Wartime Penicillin, told as sharp clash of vivid personalities and philosophies -- not as a dry scientific treatise or as cheerleading fantasy of selfless wartime cooperation

If you have never read a book about the exciting saga of wartime penicillin that is hardly because of a lack of choice.

Dozens and dozens of authors have written well researched (and well regarded) renderings of the dramatic story, even if we discount the mass of uniformly dreadful books directed at children.

But despite a potential reading audience  that since 1944 that must number in the billions, none of these books can be said to be a national - let alone international - best seller.

Even more unexpectedly, there has never been any Hollywood movie about the wartime penicillin saga, let alone any successful one.

All these penicillin books to date suffer from one honest, sincere but erroneous assumption.

All their authors are united in seeing a single reason for the 15 years of delay between fleming's discovery of penicillin and when we in the rest of the world first heard about.

The same explanation is also used to account for the 25 year delay between the 1928 discovery and when it became readily available to almost all of the world's dying (regardless of income or location) during the 1950s.

Technical Flaws ?

They believe that all the delays in bringing penicillin to a world that badly needed it can  blamed on technical flaws in our sincere efforts to purify and preserve penicillin.

These steps were judged essential before it could be safely injected into the dying and cast as not really not surprising delays ---- once the reader is shown the complex nature of the penicillin molecule .

 These  authors consider briefly and then quickly dismiss the idea that the delays were really the result of character cum intellectual flaws ... in the complex natures of those we initially allowed to lead the penicillin effort.

These authors can hardly be accused of sugarcoating the personality clashes among the best known of the penicillin leaders or of denying differences between the various international organizations involved .

But neither do they portray these clashes as lying at the very heart of the causes for the years of delays.

Big Pharma - Big Science - Big Government vs Indie PEN

Powerful individuals and organizations holding widely popular views lay behind the delay to bring penicillin to the whole world.

In the beginning only a handful of individuals with few resources refused to accept the validity of these excuses for the delay in penicillin's mass introduction.

I call them , collectively, the Indie PEN movement.

Against overwhelming odds, this handful took on Big Pharma, Big Science , Big Government at the height of a Total War - and then, quite unexpectedly, totally triumphed at the very end.

A classic tortoise and hare story.

These personality (cum intellectual) flaws were not merely of a petty pattern or whimsically inconsistent .

Character/Intellectual Flaws ?

They are seriously held, consistently represented and strongly sustained .

The conflicting intellectual arguments and those who made them were internally consistent.

That is , the differing intellectual positions were held by individuals whose personalities were of those people who generally held those particular intellectual viewpoints.

This is why I say it is hard to separate out character flaws from intellectual flaws.

Those differences ran deep - deep as can be.

They reflected deeply held personal or institutional philosophies ("Weltanschauung") that differed in almost every way possible.

Some of those philosophies that lay behind the delays to bring penicillin to the masses would be regarded as deeply repugnant today.

 I certain think that way about them - I am not shy in saying that I see more than a whiff of the clash between absolute good and absolute evil buried deep inside the wartime penicillin saga.

 And I also see those ignoble philosophies as the main reason for all the delays.

 They lay behind the secret drive to weaponize penicillin and to deny it to most of the wartime world.

So we have before us a number of vivid , strongly etched characters (with strongly held and violently different worldviews ) clashing repeatedly .

I  don't think I am wrong in thinking that this will all make for a truly propulsive page turner --- one that also happens to better represent the reality of the war years.

Seventy five years on, its finally time that we dropped all remnants of the wartime Pollyanna rah rah cheerleading.

Let's let the story of wartime penicillin finally unfold as it truly happened , ignoble warts and selfless heroics and all ....