The terrible simplicities of scientific reductionism was the very mother's milk of all the horrible 'terrible simplifiers' of High Modernity (1875-1965): starting with Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and crossing the water to their gentler and kinder Anglo-American opponents.
For none of the big political ideologies of Modernity at all rejected reductionist science or damned it with faint praise - instead they clasped it to their bosom and then claimed it formed the spiritual foundations of their peculiar faith.
Showing posts with label osrd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label osrd. Show all posts
Sunday, May 10, 2015
Monday, January 12, 2015
OSRD (and academia's) dirty little secret : just how little the OSRD spent on penicillin - not how MUCH it spent on A-Bomb
Vannevar Bush grew a whole lot fonder of penicillin after it was highly successful (and highly popular among voters and congressmen) than when its future lay in doubt and only he had the power to ensure it succeeded.
The uncomfortable fact is that it was Washington's tiny New Deal-oriented OPRD (and not the similar-sounding but Republican Party-dominated much larger ORSD) that actually gave the world cheap abundant natural penicillin in time to save millions of lives during the wartime and postwar health crises.
While the OPRD had all the ideas and all the energy, it was the OSRD that had all the money --- and all that money bought plenty of tame academics prepared to rewrite war history - for money - in a manner than would have even given Goebbels himself pause.
The uncomfortable fact is that it was Washington's tiny New Deal-oriented OPRD (and not the similar-sounding but Republican Party-dominated much larger ORSD) that actually gave the world cheap abundant natural penicillin in time to save millions of lives during the wartime and postwar health crises.
While the OPRD had all the ideas and all the energy, it was the OSRD that had all the money --- and all that money bought plenty of tame academics prepared to rewrite war history - for money - in a manner than would have even given Goebbels himself pause.
Sunday, January 4, 2015
The Manhattan (natural penicillin) Project : Googling up a Ghost
How an amateur historian in a small city used the new Google Search tools to recover the lost story of wartime penicillin
I first fell upon the lost story of wartime penicillin way back in the Dark Ages --- late in 2004.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
'Running against New York City' secret of OSRD and NAS wartime success in Washington
In 1940 New York City and New York State were at the very height of their power in the United States.
At that time, they even retained a very significant chunk of the American population - which translated into things like crucial electoral college votes.
They held an even greater percentage of the nation's wealth and financial lending clout, its best research facilities and research libraries, its biggest and most varied industrial base (from light to the heaviest of industries), its media and cultural arbitors of national taste.
It was also filled with immigrants of all sorts, with uppity Harlem Negroes, priest-dominated Roman Catholic Italians and left wing Jews : everything the rest of America : mostly native-born, white, Protestant Anglo Saxons raised in small towns feared and disliked.
FDR had lot of New Yorkers in his regime : particularly lots of lefties and Jews - it was in fact one of the main reasons why he was so disked in Washington.
But for the war effort, he recruited rock-ribbed Republicans to run many important agencies, hoping their presence would bring 'their kind of people' on board to defeat the evil Hitler.
In those days, the highest concentrations of Republicans weren't found in business offices but in universities - particularly among the senior scientists.
So no surprise that his most egghead/ivory tower oriented agencies were run by Republicans.
The most successful of these (the OSRD's nuclear committee and NAS COC penicillin committee for example) quickly realized that while their being a small town WASP Republican was good news in Washington politicians' eyes it was not enough.
They were also some of them damn dome-headed eggheads, alway out of touch with rural realities.
More was needed to win the bureaucratic war between New Deal and Republican oriented agencies over congressional funding, influence and support.
So they worked hard to ensure that as few New York City boys as possible were added into their governing councils.
They couldn't get away with having no one from New York State - so they tried for token New Yorkers - ones without dominating Alpha Male personalities : bench warmers.
Now unlike FDR himself, comparatively few truly successful people made a career and a name for themselves in the states) were they were born and raised.
J Robert Oppenheimer was raised in the very heart of enemy territory, on Manhattan Island itself, but he had become a born-again Westerner so he is hard to fit in one slot.
If Harold Urey (nuclear) and Alphonse Dochez (penicillin) fitted the token New Yorker role in not having commanding personalities in committee, neither were actually born and raised in New York City where they now lived and seemingly represented in these key national power structures.
But look over the key figures in the atomic bomb and penicillin efforts and see if you don't agree with me ....
At that time, they even retained a very significant chunk of the American population - which translated into things like crucial electoral college votes.
They held an even greater percentage of the nation's wealth and financial lending clout, its best research facilities and research libraries, its biggest and most varied industrial base (from light to the heaviest of industries), its media and cultural arbitors of national taste.
It was also filled with immigrants of all sorts, with uppity Harlem Negroes, priest-dominated Roman Catholic Italians and left wing Jews : everything the rest of America : mostly native-born, white, Protestant Anglo Saxons raised in small towns feared and disliked.
FDR had lot of New Yorkers in his regime : particularly lots of lefties and Jews - it was in fact one of the main reasons why he was so disked in Washington.
But for the war effort, he recruited rock-ribbed Republicans to run many important agencies, hoping their presence would bring 'their kind of people' on board to defeat the evil Hitler.
In those days, the highest concentrations of Republicans weren't found in business offices but in universities - particularly among the senior scientists.
So no surprise that his most egghead/ivory tower oriented agencies were run by Republicans.
The most successful of these (the OSRD's nuclear committee and NAS COC penicillin committee for example) quickly realized that while their being a small town WASP Republican was good news in Washington politicians' eyes it was not enough.
They were also some of them damn dome-headed eggheads, alway out of touch with rural realities.
More was needed to win the bureaucratic war between New Deal and Republican oriented agencies over congressional funding, influence and support.
So they worked hard to ensure that as few New York City boys as possible were added into their governing councils.
They couldn't get away with having no one from New York State - so they tried for token New Yorkers - ones without dominating Alpha Male personalities : bench warmers.
Now unlike FDR himself, comparatively few truly successful people made a career and a name for themselves in the states) were they were born and raised.
J Robert Oppenheimer was raised in the very heart of enemy territory, on Manhattan Island itself, but he had become a born-again Westerner so he is hard to fit in one slot.
If Harold Urey (nuclear) and Alphonse Dochez (penicillin) fitted the token New Yorker role in not having commanding personalities in committee, neither were actually born and raised in New York City where they now lived and seemingly represented in these key national power structures.
But look over the key figures in the atomic bomb and penicillin efforts and see if you don't agree with me ....
Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Penicillin meeting is just the cover story for atomic bomb meeting
On December 17 1941, the medical wing of America's famous OSRD war research agency held a rare - possibly unique - meeting outside the Washington beltway.
Even rarer was the presence of one attendee, the boss of the OSRD himself, Vannevar Bush, never one to think war would be won by advances in medicine.
What on earth was really going on ?
Supposedly the meeting was held in New York city's highly exclusive University Club to please the CEOs of America's drug companies - but to do that , Chicago would have been a more central choice.
The head of the medical wing, Merck chief scientific consultant A N Richards , had really brought his committee to New York City solely as a favour to Bush.
Bush needed a suitable cover story for a series of meetings on something he felt far more important than Henry Dawson's little Manhattan based natural penicillin project.
Bush was finalizing a plan to ask FDR to approve a wartime atomic bomb as the top Allied war project : the atomic Manhattan Project.
So far most of America's atomic bomb research had happened at the same university where Dawson was doing his penicillin work : Columbia.
Its dean of science George Pegram and its Nobel winning physical chemist Harold Urey had just returned from a special fact finding mission to check out Britain's atomic efforts.
On their return their letter to Bush had made it clear the British plans were well advanced and that America needed to get on board or be left behind in strategic strength.
