Po, Po Pitiful Mo : too many Boomers praising plentitude & practising plenticide ...

Modernity's great sin was not its assumption that all our God-given diversity was actually, at its core, very simple, predictable and controllable.

Rather the sin lay in the fact that when Modernity's scientists discovered this not to be the case, they and it did not desist.

Instead human Hubris set about trying to create an alternative artificial simplicity that was predictable and controllable by Man alone : the Triumph of the Will over the Wind.

Natural penicillin the Strawberry Roan : there ain't no chemist here all alive that can stay with that mold when it makes that... high dive"

Chemists versus the fungal Strawberry Roan

To the Big Scientists of the Modern Age , natural penicillin from the penicillium mold was like an old moth-eaten cayuse , an old strawberry roan , a has been and a never was .

They saw it as a living being easily broken at the chemical wheel - requiring only a little heat and pressure to make it reveal all of its secrets.

Then the chemists could patent improved analogues of natural penicillin and thus corner the financial market on this precious lifesaver.

But as Montana Slim (Wilf Carter) might have sung it - "There ain't no chemist here all alive that can stay with that mold when it makes that... high dive."

Eighty seven years after chemists first set to work to break the penicillium mold , it still rides the range free and unpatented.

"A true micro bucking bronco that's never been rid, though there's many a chemist that claims that he did...."

1945 Big Science's failed promises : synthetic stability and predictability

Chemically-minded/blinded scientists (and during WWII that included almost all scientists) hate, hate, hate penicillium mold.

To them , it is like an unbroken , un-house-trained mustang bronco .

A petulant two year old pooping penicillin all over the floor and then mutating like crazy so it now refuses to eat right, go to bed on cue or produce more penicillin on demand.

And natural penicillin itself - it also sometimes mysteriously lost its potency in mere days or even hours.

"For Darwin's Sake, give me man-made penicillin every time !" was their universal cry.

"It will be stable in shelf life and with all its predictable characteristics both known in advance and consistently stable."

But if we have learned anything since Big Science's apogee in 1945, it is that merely because a substance is man-made does not mean we can predict all its characteristics in advance.

Witnesses in my defence ?

Freon Gas, Leaded Gasoline, DDT and Thalidomide just for starters.

As the offspring of a philosophy prof who taught intro logic for decades , I am tempted - very tempted - to say that all scientists need to pass a tough course in logical fallacies.

For these sort of fallacies tend to show up ,time and again, not in scientists' overt research data, but in their unspoken and unquestioned silent assumptions....

Manhattan Indie PEN : penicillin misfits, unfits & rebels fermenting a revolution and renewing hope to a world tired, huddled and wretched

Today, words and phrases like "all-natural", "green" , "locally grown" and "no added chemicals" are such advertising cliches that it hard to believe there was a time , up to the end of WWII, when such phrases were totally anathema.

Back in that era , advertising cliches were more likely to invoke being chemically pure and to see being 100% synthetic , plastic and man-made as virtues to seek out.

But after Hiroshima , Auschwitz , Napalm and other WWII 'man-made wonders', these concepts very gradually fell out of vogue.


But at the beginning of WWII , they dominated thought in areas ordinarily seen as lying well beyond and above the thought behind popular magazine ads.

Areas such as the science of penicillin.

At a time - before as well as during the war - when only penicillin could save lives from some diseases , it seems incredible that medical researchers' aesthetic tastes could forestall the use of 'safe enough' indie PEN (crude penicillin juice) but it did - for 15 long, life-wasting years.

Before they'd be seen in public giving penicillin to the dying with no other alternative, most doctors wanted penicillin to be as pure as any chemical synthetic, as colorless and tasteless, and about as stable as any loaf of stabilizer-laced white bread could ever hope to be.

They'd rather inject almost any new manmade chemical into a human bloodstream before they would inject the life-saving juice from some bog-ordinary basement slime.

No slime from the basement of life on earth could possibly be better at saving lives than the PhD educated minds from the best Anglo Saxon universities in the land.

It was all a bit like letting your daughter date a Jew or a Negro.

Not done.

Today of course it is all totally different.

If people still don't want their daughters dating Jews or blacks, they have become smart enough not to say so in public.

And student numbers in chemistry degree programs have never been lower while biotechnology (with fermentation usually at the heart of its successes) is where all the graduates and jobs are at.

