated.

These national pools of poverty, isolation and infectious diseases had kept these diseases globally endemic for thousands of years .

For example, a short twenty years after penicillin's introduction, Rheumatic Fever (until 1960 the leading cause of school age death due to infection) quickly became something that younger doctors only read about in a medical history book - but never themselves saw in their entire careers.

So loudly curse the toxic molds - but spare a moment to silently thank the Non-Toxic mold - saving lives for seventy five wonderful years as of next October 16th 2015 .

Because as once famous advertising firm Ayer's reminds us, we almost lost natural penicillin - thanks to the best of Allied science - it almost got away....

Meet the "GOTHAM SEVEN"

Their leader, Dr Henry Dawson, dying of Myasthenia Gravis (MG) with deadly bulbar nerve involvement.

By the end , his MG crisis were ever more frequent and he was reduced to working out of a wheelchair, with oxygen assist.

WWI poison gas and too much time in damp trenches hadn't helped his lungs now threatened by bulbar nerve failings.

His foot and shoulder had also been severely wounded in the war, resulting in months spent in hospitals recovering.

His wife and helpmate, Marjorie Granger Dawson, had been born with congenital hip problems and no amount of operations had helped - she walked , but with a cane.

His clinical assistant , Thomas H Hunter. Polio had left him with two legs paralyzed so he got about with two crutches.

Former Dawson patient (and Dawson's great behind-the-scenes influence within the powerful WPB ) , financier Floyd Odlum.

The Warren Buffett of his age, he was crippled by rheumatoid arthritis while stressing about American unpreparedness for total war.

He was wracked with pain for the rest of his life and only really comfortable submersed in a warm water swimming pool.

Another former Dawson patient, Dr Dante Colitti

Years spent in hospital while doctors struggled to save his life from TB of the spine left him determined to become a surgeon despite his arthritis of the spine.

A condition which left him a hunchback and required him to use crutches.

The medical establishment rejected his services - partly because he was also catholic and Italian-American.

When he saw his chance he delighted in emulating Dawson , by tweaking the noses of the medically powerfuls by getting scarce penicillin for a dying baby via an appeal to the Hearst newspaper empire.

Miss H : Dawson's first SBE patient in which is can be said for sure that his penicillin alone saved her life.

But SBE casts its net wide and with her , it also damaged her uterus so badly she couldn't have children and left her blind in one eye. But she hung on, despite all the new operations and hospital stays, and thrived.

Her continued survival was crucial to answering the many doubters of Dawson's use of precious penicillin on the useless SBE patients, in the critical period between the Fall of 1942 and the Fall of 1945.

Charlie Aronson, along with Aaron Alston, was the first person to ever get a penicillin shot. Dawson's historical injections couldn't have hurt, because Charlie amazingly survived the then almost invariably fatal SBE.

He got a second bout of SBE and more Dawson penicillin again saved his life - but SBE also gave him a life threatening major stroke that left him permanently paralyzed in speech and body and in a wheelchair.

He survived and thrived - it was but the latest in a life long battle with a half dozen diseases that should have killed him.

As far as we know , he survived SBE - thanks in part to his historic first ever penicillin injection - from October 1940 till at least the end of December 1948.

(My current best guess is that he lived at least until 1955.)

His continued survival again stifled the many doubters to Dawson's SBE efforts.

In the parlance of the day, all seven were 4F --- in fact, the 4F of the 4F , useless, unfit, useless mouths.

But these seven , the Gotham Seven, were the ones who fought off their own Allied government and their own physical weaknesses to rescue natural lifesaving penicillin and set it free for all.

Honour their names : un-super heroes indeed....

The Big Apple's (green) un-super heroes

The biggest horse races offer the biggest prize money so every jockey naturally wants to win big in the biggest of Big Apples - New York City.

Nothing living and green is implied in the term  --- nothing beyond the green colour of cold hard cash.

Its ironic then, isn't , that wartime's penicillium green grew best in The Big Apple's (The Green Apple's ?) concrete jungle.

Not in leafy green Oxford University.

Brewed up in Gotham by Henry Dawson's small group of unfits, misfits and rebels - fermenting up a revolution in how the world of medicine now views the natural world....

How New York rescued natural life-saving penicillin-for-all from Alexander Fleming

If you are Alexander Fleming you only have to make three big mistakes to win a Nobel prize and eternal acclaim.

Mistake one : insist that penicillin will never be a success unless man first synthesizes it.

(We're still waiting !)

Mistake two : insist that penicillin will never work if taken internally but will only work as a topical antiseptic.

(In fact, penicillin really only works when taken internally, as an antibiotic, to save lives while as an antiseptic it may actually impede healing of minor scrapes and cuts.)