Bush was there in NYC to hear this confirmed in detail by Pegram - a man he trusted completely to be 'sound' .
Bush had to be sure , before he gave the red light to this hugely expensive project that would suck scarce resources from other (possibly war-winning) new weapons.
Bush gave so much money to Columbia for its atomic Manhattan Project work during the war - money that the entire university badly needed - that Columbia was completely willing to throw Dawson's penicillin Manhattan Project 'under the bus' when Dawson's efforts roused Bush and Richards' ire.
For in Manhattan , the twin projects Bomb/ death and penicillin/life intertwine constantly....
Even rarer was the presence of one attendee, the boss of the OSRD himself, Vannevar Bush, never one to think war would be won by advances in medicine.
What on earth was really going on ?
Manhattan's twin wartime projects collide
Supposedly the meeting was held in New York city's highly exclusive University Club to please the CEOs of America's drug companies - but to do that , Chicago would have been a more central choice.
The head of the medical wing, Merck chief scientific consultant A N Richards , had really brought his committee to New York City solely as a favour to Bush.
Bush needed a suitable cover story for a series of meetings on something he felt far more important than Henry Dawson's little Manhattan based natural penicillin project.
Bush was finalizing a plan to ask FDR to approve a wartime atomic bomb as the top Allied war project : the atomic Manhattan Project.
So far most of America's atomic bomb research had happened at the same university where Dawson was doing his penicillin work : Columbia.
Its dean of science George Pegram and its Nobel winning physical chemist Harold Urey had just returned from a special fact finding mission to check out Britain's atomic efforts.
On their return their letter to Bush had made it clear the British plans were well advanced and that America needed to get on board or be left behind in strategic strength.
Bush was there in NYC to hear this confirmed in detail by Pegram - a man he trusted completely to be 'sound' .
Bush had to be sure , before he gave the red light to this hugely expensive project that would suck scarce resources from other (possibly war-winning) new weapons.
Bush gave so much money to Columbia for its atomic Manhattan Project work during the war - money that the entire university badly needed - that Columbia was completely willing to throw Dawson's penicillin Manhattan Project 'under the bus' when Dawson's efforts roused Bush and Richards' ire.
For in Manhattan , the twin projects Bomb/ death and penicillin/life intertwine constantly....
Saturday, September 13, 2014
"The 'Cillium is a Roan that's never been rid , though thousands of chemists once claimed they did "
The title is a snatch of a song about the penicillium chrysogenum , with apologies to Curley Fletcher and his rather better known tale of the Strawberry Roan that also was never successfully rode.
To justify the expense of the Manhattan Project , America's military research bosses at the OSRD saw to it that A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then credited (wrongly) with being the sole cause for ending WWII.
To justify all the OSRD money wasted on not synthesizing penicillin, particularly when their rival WPB-OPRD spent far less to quickly make natural penicillin a resounding success, the OSRD bosses faked a synthetic success (about penicillin) to release to the gullible scientific media.
For Vincent du Vigneaud's team at Cornell Medical in NYC did indeed produce a little biologically active penicillin in the course of their efforts to synthesize penicillin.
So thousands of the world's top chemists got to take a public bow for yet another signal triumph in modern - BIG - science's endless progress ever upward.
But privately most knew that du Vigneaud synthetic goal was towards a molecule shape that did not match the necessary shape of biologically-active natural penicillin.
So this tiny amount of real penicillin must have been an accidental impurity of a mis-conceived theoretical approach !
More than 85 years after it was discovered, chemists have still not commercially synthesized a better or cheaper base penicillin molecule than what the tiny weak fungi can do on its own ...
To justify the expense of the Manhattan Project , America's military research bosses at the OSRD saw to it that A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then credited (wrongly) with being the sole cause for ending WWII.
To justify all the OSRD money wasted on not synthesizing penicillin, particularly when their rival WPB-OPRD spent far less to quickly make natural penicillin a resounding success, the OSRD bosses faked a synthetic success (about penicillin) to release to the gullible scientific media.
du Vigneaud's synthetic success (read synthetic = fake)
For Vincent du Vigneaud's team at Cornell Medical in NYC did indeed produce a little biologically active penicillin in the course of their efforts to synthesize penicillin.
So thousands of the world's top chemists got to take a public bow for yet another signal triumph in modern - BIG - science's endless progress ever upward.
But privately most knew that du Vigneaud synthetic goal was towards a molecule shape that did not match the necessary shape of biologically-active natural penicillin.
So this tiny amount of real penicillin must have been an accidental impurity of a mis-conceived theoretical approach !
More than 85 years after it was discovered, chemists have still not commercially synthesized a better or cheaper base penicillin molecule than what the tiny weak fungi can do on its own ...
Sunday, September 7, 2014
Int'l competition spurs penicillin production as American Pfizer/Dawson goes against British ICI/Florey for most production
Wartime penicillin production was greatly hurt , not helped , when Florey came to America.
Because then an Anglo-American cartel emerged that focused on restricting what firms could produce penicillin - rather than increasing competition to produce more penicillin.
Already in September 1941, fermentation experts Pfizer and their advisor Dr Dawson were already producing commercially-oriented penicillin in the USA - without government inference or 'help' .
As was Florey's team and chemical giant ICI in the UK, again without government 'help'.
This was before Florey's across the ocean visit to his good American friend Dr A N Richards.
That led to Richard's decision to abuse the extraordinary wartime powers of American's main military research agency (the OSRD) to create an international penicillin cartel.
Only when Dawson's former patient and friend Floyd Odlum induced the equally powerful (but New Dealer oriented) WPB agency to open up penicillin production to more firms, did the spur of competition finally produce massive amounts of penicillin.
But what if Florey had stayed home instead of coming to America to mark his claim to penicillin fame over that of Dawson ?
The normally cautious Pfizer had been very bold once before - risking all on a new method of producing citric acid and ending up very wealthy.
If it decided to go all out for penicillin in 1941-1942 as it did in 1943-1944 , there would have been no wartime penicillin shortage crisis....
Because then an Anglo-American cartel emerged that focused on restricting what firms could produce penicillin - rather than increasing competition to produce more penicillin.
Already in September 1941, fermentation experts Pfizer and their advisor Dr Dawson were already producing commercially-oriented penicillin in the USA - without government inference or 'help' .
As was Florey's team and chemical giant ICI in the UK, again without government 'help'.
This was before Florey's across the ocean visit to his good American friend Dr A N Richards.
That led to Richard's decision to abuse the extraordinary wartime powers of American's main military research agency (the OSRD) to create an international penicillin cartel.
Only when Dawson's former patient and friend Floyd Odlum induced the equally powerful (but New Dealer oriented) WPB agency to open up penicillin production to more firms, did the spur of competition finally produce massive amounts of penicillin.
But what if Florey had stayed home instead of coming to America to mark his claim to penicillin fame over that of Dawson ?
The normally cautious Pfizer had been very bold once before - risking all on a new method of producing citric acid and ending up very wealthy.
If it decided to go all out for penicillin in 1941-1942 as it did in 1943-1944 , there would have been no wartime penicillin shortage crisis....
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Manhattan Natural : wartime Gotham's un-super heroes ...
At a time (WWII) when comic book superheroes , usually operating in a make-believe Manhattan, were saving the world every day and enthralling North American children and youth , lesser known but equally larger-than-life actual heroics were taking place in a real Manhattan.
But these valiants bringing natural penicillin lifesaving to the world against government blowback were hardly Superman or indeed any sort of superheroes .
If by the term 'superhero' we mean someone strong in body as well as mind.
They were un-super heroes if ever than phrase had meaning.