Manhattan Indie PEN

Manhattan Indie PEN - once only home to misfits, unfits and rebels has brewed up an intellectual storm so successfully that they have become the norm - with yesterday's rebels as today's bosses.....

"Irish Jimmy" Duhig and his Uisce Beatha : Penicillin as Orange Juice

I woke up the middle of last night to find I had a bad cold and so naturally got to thinking about its prevention and cure.

Its natural and unnatural cure and what all this had to do with the unknown history of wartime's crude penicillin.

Naturally, one avoids respiratory colds and worse by eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables , drinking lots of liquids, getting plenty of rest, and living a secure existence in a well ventilated sizeable home.

One gets more and deadlier respiratory diseases living stressed lives in cramped, il-ventilated homes without adequate fresh fruit and vegetables.

The other way to avoid colds and such is to daily pop a lot of synthetic vitamin pills for your entire life.

You will then have become that most sought after client of Big Pharma : someone from (A) a sizeable group of people who have a (B) 'chronic' 'disease' and (C)  who can afford to buy the moderately expensive solution to the disease, daily, from a drug company for the rest of their lives.

Insulin for middle class diabetics was a big money spinner for Big Pharma , starting in the 1920s, for just those reasons ---- just as the mania for vitamin pills for the middle class was in the 1930s.

No mind that the middle class were hardly needing any vitamins, based on their adequate and varied diets based on the more expensive fresh products of Nature.

They may not have needed any tiny white synthetic vitamin pills .

But they did have enough money to buy them and they did have the necessary ingrained faith in "Science" that helped them swallow Big Pharma's claims regarding the need for daily synthetic vitamin supplements to succeed in this "busy, complex, Modern Age."

Now adequate Vitamin C is regarded as vital to prevent and limit colds.

We can get enough simply eating enough fresh vegetables but most  of us like to supplement this with a tasty morning glass of golden orange juice rather than dash down a tasteless dry little white pill of 100% pure synthetic Vitamin C.

Horrors ! said 1930s Big Pharma and its tame pill-pushing scientific "consultants".

That glass of orange juice or the even more basic orange or lime itself is so impure - containing merely a tiny fraction of one percent pure Vitamin C.

Who knows what bad toxins lurk within it ?

Well we now agree that the orange or lime holds only other goodnesses - like soluble and insoluble fibre.

Scientists knew this even back in the 1930s, but the majority had tagged along on a culture-wide Modernist mania for purity - racial and chemical - and couldn't see the fibre benefits for all their dark fears of possible unknown impurities in the innocent orange.

Nasty Reds lurking under "only innocent-looking" orange beds or groves.

Jimmy Duhig, along with Henry Dawson, Robert Pulvertaft and a very few others didn't buy all this : they thought that the golden solution of crude penicillin was the literal Water of Life, Aqua Vitae or Uisce Beatha , for their dying patients.

Even after 100% pure natural penicillin was available after the war, Dawson's co-worker Gladys Hobby, now a key employee of Big Pharma, was allowed to publish a scientific article seeking to demonstrate that crude penicillin was ,in some way, more effective than the pure stuff !

But back to our trios of modern-day James Linds.

Instead of waiting - perhaps centuries - for a patently-profitable synthetic penicillin pill , they did a James Lind and starting saving lives - right now ! - with the penicillium equivalent of Lind's natural lime juice for scurvied sailors : natural crude penicillium juice.

The fact that these still-unknowns saved many lives while the now-famous Howard Florey merely fiddled about trying fruitlessly to make synthetic penicillin merely reminds of the power of Big Pharma and their many scientific sycophants on Nobel Prize committees.....

WWII as apogee AND nadir of Modern Science....

The night 'the music died' began when the young pilot of the small plane that Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were in, misread an instrument and thought he was climbing above a storm when he was really going full blast down into the ground.

Various Modern scientists (and their shills the science 'journalists' , ie editors) might be considered to have done something very similar to that unfortunate pilot.

They mis-read the Atomic Energy fire-bombing of civilians, the mass production of cheap Natural Penicillin and Auschwitz's gas chambers and frugal use of the resulting dead humans as furnace fuel and for soap as triumphs - rather than failures - of Physics, Chemistry and Biology.