Mistake three : go along with the Churchill government's decision to only make enough wartime penicillin to help frontline Allied forces with wounds moderate enough to be likely to quickly return to battle.

(When America's New Deal-oriented WPB (War Production Board) decided to mass produce wartime natural penicillin, American diplomats were soon using that bounty to save lives (and win hearts and minds) all over the Allied, Neutral and Occupied world.

 Soon a Pax Americana (Pax Penicillia ?) was replacing a century-old Pax Britannica.)

By contrast , on October 16th 1940 , Gotham City's Dr Henry Dawson set out to challenge these three tenets of fellow Scot Alexander Fleming, line by line.

In just five weeks, he read an early - vague -report on penicillin, located some spores, grew them, tested them on himself for toxicity and then gave the world's first ever "crude" natural antibiotic shots.

To two young men dying of SBE , a then invariably fatal form of endocarditis.

(A) Dawson was never shy about admitting that his penicillin shots were not 100% synthetical pure or even 100% naturally pure.

In fact he was the first to label his type of penicillin as 'crude' and natural --- and the label stuck.

(B) Crude or not, he had shown that natural penicillin was non toxic - in fact far less toxic than the conventional alternative, the sulfa drugs. So why not use it internally , to save lives ?

(C) Social Medicine (a sort of 1930s version of Obamacare) was in the Fall of 1940 being destroyed by conservatives under the guise of War medicine.

War medicine's eugenic claim (the same claim as Hitler made on the first day of WWII) was that we couldn't afford to waste precious medicine on useless 4Fs when our precious 1A soldiers need all our help.

Top of the list among the 4Fs to be Code Slow-ed to death by war medicine's Death Panels were the SBEs - which is why Dawson so insolently chose the SBEs as the ones he gave history's first penicillin needles to.

To make the sting of his rebuke even more obvious, he gave those historic needles to these '4Fs of the 4Fs' on the very day that America was conducting its very first peacetime draft registration, seeking out all of its 1As.

As is well known, Alexander Fleming's synthetic penicillin laid a big egg .

So it was left to the NYC firm that had most bought into Dawson's vision, Pfizer (then a modestly sized supplier to the soda pop industry) to supply 80% of the penicillin landed on D-Day - in fact to supply most of the world's penicillin during WWII.

And that is how New York rescued the miracle of penicillin from the man who found it - like an unwanted gift - on his desk 16 years earlier...

Time to end the much-told cover-up of UNSUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin and tell the untold tale of SUCCESSFUL wartime penicillin

Against about fifty previous books about wartime penicillin , I want my penicillin book to do something wildly different --- I want to celebrate success, not cover-up failure.

If the wartime deployment of penicillin was ultimately successful (and everybody seems to agree it was) what exactly did this successful  penicillin look like?

It turns out it actually was :

(a)  naturally made penicillin - not man made.

(b) and (via exports of massive amounts of American penicillin under Lend-Lease and other programs), it was made available to all in the wartime world dying from any and all diseases it could cure - not just reserved for a relatively small number of frontline Allied soldiers judged capable of returning to immediate combat, if given penicillin.

Ie , what successful wartime penicillin definitely was not, was synthesized and weaponized.


I am writing this book because I believe , 75 years after the start of wartime penicillin , it is overdue time to finally have a long, hard and brutally honest look at the actual record of the people and institutions universally regarded as the heroes of wartime penicillin.

Chief among them - by general consensus - are Fleming, Florey along with the MRC and the Ministry of Supply in Britain.

 In America : the OSRD-CMR, NRRL chief Coghill , Merck Inc and the NAS-COC .

Yet all these heroes spent the entire war stridently opposed both to (a) the immediate mass production of naturally made penicillin and (b) its wartime production in quantities sufficient for all dying for lack of it in the world .

If they be the 'heroes' of wartime penicillin , it hardly needed villains !

By contrast , institutions like the British Royal Navy, Glaxo , Pfizer , the WPB and people like Dawson , Demerec , Pulvertaft and Duhig rate a paragraph (or at best , a page or two) in even lengthy accounts of wartime penicillin.

Yet these people and institutions strongly promoted the immediate wartime mass production of naturally produced penicillin for all  - and then set out and did it - they made the successful version of wartime penicillin.

They did not advocate holding off on the wartime production of badly needed penicillin until it had been totally synthesized at commercial prices (something that hasn't happened yet).

Nor did they advocate that wartime penicillin be only used for those who were moderately injured, among the frontline Allied troops.

All these people and institutions shared one more thing in common (besides achieving the only universally popular scientific success of WWII).

They were not part of the Anglo-American medical-scientific establishment.

Thus they did not have privileged access (during the crucial years of 1944-1948) to information still labelled secret and only released - on a highly selective basis - in self-serving official histories that successfully polished the turd that was the total failure of weaponized synthetic penicillin.