They were more like a badly aged Clark Kent , still mild and meek but now weak and crippled .
They never numbered more than a handful : misfits , unfits and just plain rebels.
They were aptly described by the official historian of their arch enemy , Vannevar Bush's OSRD , as "4Fs, women and the Grace of God".
Henry and Marjorie Dawson, Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Thomas Hunter, Charlie and Miss H --- they hardly had more than a handful of really good limbs between the seven of them.
'Unfits' the whole lot of them - the very 4Fs of the 4Fs - yet real life heroes despite all that .
Perhaps we could still make use of their story - as a sort of role model - by making a series of comic books or graphic novels about their wartime exploits ...
But these valiants bringing natural penicillin lifesaving to the world against government blowback were hardly Superman or indeed any sort of superheroes .
If by the term 'superhero' we mean someone strong in body as well as mind.
They were un-super heroes if ever than phrase had meaning.
They were more like a badly aged Clark Kent , still mild and meek but now weak and crippled .
They never numbered more than a handful : misfits , unfits and just plain rebels.
They were aptly described by the official historian of their arch enemy , Vannevar Bush's OSRD , as "4Fs, women and the Grace of God".
Henry and Marjorie Dawson, Floyd Odlum, Dante Colitti, Thomas Hunter, Charlie and Miss H --- they hardly had more than a handful of really good limbs between the seven of them.
'Unfits' the whole lot of them - the very 4Fs of the 4Fs - yet real life heroes despite all that .
Perhaps we could still make use of their story - as a sort of role model - by making a series of comic books or graphic novels about their wartime exploits ...
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Abundant Penicillin by 1942 - only if Howard Florey didn't come to America ?
When ,in April 1941, Howard Florey learned that his best shot at world acclaim (as the only begetter of systemic penicillin) was at risk because Henry Dawson had got there first, the old claim jumper boot scooted over to America to shake a little dust.
Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
Together the pair agreed that most of the wartime penicillin effort should go into first synthesizing it - rather than merely scaling up existing natural penicillin fermentation technology and getting penicillin to the military and civilian patients dying for lack of it - now.
Richards (who never met a conflict of interest he didn't like) was mindful that Merck's cross harbour rival, Pfizer, was likely to be the big winner if natural fermentation - and not Merck's strength artificial synthesis - was used to produce this priceless new drug.
Left alone, Pfizer (with Henry Dawson's team assisting) was already on the way, during that Fall in 1941 , to producing enough penicillin to get the show on the road.
A pity then that Florey had to spoil the show ...
Unfortunately, while in America he met and bonded with an old friend, A Newton Richards, the chief medical advisor (sans MD degree !) to both Merck and the US government's war science research arm , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
Together the pair agreed that most of the wartime penicillin effort should go into first synthesizing it - rather than merely scaling up existing natural penicillin fermentation technology and getting penicillin to the military and civilian patients dying for lack of it - now.
Richards (who never met a conflict of interest he didn't like) was mindful that Merck's cross harbour rival, Pfizer, was likely to be the big winner if natural fermentation - and not Merck's strength artificial synthesis - was used to produce this priceless new drug.
Left alone, Pfizer (with Henry Dawson's team assisting) was already on the way, during that Fall in 1941 , to producing enough penicillin to get the show on the road.
A pity then that Florey had to spoil the show ...
Connecting New York's PENICILLIN dots ...
Some authors are content to merely describe a long series of coincidental dots ---- other authors like to investigate to see if anything connects all those coincidental dots.
I am one of the latter : as many a TV police detective is fond of saying , my motto is "I don't believe in coincidences."
When I fell upon the story of Henry Dawson and wartime penicillin, I noticed that most of the twenty or so full length accounts of wartime penicillin always included the awkward fact that he (and not their hero Howard Florey) was the one to give history's first ever penicillin shots.
They briefly described that first needle in a sentence or paragraph or page or two --- and then always go on quickly to say that Dawson himself was dying of a terminal illness - 'so necessarily passes out of our story'.
The rest of their three hundred or page accounts have nothing further about Dawson's team.
Clearly they mentally needed a way to dispose of Dawson (his convenient terminal illness) without seriously engaging his team's more than five years of involvement with penicillin.
They already had a preconceived shape to their biography of Florey and so they mentally hardly wanted to investigate Dawson's story any further --- less it ruined their story's trim panty lines.
Dawson did indeed die from his illness - but that was only at the end of April 1945 , while his team effort can be said to have begun when team member Karl Meyer learned firsthand of Florey's successful curing of infected mice in the early summer of 1940 from Florey ex-team member Leslie Epstein (Falk).
Dawson in fact kept very active in pioneering penicillin work right up to his death.
His team - in particular Gladys Hobby at Pfizer and Thomas hunter at Columbia - continued to do important work with penicillin for a few more years , even after the war's end.
Now what struck me with the force of a hammer in the first few days of my research - even back ten years ago when I knew almost nothing about wartime penicillin - was the amazing number of truly significant events in the penicillin story that had happened in the New York City area.
And that they all seemed to be of a similar type - let us simply describe them as all taking a similarly non-conventional approach to solving the penicillin supply issue.
Set against the relatively inactivity of a similar nature from the other 1990 million other human beings on earth in 1940 , they certainly seemed statistically odd beyond measure to be unconnected.
Since Dawson was both the first and the most active of these NYC inside agitators , I began seeking out possible links between him (or his team members) and these other New York penicillin efforts.
I quickly found many, many direct connections - and am still doing so.
Who - just for a minor example - would have ever thought that Dr Anne Fulcher Hunter had both a husband (Thomas Hunter) working with Dawson at the heart of the natural penicillin effort at Columbia and a half brother (Donald Melville) working at the heart of the opposing synthetic penicillin effort with Vincent du Vigneaud at Cornell ?
Heatedly interesting discussions indeed around her family dinner table !
My book will make the case that Dawson's passion inspired many New York scientists and businessmen to step out of their conventional skins for once in their lives to try something very risky and yet very morally worthy.
Most of these people would probably freely admit that their wartime Dawson-inspired penicillin adventures were the high points of their careers and indeed of their entire lives.
So I will fully structure my book around Dawson and NYC, but unlike previous books, I will not damn contrasting efforts by a single sentence-paragraph-page of faint praise.
Florey, Fleming, the OSRD and Merck will all get plenty of space to make their case for limiting wartime penicillin use to frontline Allied soldiers only - and that only after it had been first perfected as a patentable synthetic analogue.
I will leave it to the reader (and to God) to decide which side made the better moral case ...
I am one of the latter : as many a TV police detective is fond of saying , my motto is "I don't believe in coincidences."
When I fell upon the story of Henry Dawson and wartime penicillin, I noticed that most of the twenty or so full length accounts of wartime penicillin always included the awkward fact that he (and not their hero Howard Florey) was the one to give history's first ever penicillin shots.
They briefly described that first needle in a sentence or paragraph or page or two --- and then always go on quickly to say that Dawson himself was dying of a terminal illness - 'so necessarily passes out of our story'.
The rest of their three hundred or page accounts have nothing further about Dawson's team.
Clearly they mentally needed a way to dispose of Dawson (his convenient terminal illness) without seriously engaging his team's more than five years of involvement with penicillin.
They already had a preconceived shape to their biography of Florey and so they mentally hardly wanted to investigate Dawson's story any further --- less it ruined their story's trim panty lines.
Dawson did indeed die from his illness - but that was only at the end of April 1945 , while his team effort can be said to have begun when team member Karl Meyer learned firsthand of Florey's successful curing of infected mice in the early summer of 1940 from Florey ex-team member Leslie Epstein (Falk).