The Americans had thought the future of aerial bombing was the Norden bombsight's ability to accurately drop a bomb in a pickle barrel from 15,000 feet, not the ability of an atomic bomb to burn out an entire city, all in an effort to destroy that city's  single navy arsenal.

The British had thought the best, cheapest, quickest way to provide penicillin was to have chemists synthesize it in big chemical factories - but they ended up waiting upon tiny fungal factories (in far off America, to boot ) to do it all by hand.

The Germans had hoped for more positive eugenic activities east of Germany : the Master Plan East talked of settling happy, hard-working, clean, pure German peasants-soldiers on the new eastern agrarian frontier , producing huge wheat crops and guarding the border.

But few German peasants actually wanted to move into an area contested by partisans and Soviet troops.

 So as a result, Hitler quickly told his supporters that 'we actually went to war with Russia so we could totally eliminate (negative eugenics) all the Jews from Europe, once and for all'.

Plan Bs (nadir) glibly sold as Plan As (apogee) : I doubt if even used car salesmen could match the chutzpah of the scientists...

May 10 2013 POSTSCRIPT :

Re-reading this blog post, I realized that I hadn't specifically indicated that the A-Bombing of Hiroshima and the triumph of natural Penicillin occurred so close to the end of the war in 1945, that they share both a wartime and postwar time space.

The end of WWII also revealed another Plan B to to the Plan B (Auschwitz) of the wartime German genetic community.

 Oswald Avery's 1944 reductionist discovery that the chemical molecule DNA was the basis for all the genes (including the long reputed ones for  alcoholism and criminality, etc, etc) had been mostly ignored.

But it was suddenly taken up with particular renewed intensity with the revelations that Auschwitz was the end result of all the prewar German genetic efforts.

Particularly by the many active Jewish geneticists :  like all geneticists, they still held that Free Will barely existed, except among scientists, and that we were largely captives to our forebearers' genes.

But the word DNA seemed offer a way to carry on the good bits of the German prewar genetic program, but minus the gas chambers and under a new name.

Life-saving penicillin can be a little bit fermented but not a little bit synthetic

If a medicine will save lives when nothing else will do so - in war as in peace - then Henry Dawson's example reminds us that our first moral requirement is to make it as much as we can, anyway we can, save lives anyway we can..... and only then try to perfect it.

Fermentation penicillin ( aka natural, biological penicillin) worked  (feebly) from day one (September 1928) but could be (and obviously was !) improved gradually.

By contrast, even after 15 years, synthetic penicillin in late 1943 still hadn't been gotten to work at all.  (IE, biologically : all resulting attempts showed no medical activity at all.)

In a way , synthetic molecules are completely like pregnancy.

As with pregnancy, there is no half-way house : you are or you aren't ; a synthetic molecule either works, or it doesn't.

In addition, even if synthetic penicillin could be gotten to work biologically, there were still two possible huge problems ahead of breaking out the champagne.

The yield could be much lower than the already low yield of Fleming's original strain of penicillium, not many magnitudes higher.

And the number of steps required in the synthesis and subsequent purification/ separation might require more, not less, money, equipment, manpower, care and close attention to detail than even the worst version of the fermentation method ever called for.

I have one word for you my boy. Rosebud ? No : quinine.

These are not just theoretical objections : as bad luck happens they all came to pass with synthetic penicillin.

The pursuit of  synthetic quinine , now a more than two hundred year long futile chasing of a tail by generation after generation of chemists , should have reminded the 1940s penicillin synthetic faithful of the possible pitfalls that could lie ahead......

Merck has credible excuses for being beaten on D-Day penicillin by Pfizer - but none whatsoever for being crushed by Commercial Solvent

Merck, the OSRD, Florey's Oxford team (all part of the synthetic penicillin obsession) continue to have many defenders among academia.

Yes, one academic excuse goes, yes Merck failed to deliver much penicillin to the D-Day beaches - that was left to Pfizer, which had been a major partner of Merck and Squibb in the three year long effort to produce commercial amounts of penicillin.

But, the excuse went, Pfizer had 20 years of highly successful fermentation experience before late 1941and the commercial penicillin project's beginnings.

But how then to explain the huge success of Commercial Solvents  in producing medical grade penicillin from a cold start in January 1944 to levels twice that of Merck in just four months and then levels six or seven times higher than Merck in just three more months after that?