It was not until 1972, with Lennard Bickel's invaluable book "RISE UP TO LIFE" , that many of the secrets of wartime penicillin began to be revealed - at least to the majority of the world that looked to British-oriented authors to explain penicillin.

Bickel was actually merely trying to boost credit to Howard Florey over that given to Alexander Fleming, but his book was just late enough to avoid the strictures of wartime secrecy and just early enough to interview many penicillin pioneers before they died.

And his account tried very hard to balance the British-oriented accounts published to date with information about lesser known but very important penicillin efforts around the world.

But Bickel , like all others to date, did not set  WPB-Pfizer-Glaxo natural penicillin in total opposition to OSRD-Merck-Oxford synthetic penicillin.

Rather, like all accounts of the atomic Manhattan Project, he sees them as being equally funded, equally ardently pushed parallel efforts towards a common (time-sensitive) goal.

But in the case of the atomic bomb , the documentary record is very clear - almost any and all ways that might help to make enough nuclear material for even a few bombs before the war's end were massively funded and whipped into a flurry of activity by General Groves .

So for example,  a trillion dollar (in 2014 dollars) gaseous diffusion production plant were built as fast as possible , before any pilot plant had even shown that particular process might work !

Even so, America only got enough weapon material for just two small bombs a scant month before Japan surrendered.

By contrast, natural penicillin's breakthrough technology ( a repeated process of selecting the best natural mutations of the penicillium mold, radiating them to produce more mutations and so on) only required a few biologists working a few months at a cost of a few thousands of dollars.

Thanks to this breakthrough, most countries outside of the USA successfully provide much of their wartime penicillin needs with a scaled up version of the primitive technology that Fleming first used - and rejected - way back in 1928 !

Only a political and moral unwillingness to create more of these primitive factories kept the UK, Canada and Australia from supplying all possible needs with scaled up 1928 technology.

It was the WPB's totally unknown OPRD , a latecomer to the penicillin effort , that quickly and cheaply made penicillin production with mutated natural penicillin such a success that we still produce all the world's antibiotics the same way to this day.

It was clear in the case of penicillin that almost everyone (outside our valiant few) from government ministers to newspaper reporters to ordinary GP doctors to Big Pharma, felt that penicillin was going to have to be first made synthetically to make enough for a wartime world and that this event was going to be quickly achieved.

(At the same time, I should say that most of the synthetic advocates generally didn't know the full extent of the intention to weaponize penicillin and that thankfully many seemed to oppose that idea when its morally repugnant nature was made clearer.)

Efforts to synthesize penicillin were fully backed by the British and American medical scientific establishment while efforts to push natural penicillin production that came from people like Cold Spring Harbour Lab chief Miloslav Demerec and Glaxo's boss Harry Jephcott were rebuffed by that same elite.

Spurred by the efforts of Dr Dawson , Dr Dante Colitti got  he Hearst media empire to rouse the Dr Moms of the world with the plight of baby Patty Malone.

Even the powerful men running the Anglo-American medical-scientific establishment (& Big Pharma) momentarily quailed before the uproar from Dr Mom , but soon they returned to pushing for perfected synthetic penicillin before seeking any all-out production.

But Big Pharma was not totally united - one man within its ranks differed - and sometimes one individual is more than enough to change a whole world.

John L Smith, boss of Pfizer, was prompted by his own Dr Mom - his wife - to connect Patty Malone to the death of his own daughter - a death that Fleming could have helped prevent if only he had promoted - rather than negating - penicillin by needle.

As an ordinary patriotic American , Smith also knew D-Day was due soon.  Unlike ordinary Americans, he also knew that only penicillin could prevent the war deaths by infection the sulfa drugs were no longer effective against.

Like General Groves on steroids, Smith whipped Pfizer employees to produce tons of penicillin - now ! - for D-Day and civilian patients.

In a surprisingly few months ( by the Spring of 1944) - Smith - thanks admittedly greatly to the timely efforts of Miloslav Demerec - had solved the world's penicillin crisis.

But the Anglo-American medical scientific establishment - as always with bureaucrats spending other peoples' money - kept pushing hard on synthetic penicillin for two more wasted years.

Their Plan B ( eventually employed) was to push the Big Half Truth that they were always fully behind natural penicillin from 1939 onward and were merely held up by the pesky penicillium spores themselves.

In fact,  the only way they could think to totally synthesize artificial penicillin was to repeatedly destroy massive amounts of natural penicillin and then examine the resulting entrails.

Thus they did in fact support the limited production of natural penicillin - all through the war - but mostly for their chemists to destroy and then analysis - not to give to any and every patient dying for lack of it.

Shamefully, academic historians have let them get away with this particular Big Half Truth ever since ....