Dawson in fact kept very active in pioneering penicillin work right up to his death.
His team - in particular Gladys Hobby at Pfizer and Thomas hunter at Columbia - continued to do important work with penicillin for a few more years , even after the war's end.
Now what struck me with the force of a hammer in the first few days of my research - even back ten years ago when I knew almost nothing about wartime penicillin - was the amazing number of truly significant events in the penicillin story that had happened in the New York City area.
And that they all seemed to be of a similar type - let us simply describe them as all taking a similarly non-conventional approach to solving the penicillin supply issue.
Set against the relatively inactivity of a similar nature from the other 1990 million other human beings on earth in 1940 , they certainly seemed statistically odd beyond measure to be unconnected.
Since Dawson was both the first and the most active of these NYC inside agitators , I began seeking out possible links between him (or his team members) and these other New York penicillin efforts.
I quickly found many, many direct connections - and am still doing so.
Who - just for a minor example - would have ever thought that Dr Anne Fulcher Hunter had both a husband (Thomas Hunter) working with Dawson at the heart of the natural penicillin effort at Columbia and a half brother (Donald Melville) working at the heart of the opposing synthetic penicillin effort with Vincent du Vigneaud at Cornell ?
Heatedly interesting discussions indeed around her family dinner table !
My book will make the case that Dawson's passion inspired many New York scientists and businessmen to step out of their conventional skins for once in their lives to try something very risky and yet very morally worthy.
Most of these people would probably freely admit that their wartime Dawson-inspired penicillin adventures were the high points of their careers and indeed of their entire lives.
So I will fully structure my book around Dawson and NYC, but unlike previous books, I will not damn contrasting efforts by a single sentence-paragraph-page of faint praise.
Florey, Fleming, the OSRD and Merck will all get plenty of space to make their case for limiting wartime penicillin use to frontline Allied soldiers only - and that only after it had been first perfected as a patentable synthetic analogue.
I will leave it to the reader (and to God) to decide which side made the better moral case ...
Sunday, August 24, 2014
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 ....
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 ....
Monday, July 28, 2014
Oxford University Artificial Penicillin totally fails to deliver - morally as well as technically
It goes without saying that Oxford University's wartime chimera of totally synthesized artificial penicillin was an abject failure.
75 years on, we still start the production of all the penicillin and beta lactam antibiotics with natural fermentation.
So ---- just a minor technical failing ?
Few go on to consider the moral failings behind the Conservative Party-led British government's wartime penicillin decisions.
The (New Deal-oriented) American WPB (War Production Board) had greatly upped the penicillin amounts originally proposed by Oxford's American ally , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
The WPB wanted not just enough penicillin produced to satisfy the life-saving demands of the American military, with some left for certain civilian conditions.
They wanted levels that meant all American lifesaving situations were met.
With plenty left over to fill all the unmet demands among the other Allies, with still more left for neutral nations, liberated Europe and even Axis POWs.
The WPB fulfilled Dr Martin Henry Dawson's dream of cheap abundant penicillin for all in the war world - in spades !
By contrast, Churchill's government was unwilling to divert enough resources away from yet more heavy bombers to cure all of Britain's military and civilian life-threatening bacterial infections - let alone to meet the needs of its own colonies.
And as for the rest of the world ? The could all whistle for their penicillin , as far as Churchill was concerned.
The prime minister of the nation that had given the world the discovery and early development of the world's first and best lifesaver thus threw all that global goodwill away - just for a handful of more bombs.
With that one - unbelievably heartless and stupid - decision , Churchill ensured that the Pax Britannica became the Pax Americana .....
75 years on, we still start the production of all the penicillin and beta lactam antibiotics with natural fermentation.
So ---- just a minor technical failing ?
Few go on to consider the moral failings behind the Conservative Party-led British government's wartime penicillin decisions.
The (New Deal-oriented) American WPB (War Production Board) had greatly upped the penicillin amounts originally proposed by Oxford's American ally , Vannevar Bush's OSRD.
The WPB wanted not just enough penicillin produced to satisfy the life-saving demands of the American military, with some left for certain civilian conditions.
They wanted levels that meant all American lifesaving situations were met.
With plenty left over to fill all the unmet demands among the other Allies, with still more left for neutral nations, liberated Europe and even Axis POWs.
The WPB fulfilled Dr Martin Henry Dawson's dream of cheap abundant penicillin for all in the war world - in spades !
By contrast, Churchill's government was unwilling to divert enough resources away from yet more heavy bombers to cure all of Britain's military and civilian life-threatening bacterial infections - let alone to meet the needs of its own colonies.
And as for the rest of the world ? The could all whistle for their penicillin , as far as Churchill was concerned.
The prime minister of the nation that had given the world the discovery and early development of the world's first and best lifesaver thus threw all that global goodwill away - just for a handful of more bombs.
With that one - unbelievably heartless and stupid - decision , Churchill ensured that the Pax Britannica became the Pax Americana .....
Sunday, July 27, 2014
Oxford Artificial versus Manhattan Natural
Howard Florey (along with Alexander Fleming and Winston Churchill's government) spend ten years before during and after WWII pursuing the chimera of totally artificial (patentable) penicillin --- to no avail.
As did Florey's supporters in America - Merck, Squibb and Vannevar Bush's all-powerful OSRD.
Set against then, on the opposite side of the Hudson River , was Dr Martin Henry Dawson and John l Smith , chemist and boss of Pfizer.
They saw possibilities in the fermentation of the (public domain - free for all to grow) natural penicillium to produce antibiotics.
This was despite its current yields being admittedly low: they felt as it was a totally new way of doing medicine , it might well improve drastically with more practise.
(I should mention that two other strong skeptics of the whole idea of the commercial viability of total synthesis of penicillin were also practising chemists : Glaxo boss Harry Jepcott and the WPB's penicillin czar Larry Elder.
It was chemist manques like Florey and the OSRD's Dr Richards who were the most likely to feel that of course man-made Chemistry was always bound to be superior to Mother Nature.)
Today of course, with penicillin being produced at 50,000 times the levels of Fleming for the same cost in time labour and materials, the case against oxford Artificial seems clear - but it wasn't so throughout the war and beyond.
Long Island scientist Miloslav Demerec deserves a lot more credit than he ever gets (which is none !) for his major role in making our wonderful world of relatively cheap abundant antibiotics ....
As did Florey's supporters in America - Merck, Squibb and Vannevar Bush's all-powerful OSRD.
Set against then, on the opposite side of the Hudson River , was Dr Martin Henry Dawson and John l Smith , chemist and boss of Pfizer.
They saw possibilities in the fermentation of the (public domain - free for all to grow) natural penicillium to produce antibiotics.
This was despite its current yields being admittedly low: they felt as it was a totally new way of doing medicine , it might well improve drastically with more practise.
(I should mention that two other strong skeptics of the whole idea of the commercial viability of total synthesis of penicillin were also practising chemists : Glaxo boss Harry Jepcott and the WPB's penicillin czar Larry Elder.
It was chemist manques like Florey and the OSRD's Dr Richards who were the most likely to feel that of course man-made Chemistry was always bound to be superior to Mother Nature.)
Today of course, with penicillin being produced at 50,000 times the levels of Fleming for the same cost in time labour and materials, the case against oxford Artificial seems clear - but it wasn't so throughout the war and beyond.
Long Island scientist Miloslav Demerec deserves a lot more credit than he ever gets (which is none !) for his major role in making our wonderful world of relatively cheap abundant antibiotics ....
Thursday, December 26, 2013
Defeating the PENICILLIN death panels
Part One : the backstory
President Obama in 2009 had absolutely no intention of emulating Hitler's use of Aktion T4 death panels, but this does not mean that death panels were not in force under an earlier Democratic administration.