True, Commercial Solvent had 30 years of success in industrial grade fermentation in making bulk acetone but had never done anything even remote to pharmaceutical levels of purity and cleanliness.

But there it was - passing an increasingly demanding FDA testing requirements with its tens of billions of units of injectable penicillin.

Clearly, the supposedly-arcane craft could be learned fairly quickly, if a corporate culture demanded it.

Even Squibb redeemed itself by well beating Merck's output, by late 1944 .

Merck lost the race for one reason only : hubris.

It thought that since it had synthesized a few 300 molecular weight molecules that all 300 weight biological molecules were a piece of cake.

Tell that to  penicillin with a weight of 334 and still not commercially synthesized.

Or tell it to quinine , molecular weight 324, and 200 years after Man-The-Almighty first started to synthesize it, still without a commercially viable synthesis technique at hand....

Keep something out of the newspapers and it can remain a secret forever - even when it is not : the case of wartime DDT

Hard to explain why both the Germans and the Japanese of WWII failed to make use of DDT to reduce their truly immense manpower losses due to endemic insect borne diseases : its use alone, could have prolonged the war a year or two more.

After all, knowledge of how to make the stuff was in the public domain, and in the open scientific literature, having been synthesized more than seventy(70) years earlier.


It had been re-synthesized in 1939 and patented by the Swiss firm Ciegy who proceeded to offer patent licenses to everyone : neutral, Allied and Axis nation alike : just as the Swiss firm Oerlikon did with its anti-aircraft guns, used by almost all military forces during WWII.

But in wartime,  busy generals and even busier bureaucrats and politicians don't have time to read scientific journals, patent applications and industry magazines : though they do like to glance through their familiar newspaper from time to time, to relax.

An "open" secret can still be effectively a total secret

So if you can keep news of a weapon out of the newspapers, as the US successfully did by censoring both DDT's domestic use and domestic coverage of DDT's success overseas, you can keep it effectively secret - albeit an "open" secret - throughout the war.

Unbelievable but true.

And an example of how the Allies planned to keep synthetic penicillin an effective - if open - secret as well....

Nova Scotia-born Dr Henry Dawson and the wartime re-invention of a military secret weapon into a widely publicized beacon of hope

I am talking about penicillin of course.

What other artifact of war has so abruptly and so totally changed its character over the course of a war ?
In 1941, the British and American medical and military elites were in agreement that the new penicillin's best use in wartime was as a weapon - and that its success as a weapon of war depended on it remaining 'new' and hence relatively secret.

The Allies would gain an absolute advantage over the Axis only if they alone had a cheap, abundant, stable, pure , potent (secret) version of penicillin.

This could only happen if the Axis had to make do with only the increasingly ineffective sulfa drugs or the expensive, scarce, unstable, weak Public Domain (natural) version of penicillin, readily obtainable by consulting the already existing published medical literature on penicillin.

Why was penicillin so secret one moment and then the hero of newsreels the next ?

So penicillin had to remain secret in two senses.

 First, penicillin had to be synthesized secretly.

This is because the old cliche of the formula stolen out of a safe in the Golden Age of Mystery books really works as a realistic plot device.

Almost all readers were aware that in the real world, without at least a fleeting glance at the synthesis formula for a process, it was almost impossible to begin to make a stab at a rival method for re-creating a man-made chemical.

Nobody steals scientific formulas used in physics, geology, astronomy or biology now do they ?

Secondly, penicillin's unique life-saving abilities had to be kept secret from the world's general public or they would demand it be made in quality for them.

Technically, the synthesizing method would still remain a secret, but alerted by the resulting public clamour, the enemy would try all the harder to match the Allied synthetic penicillin ---- and neither the Germans or the Japanese were slouches in the synthetic department.

And penicillin's actual medical use was also to reveal a distinctly war-like character : it was to be triaged, military style.

That is to say, it was not to be "wasted" (to use Winston Churchill's infamous "green-inked" phrase).

There was simply no military point trying to save the lives of dying ex-combat soldiers who would be of no further military use if they did survive, not when penicillin could be better used to quickly return lightly wounded or infected combat soldiers into battle, so they could get a second crack at dying for their country.

