What if Fleming's team , in early 1929, HAD easily purified penicillin and then synthesized and patented analogues of it ?
Contrary to myth , there never was any 1928-1948 resistance, at all, by normal doctors and scientists to the injecting of penicillin to save lives - just provided it was the penicillins that we have today.
These penicillins are all made by someone else while someone else will gladly come and deliver them to any doctor's door.
Just as chemists have worked hard to ensure these modern penicillins have a long and profitable shelf life in doctors' offices.
Someone else, actually lots of 'somebody elses', have also worked very hard to ensure that all the safe dosages and bad side effects have been found and are made are clear to everyone - laity and GPs alike.
These modern penicillins cum beta lactams emerge as crystal pure white and are usually at least partially semi-synthesized.
They are made in gleaming porcelain-white factories in high tech stainless steel tanks - operated by men mostly.
Men who almost never even seen the yucky green slime hidden inside those opaque stainless tanks.
Nature and the natural has been removed as far as possible from the scene - Man instead, is everywhere.
It would still be best if Man had synthesized penicillin totally out of basic chemicals off the shelf but that can't be.
So while the slime still does all the actual hard work (actually makes the tasty steak), Man (medical and scientific PR) does its best to sell the sizzle instead.
The green slime is rendered as Man-made as possible before anyone has to see or touch the stuff.
Yes, normal doctors and scientists have always loved modern penicillin - it was just ancient natural penicillium molds that they (largely unconsciously) feared and detested.
Fleming in 1929 , Florey in 1940 and 1941, Dawson in 1941 and 1942 : no one responds to their Good News gospels
All three detailed to the entire world of doctors of the wide anti-bacterial potency, the extremely low toxicity and the ease of production of natural penicillin in any hospital lab .
Yet in the many published books on early penicillin there are almost no clear accounts of any - let alone many - doctors responding to all those articles with a request for some of the starter penicillium spores.
There were no shortage of patients dying of penicillin-treatable diseases in those days.
Just seemingly a shortage of doctors willing to use elbow grease to make the penicillin to save lives - a job a later doctor admitted could be easily done by 'any' hospital lab technician.
And I just don't buy that.
I remain convinced that in the medical world from 1928 to 1948, there were many, many hard working doctors willing to practise very heroic medicine and willing devote long hours to saving the dying.
So why the moral holdback in the sole case of penicillin - particularly when it will probably turn out to be the easiest to make, safest lifesaver to deliver that will ever be found ?
Its about the mold - not the medicine
The answer, I suggest, lies back beyond the medicine to the mold itself - our ancient (and ongoing) muddled relationship with yeasts, mushrooms and molds.
Generally we like yeasts and mushrooms but detest molds - though all are but different visible forms of the same basic being - the fungus.
To over-simplify terribly, we should think of mushrooms as the above-ground flowering heads of underground molds with the yeasts very much like the tiny spores those mushroom heads' periodically release.
Some yeast/spores are good - bread, beer - others spoil food and ruin whole crops.
Some mushrooms are among the tastiest of foods - while other ours are among our fastest fatal poisons.
Moreover by 1900 ,most of us olny saw yeast and mushrooms as divorced from nature - bought packaged in stores.
By contrast, we didn't really consciously buy mold - all by itself - in stores : though we did buy mold-infected cheeses instead.
Instead, in those largely pre-plastic polymer days - we did see mold in nature and in our homes almost daily ---- and hated doing so.
Mold spreading and spoiling our foods , ruining any clothing made of natural products stored in dark damp warm places, rotting wet wood fixtures, growing vigorously up dank dark basement walls.
Mold seemed associated with death and decay - who hadn't come across an animal body dug up by a dog and seen the mold threads running all through the shrunken corpse ?
It even smelt bad ( actually we simply associated its smell with negative situations !)
The fact that it was slimy, slippery, and jelly like was the worst.
Though we often like like materials and even food that is slippery and jelly-like.
But mold only grew by decaying something else : a black spot quickly became a furry and slimy jelly only by visibly dissolving what was once seemingly dry and solid with fixed boundaries into a watery gell with fluid boundaries.
Now humanity isn't that upset by violent death - not by the way we love war, murders and the slaughter of animals.
And the molds rarely kill what they consume - they usually feed on the those who have died naturally or at others' hands.
So it it isn't the deadness of death they evoke - only the decay of death - the breaching of definite boundaries between the fixedness of solid substances and the fluid state of liquids.
A mold (gell) is neither solid or liquid - or rather, worse, it is both.
The ever changing slimy mold is the very symbol of modernization or globalization - the mixing and intermingling of everything and anything in ever new unexpected ways.
By contrast, the 100% pure rationally-made chemical synthetic, built from the bottom up by chemists out of known consistent pure atoms, with consistent known repeatable results, is the very symbol of Modernity.
I buy Roger Griffin's thesis - even if he doesn't - that all Modernity (not just Fascist Modernity) was a reaction against Late Victorian modernization and globalization that progressive moderns both sought and feared.
So I see this twenty year battle (between using slime mold to save lives or waiting until it has a chemical synthetic before doing so) as a key battle between Modernity and modernization.
Perhaps even the key battle : the result being the end of Modernity and the birth of a post-Modernity far more willing to seek power-with-nature rather than only wanting power-over-nature....
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