These death panels - common to all Allied nations during WWII - did not directly echo the German efforts, instead they and the German death panels were all part and parcel of a world wide ground swell among the well educated and the well off in support of 'eugenic' triage.
Starting at the very outbreak of the war in 1939, Hitler had authorized doctor-run death panels to met to decide which of the weak and elderly in Germany should be actively killed off.
He had wanted to do much earlier, but judged it would be politically risky internally.
Now he could use the excuse of urgent war need as the reason to roll back the Weimar Republic's expansion of Social Medicine , supposedly in an effort to divert the freed up money towards War Medicine instead.
Sharing similar eugenic motives, the mostly eugenically-minded medical elite in Allied and in Neutral nations also used the urgent need for expanded War Medicine for the 1As, as an excuse to roll back Social Medicine for their society's 4Fs.
This roll back could lead to patients dying - death by indirection rather than direct acts of murder, of course ,because these people prided themselves on not being Nazis .
(Vichy France, for example, so reduced funds to institutions for the chronically ill, that tens of thousands were "CODE SLOWED" to death due to inadequate food, heat and medical staff attention. Just as Britain had done similarly during the last years of WWI).
Asking, "how do we ration life-saving medical resources like the 1960s' supply of kidney dialysis machines ?", is the totally wrong question
What we first need to ask is , "why did the 1960s feel the need to ration life machines in the first place, when it didn't ration death machines ?"
Clearly the totally absence of any money isn't the real issue but rather " how do we divide the very big but still limited bag of money that we do have"?
So hospital auxiliary bake sales did raise money for some kidney dialysis machines back then - but no bombers or nuclear weapons were ever fund-raised that way.
All politics is about rationing : 'the authoritative allocation of scarce resources' as the textbooks describe it .
The decision to allocate most of the available money to H-bombs and so to supply only a small amount for the supply of baby incubators and the such like was a human-made decision, not an Act of God or a Law of Nature.
Just as the President who intoned "bombs were dropped on Cambodia" in an academically-correct passive, nay wimpy, voice really meant that "men dropped bombs on Cambodian civilians and killed them, because I ordered it so."
Stalin and Hitler forthrightly ordered millions to be murdered - they did not artificially create a shortage by a human political decision and then sit around piously in death panels trying to decide how to allocate patients to that shortage as 'fairly' as they could.
Bad Faith and Hypocrisy were not among their many sins of Hot and Cold.
But the sins of the lukewarm might well be dealt with even harsher on Judgement Day and it is the lukewarm sinners of wartime penicillin that we now turn to.
Britain's Conservative-dominated government said it would only make enough penicillin in wartime to handle the military cases it wanted penicillin to deal with.
And their Labour and Liberal partners went along with that.
So, no penicillin for penicillin for civilians in Britain or in her colonies, none to Allied POWS, none for British military casualties judged of no further military use.
Canada and Australia "me -too-ed" in agreement - one government liberal the other Labour.
America having a government of competing agencies, on the same Social Darwin model as Hitler's government , spoke with two main voices.
The scientific medical elite (OSRD and NAS) ,with some support from the military and industry , wanted only enough made to deal with priority military cases. Think of FDR as the "Doctor Win the War" of 1940 onwards.
But think also of an earlier FDR, "Doctor New Deal", and all his New Dealer supporters' high hopes.
Because what was now left of all these New Dealers were huddled in a stockade known as the WPB (War Production Board), surrounded on all sides by the hostile Republicans that FDR had brought into his administration, as part of his willingness to lose the internal social war to win the external military war.
The WPB proposed that enough wartime penicillin be made in America to generously supply all the penicillin needs of the military, the civilians and the overseas allies, neutrals and residents of enemy occupied lands.
The WPB won the argument -- when the new Army Surgeon General switched sides .
But until industry went along with the gag, America would still have not enough for anyone domestic , let alone everyone domestic and their foreign cousin.
The year long delay until one industrial firm really climbed on board with gusto allowed the OSRD-NAS to play God by convening penicillin death panels.
They might have operated unchallenged but for one man : Henry Dawson.
He fought them , won and so changed history ....
Clearly the totally absence of any money isn't the real issue but rather " how do we divide the very big but still limited bag of money that we do have"?
So hospital auxiliary bake sales did raise money for some kidney dialysis machines back then - but no bombers or nuclear weapons were ever fund-raised that way.
All politics is about rationing : 'the authoritative allocation of scarce resources' as the textbooks describe it .
The decision to allocate most of the available money to H-bombs and so to supply only a small amount for the supply of baby incubators and the such like was a human-made decision, not an Act of God or a Law of Nature.
Just as the President who intoned "bombs were dropped on Cambodia" in an academically-correct passive, nay wimpy, voice really meant that "men dropped bombs on Cambodian civilians and killed them, because I ordered it so."
Stalin and Hitler forthrightly ordered millions to be murdered - they did not artificially create a shortage by a human political decision and then sit around piously in death panels trying to decide how to allocate patients to that shortage as 'fairly' as they could.
Bad Faith and Hypocrisy were not among their many sins of Hot and Cold.
But the sins of the lukewarm might well be dealt with even harsher on Judgement Day and it is the lukewarm sinners of wartime penicillin that we now turn to.
Britain's Conservative-dominated government said it would only make enough penicillin in wartime to handle the military cases it wanted penicillin to deal with.
And their Labour and Liberal partners went along with that.
So, no penicillin for penicillin for civilians in Britain or in her colonies, none to Allied POWS, none for British military casualties judged of no further military use.
Canada and Australia "me -too-ed" in agreement - one government liberal the other Labour.
America having a government of competing agencies, on the same Social Darwin model as Hitler's government , spoke with two main voices.
The scientific medical elite (OSRD and NAS) ,with some support from the military and industry , wanted only enough made to deal with priority military cases. Think of FDR as the "Doctor Win the War" of 1940 onwards.
But think also of an earlier FDR, "Doctor New Deal", and all his New Dealer supporters' high hopes.
Because what was now left of all these New Dealers were huddled in a stockade known as the WPB (War Production Board), surrounded on all sides by the hostile Republicans that FDR had brought into his administration, as part of his willingness to lose the internal social war to win the external military war.
The WPB proposed that enough wartime penicillin be made in America to generously supply all the penicillin needs of the military, the civilians and the overseas allies, neutrals and residents of enemy occupied lands.
The WPB won the argument -- when the new Army Surgeon General switched sides .
But until industry went along with the gag, America would still have not enough for anyone domestic , let alone everyone domestic and their foreign cousin.
The year long delay until one industrial firm really climbed on board with gusto allowed the OSRD-NAS to play God by convening penicillin death panels.
They might have operated unchallenged but for one man : Henry Dawson.
He fought them , won and so changed history ....
Thursday, December 5, 2013
science LOST world war two...
'What ?! Don't be foolish : if historians of all stripes agree on one thing, it is that 'science' won WWII - the freedom-loving Allies simply had better 'science' then did the dictators of the Axis.'
I doubt that all historians think that way.
I am fairly sure that British historian David Edgerton hardly agrees that mere science , rather than an extraordinary advantage held by the Allies in terms of population, territory and resources, 'won the day' (albeit six long years after the war began).
What I think best describes WWII is that all sides constantly expected one thing to happen, based on their scientific beliefs, and over and over another unexpected thing actually happened.
Let us look at the mid term American elections for what I mean : if ,when asked 'who won' I said 'the politicians' , you'd think me very rude indeed.
'Yes, yes, but who won : Republicans or Democrats ?'
We expect conflicts , with winners and losers , in almost every aspect of human life - but not in science.