Battles were won or lost by the side that could muster a greater  number of their units' total complement into battle.

Penicillin used under such inhuman terms certainly approached the most war-like of war medicines.

War medicines like the amphetamines, ("The Ecstasy of the Einsatzgruppen") , which unlike penicillin was never in short supply on any military front.

Not once the Axis and the Allies alike discovered that like booze, it made combat soldiers more aggressive , more willing to kill or be killed.

Germ, chemical and radiation warfare were other areas where medical expertise helped make war and killing more effective.

By contrast, social medicine can actually exist in wartime : it tries to lessen the number of non-combat deaths in war and it does so not merely by pouring penicillin powder into combat wounds to reduce the chance of infection.

It says instead that all life is worthy of life, regardless of an individual life's current utility to the war effort.

Because most deaths in war occurs not in combat between troops, but when captured troops , enemy civilians and your own civilians are triaged into two piles : those worthy of decent food, shelter, and health care and those deemed unworthy.

Nazis let millions of Soviet POWS starve to death or to die of disease to free up food supplies for the German civilians back home ; they also shot to death millions of Jews for the same reason.

In India, British authorities, not caring greatly about the Bengali poor, also let millions starve to death or die of hunger related disease, in a time and place with plenty of food.

In America, medical authorities considered people with endocarditis to be a burden on scarce medical resources, who even if they did live, could never contribute much to the military or the civilian war effort - best deny them life-saving penicillin and let them die.

By contrast, Dawson and his supporters said make lots of penicillin and give it freely to our soldiers ( useless or useful) , to all our civilians at home,  to civilians in neutral and occupied countries and even to enemy POWs and civilians.

And then suggest that such a coalition of nations willing to do that is really a coalition worth fighting or dying for, and a coalition worth surrendering to, because you know you will be treated fairly.

Social medicine, said Dawson, was actually the most effective war medicine of them all : and in the end, even Churchill was probably forced to reluctantly agreed, once he got the time to pause and reflect.

 And he certainly got plenty of time to reflect, after his surprising post-war election defeat ---- caused in part, I believe, by his government's unwillingness to provide civilian penicillin during the war : his green-inked words had definitely come back to haunt him.....

MAE WEST on Modernity : rubes....

Michael Marshall

The hallmark of  THE AGE OF MODERNITY ( aka THE AGE OF MASCULINITY) was to mistake size for sophistication, which as MAE WEST once famously quipped, is the mark of the male rube and the unsophisticated .

God, said Modernity, not Viagra, was on the side of the Big Battalions, if you know (wink,wink,nudge,nudge) what I mean.

Mae said, in essence, "'taint the meat, its the motion..."

Still, to hear Modernity talk, the very best way to be sure to sink a 70,000 ton battleship was to send in a half dozen battleships, each with thousands of crew, and all bristling with guns and armour.

 Then use their very long range naval guns with their very big shells, to safely sink the 70,000 tonner from 25 miles away.

To destroy a mile square chemical plant ?  Just send in a few hundred heavy bombers ,(battleships of the air) , bristling with men, machine guns and armour, to safely drop lots of large bombs on it from 25,000 feet above it.

But any cursory reality check of WWII reveals that very different methods were required for real results.

One small submarine or one small dive bomber (or one sea mine, for real economy) getting in very close,time and again, proved to be much more accurate and hence much more lethal in sinking battleships and aircraft carriers.

Lethal often as well to the submarine or dive bomber.

But hot courage, not cool science, seems to work out better for this particular human activity.

Similarly, a single light, unarmed and unarmoured wooden bomber, the Mosquito, seemed to do much better than the vast air armadas when it came to halting the production of chemical plants.

Sneaking in low and unobserved - something that can not be said for a stream of hundreds of large aircraft dozens flying in a formation that is dozens of miles long and wide, the Mosquito
got in 'close and personal' with the chemical plant's key bottleneck
building - perhaps its power plant or cat converter.

A single bomb, delivered close and accurately, could do the job.

The air armanda, by contrast, usually ended up dropping most of its bombs from so high up that they landed instead on civilians' homes.

In addition, that unsuccessful raid frequently cost 10% of those aircraft.

With their large crews ,that meant the lost of hundreds of young lives.

And the need to constantly build more replacement bombers  represented a large percentage of the economic output of their entire nation back home, because they were so large and complex.

They consumed resources that then could not be devoted to more useful and economic ways to end the war and save lives.

Which is to say: smaller aircraft/vessels, with their smaller crews to end up dead.

Now a chemical plant, a human chemical plant, at first glance seems to be very big and sophisticated.

Big and complex and expensive yes --- but hardly sophisticated.

"Surely not !", you exclaim, still trusting that old high school chemistry teacher.

"Just look at all those incredibly sturdily built massive reactor vessels and tubing and the incredibly elaborate instrumentation dials."

Oh yes, all those vast amounts of fossil fuels going in to heat things up, to cool things down, to heat them up again, to cool them down again.

And yes, all that energy devoted to increasing pressures to hundreds of atmospheres - hence the need for very thick and sturdy ( read: very expensive) reactor vessels.

Still not convinced ?

Well let use make some totally man-made synthetic penicillin then, using today's best chemistry.

One caveat - we will make it at factory sized scale, not in a flask like some academic with one eye an article for NATURE and another on a Nobel prize - we want to make this a profitable venture.

We will start with lots of very complicatedly made chemical reagents - themselves the products of factory-sized operations.

We will heat them up/cool them down and pressure them up/pressure them down, from reactor vessel to reactor vessel,  chemical step by chemical step.

The basic ingredients of penicillin itself cost pennies , but the reagents needed to make it are very expensive so we need to recover them , as well as very expensively separate them from the chemical results at each step of the process.

In fact purification is the most expensive part of this whole business - we will end up sticking this in someone's bloodstream after all.

But purification isn't the fatal step - it is the level of yield after one run through ( infinitely tiny) versus the total sunk and operating costs (huge).

We can run the results of one batch back through the system to increase the yield a bit ,and so on over and over, but it is still very expensive for each iteration.

This is how the world made most of its nuclear weapons, cascading the tiny initial yields of the gaseous diffusion process, back into the system over and over, in plant buildings about a mile square.

It cost trillions but cost is no object when it comes to killing people; however if we want to save lives, we need be practical and prudent and make a profit.

Synthetic man-made penicillin would be too expensive to use - we would be shifted - as patients and doctors - to using cheaper but less effective drugs.

Or ?

Or we could switch to the chemical equivalent of the tiny submarine, dive bomber and Mosquito.

Dr Martin Henry Dawson was a decorated soldier of the First World War --- but in the Second World War, he was a civilian.

His 'war work' was not directly in the weapons business - he designed no dive bomber or submarine - he was a medical doctor not a PhD.

But he come up with the medical equivalent of the small, cheap dive bomber, submarine or Mosquito .

The living fungi cell, far too small to see, is a complete penicillin producing plant in itself.

It does the job without huge heavy reactors or heavy outlays of energy - because it makes penicillin in ordinary temperatures, at ordinary atmospheric pressure, in relatively few steps.

Best of all, these factories, when they are not making penicillin, will make duplicate chemical factories of themselves, out of agricultural waste and a little dirty water !

In fact from one tiny cell or spore, invisible to all but the best microscopes, using only a few pennies worth of agricultural waste and tap water, you will quickly see trillions of tiny chemical plants springing up, producing useable amounts of the life-saving penicillin.

Rather than using huge amounts of scarce and expensive stainless steel reactors and complicated and expensive instrumentation equipment, penicillin could have been made in underused rural milk plants using underemployed and unskilled rural workers living in their already built homes.

(For new urban housing for tens of thousands of new urban workers was one of the scarcest materials in every nation's war effort.)

Sophistication, I am saying, includes lateral thinking outside the box, and is frugal and economical not simply big for the sake of impress-the-locker-room bigness.

May I suggest that the women who grew most of the natural penicillin that we used in WWII appreciated this fact much quicker than the men ever did ?

WWII  demonstrated one thing for sure: God - the God of sophistication - is on the side of the Small Battalions.....

On the May & Baker factory floor, the magic bullet of M&B 693 was decidedly low tech

Science journalism and Chemistry Industry advertising (often hard to tell apart in the 1930s) saw the new Sulfa Drugs as the latest and most glamorous product to roll out of the cornucopia of the synthetic arcadia.