Everything that happened scientifically in the war is simply credited to 'science' , with no sense of the possibility of scientific winners and losers or of scientific conflicts.
1940's Allied plans for precision bombing with the Norden bombsight and the 1945 Allied atomic fire bombing all of civilian Hiroshima merely to burn down its naval base are in 100% opposition to each other - scientifically - but they get rolled up together as just two of the many scientific triumphs of WWII.
Wartime penicillin was delayed for decades by the Allied scientific elites' determination to first make it as highly profitable patentable synthetic penicillin.
But when this failed and the underdog natural penicillin proved the real winner, the academic history of penicillin elided synthetic penicillin from our memory banks, like a Stalinist commissar vanished from a group photo.
Reading the published histories of penicillin, one might think that the OSRD proponents of synthetic penicillin (and the steadfast opponents of the OPRD's natural crude penicillin) had been ardent champions of the natural method all along.
Here are two rival Washington bureaucracies , competing. No surprise surely, but because they are scientific bureaucrats , conflict is denied by science-cheerleading historians and the great triumph of the tiny OPRD is transferred to the mighty OSRD, by implication.
So if the story of wartime penicillin's fierce internecine war is ever to be told, a political scientist, not a medical scientist, is the best person for the job....
I doubt that all historians think that way.
I am fairly sure that British historian David Edgerton hardly agrees that mere science , rather than an extraordinary advantage held by the Allies in terms of population, territory and resources, 'won the day' (albeit six long years after the war began).
What I think best describes WWII is that all sides constantly expected one thing to happen, based on their scientific beliefs, and over and over another unexpected thing actually happened.
Let us look at the mid term American elections for what I mean : if ,when asked 'who won' I said 'the politicians' , you'd think me very rude indeed.
'Yes, yes, but who won : Republicans or Democrats ?'
We expect conflicts , with winners and losers , in almost every aspect of human life - but not in science.
Everything that happened scientifically in the war is simply credited to 'science' , with no sense of the possibility of scientific winners and losers or of scientific conflicts.
1940's Allied plans for precision bombing with the Norden bombsight and the 1945 Allied atomic fire bombing all of civilian Hiroshima merely to burn down its naval base are in 100% opposition to each other - scientifically - but they get rolled up together as just two of the many scientific triumphs of WWII.
Wartime penicillin was delayed for decades by the Allied scientific elites' determination to first make it as highly profitable patentable synthetic penicillin.
But when this failed and the underdog natural penicillin proved the real winner, the academic history of penicillin elided synthetic penicillin from our memory banks, like a Stalinist commissar vanished from a group photo.
Reading the published histories of penicillin, one might think that the OSRD proponents of synthetic penicillin (and the steadfast opponents of the OPRD's natural crude penicillin) had been ardent champions of the natural method all along.
Here are two rival Washington bureaucracies , competing. No surprise surely, but because they are scientific bureaucrats , conflict is denied by science-cheerleading historians and the great triumph of the tiny OPRD is transferred to the mighty OSRD, by implication.
So if the story of wartime penicillin's fierce internecine war is ever to be told, a political scientist, not a medical scientist, is the best person for the job....
Sunday, September 1, 2013
Wartime Penicillin intended to be secret and synthetic
It ended up public and 'public domain' natural, thanks to Henry Dawson and his supporters.
The British War Department and the American OSRD (run by Vannevar Bush) had expected to quickly, cheaply and, above all, secretively mass produce synthetic penicillin.
Enough artificial penicillin to supply the Allied front lines in the big pushback against Tojo and Hitler, while the enemy had to make do with the rapidly failing Sulfa drugs or try to produce tiny amounts of impure natural penicillin.
The whole project depended on keeping accounts of penicillin's miracle cures away from the Allied public.
That would only create a public sensation , as it had earlier for Sulfa's first miracle cures, which the Axis would soon learn about , thanks to newspaper articles in Neutral papers.
Once alerted, clever German and Japanese chemists would also soon synthesize penicillin and negate the temporary military advantage the Allies had gained via secrecy.
So : the potentially morally shabby story of wartime penicillin : medicine as a weapon.
But when the normally-stodgy Henry Dawson actually dared to steal government-sanctioned war penicillin to successfully save some young 4F kids banefully abandoned by their government as just 'useless mouths' , word spread rapidly in the gossip-driven circles of wartime medical New York.
A young doctor with his own burden of prejudice from the anglo protestant medical elite to rouse his ire, Dante Colitti, got the newspaper chain that invented yellow journalism (Hearst) to come to the defence of the yellow magic and no sooner than you could say 'that darling little Patty Malone', the jig was up for the OSRD and War Department.....
The British War Department and the American OSRD (run by Vannevar Bush) had expected to quickly, cheaply and, above all, secretively mass produce synthetic penicillin.
Enough artificial penicillin to supply the Allied front lines in the big pushback against Tojo and Hitler, while the enemy had to make do with the rapidly failing Sulfa drugs or try to produce tiny amounts of impure natural penicillin.
The whole project depended on keeping accounts of penicillin's miracle cures away from the Allied public.
That would only create a public sensation , as it had earlier for Sulfa's first miracle cures, which the Axis would soon learn about , thanks to newspaper articles in Neutral papers.
Once alerted, clever German and Japanese chemists would also soon synthesize penicillin and negate the temporary military advantage the Allies had gained via secrecy.
So : the potentially morally shabby story of wartime penicillin : medicine as a weapon.
But when the normally-stodgy Henry Dawson actually dared to steal government-sanctioned war penicillin to successfully save some young 4F kids banefully abandoned by their government as just 'useless mouths' , word spread rapidly in the gossip-driven circles of wartime medical New York.
A young doctor with his own burden of prejudice from the anglo protestant medical elite to rouse his ire, Dante Colitti, got the newspaper chain that invented yellow journalism (Hearst) to come to the defence of the yellow magic and no sooner than you could say 'that darling little Patty Malone', the jig was up for the OSRD and War Department.....
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Aktion 4F : something done to 4Fs, rather than something done for 4Fs ?
For years, I have thought and written of Dr Henry Dawson's efforts to try and save the lives of young SBE patients ,"The 4Fs of the 4Fs" , as if it was a sort of counterpoint to Nazi Germany's efforts to kill similar chronically ill people, the infamous Aktion T4 campaign.
His own Aktion 4F as a sort of counterblast to their Aktion T4.
But Dawson wasn't actually directly opposing the German Nazis' murderously utilitarian disposal of humans judged useless consumers of badly needed resources in a Total War.
He was combating similar notions held by the powerful in the Anglo-American medical establishment.
The OSRD , the NAS and the MRC all judged SBE to be a "militarily unimportant disease" and refused to allow any penicillin be diverted to saving its patients.
This despite Dawson demonstrating over and over that penicillin was the only thing that could cure this hitherto invariably fatal disease dubbed "the Polio of the Poor".
So in a way, the Allied treatment of the SBE 4Fs , along with their diverting penicillin away from badly wounded frontline troops in the Mediterranean towards otherwise fit soldiers who had deliberately contracted VD to avoid combat , could be see as exact counterparts to how the Nazis behaved in similar medical situations.
(For example, secretly killing Eastern Front soldiers rendered permanently mentally ill in combat to free up medical beds and supplies for soldiers judged able to return to battle eventually.)
In which case, the co-ordinated campaign , around the Allied world , from the US to Canada to Britain to Australia , to deny penicillin to SBE cases, can be seen as being the true Aktion 4F.
Food for thought....
His own Aktion 4F as a sort of counterblast to their Aktion T4.