But as John Lesch describes in his account of how the British drug firm May & Baker developed its famous M&B693 (the sulfa drug that saved Churchill's life at the height of World War II) the view from the factory floor was distinctly low tech.

A dusty bottle of a rarely used chemical compound, made up for an ex-employee who never used it, but retained by the research lab of a large drug firm because, well, its the Great Depression and money is too tight to lightly throw anything out.

Experimental Chemistry Theory insisted there is absolutely no point in wasting effort in trying the contents of that old

chemical bottle in synthesising a potentially useful analogue from the original German sulfa compound.

Fortunately, an older tradition (in medicine they call this the 'hands on' or clinical approach) said "try everything" .

Unexpectedly ,and thankfully, the unusual new compound showed some promise in the chemical lab.

But the next stage would be to try it on deliberately-infected mice in another type of lab.

But this lab had none of the usual mice (infected with strep bacteria) -- money was tight in the Depression remember ?---

so a harried assistant, trying to fill in for his boss while he was away, tested the compound instead on mice inflected with the bacteria that gives us the worst kinds of pneumonia.

Nothing had ever killed these bacteria reliably and almost everything possible had been tried on them since 1919 and the pandemic of Spanish Flu.

(Most of the Spanish Flu's 50 million deaths worldwide were actually caused by pneumonia -- reason enough to research it more thoroughly than any other virulent agent had been to date.)

Once again, trying the unexpected and the unscientific paid off - this new sulfa killed the most dangerous of the pneumonia types.

This would, if confirmed, be headline news worldwide and would push May & Baker into the front rank of world drug firms.

But for now, back to Depression realities.

A number of intermediate chemicals had to be made in quantity on the way to making the actual sulfa.

Various stratagems were employed as the factory hands struggled to break up recalcitrant chunks of an important intermediate into a coarse powder, without blowing up themselves and their building.

Their delicate lab-grade tools of high precision?

A hammer and chisel !

Then a lot of ordinary mortars and pestles were filled with the crude powder and it was slowly,painfully, hand-ground down to a sufficiently fineness.

May and Baker, despite being a large, diversified , long standing British drug house , had no vacuum still and so its first sulfa 693 had to be made up in one or two litre flasks, so to make that first batch of one kilogram took two months of hard unrelenting effort on behalf of the entire team.

Still,a little of that very first batch in early February 1938, saved the life of a Norfolk farm labourer who was given up for dead because of his seemingly non-responsive lobar pneumonia.

A decidedly better result that the much better known first British effort, in early February 1941, to use penicillin to save the life of a policeman !

Pneumonia - the dreaded 'Captain of the Forces of Death' - had a cure !

But Lesch's detailed account of the development of M&B693 bears only the most fleeting acquaintance with the usual starry-eyed account provided to the public by Thirties media accounts...

Sulfa - the Commissar that Vanished

Until 2007 and Professor John E Lesch's "The First Miracle Drugs" , the most recent book on the sulfa drugs aimed at the general book-reading public dated from late 1943.

Of course, that was just before the story of Baby Patricia made natural penicillin the new 'miracle drug' sensation - a position it largely retains today.

In societies uncomfortable with the very idea of 'failure' , projects aren't allowed to fail and die - instead they merely disappear and become invisible, forgotten and denied.

In the case of Sulfa drugs, that means Germany, the UK and the US -all intent on forgetting their hopes and disappointments over Sulfa compounds.

One wonders how hard it was then for this American author to find a American publisher for his book ?

Sometimes it is societies more comfortable with failure ( or more uncomfortable with success) that deal better with 'failure tales' such as the fate of Sulfa drugs.

No current study exists of the successes, failures and hopes of synthetic drug-making in general, from 1895 to 1945, before biologically-based drugs like the antibiotics took (or was that re-took ?) centre stage.

Synthetic drugs were only a part - but a very emotionally powerful part - of the worldwide push, from 1850s till the 1950s, to synthesise and replace as much as possible of the natural world , in attempt to speed up Darwin's evolution.

This is because synthetic drugs intent on keeping us alive, seem themselves more 'alive' than did synthetic silk, aka nylon, for example.

As such, it was an exact counterpart to the contemporary Eugenics movement, attempting to do the same with human beings.

We need such a study because the obsession with replacing an 'imperfect' world with a manmade 'better' one has hardly died ...