But Dawson wasn't actually directly opposing the German Nazis' murderously utilitarian disposal of humans judged useless consumers of badly needed resources in a Total War.
He was combating similar notions held by the powerful in the Anglo-American medical establishment.
The OSRD , the NAS and the MRC all judged SBE to be a "militarily unimportant disease" and refused to allow any penicillin be diverted to saving its patients.
This despite Dawson demonstrating over and over that penicillin was the only thing that could cure this hitherto invariably fatal disease dubbed "the Polio of the Poor".
So in a way, the Allied treatment of the SBE 4Fs , along with their diverting penicillin away from badly wounded frontline troops in the Mediterranean towards otherwise fit soldiers who had deliberately contracted VD to avoid combat , could be see as exact counterparts to how the Nazis behaved in similar medical situations.
(For example, secretly killing Eastern Front soldiers rendered permanently mentally ill in combat to free up medical beds and supplies for soldiers judged able to return to battle eventually.)
In which case, the co-ordinated campaign , around the Allied world , from the US to Canada to Britain to Australia , to deny penicillin to SBE cases, can be seen as being the true Aktion 4F.
Food for thought....
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
"Pax Penicillia" : how Churchill's Britain won the war and lost the peace
The decision by Winston Churchill's (Tory) Minister of Supply (MoS) not to divert the money for one additional Lancaster squadron, used to bomb civilians in Europe, towards providing enough penicillin for British (and European) civilians resulted in Churchill's Tories winning the war for Britain --- but at the cost of losing the peace.
By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.
Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.
And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...
By contrast, when the (left-leaning) War Production Board (WPB) decided to greatly up the production level of American penicillin from the miserably niggardly amounts proposed by the (right-leaning) OSRD , the resulting surplus provided State Department diplomats with the amazing opportunity to wrestle Victory's moral authority from Britain (which claimed - somewhat incorrectly - to have stood alone against Hitler) to the tardy latecomers Americans.
Forget Chewing Gum and Coca Cola, or even the A-Bomb , the single best means for American diplomats to win friends for America was by providing the gift of life to people dying of sulfa-resistant infections all over the world.
And thus, American "Pax Penicillia" replaced the "Pax Britannica"...
Saturday, February 16, 2013
Penicillin's "Bengali Famine Years" : 1943-1944
It was not America and Britain, it was not even the British and American governments ,that made the momentous decision, between late 1942 and early 1943, not to divert tax money just a little away from bombs and towards penicillin production instead.
This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944, to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.
It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.
But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.
Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.
By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.
Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.
These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.
As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.
And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.
FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.
But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.
That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .
Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.
If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .
If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.
My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.
Just as in the UK, Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.
And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.
For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....
This decision led, over the period of 1943-1944, to a Bengali Famine-like situation among the Allies over shortages of live-saving drugs for civilians.
It was only one government agency in each country that made that decision ; albeit all-powerful agencies in the middle of a war.
But I do not believe they acted contrary to the informally expressed sentiments of their country's war cabinets.
Let the record note their names : Vannevar Bush's weapon-developing agency known as the OSRD in America and the Ministry of (Army) Supply (MoS) in Britain, with the common link urging them into this course being Sir Howard Florey.
By contrast, diverting even a tiny tiny amount of the government's war resources to the issuing of firm standing orders for penicillin purchases could have provided adequate semi-purified natural penicillin to treat all cases (civilian and military) of patients dying from blood poisoning that were resistant to the only life-saving alternative, the sulpha drugs.
Let me make it perfectly, morally, clear : the fundamental issue was not that penicillin was in short supply : it was that any method of saving those dying of sulpha-resistant blood poisoning was in desperately short supply.
These diverted resources , expressed as firm government orders for penicillin at currently profitably prices ,would have stimulated private capital to make good use of current technology and of idle rural factories that had closed because of the war , as well as unskilled rural labour also left idle because of the war.
As models that this could have and in fact did work in practise, one only needs, in the case of Britain, to point to Glaxo's first low tech but efficient penicillin factories cobbled out of bits of unused space in other people's factories.
And in the American case, to point to an enterprising rural mushroom farmer called Raymond Rettew who briefly became the world's biggest penicillin producer, in the late spring of 1943.
FDR's party did not lose the 1944 election over this issue , because another part of his American government (the WPB, War Production Board) chose to totally reversed this decision, and in spades.
But Churchill's party did ultimately pay the full price for this decision made by the MoS (led by his fellow Tory, Sir Andrew Duncan) not to push for enough penicillin production resources to help civilian as well as soldier, later in the war.
That was when his party overwhelmingly lost the general election it was supposed to romp home in, July 2nd 1945 .
Churchill's equally callous decision not to stop the wartime Bengali Famine in which four million people died ( "If there really is a famine, why hasn't Gandhi died?" he sneered) probably also sealed the chances of Churchill's Britain holding onto the Indian Empire.
If Florey had been even moderately left wing rather than very right wing, he might have gone to other more left wing oriented agencies of the British and American governments and the wartime penicillin story could have been very different .
If the wartime history of Civil War Era America was written as historians write the Pollyanna story of wartime penicillin, there would be only one America and one government ,with no sense at all of conflict between different parts of America.
My work on wartime penicillin will make it very clear that two agencies of the American government, the OSRD and the WPB were not in agreement on penicillin production levels and methods but in conflict.
Just as in the UK, Howard Florey/MoS and Harry Jephcott/Glaxo were not in agreement on these same issues but in conflict.
And I will make it clear that there were no technical reasons why civilians could not have penicillin in 1943-1944 , rather it was the result of a political and moral decision not to produce one less bomber squadron if that was the cost of bring penicillin to dying civilians.
For these were penicillin famines by government fiat : Bengal-on-the-Potomac and Bengal-on-the-Thames.....
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
The first - and internally fatal - Tory response to the Beveridge Report : the Ministry of Supply takes over Penicillin ...
To make sense of this claim, we need to clear as to what the role of Britain's powerful wartime Ministry of Supply actually was.
The Ministry of Supply (the MoS) was never the British equivalent of the American War Production Board (WPB), no matter how many times this claim is offered up.
In fact, it was very much closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development (the OSRD) per the role set out for both under statute , than it was to the statutory role set out for the WPB.
Britain's Ministry of Supply strived to supply the military's needs - period. Unlike the WPB, it did not try to arbitrate between the conflicting demands of civilian and military claims upon scarce material and manpower.
Equally, the OSRD did NOT deal with all of America's wartime science and research efforts , a point that no doubt Jesus Christ himself will have to repeat again and again to academics on Judgement Day and on into all Eternity.
It only dealt with that amount of science and research that involved the designing of (but not the production of) new weapons that could come into use, during the current war.
Bush was very very careful to sharply limit the parameters of his organization, all to make it more dominant within its narrow but vital sphere.
So when Howard Florey went to both the OSRD and to the Ministry of Supply to help in the production of penicillin - rather than going instead to ask help from the American Public Health Service and the British Ministry of Health, he had already made it very clear where his penicillin priority lay.
He wanted additional penicillin production yes --- but only sufficient to supply the armed forces, period.
Florey was strongly conservative, as were all the key individuals within the Minister of Supply and the OSRD : Big Government to them was abhorrent.
Thus the sudden willingness, eagerness even, of the Ministry of Supply in the Fall of 1942 to go all out and seize control of all of the British commercial penicillin production has to be seen as ideologically surprising.
Unless it can (and should) be seen as the opening conservative counter-attack against the rumoured radical notions of the Beveridge Report.
A preemptive move to ensure that the Ministry of Health (also run by a Tory minister but with wider than just military responsibilities) didn't dominate penicillin production.
If is often claimed that the Ministry of Supply took over all of penicillin production because the Scottish-born minister was an old pal of fellow Scot, Alec Fleming, who asked him to do so.
Politicians - grant us at least this - do not spontaneously fall upon old friends and their requests with open arms --- not unless it suits us.
In September and October 1942, Fleming's request much suited Duncan and the British Tories.
In late September and October 1942, the tenor of the Beveridge report, though as yet unreleased, was well known within the top officials of Whitehall.
It called for a placing the values of equality and egalitarianism at the core of the British government - a notion intensely hostile to Tory values.
For penicillin, all this Beveridge "equality" talk could only mean one of two things.
It might mean divvying inadequate amounts of penicillin equally between dying civilians and dying soldiers - when Tories felt the most vital hope of penicillin was that it would help maintain current front line troop levels without the need to "call up" middle class men (their voters) now at home engaged in war work.
Or it might mean diverting the cost of one additional Lancaster squadron (three million pounds) away from the all-out bombing of civilian Germany , towards creating more penicillin factories on the successful Glaxo model.
Glaxo had taken up space in bits of idle factories and by using local cheap and plentiful unskilled labour,( aka women) , had cheaply but efficiently produced a lot of penicillin with current low technology methods and equipment.
(Basically making penicillin as if it was a milk product , using the very abundant modern dairy equipment existing everywhere thanks to the 1920s civilized world's mania over pure milk.)
A lot of similar factories could be quickly brought up to speed, supplying a good deal of penicillin, without requiring too much vital material like stainless steel, already in desperately short supply.
If all this sounds very familiar, that is because this solution is what Britain in the end was forced to do - but very late and only under intense public pressure.
If it had been done wholeheartedly in the Fall of 1942, there would have been no highly public late 1944 civilian penicillin famine crisis.
But the Conservative bits and bob of the Coalition Government wanted no part of equality and penicillin was just the first of many counterattacks against the threat of Beveridge.
They were unsuccessful in the extreme, blowing what had to seem to them (and to Labour !), a sure electoral victory at war's end.
"Unfair distribution of a vital commodity in short supply" , to quote The Times (of all people !) referencing an earlier debate over Hugh Dalton's fuel rationing proposals , was totally anathema to the British public.
In June 1945, what little polling type information we have suggests it was the unfair rationing of medical services that moved people to Labour .
The most current example of that unfair medical rationing had to be rationing difficulties with life saving penicillin.
Let me repeat that : "life saving". This was not just temporary unfairness in allocating housing or clothing : this was the unfair allocation of life itself.
You can't get a more "vital commodity" than life itself : to switch from the specialized language of the economist to that of the political scientist trying to account for a surprise pattern of vote changing, "life" is a very salient issue.
If so, the unexpected and total defeat of Churchill's Tories in June 1945 can be seen as having its origins in the Fall of 1942, when the Ministry of Supply (and Howard Florey) successfully re-defined the shortage of penicillin (contra Beveridge), as a shortage of military penicillin, civilians be damned.....
The Ministry of Supply (the MoS) was never the British equivalent of the American War Production Board (WPB), no matter how many times this claim is offered up.
In fact, it was very much closer in spirit to Vannevar Bush's powerful Office of Scientific Research and Development (the OSRD) per the role set out for both under statute , than it was to the statutory role set out for the WPB.
Britain's Ministry of Supply strived to supply the military's needs - period. Unlike the WPB, it did not try to arbitrate between the conflicting demands of civilian and military claims upon scarce material and manpower.
Equally, the OSRD did NOT deal with all of America's wartime science and research efforts , a point that no doubt Jesus Christ himself will have to repeat again and again to academics on Judgement Day and on into all Eternity.
It only dealt with that amount of science and research that involved the designing of (but not the production of) new weapons that could come into use, during the current war.
Bush was very very careful to sharply limit the parameters of his organization, all to make it more dominant within its narrow but vital sphere.
So when Howard Florey went to both the OSRD and to the Ministry of Supply to help in the production of penicillin - rather than going instead to ask help from the American Public Health Service and the British Ministry of Health, he had already made it very clear where his penicillin priority lay.
He wanted additional penicillin production yes --- but only sufficient to supply the armed forces, period.
Florey was strongly conservative, as were all the key individuals within the Minister of Supply and the OSRD : Big Government to them was abhorrent.
Thus the sudden willingness, eagerness even, of the Ministry of Supply in the Fall of 1942 to go all out and seize control of all of the British commercial penicillin production has to be seen as ideologically surprising.
Unless it can (and should) be seen as the opening conservative counter-attack against the rumoured radical notions of the Beveridge Report.
A preemptive move to ensure that the Ministry of Health (also run by a Tory minister but with wider than just military responsibilities) didn't dominate penicillin production.
If is often claimed that the Ministry of Supply took over all of penicillin production because the Scottish-born minister was an old pal of fellow Scot, Alec Fleming, who asked him to do so.
Politicians - grant us at least this - do not spontaneously fall upon old friends and their requests with open arms --- not unless it suits us.
In September and October 1942, Fleming's request much suited Duncan and the British Tories.
In late September and October 1942, the tenor of the Beveridge report, though as yet unreleased, was well known within the top officials of Whitehall.
It called for a placing the values of equality and egalitarianism at the core of the British government - a notion intensely hostile to Tory values.
For penicillin, all this Beveridge "equality" talk could only mean one of two things.
It might mean divvying inadequate amounts of penicillin equally between dying civilians and dying soldiers - when Tories felt the most vital hope of penicillin was that it would help maintain current front line troop levels without the need to "call up" middle class men (their voters) now at home engaged in war work.
Or it might mean diverting the cost of one additional Lancaster squadron (three million pounds) away from the all-out bombing of civilian Germany , towards creating more penicillin factories on the successful Glaxo model.
Glaxo had taken up space in bits of idle factories and by using local cheap and plentiful unskilled labour,( aka women) , had cheaply but efficiently produced a lot of penicillin with current low technology methods and equipment.
(Basically making penicillin as if it was a milk product , using the very abundant modern dairy equipment existing everywhere thanks to the 1920s civilized world's mania over pure milk.)
A lot of similar factories could be quickly brought up to speed, supplying a good deal of penicillin, without requiring too much vital material like stainless steel, already in desperately short supply.
If all this sounds very familiar, that is because this solution is what Britain in the end was forced to do - but very late and only under intense public pressure.
If it had been done wholeheartedly in the Fall of 1942, there would have been no highly public late 1944 civilian penicillin famine crisis.
But the Conservative bits and bob of the Coalition Government wanted no part of equality and penicillin was just the first of many counterattacks against the threat of Beveridge.
They were unsuccessful in the extreme, blowing what had to seem to them (and to Labour !), a sure electoral victory at war's end.
"Unfair distribution of a vital commodity in short supply" , to quote The Times (of all people !) referencing an earlier debate over Hugh Dalton's fuel rationing proposals , was totally anathema to the British public.
In June 1945, what little polling type information we have suggests it was the unfair rationing of medical services that moved people to Labour .
The most current example of that unfair medical rationing had to be rationing difficulties with life saving penicillin.
Let me repeat that : "life saving". This was not just temporary unfairness in allocating housing or clothing : this was the unfair allocation of life itself.
You can't get a more "vital commodity" than life itself : to switch from the specialized language of the economist to that of the political scientist trying to account for a surprise pattern of vote changing, "life" is a very salient issue.
If so, the unexpected and total defeat of Churchill's Tories in June 1945 can be seen as having its origins in the Fall of 1942, when the Ministry of Supply (and Howard Florey) successfully re-defined the shortage of penicillin (contra Beveridge), as a shortage of military penicillin, civilians be damned.....
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